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)

Intel Antitrust Settlement Waits on FTC Commissioners

Intel has come to a preliminary antitrust settlement with the Federal Trade Commission's lawyers. It arrived there a few days ahead of a July 22 deadline, but there's no deal until it's approved by the agency's five commissioners and apparently it didn't look like they were going to say yea or nay by the 22nd so Intel has gotten a deadline extension until August 1. The deadline puts the FTC's litigation against the company on hold. Anyway, the deal would reportedly regulate the giant's use of discounts on both processors and graphics chips, but what that means exactly nobody is s... (more)

The Essential Guide to Better Release Management & Deployment

Click Here to Download This eBook Now! Managing an application release and its distribution is a complex piece of the development process. A release may pass every test in QA, then quickly go haywire when in production. Components can get left behind, destination targets are missed or files get installed in the wrong locations with no easy way to roll back. Download this eBook from Aldon and learn how to how to make your efforts feel like a walk in the park and not a day on the battlefield. Click Here to Download This eBook Now! ... (more)

XML Maven Goes to Google to Fight the iPhone

Google Session at Cloud Expo XML co-creator Tim Bray has fled Sun and Oracle - where he says he could have stayed - for Google Android and the title developer advocate to stick it to iPhone, which he labels a closed "sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it....Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to... (more)

Why Web Services Failed at SOA (and Why REST May Fail Too!)

First, let's review what is the concept behind services, with particular mention of the web services themselves. A service is a business functionality exposed by a simple interface. Note that it is not an object, nor a method, nor a module, not a procedure. It is pure business functionality. Services are consumed, not called, nor executed nor invoked. We define the service consumption as the interaction between agents, a client and a provider, which will communicate using a messaging system, where the data unit is a document. Consumption may be local or remote (meaning a service ma... (more)