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Eye on the Enterprise by Richard Adhikari (bio)

MIS Information

September 4, 2008, 10:03 PM

Apple's iPhone among new capabilities the cloud brings

At the Office 2.0 conference today, held in San Francisco, Google executive Matthew Glotzbach said during his keynote speech that iPhone access to applications on the the cloud has transformed the mobile landscape. "I live almost exclusively in the cloud, and can access all my documents, flip through this presentation I'm making, plan for meetings, all from my iPhone," he told the audience.

Glotzbach's speech, titled "Ten things I can do in the cloud today that I couldn't a year ago," highlighted the power of the cloud. True, he's biased; after all, Google is a major player in the cloud space. But, as consumers and businesses both have found, the cloud is highly empowering, not least of all because it's either free or really, really inexpensive for what it offers.

Among the other things the cloud offers is instant translation capabilities through Google Translate, but that was a bit of a bust, with someone from the audience saying there was a big mistake in the English to Spanish translation Glotzbach demonstrated. He recovered well, though, saying translation is not perfect yet. Mind you, there are other online sites offering free translation, one of them being SmartLink's translation2paralink.com.

Online collaboration, the collaborative capabilities of Google Forms, the availability of online templates, and the ability to build scalable business applications on the cloud are among the other capabilities Glotzbach talked about.

Will newer and more innovative cloud applications and technologies to leverage them emerge? No doubt. Perhaps Glotzbach should begin taking notes for a speech along the same lines next year, just to see what will change and how.

Posted by Richard Adhikari at 10:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

September 3, 2008, 10:49 PM

Microsoft validates VMware's ESX hypervisor

VMware's announcement today that it has received Microsoft's seal of approval, under the latter's Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) came as no surprise.

 

While VMware remains in fear of Microsoft's entry into the virtualization market and its new CEO Paul Maritz, a Microsoft alumnus noted for his pugnacity, has publicly vowed to fight Microsoft tooth and nail, the two simply had to enter a marriage of convenience.

Microsoft would gain a foot-hold among VMware's customers, and VMware needed Microsoft's blessings because, otherwise, it would not be able to run its hypervisors on the Windows Server family. Since Windows Server is a billion-dollar business for Microsoft, that would be a huge loss.

The pain would be most keenly felt in the SMB market, where VMware has tens of thousands of customers, by its own account, and which is a Microsoft stronghold.

There's no doubt, however, that the alliance between the two is an uneasy one. On September 8, one week to the day before VMware's major conference, VMworld, kicks off, Microsoft will make some announcements about virtualization. The technical term for this is stealing someone's thunder.

Whether or not VMware executives hope Microsoft will then be struck by lightning during the launch is not something they will discuss openly; but chances are that sales of Pepto-Bismol will surge in their vicinity.

Posted by Richard Adhikari at 10:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

August 25, 2008, 1:11 PM

CA, Arcot team up for increased Website security

That old saw about every cloud having a silver lining is true -- at least when it comes to data breaches and ID theft.

Bad as these may be for the average consumer, they open up a great opportunity for vendors.

That burgeoning opportunity now sees CA strengthening its SiteMinder Web Access Manager by teaming up with Arcot, which offers risk-based authentication in its RiskFort product.

The combination of the two will help detect, assess and block fraud attempts in real time for ay consumer- or enterprise-facing portal.

Here's how it works: RiskFort keeps logs of where consumers or enterprise staff normally log in from. If they log in from somewhere else, it uses statistics and analysis to calculate a risk score.

Based on that risk score and policies put in place by companies using the two, CA SiteMinder will then grant or deny access or initiate some other action.

"SiteMinder tells you who can do what within an enterprise; we're adding higher assurance that the who is the right user," said Ram Varadarajan, president and CEO of Arcot.

The deal will help CA continue its attempts to broaden the authentication capabilities of its security product line.

RiskFort works well with SiteMinder, and "strong authentication solutions such as tokens haven't been successful in the online consumer world because they need to be deployed, and that's expensive," Bill Mann, senior vice president, CA Security Management, said.

Tokens are needed in two-factor authentication which is increasingly becoming desirable as the growing number of breaches and the growth of ID theft show. Security experts generally agree that a user name and password is easily cracked and is proving inadequate as cyber criminals get more sophisticated.

The problem with tokens is that the consumer or user needs to carry them around, and often forgets to do so. Arcot's approach is based on offering a software alternative to a physical token.

"As Web 2.0, software service, collaboration and social networks get used more in business, the demand for identity assurance will become even more critical," Mann said. Indeed, and enterprises need to be able to authenticate that people are who they claim to be online.

Posted by Richard Adhikari at 1:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

August 20, 2008, 8:50 PM

Testing as a service uses innovative pay model

My old pal Bob Dylan never spoke a truer phrase than when he said the times they are a-changing.

Not a million years ago, the concept of software as a service began taking off; then Salesforce.com launched the platform as a service concept with its Force.com application development platform.

And now we have testing as a service, from a company by the name of uTest. "We're the SaaS marketplace for software application testing," uTest CEO and co-founder Doron Reuveni told me. "There's no long term contracts, when you're ready, come to our Website and sign up, define your parameters and tell us the kind of testers you want."

Reuveni said uTest has 8,700 professional software testers from 135 companies worldwide, most of whom do the same thing in their day jobs. About 60 percent of them have three to 10 years' testing experience.

The company signs agreements with testers and pays them with a debit card. Testers log their results, and, over time, uTest will "create the largest repository of knowledge and statistical information about software testing, and knowledge base of methodologies of how to test," Reuveni said.

Customers pay per bug found, and pay for performance. When they sign off on an application and pay for the testing, they also grade the tester.

Some companies, especially those using agile development methodologies, subscribe to the service because "they need our services on an ongoing basis," Reuveni said. They get a discount on the bug rate, but also have to commit to a minimum amount of usage monthly.

The service was launched as a pilot with 12 customers "of various sizes from small, innovative companies to large enterprises," all of whom are full-time customers now, and uTest has added another 12 customers, Reuveni said.

So what's in it for the testers? The thrill, kiddies, the thrill. "We give testers the opportunity to test brand new applications, we expand their knowledge and expertise, and we run forums and Webinars that cater to them," Reuveni said.

Posted by Richard Adhikari at 8:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

August 19, 2008, 7:40 PM

Virtual question: Can Raritan manage?

Raritan Helps Manage Virtual/Physical Data Center Equipment

Virtualizing the data center to consolidate servers and reduce costs has been top of mind for a while, and the big boys -- HP, IBM and CA -- have added virtual machine (VM) management capabilities to their data center management tools.

Which is as it should be; their customers are the mega-corporations. But you know that virtualization in the data center really taken hold when a relatively small player like Raritan adds VM management capabilities to its data center management offering.

Raritan's product, CommandCenter Secure Gateway, simplifies the management of heterogeneous IT environments through a unified portal, and Release 4.0 of the product, unveiled yesterday, provides standard data center management tools -- discovery, access and control, power management and auditing. It does this for both virtual and physical servers as well as networking equipment and power devices.

Release 4.0 also tracks migration of data between physical and virtual machines, and, in essence, lets administrators do pretty much anything to a VM that they can to a physical server.

"We view a virtual machine as one more item in the IT infrastructure that CommandCenter Secure Gateway can manage," Henry Hsu, Raritan's director of enterprise product management said.

Think that's a Eureka! moment? At this point in time, yes. But some day, all IT administration tools will be built this way.

Posted by Richard Adhikari at 7:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

August 11, 2008, 8:08 PM

Eyeballing the Olympics in real time

In the little world I inhabit, all the people spent the weekend watching the Olympics. From the opening ceremonies Friday through the last showings we could catch Sunday and still get enough sleep to get into work on time. Tired, sleepy-eyed but on time.

The medal fever mounted as the weekend wore on, and, by the time the gymnastics were broadcast, everyone was hoping and praying the U.S. would win. Put it this way: Nachos were the staple in our diet, and nobody even wanted to get a fresh bag or another beer in case we missed something.

There's another way to do this, of course, one that is not quite so hard on the stomach, and still lets you get a good idea of how we're doing at the Olympics now, and compare the results with how we did at the 2004 Games.

You can get statistics on the Internet, live and in real time, here. There are four dashboards, two showing 2004 Games results and the other two this 2008 Beijing Games results, the latter live and in real time.

In the spirit of the Olympics, Shadan Malik , president and CEO of iDashboards, which put up the site, decided to use his company's business intelligence software for a little bit of fun. "The Olympics spirit is strong around here," he told InternetNews.com.

The four dashboards will be paired off. Each pair will have one dashboard showing 2004 results and the other showing 2008 results so viewers can get a side by side comparison of results.

One pair of dashboards will each show a scorecard and maps of countries, listing how many gold medals they won.

The other pair will each have a map of the world with the countries color coded. TO see any country's medal tallies, just position your cursor over it. The medal tallies will be broken down by type -- gold, silver and bronze.

Figures for this year's games are in real time, of course. Happy viewing.

Posted by Richard Adhikari at 8:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

July 10, 2008, 2:14 PM

Oracle finally gets a bite at the Apple

Well, the mobile apps world has just been stood on its head. The RIM BlackBerry, long the standard for mobile enterprise workers, is now being seriously threatened by the iPhone, which is going to run Oracle business applications.

It's a combination of mobile enterprise underdogs taking on the establishment, consisting of BlackBerry on the wireless hardware side and heavyweights IBM and SAP on the mobile software side.

But the only surprise about the announcement is its timing: We all knew Oracle was not happy at being beaten to the mobile workplace by archrival SAP and by IBM, and Apple has been trying to crack the enterprise to widen its market.

In March, Apple opened its SDK to developers, and got Salesforce.com to demo an app on the iPhone. Couldn't make the hint any stronger without clubbing people over the head with a two-by-four. So we all knew enterprise apps were on the way soon.

The next few weeks should be fun.

Posted by Richard Adhikari at 2:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

June 10, 2008, 8:52 PM

News from the world of virtualization

The key word for today is virtualization. And verily, it is virtually good.

Less than six months after acquiring Thinstall in January, VMware has announced, at Microsoft Tech-Ed Professional being held in Florida today through Friday, that it's releasing VMware ThinApp 4.0, based on Thinstall's product.

This has two new features, Application Link and Application Sync. These enable two virtualized applications to communicate with one another, and let systems administrators update virtual apps remotely.

"We decouple operating systems from the hardware by virtualizing key resources like networking, the CPU, memory and disk, and allow the OS to be contained in a VM, and let multiple VMs run on the same server or on different servers, fully encapsulated from the hardware," VMware's Ed Albanese told me, adding that the company's approach to application virtualization is "very innovative".

This approach eliminates system conflicts so you can "deploy an XP or Windows 2000 image in a Vista image and move the VM from one PC to another at the desktop," Albanese told me, adding that the image can be deployed anywhere -- "a terminal services environment, a Citrix environment, a physical PC, a virtual desktop, a USB key stick." OSes supported are Windows XP, NT, 2000 and Vista; and the application supports 32- and 64-bit Windows hosts.

Fascinating...but being able to bung your VM onto a thumb drive et cetera are pretty standard when you use virtual images. And it wasn't a million years ago that I wrote about Xenocode, which virtualizes applications and lets you "run Office 2003 and 2007 side by side on the same desktop or run IE6 on Windows Vista" and about MokaFive's Virtual Desktop Solution, which automates lifecycle management for virtual machines.

Xenocode uses its own hypervisor while MokaFive uses VMware's VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) -- the core virtual layer that separates the hardware from the software -- and builds intelligent services around it.

 

Posted by Richard Adhikari at 8:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) | Share

June 4, 2008, 9:46 PM

Of policy and entitlements, managing documents, and virtualization

The Concordia Project has just announced the use case presentation line-up for its first public workshop on policy and entitlements management.

This will be held June 23 at the Burton Catalyst Conference 2008 in San Diego.

Representatives from Cisco, Boeing, Micron, Oracle/BEA Systems and the U.S. Army will present policy management use case scenarios to a panel of Concordia technology and policy experts.

The scenarios will include entitle and fine-grained authorization in the enterprise, and there can be no more fine-grained authorization than in the army, where everything, down to the number of hairs on your head, can be stamped classified.

The Concordia community will then work on prioritizing the next steps involved in developing solutions to meet the requirements that will crop up in the scenarios.

What, you may be asking, is the Concordia project? It's a global initiative to drive interoperability across identity protocols in use today.

Participants take on a project when a deployer presents a problem that existing identity protocols do not solve, work with the Internet community to document resulting use cases, requirements and interoperability scenarios, record these on the Concordia wiki and feed the use cases and requirements to a technical group which develops applicable specifications.

That ol' Internet sure gets leveraged.

Rich Internet applications and mashups have made that old saw, 'Vox populi, vox Dei' really hit home.

Once users saw how easy it is to do mashups and all that other cool stuff on Google, Yahoo et al, they began demanding it at their corporate desktops.

The vendors are happy to go along because it's more money for them; but enterprises have to make sure they have at least some idea of the ROI they can expect before jumping on the bandwagon. After all, just because the technology's there doesn't mean you have to bankrupt yourself implementing it.

That having been said, digital map and dynamic content provider Tele Atlas has leveraged Oracle Universal Content Management nicely to deploy dynamic, up-to-date region-specific content across its Websites in 14 languages around the world.

It leverages one Oracle-based content repository to repurpose content on the fly; business users can make changes to the site, review the changes online, submit the changes to an automated approval process (remember the old days of automated workflow?), then post them on the live site themselves.

That's a far cry from the days when any changes would have to be submitted physically to managers' desks and slowly work their way up through the hierarchy and managers spent a disproportionate amount of their time on simple approvals and other administrative tasks.

Meanwhile, newbie virtualization company Neocleus, which has enhanced and modified the Xen Open Source hypervisor to include a GUI and several connectivity and compatibility options, as reported previously in InternetNews.com, (http://www.internetnews.com/software/article.php/3745566) has teamed up with Fujitsu Consulting to provide enterprises with its endpoint IT management solutions.

Fujitsu will provide the system integration expertise and services, and Neocleus its Type 1 open source hypervisor for endpoints.

Neocleus's premise is that removing IP and security agents outside of Windows so the operating system can be treated as a file will make it install cleaner and be easier to restore.

Also, moving antivirus applications outside Windows will make it more secure as the antivirus applications depend on the same API that Trojan Horses are trying to capture.

Some had voiced doubt that this would work, but it looks as if Neocleus is forging right ahead.

Posted by Richard Adhikari at 9:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share