LinuxWorld, San Francisco: Who'll Buy Novell First, Sun or IBM? So Sun president Jonathan Schwartz, apropos of nothing, up and tells the Wall Street Journal - in time to make the edition that hits the newsstands the morning LinuxWorld Conference & Expo opens - that Sun has been thinking about buying Novell. He said Sun wasn't negotiating with Novell, but it's been thinking about acquiring it because it would disrupt IBM's strategy of boxing in Red Hat - so Red Hat won't become another ungovernable Microsoft impudently competing more and more with IBM's own products - by throwing more of its business to Novell satellite SUSE, a wedding IBM paid for. Well, either what we've got here is a stink bomb or a trial balloon. In a blog attributed to Jonathan, he writes, "Whoever controls Novell controls the operating system on which IBM's future depends" and Sun, which has any... (more)

Sun CEO Reviews Company's Prospects for 2009-10

Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been reviewing Sun's three major strategic imperatives, and the company's progress going in to its next fiscal year. As industry blogs go, the three entries he's produced so far are miniature masterpieces. A fourth and last one is on its way. The first in the series, titled "Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps," kicks off with the bright and breezy intro: "We're approaching the end of our fiscal year, and given all the swirl in the economy, I thought it worthwhile to restate where Sun's headed as a company, to let customers, partners, employees and investors see and understand where we're headed. Clarity's always useful, doubly so in times of uncertainty." But it isn't long before Schwartz shows us how he's earned his reputation as one of the industry's most insightful bloggers, with a natural ear for a ringing phrase: "I'm neither wo... (more)

MySQL Boss To Follow Co-Founders Out the Door

Sun has lost the stickiness test. MySQL boss Marten Mickos, the operation’s former CEO and senior VP of Sun’s database group since its acquisition almost exactly one year ago, is following co-founder and MySQL’s original developer Monty Widinius out the door. Sun lost the open source database’s other co-founder David Axmark a few months ago. Monty’s decision, in the works for months and all wrapped up with his perception that Sun was mishandling MySQL development, was still “pixel-ating,” so to speak, on his blog when news of Marten’s exit broke. Monty was unhappy with MySQL 5.1 being rushed out the door and with the community’s access to the database’s source code under Sun. Mickos, like Axmark, apparently felt stifled inside a big company and maybe never intended staying longer. He is quoted as saying in his farewell address to the troops, “I love the challenge ... (more)

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz Scopes Out Future for Sun's Cloud

"At Sun, we're planning on maintaining Java's ubiquity as the number one runtime environment, backed by the world's most price performant datacenter infrastructure, all powered by Sun's cloud." That, in no uncertain terms, is Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's vision for Java and stresses the new role that Cloud Computing is beginning to play at Sun. "The Java platform is only growing in importance and value, across billions of devices," Schwartz noted, writing on his industry blog. He also shared his view of the overall marketplace, as follows: "First, freely distributed, open source software will continue to create enormous revenue opportunities for those that understand the underlying business model - as an example, the Java business for Sun, last quarter, delivered more than $67m in billings, up nearly 50% year over year. On an annualized basis, that means the Java client... (more)

Android Outside the Mobile Domain

Enterprise open source commentator Glyn Moody says that Android-based ARM systems, such as the chipsets for Google's Android operating system announced this week by Freescale, could be part of the next wave of price reductions that will push netbooks down to $150 and less. Moody believes that Apple will over time lose its iPhone advantage to open source solutions like Android. Here is his logic: "Freescale's announcement is still at the level of marketing hype, but it is nonetheless indicative of how people are starting to think. And the crucial element is Android, because once you have netbooks running the stack, then you will have a spectrum of hybrids that can mix mobile and netbook features. Again, this is something free software is ideal for: there are no constraints on experimentation, and the tools for trying things out are readily available. This is an aspec... (more)

Cisco Takes its Long Shot at Morphing into IT’s El Supremo

Cisco CEO John Chambers Monday became the latest in a long line of visionaries to come down from the mountain top with an architectural roadmap to the Promised Land at an exploitable industry inflection point. If the purportedly game-changing next-generation platform scheme succeeds, Chambers will be rich, even more fiendishly rich than he already is, and Cisco will own not only the data center, but the cloud, the data center's logical successor, and the computer establishment, as we know it, will be up-ended. As prophesied, the widgetry, Cisco's answer to its slowing networking fortunes and the growth demanded of it by Wall Street, centers on a newfangled Nehalem-based blade server called the Unified Computing System, which is all about convergence with networking at its heart. There's no guarantee it will take off; it's still slideware; and it will take time to gau... (more)

Obama Endorses the Value of U.S. Social Technologies

"We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It’s how we make a living." With this one sentence, spoken Tuesday during his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama ushered in once and for all the Age of Sociotechnology, the age that recognizes the importance of the interaction between people and technology in both workplaces and society. Obama recognizes perhaps better than anyone in America the extent to which technology nowadays is socially constructed and society is technically constructed. "We are the nation...of Google and Facebook" - those eight words may well go on to become the most significant President Obama has ever uttered to date. For better or for worse, it would seem that the destiny of the U.S.... (more)

Facebook, Google, and the Near-Term Future of the USA

On the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 12,000 for the first time since June 2008, it was impossible not to correlate the eloquence and optimism of President Obama's "State of the Union" speech on Tuesday night with the restoration of a sense of perspective and hope in the USA about the future. Obama grasped the nettle full-on. "We are poised for progress," he declared, adding: "Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing." As one blogger expressed it, though - and he is a former Goldman Sachs trader called Tyler Durden, so he ought to know wheref he speaks: "There was a massive pink elephant in the room called reality though." Durden's gripe is with what he deems to be the unreality of Obama's praising Google and Facebook so highly in an Ameri... (more)

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley Speaker Profile: Rich Wolski – Eucalyptus Systems

With Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley (11th Cloud Expo) due to open in two weeks' time at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, let's introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical program at the West Coast conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing & Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud and/or Big Data solutions that are transforming the world of Enterprise IT? CLOUD EXPO SPEAKER NAME: Rich Wolski TWITTER: @RichWolski COMPANY: Eucalyptus Systems 11TH CLOUD EXPO SESSION TITLE: The Five Steps to Deploying a Private Cloud SESSION DESCRIPTION: http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/2361109 BRIEF BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Rich Wolski is the Chief Tec... (more)

Cloud Expo New York Speaker Profile: Mark Hinkle – Citrix Systems

With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under two weeks away, what better time to remind you in greater detail of the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses...? CLOUD EXPO SPEAKER NAME: Mark Hinkle TWITTER: @mrhinkle COMPANY: Citrix Systems 10TH CLOUD EXPO SESSION TITLE: Crash Course in Open Source Cloud Computing SESSION DESCRIPTION: ht... (more)

Hadoop and Business Intelligence

Like my colleague Alex Olesker, I too attended Cloudera Day 2012.  While there were many panels of interest, perhaps one of the most important was Amr Awadallah‘s talk about big data applications to business intelligence. Many CTOVision readers with backgrounds in the intelligence community may think of corporate espionage when the phrase “business intelligence” is uttered, but I assure you that this is definitely not the case. Business intelligence is different from competitive intelligence, which is primarily based on open-source analysis of competitors and markets. Rather, business intelligence is quantitative analysis of internal data using advanced analytics techniques. As we’ve noted before on CTOLabs, business intelligence is a changing field that is increasingly awash in information. Analysts face three core problems: More information – Critical information no... (more)