Articles by Maureen O'Gara

Virtualization: VMware Joins the Linux Foundation

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:30:00 EDT

VMware, which seems to be as far from open source as you can get these days, has joined the Linux Foundation, promising to make more contributions to the Linux community. It's cultivating the Linux crowd as adoption of Linux expands as a result of its position as a platform for cloud computing and in virtualized environments.

Steve Jobs Eats Humble Pie

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:15:00 EDT

In an internal e-mail leaked to Ars Technica, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted that MobileMe, Apple’s panned flirtation with the cloud, was launched prematurely and was “not up to Apple’s standards.” Remember? Even the Apple-loving Walt Mossberg over at the Wall Street Journal branded it “ragged” and unreliable.

IBM and Linux Distros Gang Up on the Microsoft Desktop

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:00:00 EDT

IBM, Canonical, Novell, Red Hat and the distributions’ hardware partners are ganging up on Microsoft, intending to push a Microsoft-free desktop alternative involving Linux, Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony. They think they see an auspicious constellation of stars in the sky – like PC margins – paving the way to making Linux-on-the-desktop mainstream – well, more mainstream anyway.

Intel Hikes Up Its Skirt

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:45:00 EDT

Ahead of Siggraph next week Intel decided to lift its skirt and pass around the paper it’ll read there describing Larrabee, its new hydra-headed x86 graphics accelerator architecture meant to take on Nvidia and AMD’s graphics arm ATI in late ’09-early 2010. The operative word that is supposed to make Nvidia and ATI quake in their boots is x86.

Dell Wants Cloud Computing Trademark

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:15:00 EDT

Dell, it appears, put in its papers with the US Patent and Trademark Office in March of last year to trademark the buzzword “Cloud Computing.” Its application quietly passed through the Opposition Stage a few months ago unopposed and thus it is now at the point that it’s been allowed but hasn’t been registered. Dell has six months to use it or lose it. Presumably it could do that in connection its Dell Cloud Computing Solutions consultancy unless somebody successfully points out that it’s a generic expression.

Yahoo Stockholders Don’t Like Jerry Yang THAT Much

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:15:00 EDT

Turns out the vote that overwhelmingly returned Yahoo’s board to office last Friday by a surprise three-to-one margin was seriously miscounted. The official tabulation claimed that CEO Jerry Yang got 85.4% of the vote (14.6% withheld) and Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock got 79.5% (20.5% withheld). By that count the pair that ran off Microsoft and its billions fared better than last year.

Amazon Backs Cloud Server Start-up Elastra

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 08:15:00 EDT

Elastra, a 40-customer SMB-directed start-up that provides a legacy-embracing configuration management service for Amazon Web Services (AWS) – your basic in-a-click virtual deployment, monitoring and accounting beginning with RDBMSes like MySQL, Postgres and EnterpriseDB – has picked up a $12 million second round from – surprise, surprise – Amazon, Bay Partners and existing investor Hummer Winblad.

Cloud Computing - AT&T Takes to the Cloud

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:15:00 EDT

AT&T broke into the cloud business Tuesday with the “global launch” of what it calls AT&T Synaptic Hosting and describes as a next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses. It’s talking about a complete pay-as-you-go turnkey hosting package using either a virtual or dedicated platform. It’s planning to put a billion dollars into this global network this year dedicating five so-called super-IDCs or Internet data centers in the US, Europe and Asia and using technology it acquired from USinternetworking (USi).

Virtualization - AMD Loses Share

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:00:00 EDT

According to Mercury Research by way of Lehman Brothers AMD lost share in both desktops and notebooks in Q2 measured in both units and revenue. Intel was up two points to 87.5% in notebook units aided and abetted by AMD's slower-than-expected Puma ramp, which took 6% off of AMD's notebook units while Intel's pushed up 11%.

Cloud Computing Start-Up Creates PowerPC-Based Cloud Desktop

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:15:00 EDT

There hasn't been a PowerPC-based computer since Apple abandoned the dingus and bolted to Intel, a move that did wonders for Apple's volumes. Now a Mountain View start-up called CherryPal is about to introduce a $249 Debian-based desktop that's about the size of a dime store paperback built around the 2W MPC5121e mobileGT PowerPC chip that Freescale usually sells to Detroit for navigation devices.

Big Yahoo Stockholder Demands a Recount

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:30:00 EDT

The surprise three-to-one margin that overwhelmingly returned Yahoo’s board to office last Friday at the shareholders meeting proved too big for Capital Research & Management to swallow. It’s demanding a recount, according to the Wall Street Journal blog All Things Digital, which has been all over the Yahoo story for months.

Sun Eclipsed by Economy

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:15:00 EDT

If Sun hadn’t done that one-for-four reverse stock split in November and turned its $5 stock into a $20 stock, it would now be a $2 stock. Instead, it’s a $9 stock, down more than 50%. And things don’t look like they’re gonna get much better. So it’s going to peel off another billion of that fortune it’s still got in the bank and buy back more stock.

No Fire in the Belly of Yahoo Stockholders

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:00:00 EDT

Deprived of a proxy fight Yahoo stockholders basically reacted with a shrug Friday to the board that cost them billions by running off Microsoft and overwhelmingly returned the existing directors.

New Release of VMware Lab Manager Announced

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:45:00 EDT

VMware has announced the pending availability of VMware Lab Manager 3, which is supposed to provide greater automation and control for IT lab environments. Software developers and QA engineers use VMware Lab to provision multi-VM environments and it’s also meant to give IT departments more control over policies. The new release supports multiple organizational units – like helpdesk operations, training organizations and sales teams – advanced networking capabilities, and tighter integration with VMware Infrastructure.

Cloud Computing: IBM Building its Eighth & Ninth Clouds

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:15:00 EDT

IBM said Friday that it is going to build a $360 million state-of-the-art commercial cloud on its campus at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, intending that the thing be the first built with IBM’s New Enterprise Data Center design principles and offer “immense pools of Internet-scale computing technology.” The company is putting another cloud computing center in Tokyo, expecting it to be used by large enterprise customers, universities and government agencies.

Mozy Claims 100% Growth in Six Months

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:24:00 EDT

Mozy, EMC’s online backup property, says it doubled the size of its enterprise and SMB customer base in the first half and now has more than 750,000 users and 20,000 business customers backing up 7.6 billion files to its 10-petabyte storage system.

Purple Flowers

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:20:00 EDT

Following last month’s $32 million acquisition of Openwave’s browser business, Purple Labs is buying the mobile applications suite and software engineering team of Sagem Mobiles, a French maker of mobile phones branded by Sony Ericsson, Orange, Vodafone et al. Sagem’s owner Safran, a French technology group, is selling out to Purple investor Sofinnova Partners, the VC firm, and will become a shareholder in the new Sagem Wireless and Purple will supply its LiMo-based software.

Mozilla Deploys Pentaho, Vertica

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:55:00 EDT

Having outgrown its homemade log analysis scripts, Mozilla has deployed Pentaho’s commercial open source business intelligence (BI) Data Integration widgetry and Vertica Systems’ high-performance analytic database to analyze large volumes of log file information in a data warehouse and business intelligence system.

Facebook Raids Mozilla

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:30:00 EDT

Mozilla VP of engineering and Firefox lead Mike Schroepfer is jumping to Facebook as one of four engineering directors. His turf will be front-end product and platform engineering and he will report to Facebook’s kid CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Parallels Aims at Internal, Channel Clouds

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:04:00 EDT

Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov figures Google could dominate the cloud – the question is how much – with Microsoft at least a close second and maybe Apple can wrestle the rest of the wannabes like IBM, HP, Facebook, Adobe and EMC for third place. Then comes the internal clouds, where VMware tends to play, and the channel clouds.

One of Google’s Own Goes into Competition with It

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:58:00 EDT

The two-year-old counter-Google search start-up, Cuil (say cool), Irish for knowledge and notable for its ex-Google founders, finally hit the radar screen Sunday and got a lot of ink because of its DNA, a lot of the comments cruelly negative. (Cuil didn’t turn up in its own search.)

Rackable To Resell IBM BladeCenters in Shipping Containers

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:42:00 EDT

Rackable Systems is going to include IBM’s BladeCenter servers in its ICE Cube modular data center offering, its idea of what you can do with a shipping container. Under its deal with IBM, BladeCenter T or HT systems will be the only blade server platforms available for custom ICE Cube implementations globally.

BI Cloud Start-up Gets Seeded

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:34:00 EDT

An emerging SaaS player called Good Data Corporation, with interests in collaboration business intelligence solutions, has gotten $2 million in seed money from analysts and sometimes investors Esther Dyson and Tim O’Reilly, Good Data founder and CEO Roman Stanek, who did NetBeans Inc and Systinet, and Windcrest Partners.

Will Yahoo Be Wearing Two Black Eyes Come Saturday Morning?

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:26:00 EDT

After telling the San Francisco Chronicle’s editorial board that Yahoo’s management was “pathetic,” oilman T. Boone Pickens dumped his 10 million shares of Yahoo stock the other day for a $50 million loss. He acquired the position in May out of sympathy for his friend Carl Icahn’s proxy fight and in hopes of a quick buck.

JavaFX Preview Out

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:54:00 EDT

Sun has released a JavaFX preview to create sexy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on PCs, mobile, TV and other consumer devices on the Java platform. It’s not ready for commercial applications yet; Sun is looking for feedback.

Portugal To Resell 500k Intel Classmate Laptops

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:20:00 EDT

Under what it’s calling the Magellan Initiative, this school year Portugal is supposed to resell for some unknown price 500,000 low-cost Intel-based Classmate PCs to the country’s grade school kids. It is Intel’s biggest Classmate sale yet; students – or rather their parents – will be given a choice of Linux or Windows. It is unclear who will build the machines to Intel’s design.

Microsoft Contemplates a Post-Windows World

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:47:00 EDT

Starting with a clean piece of paper, Microsoft is having a go at building a non-Windows operating system. Code named Midori, it may never be released but if Midori isn’t heir to Windows Microsoft better have something else like it up its sleeve.

Microsoft To Sic Red Dog on the Cloud

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 13:25:00 EDT

One of Microsoft’s confidants says that the Red Dog project that broke cover in a want ad a few months ago is indeed the Kiplingesque pet name for Microsoft’s impending cloud infrastructure – well, at least part of it anyway. It was described in the ad as virtualized and fully automated with highly scalable storage.

Microsoft’s Appeasement Party Strikes Again

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:48:00 EDT

Like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is now suddenly a platinum sponsor of that open source touchstone, the Apache Software Foundation, and has pledged its $100,000 check. The move was announced Friday at the Open Source Convention in a speech by Microsoft senior director of platform strategy Sam Ramji, who described it as an endorsement of the “Apache Way.”

Alfresco Looks To Oust SharePoint

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:17:00 EDT

Alfresco pounced on that SharePoint protocol that the European Commission forced Microsoft to disgorge and turned up Thursday with what it claims is the first fully compatible open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, one of the fastest-growing and stickiest products in the Microsoft arsenal.

Oracle Amends Suit

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:43:00 EDT

Oracle has amended its billion-dollar suit against SAP claiming to have found the smoking gun implicating SAP CEO Henning Kagermann and SAP’s executive board in the wholesale theft and resale of Oracle’s IP by SAP support subsidiary TomorrowNow (SAP TN).

Apple, Google, Yahoo & Cloud Computing

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 02:00:00 EDT

Industry gadfly John Dvorak is advancing a theory culled from the blogosphere that Microsoft wants Yahoo for some all-important patent or another that would give it an edge in cloud computing, SaaS and portable search advertising.

Cloud Computing - Clouds Have Their Blue Screen of Death Too

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:45:00 EDT

One of the problems with clouds is that they have this tendency to rain as it did on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) on Sunday when it was down - and not for the first time - in both the US and Europe for something like eight hours - translating into less than 2Nines availability in a month (not a year, a month). Users couldn't access their stored data - a particularly scary situation for a cloud-dependent business.

Cloud Computing - NGASI Takes its AppServer Manager to the Cloud

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:15:00 EDT

Application server management software developer NGASI has introduced a hosted version of its AppServer Manager on Amazon EC2. The 'no installation required' service gives Amazon EC2 users the option of not installing their own version of NGASI AppServer Manager to manage application servers.

Cloud Computing - SnapLogic-SugarCRM an Item

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:00:00 EDT

SnapLogic, the outfit that calls itself the really simple integration company and leverages RESTful web technology, has announced a SugarCRM Solution Pack, an extension to its open source data integration framework. SnapLogic enables enterprises to integrate data on both sides of the enterprise firewall and create custom integration solutions, including application integrations, enterprise mashups and rich Internet applications (RIAs).

Virtualization - VMware To Cut its Hypervisor Price To Free

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:00:00 EDT

Two weeks after its co-founder and CEO Diane Greene was abruptly dismissed, VMware - now run by one of Microsoft's old rulers, Paul Maritz - disclosed exactly how much under its promised 50% year-over-year growth 2008 is going to be. It's going to be 5%-8% short of the magic number.

"Cloud Computing Is the Plan" - Ballmer Memo

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 18:00:00 EDT

With Microsoft mandarin Kevin Johnson bolting to Jupiter, leaving Microsoft to lick its wounds over Yahoo and reorganize, CEO Steve Ballmer sent out an all-hands e-mail to Microsoft folk encapsulating the message he delivered to financial analysts gathering in Redmond Thursday. Ballmer highlighted software-plus-service, associating it with a 'platform in the cloud and delivering applications across PCs, phones, TVs, and other devices, at work and in the home' (Microsoft's Mesh widgetry) and promised 'more about our cloud platform initiatives and the next versions of our Live and Online technologies' at the company?s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) at the end of October.

Cloud Computing - Yahoo, HP & Intel Embark on Joint Cloud Research

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:30:00 EDT

Yahoo, HP and Intel are going to do cloud research together using a global, multi-data center, open source Cloud Computing Test Bed bigger than anything put together for such a purpose before, they said. The whole testbed could potentially scale to 24,000 cores, 18 terabytes of memory and 9 petabytes of disk, roughly 164 teraFLOPS of power, big enough, the threesome said, for Internet-scale tests, at least tests of short duration. There will be six – God willing always-available – sites: one at each of the vendors and one each at the state-run Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.

Google’s Money Cries Out To Be Invested

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:48:00 EDT

Some little birds whispered in the Wall Street Journal’s ear and got it to report that Google, which usually just buys start-ups, now wants to set up a venture arm a la Intel Capital, leaving the reader to imagine where the money would go, what stage companies might catch its eye and what strings it might impose.

YouTube Gets Sued Again

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:50:00 EDT

Google and its little pal YouTube have attracted another lawsuit for copyright infringement. Rome-based Mediaset, controlled by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, is demanding 500 million euros ($779.3 million) in damages. Mediaset sampled YouTube’s content on June 10 and says it found “at least 4,643 unauthorized videos and clips owned by us, equivalent to upwards of 325 hours of transmission time.”