Private Clouds Better for Security, Red Hat CEO Says

By Joab Jackson05/27/2009

A private cloud could offer almost all the benefits of a public cloud, but without the attendant security and privacy headaches, said Jim Whitehurst, president and chief executive officer of enterprise open source software vendor Red Hat.

Moreover, if a company is running more than 1,000 servers, it could save money and become more flexible with its processor resources by building an internal cloud computing infrastructure.

"There is a significant amount of value in a cloud infrastructure for a single entity that is running multiple programs and multiple datacenters," Whitehurst said, speaking at the Federal IT on a Budget Forum held this week in Washington, D.C.

"What are the benefit of a public cloud? For most large agencies...or even medium-sized agencies, there is a not a lot of purchasing cost advantage with going to a third-party cloud," Whitehurst said. "The real benefit is getting high utilization of your existing infrastructure and flexibility around that."

At present, Red Hat has more than 50 enterprise customers with private clouds. "They are seeing huge benefits [by] running clouds themselves," Whitehurst said. He mentioned that one customer he spoke with, a chief information officer of a large organization running 25,000 processors, told him that public cloud services such as Amazon.com's would not provide much of a cost advantage to his organization, as his company could obtain servers at almost the same cost as those providers.

To set up a private cloud, an organization would pool all of its servers and offer the processing power to each department. It could enjoy the economies of scale that clouds could provide, and not worry about the privacy and security concerns that dog public cloud providers, according to Whitehurst. It could also sign agreements with other agencies or organizations whose peak processing times are different from its own in order to have extra computing capacity on hand for those periods with the heaviest workloads.

Whitehurst said that today's public cloud offerings are mostly in the "vaporware" stage, meaning there is not much of use for enterprise users, again due to the outstanding security and privacy issues. Building a private cloud, however, will help agencies get prepared for such time when and if public cloud offerings become an alternative.

In April, IT analyst firm McKinsey & Co. released a report that argued that while small- and medium-sized organizations could save money by using public cloud services, large organizations could actually save money by keeping their processing needs in-house.

Federal Computer Week staff writer Doug Beizer contributed to this report.

Windows 7: Expect 'Modest' Bump in PC Sales, Veghte Says

By Kurt Mackie06/08/2009

Microsoft's Bill Veghte spoke at the UBS Global Technology and Services Conference on Monday, providing a general overview of the Windows 7 business plan.

Veghte, who is Microsoft's senior vice president of the Online Services and Windows Business Group, described the coming Windows 7 product line but he did not reveal any pricing figures, which is Microsoft's next step before releasing the operating system into general availability. Pricing is also a big question among the investment analyst crowd at the conference.

In general, Microsoft sets Windows prices based on developed markets and emerging markets. Those segments are further broken down into enterprise, small-to-medium business and consumer markets. The products are differentiated based on a "good, better, best" experience, Veghte explained.

At the low end, Windows 7 Starter edition will be available as an entry-level original equipment manufacturer offering that's only for netbook-class PCs, Veghte said. Microsoft is planning about six Windows 7 editions, which the company outlined in February.

Veghte offered little hope for those expecting Windows 7 to push new PC sales in the current slumping economy. While he said Microsoft was "incredibly optimistic" about Windows 7, the company expects the bump in new PC sales to be "modest." Veghte added that he's found enthusiasm among CIOs and IT professionals for Windows 7, but his personal opinion is that it will get "drowned by the macro-environment" of the current economic downturn.

Veghte dampened hopes for retail upgrades, telling the crowd that "I worry that some of you have large numbers for that upgrade opportunity." Most OS upgrades will happen as people buy new PCs, he added, and it'll be seen more on the consumer side.

Veghte was asked about Microsoft's plans for working with the ARM chip in netbooks, which are small, low-cost laptop-like devices. He didn't answer the question. Microsoft has worked with ARM in the past, but principally with Windows Embedded CE and Windows Mobile.

Microsoft currently provides Windows XP Home edition for netbooks, where it has gained a "more than 90 percent attach rate," Veghte said. Most of those netbooks use Intel's Atom processor. However, it's thought that the ARM processor could show promise due to its greater power savings. ARM processors could be used in netbook-like mobile devices, and that could pose a potential challenge to the current Wintel netbook market lock.

Microsoft is currently going through an experimental period with netbooks, Veghte said, and the company will "compete vigorously." However, Microsoft sees the world in terms of PCs and phones. For those who want something extremely mobile, there are smartphone devices, he said.

In response to a question, Veghte emphasized that the PC isn't being supplanted by the World Wide Web. It's an "and" opportunity -- not "or," he said. The tie-in for Microsoft is Windows Live, which is a collection of Microsoft's online services. Windows Live is a "key vehicle for connecting the PC and Web," he explained.

Microsoft has previously announced that Windows 7 will ship on Oct. 22. To encourage sales, Microsoft allegedly will start a "technology guarantee program" promising Vista buyers a free upgrade to Windows 7, which will begin on June 26, according to leaked information. However, Veghte did not mention or confirm the program's existence in his talk.

Groove To Get a Name Change

By Kurt Mackie05/14/2009 Microsoft Office Groove 2007 will get a name change next year that's more in tune with the SharePoint side of things.

The client product will be known as "SharePoint Workspace 2010" and will be added, along with OneNote, to the Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 product, according to a Microsoft announcement published on Wednesday.

Groove is a collaboration and document-sharing client application, with optional server support, that is designed for small teams of two to 30 people. The client application is currently available as part of the Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate edition. Groove originally was the brainchild of Ray Ozzie, who now serves as Microsoft's chief software architect.

Groove isn't going away and SharePoint Workspace 2010 isn't considered by Microsoft to be a new product.

"We are not discontinuing Groove, just renaming it to SharePoint Workspace 2010 to better reflect the alignment and integration with SharePoint Server 2010," a Microsoft spokesperson explained by e-mail.

Microsoft has been fiddling around with its product names lately, including SharePoint, which also is a Microsoft collaboration application. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, or MOSS, is getting a name change for the 2010 edition. Microsoft plans to drop the "Office" part of MOSS, the company explained last month. The rationale is that people think of Office and SharePoint as two different products.

As for the Groove-SharePoint product relationship, a Microsoft blog described it in this way: "Groove is to SharePoint [as] what Outlook is to Exchange."

If that isn't confusing, Microsoft also has another document-sharing and collaboration service for Microsoft Office 2007 called Office Live Workspace, but it's just a free extension to Office. The Groove news has nothing to do with Office Live Workspace.

Another Microsoft service that seems kind of similar is Microsoft Live Mesh, which is another Ozzie brainchild. Live Mesh was announced back in April of 2008.

"People on the Live Mesh development team have an affinity for many of the things Groove does well, but Groove is focused on a different set of Office-specific scenarios for the enterprise," the Microsoft spokesperson explained. "The architectures are also fundamentally different; the Groove architecture is based on decentralized peer technology that doesn't rely on cloud services."

Microsoft announced last week that SharePoint 2010 will be a 64-bit only application when rolled out. It will play well with 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2, as well as 64-bit versions of SQL Server 2005 and 2008. It won't work with Internet Explorer version 6.

Microsoft Office Groove 2007 appears to be only a 32-bit app, according to the system requirements. However that will change with the 2010 product.

"Office 2010 Suite products, including SharePoint Workspace 2010, will be available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions," the Microsoft spokesperson explained.

The current Groove product has optional server support. Organizations would typically use Microsoft Office Groove Server 2007 or Office Groove Enterprise Services if they needed centralized management support for the client product, according to Microsoft's FAQ. Otherwise, Groove can be run without the server.

"Groove Server 2007 is not required to run Office Groove 2007 (client app)," the spokesperson explained. "It is an option IT departments can purchase as part of volume licensing if they wish to centrally deploy, manage, and integrate Microsoft Office Groove 2007 across the enterprise."

At the Microsoft Tech-Ed event on Monday, Bill Veghte, Microsoft's senior vice president of Windows business, explained that Microsoft Office 2010 will have a technical preview starting in July. The exception is Tech-Ed attendees and invitees, who already have access to the Office 2010 bits. Other would-be testers face getting on a waiting list, as described here.

Microsoft expects the upcoming Office and SharePoint 2010 products to be available in the first half of next year.

Linux Foundation Takes Over Linux.com

By John K. Waters05/20/2009

The Linux Foundation last week rolled out a new community portal aimed at providing a central destination for the Linux community to interact with enterprise developers.

The Linux.com site aggregates news, provides social networking opportunities and showcases original content from each of the Linux community distros. "It will provide original content and easy-to-find resources for Linux users and help those folks surface their skills and technical prowess to potential employers," said Linux.com Executive Director Jim Zemlin. "What the site becomes over time will largely be up to the users."

The Debian, Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu communities will be providing direct contributions, Zemlin said. Visitors to the site can also expect input from community managers and developers, who "will join in conversations to help Linux users understand and use the leading Linux 'distros,'" the press release said.

The Foundation actually took over an existing Linux.com site in March. The nonprofit consortium re-designed and re-purposed that site in hopes of developing it into the primary touchstone for the Linux community.

But does the world really need another Linux portal? "There's this huge proliferation of Web sites devoted to Linux," said Gartner analyst Mark Driver. "But a lot of them are just fanboy sites. Linux.com appears to be an attempt by the Linux Foundation to create a professional, well-designed site for this purpose, and to give the Foundation itself a higher profile in the community."

Zemlin said Linux.com will offer tools that provide not only content but also context to those interested in Linux. "These resources have long existed in a variety of places," he said. "Linux.com brings them all together into one, central forum. There will always be sites that are tailored best for a specific community; Kernel.org is a great example of that. Unlike Kernel.org, which is used by the Linux kernel community to develop code, Linux.com is tailored for the Linux user community and will take a much broader view."

That broader view is likely to appeal to enterprise developers and IT management, Driver said. "Most of the Linux converts up until recently were largely already familiar with the technology. If the Foundation does a good job, this site will provide a jumping-off point for all things Linux, which these IT shops will appreciate. It doesn't need to be everything, but it should be the first place a person goes for information on Linux."

Zemlin said reaching out to enterprise users is a key goal. "We want to enable the folks in the enterprise trenches to find out about how to solve technical problems, where to get support or provide peer review of Linux software and hardware. With the focus on Linux users, we're looking to address their specific requirements from a community of peers, both users and developers."

One of the most striking features of the site is its "guru" listing, which the Foundation designed to showcase the skills of top Linux developers. To motivate participation, the site is running an "Ultimate Linux Guru" contest, the winner of which gets a Linux notebook signed by Linus Torvalds. Zemlin said the Foundation will invite the top five contributors to Linux.com to the annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. And the top 50 Linux gurus will be recognized in a yearly report.

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, openSUSE community manager at Novel, welcomed the site. "I'm glad that the site is in the hands of a neutral party that's interested in promoting Linux itself, rather than a specific distro or vendor, and building community," he said. "We need a community watering hole where everyone goes to share information about Linux and learn more about Linux itself and the various vendors and distros."

Brockmeier hopes that as the site evolves, it will include strong white papers and case studies that inform businesses about deploying Linux, as well as more guides for those moving applications to Linux.

"I'd like to see some strong content on what to use to replace popular applications," he said, "and not just a list of 'use application X to replace application Y' but actual guidance on switching to the new apps."

Microsoft's Oslo CTP Includes First Look at Quadrant

By Jeffrey Schwartz05/29/2009

Microsoft this week released a new community technology preview (CTP) of its modeling environment code-named "Oslo." The latest CTP includes a new software development kit (SDK) with runtime and provides the first public look at Quadrant, the tool intended to provide visual browsing of models.

Oslo is the model-driven development platform that runs on a SQL Server 2008 repository under development by Microsoft. The first CTP was released at last year's Professional Developers Conference. Microsoft has since issued two other CTPs. As reported in a March interview with Kris Horrocks, senior product manager for Microsoft's developer platform team, Oslo will be part of Visual Studio 2010, which was also released to beta last week.

"In theory, Oslo will bring programming in one layer of abstraction closer to the user and the user's intent," said Stephen Forte, chief strategy officer at Telerik, who has spent the past few days testing the new Oslo CTP. "It's a great vision and I hope Microsoft completes that vision. They are doing a good job so far."

In addition to some updates to Oslo's "M" language for defining domain models (including domain-specific languages, or DSLs) and productivity fixes aimed at improving how developers work with the language, the first preview of Quadrant is a key component of the new CTP. Quadrant is the data visualization tooling that allows for the browsing of the Oslo repository.

Quadrant effectively is a separate shell, Horrocks said in the interview. "We are working in close concert with our Visual Studio team...to understand what the experience needs to be for our customers who are doing some modeling in the DSL Toolkit and some in Oslo," Horrocks said.

"What's interesting about the tool is now you can put things into the repository and you now have the ability to view them graphically as opposed to just using command lines or SQL statements," Forte said. "It's obviously in an early form but it looks pretty good. You can really work with your application data and metadata much better."

Another noteworthy addition to the CTP is the M editor, called Intellipad, Forte said, because it allows him to compile his DSLs created in M into the image files rather than having to use a command line interface.

"You can actually author M in Visual Studio much easier now with this SDK," Forte said. "You could in the past but integration is even tighter. For example, if you create and end the project in Visual Studio, you can now open that same M project in Intellipad, which you weren't able to do before. So the tooling definitely interoperates nicely."

Microsoft posted release notes at its Oslo Developer Center portal. The CTP is available for download here.

Microsoft's Bing Search Engine Unveiled

By Kurt Mackie05/28/2009

Microsoft announced "Bing" on Thursday, the company's newest search engine technology and brand campaign.

The consumer-oriented Bing search portal will "begin to roll out over the coming days," according to Microsoft's announcement, but it will be available worldwide on June 3 at http://www.bing.com.

Microsoft has been considering various branding alternatives to its current Live Search solution for many months. The Bing name was picked for various marketing reasons, according to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO.

"I'm not the creative guy, here…short mattered…people like to 'verb up'…works globally, doesn’t have negative connotations," Ballmer explained, in an interview at the All Things D event, which is being held this week in Carlsbad, Calif.

Fevered speculation about the new search brand seemed to center on the "Kumo" name, but that turned out to be an intentional marketing diversion. Even Microsoft's own employees were misled.

"Microsoft employees are redirected to Kumo automatically whenever we opened up a Live Search while connected to the corporate network," a Microsoft blog explained.

Another Microsoft blogger explained the Bing name as based on a so-called recursive acronym. "In my personal opinion, BING = Bing Is Not Google," the blogger wrote.

Google currently holds the No. 1 position in terms of online search engine use, with a 64 percent market share, according to April comScore estimates. Yahoo places second with a 20 percent share, and Microsoft trails in third place with about eight percent search use.

Microsoft's spending on search technology has been showing up regularly in its quarterly reports as an expense drain. Ballmer said at the All Things D event that Microsoft plans to invest "lots" of money on the Bing branding effort. A report by Advertising Age quantified that amount, suggesting that Microsoft would allocate "$80 million to $100 million" on promoting the Bing brand.

Previously, Microsoft had tried to increase its search marketing share by offering to buy Yahoo. Microsoft has since dropped that bid, but Microsoft officials still talk about establishing some sort of search deal with Yahoo. However, the All Things D event failed to generate any such news about an impending deal. Yahoo's CEO Carol Bartz noted at the event that a Yahoo acquisition by Microsoft would only be possible with a "boatload of money."

Bing may turn out to be just one project in Microsoft's overall efforts to catch up with Google on search. Other technologies besides Kumo (now Bing) are under development, according to Mike Nichols, Microsoft's general manager of Live Search.

"We're testing, not just in the Kumo test, but in all kinds of top-secret prototypes that I can't tell you about, all kinds of ways to address these and other opportunities," Nichols said in an interview.

Another change that will happen with the Bing release is that Redmond's online mapping application, Microsoft Virtual Earth, will get rebranded as "Bing Maps for Enterprise," according to a Microsoft blog. The consumer mapping version, called Microsoft Live Search Maps, will be renamed as "Bing Maps."

One user who tested Bing for a week described Bing as a sort of portal page that you stay on after searching. Microsoft's announcement makes the point of calling Bing a "decision engine" rather than a search engine. Some of the features seem to bear out that description. For instance, Bing has an "explore pane" that sits at the left of the screen and provides additional links to help filter search results. A Quick Preview feature lets users hover over a search result to peek at the site's content without actually going there.

Microsoft describes more of Bing's new search features at its portal page. However, in keeping with Bing's consumer focus, Microsoft will continue the "cashback" program that's currently part of Live Search. Cashback provides discounts to buyers when they use the search engine to buy products. Microsoft had hoped to kill off the popularity of Google's search engine with cashback, but Google still leads in search market share by a wide margin.

Despite Hoopla At WWDC, Apple Offers Incremental Extras For Enterprise Developers

By John K. Waters06/09/2009

With Apple Inc. refreshing its iPhone line and Macintosh platform this week at its Worldwide Developer Conference, the company is continuing its incremental efforts to make its offerings appeal to enterprises.

The new iPhones and upgraded Macintosh client and server offerings unveiled at the WWDC in San Francisco on Monday offer some noteworthy, though modest new capabilities for enterprise developers and IT managers. But because of their large consumer appeal -- Apple said it has sold 40 million iPhones -- enterprises cannot ignore what comes from the Cupertino, Calif.-based company.

Perhaps most noteworthy to enterprises, the newest releases offer improved connectivity to Microsoft's Exchange Server. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, due in September, will include native support for Microsoft Exchange through ActiveSync. The feature makes it possible to use Apple's Mail client or Microsoft's Entourage client with Exchange 2007 Server without the IMAP restrictions. Because Exchange is the most widely deployed messaging and collaboration platform, enterprises are reluctant to support mobile devices that don't interoperate with it.

Apple added native Exchange support to the iPhone about a year ago, also via ActiveSync. That upgrade also included remote kill capabilities and some other Exchange-oriented management features. When the newly launched iPhone OS 3.0 debuts later this month, it will offer some additional business-oriented security features, including hardware encryption capabilities, and the ability to wipe out all data from a device if it is lost or stolen.

''These are features and capabilities that consumers really don't care about [but IT managers do],'' said Michael Gartenberg, VP of strategy and analysis at Interpret, LLC, a market research firm. ''One of the last complaints from the enterprise has been a lack of good Exchange clients for Mac OS, and they're fixing that with Snow Leopard.''

The company also released a developer preview of Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server, the next major release of its server platform, due in September. It's built on a full 64-bit UNIX server OS, and based on open standards, Apple said. It comes with features aimed at developers, such as Podcast Producer 2, for automating the creation and publication of podcasts, and Mobile Access Server, which provides secure access to firewall-protected network services for iPhone and Mac machines.

Apple's release of an upgraded Macintosh client platform comes as Microsoft is set to release Windows 7, which the company said will be released October 22 . Apple is hoping this will give pause to those enterprises faced with the eventual loss of support for Windows XP. ''The upcoming release of Windows 7 represents a huge inflection point,'' Gartenberg said, ''because Microsoft has said you really can't stay on XP any more. Given the cost of OS migrations in the enterprise, which often represent not just the cost of an operating system, but acquisition of new hardware, I suspect that Apple is hoping that businesses will say, 'if we're going to be pushed off XP as a platform, perhaps it's worth looking at all the platforms that are business friendly.' I think we're going to see Apple targeting those enterprises.''

It's a target few anticipate Apple will hit in a large way. Macintosh-based systems represent a small sliver of computers used by enterprises, and there's no evidence that that will change. What continues to stymie Apple's enterprise goals is good examples of Apple-based enterprise applications, said Bola Rotibi, principal analyst at Macehiter Ward-Dutton,

''Apple is showing some impressive features and capabilities, and some good developer support with SDKs and APIs, to be sure,'' Rotibi said. ''And I agree that the company has got the enterprise in its sights. But the question is: where are the big enterprise apps? Where are the big companies making a commitment to the Mac platform? In the enterprise, we're still talking .NET and Java.''

In an ideal world, businesses would adopt the best machine for a given job, Rotibi said. ''Then I think Microsoft would have something serious to worry about. But that's not what we see, usually. Apple still has a pretty wide perception chasm to get across to impact the enterprise. Which is not to say that they can't cross that gap. But there have been plenty of good technologies that didn't make the jump.''

Still, Gartenberg said, the momentum of iPhone adoption and the subsequent inroads it's making into the enterprise are likely to move Apple's platforms toward greater acceptance by business. ''Once you had the Exchange support for the iPhone, you started to see executives becoming fans of the device,'' said Gartenberg. ''That led to them buying MacBooks and bringing them into the company to do their work. And when a senior vice president of the company brings a MacBook into the office, hands it to the CIO, and says make it work, it's now a business machine whether IT likes it or not. That's going to impact enterprise developers.''