Cloud development ties code to dollars

Writing applications for cloud environments is a different affair that writing for in-house hosting. At the All About the Cloud summit in San Francisco this week, the focus was on what changes developers need to make to their applications to enable their optimal use in the Cloud. Perhaps the most interesting revelation offered during the event was that of the direct correlation between billing and the quality of source code.

Treb Ryan, CEO and founder of OpSource, said in a keynote talk that Cloud hosting offers “the best margins I have seen in the hosting business.” He added that Amazon has largely played down the profitability of Cloud hosting, and he suggested they have done so to scare off potential competition. OpSource has been offering hosting for software-as-a-service applications for more than five years and has relatively recently entered the Cloud hosting business.

Ryan said that applications hosted in the Cloud are under a performance microscope. If they send too many requests to the database, that will be reflected by a higher bill at the end of the month. He said that developers writing applications for deployment in the Cloud need to realize that “bad code costs me twice as much as good code. I can cut my op costs in half” by optimizing the code.

Thus, said Ryan, developers can see a direct correlation between the code they've worked on all month and the reduction in their Cloud hosting bill. That's something developers haven't really been able to do since the days of mainframes and time-sharing.

Elsewhere at the All About the Cloud summit, attendees and speakers discussed the remaining problems of the Cloud. Integrating Cloud applications with on-site systems was one of the first and most painful points discussed.

Paul Daugherty, chief technologies architect at Accenture, said, “We are at an inflection point where integration becomes more critical. Increasingly we're seeing a big increase in data sources used. Initially integration was about two different applications, but now it's getting into the 10s and 20s.

"There was an interesting piece of research Gartner did: They looked at companies using SaaS applications. One of the less obvious data points out of their sample respondents was that 14% or 15% adopted SaaS, then reversed back out onto on-premise. The No. 1 reason for that is cost of integration, and cost required was too great."

Another remaining Cloud issue is security, said Ryan. “We're still addressing security. The idea that the vast majority of Cloud environments have the same user name and password for all users is ridiculous."

He added that most Cloud providers do not currently offer a way to tie multiple accounts together, and thus whole companies sometimes use the same login and password for their Cloud environments. Instead, Ryan would prefer accounts that could be used by each user, but could also be tied together for collaboration on the same virtual machines within the Cloud.

from SDTimes, By Alex Handy

Synergetics India: IT Consulting and Training Services on .NET 4.0, SQL server 2008 BI. Awarded as the Best. NET Training Service Provider by Microsoft.

Symbian opens up developer tools for Web platforms

To open its platform to a wider pool of developers, particularly Web developers, Symbian announced in late April the availability of its new Web application development tools.

The open-source tools are built on top of the Eclipse JavaScript Debug Toolkit project and add mobile-specific capabilities to enable the transition from desktop development to mobile development. The capabilities include mobile application previewing, debugging, project creation and mobile API support.

With these new tools, any Web developer can apply existing skills in CSS, HTML and JavaScript to create an application for the open-source mobile platform, Symbian 3.

The non-profit organization took this approach to ease the creation of apps and widen the pool of developers for them, said Larry Berkin, head of global alliances at Symbian. He also noted that there are a lot more Web developers out there than native developers.

Despite still being the most widely used operating system in terms of the sheer numbers of phones using it, Symbian has fallen behind in popularity since the introduction of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating systems, said Theresa Lanowitz, CEO of technology analyst firm Voke.

Lanowitz added, however, that she thought “[Symbian] always had a good road map” as far as development, but it lacks a connection with customers.

Another way Symbian is trying to tap into the reservoir of Web developers is by offering JavaScript APIs as a way to create more-robust applications. This will give developers a means to create more-capable applications with access to contacts, an accelerometer, a GPS and a camera, among other features.

The tools can be used on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems, and will supplement the Nokia-owned Qt framework that already supports application development for the Symbian 3 platform.

From SDTimes, By Katie Serignese

Cloud computing will be hybrid

Cloud computing will be hybrid:

Ovum The next three years will see Cloud computing mature rapidly as vendors and enterprises come to grip with the opportunities and challenges that it represents

SAP to purchase Sybase in cash deal

SAP announced yesterday that it will acquire venerable database company Sybase to bolster its mobile development practice. The deal is valued at approximately US$5.8 billion in cash.

Sybase's board of directors unanimously approved the transaction, which is a 44% premium over its three-month average stock price of about $36 per share. The transaction will close in the third quarter. The agreement was signed by SAP's American subsidiary and underwritten by Barclays Capital and Deutsche Bank.

Sybase will operate as a standalone unit of SAP called “Sybase, an SAP Company.” Its management team will be kept in place, and SAP intends to appoint Sybase's CEO John Chen to its board.

Datamonitor analyst Warren Wilson said in a statement, "The acquisition may also signal a shift in SAP’s long-standing strategy of growth through internal development rather than acquisition—a wise shift, in our view, given the rapid pace of IT innovation overall and the market’s positive response to arch-rival Oracle’s acquisition-based strategy."

The acquisition also broadens Sybase's capacity to develop new solutions for analytics. It will gain access to SAP's in-memory database technology, significantly increasing the performance of its analytics and complex event processing software, as well as enabling it to build those capabilities into its transactional products, Wilson stated.

"The move also furthers SAP’s strategy of supporting customers’ heterogeneous IT environments, because Sybase’s anytime/anywhere/any application approach has resulted in a platform that is versatile enough to connect and mobilize a wide variety of applications and data, both SAP and non-SAP," said Wilson.

Sybase, founded in 1984 as Systemware, began as a database software maker competing with firms like IBM, Informix and Oracle. The company’s main product, called SQL Server, was originally offered for Unix.

Sybase worked with Microsoft to port SQL Server to OS/2 and Windows NT. Both companies marketed and expanded the Windows version; Microsoft SQL Server grew into a dominant player in the database industry, while Sybase SQL Server fell behind.

The companies have since taken their database product lines in different directions; Sybase now calls its database Adaptive Server Enterprise.

Since the late 1990s, Sybase has reinvented itself as a provider of tools for building applications and delivering data to mobile devices.

In 2006, Sybase acquired Mobile 365, a mobile messaging company that handles over 1.5 billion messages per day, ranging from alerts and promotions to transactions, according to Datamonitor. Mobile 365 has relationships with more than 850 mobile providers covering more than 4 million subscribers.

In buying Sybase, SAP has substantially strengthened its hand in mobile applications, Wilson said. Sybase's platform provides versatile deployment options for mobile applications across BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile devices.

The combination of SAP and Sybase is a "transformative event" for the software industry, "revolutionizing" how transactional and analytic applications are built, Sybase's Chen said in a statement. Allowing customers to run their business from many devices will drive enterprise productivity, he added.

By David Worthington 

BSIMM crafts model for building in software security

With the sample size of participating companies having tripled in one year, the folks behind the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM) have found that most have an internal group responsible for security, and that 15 activities to ensure security are almost universally done.

The BSIMM project began in March 2009 as a joint effort between Cigital and Fortify Software to record what organizations are doing to build security into their software and organizations. Starting with input from nine companies, the number of participating organizations has grown to 30, according to Gary McGraw, CTO at security consulting firm Cigital. He said the larger sample size allowed the group to statistically validate the model, and that the levels for measuring security are sound.

McGraw explained that the BSIMM team observed 109 activities that the 30 organizations do to secure their software, and those activities are broken down into 12 “large-scale conceptual buckets,” he said, such as training or code review. Then the activities within those buckets are further divided into three levels: The things that most of the organizations do are at the first level, while level 3 is for “the rocket science, things that are rarely done but are very cool,” he added.

Organizations can download BSIMM2 to compare their own activities to what other groups are doing and plan their security strategy going forward, explained Brian Chess, cofounder and chief scientist at Fortify Software, which makes vulnerability detection software and provides security services.

Chess said that the companies studied all do good hosting and network security. “They all have firewalls, that’s no great revelation,” he said. “But there are 14 other activities that almost all the companies universally do.”

By David Rubinstein

Microsoft Rides Windows 7 To Another Solid Quarter

Microsoft Rides Windows 7 To Another Solid Quarter 

Microsoft didn't do badly in its fiscal 2010 third quarter, certainly a lot better than it did in last year's Q3 when it reported the first quarterly revenue decline in company history. But in the eyes of investors at least, Microsoft's results were less than stellar.

As expected, Microsoft's results were buoyed by Windows 7. The Windows and Windows Live division reported revenue of $4.4 billion, up 28 percent from the $3.4 billion it reported in last year's quarter. Given the Microsoft's OEM channel accounts for about 80 percent of total Windows revenue, this jump is linked to sales of new PCs.

"Business customers are beginning to refresh their desktops and the momentum of Windows 7 continues to be strong," Kevin Turner, COO, Microsoft, said in a statement.

For the quarter ended March 31, Microsoft's net income rose 35 percent to $4.01 billion, or 45 cents per share, compared to $2.98 billion and 33 cents per share in the year-ago quarter. Overall revenue during the quarter was $14.5 billion, up six percent from the $13.6 billion the company pulled in during the year-ago quarter.

Despite the strong numbers, Microsoft investors were apparently not satisfied, as Microsoft shares were trading down 40 cents at $30.98 in after-hours trading.

Microsoft's Server and Tools division revenue was $3.5 billion, up two percent from last year, while Microsoft Business Division revenue dropped six percent to $4.2 billion during the quarter, which the company attributed to $305 million in deferred revenue for its Office technology guarantee program, which allows customers that buy Office 2007 in advance of the Office 2010 launch to upgrade to the new version.

Online Services division revenue grew 12 percent to $566 million due to a 19 percent jump in online advertising revenue, according to Microsoft. This number includes a $154 million charge for transition expenses stemming from Microsoft's search partnership with Yahoo. Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division revenue was up slightly at $1.66 billion.

"Windows 7 continues to be a growth engine, but we also saw strong growth in other areas like Bing search, Xbox LIVE and our emerging cloud services," said Peter Klein, CFO, Microsoft, in a statement.

Dell Commences Cloud Computing Charge,

Dell Commences Cloud Computing Charge,

Dell sharpened its enterprise cloud computing strategy, launching a host of new products and services—including new cloud-specific servers—to deliver turnkey cloud solutions and start "taking the guesswork out" of cloud computing.

At its massive Solutions for the Virtual Era product launch in San Francisco, Dell revealed a host of new products and services. As part of the launch, Dell pulled the curtain off of its new turnkey cloud solutions play. The offerings piggyback on the roughly three years of experience Dell has amassed with cloud offerings in its Data Center Solutions group.

The Round Rock, US-based company said it is offering new integrated solution stacks, services and hardware to ease the deployment and management of cloud environments.

In a blog post outlining Dell's new cloud solutions, Dell cloud evangelist Barton George said the company's new solutions feature tested and supported cloud solution stacks tying together hardware, software and services that ease customers' ability to deploy and manage cloud environments.

First to market will be Dell's cloud platform for Web applications. Working with cloud software provider Joyent, Dell will offer a turnkey private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution comprising pre-tested, pre-assembled and fully-supported hardware, software and services—all sold and supported by Dell. The PaaS offering will thwart key challenges of Web app development and deployment like unpredictable traffic and fear of under-provisioning and migration. Dell said the solution is aimed at enterprise application developers looking to develop applications in the cloud to be deployed in the cloud, George wrote.

Dell also added new ISV partners to the mix to help lead customers through deployments. George said the cloud Partner Program will be available to cloud ISVs, through which Dell will offer cloud solutions and blueprints optimized and validated for Dell's cloud platforms. At first, Dell will work with three partners: Aster Data, which will provide Web analytics; Canonical, which offers an open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service private cloud; and Greenplum, a self-service data warehousing vendor.

Dell said it will continue to work with VMware and Microsoft on the Evolutionary cloud side, and Microsoft and Dell will work together on joint solutions on the Windows Azure platform with Dell offering services and Microsoft investing in Dell hardware for the Azure infrastructure, Dell said.

Dell also launched a new line of hyperscale-inspired PowerEdge C servers, which includes the PowerEdge C1100, C2100 and C6100 targeting HPC, data analytics, gaming, social networking and, of course, cloud computing. The servers are based on Dell-created designs that are in use by large Web companies and cloud providers. The C1100 is a high-memory, power-efficient, cluster-optimized compute node server; the C2100 is a high performance data analytics, cloud computing platform and cloud storage server; and the C6100 is a four-node cloud- and cluster-optimized, shared infrastructure server.

Lastly, Dell unveiled a suite of professional cloud servers geared toward helping customers prepare for and implement cloud computing solutions. Dell's Integrated Solution Services will deliver cloud lifecycle management and also include cloud readiness assessment services, and additional services around cloud design, deployment, management and maintenance.

By Andrew R Hickey, ChannelWeb

Microsoft Partners Say Office 2010 Ready To Roll

Microsoft Partners Say Office 2010 Ready To Roll,

With Office 2010 now code-complete, Microsoft channel partners are getting ready to drum up demand for the latest version of the software giant's productivity suite.

Ken Winell, CEO, ExpertCollab, a SharePoint-focused solution provider in US, has been using the beta version of Office 2010 for months. "I have found it stable and feature-complete," he said. "Microsoft has always been careful to ensure the flagship product is not buggy out of the box, and the extended beta period hopefully made sure.

Dave Sobel, CEO of Evolve Technologies, a Microsoft partner, agrees with the stability assessment. "It definitely bodes well for its launch," Sobel said. "I haven't had any issues with it, but Office has always been stable. I expect customers to have the same sort of reaction."

One of the most closely watched aspects of Office 2010 is Office Web Apps, free cloud-based versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote. Office Web Apps will go up against Google Apps in the market for free Web-based productivity apps, and they're viewed as Microsoft's response to Google Apps' growing profile in the marketplace.

But Google Apps has some key limitations, such as its inability to format and work on documents offline. That's an essential feature for many users, according to Winell.

However, Google has started to make some inroads in sharing documents, Winell said. "The new version offers a near real-time collaboration ability that is pretty good," he said. "It is my understanding that the attraction of Google Docs is the cost (none) or for enterprises is substantially lower than a full Microsoft license.

Microsoft partners believe that Office Web Apps will give Microsoft a powerful tool for combating Google Apps, particularly in companies that have standardized on Microsoft technology.

"We just haven't seen any customers express any interest in Google Apps at all," said Marc Harrison, President, Silicon East, a Microsoft solution provider in US. "That being said, if they do at some point in the future, we'll just point to Microsoft's Office Web Apps, offhandedly mention they're compatible with the desktop apps pretty much the entire world is using, and let them make their own decision."

Sobel echoed this sentiment: "There's a faceoff between Microsoft and Google because both want to manage the technological environment as well as customer relations," he said. "Google oversimplifies and has always had a one-size-fits-all philosophy, while Microsoft now offers more choices and is embracing multiple ways of doing things."

Microsoft has a clear advantage over Google when it comes to cloud apps because of customers' preference for Office software, particularly in the business marketplace, says Matt Makowicz, Principal, Ambition Consulting, a US-based solution provider.

"Microsoft has made it a mission to win in the cloud computing space," Makowicz said. "The availability of Office 2010 will help keep Microsoft at the forefront of the productivity suite conversations and ahead of Google, with help from partners who continue to recommend Office over anything else."

Microsoft Readies Its Cloud CRM Apps For Global Markets

Microsoft Readies Its Cloud CRM Apps For Global Markets

Microsoft is going global with its on-demand CRM application.

In the second half of the year, Microsoft will make Dynamics CRM Online software available in 32 new markets, including Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and UK.

Until now Dynamics CRM Online has been available only in the US and Canada. The service competes head-to-head with cloud-computing CRM applications from Salesforce.com, Net Suite, SAP and Oracle.

 “We're seeing tremendous momentum around our Dynamics CRM product,” said Stephen Elop, President and Microsoft Business Division. Sales of Dynamics CRM, online and on-premise combined, grew 40 percent in fiscal 2009, he said.

Dynamics CRM has about 22,000 customers and about 1.1 million users today. More than 1,000 customers subscribe to Dynamics CRM Online, ranging from businesses with five seats to several with 500 or more seats, said Brad Wilson, General Manager, Dynamics CRM, Microsoft, in an interview. Dynamics CRM Online, which shares the same code base as the on-premise version, has been available for about two years.  

Earlier this year, Microsoft added Dynamics CRM Online to its list of products that can be sold under an enterprise agreement license. "So we expect to see some healthy growth in our seat-count for CRM Online," Wilson said.

Microsoft also said this week that it's offering its Dynamics GP customers a Dynamics CRM Online subscription for $19 per user per month.

About 4,000 Microsoft channel partners work with Dynamics CRM. Kirill Tatarinov, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Solutions, sees opportunities to capture customers and channel partners of competing vendors whose CRM products have are difficult to work with. "We're seeing a phenomenal amount of CRM shelf ware," he said in a press conference.

Wilson said solution providers who work with Dynamics CRM Online include resellers of the on-premise product who want to add an online component to their offerings, partners who sell other Microsoft products such as Exchange and SharePoint and want to add CRM applications to their product lineup, and startups building new businesses around Software-as-a-Service. Most focus on developing value-added services around the on-demand application.

The timetable for availability in specific countries hinges on working out operational issues such as establishing payment and local tax collection processes. Wilson said Microsoft is currently recruiting channel partners in each market to help sell the service.

Microsoft also unveiled the May 2010 service update for Dynamics CRM Online, which offers new development tools for building connections to other on-demand and on-premise applications. It also provides a framework for integrating Dynamics CRM Online with Microsoft's Dynamics GP ERP application set, and new portal accelerators that businesses use to extend CRM functions such as partner relationship management and event management to external constituents.

The new release of Dynamics CRM Online also helps set the stage for its international expansion by providing multi-language support for North American customers with departments or international operations with French, Spanish or Brazilian Portuguese language requirements.

Microsoft also said that starting August 1, 2010, it would ship a version of its Dynamics AX software, Dynamics AX for Retail, for specialty retailers. The application will provide links between point-of-sale devices such as cash registers to back-end ERP systems.  

By Rick Whiting, on ChannelWeb