Ginni at IBM

Dear IBM Business Partner

On 25 October, IBM's board of directors elected Virginia M. Rometty president and chief executive officer of IBM, effective 1 January 2012. Ginni, as she is known to many, is currently IBM senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy. She succeeds Samuel J Palmisano, who currently is IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. Mr. Palmisano will remain chairman of the board.

In a written statement, Mr. Palmisano said, "Ginni Rometty has successfully led several of IBM's most important businesses over the past decade - from the formation of IBM Global Business Services to the build-out of our Growth Markets Unit. But she is more than a superb operational executive. With every leadership role, she has strengthened our ability to integrate IBM's capabilities for our clients. She has spurred us to keep pace with the needs and aspirations of our clients by deepening our expertise and industry knowledge. Ginni's long-term strategic thinking and client focus are seen in our growth initiatives, from cloud computing and analytics to the commercialisation of Watson. She brings to the role of CEO a unique combination of vision, client focus, unrelenting drive, and passion for IBMers and the company's future. I know the board agrees with me that Ginni is the ideal CEO to lead IBM into its second century."

As IBM's global sales leader, Ginni, oversees IBM's sales community including the Global Business Partners and Midmarket organisation. She is accountable for revenue, profit and client satisfaction in the 170 global markets in which IBM does business. She is responsible for IBM's worldwide results, which exceeded $99 billion in 2010. She also is responsible for leading IBM's global strategy, marketing and communications functions. Previously, Ginni was senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services. In that role, she led the successful integration of PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting—the largest acquisition in professional services history, building a global team of more than 100,000 business consultants and services experts. She has also served as general manager of IBM Global Services, Americas and of IBM's Global Insurance and Financial Services Sector.

I have known and worked with Ginni for many years. She is an exceptional leader and an expert in the disciplines that are critical to our future success. She is a proven advocate of our Business Partner community and understands the importance the channel brings to IBM. I look forward to her continued support and leadership as IBM moves into its second century.

Rich Hume - IBM

Tech Giants Sizing Up Yahoo Bid/ Yahoo NOT Sold yet!

October 23, 2011, 9:33 pm
Tech Giants Sizing Up Yahoo Bid from nytimes.com
By MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED and EVELYN M. RUSLI
ps: Israeli Radio said Google is buying Yahoo, Not True Yet!! (s.c.)

As a host of potential bidders circle Yahoo, several of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies are considering whether to jump into the fray themselves.

Microsoft and Google are both weighing whether to participate in the bidding. Each has its own business reasons for wanting to see the continued existence of Yahoo, which despite its financial struggles still has a monthly audience of almost 700 million unique visitors.
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News

But there’s one thing the technology giants have in common: Not one of them wants to actually buy or run Yahoo.

Instead, Microsoft and Google are considering lending financial support to private equity firms or others weighing a bid, according to people briefed on the matter.

Microsoft is the furthest along, having held discussions with a number of leveraged buyout firms, these people said. Under one possible combination, Microsoft would chip in billions of dollars in financing as part of a consortium led by the private equity firm Silver Lake and the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, three of these people said. That group would be backstopped by billions of dollars in bank financing as well.

Google, for its part, has had conversations with two private equity firms about backing a takeover, according to another person briefed on the matter. Such discussions are in the early stages and may not lead to a bid, this person said.

Representatives for Microsoft, Google, Silver Lake and Yahoo declined to comment on any potential bidding.
rest of article at nytimes.

Microsoft Posts Gain Despite Soft PC Sales

October 20, 2011 nytimes.com
Microsoft Posts Gain Despite Soft PC Sales
By NICK WINGFIELD

SEATTLE — Microsoft said its net income rose 6 percent in its first fiscal quarter, but the company’s results continued to reflect weak growth in PC sales.

The PC market, especially the part representing the companies using Microsoft’s Windows operating system, has suffered lately as economic uncertainty has crimped spending on information technology. Newer types of devices like tablets and mobile phones have sapped some of the business as well.

Microsoft said net income rose to $5.74 billion, or 68 cents a share, from $5.41 billion, or 62 cents a share, a year ago. Revenue rose 7 percent, to $17.37 billion, from $16.2 billion a year ago.

Analysts estimated that, on average, Microsoft would earn 68 cents a share on revenue of $17.24 billion, according to Thomson Reuters. Microsoft’s shares fell 1 percent after it released the financial results at the close of normal trading.

Microsoft said its revenue from selling Windows rose less than 2 percent during its first quarter, which ended Sept. 30. That reflects the fact that shipments of new PCs grew only 3.6 percent globally in the quarter, which ended Sept. 30, according to the research firm IDC. Apple defied the trend, reporting a 26 percent increase in the number of Macs sold during the same period, the company said on Tuesday.

Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, said the company’s revenue from Windows sales was weaker than he had expected. “We’ve now had a year where Windows hasn’t come in in-line with analyst expectations,” he said. “It’s less of a miss than in the past.”

The Microsoft division that includes its Office suit of applications fared better than Windows, with a revenue increase of almost 8 percent. That division — Microsoft’s largest, representing a third of total revenue — got a boost from a new version of Office released last year that continues to sell well for the company, despite competition from free and low-cost online applications from Google and others.
The rest of this article on nytimes.

Waze- I use it

• haaretz themarker Latest update 04:54 19.10.11

Israeli start-up Waze draws investment from Chinese billionaire

Hong Kong's Li Ka-shing, greater China's richest man, invests in Israeli navigation technology start-up.

Steve Jobs talks Thin Clients in 1997 | The Candid Root

Steve Jobs talks Thin Clients in 1997!

Steve Jobs talks Thin Clients in 1997 | The Candid Root

Watch Steve Jobs in 1997 discuss network based computing. Listen for mentions of “Thin Clients” and “stateless devices” (between 2:00 and 4:00). Steve discusses the same benefits and concepts behind the solutions we provide at DisklessWorkstations.com with LTSP.  Call it VDI, call it Cloud Computing, call it Thin Clients, at the of the day the concepts are all the same.

Mint Cast: The Popular Ubuntu Derivative:

Episode 83: The Wonderful World of Linux

News & Personal Updates

• The Linux Foundation suffers a major hack and is still down as of recording time
  http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/some-linux-foundation-crack-attack-details-emerge/9535

• Fedora is looking for a codename for Fedora 17: Hugo or Shakespeare
  http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTkwNA

• Proposed Kernel 3.1 logo change
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/9/10/24
  http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2011-09-13-009-41-SY-SM-HU

Non-News…!

• IBM sells Google 1,023 patents for Android legal defense
  http://www.zdnet.com/blog/google/ibm-sells-google-1023-patents-for-android-legal-defense/3317

• What’s coming in Ubuntu’s new Unity Linux desktop
  http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/whats-coming-in-ubuntus-new-unity-linux-desktop/9519

• Official NASA Futuristic Space MMO May Come to Linux
  http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2011/09/official-nasa-futuristic-space-mmo-may.html

Main Topic

http://www.mintcast.org/2011/09/episode-83-the-wonderful-world-of-linux/

• The Wonderful World of Linux:

IBM to Acquire i2 and Algorithmics

ARMONK, N.Y., - 31 Aug 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire i2 to accelerate its business analytics initiatives and help clients in the public and private sectors address crime, fraud and security threats. Financial terms were not disclosed.

With more than 4,500 customers in 150 countries, i2 is a leading provider of intelligence analytics for crime and fraud prevention based in Cambridge, UK with U.S. headquarters in McLean, Va. i2’s clients span multiple sectors globally such as banking, defense, health care, insurance, law enforcement, national security and retail. i2 solutions are currently used by 12 of the top 20 retail banks globally and eight of the top 10 largest companies in the world.

Organizations in both the public and private sectors today are facing an exponential increase in “big data” -- information and intelligence coming from disparate and unstructured sources including social media, biometrics and criminal databases. When it is accessible to the people who need it, this information can be used to anticipate potential problems, make better, faster decisions, and coordinate resources to deliver exceptional service to citizens and customers. IBM Press Releases.
IBM to Acquire Algorithmics

IBM Accelerates Business Analytics into Financial Risk Management
ARMONK, N.Y., - 01 Sep 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Algorithmics for $387 million, subject to price adjustments at closing. Algorithmics is a risk analytics firm with operations in Toronto, Canada. Algorithmics risk analytics software, content and advisory services are used by banking, investment and insurance businesses to help assess risk, address regulatory requirements and make more insightful business decisions. Algorithmics is a member of Fitch Group, which is majority owned by Fimalac, a holding company based in Paris, France.

This acquisition expands IBM's business analytics capabilities in the financial services industry by helping clients quantify, manage and optimize their risk exposure across a range of financial risk domains, including market, liquidity, credit, operational and insurance as well as economic and regulatory capital.

Linux, Open Source & Ubuntu: Linux Turns 20: Open-Source OS Changes Course of IT History

Linux Turns 20: Open-Source OS Changes Course of IT History

Link above with Slideshow about Linux today. 

On Aug. 25, 1991, Linux Torvalds announced a new project on the comp.os.minix newsgroup. He described a "free operating system" that resembled Minix, an operating system based on Unix, and asked for feedback on what people thought worked and didn't work. Torvalds was not aiming high with this project, noting that his new project would be "just a hobby" and not "be big and professional like gnu." Now 20 years later, the OS has exceeded its creator's expectations as it is now available for practically every processor architecture and can power mobile devices, computers, mainframes and supercomputers. The free operating system that Torvalds just gave away to anyone may never supplant Windows or Mac OS X on the desktop, but it is appearing in practically every other computing device, including set-top boxes, cloud servers, social networks, tablets and mobile phones. A vast majority of users may never download the operating system, but the odds are likely they are using a product based on it. Now eWEEK takes a look at some of the biggest achievements of the little operating system over the past 20 years. 

Security Controls and Lessons Learned from the Financial Crisis

Security Controls and Lessons Learned from the Financial Crisis (IBM)

Bryan Casey 270003BSJV |  Today 10:43 PM | Tags:  financial mortgage security ibm crisis
Comments (0)  |  Visits (61)

You know one of the interesting things I've noticed, and it's not really specific to security, is that the more interconnected the world becomes, the harder it is to find the root cause when something goes wrong.  If we look at the financial/mortgage crisis for example, if you wanted to point the finger at one person or event, could you do it?  I've wanted to for a long time, tracing this chain back to some single point of failure, but it's really not possible.  When something like this happens, where there isn't one root cause, accountability becomes a big mess because everyone can push the problem onto someone else.  The problem is that if everyone pushes around problems, problems never get solved.  So, the way that we need to look at it is that instead of there being limited accountability, there needs to be a lot of accountability. 

This type of complex interconnected failure isn't so different from what we see in the news around data breaches.  People want security to be simpler and they want to find that single point of failure, and sometimes it's there, but often times, it's really not.  Our technology world has grown to become a complex systems of systems where legacy systems are communicating with new systems, the notion of a perimeter is dissolving, new consumption and delivery models are popping up all the time and we have to secure all of this. 

Let's face it, the majority of attacks today don’t operate in little silos.  They can cross users and endpoints, applications, networks, databases, etc.  So despite the fact that you might have different teams responsible for all of these areas of your system, and you might see them as separate, attackers see this as one, connected system.  As a result, when breaches happen, often times it is often a combination of insufficient security controls, problematic policy and even things like a lack of user education. When we live in a world of complex and networked technologies, the notion of a single point of failure is disappearing.

So what do we do about this?  Obviously a layered defense is imperative.  You need to think about your data, how it moves, where it rests, how it gets accessed, which data is most important and how you can apply security controls all along the way.  Moving away from just the technology, one of the other things that people talk about is accounting for the human element in security.  When people are talking about this they are generally referring to the fact that users will click on just about anything, so security has to acknowledge that users are going to constantly put their organizations at risk.  But there's another side of that human element that I think is important, and that is establishing a culture in your organization that security needs to be top of mind, and that everyone is responsible.  Whether you are a developer, a DBA, an executive who might be targeted or an IT manager, security is something you need to consider.  Yes, new technologies will help, but changing culture and process, while never easy, is almost always an essential element of dealing with systemic issues, whether they be financial markets or security concerns. 

The last bit worth acknowledging is the dangers of ignoring something that appears broken, but ignoring it because it hasn’t actually broken yet.  So in this case we’re talking about warning signs around the economy but the market still going up, and IT decision makers saying, "well we haven’t been breached, so we must be secure," regardless of their actual security posture. 

Despite what we would all like, these aren’t issues you can just sweep under the rug and cross your fingers hoping that a problem won’t pop up.  Organizations need to confront these issues. 

The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs
from techrepublic

By Jason Hiner

July 22, 2011, 10:04 PM PDT

Takeaway: The IT profession and the IT job market are in the midst of seismic changes that are going to shift the focus to three types of jobs.

There’s a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It’s a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salaries by getting training and certification, job hopping, and, in many cases, being the only qualified candidate for a key position in a thinly-stretched job market. At the time, IT was held up as one of the professions of the future, where more and more of the best jobs would be migrating as computer-automated processes replaced manual ones.
Unfortunately, that idea of the future has disappeared, or at least morphed into something much different.

The glory days when IT pros could name their ticket evaporated when the Y2K crisis passed and then the dot com implosion happened. Suddenly, companies didn’t need as many coders on staff. Suddenly, there were a lot fewer startups buying servers and hiring sysadmins to run them.
Around the same time, there was also a general backlash against IT in corporate America. Many companies had been throwing nearly-endless amounts of money at IT projects in the belief that tech was the answer to all problems. Because IT had driven major productivity improvements during the 1990s, a lot of companies over-invested in IT and tried to take it too far too fast. As a result, there were a lot of very large, very expensive IT projects that crashed and burned.
When the recession of 2001 hit, these massively overbuilt IT departments were huge targets for budget cuts and many of them got hit hard. As the recession dragged out in 2002 and 2003, IT pros mostly told each other that they needed to ride out the storm and that things would bounce back. But, a strange thing happened. IT budgets remained flat year after year. The rebound never happened.
Fast forward to 2011. Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve drastically reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they’ve outsourced much of the data center altogether. These were the jobs that were at the center of the IT pro boom in 1999. Today, they haven’t totally disappeared, but there certainly isn’t a shortage of available workers or a high demand for those skill sets.
That’s because the IT environment has changed dramatically. More and more of traditional software has moved to the web, or at least to internal servers and served through a web browser. Many technophobic Baby Boomers have left the workforce and been replaced by Millennials who not only don’t need as much tech support, but often want to choose their own equipment and view the IT department as an obstacle to productivity. In other words, today’s users don’t need as much help as they used to. Cynical IT pros will argue this until they are blue in the face, but it’s true. Most workers have now been using technology for a decade or more and have become more proficient than they were a decade ago. Plus, the software itself has gotten better. It’s still horribly imperfect, but it’s better.
So where does that leave today’s IT professionals? Where will the IT jobs of the future be?

1. Consultants

Let’s face it, all but the largest enterprises would prefer to not to have any IT professionals on staff, or at least as few as possible. It’s nothing personal against geeks, it’s just that IT pros are expensive and when IT departments get too big and centralized they tend to become experts at saying, “No.” They block more progress than they enable. As a result, we’re going to see most of traditional IT administration and support functions outsourced to third-party consultants. This includes a wide range from huge multi-national consultancies to the one person consultancy who serves as the rented IT department for local SMBs. I’m also lumping in companies like IBM, HP, Amazon AWS, and Rackspace, who will rent out both data center capacity and IT professionals to help deploy, manage, and troubleshoot solutions. Many of the IT administrators and support professionals who currently work directly for corporations will transition to working for big vendors or consultancies in the future as companies switch to purchasing IT services on an as-needed basis in order to lower costs, get a higher level of expertise, and get 24/7/365 coverage.

2. Project managers

Most of the IT workers that survive and remain as employees in traditional companies will be project managers. They will not be part of a centralized IT department, but will be spread out in the various business units and departments. They will be business analysts who will help the company leaders and managers make good technology decisions. They will gather business requirements and communicate with stakeholders about the technology solutions they need, and will also be proactive in looking for new technologies that can transform the business. These project managers will also serve as the company’s point of contact with technology vendors and consultants. If you look closely, you can already see a lot of current IT managers morphing in this direction.

3. Developers

By far, the area where the largest number of IT jobs is going to move is into developer, programmer, and coder jobs. While IT used to be about managing and deploying hardware and software, it’s going to increasingly be about web-based applications that will be expected to work smoothly, be self-evident, and require very little training or intervention from tech support. The other piece of the pie will be mobile applications — both native apps and mobile web apps. As I wrote in my article, We’re entering the decade of the developer, the current changes in IT are “shifting more of the power in the tech industry away from those who deploy and support apps to those who build them.” This trend is already underway and it’s only going to accelerate over the next decade.

Microsoft and SUSE extend Microsoft's controversial Novell Linux pact

Summary

Microsoft and SUSE announced they are extending the 2006 Microsoft-Novell Linux patent-protection agreement, and that Microsoft is buying $100 million worth of SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates for its customers.

In November 2006, Microsoft inked its controversial cross-licensing pact with Novell. In exchange for Microsoft distributing to its customers certificates for Novell’s SUSE Linux, Novell paid Microsoft patent-licensing royalties for Linux.
The original pact was due to expire in 2012. On July 25, Microsoft and SUSE announced a year ahead of that expiration date that they’re extending their partnership.
Microsoft is buying $100 million in additional SUSE Linux Enterprise certificates and the pair are going to continue to collaborate on interopability solutions through January 1, 2016. The SUSE certificates are designed to insure Microsoft customers who are implementing Linux that they won’t be caught in any Microsoft-Linux patent crossfire.
In the years following the original Microsoft-Novell agreement, a lot happened. In February 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated the deal between Microsoft and Novell was proof that open-source vendors need to respect Microsoft’s intellectual property. One month later,Microsoft licensing officials claimed publicly that Linux and other free software violated 235 Microsoft patents. Microsoft convinced a few smaller Linux vendors to sign patent-licensing deals with the company.
In 2010, Attachmate ended up purchasing Novell for $2.2 billion, and Microsoft and a handful of other tech companies bought 800 or so Novell patents as part of the arrangement.
In more recent months, Microsoft has increased its IP licensing pressures on Linux and Android vendors and has convinced quite a few, including Amazon, General Dynamics, Onkyo and Velocity Micro, to sign patent-licensing agreements. Barnes & Noble, maker of the Linux-based Nook, is fighting Microsoft over its attempt to exert its IP claims.
Microsoft and SUSE said that the agreement is benefiting customers and partners who need interop guarantees to do things like run SUSE guests on Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor.from zdnet 25th july 2011

Learning from Amazon's cloud collapse, (Mashable)

Learning from Amazon's cloud collapse

(Mashable) -- Call it Cloudgate, Cloudpocalyse or whatever you'd like, but the extended collapse of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) is both a setback for cloud computing and an opportunity for us to figure out how to stop it from happening again.
Amazon may be best-known for its online shopping site, but it also has a substantial cloud computing business. It provides a scalable, flexible and particularly efficient solution for companies to store and deliver massive amounts of content.
Its model of only paying for what you consume was a radical innovation when it launched in 2006.
In fact, Amazon Web Services has been so affordable and reliable that thousands of companies from Foursquare to Netflix utilize the company's cloud computing technology and servers to run their businesses.
They put their faith in Amazon's cloud because there was no reason to think that it would falter. One of cloud computing's key tenants is reliability through redundancy of both servers and data centers.
Then on Wednesday, Amazon's northern Virginia data center started experiencing problems that caused major latency and connectivity issues.
The trouble was apparently due to excessive re-mirroring of its Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes -- this essentially created countless new backups of the EBS volumes that took up Amazon's storage capacity and triggered a cascading effect that caused downtime on hundreds (or more likely thousands) of websites for almost 24 hours.
The collapse took its share of victims. Among the most prominent companies affected were Foursquare, Quora, Hootsuite, SCVNGR, Heroku, Reddit and Wildfire, though hundreds of other companies big and small were affected.
Luckily, one of Amazon's most prominent customers, Netflix, didn't experience problems because it's built for the loss of an entire data center, while companies relying on Amazon's four other global data centers didn't experience too many issues.
A learning moment
FathomDB founder Justin Santa Barbara has a detailed post on his blog about what may be the biggest problem to come out of this week's collapse: Amazon's cloud redundancies failed to stop a mass outage.
Its Availability Zones are supposed to be able to fail independently without bringing the whole system down. Instead, there was a single point of failure that shouldn't have been there.
This week's disaster in the cloud is a reminder to startups to build redundancy into their applications and their own systems, but as Santa Barbara points out, most startups don't have the time or resources to engineer for multiple cloud systems (each Amazon global region/data center has its own rules and features, making a simple "switch" to another center difficult).
These companies trusted Amazon to keep them online, and Amazon failed to deliver.
Catastrophic issues will always occur, but in the pre-cloud era, downtime only affected a single computer or website. Today, a catastrophic event takes down thousands of websites, causing millions or even billions of dollars in lost revenue and productivity.
This incident is no reason for us to shun cloud computing, though. Its benefits (scalability, cost reduction, device independence, performance and more) far outweigh its cons.
We do need to take a hard look at how we structure our cloud infrastructure though and find new ways to either prevent single points of failure or quickly move content off failing clouds faster, especially as the world's computing power is consolidated into fewer and fewer systems.
Cloud computing is still in its infancy, and today's events make it clear that we still have a lot of work to do. It could be a whole lot worse next time if we aren't prepared.

See the original article at Mashable.com.

© 2010 MASHABLE.com. All rights reserved.

IBM Cloud Computing

The world is changing. A new reality is emerging for organizations of every size from every part of the planet. It’s called the cloud—a profound evolution of IT with revolutionary implications for business and society, creating new possibilities and enabling more efficient, flexible and collaborative computing models.
IBM is helping clients excel in cloud computing, providing secure and reliable Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (Paas) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions.

The 5 Best Cloud Clients/ Brighthub.com

Article by  Arun Kumar, MVP at brighthub.com
Cloud clients refers to the cloud service providers that offer cloud computing services. Based on their popularity and feedback on Internet, I have handpicked some of the best cloud clients so that you can decide which one suits your needs.

Read full article here: http://www.brighthub.com/environment/green-computing/articles/100564.aspx#ixzz1G2RC20jT

#1 Microsoft Cloud Storage

#2 Google Cloud

#3 IBM Cloud Computing

#4 Ubuntu Cloud Computing

#5 Mozy Cloud Computing

 

 

 

 

 

Together, Nokia and Microsoft Renew a Push in Smartphones-nytimes

February 11, 2011

Together, Nokia and Microsoft Renew a Push in Smartphones

By KEVIN J. O’BRIEN

LONDON — Nokia, the struggling world leader in mobile phones, said on Friday that it would discard its own cellphone operating system and begin using software made by Microsoft, in an alliance to shore up the halting efforts in smartphones of two market leaders.
The announcement by Stephen Elop, the former Microsoft executive hired by Nokia in September as the company’s first non-Finnish chief executive, was an admission of failure by Nokia, which had helped define the mobile phone age in its infancy.
The alliance is also a gamble, perhaps a last-ditch effort for both Nokia and Microsoft to gain a lasting foothold in the booming market for sophisticated smartphones, where Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android software are leading the way in technology innovation.
“Nokia is at a critical juncture, where significant change is necessary and inevitable in our journey forward,” Mr. Elop, a Canadian who led Microsoft’s business software division before moving to Nokia, said in a statement. “Today, we are accelerating that change through a new path, aimed at regaining our smartphone leadership, reinforcing our mobile device platform and realizing our investments in the future.”
Microsoft’s operating system software dominates the PC industry. But mobile devices like smartphones are expected to surpass desktop and laptop computers this year as the main way to gain access to the Internet. Microsoft has only 2 percent of the global market for phone software.
At least at the outset, the alliance may “Microsoft will have the rationale to really double down with its investment in the smartphone platform and ecosystem,” said Al Hilwa, an analyst at IDC.
One measure, in addition to market share, of how far Microsoft trails in building that ecosystem is the number of software applications developers have created for the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 operating system. The Microsoft applications store, though growing rapidly in recent months, has about 8,000 applications, Mr. Hilwa said. By contrast, more than 350,000 applications have been developed for Apple’s iPhone.
“It’s a big win for Microsoft today,” said Pete Cunningham, an analyst with Canalys, a research firm in Reading, England. “Windows Phone 7 is no one’s priority. But now Microsoft has a leading vendor committed to use the platform. For Nokia, the big question is how quickly can the company execute on this. That has been one of the major issues.”
Nokia held meetings with Google and considered Android, Mr. Elop said in an interview, but was concerned that Google, not Nokia, would benefit from a alliance. Android, which Google gives away to phone makers, is widely used by Samsung, LG, HTC, Huawei, Motorola and Sony Ericsson.
Nokia risked becoming a commodity maker of mobile phones by ceding software to Google, Mr. Elop said. An alliance with Google, he said, “felt like giving up, not like fighting back.” With Microsoft, Mr. Elop said, “this is now a three-way horse race.”
Microsoft, analysts said, most likely offered Nokia more generous support than Google in paying for engineering assistance, revenue-sharing terms on mobile advertisements, search and map services. In 2007, Nokia paid $8 billion for Navteq, a mobile mapping service, which Google undermined by offering Google Maps free.
“It looks like a good deal for Microsoft, but far riskier for Nokia,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “It’s choosing a new platform and an unproven one in Microsoft’s smartphone software.”
Dropping Symbian, Nokia’s operating system, will be temporarily disruptive to Nokia’s product plans. About 200 million phones around the world use Symbian and the company expects to sell another 150 million more before halting its development and switching to Windows. Investors were skeptical of the Nokia-Microsoft partnership. Nokia shares dropped 14.2 percent in Europe. Microsoft shares closed down 0.9 percent.

Mark Sue, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets who attended the investors’ conference where the announcement was made, compared the alliance to “two unpopular kids in high school with rich parents suddenly becoming prom king and queen.” He added: “It was clear that Nokia needed to do something different. But there is a lot of skepticism about whether this will work.”
During a joint interview with Mr. Elop, Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, dismissed the initial market reaction and skepticism surrounding the alliance. “Objectively, is today a better day or a worse day for Microsoft?” Mr. Ballmer asked. “Objectively, is today a better day or a worse day for Nokia? Ding! It’s a better day for both. So whatever people thought yesterday, they should think something a lot more positive today.”
Mr. Elop also sidetracked Nokia’s one-year collaboration with the chip maker Intel, called MeeGo, to produce a new generation of Nokia smartphones. It will become a long-term open-source project designed to develop new kinds of devices, Mr. Elop said. The collaboration failed to produce a cellphone in its first year.
Nokia’s share of the global handset market, once more than 50 percent, is now falling rapidly as its rivals close in. According to the Gartner research firm, Nokia’s global share fell to 29 percent in 2010 from 36 percent a year earlier as Apple and Research In Motion, maker of BlackBerry, both posted gains.
The announcement left some big questions unanswered. Mr. Elop declined to say when Nokia and Microsoft would sell the first handsets, later clarifying in a presentation to analysts that significant numbers would be ready by 2012. He also said he was not prepared to say if and when Nokia and Microsoft would collaborate on a tablet computer.
He said the alliance would coincide with “significant” job cuts, the scope of which he said remained to be determined after talks with its unions. Nokia employed 132,427 people at year-end.
During his two-hour presentation with financial analysts, Mr. Elop, who usually comes across as earnest and serious, had the audience laughing when explaining the new organizational chart of his leadership team, with his name at top. “If this works, I will be C.E.O.,” he joked, pointing to his name.

In Memory of DEC Founder Ken Olsen | Cloud Computing Journal

In Memory of DEC Founder Ken Olsen | Cloud Computing Journal

"There was no reason for news of Ken Olsen's death to hit me hard. I never worked for the man; heck, I never even met him. But he was a big influence on my life and industry.

Ken wasn't some charismatic guy that people would crowd into convention centers to see. But he was the original dragon-slayer, the Man who slew the myth of IBM invincibility. The world has never been the same.

Long before Steve Jobs announced the Macintosh on Super Bowl Sunday 1984, portraying IBM as Big Brother in the process, Ken Olsen became IBM's little brother in the important business of business computing.".....

Read on Link above

Sam

My Top Five Cloud Computing Predictions for 2011: John Savageau | Cloud Computing Journal

My Top Five Cloud Computing Predictions for 2011: John Savageau | Cloud Computing Journal

My Top Five Cloud Computing Predictions for 2011: John Savageau

1. ESBaaS Will Emerge in Enterprise Clouds. 
   Enterprise service bus as a service will begin to emerge within enterprise clouds to allow common messaging within applications among different organizational units.  This will further support standardization within an enterprise, as well as reduce lead times for applications development.
2. Enterprise Cloud Computing will Accelerate Data Center Consolidation. 
   As enterprises and governments continue to deal with the cost of operating individual data centers, consolidation will become a much more important topic.  As the consolidation process is planned, further migration to cloud computing and virtualized environments will become very attractive – if not critical – to all organizations.
   
   
   
3. Desktop Virtualization.  
   As we become more comfortable with Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, and other desktop replacement environments, the need for high-powered desktop workstations will be reduced to power users.  In addition to the obvious attraction for better data protection and disaster recovery, the cost of expensive workstations and local application licenses makes little sense.  The first migration will be for those who are primarily connected via an organizational LAN, with road warriors and mobile users following as broadband becomes more ubiquitous.
4. SME Data Center Outsourcing into Public Clouds.  Small companies  requiring routine data center support, including office automation, servers, finance applications, and web presence, will find it difficult to justify installing their own equipment in a private or public colocation center.  In fact, it is unlikely savvy investors will support start up companies planning to operate their own data center, unless they are in an industry considered a very clear exception to normal IT requirements.
5. Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage will Look to PODs and Containers. 
   Microsoft and Google have proven the concept on a large scale, now the rest of the cloud computing and data center industry will take notice and begin to consider compute and storage capacity as a utility.  As a utility the compute, storage, switching, and communications components will take advantage of greater efficiencies and design flexibility of moving beyond the traditional data center concrete.  This will further support the idea of distributed cloud computing, portability, cloud exchanges, and cloud spot markets in 2012…

© 2008 SYS-CON Media Inc.