by Tim Negris
Larry Ellison is one of the most misunderstood guys in Silicon Valley, and his extemporaneous pronouncements often only serve to make him more so. Sometimes his remarks are explosive and expository, like his now-famous Churchill Club cloud computing rant, and other times they are compact and cryptic, like his recent remarks about buying some chip companies. Either way, the pattern is familiar: he says something that prompts a lot of misguided chatter, and then he does something that only deepens the confusion.
After his Churchill Club diatribe, he was roundly, loudly, (and wrongly) tarred as a cloud-hating Luddite. Then, last week, when he showed off his new “cloud in a box” at OpenWorld, there was a lot of confounded mumbling damning the first as crafty equivocation or the latter as a cynical epiphany.
But, anybody who really listened to what he said and who understands what he did probably isn’t so confused. At the Churchill Club, he railed against marketing hype passing for technical innovation, and at OpenWorld, he touted tangible technology that is, in his view, the real deal.
Now, with this chip thing, it’s happening again. All he said was, “You’re going to see us buying chip companies. Silicon is very important.” But it was enough to get tongues wagging and the stock prices jumping for companies that are unlikely to be the ones he was talking about.
Chips is Chips – Not!
A lot of the chatter and (stock) speculation has focused on companies that make CPUs – AMD, ARM and Nvidia. But, to believe that Ellison would buy one of those you’d have to also believe that he’s interested in putting Oracle into a business other than enterprise technology, like supplying processor chips to makers of PCs, cell phones and embedded systems. Or, you’d have to believe that the Sparc CPU wasn’t a big part of why he bought Sun and that the new five-year Sparc road map is an elaborate prevarication.
To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes an enterprise technology company is just an enterprise technology company. And, in 30 years, Oracle has never tried to be anything else, so why start now? No good reason comes to mind.
Recognize that there are few Silicon Valley executives with a clearer, straighter, shorter path between thought, word and deed than Ellison. Now, think about his demonstration of the Exalogic Elastic Cloud at OpenWorld and recall what he has said this last year about vertical integration of hardware and software and about the folly of customers piecing together solutions from “best of breed” elements from different vendors. The answer to the question of which, or at least what kind of chip companies he may buy is as plain as the box on the stage.
The Exalogic Elastic Cloud comprises three main subsystems: processor, disk and interconnect, all of which, of course, incorporate an assortment of different kinds of chips. Some are standards-based commodity products with low prices and many sources, where ownership brings few rewards. Others, though, are powerful proprietary products that would bring Oracle both strong product differentiation and competitive leverage in relation to other server makers that must also use those chips.
Remember that right before his lob about buying chip companies he said, “Our focus is to build our [intellectual property] portfolio.” Forget standards and after-market boards. Larry’s cloud-in-a-box is a sealed cube and its hardware innards ain’t nobody’s business but his. So, to handicap which chip stocks should actually be moving on Ellison’s latest pronouncement, look to IP-rich components surrounding the processors, disks and interconnects.
Processors
The Exalogic box he demonstrated at the show contained 30 servers, each with two six-core Xeon CPUs. Now, before you say, “See, there’s where he’ll put the Opterons when he buys AMD,” consider instead the greater likelihood of the Xeons being replaced in the production machine with the just-announced 16-core Sparc T3, which delivers comparable performance, but runs cooler and eats less power than the x86 chip.
The interesting bit about the servers in the Elastic Cloud is that they use solid state disks (SSDs) to hold the operating system. Although SSDs are mostly made up of commodity memory chips, it takes some pretty special hardware mojo to endow them with fault tolerance and other attributes especially important in the utility (cloud) computing model.
SandForce is a four-year-old Valley start-up (sorry, traders) that just raised a $20 million D round on the strength of its patent-pending SSD controller technology. Currently SandForce packages its DuraClass controller with its own SSDs, but designed it to be easily incorporated by other SSD vendors, too. One of DuraClass’s key selling points is high and symmetrical read-write speeds, which would make it an excellent choice for OS storage in Ellison’s big box.
Disks
SandForce could also play a part in Oracle’s storage subsystem as a way-faster-than-disk element for storing frequently referenced data. But, we’re years away from all-SSD storage in large enterprise systems and it’s unclear how easily and to what advantage the SandDisk technology could be mixed with the conventional “rotating” disks that make up the bulk of the storage subsystem.
Enter Texas Memory Systems, a long-established, privately held, VC-free, engineer-run Houston-based company that is also in the SSD controller and drive business, sporting the trademark “World’s Fastest Storage,” claiming a number of large enterprise and government customers, and already an Oracle partner. What sets TMS apart from SandForce as a candidate for inclusion in the Oracle storage subsystem is its purchase a year ago of storage virtualization start-up Incipient, whose technology gives TMS the ability to transparently mix spinning disks with SSDs and enable easy migration from the former to the latter.
Interconnect
This is the part of the system that ties the processors to the disks and the processors to each other, and plays a big part in assuring the system’s overall speed, flexibility and reliability. There’s something of a battle brewing these days between two different interconnect technologies: Ethernet and InfiniBand, with many companies arrayed on either side. The Exalogic box uses InfiniBand and Ellison has made it clear he thinks it’s superior to Ethernet for his purposes.
It’s worth noting in passing that the increasingly popular VBlock cloud infrastructure technology being flogged by the Cisco/EMC/VMware VCE troika uses Ethernet and for that reason and others is likely to become one of Ellison’s favorite piñatas in future stagecraft.
One possible acquisition candidate in the InfiniBand interconnect area is a no-brainer and thus already mentioned in a number of places. Mellanox is the leading supplier of InfiniBand chips, cards and switches, one of their guys runs the InfiniBand Trade Association, they are a long-time Sun familiar, and most companies in the InfiniBand space are in some way beholden to them. They are a public company, but not gigantic, and not diversified into other businesses that Oracle can’t use.
But, Mellanox is not the only candidate in the InfiniBand interconnect area; there are others that could make good acquisition prospects, either as alternatives or in addition to Mellanox. Remember, InfiniBand is used to connect the processors to the storage and to each other. While Mellanox plays in both of those roles, there are other companies more focused on one or the other that might also fit into Oracle’s plans.
QLogic makes InfiniBand products for clustering processors, but has a longer, deeper history and considerable leadership in storage-related products. In that area, besides InfiniBand, it also offers Ethernet and Fibre Channel storage connection technology. Although Oracle wants to be the only box in the data center and wants all storage to be in that box, obviously that isn’t going to happen. Integrating with other storage products using all three protocols will likely be a requirement, and one that Oracle could meet with greater ease and control if it owned QLogic.
A third interconnect candidate is Voltaire, which offers InfiniBand switches and adapters with an emphasis on server clustering for high performance computing. Unlike Mellanox and QLogic, Voltaire doesn’t appear to be in the chip business and their unique IP seems to be in fabric management and application acceleration software. So, depending on how literally one takes Ellison’s remark about “chip” companies, Voltaire may or may not be a good possibility.
On the other hand, as of this writing, Voltaire has just become the subject of speculation as a possible acquisition by Oracle nemesis IBM as an adjunct to its purchase days ago of Voltaire partner Blade Networks. That could conceivably make Ellison more interested in buying Voltaire as a way to mess with IBM, in addition to its obvious face value.
Tell-Tales
However, one phrase that figures quite prominently in Voltaire’s positioning and may make it less attractive to Oracle: “scale-out.” In this context, scale-out represents the idea of building up computing capability by lashing together large numbers of small commodity boxes or blades, and it’s an idea with significant proponents. Google, for instance, is essentially the biggest scaled-out system ever created.
But, Ellison is more of a “scale-up” kind of guy. Scale-up means building the biggest box you can and, if you must, then building another and hooking them together. In fact, in his Exalogic demo he suggested that two of those machines could handle all of Facebook’s 500 million users. It is a safe bet that presently Facebook is running on way more than two big machines.
So, touts take note, as you consider which companies may be on Ellison’s buying radar, be skeptical about any chip and component companies flaunting “scale-out,” along with “standards,” “multi-vendor,” “open” or anything else that doesn’t make sense in the context of Ellison’s vertically integrated, all-Oracle “big honkin’ cloud-in-a-box.” And, if a company makes most of its money selling things that don’t go in a data center, forget it.
Look instead for the companies making patented proprietary chips that get soldered onto other companies’ boards, and/or those making heavily engineered boards that get built into major vendors’ servers. And, give extra credence to any cases where the purchase will give Oracle immediate product differentiation in terms of speed, capacity and throughput, give it technical leadership and competitive leverage, or enable it to steal a long march on IBM. If you understand Ellison, you know those are the things he cares about the most.
OpenOffice Kidnapped
A bunch of European and Brazilian developers kidnapped OpenOffice.org (OOo), the Sun-started challenge to Microsoft Office, Tuesday to the cheers of Oracle enemies like Google, which Oracle is suing for infringing on Java, Red Hat, whose code Oracle poached for it own Linux, Novell, whose own version of OpenOffice has patches Sun wouldn’t accept, and Canonical, which has a relationship with IBM, Oracle’s biggest enemy of all.
IBM itself, however, whose Lotus Symphony product is based on OpenOffice, seemed a little taken aback by the kidnapping and – apparently more concerned with the Open Document Format (ODF) than OOo – has adopted a wait-and-see attitude to the development.
The high-handed note the kidnappers left announced “a major change in the project’s structure” and said simply, “from now on, the OpenOffice.org community will be known as ‘The Document Foundation.’”
It said that Oracle, which acquired OpenOffie.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems and so owns the OpenOffice.org trademark, “has been invited to become a member of the new foundation, and donate the brand the Community has grown during the past 10 years. Pending this decision, the brand ‘LibreOffice’ has been chosen for the software going forward.”
It also wants “the other assets [Oracle] holds in trust for the Community, in due course, once legal etc issues are resolved.”
That’s as much as they want to do with Oracle, which is not exactly a hero of openness, is given to having a tighter grip than Sun, and has had little to say about its intended Google-y Oracle Cloud Office since the name fell from its lips last winter. Presumably it is closed source.
Oracle, which is the biggest contributor to OpenOffice, has yet to respond to the news that there’s a new OpenOffice developer in town that means to “liberate the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company.” But judging from the icy silence with which Oracle greeted the attention-seeking ultimatum it got from the OpenSolaris governing board, it may be best for everyone to assume that the LibreOffice fork is going to be the LibreOffice fork – and, yes, there’s some English-only beta code for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X at libreoffice.org now.
Evidently a roadmap is expected soon too.
One of the Foundation’s first changes in how Sun and then Oracle ran things was to can the requirement that contributors turn over their copyrights. And unlike Sun, which had the commercial StarOffice, there will only be the one LibreOffice, governed by both the LGPLv3 and the Mozilla Public License.
One of the renegades, Charles Schulz, a member of the Community Council and Native Language Confederation lead, said in a statement that “The Document Foundation supports the Open Document Format, and is keen to work at OASIS [on] the next evolution of the ISO standard.”
The new movement expects to accelerate ODF adoption by government and the enterprise.
Google mumbled something about LibreOffice “encouraging further development of open source office suites” and Markus Rex, who runs open platform solutions at Novell, hoped “to see LibreOffice do for the office productivity market what Mozilla Firefox has done for browsers.” It appears that the enhancements in Go-OOo, Novell’s version of OpenOffice, will be merged into LibreOffice.
Canonical means to ship LibreOffice in future releases of Ubuntu and Simon Phipps, who was Sun’s chief open source officer, didn’t make the Oracle cut and is now a director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), is looking forward to seeing the innovation a “truly open community” can drive.
The foundation, which is being led by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers, is setting up its own web infrastructure because it seems that “since Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems, the Community has been under ‘notice to quit’ from our previous Collabnet infrastructure.”
It is soliciting funds and resources from companies and telling they won’t have to worry “that they may be helping a commercial competitor.” It needs developers, localizers, documentation writers and QA testers. Its bank account is being handled by OpenOffice.org Deutschland eV.
So far endorsements have come in from the Free Software Foundation (Richard Stallman himself), the French and Norwegian OpenOffice communities, Brazil’s BrOffice.org, the Gnome Foundation, NeoOffice, an OpenOffice fork for Mac, credativ, a UK open source consulting and services outfit, Collabora, a UK-based open source consultancy, and Liberix, a non-profit Czech open source support operation.
If the Supreme Court Hears Microsoft’s Case It’s Gonna Be One Crowded Courtroom
Practically everybody and his brother is backing Microsoft’s appeal to the Supreme Court in its attempt not to pay Canadian ISV i4i $290 million for Word’s alleged infringement of an i4i custom XML patent that Microsoft claims is invalid.
Google, Apple, Intel, Yahoo, HTC, Dell, HP, Facebook, Wal-Mart, Toyota, Intuit, Netflix, Verizon, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Apache Foundation, the Computer and Communication Industry Association (CCIA), the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) and the Clearing House Association, 35 law professors and others have all filed amicus briefs trying to persuade the court to hear the long-shot case.
Microsoft is challenging the judicial notion of “clear and convincing evidence” used by the Federal Circuit to uphold the district court’s decision that i4i’s patent is valid. It says the standard should be changed back to the old pre-1982 rule of a “preponderance of evidence.” That way defendants would have more latitude in proving patents they are supposed to have violated aren’t valid in the first place and wouldn’t have been if the patent examiners had seen all the evidence.
The Federal Trade Commission favors the “preponderance” standard and says the “clear and convincing” proof demanded by the Federal Circuit simply whistles through too many really bad patents.
The amici, who have millions riding on the decision, argue that “preponderance” – the same standard allowed a plaintiff in proving infringement – could save endless frivolous litigation and put throw a money wrench into the troll business.
According to Law.com, if the Supremes take the case it “could lead to a historic realignment in the patent litigation arena.”
RIM Unveils its Tablet
Having been kicked in the teeth by both iPhone and Android smartphones this year, Research In Motion unveiled its rumored iPad copycat Monday in an attempt to stop both Apple and Google from leaching more of its revenues.
The thing is called the Blackberry Playbook, a clear appeal to the company’s largely male installed base of Crackberry heads.
The tablet is positioned as a multitasking “enterprise-ready professional tablet” “perfect for either large organizations or an ‘army of one.’” However, it may have a split personality. Beside corporate power games, it’s also supposed to be good at playing traditional games.
Unlike Apple, the Playbook is “Flash-loving.” It supports the Apple-scorned Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe Mobile AIR as well as the Apple-doted-on HTML 5 so RIM can brag that Playbook will deliver “the real, full web experience to mobile users.”
Otherwise it’s smaller, thinner and lighter than the iPad measuring less than half an inch thick (5.1″x7.6″x0.4″) and weighing 14 ounces with a seven-inch 1024 x 600 touchscreen display.
Initially the Playbook won’t be able to connect to the Internet directly, which is actually a plus in enterprise terms.
It’s fitted with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and in the absence of Wi-Fi it piggybacks on the Blackberry via Bluetooth to access the Internet (no separate service plan). That means that the smartphone’s content is viewable on the tablet, but actually stays on the phone and is only temporarily cached on the tablet (subject to IT policy controls). It disappears once the connection is broken so there’s theoretically less of a security risk and less of a manageability issue.
Eventually RIM is supposed to come up with 3G and 4G versions of the tablet.
The thing is powered by an unidentified 1GHz dual-core processor running on the Unix-like symmetric multiprocessing QNX Neutrino kernel that RIM acquired when it bought QNX earlier this year for about $200 million. For purposes of the Playbook the operating system is called the BlackBerry Tablet OS and is reputed to offer a highly responsive and fluid touchscreen experience for apps and content services. It’s eventually supposed to replace the Blackberry OS in the company’s smartphones.
The Eclipse-supporting Neutrino, which runs on the PowerPC, x86, Mips, SH-4 and ARM chips, is supposed to be one of the most reliable, robust and secure (Common Criteria EAL 4+) real-time operating system architectures in the world. It supports mission-critical applications in everything from planes, trains and automobiles to medical equipment and the largest core routers that run the Internet not to mention, as Bloomberg does, the control systems in nuclear power plants and the US Army’s unmanned Crusher tanks. (Top that for reliability.)
The OS is POSIX-compliant so C-based code is portable. It supports Open GL for graphics-intensive 2D and 3D applications like gaming, and will run applications built in Mobile AIR as well as the new BlackBerry WebWorks app platform so apps (like Java apps) written for BlackBerry 6-based smartphones will also run on PlayBook.
The widget includes dual 3 MP front-facing, 5 MP rear-facing HD cameras for video capture and video conferencing that can both record HD video at the same time, and an HDMI-out port for presenting one’s creations on external displays. It has 1GB of RAM, way more than the iPad.
The dingus won’t be in retail store in the United States until early 2011 with rollouts in overseas to follow in Q2. However, developers and some corporate customers will get the widget in October for development and early testing. An SDK is supposed to be out in the next few weeks and developers can register for early access at www.blackberry.com/developers/tabletos. The thing is supposed to use industry standard APIs.
There’s no price yet although Reuters says it should come in at the “lower range of prices for consumer tablets already in the suddenly congested market.
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAaez_4m9mQ&feature=player_embedded.
IBM Buys Blade Network Technologies
IBM says it’s buying privately held Blade Network Technologies, a data center switching outfit it’s worked with since 2002, for some unrevealed price rumored to be around $400 million. Last Monday IBM bought the publicly traded Netezza for $1.7 billion.
Blade started out in 2002 as a Nortel unit spun out four years later as Nortel went down the tubes a private company backed by Garnett & Helfrich, Terry Garnett having been a Larry Ellison lieutenant.
Blade has a blade server, some top-of-rack switches and software to virtualize and manage cloud computing and other workloads. Its devices route data and transactions to and from servers. The widgetry can improve systems performance, deliver information faster, optimize virtual environments and lower energy use.
Blade claims half the Fortune 500 as customers, many of them joint clients with Big Blue. IBM says actually upwards of 50% of its System x BladeCenters currently attach to or use Blade products.
IBM expects to close on the deal in Q4. It wants to be able to manage the new, more demanding workloads. It says that with Blade, it can drive innovation at the systems networking level to speed the delivery of key information from system to system – for workloads such as analytics (an IBM favorite) and cloud computing – while reducing data center costs.
Since Cisco got into the server business last year, IBM has been expanding its network offerings through relationships with other networking companies. Now, without abandoning the others, it’s bringing one in-house.
Brian Truskowski, the general manager of IBM’s system storage and networking unit, said in a statement that “Blade will help IBM better integrate networks with its systems, optimizing them for workloads that require high-speed and low-latency performance.”
IBM said Blade’s software helps address the massive virtualization requirements of cloud computing environments. With servers more closely integrated with the network users can deploy thousands of virtual machines to run large application workloads in the cloud and reduce complexity through simplified management.
Blade’s got nine million ports installed. It’s also got its own Unified Fabric Architecture, an interoperable converged fabric for “Ethernet Everywhere.”
Blade, which has around 200 people, said last September when it picked up a B round of undisclosed size that it was valued at $230 million. The money came from NEC, Juniper, its original backer Garnett & Helfrich Capital and a “silent investor” only identified as an “industry leader.” It said then that it had passed six-million Ethernet switch ports. NEC, which got a board seat, uses Blade’s Ethernet switches for the network infrastructure for its SIGMABLADE blade servers.
Microsoft Kills its Blogging Platform
Microsoft is throwing in the towel on its six-year-old blogging platform Windows Live Spaces (née MSN Spaces). It’s sending its bloggers over to WordPress.com, a competing platform, where Microsoft’s current crop of scribblers can get free space.
The two have worked out a migration scheme and Microsoft will redirect URLs. Bloggers can use Microsoft’s facilities until the end of the year but have to be out by March.
Microsoft counts 30 million “active” users. In comparison WordPress, written in PHP and hosted op Apache, for Pete’s sake, powers over 8.5% of the web, is used on over 26 million sites and is seen by over 250 million people a month.
This is the new practical “why-waste-the-money” Microsoft, which has decided not to fight the social networking crowd with look-a-like services and simply integrate with them instead.
Oracle Sues Micron Technology
Oracle sued Micron Technology last Friday for overcharging Sun artificially inflated prices, an antitrust complaint, when Sun bought upwards of $2 billion worth of DRAM from the DRAM cartel between 1998 and 2002.
Micron was never charged when the Justice Department investigated it, Hynix Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics, Infineon Technologies and Elpida Memory eight years ago for collusion and criminal price-fixing because Micron co-operated and copped a plea. The upshot was that the conspirators, including Micron, wound up paying $731 million in fines and some of their executives drew jail time.
Sun sued some of the culprits back before it was Oracle. Now Oracle wants restitution and triple damages from Micron, which Sun never got around to settling up with. The suit claims Sun lost money and customers to the high DRAM prices caused by artificially stifled production.
‘Out, Out, Damn’d Cisco’: HP
Sounding as obsessive-compulsive as Lady Macbeth, HP said Monday that it had finally ripped all the -supplied WAN routers and switches out of its six data centers and replaced them with its own networking widgetry.
HP swore to go Cisco-free in April when its acquisition of network pioneer 3COM closed. You can’t very well give aid and comfort to a one-time friend that’s turned on you and now wants to sell servers.
The jihad took a motivated HP less than six months – coming in ahead of schedule with no data center downtime. It claims it’s getting better-than-expected performance.
The replaced routers and switches let HP’s data centers in Austin, Houston and Atlanta talk to each other and to the Internet. The company says it’s got an open standard-based network architecture now. It will now move on and install its own products on the fringes of the network connecting company facilities worldwide.
The exercise should help push HP’s networking front against Cisco. According to HP CIO Randy Mott, “When we talk to customers around the world, they’re looking for a full networking portfolio provider with open architecture enabling an alternative to the proprietary protocols they’ve been locked into for decades.”
CA Technologies Buys Hyperformix
CA Technologies said Tuesday that it’s buying Hyperformix, a small 50-man Austin, Texas server virtualization capacity management ISV, without saying what it is paying.
CA figures the widgetry will bolster its virtualization management portfolio and, in turn, enhance its cloud cred.
It says, “An important aspect of our virtualization and cloud strategies is to help customers overcome the ‘VM stall’ challenges they encounter as they roll out virtualization and progress to a dynamic, cloud-based data center architecture.”
VM stall is supposed to be what happens after organizations virtualize all the low-hanging fruit – their low-risk, low-impact systems – dev/test servers, web servers, file servers, internal applications – and stop short of virtualizing their tier 1 business services, customer-facing environments, enterprise-wide systems, third-party applications, multi-platform services and composite applications.
Hyperformix is supposed to move them off the dime by discovering how physical, virtual, hardware, software, storage, and network resources are being used and predicting what resources will be needed in the future. The upshot is supposed to be a mature dynamic data center and private cloud operation.
CA expects the acquisition to close by the end of December when Hyperformix will become part of the its virtualization and automation business. CA means to expand its integration with Hyperformix solutions to include its CA Virtual, CA Service Automation, CA Service Assurance and CA Cloud portfolios.
Hyperformix started out in life developing predictive software for machinery 20 odd years ago as Scientific Engineering Software. Post-2000 as Hyperformix it raised ~$34.8 million in debt and equity funding from such as Morgan Stanley Venture Partners, M/C Venture Partners and LTI Venture Lending.
Wikipedia says it has specific applications for managing the performance of SAP software and 20 patents approved and pending related to analytic and simulation modeling. CA Technologies and Hyperformix share a bunch of customers.
RightScale Pushes into Dev & Test
RightScale, the cloud manager, has moved into development and test with a cloud management solution that software development and testing teams can use to provision and use cloud computing resources.
The new RightScale Development & Test Solution Pack supports four development languages, PHP, Java, Ruby and .NET, and includes Java and PHP solutions from RightScale’s buddies IBM and Zend Technologies.
The IBM Java stack includes the IBM DB2 database and its WebSphere application server, available either in the freebie Community Edition or the commercial Enterprise Edition.
Zend, for its part, delivers a tested stack that incorporates PHP, the Zend Framework, required extensions and drivers, and a set of application management capabilities developers might find handy on the cloud.
Zend says that with the RightScale platform, developers can leverage Zend Server capabilities, such as code tracing, performance optimization and job queuing, to build and test scalable applications faster without spending time setting up multiple server environments.
RightScale’s software pack is supposed to be an easy on-ramp to cloud computing, especially for companies that aren’t ready to move production applications to the cloud, sort of a learning experience without any long-term commitment or risk.
The widgetry includes RightScale’s core Cloud Management Platform with two different user interfaces – a self-service interface designed for developers and testers to launch servers in the cloud, and an administrative interface for customizing RightScale’s standard environments.
It also comes with two pre-configured server environments tailored for different stages in the dev & test process: an “All-in-One” configuration for doing basic integration testing on a single server in the cloud and a “Multi-Tier” environment for more complex testing with separate load balancing, application and database servers.
Of course once in production, operations staff can use RightScale’s Cloud Management Platform to monitor and manage system performance, users and costs.
The widgetry, which is supposed to maintain more consistent, reproducible environments from design through production, is available as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for an introductory subscription price of $250 a month for the first year.
FalconStor CEO Leaves after Shenanigans
FalconStor Software president, CEO and chairman ReiJane Huai resigned Wednesday following “his disclosure that certain improper payments were allegedly made in connection with the company’s contract with one of its customer.”
The Long Island company issued a statement saying it “has fully cooperated with law enforcement authorities with respect to the ongoing investigation, and it will continue to do so. In addition, a special committee of the board has been formed to conduct a full internal investigation of these matters and the special committee has retained counsel to assist it in its investigation.”
Eli Oxenhorn, a current board member who’s association with Huai goes back to their Cheyenne Software days, has been named non-executive chairman; chief strategy officer James McNiel has taken over as interim CE0 and interim president; and CFO James Weber is also now interim COO.
The $90 million-a-year publicly traded availability house lost money last year. Its widgetry is sold OEM or branded through Acer, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Huawei, SGI, and others. Cheyenne was bought by CA, which is how CA came by its ArcServe backup line.
PalmPad Headed This Way
Stop me if this sounds familiar.
HP’s troops were out in force this week talking up the company’s mobile strategy. The company will major on the webOS 2.0 it got in July when it closed its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm.
It’s dumped whatever Android tablets it had on the drawing board except for the ones it’s using to run its newfangled cloud-based printers and will field a Windows 7-based tablet ahead of its webOS-based PalmPad due out early next year.
It expects to own 17% of the global tablet market in 2013 and that market will probably be worth about $40 billion, it thinks.
WebOS is supposed to be better at running multiple applications simultaneously than Apple is.
HP has also dumped any Android- and Microsoft-based phone plans for Palm phones, which it will “aggressively” push through its giant PC base. It expects to stream music from the cloud to its smartphones, which will store the ones most listened to.
CodePlex Foundation Now OuterCurve
To avoid any more confusion between Microsoft’s open source forge site codeplex.com and the year-old open source CodePlex Foundation that Microsoft originally sponsored, the foundation has renamed itself the OuterCurve Foundation.
It says the forge shared its name on the hunch that there would be more affinity between the forge and the foundation but that hasn’t proved true. (Surprise. Surprise.)
It says it wanted a name that would make it an attractive investment for additional sponsors.
A branding company in Boston called Protobrand came up with the new name.
The foundation’s job is to provide a software IP management process and project development governance for corporate projects looking for open source developers. It currently has seven projects under management.