All posts by : Between the Lines

1 of 173 | News to know: HP, Hulu, IE 8; SOA; Citrix; Bearing Point - Here are today’s notable headlines. You can get News To Know via email alert and RSS daily.  For continuous updates see BNET’s around-the-Web tech coverage Larry Dignan: Citrix to offer free XenServer; Takes shot at VMware HP’s mixed bag: Sales weak across all units, earnings on target; Outlook weaker than expected Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft’s IE 8 incompatibility list: 2,400 major sites (and counting) Microsoft’s [...] ...

2 of 173 | IBM, Amazon foreshadow a bevy of connecting clouds; Is Microsoft surrounded? - If there were any lingering doubts about whether Amazon Web Services were enterprise ready they dissolved this week once IBM became a partner. And now that Amazon and IBM have teamed up a picture of multiple computing clouds is emerging. Amazon Web Services teamed up with IBM to provide pay-as-you-go access to Big Blue’s database servers, [...] ...

3 of 173 | IBM taps Amazon to further extend cloud offerings - Just one day after IBM made several announcements related to a new cloud computing initiative, the company said it would offer software to clients and developers on Amazon Web Services under a “pay-as-you-go” model. In a release, the company said: Businesses today are looking for ways to quickly build, deploy and take advantage of the flexibility [...] ...

4 of 173 | Engine Yard takes Ruby and Rails to Amazon’s cloud bandwagon - Engine Yard, which makes application development software for Ruby and Rails deployments, said it will make its offerings available on Amazon Web Services. The move is part of a mass migration to Amazon’s EC2 services. Engine Yard specializes in Ruby and Rails deployments. Ruby and Rails is an open source programming language used by a bevy [...] ...

5 of 173 | Adobe takes LiveCycle developer tools to Amazon Web Services - Adobe said Monday that it will make its LiveCycle ES Developer Express software available on Amazon Web Services. With the move (statement, Techmeme), Adobe is using Amazon’s EC2 and S3 service to create a development environment for enterprise developers to develop and test using LiveCycle without installing it. The goal appears to be to give enterprise [...] ...

6 of 173 | Amazon EC2 launches Web-based management console - Amazon Web Services announced a Web-based management console for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. According to Amazon’s Web Services blog, the console allows you to access your environment with a user name or password. It adds: No more certificates or public/secret keys to manage! If you’re like me, I never seem to have my own computer [...] ...

7 of 173 | Migrating to Amazon Web Services: The blueprint - Moving your infrastructure to Amazon Web Services–or any other cloud platform–sounds like a no-brainer in many respects. You can scale up or down as needed and pay only for the computing and storage you use. The big question, however, is this: How exactly does a company migrate its infrastructure? Helpstream, a software as a service customer [...] ...

8 of 173 | iPhone cut-and-paste coming, not from Apple - If it seems very basic, that’s because it is. Yet, iPhone users are so eager to have a cut/copy-and-paste tool that they’re willing to pin their hopes on a YouTube video and Twitter feed. (Techmeme) At this point, that’s all there is to Pastebud, a soon-to-launch Web service that reportedly circumvents Apple’s permissions because it’s not [...] ...

9 of 173 | News to know: SAP’s mistake; Mozilla; Yahoo; CRM - Here are today’s notable headlines. You can get News To Know via email alert and RSS daily: Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft releases to select testers updated IE 8 build CES: Zune phone, no. Pink, maybe Ryan Naraine: Window Snyder leaves Mozilla Dancho Danchev: Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail systematically abused by spammers IE7 XML parsing zero day exploited in the wild CheckFree [...] ...

10 of 173 | Amazon puts human genome, other data sets in the cloud - Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Thursday said it will publish data sets such as the Human Genome, U.S. Census and labor statistics to its cloud to make the information easier to access for researchers. For starters, Amazon will publish various U.S. Census databases from the U.S. Census Bureau, 3-D chemical structures provided by Indiana University and [...] ...

11 of 173 | News to know: Adobe; Windows 7; Sun; SOA; Apple - Here are today’s notable headlines. You can get News To Know via email alert and RSS daily: Mary Jo Foley: A plea to the Windows team: Don’t make Windows 7 too Mac-like Microsoft disparages open-source TCO with year-old case study Michael Krigsman: 5 steps to cut IT budgets wisely TechRepublic: 19 mistakes technical leaders make most often 10 classic clueless-user [...] ...

12 of 173 | Amazon launches CloudFront; Content delivery network margins go kaboom - Amazon Web Services on Tuesday launched CloudFront, a pay-as-you-go content delivery network. The move is likely to accelerate already brutal pricing in the content delivery network market, which includes Akamai and Limelight Networks among others. CloudFront’s biggest feature is that there are no up-front commitments and long-term contracts. Content delivery networks speed up the Internet by [...] ...

13 of 173 | Comcast’s faster web: tempting users to reach for the (bandwidth) ceiling [Video] - Comcast's new extreme Web service opens the door to more advanced Web surfing, things like downloading full-length movies in a matter of minutes. But the more users do, the more data they use. With Comcast imposing a bandwidth cap on users, how will users know when they're close to reaching that 250 gigabyte limit? ...

14 of 173 | Amazon: EC2 is production ready; Will enterprises bite? - Amazon Web Services EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) service has dropped the beta tag, added a service level agreement and launched Windows and SQL betas and plans a management console. Add it up and it appears that Amazon is giving prospective enterprise customers most of the things they need to take the e-tailer-turned-cloud player seriously. Amazon CTO Werner [...] ...

15 of 173 | Cisco unveils collaboration lineup; Enterprise 2.0 on the move? - Cisco on Wednesday rolled out its collaboration portfolio as it targets the enterprise market–and notably the Microsoft SharePoint juggernaut. At least Cisco isn’t alone–Oracle earlier this week unveiled Beehive, which is another collaboration effort. Oracle wouldn’t say that Beehive is a direct competitor to SharePoint, but it certainly looks that way. Oracle is looking to occupy [...] ...

16 of 173 | News to know: Google and T-Mobile on G1; OpenWorld; SOA; Apple - Here are today’s notable headlines. You can get News To Know via email alert and RSS daily: Andrew Nusca: T-Mobile G1: Specs, pricing breakdown UPDATED: T-Mobile, Google, HTC unveil G1 (with hands-on pics) Ed Burnette: Google releases Android 1.0 SDK Hands-On with T-Mobile G1 Larry Dignan: Google’s Android: Following the money on mobile search Adrian Kingsley-Hughes: Can Google out-cool Apple? Josh Taylor: [...] ...

17 of 173 | News to know: Windows 7; Oracle OpenWorld; Adobe CS4; Search 2.0 - Here are today’s notable headlines. You can get News To Know via email alert and RSS daily: Mary Jo Foley: Windows Live team confirms Win7 to replace subsystems with services Ed Bott: How to set up a new PC in one easy session Larry Dignan: Amazon adds Oracle support to EC2 Video: Oracle unveils Beehive Oliver Marks: Oracle’s Beehive: [...] ...

18 of 173 | Oracle OpenWorld: Looking for some excitement. - If you’re going to kick off a conference these days - that is, when the economy is tanking and people are wondering if the doom-and-gloom is headed for the tech sector - it’s probably best to give folks something to buzz about. At Oracle OpenWorld, company president Charles Phillips introduced Beehive. The built-from-the-ground-up open software is [...] ...

19 of 173 | Video: Oracle unveils Beehive - At Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, Oracle President Charles Phillips and Chuck Rozwat, the company’s executive vice president of product development, announced the release of Beehive. Beehive is an open, integrated communications system that includes instant messaging, video conferencing, and e-mail. They explained that collaboration is a snap when users have all their communications in [...] ...

20 of 173 | Beware the shocking iPhone 3G power adapters - Apple on Friday said it recalled (actually it’s an “exchange”) every power adapter that shipped with the 3G iPhone. In a statement Apple said: Apple today announced that under certain conditions the new ultracompact Apple USB power adapter’s metal prongs can break off and remain in a power outlet, creating the risk of electric shock. Apple has received [...] ...

21 of 173 | Amazon to offer content delivery service. - Amazon has made it official. Content delivery networks are officially a commodity. The company said today that, by the end of the year, it will launch a new service to distribute content with low latency and high data transfer rates. According to the company’s web services blog, the service is designed to meet certain goals: Allow developers [...] ...

22 of 173 | News to know: IE 8; iPhone password locks; SOA; Palm Treo Pro reviews - Here are today’s notable headlines. You can get News To Know via email alert and RSS daily: Mary Jo Foley: IE 8 Beta 2 ready for download Ed Bott: Internet Explorer 8 gets a massive makeover Gallery: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Adrian Kingsley-Hughes: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 vs. Firefox 3.0.1 Dana Blankenhorn: Has Firefox already matched IE privacy [...] ...

23 of 173 | News to know: RIP enterprise data center; Red Hat breach; Google - Here are today’s notable headlines. You can get News To Know via email alert and RSS daily: Dion Hinchcliffe: Are we ready to declare the “time of death” for the enterprise data center? Joe McKendrick: Is SOA an elixir or real fix for ‘medieval’ data practices? WOA wins hands-down over SOA in popularity contest Ed Bott: Is 64-bit Flash [...] ...

24 of 173 | Amazon: Persistent storage open for EC2 - Amazon said Thursday that its Elastic Block Store feature is now available to all of its EC2 Web service customers. The move gives Amazon Web Services a full storage suite delivered as a service. EC2 is Amazon’s storage service and the Elastic Block Store gives customers a “persistent, high-performance, high-availability block-level storage which you can attach [...] ...

25 of 173 | News to know: Mozilla; Windows Server; LinuxWorld; Apple - Notable headlines: Ryan Naraine: Talking Firefox security with Mozilla’s Window Snyder Mary Jo Foley: What’s next for Windows Server Microsoft finalizes SQL Server 2008 TechRepublic: 10 questions (and answers) about Microsoft Live Mesh Dancho Danchev: Today’s assignment : Coding an undetectable malware Fake CNN news items malware campaign spreading rapidly Joe McKendrick: Expert: SOA vulnerable to DNS security flaw, too Larry Dignan: [...] ...

26 of 173 | Amazon aims to make Mechanical Turk more business friendly - Amazon on Wednesday rolled out new features to its Mechanical Turk web service designed to expand its appeal to a broader set of businesses. Mechanical Turk is a work marketplace that can be used to outsource software development. The company said its latest Web interface guides business through designing so called “human intelligence tasks,” which is [...] ...

27 of 173 | IBM pads software lineup; Buys ILOG for $340 million - IBM said Monday that it will acquire ILOG in a deal valued at $340 million. The Paris-based ILOG makes business rules management software. Big Blue said it will combine ILOG’s software with its business process management software and service oriented architecture technology (statement). The $340 million price tag is a 37 percent premium from ILOG’s closing [...] ...

28 of 173 | News to know: Windows 7; Firefox 3.0; Yahoo; SOA; Nokia - Notable headlines: Mary Jo Foley: Windows 7: To wait or not to wait? That is the question Microsoft continues paring back the Windows Live family Adrian Kingsley-Hughes: Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 2 available from FTP servers Firefox 3.0 a memory hog? Gallery (right) WSJ: Mozilla Firefox 3.0 Is the Best Browser For Web — For Now Larry Dignan: Google’s [...] ...

29 of 173 | Flock adds support for Digg, Pownce and AOL Webmail - Flock on Monday said that it has added support for Digg, Pownce and AOL Webmail in the latest version of its social networking browser. The Flock 1.2 browser, which navigates a bevy of Web services, is available for downloading. Flock has a cult following–3.5 million downloads with about 2.4 million of those users making the browser [...] ...

30 of 173 | Run by Wall Street? A Cause or a Company? - In light of the Yahoo! - Microsoft fiasco, fellow bloggers Larry Dignan and Vinnie Mirchandani have been asking the question whether there is too much emphasis on just one stakeholder - the shareholder. After all, shouldn't a technology company (or any company for that matter) be equally focused on the value for customers, partners and employees. I believe that the real problem is not that of prioritization of stakeholders but a more fundamental issue: Does your company stand for something? Larry and Vinnie discussed the following in a recent conversation: Technology companies cater to Wall Street interests too much often at the expense of good strategy. Isn’t wh......

31 of 173 | SAP aims to make upgrades easier; Rolls out enhancement packages; Touts analytics - Henning Kagermann, co-CEO of SAP, wants to do away with the upgrade-go-round with its upcoming Business Suite 7.0 with “enhancement packages,” small optional updates designed to add functionality to enterprise resource planning applications. Enhancement packages are small SOA-enabled packs that can add new functionality to SAP’s Business Suite. Kagermann noted that you won’t have to upgrade [...] ...

32 of 173 | Oracle closes BEA deal; Last ‘logical’ purchase? - Oracle said Tuesday that it closed its acquisition of BEA Systems following European Commission approval. In a statement, Oracle president Charles Phillips BEA will help the company’s vision of a “a modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure” and provide “a series of complementary and well-engineered middleware products.” Wall Street analysts say BEA should add about 4 cents a [...] ...

33 of 173 | Amazon Web Services: Reading the financial tea leaves - One of the more interesting lines of Amazon’s earnings report was the “other” line, which largely includes Amazon Web Services such as S3 and EC2. Reading the tea leaves it appears that Amazon’s side ventures are gaining momentum. Unfortunately, tea leaves are all we have. Amazon Web Services (AWS) isn’t material to the company’s earnings yet [...] ...

34 of 173 | News to know: Google; AMD; Desktop Linux; Green IT; Psystar - Notable headlines: Larry Dignan: Google delivers; Maybe paid clicks weren’t such a big deal Charles Cooper: Google settles a score with ComScore Techmeme AMD posts loss; sees seasonally down quarter ahead Sixth straight quarterly loss for AMD Gallery: Hyper-V virtualization in action (right) Phil Wainewright: Amazon Web Services gets serious about enterprise Amazon steps up Web services support Amazon: May We Help You? Business systems [...] ...

35 of 173 | Amazon steps up Web services support - Amazon Web Services (AWS) is growing up quickly. The company rolled out premium support services, which will be a welcome sign as more enterprises dabble with Amazon’s cloud. AWS rolled out premium support services for Amazon EC2, S3 and SQS with two tiers gold and silver. According to Amazon: The Gold plan also includes round the clock (24 [...] ...

36 of 173 | HP launches data center as a service; The cloud meets outsourcing - Hewlett-Packard on Monday plans to launch an effort to offer data center as a service to large enterprise customers. The move is notable for the following reasons: Cloud infrastructure has been primarily focused on small- to mid-sized businesses that have been leveraging companies like Amazon Web Services. Large enterprises can wrap in HP’s service along with existing outsourcing [...] ...

37 of 173 | Red Hat acquires consultants to push JBoss - Red Hat has acquired Amentra, a service oriented architecture consulting firm and systems integrator, to help push its JBoss middleware. The deal, announced Thursday, gives Red Hat some foot soldiers to sell the company’s stack of software including JBoss, which has been a tough sell. Amentra will operate as an independent company. Red Hat is trying to [...] ...

38 of 173 | Cloud computing hasn’t gone Fortune 500 yet, but it’s coming - Large corporations haven’t joined the ranks of startups flocking to cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services, but they are ignoring it at their own peril. That’s the key takeaway from a research report by Forrester analyst James Staten. The report, based on interviews with more than 30 companies, concludes that cloud computing has been “wildly [...] ...

39 of 173 | U.S. to plug Open XML as an ISO standard - The United States is likely to recommend Microsoft’s Open XML standard as an international standard. News.com’s Martin LaMonica reports: Two members of the technical committee tasked with setting the national position on a pivotal vote said the States will retain its “Approve” position in a vote to make Open XML (all resources) a standard [...] ...

40 of 173 | BlueTie brings ‘featuretisements’ to workflow - BlueTie has come up with a novel way to generate revenue for its collaboration suite aimed at small businesses. Rather than licensing, subscription or ads BlueTie is using”featuretisements,” where the company is paid on a cost per action basis. The idea is to integrate monetizable services into the workflow of email and calendaring. For example, [...] ...

41 of 173 | Amazon explains its S3 outage - Amazon has issued a statement that adds a little more clarity to its Web services outage on Friday. Here’s Amazon’s explanation of the S3 outage, which wreaked havoc on startups and other enterprises relying on Amazon’s cloud. Early this morning, at 3:30am PST, we started seeing elevated levels of authenticated requests from multiple users in one of [...] ...

42 of 173 | What happens when the cloud doesn’t work? - Update below: Cloud services sound great. A company can host their infrastructure with a large player like Amazon and Google, spend little and grow the business. Data center investment? Why would you do something like that? Those theories are being tested today as Michael Krigsman is on the case of a major Amazon Web services outage. [...] ...

43 of 173 | Workday acquires Cape Clear to deliver integration as a service - On demand enterprise software provider Workday is adding integration services to its stack with the purchase of Cape Clear, an Enterprise Services Bus (ESB) provider. Workday had already integrated Cape Clear’s bus into its HR and financial applications, such as providing report services via Excel. Cape Clear’s solution won’t be offered as a standalone product henceforth, [...] ...

44 of 173 | IBM demos ‘On Demand Workplace’; Will Web 2.0 deliver productivity gains? - IBM demoed its enterprise 2.0 experiments Tuesday including its On Demand Workplace–an application that’s part intranet, part Facebook and part Web service that becomes an interface to legacy systems. IBM executives held court with a handful of bloggers, writers and analysts at its New York offices. The presentations, currently underway, are led by CIO Mark Hennessy [...] ...

45 of 173 | Amazon rolls out beta of its cloud database - Amazon has announced the limited beta of its SimpleDB, a database Web service designed to ride shotgun with Amazon’s S3 storage service and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon’s Simple DB provides real-time lookup and querying of structured data, which will presumably be stored on the S3 service. According to Amazon customers will save money because they [...] ...

46 of 173 | Economics that are impossible to stop - A few days ago, Jeff Barr, Amazon’s Web services (AWS) evangelist visited my class and got a report of what we’d built over the course of the last semester on top of AWS. Each student had built part of a project that eventually used 25-30 independent machines. One weak spot was data storage. [...] ...

47 of 173 | News to know: Salesforce.com; Second Life currency theft; SAP; Document standards - Notable headlines: Larry Dignan: Salesforce.com rolls out customer data sharing; eyes 1 million subscribers. Dan Farber: SAP blesses the iPhone. Michael Krigsman: SAP Influencer Summit: SOA grows up David Berlind: Did the W3C acknowledge CDF’s potential as an office format (vs ODF) in newly public e-mail? Mary Jo Foley: Microsoft starts rolling out more OOXML translators. Microsoft [...] ...

48 of 173 | Oracle’s ultimate grand Fusion - Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of Oracle Server Technologies, spent an hour on stage at OpenWorld  this morning patiently talking through various new features in the company’s growing Fusion Middleware portfolio, which includes a laundry list of products, such as SOA Suite, WebCenter Suite, JDeveloper, Application Development Framework, Application Server, Identity Management Suite, [...] ...

49 of 173 | Oracle’s Charles Phillips: Fusion on track and SaaS for all - In a meeting with Enterprise Irregulars after his keynote at OpenWorld, Oracle President Charles Phillips discussed the future of Fusion, software-as-a-service (SaaS), his notion of “acquired innovation” and other topics. Fusion is Oracle’s next-generation suite of applications, built from the ground up on SOA principles. He was asked if Fusion is “real.” He responded, “I’ve been [...] ...

50 of 173 | Google’s new mantra: Making the Web a better platform for all - “In the next year we will make a series of announcements and spend hundreds of millions on innovations and giving them away as open source,” said Vic Gundotra, the new head of Google’s developer programs. Google believes that innovation on the Web has been lacking. XML and HTTP Request were innovative technologies in 1998, but [...] ...