Tech Pulse

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) violated patent rules by using Linux in its backend servers.

2011-04-23T21:02:00.000-07:00

A number of software giants who are using Linux kernels from different providers without owning the proper rights are expected to face patent violation issues in future.
The jury said that Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) violated patent rules by using Linux in its backend servers. The search giant has been ordered to pay an amount of $5 million to Bedrock Computer Technologies, a Texas based small business. This may be the beginning of many future disputes.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) company shares are currently standing at 525.1.

Has Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) entered healthcare sector too?

2011-04-21T22:28:00.000-07:00

Has the search giant Google unwittingly entered the health care sector?

I visited the doctor recently to seek medical advise and the doctor said that I can find a lot of health related information on Google. I am not sure if the doctor was trying to impress me with his knowledge of the IT world or he was simply too lazy to provide with good advice. No matter what his reasons were - healthcare providers are turning to the web to provide more information related advise.

Recently, I have received invites from my friends to join this new social networking site which provides health advise. Visit http://www.livehealthclub.com/ to find out more. Surely, health concierge services are on the rise and it may not surprise me that Google with its huge reputation may extend its dominance to this sector through a variety of partners.

Needless to say, what the doctor meant was that the information was readily available in the World Wide Web rather than on Google. What this basically means is that Google will continue to extend its dominance into other sectors and coner stone its competitors.

HP (NYSE: HPQ) Poised To Capitalize On Apple, Amazon Lessons

2011-04-19T19:28:00.000-07:00

HP’s new CEO, Leo Apotheker, sees the broad pattern that Apple represents and seems to position HP (NYSE:HPQ) to do what Apple did — both in the enterprise and consumer business. A distinct departure from Mark Hurd.

HP is well positioned to be a dominant player in the cloud space with an assortment of partnerships from software vendors, ISPs and other service providers

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) downgraded to Neutral from Buy

2011-04-19T07:23:00.000-07:00

Nomura expects Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) to guide Q2 below Street estimates given weak PC demand and for enterprise PC and server demand to moderate in 2H11. Price target lowered to $22 from $27.

Intel (NASDAG: INTC) Talks About Itanium and Xeon E5 CPUs

2011-04-19T00:36:00.000-07:00

Just before this year's Beijing Intel Developers Forum closed its gates, the Santa Clara chip giant held one last keynote which reaffirmed the company's support for the Itanium architecture as well as the Q4 release of the first Xeon E5 processors.

During the presentation, Intel (NASDAG: INTC) admitted that its Xeon processors have come to catch up, and even surpass, Itanium in terms of reliability and performance, but the company still believes there is a place for this chip in the server world.

This is true especially for customers who need to run HP-UX (NYSE:HPQ), OpenVMS, HP NonStop and other mainframe operating systems that have full support for the Itanium architecture.

In addition, although the Itanium market represents only a fragment of the total x86 server shipments, this still accounts for about $4 billion US, which is considerably more than AMD's (NYSE:AMD) share of the same market segment.

“The Tukwila product is on the market place now, Poulson will double the performance [of Itanium product line in 2012] and we have the Kittson in development.

“But now Xeon is in the space when there is no workload on the planet that Xeon cannot handle,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president of the Intel architecture group and general manager of Intel's data center group.

Poulson is Intel's first processor to feature more than 3.1 billion transistors, occupies a die area of 544mm2 and, during the keynote, Intel even presented a wafer that featured the new chips.
In addition to Itanium, Intel also wanted to reassure everyone that all is in order with its upcoming Xeon E5 processors and that these will be available by the end of the year.
The Xeon E5 CPUs are based on the Sandy Bridge EP architecture, feature up to eight processing cores and are targeting multi-socket servers. (via Computer Base)

HP (NYSE:HPQ) poised to take market share from Apple’s (NASDAQ:APPL) iTunes

2011-04-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

PreCentral is reporting that HP (NYSE:HPQ) has sent VIP contacts a PowerPoint presentation which details features and functions being developed for the HP TouchPad, Veer, and Pre 3. It turns out that in that presentation HP also unwittingly revealed its plans for a cloud-based music and movie service. The service will cache tunes most likely to be accessed by a user to their device and even let folks listen to tracks not yet purchased. Will HP beat Apple (NASDAQ:APPL) and Google to the punch? With HP’s widespread channels and distribution, it may just edge out some market share from Apple’s iTunes.

Intel Redeploys Itanium Engineers to Xeon Projects

2011-04-18T20:03:00.000-07:00

Intel Corp's (NASDAG: INTC) officially claims that Xeon processors may offer better level of performance and availability than the company's Itanium. According to people with alleged knowledge of the matter, Intel had been specifically reappointing engineers from the Itanium teams into development of Xeon central processing units (CPUs).

"Nearly all the Itanium engineers, save a small development team working on Poulson and then rotating over to Kittson, have been redeployed on Xeon-related projects," said person with knowledge of the situation, who wanted to remain anonymous.

At Protegesoft, we have migrated our flagship application Financial Portfolio Builder and have optimized it for the Xeon Chipset. With Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL) and RedHat (RHT) withdrawing their support for the Itanium architecture, the commercial viability for Itanium market is suspect.

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) chips away Intel’s (NASDAG: INTC) chip market share

2011-04-18T17:09:00.000-07:00

FOR many years, Moore's Law was regarded the sacred rule of information technology. It predicted that industry advances would require a doubling of chip capacity every 18 months.

The law was named after Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, who first postulated the idea in 1965. Unfortunately for Intel, the company paid too much attention to the law and too little attention to what was really going on in the consumer electronics world. Personal computers, the old industry standard, were becoming eclipsed by mobile Internet devices like tablets and smartphones that required a new kind of chips.

Intel officials attending the annual Intel Developer Forum held in Beijing last week admitted with some embarrassment that Moore's Law no longer holds true.

"It's a pity that we looked forward, but we acted at a slow pace," said Ian Yang, Intel China's president.

It was a remarkably frank admission from the world's biggest computer chip maker, a company that many think blew the opportunity to position itself early in the market for chips operating on mobile Internet devices. That market is now dominated by the likes of Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and ARM.

For past decades, Intel developed chips for computers and set market trends because of its huge market share and influential sway over the industry, The company captured around an 85 percent share of the computer chip market, especially after it developed products for netbooks - super mobility computers with basic Internet functions.

Moore's Law might have held true for Intel had not seen the tablet computer suddenly burst on the scene. When Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) launched its iPad globally last year, the industry framework changed dramatically - and not in a way favourable for Intel.

Compared with the traditional computer and the lightweight netbook, the iPad provides users a long battery life, touch screen and huge amount of online applications that add up to a popular user experience.

For the industry, it has boiled down to a battle between computing power and user experience, and Intel is finding itself on the wrong side of the trend.

Intel has focused its chip development on computing ability and now the firm isn't able to provide a chip with what is known as "good enough" power consumption for mobile devices.

"'Good-enough computing' has become a firm reality," said Jay Chou, an analyst at IDC, a research firm. "The real question PC vendors have to think hard about is how to enable a compelling user experience that can justify spending on the added horsepower."

In 2010, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) sold 15 million iPads. In the United States, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) 's mobile computer sales, including iPad and Mac laptops, have surpassed that of Hewlett-Packard, the world's No. 1 PC maker.

In the past two weeks, Lenovo, RIM, Motorola and other companies have launched their own tablet computers in China.

Acer was the latest to join them with a new line of tablet products unveiled last Friday. Most tablet products now feature ARM chip architecture and Qualcomm chips, though Apple uses its own chips. In short, Intel has been bypassed.

The popularity of tablets and even smartphones is hurting PC sales, a segment that Intel heavily depends on at present.

Global PC sales fell 1.1 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period last year, according to Gartner.

IDC estimates PC sales have fallen 3.2 percent because consumers are flocking to the newer mobile technologies.

The consumer wave has not only hit Intel but other industry players who put their faith in Moore's Law.

Source: Shanghai Daily

System Integrators are monolithic creatures soon to become relics in this fast changing world.

2011-04-16T23:23:00.000-07:00

You are not very smart if you’re running a Systems Integrator business or a professional services company. You either need to be super large global player (like Accenture), or a national icon (like Infosys) or you might as well get out of business. With project risks underwritten by large SI firms, the burden to deliver projects on time within budget is onerous. The perennial issue of project and scope creep is always there which erodes any profit margins, actual or imagined. And if you come from the old-school of giving the client superior customer service at any costs; it may really cost you an arm and a leg. Good luck!

Let’s face it – there is always someone who can deliver at a fraction of what it costs you internally. So it makes sense to outsource, right! Given the time, everybody gets it right anyway. Besides, your client knows someone, a niece or cousin or somebody who can do it within a week for next to nothing. Seriously, I do believe them – there are real people living in India, Vietnam, China, Ukraine or the Philippines who can do it at unbelievable prices. The difference is so vast, you will begin to start asking, what’s our obsession with superior client services or CMMi Level 5 and all that jazz. There is one business maxim – ‘Businesses seek optimal returns’.

If you a marginal player in the industry, you become the price taker. In fact, even the large players are not immune from this problem. It is a matter of time arbitragers equalise any price premiums in the market place. Get out before it’s too late.

In my next blog, I’ll discuss about where I think we are going to gravitate to in the near future. i.e. where the money is!

Free2move announces wireless sensor-logger for humidity & temperature monitoring Addresses requirements for monitoring of buildings, machinery and sensitive goods

2011-04-14T21:25:00.000-07:00

2011-04-15, Free2move Holdings AB

The Ison™ is a new member of Free2move’s FS800 family of ultra-low power wireless
sensor technologies with advanced sensor and logging capabilities. The sensor can
store up to 10,000 log-points with simultaneous humidity and temperature
measurements into its protected memory. Log-intervals are configurable and alert
threshold values are configurable. It is self-calibrating and maintenance free. In its
most advanced variant, it can provide battery life in excess of 30 years.
The small size of the Ison™ along with its wireless reporting of sensor data makes it
possible to conceal it within building structures, from where it can report humidity and
temperature variations. It may also be employed for the monitoring of warehouses,
transportation environment, healthcare, sports facilities as well as industrial
environments. Logged sensor data can be uploaded to USB, WiFi or LAN compliant
reading devices at a range of up to 100 metres (300 feet) in free air.
The Ison™ supports both on-demand reporting and alert reporting. On-demand
reports are mainly used for compliance verification and for statistical measurements.
Alert reports are used for operational rectification and preventive maintenance; for
instance to prevent dew-point issues in electrical installations.
“We are delighted that initial orders for the Ison™ have already been secured and the
product has started shipping”, says Martin Harnevie, Chief Executive of Free2move’s
RFID unit. “Strong interest has been received from the construction sector, marine
technology sectors, agriculture, consumer goods manufacturing, and healthcare.”
An evaluation and development kit for Ison™ is also available from Free2move.
About Free2move
There are two subsidiaries of Free2move Holding. Free2move AB is a global provider
of wireless audio communication products and Free2move Asia is a global provider of
wireless sensor and RFID technologies.

More information
For more information please see www.free2move.us. Or contact Martin Harnevie, +60
19 312 9026, martin@free2move.us or Per-Arne Wiberg, +46 702 20 33 82, perarne.
wiberg@free2move.se.

Intel press releases confirm Itanium roadmap committed

2011-03-28T17:22:00.000-07:00

Intel press releases confirm Itanium roadmap committed

Oracle’s press release dated March 22nd stated “..Itanium was nearing the end of its life”. Really?

I would like to share Intel’s press releases for those of our readers whom have not seen the recent announcements.

On Feb 17 (only five weeks prior to Oracle’s statement above), Intel released Poulson, offering 3.1 billion transistors, the most of any current microprocessor, to advance the Itanium architecture for the next decade of mission-critical computing. Here is the fact sheet and Intel contact information
Intel further positions the Itanium roadmap in the press release on March 23. Kittson is an officially committed roadmap product for Itanium beyond Poulson and is also in active development.

Interestingly though, HP Integrity has the #1 market share in Singapore. Read my blog at http://bit.ly/eaUdqj and it is disappointing to learn that Oracle will no longer be releasing new versions on the Itanium platforms. There are alternatives, and it may be worth porting the apps and databases to DB2.

One thing I would like to state is that the Itanium has earned a reputation as a good DB workhorse and in fact I came across several entries when I was judging the finalist for the ISA Award 2010 - one of the telecom operators had migrated from SPARC to Itanium and reduced the number of servers and CPUs and even managed to increase the throughput at the same time.

The Itanium chipset still has a great price-performance value proposition from a server point of view and I am glad that Intel is committed to the Itanium roadmap.

HP (NYSE:HPQ) Integrity Systems #1 in Market Share

2011-03-28T03:07:00.000-07:00

HP Integrity Servers has claimed the No. 1 spot in the Singapore UNIX market based on the IDC Q4 CY10 data!
At 40.7% market share in Q4, we are experiencing a 13.7% Year on Year 4Q share growth vs. CY2009!

HP continues to drive better price-performance ratio for business critical servers.

The Quality Continuum

2010-10-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

Software quality, unlike beauty, can be measured and quantified. There are basic tenets in place - like maintainability, portability, scalability and so on. Somehow that notion has been completely replaced by over emphasizing on the form rather than the substance. What do I mean by this?

I was recently involved in a project executed by a CMMi level 5 company. The code was written in 2008/9 and the project went live in June 2009. In March this year the client wanted to do some enhancement work on the system. I was asked to come and look at the overall architecture of the system.

What was startling was that this project was executed by one of the largest and most prestigious IT vendors from where I am from. To start with, the program was delivered in 2009 with many bugs, had 13 *.sln files within a single system, 7 databases and 17 web-service solutions. My first reaction was - what is going on?

Soon I realized what the true problem was, the Internal QA was obsessed with the Project Management Plan ("PMP"), the Project Manager was scrutinizing the schedule to the last detail and the users were obsessing over the specification and nobody actually bothered with the real fundamentals - building software solutions that actually work.

While it is great to have a quality process in place - it is an unforgivable sin to compromise on the basics - code quality and design principals. The lesson learnt is that improvements in the maturity models such as CMM or CMMi's without corresponding improvements in the software quality assurance process can be counter productive.

Ironically, improving the process of poor coding standards makes the software quality unbearably lousy.

One of my first year University books was entitled, "The Arts and Science of Programming." Now, would you put Da Vinci through the CMMi process? I guess not....

Migration from legacy systems

2010-05-21T22:57:00.000-07:00

I was recently on the panel of judges for the Itanium Solutions Award 2010. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of submissions for the Data Center Modernization award this year.

As all the finalist were of very high standards, and since all brought out the value of their Itanium deployment, I was looking out for a differentiator that would set them apart. Generally, I used the additional guidelines below:

- Improvements in processing power
- Reduction in CPU utilization running the same apps on the legacy vs the Itanium
- Reduction in the number of CPUs running the same apps on the legacy vs the Itanium
- Direct cost savings as a result (licenses, etc)
- Improvements in the management of the data center
- Ease of partitioning
- Ability to scale the database efficiently.
- Ability to migrate / upgrade the servers without impacting the business through minimal downtime.

I congratulate all the Finalists and Winners of ISA Award 2010

Optimising .NET Applications on Itanium

2009-04-11T21:49:00.001-07:00

Optimizing financial portfolios is both mission and time critical and the user does not have the luxury of waiting for the application to churn out data over long time periods. The modern portfolio optimization techniques use historical prices as the basis to compute risk and returns. This method of optimization uses voluminous data and it is also compute intensive as it needs to find the most optimal investment portfolio configuration in a given vector. The problem is further compounded when the investment time horizon or the portfolio size increases.

To address this issue, the team at Protegesoft used two simple approaches: (1) cache critical secondary data in memory through data structures and (2) to hyper-thread sections of codes to improve processing time.

Both Intel and HP offer many tools to optimize code for Itanium based servers on their native compilers. On the other hand, there are fewer options available for .NET based applications. The key thing to remember is that Itanium is a 64bit architecture allowing applications to access in excess of 4MB of memory. .NET framework permits hyper-threading which is Microsoft’s implementation of parallelism. Hyper-threading works both on Xeon and Itanium chipsets.

The way to attaining optimal application performance is first to ascertain the objective of the program. In our case, we were looking for optimal portfolio configuration in a given vector. Linear algorithms were too time-consuming as it performs an exhaustive search. Quadratic and logarithmic algorithms offer much faster solutions to the problem.

Back to basics
Visual Studio is an excellent RAD (Rapid Application Development) environment. However, typical .NET applications are closely coupled with the database. At Protegesoft, we departed from the norm to encapsulate business and other financial portfolio functions in class libraries. Caching was also used extensively to reduce the incidence of select statements from databases. In order to cache the data in memory, we used data structures to store critical secondary data that was frequently accessed to speed up fetch operations. This improved performance of the application dramatically.

Second, we optimized frequently used portions of code. This also meant that dead code was removed and we also checked the efficiency of inner and outer loop. In some cases, a ‘Parallel For’ was used instead of a normal ‘for’ loop.

There are also other optimizing techniques discussed for mission critical applications. For more information:

Introduction to Microarchitectural Optimization for Itanium® 2 Processors:
http://cache-www.intel.com/cd/00/00/21/93/219348_software_optimization.pdf

Optimizing Itanium Based Applications
http://h21007.www2.hp.com/portal/download/files/unprot/Itanium/OptimizingApps-ItaniumV9-1.pdf

protegesoft

IDA Success Story: Protegesoft Wins Global ISA Award

2009-04-06T22:06:00.000-07:00

Two of the three Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards for 2008 were awarded to HP Developer & Solution Partner Program (DSPP) Member companies. Protégésoft won the award for Enterprise Business Application achievement and S7 Software Solutions was recognised for Entrepreneurial Innovation. A third award went to the University of Houston's bioinformatics research team for Humanitarian Impact. The Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards program recognises innovation and achievement using Intel® Itanium® processor technology to solve complex humanitarian, business and entrepreneurial challenges.
The Enterprise Business Application category awards the creative use of applications that use the benefits of the Intel Itanium architecture to produce either hard business results (such as cost savings and ROI) or soft business impact (including customer satisfaction and new product development). Winner Protégésoft replaced outdated and cumbersome legacy systems with HP Integrity to take advantage of features in their new Financial Portfolio Builder (FPB). FPB is a comprehensive financial investment system that runs on four-way HP Integrity servers running Microsoft Windows Server 2003. FPB supports the entire spectrum of portfolio management. It includes account setup and maintenance, investment allocation, monitoring and dynamic rebalancing, reporting and more -- all on a single unified platform. Using this tool, clients of investment banks achieved annualised portfolio returns of more than 22 percent with an efficiency of almost 30,000 times faster than the conventional method.

For full article: http://www.ida.gov.sg/Infocomm%20Industry/20080610113750.aspx

ROI, cost-savings, with Protégé’s financial software

2009-03-31T18:52:00.000-07:00

Protégé’s application serves banks and financial institutions

June 2008: Singapore software developer Protégé has won the Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards for 2008 for Enterprise Business Application achievement.
Protégé was one of three award winners. The others were S7 Software Solutions for Entrepreneurial Innovation, and the University of Houston's bioinformatics research team for Humanitarian Impact.

The Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards programme recognises innovation and achievement using Intel Itanium processor technology to solve complex humanitarian, business and entrepreneurial challenges.

Read full article at http://www.singaporeinfocomm.sg/home/index.php/web/success_stories/roi_cost_savings_with_protege_s_financial_software

Can tech companies survive this downturn?

2009-03-26T06:13:00.000-07:00

The news is all over the wire about the possible acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM. The sun is not only setting for Sun Microsystems, it seems to be going down for other well known brands as well. One of those listed by the Channel Insider 2009 Survey is AMD.

In another blog by Joan Jacobs of the Itanium Solutions Alliance, http://blog.itaniumsolutions.org/2009/03/a-big-blue-sun/; she speaks about how this merger would be reducing the choices of microprocessor for the mainframe architecture.

Coming out of this recession, we are going to see much stronger and larger firms in the tech arena. The weaker ones will either be left behind, acquired at deflated capitalizations or will simply vanish.

The companies that survive will be good candidates for acquisition and will have better valuations because they would have figured out ways of ridding out the recession and would have put in place revenue and business models that are not only recession proof but viable beyond the current economic malaise. Follow the link below:

Based on Channel Insider 2009 Market Pulse Survey, they have predicted that more tech companies will go out of business. Check out this link. http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/News/Dire-Predictions-Tech-Vendors-That-May-Not-Survive-2009/

Hyperthread Benchmarks on Itanium Servers

2009-03-24T01:55:00.000-07:00

There is so much debate about this topic that I thought I should add to this about my experience.

We did a benchmark tests on a similar sized machines on a HP and Fujitsu Itanium Servers. The configurations were similar as both were running Windows Server 2003 IA64 Edition. HP seemed to give better performance with Hyperthreading turned ON while Fujitsu gave better performance with Hyperthreading turned OFF. However, it is important to note that the differences were only marginally different.

Please note that these benchmark results are specific to Protege's applications. You may have a different set of results with your own applications. The best advise I can give is to have your applications tested by HP and other vendors to see whether hyperthreads work for you.

Windows IA64 on Itanium Servers

2009-03-23T06:42:00.000-07:00

Itanium architecture supports the popular operating system Windows Server. You will need to install Windows Server IA64 Edition. It is a 64bit Operating System and supports the popular MS SQL Server.

MS Biztalk, MS Office and other Microsoft Applications may have compatability issues with Itanium based servers running on Windows IA64 Edition.

Depending on how your application was written, you will need to either turn the hyperthread as on or off. Do a proper benchmark tests with both scenarios.

As a rule of the thumb, leave it to the OS to manage the hyperthreads in your application. Only is very rare occassions that you will have to manage the hyperthreads yourself.

Do provide me with some feedback on how your applications performed on X64 and IA64 platforms.

Why Itanium?

2009-03-22T06:48:00.000-07:00

I get this question all the time - Why Itanium and why not Xeon?

It all depends on the kind of application you're running. Itanium based servers give better compute power over Xeon based servers. While Xeon based servers gives good price performance for data intensive applications.

Most of your .NET applications run on the Itanium chip set without much modification. So the effort is really not intensive. You can develop the application in a 32bit environment and recompile it in a 64bit - this way you can save alot on your development environment.

As far as I know, there are some compatibility issues, but there is no need to sweat over it!!!

Itaniun Solutions Award

2009-03-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

I have been involved with ISA for the last four to five years and I must confess that it is the most rewarding journey of my career. I was introduced to the Itanium platform through HP back in 2004 and I didn't think much of it back then. It was only after HP had shipped an Integrity Server (Itanium) that I started to doodle with this machine. It was quite daunting in the begining but we soon learned that this puppy could really run!!! The performance was simply amazing.

We build several apps over the next few years - the most successful was of course the Financial Portfolio Builder, which optimized stock and bond portfolios dynamically. You can read more about the application on my website at http://www.protegesoft.com/ Winning the award was not only a personal achievement but it gave us better recognition in the industry and opened more doors.