Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-22

• How enterprises can (gently) squeeze their vendors during the recession
  Adobe Systems Inc., IBM, Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp. are jacking up audits the most, respondents told Gartner, but so are many other vendors.
• EU and Oracle Should Just Say We Want Sun Dead
  ...makes you wonder whether continental regulators and Larry Ellison have an unquenchable taste for irony or are really interested in seeing Sun dead and buried, given that the review time has just extended another six days to January 27. [If this deal doesn't go through, maybe MySQL will survive but competition will certainly decline in the hardware business as Sun will definitely not survive in any meaningful way.-DBM]
  
• Why Chatter Matters
  I know there are at least two to three years before we actually see this implemented and see more details (Chatter is not expected until late 2010 to begin with). I know that it may not happen (yes, I read the Beta Agreement — sorry, Safe Harbor statement that Marc displayed on screen as well as everybody else). And, yes, I will be disappointed if it does not happen — but even if that is the case, the milk has been spilled. The path to the cloud has been uncovered.
• Measuring Your CAC Effectiveness
  CAC ratio is: [($Total Sales + $Total Marketing)/$First Year Contract Value]. The objective is to make the CAC ratio less than 1 which implies a customer acquisition payback of a year or less. This is the ratio I recommend companies use to measure their sales/marketing effectiveness.
• Intel Capital invests $25 million in tech companies
  Intel Capital, the venture capital arm of the world's largest chip maker, Tuesday detailed seven new investments worth around US$25 million in total, in addition to an investment in U.S. WiMax operator Clearwire.
• Rivals Take Aim at the Software Company SAS
  A TOUR of its carefully tended, 300-acre corporate campus here leaves little doubt why surveys, year after year, rate the SAS Institute, the world’s largest private software company, among the best places to work. There is the subsidized day care and preschool. There are the four company doctors and the dozen nurses who provide free primary care. The recreational amenities include basketball and racquetball courts, a swimming pool, exercise rooms and 40 miles of running and biking trails. There is a meditation garden, as well as on-site haircuts, manicures, and jewelry repair. Employees are encouraged to work 35-hour weeks. Academics have studied the company’s benefit-enhanced corporate culture as a model for nurturing creativity and loyalty among engineers and other workers. Six years ago, in a report on “60 Minutes,” Morley Safer called working at SAS “the good life.” But that good life is under threat today as never before.
• Lawyers ate Oracle’s commitment to Oracle Forms
  The latest version of this reassuringly says about Forms and Reports: “Oracle has no plan to desupport these products. Furthermore, new version of Oracle Forms,Oracle Reports will continue to be released as part of Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Forms 11g and Oracle Reports 11g are components of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.” However, the document now starts by saying that “It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.”
• Microsoft extends Dynamics capabilties
  The Sites Service is built on the new Windows Azure cloud platform, and enables users to create and manage sites without having to leave their Dynamics ERP application, said the firm. Advertisement Examples could include landing pages for marketing campaigns, or sites for product registration information and customer feedback, said Microsoft. The new Commerce Service has been built to help integrate ERP with e-commerce systems including storefronts and business-to-consumer marketplaces, in order to enable multi-channel strategies. Finally, the Payment Service enables customers to process payments from a variety of channels including e-commerce, point of sale and call centres, all from within the Dynamics interface.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-21

• Usability in enterprise Apps: Workday 9
  Workday 9 is a great example of a design that is centered on making people very productive in getting work done - exactly what you'd expect from the crew at Workday.
• EU Ombudsman faults EC's Intel antitrust ruling
  The European Ombudsman accused the European Commission on Thursday of "maladministration" during its antitrust investigation of Intel, which resulted in a hefty fine earlier this year, as well as an order to desist from its anti-competitive practices.
• New H-1B hiring bill takes aim at tech firms
  The two lawmakers who successfully added H-1B hiring restrictions to the financial bailout bill earlier this year have introduced legislation that would bar any firm that lays off 50 or more workers from hiring guest workers.
• H-1B Visa Beef May End Up in Supreme Court
  The Programmers Guild and other litigants fighting a 2008 Department of Homeland Security decision to extend from 12 months to 29 months the amount of time mathematics, engineering, science or technology students are allowed to work after graduation under an optional practical training program say it amounts to little more than a back-door attempt to circumvent the H-1B visa cap. H-1B visa opponents have turned to the Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to overturn a 2008 Department of Homeland Security decision that the Programmers Guild, the Immigration Reform Law Institute and others claim is a back-door circumvention of the H-1B visa cap.
• Microsoft Talks Windows Azure, Launches 'Dallas' Data Service
  Microsoft will make its Windows Azure cloud platform available as of Jan. 1, 2010, Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie says in a keynote speech at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. The company also announces a data-as-a-service solution code-named Dallas.
• Microsoft settles employee spying case
  The deal closes an unusual case in which Microsoft said that Mullor continued on as CEO of a company called Ancora while working at Microsoft. While Mullor was employed at Microsoft, Ancora accused several computer makers including Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba of infringing on a patent. The PC makers asked Microsoft to defend them since the technology was provided by Microsoft.
• Microsoft adds app, data marketplace to Windows Azure
  Azure will also host "an open catalog and marketplace for public and commercial data" codenamed Dallas, Ozzie said. Developers can use the data to build their own services and mashups. Dallas is now in Commercial Technical Preview.
• Google, Bing take bigger bites of search market; Yahoo slips
  While Microsoft Bing and Google inch up, Yahoo looks like lame duck
• Google, Microsoft Bing Are Squeezing Yahoo in Search
  Google paced the market with 65.4 share, up from its 64.9 percent share in September, comScore claimed. Microsoft Bing nearly reached double digits with 9.9 percent, up from its 9.4 percent share in September. Google and Microsoft's collective gain came at the expense of Yahoo, which plummeted to 18 percent in October from the prior month's total of 18.8 percent. That's Yahoo's lowest share ever and its largest month-to-month share decline since August 2008.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-20

• Theory of competition fails in open source, elsewhere
  Open source loves a monopoly.
• Apache Mahout Wiki
  Apache Mahout is a new Lucene TLP project to create scalable, machine learning algorithms under the Apache license
• Mmmm. Tasty Kool-Aid. (Why yes, I am at Dreamforce, why do you ask?)
  What flavor, you ask? Innovation. Mmmm. Tasty. Refreshing. And (being cloud-based) less filling.
• Day 2 with Marc Benioff and Salesforce.com at Dreamforce 2009 #df09
  "Traditional platforms are too slow, too complex and too expensive," he said. He rated Sun and Oracle as too expensive, Microsoft's SharePoint as too slow, BEA Weblogic as requiring too many people, and SAP as too complicated, before announcing that Salesforce.com has launched a free edition of Force.com.
• Hadoop at Twitter (part 1): Splittable LZO Compression
  At Twitter we are significantly ramping up usage of Hadoop to help us analyze the massive amounts of data that our platform generates each day. We are happy users of Cloudera’s free distribution of Hadoop; we’re currently running Hadoop 0.20.1 with Pig 0.4. In this first of a small series of posts about our architecture and the open source software we’re working on around it, we’d like to focus on an infrastructure-level solution we use to make our cluster more efficient: splittable LZO for Hadoop. Using LZO compression in Hadoop allows for reduced data size and shorter disk read times, and LZO’s block-based structure allows it to be split into chunks for parallel processing in Hadoop. Taken together, these characteristics make LZO an excellent compression format to use in your cluster.
• SugarCRM Launches Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Against Salesforce.com
  Now, of course, having .com on the end of your name is about as hip as wearing Hammer pants. In a way it's almost embarrassing, like some weird vestigial appendage from that wacky dotcom craze. Advertisement Anyway, the thing is, Benioff is ripe for parody, and now someone has done it—and it just happens to be one of his competitors. SugarCRM, a tiny company that makes the same kind of software that Salesforce.com makes but charges less, decided to have some fun at Benioff's expense and maybe to drum up a little business at the same time. So they created a knock-off of Benioff's book and called it Behind the Smoke Screen: the untold story of how Salesforce.com still manages to sell 1999 technology 10 years later. Where the real book has a glowing blurb from Michael Dell, the parody features one from Kim Jong Il. Inside are six tiny chapters that poke fun of Salesforce.com for using proprietary code (SugarCRM is open source) and relying on stodgy, old Oracle database software (SugarCRM
• Microsoft CEO Ballmer Touts Windows 7 Gains
  Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tells his audience at the Microsoft Annual Shareholder Meeting that Windows 7 has been outselling previous versions of Windows, including Windows Vista, by a ratio of 2-to-1. Data from outside analysts suggests that Windows 7 has made steady gains in the PC market since its Oct. 22 release.
• Interop: Microsoft Exec Says 'Google Me'
  The exec told audience members seeking his contact info to "Google (NSDQ: GOOG) me." Yousef Khalidi, distinguished engineer for Microsoft's Azure cloud OS, had just wrapped up a panel discussion on cloud computing when he made the gaffe. Khalidi drew laughs when he quickly corrected himself and advised the audience to "Bing me" instead.
• Salesforce demos Service Cloud 2 #df09
  Marc Benioff and Kraig Swensrud, senior vice president of product marketing, show attendees the company's new customer service software, Service Cloud 2. The new tool helps businesses connect their traditional call center technologies with social media applications through a cloud computing infrastructure.
• IBM Cuts Power Memory Prices to Lure HP, Sun Customers
  IBM is pressing what it sees as an advantage over HP and Sun by cutting prices by as much as 70 percent on memory in its Power systems. The goal is to further tempt customers of Sun’s SPARC systems and HP’s Itanium platform to migrate to IBM’s Power architecture. However, one analyst also said that the Power platform also is competing with less-expensive x86 systems, which are moving deeper into scale-up environments.
• How IBM Brought Analytics to the Cloud
  IBM Smart Analytics Cloud provides easily consumable business intelligence services, systems and software to help customers create an efficient delivery of shared business intelligence services across lines of business and functional organizations, IBM officials said. IBM’s own Analytics Cloud deployment served as the template for this solution offering, which features: · IBM services - enables the client to transform the corporate business intelligence (BI) strategy and achieve rapid return on investment with planning and strategy sessions, installation and implementation of the Smart Analytic cloud solution, as well as optimization of the cloud for the enterprise · IBM Cognos 8 BI - provides the BI capability for the cloud, offering a broad range of business intelligence services, including reports, analysis, dashboards and scorecards to monitor business performance, analyze trends and measure results · IBM System z - supports the foundation for
• Cray Jaguar Takes Top Supercomputer Spot from IBM Roadrunner
  After more than a year as the world’s fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Roadrunner system was knocked down to the second spot by Cray’s Jaguar. Cray’s XT5 system got a boost when the computer maker swapped out the quad-core AMD Opterons for the six-core “Istanbul” chips, ramping up the power to more than 224,000 processing cores. Sun and SGI also were represented in the top 10 of the Top500 list of the fastest systems.
• Hot IT Jobs for 2010 - Careers
  [5 of top 9 are SAP...-DBM] 1. SAP SRM Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 25% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 33.3% 2. Linux Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 11.1% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 42.9% 3. SAP SCM Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 22.2% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 33.3% 4. C++ Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 20% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 0% 5. Microsoft Commerce Server Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 18.2% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 18.2% 6. SAP PM Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 33.3% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 25% 7. Java EE, SE, ME/J2EE Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: -16.7% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: -11.1% 8. SAP SEM Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 9.1% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 0% 9. Netweaver PI Pay Premium Increase Last 3 Months: 10% Pay Premium Increase Last 12 Months: 22.2%

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-19

• Benioff: Denial of the cloud has destroyed SAP
  By not embracing cloud computing, SAP has destroyed its business. This was the view of Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive of Salesforce.com, who gave a frank and brutal review of the software company. During a press session at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week, Benioff said: “ I think SAP are in a lot of trouble... I would say that their religious and fanatical denial of the cloud may have destroyed their company.” He listed attempts made by the company to join in with cloud computing, but said they never materialised. “SAP remains an innovation-less company,”he added, “but they are very nice people.” Benioff was slightly kinder to other rivals including Microsoft and Oracle – the latter being Benioff's former employer - who have made stronger moves into cloud solutions, saying they were “doing a better job with the cloud than a year ago.”
• SAP CEO: Things Are Starting To Stabilize
  "Things are starting to stabilize...there is more pipeline activity...and we are seeing a gradual volume increase in some areas," Apotheker said, speaking at the Morgan Stanley TMT conference in Barcelona.
• SAP boss predicts ‘wave of growth’
  With an eye towards possible acquisitions, Europe’s biggest software firm SAP is on the verge of a substantial “wave of growth,” company CEO Léo Apotheker said on Tuesday in Berlin.
• Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP
  Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP is a new product planned for availability in the second half of the coming year through a collaboration between Microsoft and SAP. The two companies are essentially pushing forward an already existing joint effort around bridging the office productivity suite and SAP, dating back to 2005. Four years ago, the duo introduced Duet for Microsoft Office and SAP, a step which led to the most recent announcement related to the delivery of Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP. According to the Redmond company, Duet Enterprise is designed to take to the next level the bridge built between Microsoft and SAP solutions. “Duet Enterprise will empower people to blend SAP data and processes with Microsoft SharePoint content and collaboration tools to increase personal and team productivity across the PC, phone and browser,” explained Pascal Gibert, director of Duet product management at Microsoft.
• SAP and Microsoft duet on interoperability
  SAP and Microsoft have teamed up for an enterprise Duet – a new product to link up the companies’ products. Unveiled alongside the release of the SharePoint Server 2010 beta, Duet Enterprise is an extension of a previous system that brought SAP into Microsoft Office.
• Gates silent at Microsoft shareholders meeting
  Gates was there, of course, because he's chairman of the board of directors. But when shareholders stepped up to the microphones to ask questions, it was CEO Steve Ballmer doing most of the answering.
• Google Chrome OS: Ditch Your Hard Drives, the Future Is the Web
  “As of today, the code will be fully open, which means Google developers will be working on the same tree as open developers,” said Pichai.
• Google Says Chrome OS Still a Year Away
  Google Inc. said the first devices running its new Chrome operating system will be available by the end of 2010, as the company gave the first public peek of software that Google hopes will drive usage of Internet applications that include its own services. Chrome OS is expected to initially run on small low-end laptops—known as netbooks—but Google expects the Chrome operating system will run on a broad range of computers over time, said Sundar Pichai, a Google vice president. He said the company is specifying what hardware features, such as chips and wireless cards, devices must have torun the software.
• Google chief engineer on why a new OS | For the Record Podcast
  To find out more, and get a feel how Chrome will affect consumers, I spoke with Matthew Papakipos, Google's chief engineer for Chrome OS.
• Google Chrome OS: Pre-Announcement in Classic Microsoft-style
  Tight integration of the OS and the browser? But wait, wasn’t that Microsoft’s capital crime, in fact didn’t the EU just force Microsoft to ship a browser-less version of Windows 7 to Europe? So Microsoft is Evil Monopolist for doing it but Google isn’t?
• Google Chrome OS - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Google Chrome OS is a project by Google Inc. to develop a lightweight computer operating system devoted to using the World Wide Web.[1] Announced on July 7, 2009, it is set to be released during the second half of 2010.[2] The Linux-based operating system will sport a graphical user interface based on Google's Chrome web browser and will run on systems with either x86 or ARM processors,[3] and designed for netbooks. Google released the Google Chrome OS open source project on November 19, 2009 as Chromium OS. Originally it was thought to use a new windowing system, but is now confirmed to be using the X server.[4]
• Chromium OS (The Chromium Projects)
  Chromium OS is an open-source project that aims to build an operating system that provides a fast, simple, and more secure computing experience for people who spend most of their time on the web. Here you can review the project's design docs, obtain the source code, and contribute
• Comfort, trust give Office edge over Google
  The fight for the productivity suite crown steps up in the online realm with the impending launch of Microsoft Office Web Apps, and analysts say the software giant appears to have an edge, over rival Google Apps--thanks to user familiarity and trust of Office products.

Usability in enterprise Apps: Workday 9

Usability in Enterprise Applications

I recently saw a video of Workday 9, and was not impressed with the apparent usability of one of the highly touted features of this release. I tweeted my impression, and got a quick and friendly response from the team at Workday. They didn't complain about my bias or lack of information. Instead, as a great company should, they opened up and accepted the feedback. They offered me (and some Enterprise Irregulars colleagues) a briefing on Workday 9, to bring us up to speed and to get more feedback from us. My comments that follow are based on this briefing.

A Little Background

Workday is a company started by Peoplesoft's founder and some key Peoplesoft employees. Peoplesoft was a ground-breaking company in many ways, and the founders and employees of Workday clearly intend to surpass their previous accomplishments with this new venture. Peoplesoft strove to change the way employers engaged with employees, and they practiced what they preached in their own company.

Workday's product is based on modern technologies, including services-oriented architecture (SOA), Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) delivery model, and Adobe Flex for a rich Internet experience.

The Wheel

My initial critique was based on a feature of Workday 9 called "The Wheel." At least, that's how I had seen it named in a number of blogs and news stories. Essentially, "The Wheel" is the "home page" for users of Workday 9. Here is a picture of "The Wheel."

Many modern applications have adopted a horizontal "tab strip" approach, where each tab represents a type of activity. Clicking on a tab typically brings up a screen with tasks related to the selected activity across the top just below the tab strip, with additional navigation or activities in a panel on the left (or right) of the screen, and with a large, rectangular workspace to the right (or left) of the navigation panel.

This "horizontal tab strip" approach is frequently used because it offers a very straightforward information architecture, and users can quickly and easily become (and remain) productive. This "L-shaped" layout pattern is used in business and consumer applications, including both browser-based and native client applications. Examples of web sites using this pattern in the consumer space include Blogger and Facebook, both with some variations on the theme. In the enterprise world, most portal-style applications use some variation on this pattern - an example from Salesforce.com is also shown here.

Unlike this familiar horizontal layout for the top level navigation, The Wheel is a role-based, circular menu. Activities are represented by icons around the edge of a circle (or ellipse, depending on your window size or aspect ratio). One benefit of an approach like The Wheel is that the user can see more options on one screen than with a horizontal layout. However, "more" is not always equivalent to "better." In this case, having watched the demo, I remain convinced that The Wheel is not an improvement in usability over a tab strip. The drawbacks of The Wheel, from my limited research and discussions with colleagues:

• The Wheel makes it hard to predictably navigate to any particular activity. Humans navigate, particularly on computers, more easily in straight lines than in curves or circles. With a horizontal tab strip, you just keep moving to the right until you find your tab. With today's high resolution and wide-screen displays, this approach can include many tabs! With The Wheel, you'd have to move your mouse or trackball in a circular motion as you browse, and that is a harder motion to make (especially on my cluttered desk).
  
• The Wheel may introduce significant usability problems for users when one or more new options are added to The Wheel, or taken away. All the learned muscle movements will have to be unlearned, because any change in the number of options will result in a new orientation for the other icons. This would not be the case in a tab strip, where you might go further or less far, but you at least don't have to change directions.
• The Wheel uses a lot of screen space for a little functionality. The area between the window's enclosing rectangle and The Wheel - this space is wasted. Similarly, the workspace created inside the wheel also wastes the space between the inscribed rectangle and the enclosing ellipse.

Workday 9 Delivers Great Usability

That said, Workday 9 has delivered some great usability in virtually every other area I saw in the product.

When the user's mouse "hovers" over an icon on the wheel, a window pops up in the center (see the "Inbox" rectangle inside The Wheel in the Workday 9 screen shot above). This working space comes up remarkably quickly, and contains all the tasks and context needed for the user to be productive. This is great design. The same effect could have been accomplished without the ellipsoid Wheel, but enough on that topic!

Throughout the product, whenever the user is looking at data that can be linked to more detail, the data is a link the user can click to directly navigate to that detail. When looking at an employee in a report, the user can click on the employee's name and navigate to the information in the system this user can see about that employee, along with all the tasks this user can perform on that employee's information, such as giving that employee a raise or updating that employee's skills in the skills database. In the Projects screen shot shown here, you can see that each project name, the project owner, the project category, and even the number of employees working on the project are all links; clicking on the link navigates to the sensible destination to get more data, whether it is the details of the project, or the list of the employees working on the project.

Whenever the user is looking at a table of data in Workday 9, the user can export that data to Excel, sort, filter, and perform other operations on the data. This is extremely useful for status reporting, embedding in presentations, doing "what-if" analysis, and just making the system pleasant to use.

Summary

There are many other examples of great design in the user interface Workday 9. The visual design is good - appealing, speedy, and clear. The information architecture is well thought-out - goal-oriented, providing a reasonable set of appropriate options, and easily learned. The interaction design allows for a high degree of productivity.

A well-designed enterprise application speeds adoption, encourages frequent use, engenders better results with more use by individuals and by the enterprise, and eases the accomplishment of the system's goals. Usability is a key element of good design (along with good functional design), and usability is a quality frequently all too lacking in enterprise software.

Overall, Workday 9 is a great example of a design that is centered on making people very productive in getting work done - exactly what you'd expect from the crew at Workday. Congratulations! My hat is off to you - you've set a bar that will be hard for other enterprise software to exceed (but I plan to do so with my team at C3!).

Disclosures

• I do not work for Workday
• I do not take any money from Workday
• My blog is not ad supported, and contains no ads from Workday
• I do not work for any Workday competitor
• I do not take any money from any Workday competitor
• My blog is not ad supported, and contains no ads from Workday competitors
• I have worked for at least two Workday competitors in the past (SAP and Oracle)
• I admire great design, especially relating to usability, comprehensibility, and user productivity
• I do not now use nor have I ever used Workday software, so my knowledge about Workday's usability, especially prior to the Workday briefing, was admittedly very light
• I am not a user experience expert, just an interested novice
  

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-17

• SAP makes business model more flexible to meet customer needs
  Germany's SAP (SAPG.DE) plans to open up its business model by enabling customers access to any software and offering less restrictive contracts in an effort to address changing customer demands. "We will give our customers the option to decide which software they want to use," Chief Executive Leo Apotheker said on Tuesday. The company also plans to increase the number of global enterprise agreements, which normally run five years, to 600 clients from currently 12.
• Dirty KPIs
  If the goal is to increase satisfaction, we might establish an outcome measure such as “# complaints about street cleanliness reported every quarter” with the target of reducing it by 5% every quarter for two years. If we are hitting the target for the output measure of street miles cleaned but not our target for the outcome measure of complaints, then we’re probably tracking the wrong activity and unlikely to meet our citizen satisfaction objective. Perhaps people care about more than just clean streets.
• Database Technology Roadmap 2009 And Beyond #pdc09
  Yes, you heard right. Oracle 12g is around the corner. There is not much information available on this new release. The only detail that leaked so far is that Oracle 12g won't support raw filesystems anymore. This is bad news for RAC environments. The OCR and the voting disk relay on raw filesystems via CFS like OCFS. The word is that ASM will step in and close the gap in 12g. Also, more emphasis on NFS will be placed as well. Other than that, there's not much information regarding functionality enhancements available. As soon as I get more details I will post it.
• Microsoft: Azure to go live in January, for pay in February #pdc09
  Codenamed "Dallas", the new service gives developers the ability to discover, purchase, and manage data subscriptions within Azure. The technology was showcased by PDC by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. Kundra demonstrated a career-finding application based on Department of Laborspecial education teachers were required in a particular area. Behind the scenes, Dallas itself is built atop Windows Azure and SQL Azure. teaching data stored and catalogued by Dallas that allowed, for example, teachers to find which areas of the country needed more teachers. The application was able to drill down within the dataset, for example to find out exactly what kind of
• Microsoft's Thinking About Azure Platform Evolved #pdc09
  In order to encourage the enterprise’s adoption of Azure, MicrosoftWindows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V virtual-machine support on Azure, enabling virtualized infrastructure to be moved more rapidly between the cloud and on-premises; Microsoft Pinpoint Marketplace, which will let partners market and sell their applications; and RTM of Windows Identity Foundation, which lets developers provide simplified user access to cloud and on-premises applications. Muglia announced Windows Server AppFabric, the Beta of which will be available for download "shortly." AppFabric is a set of integrated technologies that make it easier for developers to build out and manage middle-tier services built using Windows Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation. In addition, AppFabric will provide easy-to-use database caching. announced several initiatives during Day One of the conference including
• Microsoft adds access controls for SQL Azure online database #pdc09
  Code-named Vidalia, the technology will provide "trustworthy data collaboration for highly-sensitive business data across disparate trust domains," said Microsoft technical fellow Dave Campbell in a talk at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09) in Los Angeles. ... Other features are coming to SQL Azure, which will go into production when Windows Azure does on January 1. In the first half of next year, it will bring a "database clone" feature for administrators, said Tony Petrossian, principal program manager for SQL Azure. By the second half, Microsoft plans to release continuous backup of SQL Azure databases. Users will be able to restore their databases to any point in time, he said.
• Android, Blackberry and iPhone Take Share From Windows Mobile
  Despite the fact that smart phone sales grew by 12 percent over the past year, the share of new devices shipping with Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system have plunged, according to third quarter figures released by Gartner last week. Only 7.9 percent of smart phones sold last quarter were equipped with Windows Mobile, down from 11.1 percent during the same period last year. According to the report, 3.2 million devices were Windows Mobile-based, compared with 4 million last year.
• What's next for Microsoft's Azure cloud platform? #pdc09
  Microsoft’s next Azure steps — which it will be executing largely in parallel — will be to get existing, and typically more complex, line-of-business apps to run on the platform and to make it possible for customers to implement Azure technologies in their own data centers (a k a, to be able to create private clouds).
• Oslo transforms into the underlying application model of the cloud #pdc09
  Microsoft only used the codename Oslo once in the PDC keynotes today, talking about SQL Server Modelling Services with the throwaway reference that "you may have heard this called the Oslo repository ". Is that Oslo disappearing into SQL Server the way WinFS did? No.
• Microsoft’s HPC Hopes at Supercomputing 2009
  Microsoft is making news at the Supercomputing 2009 (SC 09) conference in Portland, Oregon, and not merely for the free cocktails and flight simulatorMicrosoft Office Excel 2010 for the cluster. drawing attendees to its booth. It has announced the availability of betas for Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 and distributed
• Microsoft's Ozzie Tips Azure Plans #pdc09
  This keynote was focused on the back end - servers, tools, and cloud computing, though he also talked about the Windows platform as a whole. Ozzie talked about how Windows Azure would look just like Windows Server to .NET developers. He talked how Windows Server and Windows Azure both were manageable through Microsoft System Center; and how developers could use windows services across their own servers, Microsoft's servers, and services offered by partners.
• SugarCRM Meets Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud #pdc09
  For VARs and solutions providers, Azure represents a potential bridge from on-premise Windows servers to cloud-based Windows applications. That bridge will lead to both open source and closed source applications — a smart move by Microsoft. And the Azure cloud could generate recurring revenue for VARs and managed service providers. Separately, Microsoft continues to promote the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) — featuring hosted Exchange, hosted SharePoint and other apps — to VARs and end-customers. But here’s the twist: Microsoft ultimately controls the pricing and product margin of BPOS applications. And Microsoft has already made a big BPOS price cut far sooner than most partners had expected.

Enterprise headlines and summaries, 2009-11-16

• 3Com Trades: What Is Wrong With This Picture?
  It’s a good thing the SEC is off for Veteran’s Day, or else it would be busy trying to sort through the slew of inside traders. First, 3Com’s stock price has been steadily raising for the past few days — as Dan Frommer points out — for no discernable reason.
• Announcing Sapience 2009: The Open and Independent Event for SAP Users
  The two-day conference will take SAP users on a "journey to independence." "Our goal is to foster an atmosphere where users understand how to leverage market alternatives and how to avoid the negative side effects of the one-stop-shopping paradigm," said Helmuth Guembel, Founder and Managing Partner of Strategy Partners International and Conference Chair. The event features on an exciting mix of speakers: * Analysts ("Ray" Wang, Vinnie Mirchandani, Helmuth Guembel, Neil Herman) who explain backgrounds and trends from both an IT- and financial perspective * ERP-veterans (ex-CEOs from Baan, PeopleSoft, and SAP) who know why and how it all happened and what to expect * Users (all of them CIOs) who found fascinating alternatives to go beyond the limits of classical ERP * Vendors presenting interesting options for cost reduction and showing new ways to extend SAP
• PDC09 Preview: Azure Launch among the Highlights at Microsoft's Developer Conference
  Three screens and a cloud: That's the vision that will be put forth this week by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference as attendees gather in Los Angeles to learn more about the company's developer platform strategy and how to take advantage of the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.
• IBM Launches Business Analytics Cloud
  IBM (NYSE: IBM) on Monday announced plans to deploy an internal cloud computing environment that will make more than a petabyte of information—the equivalent of 100 times the content of the Library of Congress--instantly available to employees under a project called Blue Insight. IBM said it also plans to make the service's architecture, dubbed IBM Smart Analytics Cloud—available to customers.
• Google poised to become your phone company
  Google is set to become your new phone company, perhaps reducing your phone bill to zilch in the process. Seriously.
• Investor Paul Allen Diagnosed With Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma
  Paul Allen, the billionaire investor who co-founded Microsoft Corp., was diagnosed earlier this month with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and is undergoing chemotherapy. Mr. Allen, whose assets include cable provider Charter Communications, professional sports teams and holdings in numerous technology startups, left Microsoft more than 25 years ago after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, from which he recovered. In an email sent Monday afternoon to employees of Vulcan Inc., Mr. Allen's Seattle-based investment firm, Vulcan CEO Jody Allen said Mr. Allen's doctors say he has diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.
• China says Microsoft violated intellectual rights
  [The most egregious case of the pot calling the kettle black!-DBM] A Chinese court has found Microsoft Corp. violated the intellectual property of local company Zhongyi Electronic Ltd., Dow Jones Newswires reported Tuesday, citing a copy of the court's decision. Beijing's No.1 Intermediate People's Court found Microsoft had exceeded the scope of a previous agreement to use and sell font types owned by Zhongyi and ordered the U.S. software giant and its China-based unit to cease immediately selling products that use the fonts, the report said.
• China Court Rules Microsoft Infringed Firm's IPR
  Beijing's No.1 Intermediate People's Court found Microsoft had exceeded the scope of a previous agreement to use and sell fonts owned by Zhongyi, according to the document. It found Microsoft had installed and used the fonts in eight of its operating systems beyond what had been agreed with Zhongyi, and ordered Microsoft and its China-based unit to immediately stop producing and selling those operating systems.
• The convenient fiction that Microsoft is evil
  It's a convenient fiction that Microsoft is the source of all evil in the technology world, particularly for a vocal minority within the open-source community.
• Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing: Thanks Microsoft, Hello Google
  That fast decisive action was refreshing, and such a contrast to the slow, secretive, bureaucracy at Microsoft. That speed and decisiveness also reflects different approaches to hiring great people, building great products and serving customers well. I have always admired Google. I am excited to now be part of the team. My job at Google will be helping developers (and startups) build great products and services using Google technology and platforms. Google is building world class products for companies of all sizes, but especially the enterprise market. I will be part of the team to make that happen.
• Top 10 emerging enterprise technologies - Page 1
  5. NoSQL databases Data is flowing everywhere like never before. And the days when "SQL" and "database" were interchangeable are fading fast, in part because old-fashioned relational databases can't handle the flood of data from Web 2.0 apps. ... Sure, you can make anything fit into a relational database with enough work, but that means you're paying for all of the sophisticated locking and rollback mechanisms developed for the accounting department to keep track of money. Unless the problem requires all of the sophistication and assurance of a top-of-the-line database, there's no need to invest in that overhead, or suffer its performance consequences. The solution? Relax the strictures and come up with a new approach: NoSQL. Basic NoSQL databases are simple key/value pairs that bind together a key with a pile of attributes. There's no table filled with blank columns and no problem adding new ad hoc tags or values to each item. Transactions are optional.
• Hadoop ported to R (and it's trivial)
  There's been a lot of buzz recently around the MapReduce algorithm and its famous open-source implementation, Hadoop. It's the go-to algorithm for performing any kind of analytical computation on very large data sets. But what is, the MapReduce algorithm, exactly? Well, if you're an R programmer, you've probably been using it routinely without even knowing it. As a functional language, R has a whole class of functions -- the "apply" functions -- designed to evaluate a function over a series of data values (the "map" step) and collate and condense the results (the "reduce" step). In fact, you can almost boil it down to a single line of R code: sapply(map(data), reduce)