BEA offers per-instance pricing for virtualization
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InfoWorld - Capitalizing on the industry&#39;s virtualization trend, BEA Systems has fashioned a per-instance model for its virtualization software in an attempt to do what a company official said better reflects usage patterns.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM released SOA productsÂ for integrating software applications and improving business processes, and said more customers are starting to understand the SOA concept. IBM is encouraging businesses to create discrete, "loosely coupled" processes that can be monitored individually and fine tuned for better performance. Building such an architecture can be complex and requires services from IBM, but the result should be a more nimble and competitive business, according to IBM. The first new offering is a set of software packages to help companies in specific industries -- initially health care, insurance, banking, and telecommunications -- automate processes using an SOA, or services-oriented architecture. The term refers to a way of designing IT systems so that services, such as an insurance claim approval, can be reused or modified more easily. The packages come with prebuilt templates for processes and standards common to each of the four industries. The health-care package, for example, ensures that SOA applications comply with the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act for managing health-care data. The offerings stem fromÂ IBM's acquisition last year of Webify Solutions, which focused on the health-care and insurance industries. IBM updated those packages and created others for the two new industries, said Manoj Saxena, a vice president with IBM Global Business Services and formerly Webify's CEO. It has also translated the products into several languages. The packages, each known as a WebSphere Business Services Fabric, start from $300,000 for an unlimited number of processors and end users, IBM said. The company also released an update to WebSphere Business Monitor, which tracks the performance of business processes. "For example, if I'm an insurance company I might have a goal to process claims about chipped windshields in two hours. This tool shows me how long I am taking, and I can see that the problem is originating from my processing center in Prague, or wherever." The previous version looked primarily at people-based processes, while the update looks at content-based processes and also gives a geographic view through a connection into the Google Maps Web service. IBM's Lotus division has employed Google Maps before, but this is the first time it has been included with a WebSphere product. Pricing for WebSphere Monitor starts at $88,500 for 100 "processor value units," an IBM pricing plan that takes processor type into account. Explaining the benefits of SOA to a CEO can be a tough sell, although Saxena said IT people understand the idea a lot better than 18 months ago, and sales cycles are shorter. "It used to be very education-heavy," he said. Business people want to see where the value is in SOA. "It's a bit like where we were with the Internet in 1995," he said. "People put up Web pages and pretty catalogues but business people didn't really see the value of it until you put a shopping cart around it. We're at the same stage with SOA. We're past the project-level discussion and now it's a question of how to take it to the business level." Regulatory compliance concerns also inhibit SOA adoption. "They are quickly realizing there's this notion of rogue services, with people publishing services all over the place that people can use." Information industries like finance and insurance are moving more quickly to SOA than physical goods industries such as manufacturing. Information industries tend to use more home-grown software and less packaged software from the likes of SAPÂ and Oracle, Saxena said. Those packages aren't necessarily less flexible but customers tend to be tied to the vendors' release cycles, which affects the timing of new projects, he said. Europe has caught up considerably to the U.S. in its SOA adoption, according to Saxena. IBM also introduced services to help customers figure out where they can get the most value from integrating processes, how far along the road they are today and what tools and services they can use. IBM encourages customers to begin with small projects, and typical engagements are four to six months, Saxena said. IBM sees five levels of SOA readiness from "ad hoc" through "aware" to "world class." He estimated that most Fortune 1000 companies are between levels one and two, although a company may be more advanced in a particular area like IT systems. Wednesday's releases are the first of several SOA announcements IBM will make in the coming weeks, targeting companies at different stages of SOA development.
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Grid computing already is close to being a $1 billion business for IBM. Now the company is stepping up its efforts to make sure its independent software vendor partners are onboard the grid-computing bandwagon.
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In a move to compete against XenSource and Virtual Iron, VMware on Monday announced a new bundle of virtualization tools for small companies. The new set of tools is designed to provide SMBs using the free VMware Server with an easy and cost-effective way to manage it. For $1,500, SMBs can get a bundle that includes the VMware Server platform with the VirtualCenter management tool.
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The software company is now looking to the red-hot virtualization market.
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BEA Systems has added the Jonas and Geronimo application servers as platforms supporting the Project Beehive open-source development initiative.
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Microsoft has begun public trials of virtualization software that will compete head-on with programs from VMware.
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3.0 already? Better toss the 2.0 rubbish Virtualization has become somewhat of a Wild West for the data center market, promising streets paved with gold for IT groups - and endless riches for the vendors hawking this new-age server slicing technology.â¦
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Virtualised SAN and NAS bid for your storage grid
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(InfoWorld) - Going virtual is becoming a real answer for data center managers, according to a survey of large and small businesses. Fifty-one percent of North American companies are either testing virtualization technology in their data centers or have already deployed it, according to a report released Friday by Forrester Research. Use of virtualization is less in Europe (35 percent either testing or deploying it) and Asia-Pacific (21 percent), but is generally growing nonetheless. Forrester compared results of a 2006 survey to a similar one in 2005 in which 41 percent of companies in North America, 30 percent in Europe and 23 percent in Asia-Pacific were using or testing virtualization. Although the Asia-Pacific number is lower in 2006 than 2005, Forrester notes the survey sample was smaller there than in the other regions. Whether or not they are using virtualization, interest in or even just awareness of virtualization grew in all geographic regions in 2006 from 2005. Virtualization refers to dynamic management of a company's total information technology infrastructure. The most common use of virtualization is in the operation of x86 servers in data centers. Virtualization makes it possible to run multiple software applications and operating systems simultaneously on one physical server. The result is that instead or running at only 15 percent to 20 percent of capacity, when one server runs only one application, servers can run at 80 percent to 90 percent of capacity. Thus, a company could spend less money buying servers. Although virtualization is more likely embraced by large enterprises, awareness of it by SMBsÂ is growing at a faster rate, the survey showed. Awareness of virtualization by Global 2000 large enterprises grew to 92 percent in 2006 from 87 percent in 2005. But awareness by medium-to-large business jumped to 86 percent from 60 percent andÂ to 83 percent from 62 percent by SMBs. Server virtualization software company VMware remains the dominant provider. Fifty-three percent of those surveyed would consider VMware for virtualization, versus just 9 percent for Microsoft's Virtual Server product. Only one respondent mentioned the open-source Xen virtualization software as a choice, while just six mentioned Sun's Solaris operating system, whose virtualization feature is called Containers. EMC, which operates VMware as a subsidiary,Â announced plans this week to launch an initial public offering of VMware stock. Microsoft, which introduced its Virtual Server product in 2004, is expected to launch an updated version later this year. Forrester surveyed 1,267 enterprises with more than 1,000 employees, and 503 SMBs with 100 to 999 employees for its report.
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BEA Systems&#39; board of directors has named an acquisition price to competitor and suitor Oracle: $21 a share, $4 more than Oracle&#39;s initial offer.&quot;We continue to believe that&#160;Oracle&#39;s unsolicited proposal to acquire BEA&#160;at $17.00 per share significantly&#160;undervalues BEA, and is therefore not in the best interests of BEA shareholders,&quot; the company said in a statement Thursday.Oracle on Tuesday set a deadline&#160;of Sunday for BEA to accept its &quot;generous&quot; original bid, which totals about $6.7 billion. The company also indicated it had no interest in a protracted merger battle.But BEA declared Thursday that the company&#39;s existing assets and future business prospects dictate a significantly higher sale price. The company said it has customers for its array of enterprise software among 75 percent of the Fortune Global 500, along with $1 billion in cash reserves and no debt.BEA said it arrived at the $21-per-share figure after talking to its financial advisor, Goldman Sachs. The company said it has authorized its attorneys to give a draft merger agreement to third parties willing to meet the price. The agreement would &quot;provide for an appropriately high degree of certainty of closing,&quot; BEA said.A successful purchase of BEA would significantly increase Oracle&#39;s standing in the middleware space. While some BEA assets would help round out Oracle&#39;s offerings, the companies overlap in key categories like Web servers and ESB (enterprise service bus) products.
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BEA Systems said Thursday it is prepared to discuss a sale of the company to Oracle Corp. and other potential suitors at a price of $21 per share.
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BEA Systems Inc. on Monday unveiled an all-in-one package of products that make it easier for independent software vendors to build and install web applications on BEA&#39;s Java-based platform.
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The application server space is heating up once again as both IBM and BEA Systems tout new versions of their platforms. With its Liquid Computing strategy, San Jose, Calif.
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Citing need among its customers and the broader market, Netezza announced on Monday that its Netezza Performance Server, a data warehousing appliance for BI (business intelligence) analytics, will soon be scalable to the petabyte level.Systems capable of that scale will be available beginning in the middle of this year, according to the company. The increased performance will be made possible in part through the company&#39;s recently announced Compress Engine, for advanced compression, according to Netezza. The new systems will also support multiterabyte per hour data-loading, the company said.Netezza, based in Framingham, Massachusetts, has regularly announced performance improvements since launching its appliance in 2002. That initial version could handle up to 6TB of data, according to the company. That leapfrogged to 27TB in 2004 and 100TB in 2005, Netezza said.&quot;We have a number of customers who are now at or approaching that upper range,&quot; said Phil Francisco, the company&#39;s director of product marketing.Francisco said the new systems will preserve the company&#39;s existing pricing model. Low-end systems start below $200,000 and scale up from there, with support coming at additional cost, he said.Richard Winter, a consultant with Winter Corp. in Waltham, Massachusetts, said the BI market is ripe for more powerful data-crunching products. &quot;Every time you turn around you see another industry that&#39;s facing a tidal wave of data and they need to understand what this data is saying,&quot; he said. &quot;Many of them have data volumes in this range that they haven&#39;t been able to afford to analyze, as much as they&#39;d like to. ... [Netezza] can deliver that analytic capability, and at a very attractive price.&quot;James Kobielus, an analyst with Forrester Research, said Netezza is now aiming for the highest end of the data warehousing market, going after the likes of Teradata.&quot;Being able to scale up to a petabyte in context of an NPS deployment will go a long way toward getting Netezza in that inner circle of vendors,&quot; he said.The company may face certain problems of perception when attempting to poach such vendors&#39; customers, however. &quot;Their chief challenge is the fact that they&#39;re a startup,&quot; Kobielus said. &quot;They&#39;re definitely not as old and mature as the IBMs and Teradatas.&quot;Netezza also may have limited appeal to customers that would prefer a one-stop shopping approach for their BI-data warehousing needs. Instead, Netezza has partnered with BI vendors such as Business Objects.In addition, heightened competition may be around the corner for the firm, according to the analysts.&quot;Over the course of the year you&#39;ll also see some appliance-type offerings from the major players like Teradata and Oracle,&quot; Winter said. &quot;They&#39;ll compete down the road.&quot;Kobielus said he sees Microsoft making a particularly strong push in coming months.&quot;I am confident Microsoft will have some really important announcements this year,&quot; he said. &quot;Definitely look out for those guys.&quot;
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Dell has announced the availability of virtualization services that aim to help enterprises draw up and implement their virtualization plans -- and it'll help you choose from its own hardware and software portfolio too of course.
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Computer Associates Thursday introduced a usage-based pricing and licensing option for its mainframe management products, aligning its offerings with IBM&#39;s On Demand model.