http://sap.sys-con.com/ Latest articles from Maureen O'Gara Copyright 2008 SAP DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL Thu, 24 Jul 2008 22:18:00 GMT SAP DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL 10 http://backend.userland.com/rss http://sap.sys-con.com/read/619114.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/619114.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT Apple telling the press that the state of its CEO's health is a 'private matter' was like waving a red cape in front of a bull. Within hours Fortune and the New York Times were reporting that the 53-year-old cancer survivor probably wasn't dying - as everyone had surmised by his emaciated appearance at the iPhone G3 introduction last month. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/618924.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/618924.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT With Microsoft mandarin Kevin Johnson bolting to Jupiter, leaving Microsoft to lick its wounds over Yahoo and reorganize, CEO Steve Ballmer sent out an all-hands e-mail to Microsoft folk encapsulating the message he delivered to financial analysts gathering in Redmond Thursday. Ballmer highlighted software-plus-service, associating it with a 'platform in the cloud and delivering applications across PCs, phones, TVs, and other devices, at work and in the home' (Microsoft's Mesh widgetry) and promised 'more about our cloud platform initiatives and the next versions of our Live and Online technologies' at the company?s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) at the end of October. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614371.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614371.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 19:45:00 GMT There hasn't been a PowerPC-based computer since Apple abandoned the dingus and bolted to Intel, a move that did wonders for Apple's volumes. Now a Mountain View start-up called CherryPal is about to introduce a $249 Debian-based desktop that's about the size of a dime store paperback built around the 2W MPC5121e mobileGT PowerPC chip that Freescale usually sells to Detroit for navigation devices. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/618135.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/618135.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:30:00 GMT Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is now running the company's Windows, Windows Live and Internet properties after Kevin Johnson, the president of the company's Platforms and Services Division (PSD) and a key player in the failed Microsoft-Yahoo talks, bolted to Jupiter Networks, where he will be CEO. Microsoft said PSD would be split into two groups, Windows/Windows Live and Online Services, both reporting to Ballmer. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/617408.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/617408.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT A year into Jerry Yang's turnaround strategy - and 10 days before a potentially ear-boxing stockholders meeting - and Yahoo has produced second-quarter results that missed Wall Street's reduced expectations. And, as the AP observed, its market value is now about $18 billion below Microsoft's last offer. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614441.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614441.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT CEO Hector Ruiz, increasingly blamed for the harrowing of AMD, stepped down during the company's Q2 conference call with Wall Street Thursday in favor of his sidekick, AMD president and patent-carrying engineer Dirk Meyer, the guy who used to run AMD's chip operation and was responsible for the Opteron chip that brought grief to Intel. Since the two have been so closed aligned it is unclear whether the change will make any substantive difference in AMD's fortunes. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614502.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614502.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:30:00 GMT Citrix on Tuesday announced Project Kensho, which is supposed to deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that will let ISVs and enterprise IT folk create portable hypervisor-independent enterprise application workloads that should run across XenServer, Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual environments. Citrix is expecting to have a free technical preview for download in September. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614538.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614538.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:30:00 GMT HP is going into the shipping container business following down the path already trod by Sun and recently IBM and some other smaller firms except HP of course figures it can do these data center add-ons better than its rivals. HP calls its 40-foot containers PODs, short for Performance Optimized Data Centers, and says that unlike its competitors its containers will house rival gear from Dell, Sun, IBM, Cisco and whomever as well as HP's own. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614540.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614540.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:15:00 GMT You have perhaps heard that while we were on vacation Linux file system ace and convicted wife killer Hans Reiser took the cops to where he had buried her body. Two days later when Reiser was supposed to be sentenced to 25 years to life for first decree murder the judge disclosed that Reiser could have pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter in exchange for three years in jail and - given the time served while awaiting trial - could have been out next spring, which would have saved his little boy from testifying. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614562.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614562.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:00:00 GMT Apple is now the third-largest PC vendor in the US, according to IDC and Gartner's preliminary Q2 data, ousting Acer from the slot. Gartner thinks Mac shipments were up 38% year-over-year in Q2 to give Apple 8.5% of the sputtering US market, up from 6.4% this time last year. IDC figures the US PC market was up 3.6% in Q2, which Gartner, which had forecast only 2% growth, claims it was achieved on the back of a lot of price cuts, Apple included. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/600668.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/600668.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:30:00 GMT With the stock market crashing, or giving a good approximation of a crash Thursday, Yahoo, poor thing - well, it has behaved like a sick lost puppy, now hasn't it - announced a supposedly pressure-relieving reorganization just like its familiars in the press said it would. It is, as was widely observed, the company's third or fourth attempt in the last 18 months or so - one loses count after a while - to rearrange the deck chairs and supposedly prove it can stay afloat with Microsoft out of the picture. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614563.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614563.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:30:00 GMT Citrix has tapped its VP of channels and emerging product sales Al Monserrat to replace its departing sales chief John Burris, who, as previously reported, is going to Sourcefire as CEO. A couple of years ago Monserrat was responsible for Citrix' North American sales. Meanwhile, Citrix has named former PeopleSoft chief marketing officer and HP veteran Nanci Caldwell to its board. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/617165.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/617165.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:30:00 GMT Two weeks after its co-founder and CEO Diane Greene was abruptly dismissed, VMware - now run by one of Microsoft's old rulers, Paul Maritz - disclosed exactly how much under its promised 50% year-over-year growth 2008 is going to be. It's going to be 5%-8% short of the magic number. Reason of course dictates that 42%-45% growth may some day look heroic. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/616134.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/616134.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:00:00 GMT 3PAR, the utility storage company, says it's got an integrated virtual desktop provisioning and management solution for the VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that will also scale VDI storage. It's supposed to automatically provision hundreds of high-performance virtual desktops that consume only a fraction of the bandwidth and storage capacity required with traditional storage, hence the name Thin Copy Desktop for VMware VDI. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/616797.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/616797.htm Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:00:00 GMT SAP said Monday that it was going to close down its TomorrowNow operation, the reason Oracle is suing SAP, claiming TM hacked into its site and stole its proprietary support information. SAP bought the PeopleSoft/JD Edwards/Siebel service start-up in February of 2005 to harry Oracle's acquisition of those firms by providing cheaper support only to find that TM downloaded more Oracle support material than it should have, a fact it admitted while contending Oracle wasn't substantially harmed and that TM didn't pass the information on to mother SAP. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/463824.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/463824.htm Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:30:00 GMT Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/615678.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/615678.htm Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT There ain't gonna be no highly diverting no-holds-barred fight-to-the-finish proxy fight over Yahoo come the company's stockholders meeting August 1. The two sides cut a deal Monday. Yahoo will be giving corporate raider Carl Icahn - who was threatening to replace the whole Yahoo board with cronies of his own and oust Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang - three seats on an expanded 11-man board still dominated by current Yahoo management that favors the anti-Microsoft status quo. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/600707.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/600707.htm Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:15:00 GMT VMware has cut an OEM deal with Inspur, the Chinese company whose name used to be Langchao and said to be the largest native server maker. Inspur will bundle and support VMware's Infrastructure 3 widgetry on its servers. Inspur says there's little virtualization deployment experience in China. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/616032.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/616032.htm Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT Apple got pared in after-hours trading Monday, dropping 18 bucks, close to 11%, apparently because of the weak guidance it issued for the current quarter and because it declared the state of Steve Jobs' health off-limits on a day when the New York Post revisited speculation that he's critically ill. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614374.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614374.htm Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:45:00 GMT That thud you heard yesterday was the European Commission hitting Intel with a second supplemental indictment-like statement of objection (SO) charging the company with three more instances of antitrust violations designed to keep AMD out of the market. Miraculously the news arrived just as AMD was posting its seventh consecutive quarterly loss. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614372.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614372.htm Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:00:00 GMT Zoho, the online Office wannabe, has gotten Swisscom, the telephone side of the old Swiss PTT monopoly, to offer its 300,000 business customers a suite of Zoho's SaaS applications as part of a six-month pilot through its Teamnet portal. The Zoho Business suite, including Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook and Meeting, will be free. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614532.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614532.htm Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:00:00 GMT VMware is supposed to report its second-quarter results on Tuesday July 22 and people will be tuning in to see how EMC's abrupt ouster of the virtualization leader's CEO and co-founder Diane Greene last week is handled and what is added to the news that VMware isn't going to make its full-year 2008 guidance of 50% growth over 2007. Parent company EMC said last week that VMware would come in 'modestly below' its revenue goals because of a more challenging spending environment but left Q2 guidance of 55% growth in place. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614015.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614015.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT The court also said Novell couldn't run interference for Linux and stop SCO from seeking royalty payments for alleged UnixWare and OpenServer infringement by Linux users under its infamous SCOsource licensing program. , it's merely a matter of time before SCO starts seeking those payments. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614459.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614459.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT As predictable as the bet that night will follow day, Apple sued a little widely watched wannabe Mac cloner in Florida called Psystar that's been selling a $399 box called Open Computer for the last few months. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614458.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614458.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:15:00 GMT Microsoft and its cross-platform, Flash-rivaling, RIA-building Silverlight plug-in are being sued in San Francisco for patent infringement by a no-profile Massachusetts outfit called Gotuit Media Corporation. The thin seven-page suit and its venue comes compliments of California lawyer Spencer Hosie who brought us the highly diverting Burst.com antitrust suit against Microsoft and its delicious tales of Candy and the Microsoft document shredder. Burst of course was settled on the courthouse steps for less than it might have gotten inside. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614373.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614373.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:15:00 GMT Amazon has kicked into Engine Yard's $15 million Series B round along with Benchmark Capital and New Enterprise Associates. The two-year-old 70-man open source company provides a deployment infrastructure, services and support for developers to take their Ruby and Rails applications to the cloud. The money should underwrite its anticipated cloud computing cluster platform and expand its business. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614456.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614456.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:45:00 GMT Microsoft earned $4.3 billion on revenues of $15.84 billion, up 18%, in its fourth fiscal quarter in June, making it a $60 billion company - compliments of emerging markets and demand for Windows Server 2008. It had better-than-expected Vista sales this time through, up to $4.37 billion, and solid results everywhere but in retail sales of the high-end Office kit - a function of all those freebies out there? - and in its online business which lost $488 million - impacted by the weak economy and explaining why Microsoft is desperate to buy Yahoo, AOL, somebody. Yahoo, meanwhile, has also been eying AOL. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614536.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614536.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:45:00 GMT About a month and a half ago HP created a Scalable Computing and Infrastructure Organization (SCIO) out of a stealth Web 2.0 group that it's had under the covers for the last year, year-and-a-half and its HPC unit along with its cloud intentions. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614530.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614530.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:30:00 GMT Sun, whose stock has been teetering on the brink of disaster, pre-announced its fourth quarter Tuesday and said it could have non-GAAP earnings somewhere between 25 cents and 35 cents because of a $100 million restructuring charge (five-15 cents GAAP) on revenues of $3.725 billion-$3.8 billion. Its gross margin is supposed to be 44%-45. Wall Street folks figured it would do 27 cents on $3.8 billion. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614497.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614497.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:45:00 GMT Such speculation makes one wonder if that means Fujitsu, whose track record in the United States hasn't been anything to write home about either, would be reluctant to buy Sun, which has been looking anemic enough lately to have spawned reports it's looking for a new CEO to replace Jonathan Schwartz and may need an exit strategy. Fujitsu, which makes and sells Sparc machines, has always been Sun's backstop. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/614498.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/614498.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:45:00 GMT As the economy swings from bad to worse and back again, Intel and the techno lust it engenders keep soldering on. The company's second-quarter results surpassed Wall Street's expectations and - despite various warnings of weakening PC demand worldwide - CEO Paul Otellini said in a prepared statement that 'As we enter the second half, demand remains strong for our microprocessor and chipset products in all segments and all parts of the globe.' http://sap.sys-con.com/read/575071.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/575071.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:30:00 GMT Since Microsoft's forecast - and its margin implications - is nothing to sneeze at, we asked industry analyst and cloud spotter Amy Wohl what she has been seeing. 'The first thing to keep in mind is that we have some semantic confusion, as is usual at this stage of a new market, around just what is a cloud. We are now pretty sure that what we used to call grids and what we now call clouds is the same thing. But we also have things called 'platforms' that seem to be very much like a kind of cloud (and are sometimes called clouds) and then there is SaaS itself which looks very much like a cloud with some application software (and some SaaS vendors describe their offering just that way). I'd say we can agree that a cloud is managed computing power, often with applications, accessed across the Internet. And I'll agree that a company can have its own cloud, if it wants one. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/606837.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/606837.htm Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:15:00 GMT There's a little puddle on Wall Street where VMware, the virtualization leader and the most brilliant IPO since Google went public, used to be. EMC, VMware's parent company, announced mid-morning that VMware co-founder Diane Greene was out presumably because the company isn't going to make its full-year 2008 guidance of 50% growth over 2007 and it hasn't reported its second quarter yet. EMC said it would come in at 'modestly below' its goal. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/605481.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/605481.htm Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:00:00 GMT Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov sent around his response to Microsoft's surprise release of Hyper-V last week: 'While he figures it'll lower the barriers to server virtualization adoption - and tear a piece out of VMware's hide - 'the breath of 20 deployments will still be fairly narrow the feature set of Hyper-V is limited...with no support for Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, FreeBSD.' http://sap.sys-con.com/read/609800.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/609800.htm Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:15:00 GMT In the statement Yahoo put out, chairman Roy Bostock said, 'After negotiating among themselves without the involvement of Yahoo!, Carl Icahn and Microsoft presented us with a 'take it or leave it' proposal under which we would be required to restructure the company, hand over to Microsoft Yahoo!'s valuable search business and to Carl Icahn the rest of the company, giving us less than 24 hours to respond. It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a proposal. While this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our stockholders.' http://sap.sys-con.com/read/605292.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/605292.htm Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:15:00 GMT Woe has come to a chip company and for a change it isn't AMD. In fact it may be AMD-inflicted. Late Wednesday GPU leader Nvidia, which competes with Intel and AMD's ATI graphics side, said its current quarter had come a cropper and that everybody should cut their expectations from $1.1 billion in revenue to somewhere between $875 million to $950 million, something like a 17% sequential drop. It had predicted a seasonal 5% decline a couple of months ago. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/595781.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/595781.htm Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT Mithras Capital, which owns a relatively small block of 1.7 million shares of Yahoo and would vote for Icahn's replacement slate in a heartbeat, sent an open letter to Microsoft Thursday asking Steve Ballmer to take Microsoft's 'alternate transaction' directly to Yahoo's stockholders. That's the better-than-Google deal that Microsoft claimed - after talks with Yahoo fell apart a second time - was worth better than $33 a share. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/602624.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/602624.htm Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT Monday was theoretically the day that, over protests and despite its popularity, Windows XP was retired as a way of pushing people to adopt the widely reviled Vista operating system before the very Vista-like 'next-generation' Windows 7 arrives, supposedly at the end of next year or at least by January of 2010. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/603561.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/603561.htm Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:45:00 GMT Five years after Samba 2.0 - with 31 dot releases intervening - the Samba team has finally delivered Samba 3.2, the latest FOSS file and print server suite for Microsoft Windows clients. Samba now has 90% of the file functionality and 95% of the printing functionality and 60% of the authentication functionality it needs to subsist but Microsoft, meanwhile, has pushed on to SMB 2 protocol and there Samba is 90% behind, according to Samba team leader Jeremy Allison. http://sap.sys-con.com/read/605486.htmhttp://sap.sys-con.com/read/605486.htm Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT Remember those Interoperability Principles Microsoft came up with back in, oh, February? Well, on Monday it posted polished-up 'Version 1.0' documentation on the protocols in Office 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 following a preliminary release in April as well as 5,000 pages worth of new documentation on the binary formats in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.