Websphere News Desk

IBM Buys Worklight

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

IBM is buying a privately held 12-year-old Israeli outfit called Worklight for its write-once-run-anywhere application platform and tools for smartphones and tablets. The price IBM is paying wasn’t disclosed. Worklight’s widgetry, which can be used to create and run HTML5, hybrid and native apps, is supposed to put new and existing consumer and employee-facing apps on multiple mobile devices – including iPhones, BlackBerries and Androids – and then securely connect them to a company’s data center. It includes an IDE, middleware, management and analytics and is supposed to reduce time to market, cost and complexity. The apparently key acquisition is expected to close this quarter and be part of IBM’s Software Group.

IBM Acquires Platform Computing

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 05:00:00 EST

IBM on Monday announced it has completed the acquisition of Platform Computing, a privately held company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Financial terms were not disclosed. On October 11, 2011, IBM announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Platform Computing, a global leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software for distributed computing environments. Platform Computing's focused technical and distributed computing management software helps clients create, integrate and manage shared computing environments that are used in compute- and data-intensive applications such as simulations, computer modeling and analytics. These technical and high performance computing (HPC) applications fuel product development, critical business decisions and breakthrough science in financial services, manufacturing, digital media, oil and gas, life sciences, government, research and education. More than 2,000 clients, including 23 of the top 30 largest global enterprises, use Platform Computing solutions.

IBM Acquires Cloud Software Testing Enabler, Green Hat

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:00:00 EST

After a spate of recent acquisition announcements from IBM like DemandTec Inc., Emptoris Inc. and Curam Software Ltd, the IT services giant continues to stay in mode with yet another one. IBM has just said that it is acquiring software quality improvement and cloud testing company Green Hat, which is headquartered in London, England, and Wilmington, Delaware, for an undisclosed amount. Green Hat's application virtualization technology helps developers conduct testing on a software application by leveraging the cloud as a virtual test environment instead of the traditional method of running simulation testing by physically constructing a full-blown testing lab composed of both hardware and software. This becomes more relevant in the context of the current explosion in the mobile applications market for smartphones and tablets. These applications require shorter development cycles and so virtual regressions are more cost-effective and time-efficient. Green Hat will bring additional functionality in terms of features, bandwidth and scalability to IBM's Rational Software business, which already offers a suite of software development and testing tools. The newly acquired testing solutions will be offered through IBM Global Business Services' Application Management Services (AMS).

IBM to Acquire Green Hat

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:00:00 EST

IBM on Wednesday announced a definitive agreement to acquire Green Hat, a provider of software quality and testing solutions for the cloud and other environments. Financial terms were not disclosed. Kristof Kloeckner, General Manager, IBM Rational, noted that the “acquisition extends IBM’s leadership in driving business agility and software quality by changing the way enterprises can manage software development cost, test cycle time and risk.” Founded in 1996, Green Hat is jointly headquartered in London, England and Wilmington, Delaware. Green Hat helps customers improve the quality of software applications by enabling developers to leverage cloud computing technologies to conduct testing on a software application prior to its delivery. Historically, to run simulation testing on a software program, a development team must construct an actual testing lab made up of both hardware and software. This time consuming and labor intensive process has become even more compounded with the short development cycle needed to compete in rapidly expanding markets such as those for smart phones and tablets. By using Green Hat’s solutions, a virtual test environment can be set up in a matter of minutes versus weeks, and for a fraction of the cost.

Rapid Development for WebSphere Portal

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:59:45 EST

OpenXava is a framework for Rapid Development of portlet applications compatible with WebSphere Portal. It is well-suited for business and database oriented applications. OpenXava allows you develop applications just by writing simple domain classes with Java or Groovy. The user interface is generated automatically in runtime, without code generation. OpenXava 4.3 adds support for total properties in collections, it has a new editor for HTML_TEXT stereotype, add info and warning messages and some other useful new features. Now you can use square brakets in @ListProperties to asociate one or more properties of the container entity to a property of the collection. In this way you can add arbitrary values as totals.

IBM Buys DemandTec for Its Cloud-ified Analytics

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 07:00:00 EST

IBM said Thursday morning that it was buying DemandTec for $13.20 a share, close to 57% premium. Big Blue will ante up roughly $440 million, net of DemandTec’s cash on hand, to take over the cloud-based ISV for its 10-month-old Smarter Commerce initiative. IBM estimates the market opportunity for Smarter Commerce at $20 billion in software alone. By running different customer buying scenarios, DemandTec’s subscription-based price, promotion, merchandising and marketing analytics are supposed to help users define their best price points and product mix based on customer buying trends both online and in stores. DemandTec has approximately 450 customers worldwide mostly in retail and consumer products like groceries, drug stores, convenience shops, consumer electronics, office supplies, apparel, department stores and fast food. IBM said it also has 31 patents in the areas of pricing, response analysis and promotion analysis.

Warren Buffett Buys 5.5% of IBM

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 08:00:00 EST

Tech-shy Warren Buffett disclosed on CNBC Monday morning that his company Berkshire Hathaway has acquired a ~5.5% position in IBM since March, spending about $10.7 billion to pick up roughly 64 million shares. He said he spent about $170 a share on average. IBM was up nearly $2 pre-market to $189.25, tickled 1% on the news. Its top has been $190.53. A close friend of Bill Gates, Buffet is famous for steering clear of high-tech investments. Now he said he regrets not buying IBM back when Lou Gerstner was running the company. Reading IBM’s 2010 annual report persuaded him. He said IBM details its growth plans and delivers on its promises. Its “stickiness” with IT departments and big stock buy-backs also contributed.

IBM and Jaspersoft Pair Up on Big Data

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 06:45:00 EDT

IBM is adding Jaspersoft to its extensive BI collection. The pair will be combining IBM’s enterprise-class Hadoop-based InfoSphere BigInsights with Jaspersoft’s BI suite to provide a complete reporting and management solution. Jaspersoft is licensing and integrating InfoSphere BigInsights under an Application Specific Licensing Agreement. The resulting Jaspersoft for InfoSphere BigInsights is supposed to combine the power of IBM’s analytics platform to manage, analyze and provide deep insight into Big Data with Jaspersoft’s ability to extract key information using reporting, dashboard and analytics views in one integrated solution.

IBM Names Ginni Rometty as CEO

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 08:45:00 EDT

After the market closed Tuesday, IBM’s president and CEO Sam Palmisano, 60, unexpectedly passed the touch to his successor Virginia Rometty, 54, who will become the first woman ever to run IBM. She starts January 1. Palmisano, CEO since 2002, will remain chairman. IBM CEOs have traditionally hung up their spurs at 60. It was thought Palmisano would stay on. Rometty, who was tipped for the job and has been at IBM for 30 years, will also be on the IBM board come the New Year. She currently heads sales, marketing and strategy. IBM, now a $99 billion concern and the second most valuable high-tech company by market cap, said she “has successfully led several of IBM’s most important businesses over the past decade – from the formation of IBM Global Business Services to the build-out of our Growth Markets Unit. But she is more than a superb operational executive. With every leadership role, she has strengthened our ability to integrate IBM’s capabilities for our clients.” She is credited with championing and then integrating IBM’s 3.5 billion PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting acquisition and pushing into the cloud and analytics. Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina was reportedly willing to pay $19 billion for PWC but couldn’t get it done. Palmisano has left it to Romettty to deliver on his promise to realize $20 a share by 2015. During his tenure, IBM exited commodity businesses, including PCs, printers and hard disk drives, and pushed into emerging markets in China, India, Brazil, Russia and other developing countries, which Rometty spearheaded and which now account for 23% of IBM’s revenues. Rometty’s obvious rival for the job was Steve Mills, now responsible for both hardware and software. He reportedly didn’t want to be CEO. Her elevation will put her in a tiny league consisting of Meg Whitman, now running HP, and Ursula Burns, who runs Xerox. Other women running Fortune 500 companies include Indra Nooyi of Pepsico and Ellen Kullman of DuPont. “Progressive social policies” had nothing to do with Rometty’s appointment according to Palmisano. In a prepared statement she said, “Sam had the courage to transform the company based on his belief that computing technology, our industry, even world economies would shift in historic ways. All of that has come to pass. Today, IBM’s strategies and business model are correct….Sam taught us, above all, that we must never stop reinventing IBM.”

IBM's Cloud Billows

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 07:00:00 EDT

IBM wants 200 million users on its cloud widgetry by the end of next year. It has to get to them before Oracle, HP or Dell do. It projects $7 billion in revenue from cloud computing hardware, software and services by 2015. To advance its ambition it’s unveiled a new “simplified” enterprise-grade public cloud PaaS it calls SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS) that will ride on its SmartCloud Enterprise and Enterprise+ IaaS, which won’t be deployed globally until the end of next year. Initially it’ll be US-only. SCAS is supposed to be safe enough for new and traditional mission-critical enterprise applications development and deployment. IBM promises cloud-based economics along with enterprise-grade security and governance, open Java and “cross-platform support with no vendor lock-in.” It’s to beta later this quarter with what IBM calls “business-centric” SLAs. What they are exactly isn’t clear. Among Blue’s offerings is a new SmartCloud for SAP Applications service for automating the most common labor-intensive tasks associated with managing SAP environments in the cloud. The widgetry will put all databases on the cloud IBM said.

IBM OEMs Nirvanix Cloud Storage

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 09:00:00 EDT

IBM Global Services is going to be OEMing Nirvanix’ enterprise-grade cloud storage under what the pair calls a strategic partnership. IBM said integrating Nirvanix would give its SmartCloud storage services a solution capable of supporting millions of users, billions of objects and exabytes of data to complement its secure cloud-ified virtual server environments. The technology IBM is bringing on board is supposed to let users upload any size file just once rather than force them to upload the same file multiple times in multiple geographies because of strict file-size limitations. They will still get continuous access to the data at multiple redundant locations. IBM says the widgetry is ideal for unstructured data as well as for storing objects in which data, metadata and index are all encapsulated as one blob. Each node in the SmartCloud storage service knows what’s stored in its neighboring nodes so they essentially work like a massive, cross-connected grid.

IBM Buys Platform Computing

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 10:00:00 EDT

IBM is buying HPC pioneer Platform Computing for its cluster, grid and cloud management software. Terms were not disclosed. The privately held Canadian company, now almost 20 years old, is thought to have revenues of around $70 million-a-year. It claims 2,000 customers including 23 of the Global 30. IBM said it considered the acquisition “a strategic element for the transformation of HPC into the high-growth segment of technical computing and an important part of our smarter computing strategy.” It figures the widgetry can be leveraged across IBM and paired with its Big Data analytics capabilities. IBM used IDC’s estimate to fix the combined opportunity for servers, storage and systems software for technical computing at over $14 billion this year, a number expected to grow over 8% a year to $18.5 billion by 2014.

IBM Buys Q1 Labs

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:45:00 EDT

IBM is buying privately held security ISV Q1 Labs, whose software is used to detect hacking threats and attacks through real-time data analysis. Terms were not disclosed. Q1 Labs, which competes with HP’s ArcSight acquisition and EMC’s RSA unit, will become part of a new IBM Security Systems Division to be run by Q1 CEO Brendan Hannigan and combine 10 other security acquisitions IBM’s made in the last few years.

IBM Donating Cooperative Web Technology

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:53:00 EDT

IBM on Monday announced that the company is donating new software code to help health care and other industries work on shared content in real-time, on the Web. The code is from IBM Project Blue Spruce and will be donated to the Dojo Foundation’s Open Cooperative Web Framework (OpenCoweb). Developed in the IBM labs, Project Blue Spruce allows people to simultaneously interact and update content in real-time via a web browser on computers and the Apple iPad and includes video chat. For example, using Project Blue Spruce, a sales rep could in a browser conduct a video chat with a client while they complete an online sales form together. Today, researchers for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are using the IBM code to help analyze health records of patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPDGeneR).

The Value of Workload-Aware Management

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 06:30:00 EDT

A couple of weeks ago, I dropped by the Intel Developer Forum to present a session and listen in on a few others. As always in these types of shows, I learned quite a bit. Most strikingly though, I was reminded of something that is probably quite obvious to many of you: Consumer interest in cloud computing will not be letting up any time soon. Based on this, and some of the other things I heard at the show, I decided to catch up with fellow IBMer Marc Haberkorn. Marc is an IBM Product Manager and is responsible for IBM Workload Deployer amongst other things. I asked him about IBM Workload Deployer, the competition, and cloud in general.

SOA Software Appoints Former IBMer as VP Technology

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 07:00:00 EDT

SOA Software has appointed Corey Scobie to the position of Vice President Technology, the company announced on Tuesday. Scobie, who has been a leader in the IT industry with roles ranging from software development to SOA portfolio strategy, will become part of SOA Software's senior technology development group. At SOA Software, Scobie will be involved in SOA Governance, partner activities and the company's growing API management product line. Commenting on the announcement Alistair Farquharson, CTO of SOA Software, stated "We are looking forward to Corey’s contributions to our efforts, especially in partner integration and SOA architecture."

An A-Z of Cloud Computing at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 05:00:00 EDT

An alphabetical selection of some of the many themes & topics to be discussed at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley (9th Cloud Expo) - being held November 7-10, 2011, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA. The markets may still be melting, but Cloud Expo is definitely coming of age!

Google Buys Some Java Patents Off IBM

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 07:15:00 EDT

Google has bought what appears to be another 1,023 patents from IBM, a transfer recorded by the US Patent and Trademark Office Wednesday and noticed by Bloomberg, which said Google bought them on August 17. The PTO also transferred 1,030 patents from IBM to Google in July after Google lost the auction for 6,000-odd Nortel patents to the combined might of Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Ericsson, Sony and EMC and their $4.5 billion. The blog SEO by the Sea flipped through the latest IBM haul and says the batch includes a bunch of Java and scripting-based patents. Whether any of them can defuse Oracle’s massive Java infringement suit against Google and its Android operating system is unclear.

IBM Buying i2

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:45:00 EDT

IBM is buying yet another business analytics outfit. This time it’s UK-based i2, which looks out for crime, fraud and security threats via unstructured Big Data. Financial terms with the investor group headed by Silver Lake Sumeru that owns i2 were not disclosed. I2’s got 4,500 customers in 150 countries in banking, defense, health care, insurance, law enforcement, national security and retail including 12 of the top 20 retail banks globally and eight of the top 10 largest companies in the world. IBM expects to join its real-time analytical solutions with i2’s technologies.

IBM Buys Algorithmics for $387 Million

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 07:00:00 EDT

IBM is buying Algorithmics, the Toronto-based risk analytics firm, for $387 million cash. Its services are used by 350 banks, investment and insurance businesses such as Allianz, HSBC, Nomura and Société Générale. The money will go to the Fitch Group, the credit ratings agency majority owned by Fimalac, the Paris holding company. The acquisition will add 900 people to IBM’s Software Group. Blue’s business analytics and optimization team, the result of $14 billion spent on 25 acquisitions the last five years, currently has more than 8,000 consultants including 200 mathematicians with more than 500 patents.

An Eye on the Competition

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 09:00:00 EDT

When it comes to IBM Workload Deployer, I have no illusions regarding the veracity of our competitors. They are out there, and they are constantly on the attack. Their dubious claims aside, I know this because I still get asked quite frequently to explain the benefits of IBM Workload Deployer versus some other general purpose cloud provisioning and management solution. So, while I have done that many times in various forums, I figured it was time to yet again address this question.

After Five-Year Drought, Java SE7 Is Here

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 14:00:00 EDT

Java SE 7, the Java Platform, Standard Edition 7 is out. It’s the first major release in five years and took 9,494 bug fixes, 1,966 enhancements, 9,018 changesets, 147 builds and four JSRs to get here. It’s also the first release of the Java platform under Oracle’s stewardship, and threatened not to happen until Oracle put its foot down and went off and wheeled and dealed and leveraged IBM. (Remember the Apache Foundation stalking off and slamming the door?) Still, it’s based on the open source OpenJDK, making it something of a novelty for a commercial release.

GSX Solutions SVP Eileen Fitzgerald Selected as IBM Champion

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 08:40:00 EDT

GSX Solutions, a provider of proactive, consolidated monitoring, reporting of enterprise messaging, mobile and collaboration environments, including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), is proud to congratulate senior executive Eileen Fitzgerald for being selected as one of this year's IBM Champions. Fitzgerald, GSX Senior VP for Customer Delivery and Product Management, worked in the Global Notes environment for over 15 years and then focused on Service Delivery, managing Notes services, infrastructures and functionalities according to Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Standards. She is also a co-organizer for several Lotus User Group conferences (such as ILUG and UKLUG) and a regular speaker at IBM Lotusphere.

IBM to Open Two Cloud Centers in Japan

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 08:45:00 EDT

IBM Thursday said that it’s opening two new cloud data centers in Japan, one to deliver its SmartCloud services – that’s its public cloud – and the other dedicated to delivering LotusLive, its cloud collaboration widgetry. The new facilities mean it’s added to the sites in Singapore, Germany, Canada and the United States delivering SmartCloud services and its 13 global cloud labs, seven of which are in Asia-Pacific, specifically in China, India, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore. The fact that they’re in Asia is important to IBM’s five-year growth plan and the $7 billion bogey it set for cloud revenues. IBM figures its jumping into the public cloud market in Japan is a positive post-disaster business story.

Different Roads to Cloud Adoption

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 11:00:00 EDT

I find that it is interesting and sometimes even helpful to sit down and reflect on past experiences. That's true for life and it's true for work. In my last post, I reflected on some of the common challenges I have seen in the rollout of enterprise cloud projects. In this post, I want to shift gears a bit and take one giant step back if you will. Let's talk about the common patters for how organizations are adopting cloud in the first place. I like to keep things as simple as possible. Remember, just because something is simple does not make it any less true! I like to boil down my characterization of cloud adoption strategy into just two camps: strategic and tactical. You may hear the same kind of thought referred to as bottom-up and top-down approaches. However, I believe those terms usually have a technical connotation, and I do not want to pigeon hole cloud adoption strategy as only a technical discussion -- it has far broader reaches than that.

IBM CEO Seeks Heir

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 07:30:00 EDT

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano is going to designate his heir apparent in 12-18 months by naming a president or operating chief, according to the Wall Street Journal. Handicappers say the mantle is likely to fall on the shoulders of Virginia Rometty, 53, who led the integration of PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ consulting arm, got her services card punched and in the three quarters she’s been running sales has managed to up the number 5.8%. Obviously she would be IBM’s first female captain. Also reportedly in the race are Global Services chief Michael Daniels, 56, who may be too old and Rodney Adkins, 52, the African-American, who held the server unit together after Robert Moffat got arrested in the Galleon Group insider-trading case.

GSX Releases New Monitor & Analyzer

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:31:39 EDT

GSX Solutions (www.gsx.com), a provider of proactive, consolidated monitoring, reporting of enterprise messaging and collaboration environments, including Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, and Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES), has announced the general availability of the GSX Monitor & Analyzer v10. The new release comes with expanded features, plus support for Lotus Traveler, IBM Quickr, IBM Sametime 8.5, Microsoft Exchange 2010, and Microsoft SharePoint servers. The v10 release provides a new modular install for selected server types and components, a revamped user interface, simplified server settings, and new reports to track mail forwarding.

What's the Big Deal About Cloud APIs?

Sat, 21 May 2011 13:30:00 EDT

APIs for cloud are important. Based on the number of writings, conference sessions, and Twitter blasts endorsing the cloud API movement, I think this is something on which we can all agree. However, I sometimes get the feeling that we just accept the fact that the API movement is important without really stopping to ask a very basic question: ‘Why are APIs for cloud important?' Now, if you asked this question to a room full of people at say, a cloud conference, you are undoubtedly going to get some amount of variance in the answers. I would wager a guess that the terms automation and devops appear in the conversation. There is little doubt that APIs for cloud solutions lay the foundation for higher levels of automation, something almost every company needs. Similarly, you cannot deny that the cloud API movement has been a significant driver behind the devops (aka "infrastructure as code") craze that one cannot help but notice today. That said, the real value of APIs for cloud is more significant than either enhanced automation or devops. The real value of the API movement is that it can help companies embarking on cloud overcome the biggest, sometimes underappreciated challenge in cloud implementation today: federation.

IBM Lights Out After Amazon

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 21:30:00 EDT

Stepping on Dell’s cloud announcement Thursday, IBM said it’s going into the public cloud business sure that it can trump Amazon because it owns the Pied Piper’s flute that enchants business. IBM needs to step on the gas if it’s going to produce $7 billion-a-year in cloud revenues by 2015 like it promised.

The IBM Workload Deployer

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:30:00 EDT

I hate sitting on secrets. I always have. I understand that sometimes it's in the best interest of everyone (and your job) to keep tight lips, but that does not make it any more fun. Inevitably, the run-up to our annual IMPACT conferences means everyone in the lab is doing their fair share of secret keeping -- just waiting for announce time. For a lot of us, that day ended Tuesday with the announcement of the IBM Workload Deployer v3.0. Now, you may be wondering, 'I have never heard of this. Why is it version 3.0??' Well, IBM Workload Deployer is a sort of evolution of the WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, which was previously at version 2.0. This is good news for all of our current WebSphere CloudBurst users because all of the functionality (plus new bits of course) that they have been using in WebSphere CloudBurst are present in IBM Workload Deployer. You can use and customize our IBM Hypervisor Edition images in IBM Workload Deployer. You can build and deploy custom patterns that contain custom scripts in order to create highly customized IBM middleware environments. So, what's the big deal here? Two words: workload patterns.

JMS Performance Comparison

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:45:00 EDT

This white paper from Fiorano presents a performance analysis of publish/subscribe and PTP messaging throughput of the following JMS Servers: FioranoMQ® 9.1.1, SonicMQ 7.6, Tibco EMS 4.4.0, ActiveMQ 5.3.0, Jboss Messaging 1.4.4, Sun JAVA MQ 4.3, IBM WebSphere MQ 7.0 All comparisons are performed using the independent benchmark test harness and tests released by Progress Software, Inc. The tests include a number of scenarios for both Publish/Subscribe (Topics) and Point to Point (Queue) message scenarios, stressing out the JMS Servers in a variety of simulated real-world scenarios. These JMS tests and test harness have been the international standard for JMS testing since 2003.

Real-Time Business Built on a Dataflow Architecture

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:15:00 EDT

Fiorano SOA Platform is the first visual SOA platform for real-time business built on a dataflow architecture, reducing the time-to-delivery of distributed applications by over 80%. Users visually assemble instantly running solutions by drawing application and service nodes on a canvas, through drag-and-drop of active Service components. The lines between nodes comprise real-time dataflow through active message pipelines, collectively representing user-defined dataflow architecture. The visual model is the ready-to-run, fully implemented application, with no additional programming required.

Cloud-Based Integration and SOA Architecture

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:45:00 EDT

Putting a cloud integration and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) strategy in play prepares enterprises for the next generation of flexible, distributed and scalable cloud-enabled business applications while facilitating greater operational efficiency, generating more revenue, and helping businesses enter new markets. This free guide from Fiorano discusses various architectures for cloud-based integration in use today, together with the pros and cons of each such architecture. This is followed by a discussion of the architecture requirements for a general purpose, cloud-enabled ESB platform that enables the seamless integration of on-premise, public and private cloud applications.

Message-Driven SOA vs. Peer-to-Peer & Process Driven SOA

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:00:00 EDT

Traditionally, CIOs have been limited to two alternatives while evaluating their next SOA solution: extend the traditional process-driven SOA architecture (low risk/return), or deploy the new generation of complex SOA platforms (higher risk/return). This free guide from Fiorano explains the unique and sustainable advantages of Message-Driven SOA, which offers a proven third alternative that protects current investments and offers a migratory path to the next generation of solutions (low risk/high returns).

IBM Moving $38m Cloud Computing Center into Singapore

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 07:30:00 EDT

IBM said Monday that it was going to put $38 million into a new Asia Pacific Cloud Computing Data Center in Singapore, adding to its centers in Germany, Canada and the United States and its 13 global cloud labs, seven of which are in Asia-Pac in China, India, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore. The new Singapore facility is scheduled to launch in April offering the company’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud portfolio to start along with IBM and third-party software. IBM said the addition reflected demand for both public and private clouds. IDC figures the Asia-Pacific cloud market excluding Japan will grow an average 40% a year rate through 2014 to reach $4.9 billion.

Cloud Expo 2011 New York: Writing Portable, Interoperable Cloud Apps

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 09:30:00 EST

Applications and data are moving to the cloud, and avoiding vendor lock-in has become a major concern. In his session at the 8th International Cloud Expo, Doug Tidwell, Senior Software Engineer at IBM, will focus on Apache libcloud and the Simple Cloud API, open source projects that let your applications work with multiple cloud providers. He will start with a simple application that uses cloud storage and virtual machines. After using live data and VMs in the cloud, he'll add more features such as message queues and databases. Bring your laptop to the session; you'll leave with an understanding of how write robust applications that work across cloud vendors and a DVD of open source tools.

IBM Imagines the Cloud Putting $7 Billion in Its Pocket

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 09:30:00 EST

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano told the company’s annual investors’ meeting Tuesday that Blue is into “thousands” of cloud engagements and that the last “technical shift in the enterprise” represents a “$7 billion opportunity for us.” IBM also expects to be getting 30% of its revenue from emerging markets by ’15, up from a previous prediction of 25%. Palmisano reiterated his projection of delivering at least $20-a-share EPS by 2015, largely on the back of software, which should double its margin by then.

The IBM Image Construction and Composition Tool

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 18:15:00 EST

In a recent post, I wrote about the importance of well-designed, well-constructed virtual images. To be clear, I am not promoting elegant virtual image design for the sake of art. Rather, if we can improve the state of the art in virtual image design and construction, there is a chance to significantly reduce image sprawl typical to many organizations today. Reducing virtual image sprawl will go a long way in reducing the amount of time and resources organizations dedicate to managing their image inventory.

Improving the Application Lifecycle with Cloud Computing

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 16:45:00 EST

Yesterday, I read the latest post on James Urquhart’s Wisdom of Clouds blog. As I often do, I found myself nodding my head as I read James’ latest thoughts on cloud. In this particular post, James provided some thoughts on the types of applications for which we would see growing cloud-based deployments in 2011. I suggest you read the full post here, but I do want to identify the three application types James points out in his post. Based on my own anecdotal experience, empirical data, and observable trends, I would say it is hard to argue with this assessment. Taking a step back, I also think this is a good approach in anticipating cloud usage for the coming year. Looking at both the technical and business attributes of applications gives us a sound context with which to predict the likelihood that users will want to deploy that application to a cloud.

IBM Seems to Be Feeling Neon’s Heat

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 06:00:00 EST

IBM wants its mainframe users to install a patch that will let IBM peer into the Specialty Processors (SPs) they have on their machines so it can see what they’re using the widgets for. And the only reason that Big Blue would want to do that is if it thinks it may lose the antitrust suit filed against it by Neon Enterprise Software. See, Neon’s zPrime software lets mainframers use SPs – which are otherwise called zIIPs and zAAPs and are actually just standard mainframe central processors under another name – to offload and run classic mainframe DB2, CICS, IMS, TSO/ISPF and batch workloads free of IBM’s notoriously exorbitant monthly fees.