Who will operate the cloud?
510724
If any of the large system vendors truly believe that a highly concentrated compute utility is the future, it's unclear why they should be embracing the role of passive arms merchant given how little control they would have over their own destiny in such
497084
Software maker expected to make leadership changes in Windows and online services units. Two prominent outside hires are expected to be looking for new opportunities.
105459
Microsoft has responded to our story yesterday about it threatening Asian governments that, if they choose Linux, they may get sued - possibly by one of the holders of the &quot;more
752157
Now that the final version of the GNU General Public Licence version 3 has been released, the in-depth analysis of its implications can begin.  Two of the first commentaries to be published have come from the legal world, and there are doubtless many more being prepared for purely internal use within software companies wondering whether to adopt the new licence.  But important as both the legal and commercial details are, I believe the true significance of the GPLv3 lies elsewhere.
399772
Government procurers will have to be more CPU agnostic
406877
This is the question posed by Will Hurley of BMC.  After chatting with him today about life, the upcoming elections, and the open source community in general, I decided that I am pretty curious about how to answer that question myself. read more
294771
Go virtual, go nuts Microsoft, of all companies, continues to lead the way with free and loose licensing terms around server virtualization software and multi-core processors.â¦
204738
The U.S. remains No. 1 in the world in high-performance computing, but IBM's Dave Turek examines whether it can maintain its current domination.
682524
The data center fabric will at a minimum bring together network, server, and storage administrators. Are you ready? Can you handle it?
236626
The big theme that's developing this year is high-definition connectivity. How will everything fit together in such a way that it's both convenient to the consumer and perpetually profitable for the various companies involved?
448634
A Gartner Group report on PC hardware sales in emerging global markets has stirred up controversy in both the open-source and proprietary software worlds. Eighty percent of personal computers sold in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe that ship with the Linux operating system eventually will be running a pirated copy of Windows, predicts Gartner.
766712
In the wake of Amazon's S3 service's recent outage, Microsoft's re-emphasizing their own Windows Server model -- and the benefits of not relying entirely on the cloud.
627118
(InfoWorld) - In the IT shop of the near future, personnel likely will manage services instead of systems, a Sun Microsystems official said Monday in elaborating both on Sun's internal plans and what can be expected of the IT landscape at large. While the average enterprise IT shop now has many servers and client systems, companies including Sun can be expected to utilize online services available over the public Internet, said Robert Worrall, Sun chief information officer and senior vice president. This will make IT staff act more as service managers than systems managers. Meanwhile, internal application developers instead would find work building applications for service providers. Sun expects to be at the forefront of this wave. "We've been out talking quite a bit about this notion that the IT organizations of tomorrow are going to look very different from the IT organizations [of] today," Worrall said. IT will focus more on business than technology, he said. IT shops will transform from building, deploying, and supporting traditional applications to serving more as aggregators of network services, said Worrall. Like doctors who do high-level diagnoses and then refer patients to specialists, IT will refer users to providers of services, Worrall said. He cited online CRM specialists Salesforce.com, one of the most prominent examples of a SaaS (software as services) vendor, as such a company providing application services. "We're simply [espousing] that over a period of time, that will become the norm and not the exception," Worrall said. Other examples of online services gaining prominence include e-mail applications from Google and Yahoo and the Oracle On Demand service. ERP and human resources applications also will be leveraged online. "I think it's time for us as industry leaders really to get our hands around how we're going to evolve that model, because like it not, the current models of building hundreds or thousands of customized business applications simply aren't sustainable," Worrall said. Acknowledging user concerns over security and protection of intellectual property, Worrall said services providers will have to provide a model that ensures privacy and data protection. Service-level agreements will become critical in meeting this goal. Concepts such as federated identity will help take care of security issues. At Sun, the company currently runs about 1,200 business applications. There is no reason these cannot be provided as online services, Worrall said. In Sun's vision, the company will buy services, then run them in a browser on a device such as a laptop or a thin client. There will be no need to maintain legions of servers. Sun currently utilizes about 3,000 servers worldwide to run its business. Sun ultimately would like to be relieved of maintaining its own datacenter, but some servers still would be needed for applications that service providers probably would not offer, such as engineering applications, Worrall said. "I'd love to say the vision is zero [servers], but I don't know that we'd ever get to zero," said Worrall. The market is already moving to this more efficient paradigm, but Sun internally expects to be largely services-based by 2015, although it could be a few years earlier or later than that, said Worrall. With Sun itself a purveyor of server hardware, a widespread move to services-based computing by users at large would mean a radical change for Sun's business model. Its customer base will shift to being service providers, who need to maintain large datacenters. With this paradigm, Sun's server sales volumes potentially could increase, even if the customer list itself shrinks. "That's where I think Sun has the greatest play in the future," Worrall said. Meanwhile, companies that otherwise could not afford their own IT networks can avail themselves to online services. IT has been criticized for being too expensive, and the service paradigm addresses this problem. "I can simply buy a standard service off-the-shelf," said Worrall. Sun anticipates SaaS moving to the next level, Worrall said. Right now, SaaS tends to have a one-size-fits-all approach to privacy, trust, and service levels. This will not be sufficient, and service providers will need to offer more flexible options, according to Worrall; 24/7 service provision will be essential if large companies are to adopt service-based application models. As Sun moves toward service adoption internally, the halls of the company's IT offices may have fewer Java developers. Instead, Sun offices will feature persons focused on vendor management, security, and compliance. Java developers, meanwhile, will find work at organizations building services. This does not necessarily mean these application development services would be outsourced; a sizable amount of work requires local knowledge, Worrall said. "Offshoring is not the panacea; you have to have an onshore presence," he said. As Sun moves to a services paradigm, the company will need to focus on an ecosystem to accommodate this, because it is not the same as having a traditional ISV strategy, said M.R. Rangaswami, managing director of the Sand Hill Group, an investment and advisory firm that has researched SaaS. Sun must focus on building a partner-friendly environment for the new model, he said. "In a SaaS model, it's very different," Rangaswami said. "You don't need to give anyone hardware or software; you need to have a program that is very sculpted to give you a quick on-board [entrance] onto the new on-demand ecosystem." Fortune 500 companies are taking a look at this model, said Rangaswami. A services-based approach offers benefits such as flexibility and savings in power consumption. But companies must fit application services into their own standards for security and compliance, he said. Sun customers, meanwhile, are latching onto the services concept over development of internal IT infrastructures. During a recent meeting in Moscow with a group of 50 startup companies, the vast majority said they would not want to build to build their own IT shops, Worrall said. Several large customers in New York City also gave the idea a thumbs-up, he said. Sun's Network.com, which also has been known as Sun Grid, is a hosted service to provide compute cycles. Although the service was criticized for not gaining much traction in the market, Worrall said the grid service has had some successes in unexpected areas, with developers rather than large enterprises latching onto it. The industry itself needs to mature before grids are as successful as they could be, he said. Sun does not plan to sell hosted application services, Worrall said. The company does see open source as a conduit for a service-based application model. Developers can experiment with many solutions without getting locked into a single provider, Worrall said.
462194
Analysts take guesses on how the Google phone will operate.
728242
Software on the Seine, anyone? Backup in Budapest? VTL from Vienna? And why not. Europeans have far more experience when it comes to dealing with data regulatory issues than we do.
260726
A leading software exporter from India won a multi-year contract to design Ferrari's Formula 1 engines. Also: IBM to become the technical adviser to British bank & hellip;. Orange unveils 3G phone for France and Britin & hellip;. and more.
243488
A jury's $1.52 billion judgment against Microsoft hangs a sudden, unexpected cloud over MP3. This could be the opening open-source advocates have been waiting for. By Eliot Van Buskirk and Evan Hansen.