2 Giants to Introduce Enhanced Data Sharing Services on Net
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Google and Microsoft separately plan to introduce on Thursday enhanced information sharing services for Internet users. Microsoft plans for the first time to offer a
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Google will unveil communications and productivity software aimed at businesses that will be accessible over the Internet.
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Grants aim to accelerate European research into business applications of shared computing.
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AT&T Inc. said on Monday it will open  two new Internet data centers, one in Shanghai and the other in  Oak Brook, Illinois.
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Blog: News last week that Cisco, EMC, and Microsoft are working on Secure Information Sharing Architecture was an exception to the industry tendency to save the juicy stuff for September.
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(InfoWorld) - Verizon Communications' Business unit will expand its business-level data platform to parts of Europe and the Asia Pacific region this year, the company said Tuesday. Verizon Business' Converged Packet Architecture (CPA) combines IP (Internet protocol) and traditional data onto one common network-access interface, with the goal of allowing customers to more easily order bandwidth or make other changes. CPA is "broadband on demand" for businesses, said Joseph Cook, Verizon Business' vice president for global network engineering and planning. With the CPA interface, customers can order bandwidth ranging from 512Kbps to 1Gbps, he said. Verizon is pushing into Europe and Asia-Pacific because many multinational corporations have offices there, and they want the same data services available as in the U.S., Cook said. Verizon Business is focused on becoming a top carrier for multinational corporations worldwide, company officials said. In Europe, Verizon Business will deploy CPA in 19 cities this year, including London, Frankfurt, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Warsaw, Dublin, Madrid, Brussels, and Zurich. In the Asia-Pacific region, Verizon Business is deploying CPA in five locations this year: Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Melbourne, and Sydney. Verizon Business also continues CPA deployment in the U.S. It now serves 37 cities, and by the end of the year, will add nine more, including New Orleans, Louisiana; Orlando, Florida; and Memphis; and Nashville, Tennessee. CPA supports legacy and newer services including IP, Private IP, Ethernet, private line data, voice traffic, Ethernet Virtual Private Line and Virtual Private LAN Service. It provides a single packet-access connection via an Ethernet interface at speeds up to one gigabit per second, often called GigE. Customers can also use CPA to migrate from older time division multiplexing (TDM) hierarchy to a packet-based technology. Some traditional network access plans require separate lines for voice, video, data and Internet, and require specific bandwidth contracts. CPA, instead, converges all applications on a single carrier-class packet access network and improves operating efficiency, Verizon Business said. MCI, which wasÂ acquired by VerizonÂ in January 2006, launched its CPA service in July 2004. Analysts praised the move, saying it would help business customers move to packet-based services.
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Users at Storage Networking World are developing information life-cycle management schemes within their storage networks to more efficiently and cost-effectively store data according to business policies.
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Japanese electronics maker NEC Corp. and U.S. software company Microsoft Corp. announced plans Wednesday to expand their business partnership in the networking and server businesses.
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Google's new API is expected to make data created by users of social networks easily available.
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The web will be more interactive and will use tools to mine its vast pool of data, say experts.
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Major storage vendors are looking to add hosted offerings, mostly by acquisition so far, to take advantage of Web 2.0 users willing to store data off-site.
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The business applications maker will integrate its technology more closely with infrastructure software from Big Blue.
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Under the effort announced today, the two will share APIs and develop protocols to enable better interoperability between Microsoft's Network Access Protection technology and Cisco's Network Admission Control technology.
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Network Appliance has brought out the latest version of its Data Ontap software, which imposes a grid storage architecture on NetApp devices by creating an abstraction layer between application servers, storage controllers and disc arrays.
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Business travelers will be able to surf the Web securely on long-distance flights by combining services from Boeing Co. (BA.N) and iPass Inc. (IPAS.O), the companies plan to announce on Monday.
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SAP&#160;is pushing ahead with two partnerships that aim to provide customers with better user interface options for its ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications.SAP and Microsoft&#160;plan to announce an upgrade in the coming weeks to their Duet software, version 1.5, which will be generally available early next year, officials at SAP&#39;s Tech Ed conference said this week.At the same time, SAP is stepping up its efforts with Adobe Systems&#160;to let developers liven up SAP interfaces using Adobe&#39;s new AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) technology, for building rich Web applications that run outside of a browser.Both projects, on show at TechEd in Munich, Germany, aim to expand the number of employees who access SAP applications and data. The partnerships are also part of an industrywide trend to bring enterprise software to a wider range of business users.SAP&#39;s standard interfaces are often seen as functional, but not very imaginative or easy to use.&quot;Anything that improves SAP&#39;s interfaces, which are hideous and hard to use, is a good thing,&quot; said James Governor, an industry analyst with RedMonk.Duet allows workers to view &quot;contextual&quot; SAP data that might help them make business decisions from within Microsoft applications such as Outlook and Excel. In the current version, that contextual data is limited to what SAP and Microsoft chose to provide for a given task.&quot;It&#39;s really the information we think people want, based on our experience and best practices,&quot; said Yifat Ferber-Harel, a Duet product manager with SAP.Version 1.5 of the product will include tools that allow developers to choose the contextual data they want to present to end users.For example, a big company might set up a process for approving promotions using Microsoft Outlook. When a senior manager receives an e-mail from a department head suggesting a promotion, a developer will be able to provide related information from SAP&#39;s human-resources software, such as the employee&#39;s sales figures, absentee record or current pay scale.The capability should help to deliver on the original promise of Duet, Ferber-Harel said. &quot;Part of our original vision was to give you the information you need to make decisions, and you can&#39;t make decisions without the right information,&quot; she said.The update will also add more user scenarios, the business cases in which Duet can be used. Today they include areas such as leave management and budget planning.At the same time, SAP is working with Adobe on its&#160;AIR technology, a recent addition to Adobe&#39;s Flex development environment. AIR is seen as a rival to Microsoft&#39;s Internet Explorer because developers can use it to build applications with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Flash that can on a the desktop instead of in a Web browser.SAP has just developed its first application based entirely on Flex, called Spend Analytics, for aggregating and analyzing spend data, said Matthias Zeller, a senior Adobe product manager, in a presentation at Tech Ed.Spend Analytics includes a tool called Briefing Book, for capturing snapshots of data that can be shared with other managers. Briefing Book is already unusual for an SAP interface, appearing as an actual book rendered virtually on the screen. The tool is usually viewed in a browser, but Adobe has developed a proof-of-concept version with AIR.Zeller showed how users can drag and drop data-views from Briefing Book onto the desktop for offline use -- something not possible in Internet Explorer. And it lets a user work with spend data in Excel, to create a forecast, for example, and then drag that data into Briefing Book. The AIR interface can&#39;t be synchronized with the data in Excel, however.AIR is available today for the Windows and Mac operating systems and will &quot;very soon&quot; be available for Linux, Zeller said. Spend Analytics is available now to some SAP customers and should be generally available in the first quarter next year.Customers looking at the technologies should consider that AIR is still in beta, while Duet has been in the market since June 2006. That said, Adobe and SAP have been working together on interactive forms for SAP since 2002. IBM&#39;s Lotus Notes group also develops client interfaces for SAP.Microsoft and SAP are increasingly rivalrous in the business applications area, and for that reason SAP may find Adobe an easier partner to work with, Red Monk&#39;s Governor said. (RedMonk does consulting work for SAP and Adobe.) In addition, companies might not always find it easy to bring teams of SAP and Microsoft engineers together, said Alan Rickayzen, an SAP senior product manager.&quot;Culturally, the SAP people are totally different from those in the Microsoft Exchange world,&quot; he told Tech Ed attendees. &quot;You have to bring together two groups of people who would not normally talk to each other.&quot;
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Company beefs up online service for shipping business information between firms over the Net.