Thursday, July 29, 2010 Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey   To the President of Syria, Mr. and Mrs. Bashar al-Assad Mr. and Mrs. President Bashar al-Assad: At the tender age of 17 months my severely ill daughter Sofia, an American citizen, was abducted by her mother on Monday, July 26, in Istanbul, Turkey, and taken to Syria. Fox News: ▸ video ▸ story I was informed yesterday by Sofia's mother that she will not be coming back to the United States nor will she allow Sofia to return home. Sofia has been diagnosed with a severe medical condition that requires immediate treatment in the United States. It was scheduled to start on July 27, 2010, in New Jersey, the day after her abduction and was supposed to last until she reaches the age of 3. Any delay in the urgently needed treatment will result in a life-long disability for Sofia and make her dependent for the whole of her a... (more)

The Future of Cloud Computing: Industry Predictions for 2012

With 9th Cloud Expo - Cloud Expo Silicon Valley - still in full swing at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California, what is being said about the future landscape of cloud computing? In this round-up we asked a variety of members of the cloud computing ecosystem, from CIOs to independent consultants to marketeers. We asked in each case for their top five predictions. Here are their views on what's in store in 2012: Santa Clara Convention Center is getting ready for Cloud Expo Silicon Valley DIY Service Provision | Cloud of Devices | Security Breach Looms | Personalized SPs | African Growth Lauren C. States | @lauren_states VP & CTO, Cloud Computing & Growth Initiatives, IBM Lauren is responsible at IBM for the technology strategy for the company's growth initiatives, including cloud computing, Smarter Planet, business analytics and emerging markets. Previously she... (more)

Application Performance Management Done Right

What is Application Performance Management (APM)? Like a lot of good questions, it depends on your business needs.  What is the goal of an ideal APM?  Does it mean 99.999% availability?  Perhaps it is a favorable overall end user experience when using the application but, as compared to what? My point is that Application Performance Management / Monitoring means different things to different businesses and it can even depend on the application involved. What is the Goal of APM “Begin with the goal in mind.” I wish I could take credit for that quote.  What is the goal of the APM? Have you listed out the objectives you hope to obtain from your APM strategy?  This approach will help your team ensure satisfaction with the final solution chosen.  Here are some examples. Minimum of 99.999% availability with lower Mean Time To Know (MTTK) and Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) Less ... (more)

ESB Myth Busters: 10 Enterprise Service Bus Myths Debunked

Since releasing my latest book, Enterprise Service Bus (O'Reilly Media, 2004), I have been doing a fair amount of visiting corporations, conducting seminars, and generally discussing with enterprise architects the subject of enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) and how an enterprise service bus (ESB) backbone can be leveraged to provide a framework for an enterprise SOA. Along the way, I have been asked many questions about the nature of an ESB. I have also fended off some misconceptions that have been growing in the general IT population regarding what an ESB is and when, where, and how it can be used. I have gathered together the most popular questions and misconceptions, and offer some clarity in the form of a "top ten" list. Myth #1. ESB is just a new name for EAI. While many IT architecture groups are focusing on building SOAs, they still inevitably be... (more)

Cloud Computing From "Agile Cloud Integration" to "Zero Latency"

Delegates, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors will be traveling from all over the world to New York this coming June 6-9 to attend 8th International Cloud Expo in New York City, co-located at the Jacob Javits Convention Center with 11th Virtualization Conference & Expo. Listen to Cloud Expo being promoted yesterday in New York City on CBS Radio/1010Wins [WikiUpload - MP3 file] Here is an early sneak-peek at some of the many and varied themes and topics due to be discussed in the breakout technical sessions scheduled in the course of the jam-packed four days. (Editorial Note: this is a small initial selection only – the Call for Papers for 8th Cloud Expo only closed February 4th, and new sessions are being selected and posted on a daily basis.) Agile Cloud Integration – see The Transactional Cloud Application Development in the Cloud – see Java in the Cloud Automation in... (more)

Where Are RIA Technologies Headed in 2008?

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning? "Because they can only give you answers." Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that readers can themselves infer where AJAX is headed. What are the top questions to ask next about AJAX? Eric Miraglia of Yahoo! 1.  (From March'08) How do I calculate the ROI of building my RIA on the iPhone SDK vs using AJAX? 2.  How do I assess the performance of my app and decide what to do next to make it faster?  3.  When it comes to accessibility, how do I know what's required of me for my rich web apps?  Beyond what's required, what makes good business se... (more)

Law in the Cloud - How Lawyers and Clients Both Benefit from Cloud Computing

Lawyers often get a bad rap -­ just consider all of those ubiquitous lawyer jokes. Why? One reason for the "lawyer stigma" is because of the traditionally high cost of legal services, and that people often only talk to lawyers when things go wrong. Charley Moore will expand upon this because now, thanks to new applications of cloud computing, lawyers are changing the way they do business - so that both lawyers and clients can work together smarter. The 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo is co-located with the 7th International Virtualization Conference & Expo and will be taking place November 2-4, 2009 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA. Register Today and Save! Sponsor and/or Exhibit Today View Full Conference Schedule In this session, learn from Founder and CEO of RocketLawyer.com and examine how cloud computing is enabling law... (more)

Oracle Claims Victory Over EC; Says Sun Will Sell Clouds

Oracle Keynote at Cloud Expo Cloud Computing Expo - Oracle expects the European Commission to wave its acquisition of Sun through next month MySQL and all without any annoying conditions. Oracle president Safra Catz, who’s been wrestling with the EC, said so when the company posted its fiscal second-quarter results Thursday, another reason Oracle’s going to have a Merry Christmas. Catz took a bunch of Oracle users to an EC hearing a week ago to buttress the company’s claims that the EC had put words in users’ mouths to support the theory of harm it manufactured to try to stop Oracle from getting MySQL. Oracle Named Exclusive Diamond Sponsor of Cloud Expo 2010 The meeting was backed by a write-in campaign from hundreds of users as well as a letter from the US Senate and a public statement from the Justice Department. A grateful Catz said, “I want to thank all of our... (more)

Commentary: Sun’s Oracle Merger

Mergers & Acquisitions on Ulitzer With only the ‘you may now kiss the bride’ custom to follow, the Oracle/Sun marriage (or dare I say Sun/Oracle) is now finally complete. After months of legal wrangling which has caused nothing but embarrassment and dwindled Sun’s stature within the market sphere, reports also came out that half of Sun's 27,000 staff will be made redundant. Thus initial indications are clear that Oracle, known for its past agnosticism to open source has an eye for the merger being based on maximizing profit. In the meantime Sun’s competitors are probably smiling wryly as the delay of the merger played into their immediate interests but what threats and challenges does this partnership now pose to the once great open source vendor which did so much for developing the tech and e-commerce industry. One thing which Oracle will most probably do is addres... (more)

Best Practices for Amazon Redshift

Data Warehouse as a Service Recently Amazon announced the availability of Redshift Data warehouse as a Service as a beta offering. Amazon Redshift is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools. It's optimized for datasets ranging from a few hundred gigabytes to a petabyte or more and costs less than $1,000 per terabyte per year, a tenth the cost of most traditional data warehousing solutions. Architecture Behind Redshift Any data warehouse service meant to serve data of petabyte scale should have a robust architecture as its backbone. The following are the salient features of Redshift service. Shared Nothing Architecture: As indicated in one of my earlier articles, Cloud Database Scale Out Using Shared Nothing Architecture, the... (more)

Weekly Roundup: Windows Azure IaaS Moves into GA

Over the last week, the cloud world seems to have received some significant announcements from Microsoft and Amazon. Also, HP Cloud has introduced a new messaging service. Plus, Appcelerator has announced the release of Titanium 3.1 and Node.ACS GA. Here’s a quick sum up of Cloud happenings over the last week. Microsoft has announced the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. This new service allows users to host Virtual Machines in Azure. In addition, they have also reduced GA prices on virtual machines and cloud services by 21-33%. Next, they have also announced the availability of Django (a high-level Python Web framework) in the Windows Azure Web Application Gallery. This tutorial helps users to create a website on Azure for Django Framework in just a few clicks. HP Cloud has introduced a new HP Cloud Messaging service. This service simp... (more)