In the run-up to the next Cloud Expo, 7th Cloud Expo (November 1–4, 2010) being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley, it's time to give my earlier list a complete overhaul. Here, accordingly, is an expanded list of the most active players in the Cloud Ecosystem. I have increased it from the 'mere' 150 I identified back in January of this year, to 250, testimony – as if any were needed! – to the fierce and continuing growth of the "Elastic IT" paradigm throughout the world of enterprise computing. Editorial note: The words in quotation marks used to describe the various services and solutions in this round-up are in every case taken from the Web sites of the companies themselves. Omissions to this Top 250 list should be sent to me via Twitter (twitter.com/jg21) and I will endeavor to include them in any future revision of this newly expanded rou... (more)

Oracle Announces Advances in App Security with Identity Management 11g

To help organizations simplify application security, Oracle announced Oracle Identity Management 11g -- the most complete, integrated and open set of best-of-breed components built on a common platform and engineered to deliver unparalleled integration both within and across the suite through a series of common components. As the industry's first Service-Oriented Security architecture, Oracle Identity Management 11g provides developers with shared services for identity administration and password management, strong authentication and authorization, workflow and auditing, thus rad... (more)

Exploring Persistence Settings - Part 5

In Part 4 I discussed the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse and how it allows you to view, create, and manage JPA entity relationships. The Entity Editor provides a centralized view of all entity relationships, allows you to modify entity properties, and allows you to navigate between the object model, mapping associations, and database schema layers. In Part 5, I will explore persistence settings. The persistence.xml file defines the context for JPA persistence. In this step, you will use the JPA Persistence Configuration Editor to explore the persistence.xml file for your JPA... (more)

Oracle Surviving Sun Just Fine, Thank You

Oracle doesn't look like it's choking on Sun any. It beat the Street and its own projections Thursday when it reported its fiscal Q4 numbers. Revenue was up 39% and income was up 25%. That translates into a record 46 cents a share on $9.5 billion - 60 cents non-GAAP on expectations of 54 cents - with new software licenses up 14% to $3.1 billion. License updates and product support revenues were up 12% to $3.4 billion. Oracle estimates that Sun reduced its $3.3 billion operating income by approximately $100 million, including $176 million of amortization, and contributed about $40... (more)

Autonomy Corporation Plc Announces Interim Results for the Six Months Ended June 30, 2010

CAMBRIDGE, England, July 22, 2010 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L), a global leader in infrastructure software, today reported financial results for the six months ended June 30, 2010. QUARTERLY REPORT AND INTERIM RESULTS Financial Highlights - Record six month revenues of $415.3 million (within the range of analyst expectations of $412-417m), up 28% from H1 2009 with overall organic growth at 14% - Six months organic IDOL revenue growth at 24%; organic growth excluding professional services at 18% - Gross profits (adj.) at $363.4 million, up... (more)