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)

OpenNebula Cloud API

Last week the OpenNebula project launched a survey to collect feedback from their community regarding what is their preferred interface for cloud consumers and how they should invest their resources in cloud API enhancement and development. The survey was open for two days receiving feedback from almost 200 OpenNebula clouds. Targeted to OpenNebula cloud administrators, its aim was firstly to have information about the level of use of the two cloud APIs offered now by OpenNebula, namely AWS and OGF OCCI. The results show that: 38% do not expose cloud APIs, their users only interface through the Sunstone GUI 36% mostly use the AWS API 26% mostly use the OpenNebula's OCCI API or the OCCI API offered by rOCCI Then they asked how they would like us to invest our resources to enhance the Cloud APIs. The results show that: 47% to enhance the existing AWS API implementatio... (more)

Okta Seeks to Accelerate Secure Adoption of Cloud Apps

"Enterprises everywhere are realizing the inherent benefits of running their core IT services in the cloud,” said Todd McKinnon, most recently VP of Engineering at Salesforce.com from 2003 to 2009, and now CEO of the on-demand identity and access management service, Okta. "This shift fundamentally requires them to rethink their IT infrastructure and how their employees access it," McKinnon added. "Okta," he continued, "is the only enterprise class, on-demand service purpose built to help customer secure and manage their entire cloud services network and the people who need access to it, with no professional services required." McKinnon was commenting on the day that he and his team launched a new on-demand service to accelerate the secure adoption of Cloud Apps. Pandora, LiveOps, Enterasys, FusionStorm, and AMAG Pharmaceuticals are the first to roll out Okta identity... (more)

Maritz Goes to EMC, Gelsinger To Run VMware

Paul Maritz, the CEO of EMC subsidiary VMware for the last four years, is stepping down and will be replaced by president and COO of EMC Information Infrastructure Products Pat Gelsinger (pictured below), the 30-year Intel veteran who might have wound up as CEO there if he had stayed and Paul Otellini retired. Gelsinger will start running VMware September 1 for the experience ahead of EMC deciding who’s going to replace CEO Joe Tucci. The news was confirmed late Tuesday after rumors that Maritz had been ousted depressed VMware stock price by 5%. As it turns out Maritz is gonna be some kind of Big Data and cloud-oriented applications strategist at EMC, reporting to Tucci and keeping his seat on the VMware board. EMC CFO Dave Goulden, another candidate to replace Tucci in what is evidently a three-horse race, was named president and chief operating officer of EMC, r... (more)

PeopleSoft Claims Oracle Bid Has Sputtered Out

"I truly believe that the Oracle saga is over." - PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway who figures PeopleSoft's hurried combination with JD Edwards killed the Oracle bid for all intents and purposes. On the other hand, an evidently still worried PeopleSoft has restarted its money-back guarantee scheme, concocted to ward Oracle off by offering customers a refund of two to five times the cost of their license if PeopleSoft is acquired. Oracle would have to foot the bill. When last heard from, Oracle was saying it was still determined to acquire PeopleSoft. Oracle's tender offer currently expires September 19. Conway claims there's no way Oracle can dislodge the PeopleSoft board as it's threatened to do next June if its tender offer fails. Oracle is going to make another appeal to PeopleSoft shareholders and try to smooth the ruffled feathers of PeopleSoft customers on Wednesda... (more)

Novell Tried to Buy SUSE, Sources Say

Well, well, well, well, well. We have it on very good authority that Novell just tried and failed to buy SuSE to add to its Ximian acquisition. Apparently $120 million for such a thing is a little rich for its taste. The German government, which reportedly owns something like 30% of SuSE ($30 million worth), is supposed to be the speed bump. It wants twice SuSE's run rate, which is said to be $31 million a year. IBM, which - in trying to prevent Red Hat from turning into Microsoft 2 - reportedly owns 20% of SuSE, is supposed to be funding the company. ... (more)

PeopleSoft Reports Loss but Wows Street

PeopleSoft lost $7.3 million, or two cents a share, on revenues of $624 million in Q3 but still beat expectations. Excluding certain accounting adjustments related to its acquisition of JD Edwards, PeopleSoft said it would have earned 17 cents a share, exceeding its guidance of 10 cents-11 cents as well as Wall Street's expectations of 11 cents. The company's revenues were also higher than its guidance of $575 million-$590 million. Software license revenues, a yardstick of growth, totaled $160 million, well above the $135 million-$150 million the company thought it would do and nicely ahead of the $121.61 million in the year-earlier quarter. Reflecting confidence in the future, PeopleSoft raised its Q4 revenue projections to $625 million-$640 million from $615 million- $630 million and its EPS outlook to 18 cents-19 cents from 16 cents- 17 cents excluding charges. ... (more)

SCO Attacked for Being Attacked

At the end of last week the SCO Group, the industry's leading pariah, found itself in the ludicrous position of having to defend its contention that it was the subject of a crippling and expanding two-day Denial of Service attack for the third time since it sued IBM in March for putting SCO-owned IP in Linux and of having to muster expert opinion attesting to the attack to gainsay self-appointed experts who claimed either it wasn't or wasn't doing enough to defend itself. SCO's critics were initially given space by Groklaw, the paralegal open source site that's got the knives out for SCO. However, the Cooperating Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), which took exception to SCO calling it a SYN attack, still found that SCO's servers had been deluged by 700 million hits in less than 32 hours that blocked access to the company's Web and FTP servers. Ditto Ne... (more)

SCO's DaimlerChrysler Suit Proves a Bust

So SCO, seeking Fortune 500s it could use as examples to others, sued DaimlerChrysler, a Unix licensee, in March because the car company ignored a letter SCO had sent it and a thousand other companies asking it to swear, among other things, that it was abiding by its processor-limited Unix license and not running Linux binaries anywhere. Prodded by the suit, DaimlerChrysler finally certified to SCO in April - though it maintained it didn't have to - that it hasn't used Unix in seven years. Then it asked the Michigan court hearing the case to throw out the SCO suit because there was "no genuine issue of fact." At a hearing on Wednesday the court, sensibly enough, granted most of Daimler's motion to dismiss, but gave SCO the right to do discovery to find out why Daimler dragged its feet in certifying. The decision thrilled SCO's many enemies, who chortled over SCO bein... (more)

MySQL To Seek Nasdaq Listing?

MySQL AB has hired a heavyweight as CFO saying he's been brought it to help manage growth. Dennis Wolf (pictured), who will be headquartered in the US and report to CEO Mårten Mickos, was managing director and CFO of Hercules Technology Growth Capital, a provider of debt and equity growth capital to technology and life sciences companies. While there, he took the company public on the Nasdaq, suggesting that's what MySQL has in mind. Wolf has also been CFO or a senior executive at Omnicell, Redback Networks and Credence Systems Corporation and has served in executive management roles at Sun and Apple. He is currently on the board of Vitria Technology and Komag Inc. He will be responsible for MySQL's worldwide finance, internal IT, accounting, HR, legal and administrative operations. Wolf's predecessor Hans von Bell has become VP, finance EMEA, the company said. Th... (more)

Web 2.0 Is Dead And It's Time To Get Out Of This Mess!

Industry blogger Alex Bunardzic writes in his "Ethical Software by Alex Bunardzic" blog: "Now that Microsoft has jumped onto the web 2.0 bandwagon, it is more than obvious that web 2.0 is dead as a doornail. Everyone knows by now that anything Microsoft touches turns into this big slimy brown mush, so now’s definitely the time to get out of that mess." Bunardzic analyzes and explains the Web 2.0 movement's fast rise and quick demise in his blog entry. He ends his blog with the following words: "So while wikis have been the first harbingers of the web 2.0 revolution, they continue to be the next wave, bravely pointing the way even as the web 2.0 is right now dying a horrible death of socio-pathological abusiveness. Let us therefore leave the frothy and frivolous world of web 2.0 popularity contest ridden sites, and march forward to the new web that will be less about ... (more)