News Desk

Micron CEO Dies in Plane Wreck

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:17:00 EST

The last American DRAM maker Micron Technology named Mark Durcan CEO Saturday after long-time incumbent Steven Appleton, 51, was killed Friday morning when the small single-engine Lancair plane he was flying – one of those build-it-yourself kit things – crashed near company headquarters in Boise, Idaho. It was his second takeoff – the first only getting a five or 10 feet off the ground – and was up only a few minutes before requesting permission to land again indicating there was a problem. Durcan, 50, who was due to retire at the end of summer, was the company’s president and COO. He now intends to stay.

Google Brick & Mortar Bound; Amazon Too Reportedly

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 16:00:00 EST

Aping Apple, Google wants to open a 1,323-square-foot open-to-the-public retail store complete with an eye-catching mezzanine visible from the street at its European headquarters in Dublin, according to a local planning application. It hasn’t explained what it wants to sell there but the mezzanine area is for visiting “business partners and contributors.” Maybe it’ll sell the Android-based, smartphone- or tablet-operated “home-entertainment system that streams music wirelessly throughout the home” that the Wall Street Journal said Thursday it’s developing and means to move under its own brand. The widgetry, which might stream other media, is reportedly due later this year after years of tinkering. The Dublin site is Google’s largest location outside the US, with expectations of housing 3,000 employees.

Symantec Confirms Blackmail Attempt

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:02:00 EST

Starting last month an unidentified hacker – or maybe it’s hackers – called Yamatough and believed to be part of a group called Lords of Dharmaraja and affiliated with Anonymous – from the looks of it not a native English speaker – or else a semi-literate – demanded $50,000 in blackmail from Symantec. The entry point was apparently servers run by Indian military intelligence. Yamatough threatened to expose stolen Norton antivirus and PCAnywhere source code. Symantec, which secretly called the cops, told CNET it agreed to pay the extortion as part of a sting operation that failed. The PCAnywhere code was posted Tuesday. The go-between was a fictional Symantec employee named Sam Thomas, who offered Yamatough incremental payments of $2,500 a month for three months until the Symantec was confident the code was destroyed. Sam was actually law enforcement.

EquaShip Sinks at Launch; Puts into Dry Dock for Repairs

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:42:00 EST

EquaShip, the ambitious start-up that wants to be the fourth US parcel carrier after UPS, FedEx and the USPS, has suspended its weeks-old service to regroup after it couldn’t get packages where they were going in a few days time. CEO Ron Wiener said it could take a year to fix the problem. Its failure to deliver within a closing time window put eBay and Amazon shippers’ critical performance scores at risk. The start-up has been courting the small and medium-sized B2C e-commerce merchants on Amazon and eBay that don’t qualify for FedEx and UPS discounts and are basically stuck subsidizing the unprofitable volumes of the FedEx and UPS mega-shippers. EquaShip’s low rates were supposed to make the discount-disenfranchised competitive so they could blithely offer the free delivery imperative to Internet sales these days without losing their shirt.

FBI’s File on Jobs Released

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:49:00 EST

The FBI Thursday released a 20-year-old file it had on Steve Jobs. The background check was done on the then-NeXT CEO reportedly because President Bush 41 was considering appointing him to his Export Council. The FBI confirmed in interviews with friends and associates that Jobs was difficult, temperamental, wanted his own way and had used pot, hashish and LSD. The agency wrote in its findings that “Several individuals questioned Mr. Jobs’ honesty stating that Mr. Jobs will twist the truth and distort reality in order to achieve his goals.”

Apache Hadoop: Now, Next, and Beyond at Cloud Expo New York

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:25:00 EST

In 2011, Apache Hadoop received tremendous attention for helping organizations cost-effectively capitalize on their big data. Hadoop is now disrupting the business of analyzing data. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Baldeschwieler, Co-Founder & CEO of Hortonworks, will look at the current state of the Hadoop project, lessons learned by deploying it at scale, and the roadmap for its future. Big Data Track attendees will learn about the exciting developments that have happened recently with the Apache Hadoop project, what is has already accomplished (including real-world examples), and what it is going to make possible in the future.

New York Drops Intel Antitrust Case

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:26:00 EST

Intel has finally seen the back of that 2009 antitrust suit that New York State’s attorney general brought against it that was pretty much a case of New York copying over the charges AMD had made in its massive but now long-settled suit. See, AMD was building a big state-of-art chip plant upstate New York, a project that Globalfoundries inherited when it bought AMD’s factories, and New York figured it could get some easy money. Its mistake was in thinking that cases like AMD’s actually go to a jury – like Intel would ever let that happen – and not realizing that AMD needed the money and would take a settlement and run. When it did, New York was left in district court in Delaware, where it had piggybacked on AMD’s suit, with no home court advantage.

Eolas Patents Found Invalid

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:43:00 EST

After hearing testimony from World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, Netscape co-founder Eroc Bina, HTML embedded tag inventor David Raggetr and prior art inventor Pei-Yuan Wei, who wrote the Viola browser back in 1991, two years before Eolas, and demo’d it to Sun in ’93, a Texas federal jury Thursday – in a district notorious for looking kindly on patent holders – found the patents held by Eolas Technologies, which once nailed Microsoft for a $565 million infringement decision, invalid. The patents claim that Eolas invented the idea of a web browser that supports plug-ins and AJAX development techniques. Eolas was suing YouTube, Adobe, Amazon, JC Penney’s, Staples, CDW and Yahoo before moving on to almost anybody with a web site. Oracle, eBay, Apple, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Playboy and TI previously settled. Eolas could appeal. It’s “evaluating its options.” The University of California co-owns the Eolas patents.

iPad 3 Next Month: AllThingsDigital

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:27:00 EST

Apple is going to launch the iPad 3, or whatever they call it, the first week of March at a special event in San Francisco according to AllThingsD, a prophecy the punters regarded as being as good as a statement from the company. As a result Apple Thursday hit an all-time high, teasing the magic $500 number, with a closing price of $493.17, up from $315 last June, after seeing $496.75 during the day. The blog figures street availability a week or so later. The dingus, the same size as the iPad 2, will reportedly be built on a way faster chip with improved graphics and a 2048×1536 Retina Display – “or something close to it,” the blog said.

To ARMs! To ARMs! Win 8 for ARM to Go to Developers

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:42:00 EST

Microsoft is about to release a limited number of ARM-based widgets running Windows 8 to developers so when the operating system hits GA it can compete against the iPad, according to what Windows president Steven Sinofsky told Bloomberg and others Thursday. The system, which can’t run legacy programs, will need brand new apps. The object of the game is to put out the x86 and ARM OS (now styled WOA) at the same time. Microsoft will reportedly hand out test PCs based on ARM chips from Qualcomm, TI and Nvidia, all running the same binaries. Developers have only gotten Windows 8 for the x86 before. They should get the ARM machines around February 29, when Microsoft means to release an x86-only Consumer Preview of Windows 8.

Google Cultivates a Rep as Patent Gouger

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:10:00 EST

Apple quietly wrote a letter to ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, in November asking it to set basic rules for the licensing of standards-essential patents and to make its patent-wielding members commit to the principles. Apple clearly had Google and its Android acolytes in mind in writing the letter. Motorola Mobility and Samsung are asking ludicrously high sums to license IP that’s supposed to be available on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND). They have also sued alleged infringers like Apple and Microsoft demanding product-stopping injunctions. Apple wants all this to stop. It wants ETSI to insist on appropriate royalties, a common royalty base and no injunctions. Apple’s lead IP lawyer Bruce Watrous told ETSI that the industry lacks consistent adherence to FRAND principles in licensing all the patents necessary to make mobile devices.

Clustrix Delivers Software-Only Kit to Demo Shard-less MySQL Scaling

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:15:00 EST

On Tuesday, Clustrix announced the availability of the free Clustrix Development Kit, allowing users to try out the NewSQL system that it's backers say scales to an "unlimited number of users, transactions or data." There's a lot to like about MySQL databases if you're a start-up, until success comes knocking a bit too fast. When big data demand soars then MySQL can sour on making the transactions needed on time. Sharding the application and data resources has been about the only answer, other than to painfully and expensively cut and run to another data base like NoSQL. This was the problem facing Massive Media when its social networking site Twoo rapidly grew to four million users in six months. By using the Clustrix distributed relational database system, Massive Media gained high scale-out transactional performance and automated fault tolerance, said Clustrix. And that has now made Twoo the poster child for Clustrix, a San Francisco start-up funded by Sequoia and USVP and its co-founder, Paul Mikesell, also co-founded Isilon, which was sold to EMC for $2.25 billion.

Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Computing and Healthcare

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:15:00 EST

What are the legal implications and consequences of cloud computing in the healthcare and high-tech sectors? What are the potential legal protections and solutions from the point of view of providers, suppliers and consumers? In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Paul Rubell, a Partner at Meltzer Lippe, will discuss the federal mandates that will encourage “meaningful use” of EHR technology by 2015, and what those mandates will require executives to understand about cloud computing and solutions for implementing cloud computing across large companies, corporations and not-for-profits in advance of federal mandates.

Oracle to Spend $1.9 Billion Buying Taleo

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:25:00 EST

Oracle rolled out of bed Thursday morning and said it’s going to buy Taleo and its talent management cloud widgetry for $46 a share or roughly $1.9 billion net of Taleo’s cash and debt. That’s an 18% premium. Not bad for a company that was originally bootstrapped. Taleo (say Ta-LAY-oh) competes with SuccessFactors, which SAP is buying for $3.4 billion, and its stock price fattened up after the SuccessFactors deal was announced in December on speculation it would be taken out by Oracle. Taleo is supposed to handle more SaaS transactions than anybody except Salesforce.com.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview Launches February 29

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:45:00 EST

A consumer preview of Windows 8, still a beta, is to launch February 29 during the Mobile World Congress at a two-hour affair at the Hotel Miramar in Barcelona. Microsoft sent out invitations Wednesday. It put out a developer preview last fall. Final release, after a release candidate, is still a big secret but the optimistic are hoping for fall in time for Christmas sales. Windows 8 is supposed to support both the ARM and x86 chip, has a new Metro interface and a built-in app store. Windows’ iconic Start button has reportedly been mothballed.

MMI Said to Want 2.25% of Apple Sales for Patents

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:30:00 EST

Mobile phone inventor and proposed Google acquisition Motorola Mobility apparently wants Apple to pay a royalty of 2.25% of sales to cover a FRAND license to its fundamental standards-essential patents according to an October 17 letter between the companies’ outside German lawyers unearthed over the weekend by patent sleuth Florian Mueller. That price, depending on MMI’s other terms, like how far back it’s talking and exactly what devices it means, could easily translate into a billion-dollar payment and give other essential patents owners similar delusions of grandeur imperiling Apple’s cost structure.

Cloud Expo New York: The Java EE 7 Platform - Developing for the Cloud

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

The focus of Java EE 7 is on the cloud, and specifically it aims to bring Platform-as-a-Service providers and application developers together so that portable applications can be deployed on any cloud infrastructure and reap all its benefits in terms of scalability, elasticity, multitenancy, etc. The existing specifications in the platform such as JPA, Servlets, EJB, and others will be updated to meet these requirements. Java EE 7 continues the ease of development push that characterized prior releases by bringing further simplification to enterprise development. It also adds new, important APIs such as the REST client API in JAX-RS 2.0 and the long awaited Concurrency Utilities for Java EE API. Expression Language 3.0 and Java Message Service 2.0 will undergo an extreme makeover to align with the improvements in the Java language. There are plenty of improvements to several other components. Newer web standards like HTML 5 and Web Sockets will be embraced to build modern web applications.

Cloud Expo New York: Mobilizing Enterprise Applications for the Cloud

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for application integration and dependency management technologies to take center stage and accelerate enterprise application workloads into the cloud with single pane-of-glass view and control.

AMD Vows Not to Be Road Kill

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

AMD Thursday told financial analysts it’s gonna try not to become road kill by addressing the “trends around consumerization, the cloud and convergence” and switching to a new “ambidextrous” strategy that includes other people’s technologies and IP to deliver differentiated products such as a tablet. That means AMD might pump for mobile maven ARM, whose low-power chips are challenging Intel enough for AMD CEO Rory Read to prophesy “the breakdown of proprietary control points.” Such a move has been suspected. The fact that AMD didn’t have a mobile strategy cost the company’s last CEO Dirk Meyer his job.

StreamWIDE Enables Carriers to Run Telephony Services on AWS

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 03:04:00 EST

StreamWIDE announced it has successfully benchmarked its software technology on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Starting today, StreamWIDE customers can migrate existing StreamWIDE services to an Amazon EC2 virtualized environment. With assistance from the StreamWIDE professional services teams, migrations can occur smoothly without data loss or service downtime. This major achievement means that fixed and mobile operators can now move their voice services such as voicemail, call center applications or voice conferencing to AWS. Additionally, new StreamWIDE customers may choose to begin deploying their telephony services immediately on AWS, using a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Amazon Machine Image, saving money, moving capital expenditure to operational expenditure and shortening a project's time-to-market in comparison with traditional on-premise deployments.

ScaleOut Software to Exhibit at Cloud Expo 2012 New York

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:15:00 EST

SYS-CON Events announced today that ScaleOut Software, a leading provider of distributed in-memory data grids and data analysis solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. ScaleOut Software develops and markets distributed in-memory data grid (IMDG) software for storing, managing, and analyzing data in the cloud, on-premise, and mixed environments. Its flagship product, ScaleOut StateServer®, accelerates application performance with linear scalability and enables automatic data migration to and from the cloud. Integrated map/reduce functionality provides intuitive, powerful data analysis.

Oracle to SAP: ‘See You Back in Court’

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:30:00 EST

As predictably as the sun rising in the east, Oracle Monday rejected the slashed $272 million award for damages that the presiding federal court judge decided it should get from SAP for its admitted copyright infringement rather than the $1.3 billion the jury awarded Oracle in late 2010 following a captivating and highly publicized trial. Oracle told the court it wants the new trial it was offered to “vindicate” the jury and its property rights as well as to avoid risking its right to appeal the court’s decision. SAP, which agreed to pay a $20 million fine to the US government to avoid criminal prosecution, said it was “disappointed.” Calling the jury award “grossly excessive,” Judge Phyllis Hamilton last September found Oracle only proved actual damages of $272 million. SAP’s third-party maintenance arm TomorrowNow illegally downloaded reams of Oracle software and customer-support documents before it was shut down in 2008.

Acer Sues Ex-CEO

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:30:00 EST

Acer has sued its former CEO Gianfranco Lanci in Milan, charging him with breaching a one-year non-compete by going to work for its Lenovo rival. It is asking for damages. Lanci left Acer last year at the end of March in a strategy flap over the company’s direction, mobile gismos and an underestimated global downturn and started consulting for Lenovo in September. He was named head of a new Lenovo EMEA unit last month, starting April 2. Acer reportedly doesn’t want an injunction stopping him from taking the job, just money. Lenovo is on a tear currently challenging HP’s grip on its title as the world’s top PC vendor. Lenovo bought IBM’s PC unit a few years ago and last year added German merchant Medion, a move regarded as dangerous to Acer.

Cloud Expo New York: The Dark Side of Virtualization

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:15:00 EST

Virtualization and private cloud are good for server consolidation, creating flexible environments, and saving IT budget dollars. A recent survey of 1200 companies with 500+ employees showed that 59% had server virtualization in production or pilot. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Dave Asprey, VP of Cloud Security at Trend Micro, will explain the types of situations when you should consider not virtualizing some of your applications. Reasons range from technical to legal to IT ops to politics to finances. Attend this session, and hear a true IT insider’s guide to the truth about virtualization.

Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Security for Regulated Industries – CloudAudit

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:00:00 EST

Regulation of consumer and corporate data is increasing in response to the growing movement into cloud service offerings. Coupled with high-profile intrusions by groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec, the necessity for a standard way to assess the security of cloud service providers becomes apparent. CloudAudit is an open standard developed by a Cloud Security Alliance working group that provides an open, common, extensible namespace and interface to enable cloud providers and authorized customers to automate audits, assertions, assessments and assurance for their cloud infrastructure, platform or application environments.

EMC to Open Cloud and Big Data R&D Center in Russia

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:00:00 EST

EMC on Wednesday announced it plans to establish an R&D center in the Skolkovo Foundation's Innovation Hub in Russia that will focus on development of cloud infrastructure solutions and Big Data analytics technologies for Bioinformatics and Energy Efficiency. EMC also plans to collaborate on research projects in these and other areas with Russian universities, government agencies, and local and multinational companies in the Skolkovo community. The new EMC facility will be located at the Skolkovo Innovation Center and will work in close cooperation with EMC's existing R&D center in St. Petersburg. The agreement was signed today in Moscow by Joel Schwartz, EMC's Senior Vice President, and Viktor Vekselberg, Skolkovo Foundation President. The Skolkovo Foundation is a non-profit organization focused on establishing an innovation hub to stimulate innovative entrepreneurship that will benefit Russia and the global economy. Skolkovo's goal is to leverage Russia's resources in the field of contemporary applied research and create a favorable environment for undertaking scientific developments in five priority areas of technological development: power engineering and energy efficiency, space, bioinformatics, nuclear and computer technologies.

Yahoo Chairman, Three Directors Fall on Their Swords

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:51:00 EST

Yahoo’s long-suffering stockholders are finally getting what they’ve wanted since he stiffened Jerry Yang’s resolve to torpedo Microsoft’s insanely great $47.5 billion $33-a-share offer to buy to company in 2008: the departure of chairman Roy Bostock. Bostock is taking with him three other tainted board members including HP printer exec Vyomesh Joshi, media investor Arthur Kern and ex-Disney exec Gary Wilson. The quartet, all reportedly volunteers, have agreed not to seek re-election this June. Who will replace Bostock is unclear but the beleaguered company has named two brand new directors, former Rovi CEO and one-time IBM higher-up Fred Amoroso and former LiveOps CEO and ex-eBay COO Maynard Webb. It is looking for more recruits. Webb serves on the board of Admob and salesforce.com and Amoroso, a Meta Group alum, knows the online video and video ad business. The exodus will leave Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson, imported from PayPal in January, with a board whose oldest member wasn’t there more than two years ago. Co-founder Jerry Yang departed the premises in mid-January. Bostock, who took credit for the re-composition of the board, made the announcements in a letter to stockholders Tuesday afternoon. He also said that the company has yet to hear an equity investment proposal it fancies to increase Yahoo’s value. It has reportedly entertained offers for a piece of Yahoo from consortia led by private equity firms Silver Lake and TPG Capital. What to do with its handsome stake in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan is still on the table too. Both Alibaba and Softbank want to buy Yahoo out. Bostock blamed the complexity of the potentially tax-free transactions for the continued delay and offered no reassurance of any final resolution. However, negotiations are reportedly moving along and Yahoo might have a deal next month, the whisperers say. The moves were made against the backdrop of a threatened proxy fight by activist shareholder Daniel Loeb of Third Point LLC. After-hours after the news broke Yahoo added five cents to its Tuesday close of $15.83.

Cloud Expo New York: Goodbye PaaS 1.0, Hello PaaS 2.0

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

The Platform as a Service (PaaS) market grew out of the fact that no other cloud solution addressed the ever-increasing complexity of managing and writing modern applications: no frameworks, libraries or APIs alone could tackle the sticky application engineering challenges. Unfortunately, PaaS 1.0 is what people are now seeing as strictly a “tool” to easily deploy apps to the infrastructure in a self-service way with little or no differentiation among offerings. However, in order for PaaS to reach its full potential and become the modern day abstraction layer for software delivery, we must enter the PaaS 2.0 phase. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Sinclair Schuller, Co-Founder & CEO of Apprenda, will explain how organizations are currently using PaaS, where PaaS is evolving to, and highlight best practices to maximize the value of existing investments when adopting PaaS today.

Cloud Expo New York: Best Practices for Big Unstructured Data Storage

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:15:00 EST

Big Data has become very popular as what can probably best be described as “loosely structured large scale data”, i.e., data sets of relatively small files. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Tom Leyden, Director of Alliances and Marketing at Amplidata, will explain what Big Unstructured Data is (lots of large, unstructured files) and how you build scalable storage infrastructures that can handle such volumes of data. The focus will be on Object Storage, which is the future storage paradigm that uses concepts of cloud computing to optimize the back-end storage for cloud applications.

Cloud Expo New York: The Growing Big Data Tools Landscape

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:45:00 EST

Hadoop, MapReduce, Hive, Hbase, Lucene, Solr? The only thing growing faster than enterprise data these days is the landscape of big data tools. These tools, which are designed to help organizations turn big data into opportunities, are gaining deeper insight into massive volumes of information. A recent Gartner report predicts that enterprise data will increase by 650% over the next five years, which means that the time is now for IT decision makers to determine which big data tools are the best – and most cost-effective – for their organization. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, David Lucas, Chief Strategy Officer at GCE, will run through what enterprises really need to know about the growing set of big data tools – including those being leveraged by organizations today as well as the new and innovative tools just arriving on the scene. He will also help attendees gain greater insight on how to match the right data center tools to a specific enterprise challenge and what processes need to change to handle big data.

Cloud Expo New York: Cloud Architectures Require Scale-out Storage

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:15:00 EST

Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid, will discuss how Ethernet SAN architectures leverage off-the-shelf hardware, standard Ethernet, and distributed storage processing to enable a building block approach to scalability – no forklift upgrades required. With Ethernet SAN, capacity and performance both scale linearly with user demand without forcing users into a complex tiered storage environment to deal with price-performance tradeoffs. Now the same storage building blocks can be configured for backup or production, virtualization or database, enabling a flexible one-tier-for-all architecture. Learn how organizations today are already leveraging Ethernet SAN as the storage backbone of their dynamic public and private cloud architectures.

SoftLayer Appoints New Chief Financial Officer

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 05:45:00 EST

SoftLayer Technologies on Monday announced the appointment of Walter Z. Berger as Chief Financial Officer (CFO), effective in March. A seasoned finance and accounting executive, Mr. Berger will help guide and oversee the company’s continued market leadership and financial growth. He brings more than 30 years of experience to SoftLayer, including extensive operational experience as a CFO with several large, publicly held companies. Lance Crosby, CEO for SoftLayer, notes that Berger’s “proven track record and leadership will be invaluable as we embark on our next phase of growth. We’re delighted to have such a high caliber executive join our team.” Prior to joining SoftLayer Technologies, Mr. Berger was the CFO and executive vice president of Leap Wireless International Inc. From 2006 to 2008, Mr. Berger served in senior management roles at CBS Corporation, including as executive vice president and chief financial officer for CBS Radio, a division of CBS Corporation. Prior to joining CBS Radio, Mr. Berger served as executive vice president and CFO and a director of Emmis Communications from 1999 to 2005. From 1996 to 1997, Mr. Berger served as executive vice president and CFO of LG&E Energy Corporation and in 1997 was promoted to group president of the Energy Marketing Division, where he served until 1999. Early in his career, Mr. Berger held a number of financial and operating management roles in the manufacturing, service and energy fields. Mr. Berger began his career in audit at Arthur Andersen in 1977. Mr. Berger is a certified public accountant and holds a Bachelor of Arts in business administration from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Information Builders and Infobright Announce OEM Partnership

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:03:00 EST

Infobright on Monday announced that Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, has entered into an OEM agreement with Infobright for its Infobright Enterprise Edition (IEE) analytic database. Information Builders' WebFOCUS business intelligence platform is installed in tens of thousands of locations, servicing millions of users worldwide. With the huge growth of data volumes being captured and the expanding need for real-time reporting and analytics, IEE adds value to Information Builders' products as an embedded database for applications that capture and store large quantities of data. IEE enables very fast query performance without any manual effort and compresses data at rates averaging 10:1 to 40:1, allowing users to store far more data in a small hardware footprint. "Many of our customers are experiencing the challenges associated with Big Data," said David Sandel, senior vice president, Business Intelligence Product Group and Worldwide Customer Services, of Information Builders. "Embedding Infobright's analytic database into our product offerings will provide the performance they need without the work other databases require, and will significantly reduce hardware and operational costs while storing much greater volumes of data."

SeaMicro Adapts Xeon for Microservers

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

SeaMicro, the ambitious start-up that has been building so-called microservers out of low-power Intel Atom chips, has started building microservers out of low-voltage quad-core Intel Xeon chips using the same architecture its Atom systems use. The development is called the SeaMicro SM10000-XE. Needless to say, it’s the first fabric-based Xeon microserver ever made. It’s also supposed to be the most energy-efficient, highest-density, highest-bandwidth Xeon server now available, period. A single SM10000-XE replaces 32 dual-socket servers, but draws half the power and takes up a third the space without any changes to operating systems, applications or management tools. It eliminates layers of Ethernet switches, server management devices and expensive load balancers.

Tilera’s New Server Chips Arrive

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:45:00 EST

Tilera, the wannabe many-core Intel server replacement, said Monday that it’s delivering the expected 16- and 36-core versions of its new 64-bit low-power proprietary TILE-GX processors along with evaluation systems it hopes will give Intel something to worry about. The things should be in volume by mid-March. They’re Tilera’s first 64-bit chips capable of using more memory than its original 32-bit widgets – like 512GB or 1TB. They’ve been shipping in limited quantities – alphas – since September. The start-up claims to have 20 design-wins and 80 “deep” engagements for the GX family that it expects will turn into design-wins – probably this year – because they’re do-or-die mission-critical projects. Forty-seven are in the US, 13 in Europe, and 20 in APAC, mostly China.

SOA Software Announces Year-on-Year Growth of 60%

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:01:00 EST

SOA Software, a provider of SOA governance, cloud and enterprise API Management products, announced year-over-year business growth of 60% in 2011, spurred by the increasing need for effective cloud computing and mainstream SOA solutions. The company also expanded to new locations, significantly increased its employee base, and built exciting new partnerships while enjoying widespread industry recognition from analysts and awards for achievement. "It is very gratifying to see the planning, collaboration and hard work result in such positive gains," said Paul Gigg, President and CEO, SOA Software. "The company is delivering tremendous value to our customers with our products being recognized as best of breed around the world. I am excited about the trajectory of continued growth, innovation and product excellence; SOA Software can rightly claim to be a leader among the world's premier software vendors in SOA and Enterprise API Management." SOA Software's business growth reflects expansion of its client base to include significant new clients as well as expansion of business with existing customers. In 2011 the Company increased its personnel by 50% and opened centers of operations in the Middle East and South Africa to complement existing business centers in North America and Europe. SOA Software is succeeding in being a step ahead of customer demand for automated governance solutions for services that are either entirely cloud-based or hybrid on-premise/cloud instances.

Salesforce Trots Out Desk.com

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 06:45:00 EST

Cloud doyen Salesforce.com Tuesday fielded Desk.com, a new on-demand social and mobile help desk platform that’s supposed to let businesses deliver personal customer service by unifying support channels including Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, the phone and the web via a Desk.com Agent Desktop. Basic pricing starts at $49 a month per full-time agent for unlimited usage. Flex pricing runs $1 an hour per part-time agent. Users can reportedly respond to cases themselves on the go, re-assign, change groups, change status, change priority for cases and modify customer information associated with cases.

Dell's New Software Division - Great News for Dell

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:30:00 EST

Some companies get it. Others wander around in the fog and think that it's a "Cloud". In case you've missed it, 2012 has been the year of some amazing strategic moves by Dell. If you think Dell isn't a software vendor, you're dead wrong. Dell "gets it" - SaaS, Software & Cloud. Dell is making some exciting waves in the "solutions" business. Building on the momentum as a result of the acquisition of Perot Systems some years ago and a buying spree where they acquired a host of best-of-breed software solutions such as Boomi (Cloud-based Integration Platform),Dell has just announced a newly created Software Division and has appointed veteran John Swainson as president, reporting to Michael Dell.

Cloud Expo New York: Big Data, Colocation and the Cloud

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:15:00 EST

As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It would allow organizations to have a cloud at various data centers instead of one cloud at one datacenter. Costs are reduced significantly since one big Internet pipe is not needed.

Andreessen Horowitz Raises New $1.5 Billion Fund

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 14:00:00 EST

Novice venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, which wouldn’t be near so influential if Netscape survivor Marc Andreessen wasn’t at the helm, has raised another $1.5 billion fund in these days of not-so-scarce money. That means it’ll have $2.7 billion under management. Andreessen, who’s accorded rock star status and gets early access to plum investments, says it’s a “very opportunity-rich environment right now.” Naturally he’s looking for the disruptive start-ups. Andreessen Horowitz started in 2009 with $300 million. It’s in all the chi-chi firms like Zynga and Facebook and sold Skype to Microsoft for a pretty penny, $8.5 billion in fact.