Waters Works Blog

Lotusphere: Hey, Maybe IBM is a Software Company

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 08:00:00 GMT

I didn't make it this year to IBM's Lotusphere conference in Orlando. The freakishly frosty winter Mother Nature and her Niño have visited upon us here in the Golden State has made that lapse in my conference schedule shiveringly disappointing. However, I did catch up with Alan Lepofsky, senior manager of strategy for IBM's Lotus Software group, who called me on Friday from his hotel just after the closing conference session. His fevered enthusiasm for the event and the technology it supports warmed me right up.

''I'm walking around the hallways this week and people are telling me, you nailed it, we're thrilled with what you're telling us,'' Lepofsky told me. ''Everyone feels like a rock star.''

This year's event drew an estimated 7,000 attendees, which I think is a double-digit increase over last year (which had more attendees than the year before that). The reason: ''Partners trust us again,'' Lepofsky said. ''We're delivering what they're asking for.''

Hmm… Give the customers what they… ask for? That could catch on.

My sarcasm aside, these guys are definitely doing something right. IBM announced growth for the Lotus group in 2006 that included a 30 percent increase of shipments of the core Notes/Domino product over 2005.

One of the most interesting products unveiled at this show was Lotus Connections, the company's first integrated bundle of social networking tools. Scheduled to ship sometime later this year, Connections aims to provide the enterprise with business-ready tools for blogging, bookmark sharing, user profiles, and software to track activities and build online communities. '

'We've established ourselves with the things people know and the products people use, while introducing Lotus as, once again, the leading provider of software for people,'' Lepofsky enthused. ''We did it a long time ago with cc:Mail. We did it again with Groupware and Notes. We repeated that with enterprise-level instant messaging. We didn't invent email or IM; we brought it into the enterprise. We're doing it again with social software. We didn't invent it, but we're making it real for companies to use internally.''

Tanisha Kuckreja, Melbourne-based analyst for Ovum, sent me a note about the show. He saw in this year's event ''a new sense of optimism at Lotus with the fog finally clearing on IBM’s delivery of the new-look Lotus platform.'' He passed along some analysis from Ovum's public sector research director, Steve Hodgkinson, who attended the event. Hodgkinson observed that Lotus General Manager Mike Rhodin ''has transformed Lotus and given it a new sense of purpose since he took over... four years ago.''

''Rhodin has presided over a significant competitive repositioning of Lotus and a total redevelopment of the core software products,'' Hodgkinson writes. ''The positioning is open, platform independent, extensible and backward compatible. No rip-and-replace upgrades required. The products are engineered for the evolving work practices of knowledge workers , built using the open source Eclipse development language, and fully compliant with open document standards.''

In fact, Domino/Notes 8, Quickr (the new content-sharing and management tool), the new Connections bundle, and Sametime 7.51 all were built on Eclipse with the company's Expeditor tool. ''We're using Eclipse to develop our own products,'' Lepofsky said. ''That opens up a world of possibilities for developers that's unheard of. Application developers were a monumentally huge part of this week.''

Gartner analysts saw the announcements and activities at the event as evidence that IBM is beginning to ''reinvent itself.''

''Significant updates to Lotus Notes and Quickplace, as well as the introduction of some compelling new products, were the reason that IBM's Lotusphere 2007 was buzzing with positive feedback from IBM customers and partners,'' Jeffrey Mann, Tom Austin, David W. Cearley wrote in a post-conference report.

But these analysts also worried about the ''murky'' relationship the Quickr product to others, such as Domino Document Manager, DB2 Content Manager and new document-oriented clients. They also feel that, though the social software has promise, ''the lack of consumer-focused or Web 2.0 software-as-a-service offerings limits penetration.''

One element of this year's show added some real weight to the event, imbued it with a new relevance, a gravitas—a coolness, if you will—that bodes well for the Lotus group: Google had a booth.

''When Google sets up a booth at your show,'' Lepofsky said, ''you're hip again.''

'Nuf said.

A webcast of the opening session is available online. You also might check out Adam Gartenberg's blog on this event. (He's the manager for unified communications in IBM's collaborative software unit.) And for Lotus tips and talk, be sure to check out Alan Lepofsky's blog.

Sun to Use Intel Chips: An Alliance by Any Other Name

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 08:00:00 GMT

I've seen so many announcements of once unimaginable corporate hookups in my time on the tech beat—Steve Jobs onstage at Macworld Boston in 1997 announcing a rapprochement with Microsoft before a massive projection of a remotely linked Bill Gates; Sun's Scott McNealy and Microsoft's Steve Ballmer burying the hatchet and exchanging bon mots in San Francisco in 2004—that today's joint Sun-Intel press conference, at which the two companies announced a new partnership, wasn't what you'd call earth-shattering, or even that surprising, given the rumors that preceded it.

Which is not to say that Sun's plan to begin building a line of servers that run on Intel chips, and Intel's plan for a reciprocal endorsement of Sun's Solaris OS wasn't big news. I wouldn't argue with the two company's official ''landmark alliance'' tag if you're looking for adjectives to describe the long-term agreement.

The two companies expect the partnership to expand the reach of Intel Xeon processor and Solaris OS-based solutions. ''Solaris adoption will be driven by the Intel Xeon processor's significant market presence,'' they said in a press release, ''and in turn Solaris will give Intel a broader presence in the datacenter, virtualization, and high performance computing space.'' Sun plans ''to complement its current offerings with platforms based on Intel architecture optimized for Solaris'' beginning in the first half of 2007.

Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz called the alliance ''a market-changing event.'' A bit hyperbolic, but a defensible description. ''This totally changes the perspective a customer has on how they can do business with Sun and how they can do business with Intel,'' he added.

Of course, I think it's fair to describe this news, vis-à-vis Intel's archrival AMD, is ''bad.'' Sun has been using AMD chips in its x86 servers for years. Reuters reported earlier that shares of AMD's stock took a hit when the partnership was announced.

Interestingly, Sun isn't abandoning AMD. IDG reports that Sun's former CEO and current chair, Scott McNealy, talked to reporters attending a company conference for U.S. government customers today. McNealy's descriptor: ''choice.'' Sun, he said, is simply providing Solaris on two major x86 processors. ''Some people are Ford folks,'' he said, ''and some people are Chevy folks. We're not going to make them choose.''

Intel's chief exec Paul Otellini said that he was ''thrilled'' about the deal, and well he should be. AMD reportedly snagged about five percent of Intel's share of the chip market last year. This deal gives Intel another way to get it back. ''Solaris is evolving as a mainstream operating system,'' Otellini said. ''It's becoming the mission-critical Unix for Xeon.''

''Mainstream.'' ''Mission-critical.'' Now we're talking adjectives.

Cool Coder Creates Eclipse App for the Arctic

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 08:00:00 GMT

Josh Reed recently spent three months in Antarctica implementing one of the worst-named, but coolest applications to come across my desk in a month of Sundays—literally. It's a graphical editing tool called the Paleontological Stratigraphic Interval Construction and Analysis Tool (PSICAT). He developed it for a group of international scientists working on the Antarctic geological drilling project, better known as ANDRILL. Those beparka'd researchers are seeking to ''drill back in time'' to recover a history of paleo-environmental changes evident in sediment core samples from below the Antarctic ice shelf.

PSICAT, which Josh would like us to pronounce 'sigh-cat,' but which I can't help seeing in my head as ''pussycat'' (even the acronym blows), is an Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) application that he customized to the task of working with stratigraphic columns. The application allows researchers to input core descriptions, and to store underlying information, such as the depths at which sand, ore, mud, fossils, and other materials were found.

''Before, scientists who were interested in particular aspects of the core—say, two- or three-meter sections that don't have any pyrite or don't have fractures—would have to search through 1286 meters of images,'' Josh explains. ''But now, because we have the data, I can type in a few things, and bam , spit out depth ranges for them to go to directly.''

Josh is a soft-spoken (at least on the phone) 24-year-old, studying for his Masters in Human Computer Interaction at Iowa State University. When I asked him for his title, he said, ''Um... Josh.'' But I think the Rochester, Minnesota, native is actually considered the IT manager of the ANDRILL project.

His academic advisor, Cinzia Cervato, is the one who recommended him for this gig. She's an associate professor in the Department of Geological and Atmospheric Studies, as well as a consulting scientist to the ANDRILL project. When she heard at a conference that the project's sedimentologists were logging core samples using bulky drawing tools, such as Corel Draw and Photoshop, she thought there might be a better way, and she thought of Josh.

''I thought that Josh was perfect for the project,'' she told the Iowa State University News Service. ''I had worked with him for a couple of years already and knew that he was a great coder.''

The drawing tools the ANDRILL scientists were using were providing them with pretty diagrams for publication, but they were unwieldy hunks of bloatware in this context. Josh's initial job was to come up with a leaner, more specialized tool with just the features the scientists needed.

''Once I started looking at the problem, I realized that the ultimate solution would be to get away from the images, which just displayed the data,'' Josh says. ''The real solution, for me, was to capture that data, so that they could do other things with it.''

Josh spent a year and a half working on the software, meeting with scientists, gathering requirements, and writing code. During that period, he worked closely with Dr. Chris Fielding, a sedimentologist on the ANDRILL project.

He built the application with the Eclipse RCP because of the flexibility its plug-in architecture provided. ''From the beginning we felt that, though we were developing PSICAT for ANDRILL, this was an application that could be used by other projects,'' Josh says. ''Even within ANDRILL there are other groups of scientists who would want their data displayed along with the core log. Eclipse allowed me to develop the features I needed up front, but it also left the door open for new features as they were identified, and for customizations for particular groups.''

He also used the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework, so he didn't have write any ''yucky'' graphics code.

Josh blogged about his adventures in the frozen north, and his account is well worth checking out. Also, the Des Moines Register published some nice shots of Josh standing next to big hunks of ice. The pix on his blog are better.

The next time it feels like you're working under harsh conditions, consider coding in temperatures that dipped to 40 degrees below zero.

BTW: There has always been this weird intrastate rivalry between Josh's school, Iowa State, and my alma mater, the University of Iowa—at least as long as I can remember. When I mentioned that I attended UI about a million years ago, Josh sort of groaned, so I guess that rivalry persists, at least a bit. He didn't make a big deal out of it, of course, and neither did I. These kinds of things are silly. Iowa State is a great university, a Big Twelve school, famed for its science and engineering departments. The fact that it was once thought of as an agricultural college—an ''ag'' school—is simply part of its rich history, and in no way diminishes its stature, at least not in my eyes. I have a brother who graduated from Iowa State and went on to become a medical doctor. Several of my cousins went there, and not one of them is a farmer. It would be beneath me to refer to this fine institution of higher learning as ''Moo U'' or ''The Udder U.'' So I won't.

CES Wrap-up

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 08:00:00 GMT

I still get a surprising amount of guff from colleagues who also cover enterprise IT for attending the annual CES gizmofest. First, let me say with affection and respect to those colleagues: bite me. Second, at the risk of repeating myself, these are not toys. For anyone with the ability to see beyond next week, ''consumer'' is a misnomer when applied too strictly to the technologies exhibited at this show. As I walked the conference floor among the glittering handhelds and dazzling high-def displays, I didn't see consumer products, but hardware platforms—platforms for which ISVs are increasingly called upon to develop increasingly powerful applications, and which the enterprise ignores at its peril. These ''toys'' set employee expectations for rich user experiences, and they offer serious potential for productivity gains. Remember instant messaging? How many network admins managing a hundred IM-capable devices do think still consider it tech for teenyboppers?

That said… Man, were there some cool toys at this year's show! I'll wrap up my coverage here with a few of my personal product favs, celeb-watch results, and other observations.

My Favorite Laptop Gizmo: The Tornado. It looks like a slightly bigger-than-average, retractable USB 2.0 cable, but when used to link a laptop and a PC, this device automatically loads a GUI, displaying the contents of both machines on both machines. You can then drag and drop files, folders, or entire directories from one to the other. It's Windows-based, weighs slightly less than five ounces, and the cables extend four feet. I love that the interface labels the directories ''This Computer'' and ''Other Computer.''

Coolest (other) Concept Phone: The Onyx. I'd probably be voting for the iPhone if Apple had unveiled it in Vegas, but among the cutting-edge cells shown at CES, the Onyx from Synaptics was definitely the coolest. A candy bar phone about the size of TV remote, it features GPS, music, teleconferencing, and Synaptics' ClearPad ''capacitive'' touch screen, which nearly takes up one whole side of the device. As the Synaptics PR people put it, The Onyx input system ''eliminates the traditional mechanical keys found on phones today and dramatically adapts to present the information and controls a user needs at any given moment.'' Another face of things to come.

Best Laptop on Steroids: Generally speaking, I really couldn't care less about gamer laptops—they typically weigh a ton—but I have to give props to Alienware's truly impressive Area-51 m9750. Even from a company known for its kickass portables with suped-up innards and chassis designs from another world, this is a mobile monster. The system comes with a 17-inch display (1920 x 1200 resolution), SLI NVIDIA graphics, Core 2 Duo processors, a Blu-ray optical drive, dual HDD up to 200GB (per drive), and up to 2GB of dual-channel DDR2 667MHz RAM. It even has a TV tuner and, weirdly exciting to me, a full-size numeric keypad. (I never learned to touch type the numbers line of a Qwerty keypad.) Rumor has it that instead of a laptop bag, you carry it around in a cage. Look for this beast sometime in late January.

Toughest Booth Babes: The young women riding the mechanical bull at the Casio booth. They didn't crank up the bulls to rider-throwing levels (at least not while I was there), but the thought of bumping around on that damned thing all day took my mind off my aching feet. Talk about buns of steel. Cool G-Shocks, too. They have pix on Engadget.

Most Disturbing Display: The Elvis-Bot. Now, from Wowee, the folks who brought us Robopet and Robosapien, comes the singing Elvis robot head. Watching that pompadoured head-thing writhe around and flex its lips while ''Heartbreak Hotel'' played in the background caused me to flash back to an episode of the original ''Twilight Zone,'' in which this guy sells his soul to the Devil (played by Julie Newmar) to return to his youth in a small town, and when he's there, as he passes a hat-shop, one of the manikin heads in the window display turns, and it's Julie, checking up on him. [Insert involuntary shudder here.] There's a video on YouTube. Truly creepifying.

CES Celeb-Watch Radar: Not much on the radar this year. Evangeline Lilly and Matthew Fox of ''Lost'' joined Disney CEO Bob Iger during his keynote. I was tempted to jump onstage and choke one of them until he/she told me who the freakin' Others are! Also, I spotted Kent McCord on the conference floor. He's the actor who played rookie patrol officer Jim Reed on the 1960s TV show ''Adam 12,'' with later cameos on everything from ''SeaQuest'' to ''Farscape.''

Best Keynote Venue: The Hilton Theater, definitely. I understand why CES organizers had to move the biggies to the Venetian ballroom, but watching the keys in an actual theater is a unique conference experience that I actually look forward to at this show. I'm glad at least a few of the presentations were scheduled there.

Richest High Tech Exec to Agree with Me: Mr. Bill Gates, who said during his conference keynote, ''“You can’t even say 'consumer,' because the experiences span into the business environment.''

Wise man.

CES Day Two: iPhone Launch Creates a Deafening Buzz; Chambers Makes the Consumer-Enterprise Connection

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 08:00:00 GMT

It is no small irony that the biggest buzz on Tuesday at the world's biggest consumer electronics show was generated by a device unveiled at another event about 500 miles away. Apple Computer's long-rumored and much-anticipated iPhone, finally launched at the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco, all but eclipsed the stunning array of mobile devices on display this week at CES—not to mention the big screen TVs, the smart-house systems, the digitally enhanced ATV, and just about everything else. For about a day, it was the talk of the conference.

Aaron and Susan, attendees from Boston, whom I found standing before LG Mobile's elegant display of its new Black Label Series of Chocolate phones, expressed what I suspect was the conference consensus. ''I can't believe we're not going to get to see an iPhone,'' Aaron told me. ''This is CES, for god's sake.'' Susan added the other most often heard comment (at least by me) on the new phone-video-music-player combo: ''I want one!'' There was in her eyes, I swear, the kind of lust and longing I associate with steamy romance novels.

On Tuesday, no one I spoke with as I wandered the various conference environs even suspected that there would be a legal controversy around the iPhone launch. Even the Cisco Systems execs gathered for a post-keynote press conference that day evinced a shoulder-shrugging nonchalance on the then-unofficial trademark dispute that would later dominate the headlines.

''As some of you may know, Cisco owns the iPhone trademark,'' the company's chief development officer, Charlie Giancarlo, told reporters, ''and has been using it since about 1996. As is fairly typical in situations like this, I have a statement that has been drafted for me, and this will be the total of what we will have to say on this topic... until we have more to say.''

(I have to note here that the mere mention of the iPhone drew cheers and applause from the reporters in attendance. Cynical, heard-it-all-before, oft-burned tech reporters were cheering the damned thing.)

The statement that followed: ''Given Apple's numerous requests for permission to use Cisco's iPhone trademark over the past several years and our extensive discussions with them recently, it's our belief that, with their announcement today, Apple intends to agree to the final document and public statement that were distributed to them last night, and that addressed a few remaining items in our discussions with them. We expect to receive a signed agreement today.''

As we now know, Apple decided not to sign, and Cisco reportedly plans to sue.

It's another little irony that one of the companies at the center of this consumer electronics controversy would give me the enterprise IT context I've been searching for since I arrived in Sin City. Cisco CEO John Chambers told his keynote audience earlier that the consumer market, which now constitutes about 10 percent of the company's business, is one of Cisco's top four ''focal points'' for the next decade. He outlined the San Jose, CA-based computer networking giant's plan to offer data, voice, video, and mobility to consumers by enabling the convergence of all those services on a variety of devices. The cornerstone of his company's consumer vision, he said, is an intelligent network, based on standards, that simplifies the complexity behind the services.

How, I have to ask, is that a ''consumer'' vision? Isn't that what enterprise software and hardware providers are striving for every single day? Isn't the need to manage complexity at least one of the driving forces behind the advent of virtualization? Doesn't the goal of linking everything while hiding the plumbing lie at the heart of service-orientation? Web services? Web 2.0?

That Cisco wants a bigger piece of the consumer pie is clear, and not surprising. The company's acquisition of consumer networking company Linksys in 2003 (which is where it snagged the iPhone trademark), was one naked nod to that market, among others. And Chambers' message on Tuesday was certainly tailored for a CES audience. But what I heard wasn't so much a declaration of intent to storm the consumer market, as a continuation of the company's broad, inclusive, ongoing network-centric IT strategy.

''The exact same concepts will start with the consumer, often with our kids, and absolutely come into business,'' Chambers said. ''While The first wave of Internet revolution was clearly driven from the enterprise down, you're now talking about the next wave literally being from the consumer to the entire environment.... People ask me, how does this tie into the business world, and how does the way we provide devices and capabilities and services to consumers translate at work? It's exactly the same architecture... Any device, any content, anywhere. The ability to collaborate [enabled by this architecture] will be next wave of business productivity enhancement going forward.''

The convergence isn't just among media and communications technologies, but the purposes of those technologies. The line between consumer and enterprise IT has long been a blurry one, and Chambers and company are in the process of erasing what remains of it.

CES Day One: My Computer Dies; Zander Makes a Colorful Entrance

Mon, 08 Jan 2007 08:00:00 GMT

After a hearty breakfast of minibar M&Ms and Diet Coke, I bolted from my hotel on Monday, ready to sink my teeth into the leathery hide of the CES monster. But first, a quick stop at a local shop for laptop repairs, because the hotel wireless network corrupted my com stack!

Aaaargh!

I hate it when something happens to my machines that I can't figure out for myself. (Hateithateithateit!) Fortunately—and I mean that literally, because it was nothing but dumb luck—I found a local repair service that held my hand and fixed my gear. Smartech is a little Mom-and-Pop-and-Two-Other-Guys operation on Tompkins Road, near the Orleans Hotel. It's run by three local boys who went off to college and came back to set up shop in the old home town. Frank Lorie is the computer service guy and Microsoft specialist (and fellow Battlestar Galactica fan). Joe Domingues is the cheerful TV service guy, and Joe's wife, the lovely Brooke, runs the office. There's also Matt, but I didn't meet him. They offer lots of services at Smartech: data recovery and backup; network design and e-mail setup; data security and firewall configuration; and more. They reassure panicking reporters for free.

But I digress...

Back at the conference, Motorola's CEO Ed Zander added some color to the show by riding onstage for his morning keynote on a bright yellow bicycle. But the clearly able-bodied chief exec wasn't just showing off his cycling prowess, or how silly a man of a certain age dressed in business clothes can look on a bike. He was making the point rather vividly that cell phones, which are widely used in countries where the tech is often otherwise pretty low, are fast becoming the dominant computing platform and content delivery vehicle worldwide. Zander expects about a billion mobile devices to be sold worldwide over the next two years as countries such as India and China, which are leapfrogging wired infrastructures and going straight to mobile tech.

'Over the next 10 years, you can expect an explosion of mobile technology,' Zander told his audience, adding that there are 500 million cyclists in China.

Zander's bike featured a new Motorola product: a bike-mounted handset charger, which Zander said his company hopes to provide to so-called emerging nations.

Throughout his presentation, Zander referred to Motorola's efforts to provide ''cool experiences'' anywhere, anytime. ''In this new world,' he said. ''The Internet will follow you; you won’t follow the Internet.''

Zander introduced a new mobile phone during his speech. Dubbed the Motorizer, it will use Microsoft's Windows Media software to transfer music purchased from a roster of more than 200 Web-based stores worldwide to the handset. Motorola says the phone should be available in the first half of this year. He also touted some new capabilities of the Motorola Q, the one-time trendsetting darling of the smart phone market, now a bit faded as competitors snag the concept and refine the form factor. He demoed a cool Bluetooth stereo headset, designed to play music streamed from a phone. The headset is meant to work up to 30 feet away from the phone, and it comes with controls to allow the user to pause songs to take or make calls. He talked about Motorola's recent acquisition of Good Technology, which is allowing the company to tie mobile enterprise users to their companies' back-end systems, e-mail, and video content. And he announced two important partnerships: The first with Yahoo, to put the new Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 mobile software on Motorola handsets; the second with Warner Music Group, to sell Motorizer phones pre-loaded with music. Users will also be able to buy ringtones, digital wallpaper, and videos from Warner.

Zander did a good job of acknowledging in a light-hearted way the elephant in the room: Motorola's disappointing holiday sales numbers, which hit the company's stock price. He rode the bike in from Chicago, he told conference attendees, because Motorola is on ''expense controls.'' (Motorola is headquartered in Schaumburg, Illinois.)

Zander's best bit: He pulls out this ancient, just-barely-mobile phone about the size of a shoebox and holds it up to his ear. ''The analysts who are here today will like this because there are a lot of gross margin dollars in this puppy,'' he quips, adding that the phones once sold for $4,000 each. ''If I could get some of you to buy some, it would sure help.''

CES, The Pre-Show: Letter to an Angry Attendee

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 08:00:00 GMT

Dear Red-Faced Guy Bellowing at the Unflappable Usher Outside the Bill Gates CES Pre-Show Keynote:

I’m with you, dude. It must have been miserable to have to stand in that line for two hours, only to be told you needed a ''voucher'' to get in. I’ve been there; I’ve got the fallen arches and the bogus KISS tickets to prove it. And yes, Singapore is one hell of a long way from Las Vegas. And, gosh, it does sound like you spend a lot of money on Microsoft products. (Who doesn’t? Am I right?) And I suppose you had a point: Mr. Gates probably should be grateful-damned-grateful. Maybe he should devote the second half of his life to curing diseases in Africa or something. And ''first come, first served'' might well have been a better way to decide who gets into the conference keynotes—but hey, hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

So the bad news is, screaming like a five year old at a Las Vegas events usher who's heard it all before didn't get you into the traditional Bill Gates pre-conference keynote; the good news is, you didn't miss much.

Gates has been doing the Pre Key at CES for 10 years now. I haven't seen them all, but I've seen Mr. Gates on stage often enough to know when the guy is phoning it in. I guess he's focused on other things these days, and I can't fault him for that. He's definitely put in his time in front of CES audiences. On this, the 40th anniversary of this massive event, we were treated to a retrospective of Gates clips from past shows. Gates doing a send up of Austin Powers. Gates as Neo from the Matrix to Ballmer's Morpheus. Gates mugging beside Napoleon Dynamite. Gates and Ballmer as the disco boys from Saturday Night Live. Gates with Conan. Gates with Leno. Funny stuff that a guy with more money than God really didn't have to put himself through.

But last night was nothing special—and after all the rigmarole around getting into that event, I expected more. Gates got a big round of applause when he told the 4,000 attendees crowded into a ballroom at the Venetian that he'd be back next year. ''The CES people might be disappointed,'' he said. ''I might just talk about diseases.'' He was referring, of course, to the ongoing work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to which he is poised to commit, full-time. Then he talked about how his company is delivering on the promise of the ''Connected Experience.'' He called Vista ''the most important release of Windows ever.'' And he continued to do his best to convince us that his operating system is still relevant.

To be fair, there was plenty of wow in the Vista demos. All the cabs are sporting ''The Wow is Now'' ads, and I'd have to say the new OS delivers, at least aesthetically. From its slicker 'n' snot photo retouching capabilities to its animated desktop wallpaper feature (the ''Dream Scene'' available in Vista Ultimate), Vista sure is pretty. We also got a look at its intuitive search capabilities, which kind of made me drool a little, and new Microsoft Local Live features that allow for 3D rendering of maps and satellite imagery, which caused me to drop my jaw more than a little.

During this demo, Gates tapped into Virtual Earth 3D technology and flew us over a real-time, 3D rendering of Vegas almost at street level. Gates wrapped up his presentation with demos of the ''Microsoft Home of the Future,'' and I was momentarily transported to the Future House at the Iowa State Fair. He showed us a child’s bedroom wall that was actually a massive display panel on which you could play games, set backgrounds, and receive reminders. He also showed off a computerized kitchen counter that responded to packaged ingredients set upon it with projections of recipes and menu-planning advice. The bags and boxes came with RFID tags. All cool, but hardly new.

It was all part of the ''digital decade'' message the folks in Redmond have been sending for a while now. This year, it looks like Microsoft might be delivering on its promise of a seamless computing and entertainment environment that encompasses the home, mobile devices, and even the car.

But I wouldn't beat up an usher to hear about it.

This years CES is a bit more contained, which I appreciate very much. But it's still the Godzilla of trade shows. There are about 2,700 exhibitors distributed between at the Las Vegas Convention Center and the Sands Expo, according to conference organizers. We're witnessing debuts of the latest technologies and consumer electronics gadgets, from GPS products to digital imaging, audio tech to smart-home systems, humungo TVs to wheelbarrows full of cell phones—and there are even a few robots.

Why should all this consumer stuff matter to enterprise codederos? I'll hold forth on that topic later.

Meanwhile, I have a suggestion for the conference organizers on how best to sort out who gets into the keynotes next year: First, rent Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Then consider: Two men enter; one man leaves.

Catching Up During the Holidays

Mon, 01 Jan 2007 08:00:00 GMT

The wisdom of conference attendees, ZapThink's must-read, more support from IBM for ODF, and McGraw's Silver Bullet.

Ah, the annual holiday lull, when Silicon Valley all but shuts down, and I get a chance to catch up on a couple of things in my gotta-blog-on-this file.

McGraw's Silver Bullet

If you haven't tuned in to Gary McGraw's Silver Bullet Security Podcasts, you're missing some great interviews with some of the leading lights in computer security. McGraw is, himself, an oft-quoted (by me, among others) security expert, CTO of Cigital, and author of numerous books on software security, including Software Security: Building Security In.

His latest interview with Bruce Schneier, founder and CTO of Counterpane, is not to be missed. McGraw calls Schneier an ''uber-guru'' of computer security, and rightly so; he's the author of eight bestselling books, including Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World, and he's the editor of the popular Crypto-Gram mailing list. McGraw talks with Schneier, security geek to security geek, about the connection between physical security and its technological component, the intersection of economics and security, and the ideas of ''wholesale surveillance'' and ''security theater.''

McGraw has come into his own as a writer in the past few years; I'm impressed with his skills as an interviewer. One aesthetic criticism: Dude, please, lose the 70s porno-movie music that opens the interviews.

IBM Continues to Support Accessibility in ODF-Compliant Products

I'm sure the standards watchers out there have already heard about IBM's latest move to support the OpenDocument Format (ODF), but for everyone else: Big Blue announced last month that it has developed software interfaces that will make it easier for assistive technologies to provide those with disabilities access to advanced features in software programs. IBM has contributed those interfaces to the Free Standards Group (FSG), a non-profit member-supported organization dedicated to strengthening and promoting Linux as a platform for application development. According to IBM, the interfaces will be further developed and maintained within the FSG's Accessibility Workgroup, which has been standardizing interfaces to make applications on the Linux platform accessible to those with disabilities since 2004.

I heard about this from the indefatigable Andrew Updegrove, who wrote in an email: ''Today's announcement (and further projects as yet unannounced), are rapidly fulfilling the pledge made by ODF supporters over a year ago to do whatever is required to make ODF-compliant software not only as accessible, but more useful, to those with disabilities than Microsoft Office.''

There has been lots of activity around the issue of accessibility in ODF-compliant products since that issue was first recognized by the State of Massachusetts in late summer of 2005. The OASIS standards body, which developed and maintains the ODF, formed a working group to improve accessibility, and several developers, both commercial and open source, are working independently on versions of ODF-compliant office suites.

For more on this announcement, and much more on the ODF and standards in general, I highly recommend Updegrove's endlessly informative blog.

Bad Title; Great Book

Don't be put off by the unfortunate title of Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer's excellent new book, Service Orient or Be Doomed!: How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business. The dynamic duo who make up the IT industry advisory and analysis firm ZapThink focus their considerable analytical powers on the evolution of SOA and Web services, and they share their insights on service orientation in this book.

Service Orient takes an interesting tack: It presents service orientation as a new way of thinking about organizing a business and its processes. Not surprisingly, it's being billed as a guide to SOA for non-technical readers—a ''must-read book for management''—but I want to recommend it to the geeks out their for the outstanding big-picture view it provides. In a post-bust world focused on business-technology optimization, codederos need to understand how SOA is affecting business.

The book is insightful, well-written, and frequently funny. Highly recommended.

Sam and Shlomo

I attend a lot of trade shows and user conferences, and there's no doubt about the value of the keynotes and sessions at these events. But I often find the shiniest pearls of wisdom among the attendees. My conversation with Zend Technologies' Shlomo Vanunu and Sam Pinkhasov, both of whom I met in October at the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, is a case in point. Vanunu is an IBM iSeries consultant, and Pinkhasov is a project manager. Both worked on porting the Zend Engine to the iSeries. Both had come to Silicon Valley from Israel for the conference. (Zend founders Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski are Israelis, and the company maintains offices there.)

We were sitting together in the audience during the conference keynote opener when Microsoft and Zend, the Cupertino, CA-based provider of products and services for the open-source PHP scripting language, announced that they would be collaborating to provide customers with richer functionality and better integration of PHP on Windows. Like most tech-beat reporters, I focused on the growing pragmatism of Microsoft and other large commercial enterprises that are now, more or less, embracing open source. Sam and Shlomo saw it differently.

''Everybody talks about that, but there are also many pragmatists in the open source community,'' Shlomo said, ''many who see the commercial potential of open source software. I would argue that it is they who are doing the embracing. Without them, it wouldn't matter how much companies like Microsoft accepted open source.''

''You should remember that there are all kinds of people in the open source community,'' Sam added. ''It's not really as monolithic as reporters think it is. I sometimes wonder if 'community' is even the right word for it.''

Of course, religious convictions do abound among the leaders in the open source... um... area. Jeremy Allison's recent departure from Novell comes to mind. Allison, a driving force behind the Samba Project, left Novell after two years with the company, reportedly because of the headline-grabbing technology and marketing pact the Waltham, MA-based Linux-vendor made with rival Microsoft in November. Allison took a job with Google, apparently in protest. In a resignation letter leaked to the open-source legal affairs blog, Groklaw.net, Allison called the Microsoft-Novell deal ''a mistake'' that ''will be damaging to Novell’s success.'' Allison will reportedly continue to work on Samba at Google.

Still, I take Sam and Shlomo's point. It's easy to fall into patterns of perception, to affix group labels and imbue those groups with traits and attitudes. When covering an industry as dynamic as IT, that's a mistake. I think I'll add avoiding that very bad habit to my list of New Year's resolutions, right above ''Work on my abs.''

It's a Literal Virtual Threefer

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 08:00:00 GMT

New virtualization products on deck this week from BEA, Virtual Iron, and XenSource.

It's shaping up to be a big week for virtualization announcements, with two of the leading vendors and an enterprise software heavyweight set to unveil spanking new products trimmed with many V's.

On Wednesday, during the company's Beijing user conference, BEA Systems will unveil its new virtualization strategy and an aggressive roadmap for optimizing the operation of Java applications in virtualized environments. This is the San Jose, CA-based company's first foray into virtualization, and the focus of the initiative is Java.

''This is all about optimizing Java,'' BEA's James Sherburne told me. ''No one else is looking specifically at Java environments and optimizing Java applications in a virtual environment. The fact that we have insight all the way down to the JVM level, we think is a huge plus.''

The first product on the roadmap is BEA's WebLogic Server Virtual Edition (WLS-VE), which the company plans to introduce in the first quarter of next year. WLS-VE is a version of its Java application server that includes the new Liquid VM technology, which will enable Java applications to run directly on a hypervisor without a standard OS. Initially, the Liquid VM will work only with VMware’s ESX Server hypervisor, Sherburne said, but the company plans to support other hypervisors in future, including those from XenSource and Microsoft.

There are actually two pieces to BEA's virtualization strategy: bottom-up enablement, which is characterized by the Liquid VM. (Sherburne called it ''our secret sauce.'') On top of that is the management piece, BEA's Liquid Operations Center, which the company plans to introduce in summer 2007.

BEA has been pursing its ''liquid'' computing strategy for about two years, and virtualization fits thematically, and practically. The idea is that, by ''liquefying'' enterprise IT assets through a service oriented architecture from the bottom of the software stack, enterprises become more flexible and (dare I say it) fluid. The company is touting its virtualization solution as a key component of its SOA 360º initiative.

With this announcement, BEA is proving that it's sometimes good to come late to the party. Rather than putting all of their eggs into bare-metal technologies, or focusing solely on a management offering, the company can present its customers with a broader, bottom-up-top-down strategy.

''Virtualization is the most explosive and transformative technology wave to hit the industry since open source,'' James Governor, principal analyst and founder of RedMonk, told me via email. ''BEA wants to take advantage of new approaches to application lifecycle [management] enabled by virtualization, but also to put forward a differentiated approach to take advantage of it. That is where BEA is heading with its strategy. Abstraction is very powerful, but adding abstraction layers can create performance and manageability issues. BEA is, therefore, putting forward a proposition that each VM doesn't need its own copy of the OS to function within a virtualized system.''

Governor hastened to point out that BEA isn't competing with virtualization market leader VMware, but is taking advantage of the virtualization that company has enabled.

The same cannot be said of Virtual Iron Software, which today announced the release of version 3.1 of its enterprise-class virtualization platform—and with it, an offer the market will find hard to refuse.

Virtual Iron Version 3.1 is priced at $499 per socket. If my calculations are correct, that's 20 percent of the cost of a comparable offering from VMware. But that's not all! The Virtual Iron product can be downloaded and licensed free when run on a single physical server with up to four sockets. Microsoft and VMware have made similar offers, but both Virtual Server and VMware Server must run on top of a host operating system, while Virtual Iron's freebie comes with a hypervisor that runs on bare metal. That, Virtual Iron's Mike Grandinetti told me, will result big performance improvements over those other products.

The Lowell, MA-based startup released its Xen-based server virtualization platform, Virtual Iron 3.0, in October. That release supported Suse and Red Hat Linux. The 3.1 version adds support for Windows XP and 2003, which is obviously critical enhancement. And it comes with a suite of management tools, including LiveMigration, which allows users to move running VMs between physical servers; LiveCapacity, which supports dynamic reallocation of resources to VMs based on demand; LiveRecovery, which provides automated failover; and LiveMaintenance, which allows physical machines to be taken offline without disturbing the VMs running on them.

Virtual Iron's new pricing scheme brings its products within striking distance of XenSource's XenEnterprise product, which starts at $750 for a two-way server license. Both XenSource and Virtual Iron use the open-source Xen hypervisor for server virtualization.

For its part, Palo Alto, CA-based XenSouce is following the recent release of its XenEnterprise with two new products: XenServer, for Windows standard server environments; and, XenExpress, a free offering that enables single virtual machine test environments.

The company bills XenEnterprise as the market’s first enterprise-grade, commercially packaged virtualization solution based on the open-source Xen hypervisor that supports both Microsoft Windows and Linux.

Both Virtual Iron and XenSource are competing with a veritable (one might even say virtual) market monster in VMware. The EMC subsidiary pioneered virtualization for x86, and it was the only game in town for ages.

''VMware definitely has that first-mover advantage,'' says IDC analyst John Humphreys. ''They've got mindshare, they've got deployments, and they're being taken ever deeper into the organization. So it's going to take a lot to get customers to think about switching. Virtual Iron's pricing is a great first step.''

Why is the virtualization market so lively this week? ''I don't know that the timing is particularly significant,'' says Gordon Haff, principal IT advisor at Illuminata. ''But the fact is, users really like this technology. VMware has been growing by leaps and bounds, and they're making a lot of money for EMC. The question that remains to be answered is, will the competition's products work as well.''

BTW: I just found out that San Jose, CA-based Cassatt Corporation has announced the latest version of its Collage platform, Collage 4.0, which comes with a new VM and network virtualization control capabilities. Cassatt isn't exactly a virtualization vendor, but an enterprise software and services company that provides management tools for existing virtualization products. The Cross-Virtualization Manager (XVM) module of Cassatt Collage may be the first product to support the automated management of the VMware ESX 3.0, Xen 3.0, and XenEnterprise 3.0 virtual machines.

Kapow Launches First Mashup-builder Community Web Site

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 08:00:00 GMT

Kapow wows, and how.

Kapow Technologies has launched what looks to be the world's first online mashup-builder community. Unveiled today at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit in Orlando, Florida, openkapow was created to accelerate mashup adoption and industry best practices in mashup design, says company founder and CEO Stefan Andreasen. And maybe to snag a few customers.

''It's like we've been selling refrigerators before anyone has seen an ice box,'' Andreasen told me. ''We have 200 very happy customers, but that's a drop in the ocean. Openkapow is our way of promoting Web 2.0, supporting mashup developers, and making people aware of our product.''

You gotta love a guy who's that straightforward.

Andreasen's Palo Alto, CA-based company specializes in providing mashup serving, feed serving, and Web scraping software that enables companies to deploy content-intensive applications, such as enterprise mashups and Web 2.0 services. The company's flagship product, the Kapow Mashup Server, is designed to allow users to connect, collect, and mashup virtually anything on the Web.

The launch of the developer community site coincides with the release of the newest version of that product, Kapow Mashup Server 6.2, which is now shipping.

Kapow was actually providing enterprise-class technologies that use a Web-based approach to building composite services and applications before ''mashup'' made its way from the pop music world to the next-gen Web. It turns out that Intel has been a Kapow customer for about two years. According to Intel project manager Mike Straight, who works on the company's global Web operations team, the Santa Clara, CA-based chipmaker has built an extensive content-management-system mashup with the Kapow Project Manager. Intel is also a big openkapow.com booster.

Why?

''As a multi-threaded solution, openkapow builds mashups that take advantage of Intel quad-core technology to effectively deliver enterprise benefits to users of the next generation of web applications,'' said Jason Powell, Intel's designated Kapow project manager, in a statement.

''Openkapow is all about accelerating the adoption of mashups in the enterprise through the network effect and grassroots momentum that a large open community can generate,'' Andreasen adds.

It's hard not to think of mashups primarily as a consumer and hobbyist phenomenon. These things are Web-app hybrids, after all, combinations of content and services from unrelated, even competing, Web sites smooshed together to create a new service. But a browser-accessed network is a browser-accessed network, Andreasen insists, whether it's part of the public network or a corporate intranet.

Seen in an enterprise context, mashups can be developed to solve a wide variety of business problems. Portals can be modified or extended to enhance existing functionality. Web services can be created from any existing application component with a web interface (think REST or SOAP). Existing application functionality can be aggregated into composite apps, combining SOA-enabled and older web-based applications and data. Data can be collected and restructured from various Web sources.

Andreasen isn't the first to make the enterprise-mashup connection. Jason Bloomberg, industry analyst at ZapThink sees mashups as part of the natural evolution of the service-oriented architecture (SOA).

''Consumers have been out there doing funky things with their browsers, and we're calling those things mashups,'' Bloomberg told me recently. ''What's interesting to us about this phenomenon is how mashup capabilities are being used in businesses to leverage services in the context of an SOA. We're calling those apps enterprise mashups.''

Whether or not you're interested in mashups, you should check out this website. It went live today, and it's one of the cleanest and best-designed dev sites I've seen. It's graphically inviting and a pleasure to navigate. It runs a version of the company's Mashup Server, which members of the community can use for free to create non-commercial applications. You'll find demos, tutorials, user forums, and blogs.

The site also provides free access to a visual scripting tool called RoboMaker. Kapow built tool around the concept of software ''Robots.'' In Kapowland, Robots are the building blocks of a mashup. They contain instructions on how to interface with source applications, and they execute specific tasks related to the clipping of site content, aggregation of data, and the creation and-or consumption of REST or SOAP-based web services or RSS feeds.

Anyone can download this IDE from openkapow.com, build a few robots, and share them with other developers in the community. All Robots developed by the openkapow.com community will be accessible to members through the Robot Gallery, a common repository on the site. They can be reused either as a standalone component, or in the context of a full mashup.

BTW: Andreasen was in Orlando to announce openkapow at the Gartner conference, so we spoke on the phone. Also on that call today was Joe Keller, former VP of marketing at Sun Microsystems, now the chief marketing officer at Kapow. I talked with Joe a lot when he was at Sun. I thought of him as The Great Explainer: No matter how dense I was, the guy would walk me through an explanation my Aunt Mary could understand.

SPL No Longer Required

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 08:00:00 GMT

Sun retires the Sun Public License. No gold watch. No cake. Not even a "good-luck" card signed by everyone in the office.

The denizens of Silicon Valley were wandering around in the traditional post-Turkey-Day, tryptophan-induced haze this week (seasoned with just a dash of the-long-weekend-could-have-been-longer grumpiness). But the Brits don't celebrate Thanksgiving, so I found Sun Microsystems' chief open-source evangelist, Simon Phipps, sharp as ever (despite his cold) when I snagged some time with him on the phone today. I wanted to hear about the latest Sun-authored open-source license sent into retirement.

''It's been my cunning plan for some time to retire old open source licenses at Sun,'' the indefatigable Phipps told me. ''This is the last of them.''

Sun has officially retired the Sun Public License (SPL). The Santa Clara, CA-based systems company contacted the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the non-profit corporation that manages and promotes the Open Source Definition, and requested that they consider it ''retired.'' Sun migrated the last large codebase--its NetBeans IDE--from the SPL last spring. The company now considers it a historical artifact.

Ta-daaa! ...yeah, I know. It's sort of an anticlimactic announcement after the company open sourced the Java Platform, but this is yet another piece of the evolving open-source story.

OSS licensing is notorious for confusing terms and quirky conditions. I think there are about 50 OSI approved open-source licenses floating around right now. There's a big list on the OSI website.

Why so many? Phipps points to restrictions in the popular Mozilla Public License (MPL), which was developed for the original Mozilla browser in the late 1990s. This is a reciprocal license, which requires modifications to be given to the community, and it explicitly names Mozilla as the owner of the code. Organizations not too keen on that idea have modified the otherwise nifty license, usually changing just two things: the name of the owner of the code, and the choice of law and venue, which is hard-coded as Santa Clara, CA, where Mozilla is based. The result was a swarm of ever-so-slightly-different ''vanity'' licenses.

Sun has been exploring licensing models for ages. In the 1990s, they licensed JINI in a way that would give the community freedom to edit it while giving it coherence. The company created the Sun Industry Standards Source License, or SISSL, under which the OpenOffice Suite was originally licensed. Last year the OSI approved Sun's own variation of the MPL, the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which the company created for its OpenSolaris operating system and its Glassfish project.

SISSL got the gold watch last year. If you go to the SISSL page of the OSI website you'll find a bright red ''Sun has ceased to use or recommend this license,'' just above the definitions.

The CDDL, however, seems to have real job security. Sun still views it as the last Mozilla-type license. ''The only reason there's any question at all about the CDDL is that we wrote it,'' Phipps says, ''and some people want to make an issue out of that. Anyone who's actually read the license would see that there's no problem with it. The CDDL parameterizes the details in the Mozilla license that were causing people to create vanity licenses. Its purpose is to make sure that nobody ever has to write a vanity license again.''

Sun considered licensing Java under the CDDL, but opted for the GNU General Public License, because of its potential for growing the market for the Java Platform. Growing that market was the company's primary objective, Phipps says, and that objective was best met with the GPL.

''We're not doctrinaire about licensing,'' Phipps adds. ''My mantra is, the right license for the right community.''

Phipps is now encouraging other creators of Mozilla-derived licenses to send them to the rest home. In his blog, he writes: ''I'd encourage the (many) other creators of Mozilla-derived licenses to take the same step. We owe it to our colleagues in the open source community to keep things simple.''

Apparently, if you're the copyright holder of a license, all you have to do is call up the OSI and declare that the license is retired.

BTW: The SPL and even SISSL are still OSI approved licenses; they don't actually get unapproved.

Borland Shifts Gears

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 08:00:00 GMT

Borland has found a buyer for its development tools group—and it's Borland.

Yes, it's true: Borland Software will not be divesting itself of its developer-tools assets, collectively known since the company put them up for sale in February as DevCo. Those assets, both technological and human, will be spun off into a wholly owned subsidiary, henceforth known as CodeGear . To the many hardcore fans of the company's IDEs, that should probably be holy owned.

Few companies in Silicon Valley have been as interesting to watch over the years, from both a technological and business standpoint, as Borland. (And brothers and sisters, that's saying something.) We profiled the company in 2003, and I had the opportunity to talk with the previous CEO, Dale Fuller, who was actually brought in to chop the then ailing then-Inprise into bite-sized pieces. Fuller and his team ended up keeping the company whole, changing the name back to Borland, revitalizing old product lines, and presiding over the company's first moves into the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) market. ''This company had extremely loyal customers who had made a choice to stick with it, even when the last administration said we don’t want you anymore,'' Fuller told me. ''I think that’s a real testament to the technology that was built here, and the technologists who built it.''

Now another slice-and-dice plan has been set aside. I'm beginning to wonder if supernatural forces are at work here. (I can envision Borland's bewhiskered evangelist David Intersimone—now at CodeGear—in a pointed hat and robe, casting spells in a backroom somewhere.)

To be precise, Borland-the-ALM-company is still separating itself from the dev-tool operation, Borland's chief marketing officer, Rick Jackson, reminded me for our news story on the plan. As we reported, the ALM operation will be headquartered in Cupertino, while the tools operation is already ensconced in Borland's old Scotts Valley campus.

''We're so happy to have a decision,'' Jackson said, ''to have clarity that allows both Borland and CodeGear to move forward. Now it's about two companies, focused and driving innovation in their markets. And that will be a refreshing change.''

I had a chance to talk with two of the newly appointed CodeGear execs last week: Former Borlanders Joe McGlynn, now JBuilder product manager, and Michael Swindell, now VP of products and strategies. Apparently, not that much has changed in Scotts Valley.

''We're going to be doing exactly the same things we set out to do at the beginning of the year,'' Swindell said. ''The only difference is that Borland is the investor.''

Swindell said it was clear to all concerned that the two businesses needed to be separated. ''There's so much happening in the development tools space,'' he said. ''So many new technologies, platforms, languages. In order for us to address those things effectively, we needed to get away from this split focus we've had for the past few years.''

Split focus or not, the tools guys have been busy. In August, they released the new ''Turbo'' product line, and they're set to release the much anticipated Eclipse-based JBuilder 2007, formerly code-named ''Peloton.''

''What we've seen in the past couple of years is an evolution in the Java enterprise space toward open source and Eclipse,'' said Swindell, in the understatement of the decade. ''And our JBuilder customers have been locked out of that, because JBuilder was based on the PrimeTime core. That's a great IDE core, but it's not Eclipse-compatible. In this release, that changes.''

The latest incarnation of the venerable IDE is built on the Eclipse tooling framework. It comes with Visual EJB support, Web services GUIs, and Java 5 Enterprise functionality, to provides, McGlynn explained, a highly productive drag-and-drop environment. It also comes with the TeamInsight collaboration portal, which is designed to let organizations leverage best-of-breed solutions for source-code management, requirements, bug tracking, and project management. The company promises that JBuilder 2006 customers will be able to migrate their existing applications easily to the new Eclipse-based IDE.

The CodeGear team won't be limiting itself to developing tools for Java, .NET, C++, Delphi, or C#, Swindell said. The new company will be looking to build products for a broad spectrum of languages, tools, libraries, and components. (Think Ajax, Ruby, PHP.)

I suspect that, even as they pursue different product lines and business strategies, Borland and CodeGear will benefit from their close connection. After all, the IDE is the dashboard for ALM, Gartner analyst Thomas Murphy observed. ''When you think about ALM, the idea is to drive everything to the IDE,'' he said. ''That's what people are familiar with. My question is, what's Borland's identity if you take away their IDE? What's the portal that you come through?''

In fact, McGlynn pointed out, JBuilder 2007 is designed to integrate with Borland's ALM products, including Together and StarTeam, which are also based on Eclipse.

JBuilder 2007 is scheduled to go GA later this quarter. More info on system requirements, languages, and pricing, is available on the JBuilder page.

BTW: The operation in Scotts Valley may be up and running, but there's no need to rush to the CodeGear website; it's still ''in transition,'' which means there's nothing there yet.

Java GPL'd

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 08:00:00 GMT

Sun open sources its Java tech under a venerable license; IBM plays the buzzkill.

I'm beginning to suspect that the real impact of IT on society will be seen by those who come after us as its power to turn nouns into verbs. To ''xeroxing,'' ''googling,'' and ''tivoing'' now add ''GPL-ing.'' I heard this nascent bit of tech slang no less than a dozen times today during the Sun Microsystems press conference, at which the company that created Java officially announced that it has begun the process of open sourcing (another noun-verb!) two more flavors of its reference implementations of the Java Platform (SE and ME).

Sun's source code contribution now represents one of the largest ever offered under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2). The GPL has been around since the 1980s, and it is the license under which the GNU/Linux operating system is distributed. Sun is releasing its Java tech under the GPLv2 with the so-called ''classpath exception,'' a clarification from the Free Software Foundation that users of this code do not have to open source their own code. The Java Platform Enterprise Edition (Java EE), already open sourced under the Glassfish Project, will also get a GPL. But Sun is not abandoning its commercial licenses. This is actually a dual-licensing scheme, which means that users can still choose to license Java under existing terms.

We reported on Sun's plans earlier today, but I could hardly miss what was arguably a historic event. Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz and EVP of Software Rich Green ran the relatively brief presentation in the main auditorium at Sun's Santa Clara, CA, campus. Schwartz called Sun's announcement ''a momentous change in the landscape of the Internet.'' one that will be seen five years from now as ''a fundamental shift'' in the industry's destiny.

''Community is at the center of everything we're doing,'' Schwartz said. ''It's not enough to ship an esoteric piece of technology and hope to make money off it. That's not our strategy. Our strategy is to drive the network effect, to drive the community, to drive volume in the marketplace, so that we, along with our partners—and even some of our competitors—can go out and drive value in the marketplace.''

''The entirety of our business model is predicated on this...,'' he added. ''As we bring more people into the community, even if they're not using Sun's technology—even if they're not paying Sun—it drives a greater opportunity for Sun, and for others in the marketplace. It's a rising tide that lifts all the boats floating on that ocean of opportunity.''

This news received endorsements from some genuine leading lights of the open-source movement. No less a luminary than Richard ''Let Java Go'' Stallman, creator of the GPL and founder of the Free Software Foundation, appeared in a video attaboy during the presentation. So did Eben Moglen, law professor and General Counsel for the Software Freedom Law Center, and tech-book baron Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media. Conspicuously absent from the proceedings was Sun Fellow James Gosling, the true father of the Java programming language. Gosling was reportedly recovering from minor surgery and could not attend, but he posted a blog message, saying that he was 'really happy we're finally getting it done.''

I received several emails on today's news. Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, sent me a note in which he observed that one of the most important parts of this announcement was Sun's decision to embrace what he called ''a permeable, transparent development process across the company's software engineering organization.''

''I believe that is just as important as the licensing decision,'' Milinkovich wrote. ''It seems that the entire software industry is taking the best practices from true open source licensing and development and using them to either create new and interesting platforms or to reinvigorate existing ones. Open source licensing and community-based development are clearly the direction the industry is moving for broadly adopted platforms.''

Most of the messages I received today about Sun's decision to GPL its Java tech were more or less positive—but not all. I recieved a statement from IBM attributed to Rod Smith, VP of emerging Internet technologies in Big Blue's software group. Smith penned the much-publicized February 2004 open letter to Sun, in which he urged the company to open source Java. In today's missive, Smith is quoted as saying that, though Sun's decision to open source two more of its Java platforms was a good one, it's choice of license wasn't so hot.

''In general, we are pleased about Sun's announcement that they intend to open source Java and are very supportive of the move...,'' Smith wrote. ''...Having said that, there already is an important existing open source effort working with Sun to create a Java compatible implementation of Java SE in the Apache Foundation – namely the Harmony project. In addition, there have been some very recent announcements that companies active in the Java ME space will be contributing key Java technologies to the Apache Foundation to jumpstart Java ME projects.''

IBM began participating in Project Harmony, the Apache Software Foundation's effort to create a compatible, independent implementation of Java SE under the Apache License, in July of last year.

Smith continued: ''In light of the Apache projects, we have discussed with Sun our strong belief that Sun should contribute their Java technologies to Apache, rather than starting another open source Java project, or at least make their contributions available under an 'Apache friendly' license to ensure the open source Java community isn't fragmented and disenfranchised, instead Sun would be bringing the same benefits of OS Java to this significant and growing open source community.''

I asked Green about Smith's gripe during the Q&A. Nonplussed by the above statement, he nonetheless kept his feet. ''Implying that we're starting another open-source Java project is... a unique interpretation of today's announcement,'' he said. ''IBM and Sun have worked closely on the evolution of the [Java] platform. They have been one of the leading advocates of the GPL, being one of the largest distributors of Linux. We think the availability of Java under the GPL will enable projects such as Harmony to bring everything together under the Java.net community group. Certainly the richness of the technologies we are releasing today far exceeds any other Java-related project out there. Regardless of this comment, I think it's more likely that Java.net and the communities therein will be the aggregation point for these other fractured programs that have occurred over the past couple of years.''

To those few email correspondents harrumphing and about-timing this announcement, I suggest keeping in mind that Sun has just given away a significant hunk of its IP, and that, as RedMonk analyst Michael Coté pointed out to me, open sourcing a previously closed-source code base turns out to be a much bigger deal than starting an open-source project from scratch. '[They had to] decide where and how to host the actual code, choose a licensing scheme, come up with a governance process that outlines how the community working on the code will operate, and sort out the legal issues with the existing code base.''

Coté believes that the biggest impact of open sourced Java will simply be a much broader proliferation of the technology; his hope is that it will draw ''non-Sun project members'' to begin contributing innovations that Sun alone ''wouldn't be able to pull off.''

''Open source is a very real and growing part of the software world now,'' Coté added, ''and companies that embrace an open-source model are well poised to prosper in the future, where open source will be more often the norm than the exception. Now is definitely the time to start figuring out how to be an open-source company.''

Interestingly, though not significantly, Sun has also open sourced its longtime Java mascot, that red-nosed, black-and-white triangle thingie with arms, Duke. No kidding. You're supposed to be able to find the specs at http://duke.devjava.net, but that URL lead me nowhere at press time. Sun is, however, keeping its steaming-coffee-cup logo.

You know you live in Silicon Valley when: The leading local paper (San Jose Mercury News) carries a full page add announcing that Sun has open sourced its Java implementations. Seriously. Full page. Big steaming-coffee-cup logo. Duke in the corner, giving the thumbs up sign. Weird.

Happy Birthday Eclipse!

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 08:00:00 GMT

Has it really been five years? Time sure flies when you're ripping the stuffing out of an entire market segment.

Eclipse is five years old today—or rather, Eclipse the open-source project is five years old. On November 7, 2001, IBM released the callow code it had been cuddling in its Object Technology International labs since the mid-1990s into the quirky meritocracy that is the open-source community.

It took the world a little while to decide that Big Blue would, in fact, not be pulling the strings of the Eclipse Consortium, but when it did, this not-named-to-piss-off-Sun-Microsystems tooling framework began capturing hearts and minds like an adorable newborn. Before long, it was riding its bike without training wheels, pulling girls' pigtails, and sending Java IDE vendors to the unemployment office.

''November 7, 2001, was the first day you could download the Eclipse code from the Eclipse.org website,'' said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, when I talked with him last week. ''Something new came into the world that day, so we're calling it a birthday. 'Anniversary' would sound like we were celebrating some kind of marriage or partnership.''

The operative word there is ''celebrate.'' Ian Skerrett, director of marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, told me that there are now 32 Eclipse birthday parties scheduled in 15 countries this month. We're talking Austin, London, Ottawa, Bangalore, Delft, Munich, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, Singapore, and more. This worldwide party schedule reflects ''a truly global use of Eclipse,'' he said.

Locations, dates, and RSVP links can be found on the Eclipse Party Page.

Birthdays are a time for reflection in my family (and cake... lots of cake), so this seemed like an appropriate moment to reach out to some of the industry watchers, IT execs, and technologists I've talked with about Eclipse over the past five years, and to harass them into sharing their observations on the Eclipse phenomenon. I asked them about milestones, market impacts, and pivotal moments.

Milinkovich cited an interesting milestone. In March 2005, around the time of the EclipseCon 2005 event, the Eclipse Foundation scored five new strategic members with real industry heft: BEA, Borland, Computer Associates, Scapa Technologies, and Sybase. ''These were companies that competed head-to-head with IBM, who had seen Eclipse become independent, who had done the due diligence to confirm for themselves that Eclipse was truly independent,'' Milinkovich said. ''Their memberships were enormously important. The fact that they were willing to plunk down $250,000 a year to join the board, and then to propose top-level projects at Eclipse—well, it was a tipping point. It was clear then that the industry was going to rally around us.''

Shipping Eclipse 3.0 a year earlier was an important technical milestone. ''That was the release that moved Eclipse from its old plug-in architecture,'' Milinkovich says. ''That release was hand-in-glove with the first release of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP). That was when we really began moving away from a 100-focus as a tools platform.''

I also put the bite on Winston Damarillo, CEO of Simula Labs and an Eclipse Board member, who graciously responded to my email with this: ''In the last five years, the Eclipse Software Foundation has demonstrated the power of open-source disruption by providing high-quality software for what is now the majority of users in the IDE market. Moving forward, the real opportunity for Eclipse is in the standardization of foundation and processes that consistently deliver timely and high-quality software in order to propagate that community process to technologies beyond the IDE.''

Doug Gaff, an engineering manager for Wind River Workbench and project lead for the Eclipse Device Software Development Platform (DSDP) Project, commented on the impact of Eclipse on software development methodologies and ''anyone who builds tools.''

''IBM’s release of the Eclipse Platform, the creation of the original Consortium, and the subsequent creation of the Eclipse Foundation have fundamentally changed both the starting point and the development methodology companies use to build software,'' Gaff wrote to me in an email. ''The Eclipse Platform and the many projects built around it over the past five years give companies a wealth of base technology upon which they can differentiate their commercial value propositions. In short, tools vendors don’t build the basic technology anymore; they start at a higher level in the technology stack. Furthermore, tools vendors who choose to engage in Eclipse with contribution and sponsorship also modify their development methodology. Rather than just consume Eclipse Technology, these companies help produce it and influence its technical direction. This methodology makes Eclipse contribution part of a commercial strategy of commoditization and differentiation, which I believe more rapidly advances the state of the art.”

Be sure to check out Gaff's blog.

Maher Masri, president of MyEclipse maker Genuitec, talked about Eclipse as a platform. ''Eclipse does so many different things, and it can be used in so many different ways, that it's just inaccurate to call it a development tool,'' he told me. ''As a rich client platform, it has the potential to invade industries in more ways than just as a high-productivity application. We've barely seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Eclipse. It's going to do for applications what the 1980s IBM motherboards did for the PC industry.''

Forrester Research analyst and Eclipse maven Michael Goulde weighed in with an observation on the impact of Eclipse on three aspects of software development: ''Eclipse has changed the software development industry in major ways, including changing how tools are built, how they are integrated, and how they are distributed,'' he said. ''In the course of doing this, some products have been rendered obsolete, but other products have been created that wouldn’t have been it weren’t for Eclipse. The choice of development tools has been made easier for development managers, but more importantly, the pace of innovation has been markedly increased as a result of building on top of the Eclipse base.''

From across the pond, British IT analyst Neil Ward-Dutton, of Macehiter Ward-Dutton, suggested that IBM didn't realize what it was doing when it open sourced the original Eclipse code. ''IBM had no idea, at the start, of the kind of momentum they'd create,'' he said. ''At the time it was a pretty random experiment; IBM had the desire to do something to ensure that it would have a counter to Microsoft's strong presence in the developer community, and it was desperate to ensure that people would have access to good non-Microsoft tools when developing in Java (remember J#?). But in truth, it's only been in the last 18-24 months that Eclipse has really moved its center of gravity away from IBM.''

Ward-Dutton's colleague, Jon Collins, couldn't resist throwing in his two cents: '''Developers are using Eclipse because it works, it's extensible, and it's free,'' he said. ''…Eclipse is the equivalent of developers around the globe helping each other to deliver better software.'

ZapThink senior analyst and founder Ron Schmelzer noted the tremendous impact of Eclipse, not just on the developer community, but startups. ''Any new development product or tool with a developer or programmatic-style interface now seems to utilize Eclipse as its IDE foundation,'' he said. ''Standardizing the development environment has made a lot of sense, and Eclipse's traction seems to be strong and growing.''

Doug Levin, CEO of Black Duck, Eclipse fan, and the apple of his mother's eye, offered kudos to the Foundation as a pioneer of a highly-effective open-source development model that reduces code fragmentation with a unified set of extensible, open frameworks. ''Building tools atop these frameworks reduces time-to-market, enabling companies like Black Duck to quickly reach a broad user community with innovative new products,'' he said. ''Black Duck, for example, was an early Eclipse user (since early 2003) in the development of our innovative product lines.''

I even managed to connect with Dan Roberts, Sun Microsystems's director of developer tools marketing, and relentlessly cheerful champion of the only IDE currently offering a significant alternative to the Eclipse dev tools (NetBeans). ''The Java Tools market has gone through several fundamental shifts over the years,'' he wrote in an email, ''and the shift to open source developer tools has created a healthy ecosystem of great tools offered at no cost for Java developers. The competition between the growing NetBeans ecosystem and Eclipse has made us both better, driving us to innovate faster in what has become a two/horse race for Java tools and platforms.''

For my money, the coolest thing the Eclipse community has done to date was an Eclipse Foundation project known as ''Callisto.'' It was the largest ever synchronized open-source project release. Ten (count 'em, ten!) Eclipse project updates, including BI and reporting tools, a modeling framework, a Web tools platform, test and performance tools, IDEs, and the latest version of the Eclipse tooling framework (3.2) itself—all taking a bow at the same time on the Eclipse download page. Whenever I think of Callisto, a little wow goes off in my head. (Or maybe I just partied too much in college.)

I'll give the last word to the guy with the party contacts: ''The nice thing about Eclipse is that it keeps getting better,'' said Ian Skerrett. ''The base technology has proven to be applicable to so many different types of software, so I think the next five years are going to be even more exciting.''

Oracle OpenWorld 2006: The Tech Conference that Ate San Francisco

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 07:00:00 GMT

Oracle pulls out all the stops to put on the biggest local tech conference and expo in memory; big show, big announcements, big boat in the hallway.

Oh, my aching feet! I've definitely got to get some better shoes... or lose some weight. (Weight Watchers or the Ecco store? Do I spend 200 bucks on loafers just so I can keep gobbling Chunky Monkey? Hmmm…)

No, I'm not sore from practicing for the next season of ''Dancing with the Stars.'' My dogs are still barking after five days at Oracle OpenWorld 2006. The Big O took up all three wings of San Francisco's Moscone Center last week for this humungous event, filled every available downtown hotel conference room, and blocked off Howard Street with tents and Vegas-sized video displays. About 42,000 conference attendees swarmed over three square blocks of the City by the Bay for keynotes, educational sessions, vendor exhibits, and special events. On Tuesday night, about 20,000 attendees spilled into the Cow Palace for a conference-sponsored rock concert. On the bill: Elton John, Joan Jett, Berlin, and Devo. A football-field-length stage with seven (count 'em, seven) massive video displays dominated the keynote auditorium. Conference organizers even put Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's racing yacht on display at the foot of the escalators in the North Hall. It was easily the biggest and flashiest local conference I've seen in 10 years of tech-trade-show hopping.

Still, size is a relative thing. As Gartner analyst Kim Collins pointed out to me, if Oracle's boast that it now has 265,000 customers is accurate, the show drew just over 15 percent of the company's client base. ''That's still very good,'' Collins said, ''but it's really to be expected, given the company's recent acquisitions.''

Good point: After three years of a different kind of gobbling, the Redwood Shores, CA-based company has moved beyond its core database business into the applications market, bringing with it a lot of customers with a lot of questions. ''The size of the show is indicative of the sheer number of people who have questions about what the company is going to be doing with their applications,'' Collins said. ''I think a lot of these customers –PeopleSoft customers, Siebel customers—come to an event like this to get answers to their questions on a broader level. And, of course, for the opportunity to network with their peers. There's a lot of sharing of information that goes on, not just between Oracle and its customers, but from customer to customer.''

The Oracle announcements from this the sprawling conference and expo were, let's say, to scale. Larry Ellison's revelation during his conference keynote that his company would soon begin offering its own support for the Red Hat Linux distro (Oracle calls it ''Unbreakable Linux'') grabbed big headlines; news that Oracle would be competing with Red Hat on price probably contributed to the subsequent slide of that company's shares.

Oracle is positioning itself as a better Red Hat service provider, Ellison said, to speed adoption of Linux. He claimed that Oracle would maintain code compatibility with patches and updates, and that the company would remove all trademark references in the Red Hat source. Other tech industry heavyweights endorsed the move, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Intel, EMC and BMC. This is Big O's first step into the OS biz, and it's likely to leave heel marks all over Red Hat.

Running a close second in terms of a conference wow was news that Oracle would be joining with HP and Intel in what amounts to an assault on the mainframe market. HP chief Mark Hurd announced the joint 'Application Modernization Initiative' during his conference keynote. The effort is intended to provide the three companies' customers with a solution for modernizing their legacy app portfolios now running on old mainframes.

''More than 65 percent of IT budgets are spent on keeping [mainframes] running,'' Hurd observed. The initiative will rely on SOA principles and enterprise grid computing platforms to provide increased reliability and efficiency without the dependency on legacy mainframe skills, he added.

''This movement toward application modernization has a lot of legs,'' says Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst and founder of ZapThink. ''A lot of companies are still using client-server applications and mainframe applications that never made the transition to the Web. Some of these applications command a high cost of ownership, because they lack flexibility and they use proprietary technologies. Now is the right time [to transition those apps], and SOA is the right strategy.''

Oracle also announced its next-gen ''user interaction environment,'' the Oracle WebCenter Suite. WebCenter is a new component of Oracle Fusion Middleware designed for info workers. It's meant to provide a unified environment that gives users access to biz applications, structured and un-structured content, biz intelligence, enterprise search, biz processes, and communication and collaboration services. The company expects this product to ''provide the first user interaction environment that breaks down the boundaries between Web-based portals, enterprise applications, and Web 2.0 technologies to enable the rapid creation of flexible, context-sensitive work processes.''

Thomas Kurian, Oracle's SVP of server technologies, told attendees about his company's new Business Intelligence Suite, Enterprise Edition. This is a very cool product designed to distill intelligence from existing applications and data sources, and to distribute that intelligence pervasively across the enterprise. Think of it as another bit of ordnance for companies waging war with the piles of data they produce, but from which they can't extract value.

One of the high points of the show for me was John Chambers' keynote. It was the Cisco Systems CEO's first time at an OOW event, so attendees might have been surprised when he all but leapt into the audience a few seconds into his presentation. But it was vintage Chambers; he spoke for an hour and rarely stopped moving. (What does this guy eat? I'm guessing it's not Chunky Monkey.)

''My role is to challenge your thought process,'' Chambers told his audience. ''Am I making you uncomfortable yet?''

Chambers covered a lot of ground (figuratively and literally), but I especially liked his big-picture view of the emerging Web-centric world as it pertains to developers. His twist on former Sun Microsystems' CEO Scott McNealy's well-known catchphrase, ''the network is the computer,'' was the best turn of phrase at the event. ''The network is the platform,'' Chambers told a very uncomfortable guy in the sixth row. As virtualization technologies evolve to encompass storage, processing, and applications, it will enable a new wave of app development on a new generation of intelligent networks, he said.

As we left the Chambers keynote, the sound system cranked up an old Elton John song. Sir Elton's tunes were positively ubiquitous at this show, probably to warm us up for the Cow Palace concert. But this particular song, ''Rocket Man,'' stuck me personally. Back in 2001, I was hard at work on a book about John Chambers when the tech downturn hit and Cisco announced the first big layoffs of the post-bubble era. Until then, the title for my book was Rocket Man: John Chambers and the Stratospheric Rise of Cisco Systems. From its initial public offering in 1990 to the spring of 2000, Cisco's share price had grown by more than 94,000 percent, and Chambers played a pivotal role in that growth, so it fit. By April of 2001, Cisco's shares had fallen 80 percent, erasing more than $400 billion in market value. I was encouraged by the publisher to change the title to John Chambers and the Cisco Way: Managing through Volatility. I still wince at that title—and I still think Chambers is one of the few CEOs in America who really gets IT.

BTW: Despite the many, many, many complaints I heard from SF residents about the traffic snarls caused by the (let's face it) over-the-top blocking off of Howard Street, San Francisco should be very happy to have hosted the Oracle event: The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the show was expected to generate $60 million in revenue for the city.

Virtualization: It's a Race Up the Stack

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 07:00:00 GMT

VMware dreams up management tools and catalysts for software distribution, while Microsoft packs bare-metal virtualization tech into its operating systems.

Analysts at IDC are reporting that the worldwide virtual machine market grew last year to $560 million—that's 67 percent growth over the year before (which saw 63 percent growth over the year before that).

Yeah, statistics annoy me too, but it's comforting to see that the numbers are validating market developments we've all been feeling in our bones. The only IT technology trend hotter than virtualization right now is Web 2.0. But Web Two vendors are just beginning to attract enterprise interest with serious software; virtualization is the must-have corporate IT capability of the moment.

Even without the numbers, Microsoft's recent moves in this market alone validate its importance. (Where goeth Microsoft…) Earlier this year, the Redmond software maker bought Softricity, a provider of app virtualization and streaming technologies. In July, it disclosed plans to begin working with open-source virtualization vendor XenSource. And its Virtual PC 2004 software is available now as a free download.

We're reporting this week on Microsoft's latest virtualization maneuver: The company has added its Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) technology to the list of license-free technologies covered by its Open Specification Promise (OSP). The VHD format, which was first introduced in May 2005, is a key element in Microsoft's virtualization product stack, industry analyst Neil Macehiter of Macehiter Ward-Dutton tells me. It's a significant move, but as my favorite British Microsoft watcher has said before, the real race in the virtualization space will take place on higher ground.

''Ultimately, the battleground in virtualization is going to be fought at a higher level—management, monitoring, optimization, resource allocation—rather than the core hypervisor or virtualization file formats,'' he says. ''Of course, he who defines the standard or gets their format adopted is very well positioned to exploit that opportunity; hence VHD and OSP.''

The VHD format allows the entire virtual machine operating system and the application stack to be captured in a single file. It's now used in the free Virtual PC 2004 and the Virtual Server 2005 products, and Microsoft says it will be used in the hypervisor layer provided by XenSource in the upcoming release of Windows Server ''Longhorn.''

So far, VMware appears unimpressed with Microsoft's recent elbow-throwing moves in the market the Palo Alto, CA-based subsidiary of EMC Corporation all but created just a few years ago. At a chalk talk for reporters, held in San Francisco last Friday, VMware's director of product management, Srinivas Krishnamurti, shrugged off the suggestion that the folks in Redmond are hot on his company's heels. VMware launched its own Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) format into the open-source firmament earlier this year, and reportedly doesn't plan to adopt the VHD format.

''There's only so much value in what Microsoft is offering,'' Krishnamurti said. ''People are already looking beyond these basic ideas. First it was the data center: where I had six machines, now I have two, and it takes less power, and the heat is not so much of a problem. But once they begin to work with virtualization, people begin to see its real potential.''

As a means of distributing software, for example? Say, as a pre-built, pre-configured, ready-to-run application bundled with an operating system inside a virtual machine? In what you might call a ''virtual appliance''? (Can you guess the topic of the chalk talk?)

VMware bills its virtual appliance solution, which runs on any standard x86 desktop or server, as ''an evolutionary step in the software distribution model.'' The company has posted a directory on its website that lists more than 300 VMware-based virtual appliances, including about 30 commercial offerings from partners. VMware's list of virtual appliance partners includes Novell, Oracle, Ubuntu, BEA, SugarCRM, MySQL, Red Hat, and Zimbra, among others.

Zimbra, a San Mateo, CA-based provider of open-source server and client technology for enterprise messaging and collaboration, has used the VMware virtual appliance to offer both trial and production versions of its Zimbra Collaboration Suite. Zimbra's VP of marketing and product management, John Robb, was at the chalk talk. ''We created this virtual appliance and we put it up on the website, but we weren't too sure how many people would want it,'' he said. ''But it's been one of our top downloads--thousands a month of just that particular bundle.''

VMware is still miles ahead in this race; IDC estimates that the company owned more than 55 percent of the market in 2005. However, we're going into another lap, and Microsoft is starting to kick. Where is this race heading? According to John Humphreys, research director for IDC's Enterprise Computing group, right up the stack.

'The growth in the dynamic VMS [virtual machine software] market will continue as organizations increasingly deploy VMS as a means of decoupling the application stack from the underlying hardware,' Humphreys writes. 'While we believe VMS is a foundational technology to the creation of dynamic IT environments, the challenge going forward is to get users to integrate virtualization with legacy management tools and enhance management functionality to solve specific business issues.'