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Database.com: nice name, shame about the platform

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 07:44:00 -0800

Guest post When Salesforce.com announced its database-in-the-cloud service, Database.com, at Dreamforce last month, I suggested smaller PaaS vendors might get squished. Unsurprisingly, those who read my remarkswere none too pleased. Matt McAdams, CEO of TrackVia, was so incensed he sat down and wrote the following, which in the interests of balance, I’ve agreed to publish as a guest post.

Last month Salesforce.com announced its new cloud database service, called Database.com. Or rather, the vendor pre-announced it — it’s not actually available yet, and won’t be until an undisclosed date in 2011. When it is available, it will be a minor addition to the database-as-a-service (DaaS) market, but clearly inferior to other existing offerings.

If you dig beneath the PR spin and examine the technical details published at Database.com, you’ll realize this is not new technology. Rather, Salesforce.com is making the existing database that currently underlies its CRM and Force.com platforms accessible to subscribers who don’t have accounts on one of those two platforms. The target audience is programmers who want to build an application outside of Force.com, but want a hosted database.

Unfortunately, web application developers will find the idea of hosting their data outside their application platform severely unappealing. The reason is latency.

In any web application, when a user clicks a button in the web app, an HTTP or AJAX request is sent across the public Internet to wherever the app code is hosted. Salesforce.com suggests this could be in Google’s AppEngine, Microsoft’s Azure, or Amazon’s EC2, among others. The app code then consults the database to retrieve information, usually a half-dozen or more times, and the resulting HTML or JSON response is sent back across the public Internet to the user’s browser. If the database and the application code are in the same location, then only two public Internet traversals are required to complete the request. If the database and the application code are in different locations, then more than a dozen public Internet traversals are required to complete the request.

Since these traversals are usually the bulk of the wait time for any web app, the app built on Amazon but storing data in Database.com will run at perhaps one tenth the speed (that is, page loads will take ten times longer) than a web app whose code and data are collocated. It’s a non-starter.

The conclusion is, people building apps on Google, Amazon or Azure will use those platforms’ native, local database services. People who use Force.com (or VMForce or Heroku) will use Database.com, but they already do — there’s nothing new there.

Database.com will do better with developers of mobile apps, which contain the user interface and the app code in the same bundle. For mobile apps that need to store data remotely (for example to sync data across devices), Database.com won’t have a latency disadvantage over any other cloud DB. However, in this scenario, Database.com has a different, equally severe disadvantage: it doesn’t support structured query language, or SQL.

Despite the buzz the contrarian no-SQL movement has been getting, the fact is the vast majority of apps and app developers still use relational databases that support SQL. Database.com doesn’t, at least not without the purchase of third-party drivers. Nor does it support cross-table joins, a bread-and-butter query type for any non-trivial app. So Database.com is inferior to other DaaS offerings that do support SQL and joins, like Amazon’s Relational Database Service, FathomDB, or Xeround.

This doesn’t mean that Database.com is without anything innovative. The visual schema designer looks slick. Also cool is the integrated permission feature, in which a user ID can be included in a query, and the rows returned are automatically filtered to only include those the user should have permission to see. More puzzling is the feature that provides a social feed of data rows changed; this is technically cool, but the actual value of sending feed updates on a row-by-row basis from the database instead of from the application layer is a head-scratcher.

The bigger criticism applies to all DaaS offerings, and it’s this: they’re solving the wrong problem. Making databases more accessible to programmers who already know how to use databases is nice and all, but how about making databases more accessible to business users? Why not let non-programmers build web apps without writing code? To do this, Database.com would have to include things that Salesforce.com discloses explicitly are not part of the platform: page layout tools, reports, dashboards, and so on. These can be built with Force.com, but using Force.com requires programming knowledge.

It seems to me the more innovative cloud DB players are the companies providing a cloud database with a complete, integrated app development platform that requires no coding, only point-and-click configuration. These platforms, like TrackVia (the author’s company) or Intuit’s QuickBase, are doing more to change how cloud apps get built than the better-known DaaS vendors are.

In summary, Database.com promises a few interesting features, but it’s hard to see why it’s a better platform than existing offerings. It’s certainly not going to put Oracle out of business. The best part may be the domain name.

Redbox: Scaling down financial estimates doesn't change bullish outlook

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 07:44:00 -0800

Wall Street is keeping closer tabs on Coinstar, the company behind the RedBox DVD kiosks, after the company said that it would miss its Q4 and 2011 forecasts when it reports earnings later this month.

In a statement issued yesterday, the company put the blame on three miscues:

The company expected better results from the holiday releases
The demand for new releases never really materialized
Customers used the company’s “rent and return anywhere” service to heart, creating “temporary imbalances in available titles across the kiosk network.”

In other words, there was some pretty poor planning on the management side.

That’s one of the reasons that Wall Street remains bullish on Coinstar today, according to analyst notes highlighted on Barron’s Tech Trader Daily blog. This isn’t a case of the business model suddenly crumbling. This is a case of Coinstar making some bad business decisions. In a statement, Coinstar CEO Paul Davis said:

We have already taken a number of decisive steps to better align content purchases with our consumers’ behavior, including offering more day and date titles and better allocating Blu-ray titles to high demand areas. In addition, since inventory migration reflects the popularity of our rent and return anywhere capability, we have made adjustments in our field processes to minimize the impact of higher levels of migration on overall rentals. While some measures such as changes in purchasing take longer to impact financial performance, early results give us confidence that we have begun taking the right steps to address these issues and position the business for further success.

The positive outlook for the business model is helping to maintain a bullish outlook for analyst. Wedbush Securities analyst David Pachter, for example, reiterated his Outperform rating and said he thinks the miss for Q4 was due to “overly aggressive guidance.”

Piper Jaffray’s Michael Olson also saw the miss as a “function of inventory management, also noting that “the real question is whether the DVD kiosk story is over, and our take is that kiosks will continue to gain share over the next couple of years.”

Until streaming models take over in the new world of Connected TV, DVD rentals will continue to be a brisk business, especially for those without the overhead of brick-and-mortar locations and employees to staff those stores.

MSI rolls out four new F Series laptops; Intel Core CPUs, THX TruStudio sound

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 07:44:00 -0800

MSI recently introduced new laptops from its F Series at CES 2011, and now we have four new models to look over from the same collection.

All four of these new notebooks sport an anti-fingerprint texture, THX TruStudio Pro Surround Sound technology, and MSI’s signature Turbo Boost Drive for improved speed and performance in gaming, video playback and more.

Here’s a breakdown on the rest of the specs:

FX700

17.3-inch display
Intel Core i5-480 processor
NVIDIA GeForce GT425M graphics card with DDR3 1G VRAM
NVIDIA PhysX, NVIDIA 3D Vision, and NVIDIA Optimus technologies
Dynaudio premium sound technology
Two USB 3.0 ports

FX603

15.6-inch display
Intel Core i5-480 processor
NVIDIA GeForce GT425M graphics card with DDR3 1G VRAM
NVIDIA PhysX, NVIDIA 3D Vision, and NVIDIA Optimus technologies
Dynaudio premium sound technology
Two USB 3.0 ports

FX400-062US

14-inch display
Intel Core i5-480 processor
NVIDIA GeForce GT325M graphics card
MSI Power eSATA ports

FX400-063US

14-inch display
Intel Core i3-380 processor
NVIDIA GeForce GT325M graphics card
MSI Power eSATA ports

Pricing ranges from $849.99 – $1,049.99. The FX400-063US, the FX400-062US, and the FX603-019US are all available from Newegg and Amazon, while the FX700 is being sold exclusively by MSI Mobile.

Virginia based CSC outbids HCL for $600 Million ArcelorMittal IT deal

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 07:44:00 -0800

In a deal considered as one of Europe’s biggest IT contracts, steel conglomerate ArcelorMittal will be upgrading their IT infrastructure. Priced at $600 Million, the 5 year contract to consolidate the steel giant’s IT systems across Europe was closely competed.

Global heavyweights in the field such as IBM, HP, Capgemini were bidding along with Computer Science Corporation (CSC), Wipro and HCL. Earlier rumors placed Wipro as the front runner since Wipro was already in a 5 year contract with ArcelorMittal working on unifying their messaging systems. However, it came down to HCL and CSC in the end with CSC outbidding HCL.

CSC has close to 25,000 employees in India and quite a bit of the new ArcelorMittal contract is expected to be done in India. CEO of Outsourcing and Investment advisory firm Tholons, Avinash Vashishtha gave a few reasons as to why CSC is a better choice for Arcelor Mittal:

CSC’s presence in Europe helps them navigate through the outsourcing laws which HCL cannot.
CSC will be able to provide packaged solutions for applications development whereas HCL will have to develop applications specifically for ArcelorMittal.

According to Avinash Vashishtha, it will cost CSC less compared to HCL for deploying these systems. As part of the contract, CSC will be maintaining ArcelorMittal’s data centers to increase efficiency. ArcelorMittal is expected to reduce costs by upto 20-30% once the systems are in place.

Google pays $14,000 for high-risk Chrome security holes

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 07:43:00 -0800

Google has shelled out more than $14,000 in rewards for critical and high-risk vulnerabilities affecting its flagship Chrome web browser.

The latest Google Chrome 8.0.552.237, available for all platforms, patches a total of 16 documented vulnerabilties, including one critical bug for which Google paid the first elite $3133.7 award to researcher Sergey Glazunov.

“Critical bugs are harder to come by in Chrome, but Sergey has done it,” says Google’s Jerome Kersey. “Sergey also collects a $1337 reward and several other rewards at the same time, so congratulations Sergey!,” he added.

Here are the details on the latest Chrome patch batch.

[58053] Medium Risk: Browser crash in extensions notification handling. Credit to Eric Roman of the Chromium development community.
[$1337] [65764] High Risk: Bad pointer handling in node iteration.Credit to Sergey Glazunov.
[66334] High Crashes when printing multi-page PDFs. Credit to Google Chrome Security Team (Chris Evans).
[$1000] [66560] High Risk: Stale pointer with CSS + canvas. Credit to Sergey Glazunov.
[$500] [66748] High Risk: Stale pointer with CSS + cursors. Credit to Jan Tošovský.
[67100] High Risk: Use after free in PDF page handling. Credit to Google Chrome Security Team (Chris Evans).
[$1000] [67208] High Risk: Stack corruption after PDF out-of-memory condition. Credit to Jared Allar of CERT.
[$1000] [67303] High Bad memory access with mismatched video frame sizes. Credit to Aki Helin of OUSPG; plus independent discovery by Google Chrome Security Team (SkyLined) and David Warren of CERT.
[$500] [67363] High Risk: Stale pointer with SVG use element.Credited anonymously; plus indepdent discovery by miaubiz.
[$1000] [67393] Medium Risk: Uninitialized pointer in the browser triggered by rogue extension. Credit to kuzzcc.
[$1000] [68115] High Risk: Vorbis decoder buffer overflows. Credit to David Warren of CERT.
[$1000] [68170] High Risk: Buffer overflow in PDF shading. Credit to Aki Helin of OUSPG.
[$1000] [68178] High Risk: Bad cast in anchor handling. Credit to Sergey Glazunov.
[$1000] [68181] High Risk: Bad cast in video handling. Credit to Sergey Glazunov.
[$1000] [68439] High Risk: Stale rendering node after DOM node removal. Credit to Martin Barbella; plus independent discovery by Google Chrome Security Team (SkyLined).
[$3133.7] [68666] Critical: Stale pointer in speech handling. Credit to Sergey Glazunov.

Google is withholding technical details on the vulnerabilities until the patches are released to its users. Google ships updates via the browser’s silent/automatic update mechanism.

SAP points to record Q4 results

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 09:02:00 -0800

In a carefully worded statement, SAP has pre-announced Q4 2010 results. Software revenue increased around 34% to approximately €1.5 billion ($2 billion) compared to €1.12 billion ($1.5 billion) in the same period 2009.

Software and software related service revenue jumped to €3.26 billion ($4.36 billion) compared to €2.57 billion ($3.43 billion), an increase of around 27%.
Total revenue for the quarter is reported at €4.04 billion ($5.04 billion) compared to €3.19 billion ($4.26 billion) while operating margin climbed from 35% to 39%.
SAP expects full year non-IFRS operating income to €3.9 billion ($5.21 billion.)

I was interested in seeing how SAP is parsing the Oracle $1.3 billion jury award following the TomorrowNow case. It says:

The company has not yet completed its preliminary review of the appropriate re-measurement of the provision recorded for the TomorrowNow litigation following the jury verdict of USD 1.3 billion released in November 2010.
The expense resulting from this re-measurement impacts SAP’s IFRS operating margin but does not have an effect on SAP’s Non-IFRS operating margin. Therefore, the company does not yet have available and cannot yet disclose preliminary fourth quarter and full year 2010 IFRS profit and IFRS operating margin numbers or reconciliations from the disclosed Non-IFRS operating margin to the IFRS operating margin.
The company expects that the re-measurement of the provision recorded for the TomorrowNow litigation will have significant negative impact on SAP’s preliminary fourth quarter and full year 2010 IFRS operating profit and IFRS operating margin. The company also expects, as a consequence, that the fourth quarter and full year 2010 IFRS tax rate will be lower than the Company’s previous expectations of 27.5 - 28.5%.

In US English:

We’ve been dinged for $1.3 billion but:

We haven’t yet figured out how the jury verdict impacts the figures that auditors and those who assess risk are most interested in.
It is likely we’ll make full provision even though we have not officially stated our forward position on the jury outcome
Despite taking a hard slap from the jury, we expect to mitigate the full financial impact via a significant tax benefit. That could mean a $360 million reduction in cash flow and profit impact.

Analyst first take and forward look:

Subject to all the usual reporting caveats surrounding pre-announcements, SAP has turned in a solid quarter. Financial analysts will be relieved though they will likely want insight into the forward pipeline. The court case will not have impacted Q4 since the case was being heard at a time when SAP was in the final stages of closing out deals that have been ongoing for 3-9 months.
It is not yet clear to me whether this quarter represents the first fruits of co-CEO Jim Snabe and Bill McDermott’s near year long customer charm offensive. Again, when the earnings call is made, I expect analysts to be testing the customer temperature.
At the beginning of 2011 we have seen a number of what analysts will consider high profile departures. Notable among those wereDoug Merritt and Bill Wohl but there were plenty of others passing through the exit door. Quite frankly, most of the names I have been given will not be missed but represent relics of the past that were not delivering. They will not be missed.
Business ByDesign is doing better than SAP expected or wants. In some senses it is still trying to keep the solution in controlled release. Fact is I am fielding questions from VARs and SIs wanting to know more. If SAP plays its cards well, then 2011 will be a surprise to them on this front.
HANA has been well received and SAP expects to see this as a short term $100 million pipeline line of value driven business. It will ram home that message at an upcoming BI event but SAP needs to exercise care that it does not spoil the HANA promise with a kludged reinvention of old technology in the BusinessObjects line of business.

Xeround announces MySQL for the Cloud Service

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 09:02:00 -0800

Xeround is addressing issues organizations have had when deploying database-based applications in cloud computing environments — locality of data and database performance — by offering a new service that the company is calling “MySQL for the Cloud.”

What Xeround has to say about the MySQL for the Cloud service

Xeround, the Cloud Database company, today officially announced that their “MySQL for the Cloud” service is a multi-geographic cloud database, with their service now available on Amazon in Europe as well as North America.
Xeround’s multi-geographic capability lets organizations choose to run their database instances closest to wherever their applications are running. By having their applications as well as databases co-hosted on the same cloud and in the same geographical region, companies that rely on Xeround can address the key issue of performance in a cloud environment and significantly decrease latency of their applications. When signing up for Xeround, customers can select the data center closest to their applications.
In addition to offering multiple data center locations, the new beta will support multiple cloud providers over the next year. Because Xeround’s cloud database is agnostic to your choice of cloud provider, those that choose Xeround can avoid vendor lock-in and migrate seamlessly between different clouds.

Snapshot analysis

A comment I’ve often heard when discussing a cloud computing deployment option with executives of multi-national organizations is both their concerns about data locality laws (laws saying that data must be stored in the local country) and database performance. Xeround appears to have heard the same comments and has developed a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering to address those requirements.

While this is a workable approach, it is one that every service provider has either already started offering on one form or another or could easily copy. So, Xeround is going to have to move rapidly if it is going to make any headway against larger service providers.

This move treats the symptom but doesn’t really address one of the underlying issues, the requirements to store certain data in specific places some countries are placing on organizations working within their borders. This issue creates problems for end user organizations, suppliers of systems and software and service providers.

Xerond’s new service offering is certainly interesting and worthy of evaluation.

GE makes its data center, cloud computing power play

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 09:01:00 -0800

GE has acquired Lineage Power Holdings in a $520 million deal that will bring its energy conversion equipment to the telecom, data center and cloud computing markets.

Lineage Power faces stiff competition from the likes of Emerson’s Network Power unit, but by bringing its scale to the game GE is hoping to sell the power infrastructure behind the cloud. GE Energy plans on using Lineage to get more accounts and tap into the power conversion markets.

According to Frost & Sullivan, Emerson has 26 percent of the energy system market, followed by Eltek at 24 percent and Delta at 16 percent. Lineage has 8 percent of the energy system market, which is fragmented (”other” has 26 percent market share).

Dan Heintzelman, CEO GE Energy Services, said in a statement:

Every new mobile device plugs into an infrastructure that requires an ever increasing amount of high-quality power. The growth in high-bandwidth mobile internet applications and cloud computing is accelerating that demand. A globally networked planet needs a lot of power to keep spinning. As the data-driven economy grows, the addition of Lineage Power’s business platform continues the expansion of GE Energy’s offerings from the electric grid to datacenters, cell towers, routers, servers and circuit board electronics.
Specifically, Lineage Power has a bevy of big name customers for its AC-DC converters and DC-DC converters. Customers include AT&T, Verizon, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. Lineage Power, which has 2,300 employees an annual revenue of $450 million, was most recently privately held by the Gores Group. The company had been owned by Tyco.
Morgan Stanley analyst Scott Davis said:
(Lineage) competes directly with Emerson’s Network Power business in the power conversion market. We think this market can grow at a high single to low double digit rate, driven by mobile internet proliferation, cloud computing and energy efficiency demands. Key customers include telecom service providers, OEM manufacturers, and data storage providers. Some of Lineage’s products are highly engineered (e.g. AC-DC converters) while others are more commoditized (e.g. DC-DC converters).
GE has been doubling down on power infrastructure. It recently acquired Dresser, an energy infrastructure company, and Wellstream Holdings, which makes oil pipes.

ComScore: Combined Microsoft and Yahoo U.S. search share stuck at 28 percent

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 09:01:00 -0800

The December 2010 comScore search data is out. While Microsoft is continuing to make modest gains, Microhoo is not.

Google’s U.S. explicit core search share was up slightly over November. Yahoo’s was down, and Microsoft’s also was up slightly.

(Explicit core search share removes certain categories of searches that comScore doesn’t deem to be actual “user-engaged” searches.)

Here’s what the last three months looked like, according to comScore:

Google (percent U.S. explicit core search market)
October 66.3
November 66.2
December 66.6

Yahoo
October 16.5
November 16.4
December 16.0

Microsoft
October 11.5
November 11.8
December 12.0

Microhoo (Microsoft +Yahoo)
October 28.0
November 28.2
December 28.0

Three months doesn’t an absolute trend make, but Microsoft is continuing to grow its U.S. search share constinually, according to the comScore data. On the other hand, as some pundits predicted would happen, Yahoo’s share is continuing to shrink constantly. The net: The overall share of Microhoo is hovering around 28 percent.

Yahoo officials said this week the global transition of certain Yahoo Search back-end functions to Microsoft’s search platform is continuing, and the company just completed that transition for organic search in Australia, Brazil and Mexico.

Google’s gotten some bad press around the quality (or lack thereof) of its search results as of late. But will average users ever see that information or care? I’m curious whether Microsoft can grow Bing beyond 28 percent share here in the U.S. — minus any kind of major gaffe by Google. Do you see that happening? If so, how?

Sony Alpha NEX-5 interchangeable lens camera gets painted gold

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 09:00:00 -0800

Already available in silver and black, Sony has added an elegant pale gold option for buyers interested in the Alpha NEX-5 interchangeable lens camera.

This “sophisticated” shade is set to launch in at least Japan on February 10, and it doesn’t look like the gold paint will step up the price. Hopefully US consumers will get a chance at this lovely hue as well. If not, you could always pick up the Olympus PEN E-PL1, already available in champagne gold.

The NEX-5 currently retails stateside for approximately $500-$600, depending on the lens buying option.

Intel's fourth quarter: Focus on Sandy Bridge

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 09:11:00 -0800

Intel kicks off tech earnings season on Thursday and the fourth quarter is expected to be strong as the PC industry prepped for the launch of Sandy Bridge, the chip giant’s latest processor with integrated graphics.

Analysts were generally upbeat on Intel’s fourth quarter, which is seasonally strong. Toss in uncertainty at AMD, which just pushed out CEO Dirk Meyer, and the outlook should be solid. The big question for Intel is whether it can top 2010’s Windows 7-powered results.

By the numbers, Wall Street is looking for fourth quarter earnings of 53 cents a share on revenue of $11.37 billion. In the first quarter, Wall Street is expecting earnings of 44 cents a share on revenue of $10.73 billion.

Among the key points to monitor:

What does the Sandy Bridge upgrade cycle look like? Auguste Gus Richard, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, said:

We expect Q1 to be above normal seasonality, driven by the launch of the company’s new microarchitecture, Sandy Bridge, which integrates graphics. In addition, Q1 will be a 14 week quarter for the company also driving a stronger than normal Q1. We believe that when a 14 week quarter is factored in, Intel’s Q1 could be flat to down 5% - significantly above the street. We believe Sandy Bridge will be a strong product cycle for Intel in the PC market, and the company will take share from the standalone graphics market.

[Video=494941]

Server demand. Intel is dominating the enterprise server market and will continue to do so. The key point here is to monitor what Intel says about enterprise demand and data center upgrades. Intel is still targeting a 12 percent to 15 percent growth rate for PC/server units.

What is the post-PC era plan? Intel has a tablet strategy with Hewlett-Packard, MSI, Samsung and Cisco and Asus and 35 design wins. However, these tablets are just ramping in production. The chip giant has talked Atom and has led the netbook charge. The problem is that computing is moving to an ARM-based architecture and that favors Qualcomm. This tablet question will linger for multiple quarters until Intel-powered devices give the iPad a run.

Are tablets hurting notebook sales? Wells Fargo analyst David Wong said:

We are hopeful that Intel’s March quarter sales outlook will help establish that the computing market overall remains healthy, and that notebook computer demand is not being impacted by the availability of tablets to the extent that some investors appear to believe.

Intel’s embedded products. At the National Retail Federation conference in New York, Intel was showing off a bevy of embedded products. Large touchscreens to aid shoppers and deliver information were all powered by Intel chips. Intel’s digital signage business is worth watching.

Ballmer makes it to year 11 as Microsoft CEO

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 09:11:00 -0800

Eleven years ago today, January 13, 2000, Steve Ballmer was appointed CEO of Microsoft.

Increasingly, many, including me, are wondering how many more years he’ll continue in that role.

There are more than a few shareholders and Microsoft employees who want Ballmer tossed. After his seeming disagreement over future direction with Server and Tools President Bob Muglia — who announced this week he is leaving the company after 23 years — I’ve heard from even more folks carping for Ballmer to go. If Ballmer won’t go gracefully, they say, the Microsoft board should do what AMD’s board just did to former CEO Dirk Meyer and force Ballmer out.

I have said on previous occasions that — despite the fact that I’ve been on the Ballmer-interview blacklist for more than 15 years — I still considered him the best person for the Microsoft CEO job. And last we heard from Ballmer on the topic of his CEO stewardship plans, two-plus years ago, Microsoft’s CEO made it clear that he had no plans to step down voluntarily until 2018 or so, when his youngest son was off to college.

Yes, Microsoft’s stock price is stagnating. But the company is still managing to break profit records (as much by trimming costs, these days, as via sales of new products), in spite of imminent-demise predictions by various analysts and company watchers.

The question — for me — always comes back to whether there is there someone who could do a better job than Ballmer leading Microsoft? I’d say if the pool of candidates is restricted to current Microsoft management, the answer is no. (Those calling for Bill Gates to return as Microsoft CEO need to give up that pipe dream. Gates has moved on, though he remains chair of the Microsoft board.) Because of the dismal record that outsiders have at succeeding and lasting at Microsoft, I’d say a non-Softie, as appealing as that may sound from a new-blood perspective, has a low likelihood of making it for long as Redmond’s CEO.

Ballmer has been with the company 30 years and in the last few, molded Microsoft to be more in his image. Most of the “Gates guys” — the techie managers favored by BillG — are gone now, replaced by the MBA types favored by SteveB. (One exception is Steven Sinofsky, the President of Windows, who was a Gates guy. Supposedly, he also is one of Ballmer’s chosen, and can seemingly do little wrong in Ballmer’s eyes.)

AMD’s Meyer supposedly was forced out by the board because he refused to get with the mobile program. According to reports, he wouldn’t accelerate AMD’s plans to build new chips for mobile devices, despite the fact he knew that’s what the company needed to do.

Ballmer also has been sluggish in pushing Microsoft to get with the mobile program. The company nearly missed the window of opportunity in the smartphone space. And the jury is still out as to whether Windows Phone 7 will be able to gain lost ground quickly enough to keep the Softies in the smartphone race.

The same thing is threatening to happen in the slate/tablet market. Ballmer is continuing to champion publicly the idea that Windows 7 is a great slate/tablet operating system. But unless Microsoft has some secret — like an interim Windows release with a touch-centric interface — up its sleeve before Windows 8, Microsoft is not going to be able to provide an operating system to its partners that will enable them to create slates that can compete battery-wise, dimension-wise and price-wise with the iPad and Galaxy Tablets. not to mention the horde of other coming Android slate/tablets.

Ballmer hinted in his “goodbye BobMu” note that he felt the Server & Tools Business needed new management to make Microsoft more competitive in the cloud. I’m curious to see who Ballmer thinks will be more aggressive in that space, whether it be another Softie or an outsider. Microsoft execs admitted last year that the company’s message that users could have it all — public cloud, private cloud and/or hybrid — was confusing, and that they planned a concerted effort to lead with the cloud. (Hence, the “We’re All In” campaign.) Since then, Microsoft’s been pushing its partners and customers full-speed-ahead toward the cloud.

When a company is as big as Microsoft, it takes time to turn the ship. But it shouldn’t take so long to correct an off-guided product course. Why didn’t Microsoft do a reset on its smartphone until 2009, when it was clearly going down the wrong path? Why was the Kin allowed to launch? Why does management think it is OK to let tablets and slates eat into PC demand until 2012 or later, when Microsoft finally will be ready with a slate-optimized operating system?

A changing of the guard, even a sweeping one like has been happening at Microsoft for the past couple of years, with the departures of Bob Muglia, Ray Ozzie, Robbie Bach, Stephen Elop, Jeff Raikes and Kevin Johnson, doesn’t necessarily mean, to me, that Ballmer needs to go. Constant reorgs are a way of life at Microsoft, and not everyone agrees with the new world order (especially those who believe they are deserving of a guaranteed spot as Microsoft’s CEO).

What I find more worrisome is the brain drain happening at the mid-management and technical management levels of the company, with departures of folks like Brad Abrams, Chris Wilson, Doug Purdy, Brad Lovering, Ian Ellison-Taylor, etc. These individuals are the ones with institutional knowledge and staff loyalties that are hard to replace, and whose expertise is now benefiting Microsoft’s foremost competitors. That growing list of departures has started to give me pause and make me question my Ballmer backing….

I am not expecting Microsoft’s board to hand Ballmer his walking papers any time soon. But I’m wondering already if the Board will have more strenuous questions for SteveB — and maybe more bonus cuts — for Ballmer this year when evaluation time comes around, if not before.

Do you think Ballmer is going to hang on until 2018 as CEO? Should he?

IBM's Watson gets its Jeopardy warm-up

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 09:10:00 -0800

IBM’s Watson supercomputer—a Linux system that’s powered by 10 refrigerator-sized racks of IBM Power 7 Systems—will get its big warm-up for its Jeopardy showdown with two former champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

At IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, Watson is set for a practice round in against Jennings and Rutter. Watson will take on Jennings and Rutter for a $1 million prize Feb. 14, 15 and 16. Watson will play Jennings and Rutter on Friday for the February broadcasts.

John Kelly III, director of IBM Research, said Watson has come along greatly in the last four years to the point where it can be a real competitor to humans.

David Ferrucci, principal investigator of Watson DeepQA technology, said that to play Jeopardy, Watson needs to navigate broad questions, unstructured data and justifying a correct answer. DeepQA uses thousands of algorithms to test hypotheses and pick an answer. Watson needs precision, confidence and speed. Four years ago, Watson took two hours to answer a question. Now Watson can do it in 3 seconds due to better processors and optimized systems.

For IBM, Watson is a way to show off its computing and analytics prowess. Watson is designed to also show the artificial intelligence possibilities. IBM said its Watson research could lead to advances in a verticals such as healthcare. In conversations with IBM execs I also note that Big Blue is basically building Skynet. They always have a nervous laugh at that one.

The interest in Watson is far ranging—press ranging from the usual tech blog suspects to Entertainment Tonight was on scene. That’s what happens when you have a few IBM wonks mixed in with Alex Trebek, host of Jeopardy.

It’s unclear whether Watson vs. the Jeopardy champs will be a fair fight. The tale of the tape seems to favor Watson. To wit:

Watson can pore through 200 million pages of natural language content.
It has 15 terabytes of RAM and 2,880 processor cores.
Operates at 80 teraflops.

We’ll be back with more from the press conference and Jeopardy match.

Microsoft working on 'Concero' cloud-management portal

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 09:09:00 -0800

Microsoft is building a new management tool, code-named “Concero,” that will allow customers to oversee both on-premises and cloud-based services.

Microsoft is planning to show off the new member of its System Center product line at the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) 2011conference in March. There is a mention of Concero on the MMS Web site agenda, that explains the coming product this way:

“The move to cloud based deployment of services will result in deployments which are partly on private on-premise clouds based on VMM and Hyper-V and partly on Windows Azure. In this hybrid world, it is imperative to have a management tool that allows customers to deploy and manage their services across these environments. System Center codename “Concero” is a self-service portal targeted at this customer base.”

The Concero tool will allow customers to manage both on-premises Services running on Hyper-V hypervisor and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (a new version of which is due in the latter half of 2011), and off-premises Services running on Windows Azure andWindows Azure Appliances. Concero will be built on Silverlight, to enable an “access anywhere” experience, according to information on Microsoft’s Web site.

I also found a Microsoft job listing mentioning Concero and caling the Concero team key to Microsoft’s effort to compete with rival VMware.

“Together with our sister teams in System Center and Azure we will deliver a world class experience that will shift customers from VM Ware (sic) to Microsoft,” said the job posting.

I asked Microsoft officials when the company plans to field a beta of Concero and when the final version is slated to be released. No word back so far.

Concero, in Latin, means “connect” or “join in conflict.” Hmmm…. Does that say something about the company’s view on interconnecting public and private clouds…?

The CRM Watchlist Part V: Different Strokes

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:12:00 -0800

Why would you speak to me that way
Especially when I always said that I
Haven’t got the words for you
All your diction dripping with disdain
Through the pain
I always tell the truth

Oh, damn. You’re here. I was listening to Vampire Weekend. Let me get the headphones off…just a sec…I’m kinda…tangled..agggh….okay. Damn.

Well, we’re in the homestretch. This is Part #5 of the Watchlist which is where I take the companies that for one reason or another defy categorization and let you see them as victors on their own. They are Spartacus.

The URLs and the names of the winners of Parts I-IV:

Finally, the CRM 2011 Watchlist: Part I - SAP, Oracle, salesforce.com, Microsoft
The CRM Watchlist Part II: The Usual Suspects - NetSuite, RightNow, Sage, SAS, CDC Software/Pivotal, SugarCRM
The CRM Watchlist 2011 Part III: Representing the Pillars - Marketo, Eloqua, Infusionsoft, Jitterjam, Sword-Ciboodle, GetSatisfaction, Moxie, Genesys, Pegasystems, InsideView
The CRM Watchlist 2011 Part IV: the Social Mainstream - Lithium, Jive, Radian6, Attensity, KickApps, Nimble, INgage Networks

What makes this group interesting is its diversity, though I’m sure it meets very few federal guidelines.

IBM

I found it curious a few month ago, when I got a PR email that said thatIBM was getting into “Social CRM.” I attempted to noodle on this without the benefit of any further knowledge than I had and came up with some facts and some speculation. The facts were, IBM had this product called,Lotus Connections (now at version 3.0) that was focused primarily on enterprise collaboration. Fact#2 - IBM had purchased SPSS for $1.2 billion in 2009 for SPSS’s mad skills when it came to predictive analytics which could include some customer analytics. Fact #3 -IBM had acquired Unica in mid 2010, one of the leaders in marketing automation of years past - and one of the first, BTW, to actually provide a usable non-math major only UI for a marketing automation product - this, of course, goes back a few years.

Hmmm. None of the facts added up to “Social CRM” exactly unless you linearly combined Lotus Connections (Social) and Unica (CRM) and came up with it that way. Nope. That made no sense as a support to the claim.

So I speculated. Maybe Lotus Connections was going to add outbound channel connectors and customer community tools or an API for integration to traditional CRM suites or…something like that.

Nope. None of that. This seemed to be pretty much a jump on the bandwagon and a pretty slick attempt to grab some thought leadership in the space.

But it got me to thinking, because, after all this is IBM and IBM has the chops, culture and funds to do things and get things that other companies could only dream of. So here was a chance for IBM to do something that they never have - become leaders in social CRM. They have been leaders in the social software space with the conversion of the Lotus “division” to the IBM Collaboration Solutions Group within the company. Lotus Connections, especially the 3.0 version, strengthened the enterprise level product by adding some much needed features such as:

They call it social analytics - I call it social network analysis. They have three widgets that have been added to the Profiles component. What makes them particularly significant is that they are widgets that embrace the notion of the social customer. They include a) Do You Know: a recommendation engine based on your activity on the social web and your existing network. b) Things in Common: this is the “someone like me” widget that deconstructs that relationship -showing you how you are “like” that someone. and c) Who Connects Us: how you connect to an individual person - social networking analysis.
Community customization - among other things it incorporates a feature that I have recommended more than once to some of the community/socnet platforms out there when they didn’t have it - the ability to create and administer a “sub-community” within a community so that you can focus in specific areas - in the case of IBM, since Lotus Connections is internally focused - specific projects.
Huge refresh to the wiki, blogging, forums, activities, profiles, and social bookmarking features - that were already decent.

These are just examples of what Connections 3.0 offers. But again, it doesn’t have much in the way of outbound social channels for customers though there is nothing that says you can’t invite customers in.

But what makes IBM intriguing is that they are entering the fray through both thought leadership and by developing a very, very good collaboration application using a division of the company near and dear to me - Lotus.

Is that enough for them to be a SCRM provider? No. They have never been a strong CRM provider, leaving a lot of that to iEnterprises , an exceptional partner who has developed not only a Notes CRM, but their own CRM, mobile versions of CRM and connectors for Lotus Notes to SugarCRM, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, salesforce.com, and Siebel. IEnterprises has kept IBM at least relevant in CRM.

But they have so much going for them with SPSS, Unica, Lotus Connections 3.0, and their clear interest in Social CRM, that it makes them more than intriguing. It makes them a company to watch - very, very closely. I wouldn’t put it past IBM to be a player by early part of next year. But we’ll have to see. Of course, I will keep you posted.. While they may not be coming from a position of historic strength in CRM, they are still entirely capable of making a fast transition. Which, to play where they want, Social CRM, they have to.

Cisco

Back in August 2010, I wrote this piece on the entry of Cisco into the world of enterprise collaboration via their Quad suite. I speculated about this as an indication that they were interested in taking it further and coming into the world of Social CRM.

Turns out I was right.

As we know now, Cisco is coming in, and doing it the right way. They’ve launched a social media analytics product called SocialMiner and a social customer care product named kind of nicely Finesse which brings the agent into a 2.0 world. They’ve significantly extended their communications hardware and software platforms. Among the cooler applications - which they’ve established use cases for and managed to price it reasonably is Cisco TelePresence, well worth looking at. In fact, in July 2010, the leader of what passes for as close to a Social CRM salon we have, Tatyana Kanzaveli, did a Social CRM Meetup with major SCRM thought leaders via TelePresence in what may be the coolest CRM related event ever. Given that what has driven SCRM from day one is a communications revolution, not a business revolution, Cisco’s improvements in their communications platform is a powerful entry into what is a growing area of interest for businesses everywhere.

Thing is that they thought this one out. Their management team for this push into SCRM, seated in the Cisco Collaboration Business Unit (CCBU), is run by John Hernandez, a customer service leader with experience at both Watchlist winner Genesys and Nortel. The rest of the team has equal and in some cases even more experience than John in this world. So they are well suited for what they are doing.

Another plus for Cisco in their entry is that they have mucho dinero to back it up, have a strong outreach to influencers, journalist, and analysts. AND they know how to ride the wave of a trend, having foreseen this one as far back as 2008 with the launch of their “human network” branding and marketing campaigns. They still have one of my all time favorite commercials for that - their first - with the Baba O’Riley song by the Who - the one also used by CSI-NY. What that means spiritually I don’t know, but the commercial nailed the communications revolution part of the equation - i.e. the most important one.

Don’t underestimate their trend-tracking actions. They are emerging now because of a careful assessment of the customer’s needs and wants, not just the rise of SCRM. They see that the customer is more demanding, more peer-focused, and more cognizant of the environment thus the push around TelePresence cutting travel costs and emissions. In other words, they are acting on the trends, not just monitoring them.

They also know how to partner. In the customer care a.k.a. contact center world that they star in they have alliances with Oracle (Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft), SAP, Microsoft and salesforce.com - meaning, given their scope, skills and target markets, the right choices.

What’s interesting here, and of course, as always, provides an element of uncertainty of results, is that Cisco, by its own admission is transitioning from a communications focused company to a collaboration focused company that uses unified communications (well, okay, they didn’t say the latter part, I did) technologies to foster that collaboration. The uncertainty lies in the change in culture required to meet that transition. They have the technologies to foster it - via Quad and Telepresence, SocialMiner, et. al. They have the leadership, and partners to support it. But the question is, does their own culture foster collaboration - so that they can meet more than just the technological needs of their target base? Can they be, to their potential customers, a “company like me?”

What Cisco has to do in 2011since SCRM is driven by customer service (human interaction), not contact centers per se, is become a bit more focused on the “human” and a little less on the “network”, so to speak at least. Meaning, even though their corporate culture is aimed at customer success - its more focused on technological success. Just read everything they write on collaboration. Its focused on the value of hardware and software - not the way that Cisco helps you do your job.

Focusing on and delivering any kind of success is commendable, but “any” is not enough in the era of the social customer. They need to humanize their culture (which given the immensely friendly nature of the customer care folks like John Hernandez, shouldn’t be a big stretch) and provide the thought leadership that the human network commercials imply they can. They truly get it. Now they have to expand out to a broader population that they can show they get it. Then, all they have to do is what they are already good at - which means continue to communicate - but in the customer’s metaphor, not the products.

This might be my most intriguing choice for 2011 because, they are so damned interesting. And provide actual value.

Infor

When I was a kid I used to see this old cartoon from the 30s or early 40s that showed this little fish chomped up by a bigger fish chomped up by an even bigger fish….you catch the drift, err, tide. In any case, that’s how I’ve thought of Infor and also how I’ve thought of their product that gets them on this list.

It began as E.piphany (no typo, it was this weird spelling back then) then was chomped up by SSA Global which was then chomped up by Infor. In case you haven’t figured it out, chomped up = acquired.

Its the Epiphany (contemporary) Interaction Advisor engine that gets my serious Watchlist attention. Infor is actually improving and reviving the product - major improvements - which is a relief because it was a genuinely excellent product that SSA Global wasted. Infor’s name for the product is the Infor CRM Epiphany Interaction Advisor - something that’s pretty damned awkward for such a smooth operator.

Infor seems to be determined to take that terrific interaction engine that could and put it back on the map which is of course what gets them on the map with me - that and a few other things.

From what I can see, Infor is treating the interaction advisor engine as a platform, but rather than offering out to the masses - in the fashion of a salesforce.com force.com platform, they are using it to spin off some very specific, highly focused applications that are both horizontal and vertical in nature. For example, they recently put together an Interaction Advisor for the hospitality industry that as they put it, “maximizes the customer relationship from the slot machine to restaurants, to shops to the guest’s room.” They have another for the retail industry announced last week called Epiphany Shopping Advisor. They have one called Churn Advisor that not just optimizes a telco’s customer experience but also locates the weak points that might cause churn. What makes these powerful is that they are products geared to a real-time customer experience throughout an entire customer lifecycle, that takes all channels into account AND, if that wasn’t enough, they capture and analyze all the data that the interactions create.

One of their coolest applications is the Infor Epiphany Email Advisor, which takes live emails - meaning those sitting in your customers’ email in-boxes -and according to their online customer behavior adjusts the offers that they may be getting in that email.

Infor has all the traditional CRM products too - they actually offer a suite -sales, marketing and customer service. But they treat it almost incidentally to their interaction advisor engine. Probably rightfully. I don’t know how good or bad it is - they’ve never offered to show it to me and I’ve forgotten to ask because my focus has been on the interaction advisor platform.

The power of their products lies in the customers involvement in the creation of the products. Its interesting but Infor, in the submissions to the Watchlist, was the only one who emphasized their use of Customer Advisory Boards to get feedback on design of the UI and the functionality. Something that all the companies who won could learn from - and something that indicates a culture that has begun to adopt the social customer’s perspective on business - and has figured out their response to it.

However, even though Infor is out there diligently demoing the Interaction Advisor to all who will watch and listen, they haven’t done a good job to date on thought leadership or industry participation, which is part of the dance you have to do. This is something they need to seriously step up in 2011 - I mean amp it up big time or they will get nowhere with what is a genuinely terrific product.

I wouldn’t have made them a company to watch if I didn’t think they could. I do and I think they will. 2011 here comes Infor.

Relayware

There was this famous song written in 1913 and sung by Al Jolson (who starred in the first talking movie ever - The Jazz Singer. Here’s a two minute clip of the movie - wow, is it dated, but this is the reason you can be a Trekkie) called “You Made Me Love You.” The first lines went like this:

You made me love you
I didn’t wanna do it
I didn’t wanna do it
You made me want you
And all the time you knew it
I guess you always knew it
You made me happy sometimes
You made me glad
But there were times
You made me feel so bad

Know what? I’ve loved and lost twice in the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) space - twice. I’ve had my heart broken two f—ing times.

I have always been a big fan of PRM. It seems to make so much sense because it enables the management and engagement of your partners - a significant piece of your overall enterprise value chain. Its the same way that Supply Chain Management and the occasional Supplier Relationship Management software successfully took care of another side of this ecosystem. AND to that end there have been some excellent PRM products such as Siebel PRM (now Oracle PRM) and especially in its day Channelwave, ClickCommerce, and, while - until now (hint, hint) - the SaaS space has only produced some not so great PRM, the idea of PRM remains so appealing to me.

But, alas, back in 2001 and again in 2004, PRM broke my heart - because apparently it was only appealing to me - not a whole lot of businesses. - It was an industry segment that while enormously useful from what I could see - just didn’t make it.

So, my broken heart told me “bury the hurt, Paul, don’t let it get you again. That’s twice you heard the siren call, felt the heat. And twice that you were lured and crushed. Beaten.” It was kind of a variation on the theme, “if it happens once shame on them, twice shame on you.” Well, to me it was “if it happens twice, shame on them…”

But I was happy. I didn’t have to deal with PRM once Channelwave sunk in the channel…hit by a…wave…of…umm…indifference. Okay, I’m stretching there.

But, sigh, then along comes Relayware. It started with a PR request that said “hey, wanna see me, huh, big boy?” And in my mind, it was Alyssa Milano (Great tweeter, and baseball fan. Sigh.), Gwyneth Paltrow, Elizabeth Banks and whatever other Hollywood actresses I think are hot (okay, sue me, I’m a guy) beckoning to me for an audience, so I said, “sure.”

And, to my surprise, I saw what might be the most complete PRM product and certainly the best thought out PRM product I’ve ever seen. Bar none. Just to give you a flavor, I’m going to show you the components, without comment, lifted straight from their website that are part of their most comprehensive offering Partner Lifecycle Management:

Administration Manager
Partner Account Manager
Registration and Approval Manager
Sales Opportunity Manager
Content and Portal Manager
Communications Manager
Partner Training Manager
Event Manager
Fund Manager
Customizable Joint Marketing
Loyalty and Incentives Manager
Partner Locator

That is a thorough job - and, you’ll have to take my word for it here, or take a look for yourself, if you don’t trust me, you…you….that each of these components is both full featured and well integrated.

Plus Mike Morgan, the CEO is both a really engaging guy and knows the space really well.

Additionally, they actually, unlike most of the other choices so far, don’t have the problem of thought leadership. Nor do they have the problem with market impact. Both of them are reflected in the fact that the analysts - institutional and independent highly respect these guys and they are seen as a premier product.

BUT there are several things they need to “cure” as a company and an obstacle not of their doing that make this, let’s just say, interesting.

Their needs:

They are a PRM company without much of a partner ecosystem. I’m not a “you must eat your own dog food guy” - I actually think that’s silly. For example, if you’re a small company selling to Fortune 1000 companies, why would you need that level of functionality. I rest that part of my case. But in this case, they do need to eat their own dog food - meaning, not use their software, but have a VAR/SI/Consulting firm/Technology partner ecosystem that is meaningful, not piecemeal. Maybe they do but I don’t see any reference to it anyway. Just 2-3 companies, who may be great at what they do but are not the kind of reference partners that I’m talking about. Nor nearly the scope.
They need some LARGE systems integrators to buy into their vision and mission which is quite clear - and that means a PRM sub-practice (part of CRM? Perhaps.), at least at this stage, at the large SI. Small companies only selling for an enterprise ready product - that this is - its oh so scalable - and pricey - doesn’t do the trick. They need an entré through the large SI’s pipeline.
They need to not emphasize the PRM is the new CRM. It isn’t. Its PRM. Its an extension of CRM frankly to the larger ecosystem. At least the way I see it. But, then again, we’ve seen how THAT’s helped the market.

The part that’s not of their own doing? PRM needs a market. Right now, Relayware has a great product, smart leadership, a clear vision and mission, thought leadership and market impact. But some of the latter is relative. There is no real PRM market still.

I think this is a company that can make the market potentially, small as they are at this point. But I don’t want to have my heart broken a third time. They won’t break it - they’re way to smart and way too pretty - in a platonic way of course. But the lack of a market could.

Final lines from You Made Me Love You?

You made me cry for
I didn’t wanna tell you
I didn’t wanna tell you
I want some love that’s true
Yes, I do, ‘deed I do
You know I do
Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie what I cry for
You know you’ve got the brand of kisses
That I’d die for
You know you made me love you

Don’t disappoint me.

Gist

Gist and I go way back. I’ve been a user of theirs by design and a little bit by default since 2009. The design was that I think that their integration with Outlook is excellent and does what Microsoft’s Social Connectors don’t. The default was that I was using Xobni too, another interesting though in my mind, not quite to Gist’s standard, product, but it crashed my system.

So I got to know Gist and, know T.A. McCann a little bit. And I liked what I saw.

First, let’s make something clear. This isn’t a full blown social CRM product. This is a plugin that aggregates social information in ways that actually have some meaning because of the way that the info is organized for the user to see. All the information from my Twitter followers and Facebook friends, among other things - all their social information and activities - are aggregated and produced along with the relevant conversations (relevant to me - context people, context) are provided fully integrated into my Outlook contact data or my Gmail or Google Apps contact data or even Lotus Notes. They also have native iPhone an Android mobile apps (both of which I’ve used - and like).

This is a good thing. But it goes deeper. Aside from the integration, I get a daily report emailed to me (my choice) on what my network is doing. Then I can go to their site and see how relevant the contacts are to me -based, I think, on the activity in relationship to me that Gist captures and presents. While those numbers are off in terms of absolute relevance, they are something of an indicator of the level of interaction that they and I have.

Gist has not only garnered some awards and a following for their well thought out and executed integrations, which now extends to salesforce.com - another reason that they can be included on this list, without trepidation. They were a Gartner Cool Company back in 2009 for example. They have over 5500 fans on Facebook - not too shabby there either. And Mr. McCann is a busy dude, out there meeting who he has to to make this company work.

They are successful enough to be the subject of recent rumors that RIM, makers of the Blackberry, want to buy them. I don’t know if they are true or not, so don’t ask me, but the very fact that they can engender that kind of rumor shows their growing impact in the market.

What do they have to do? A few things:

Integrate with more CRM systems. The idea is that Gist becomes a core part of a CRM system system or an Enterprise 2.0 system. Rich social data is important to contemporary companies and the more sy systems they integrate with the better their entry point into the market.
Competition in their part of the universe is only going to get tougher. Its coming from the standalone plugins like them and through native integration like IBM does with Lotus Connections or attempts at it such as Microsoft’s Social Connectors. Scale, scale, scale and much better, more refined metrics. If you’re going to measure relevance, then don’t do it halfway, which is kind of where it is now.

These guys are going somewhere. They are worth watching in 2011. Where they end up at the of this year, is, I can say definitively, solely up to them. But they’d better decide where they want to be by the end of the year, right now. That way, they can chart their own destiny - and we can watch them follow it.

Clarabridge

Clarabridge had been fired as a shot across my bow for the last 2 years roughly, but especially in 2010. I kept hearing about how good their text and sentiment analysis engine was and that they represented an area of analytics called collective intelligence which was up and coming and that they were a good company to deal with.

So I began to track them.

And they were all of the above. And the area, “collective intelligence” perhaps a little specious a name, is important.

What I particularly liked about Clarabridge is that their name would pop up in odd places, which also means that it was popping up in the expected places too. I would hear of their name in partnership with companies that were quality companies who could use the Clarabridge engine as a complementary service such as Watchlist winner Vovici (look down…a little further…). They had some of the standard expected partners too - Teradata among them. As far as I’m concerned, when establishing alliances/partnerships for vendor companies, the mix needs to be those partners who will get you into the target markets that you need to be in and provide complementary technology and/or services and some who get you to markets that are niche but a potential revenue stream.

I also saw that the approach that they took with their products was in line with the contemporary requirements of the 21st century business.

That usually means greater and more granular customer insight.

What does that mean in Clarabridge-talk? It means they use an 11 point intensity scale for sentiment analysis. You get more than the usual 1-5 or the positive, negative, neutral we’re all so caught up in and yet, is so limited, when it comes to the nuances of emotion in the customer-company interrelationship. This means, in human terms, that you’ll be able to distinguish between irritated and furious and angry. Which means a lot when it comes to both taking action, deciding what your response is going to be and for longer term insight in general.

But their products go a lot further than that - though that appeals to my “we understand our own emotions in a terribly granular way” argument a lot.

They went out on a limb in 2010 - a big thick branch actually - and announced Clarabridge Professional, which they call “ ”the industry’s first self service, SaaS based sentiment and text analytics product.” Some of that characterization is a bit self-serving because “self-service” is actually “Users can upload their data” meaning “manual” but what makes this a smart, smart idea is that they they are uploading data into category models - templates, if you will, that will spit out analysis of the unstructured data in minutes. Lovely, for the small and and lower end of the midmarket businesses. Apparently, the midmarket in particular felt this way, because within 9 months of the release of Professional, they had 800 customers. Not-too-shabby.

Their enterprise edition, considerably more complex, has a set of problems associated with the complexity, though has real power too. I had Scott Rogers, a thought leader in SCRM and someone who has not only used Clarabridge but knows the customer insight applications space give me a short fair assessment, which I want to pass on to you:

The categorization methodology (using word clouds) is very flexible, ranging from fast and simple to set-up to highly complex (and, not only tedious, but requires caution of the part of the user).
Beyond just volumetric measures and trending of word cloud strings, etc, gleaning real actionable insights from the output is difficult, and requires a good analyst to make sense of the data.”

That says it, I think quite well, so now whassup for them in 2011.

Clarabridge is a company with a bright, accomplished set of high tech industry veterans (who have the added power of being foodies) who know how to manage a company. As a result, cash positive, well financed, and 105% growth in 2010.

Not bad. I’d say I’m very pleased on my 11 point scale.

But we ain’t done yet.

They have a lot to do in 2011. While I’m clear that I think that Customer Insight Applications are perhaps (along with Knowledge Management) the keys to SCRM in 2011, the category of collective intelligence as nuanced as they can provide still has to be established. Right now, sentiment analysis is associated with 1-5 at its most granular. This goes way beyond that and the value proposition, while clear, needs data to back it up. Its real new and the promise is big. Clarabridge has a chance to take a real leadership position here. They need to make the case in 2011. Not 2012.

Really Simple Systems

Really Simple Systems might have the shortest entry of the lot. They are what I consider perhaps the best traditional CRM package for small businesses in the market. Know why?

They provide all three pillar components - sales, marketing and customer service - and they do it in a way that both is functionally reasonably complete - certainly complete enough for small businesses - and actually reasonably priced. They’ve got the usual three tiers, but the first tier is a 2-user max cloud-based free edition of CRM that provides basic sales functionality - they have over 1000 users of it. The enterprise edition is designed to appeal to large small businesses or midmarket players. It provides competent functionality for all three CRM pillars - sales, marketing and customer service. Note the word, competent in conjunction with marketing functionality - not one you hear that often in suite level CRM especially not small business. But, here it is. And about time, let me tell ya.

These guys were the 2010 winners of Sift Media’s Software Satisfaction Award for CRM - which I was a judge on. Here’s what I said after they won:

“Really Simple Systems won the Software Satisfactions Awards for a really simple reason - they produce a very good hard core traditional CRM product that their customers can actually use, actually like and can afford. Hard to beat that, isn’t it?”

Double that and its what I think today.

But lest you think they are perfectly positioned, let me throw out what I think they have to deal with in 2011.

Pretty easy actually.

They are strictly traditional - and they have broadened their target markets beyond the small businesses they were solely focused on in 2009. That means that social functionality, as they move upmarket (even saying that their enterprise edition can appeal to a “division of a large company”) needs to be incorporated or they need to partner with a social CRM vendor to provide the social data that midmarket and “divisions” of large enterprises crave.
They need to move a lot faster on thought leadership. This company is an operationally sound, smartly run, and quiet company. They need to be louder in the marketplace. Small business, still their sweet spot, despite all the upmarket products and talk, is probably the most highly targeted area that remains largely unpenetrated and has a lot of competitive products emerging, with varying degrees of noise. Really Simple Systems to remain competitive is going to have to make some noise.

Brent Leary will be covering much of the small business choices out there on Social CRM: The Conversation, probably next week - but I had to include Really Simple Systems because they live up to their name and yet still manage to provide actual ways for small business people to do their jobs.

How quaint.

Vovici

Vovici is a company that takes care of business. I’ve been following them for a long time, have had little interaction with them - except as of late - and yet, they are truly the giant of enterprise feedback management (EFM).

In fact, I used to hate surveys - except for the highly specialized customer experience mapping surveys - which I use in my consulting work when it gets to the customer experience mapping side of things. But after seeing Vovici’s EFM and realizing that their survey methodology is the core of their EFM system, I’m converted. Seriously.

Key to the Vovici difference is that their survey mechanism is dynamic - as opposed to the more typical approach which provides. What allows that at the core is what they call (or will as of this year) Panel Profile Builder - or at least will in 2011. Essentially what it does, as I understand it, is use customer data as it is recorded to increase feedback quality. Meaning that using their Community Builder and their Panel Profile Builder, you can actually create feedback communities - e..g panels that can be queried and the feedback that is captured can be used as insight to help refine the panel, the questions and also to dynamically alter the relevance of the individual panelists responses.

Sweet.

What makes them powerful is that they can use their system to scale up towards ungodly amounts of participants and yet still get granular feedback - and incorporate it into individual customer records. They are integrated with Oracle and salesforce.com for that.

Their EFM suite can be customized to pretty much any level imaginable from look and feel, to an OEM white label to field levels to workflow and business rules. Plus they are SAS70 compliant - meaning as secure as they come.

If this was all, I’d say great, but what really makes Vovici stand out is that they have a highly experienced stellar management team led by Jeffrey Henning, one of the company’s founders. His blog at their site, according to Vovici, gets 40,000 visitors a month. Not too bad for a corporate maven.

These guys spend time not only on the operational, but thinking through what the thought leadership initiatives have to be in their segment of the industry. They recognize that Voice of the Customer programs to create the right customer experience are the essential core of loyalty and advocacy and their entire product line and solutions offerings are true extensions of this philosophy. But they also have a framework and methodology associated with all of this. So for example in 2010, they announced the existence of the Customer Experience Wheel (take a look at slide 11). Its premise isn’t particularly new. It focuses on the “moments of truth” to use the industry jargon - those key points of customer interaction which have the most important impact on the customer’s relationship to the company. But what made this valuable is that it is visually broken out in very easy to digest pieces so that it is clear what makes or breaks the customer relationship.

That said, there are some things I would do immediately that Vovici, with all this solidity, doesn’t do.

Make the website more comprehensible. I went to it several times to understand what they meant about something and, reading the site’s explanation of that something left me hanging badly. For example, Online Communities. Not that the idea was complicated. But what they call online communities didn’t seem to be addressed directly. All in all, EFM is not a simple subject and it needs to be simplified. Take the Customer Experience Wheel as a great example of the simplification.
A lot of their thought leadership, while incredibly good and interesting, is internally generated. Remember what I said about collaboration between third parties and vendors around key ideas. Focus on them.
Integrate with other CRM vendors beyond Oracle and salesforce.com. There are a lot of large enterprise players out there and they don’t all use those two. Vovici has a huge amount to offer.

All in all, this company truly rocks and their EFM system convinced me to change what I think of something that I never particularly trusted. That says a lot. They can capture more market with their excellent products, smart thinking and terrific management. But that’s up to them, now, isn’t it?

Zuora

Zuora won a slot last year, one of a much smaller Watchlist of 18. Yet, they really didn’t fall into the realm of CRM so this year I vowed that companies like Zuora, Successfactors, and Workday, though worthy of winning stuff, weren’t going to be on this list because they really didn’t qualify.

So, I was at Dreamforce 2010 and ran into Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo. We go back quite a few years to when he was CMO and then Chief Strategy Officer of salesforce.com. Thus, we made sure we had a chance to talk. Damn if he didn’t tell me how they were now positioned which took him straight from not on the list anywhere to a candidate for finalist who didn’t even appear on the final candidates list. In other words, he won after the fact.

Why? Because Tien, in his infinite wisdom, realized that Zuora, who handle subscription based billing and payment, was actually operating as, not the back office, not the front office but the middle office. Meaning that their raison d’etre is to handle that layer of transaction and transaction behavior that sits between the operational parts of business and the customer-company interactions. Which puts them back on the Watchlist radar.

Tien’s and his co-founders vision is based on the idea that we have a subscription economy that his rapidly evolving.

To do this, Zuora first developed their SaaS based Z-Billing product now in its 2.0 incarnation to handle dozens (I think they have 30 templates that are provided with the product - but don’t hold me to that) of different subscription based billing models. If it doesn’t fit a template, it can be customized. They have a set of super powered metrics to bench against - monthly recurring revenue, total contract value, various churn metrics, you name it. They have this integrated with Z-Payments which is tied to all the payment gateways including credit cards, Paypal, etc. They have Z-Commerce which is their platform for building custom solutions. For the purposes of their Watchlist win, they also have Z-Force, a native salesforce.com integration that ties into the salesforce.com applications and can serve as the “mid-office” piece -pricing, quoting, orders, renewals. etc.

What makes this powerful is that there is a vision and thought leadership associated with the product set. That would be Tien’s world - the subscription economy which is based on the simple premise that the business world is evolving to this “payments over time” model. In other words, people are willing to pay over planned periods of time for what they need. I think that its an extension of the model that evolved around a service economy of a few years ago, when products become commoditized to the point that the real value was in the services that grew up around the use of the products. Sometimes the products (software being a good example in many instances) were given away and the customer would subscribe to the services that the products “unlocked.” What better way to pay then with a regular payment over time for the life of the provision of the services? For a good discussion on the subscription economy, go here.

Zuora mastered this approach. They have been wildly successful, signing up (Q1 2010) more than $1 billion in contracted subscription revenue - just for the quarter. They have a powerful, highly experienced management team, a strong set of partnerships/alliances including salesforce.com (of course), NetSuite, Microsoft, VMWare, VISA, Paypal. They have a strong group of mid-tier and top-tier systems integrators working with them - Astadia, Bluewolf, ATG (now Oracle) and Deloitte among others. They just got a second round of funding of over $20M in November so they are set there - and they have a top tier customer list.

So this is a company that put together the whole package. The management team, the partnerships, the marquee customers, the thought leadership, the market presence and the strong funding and revenue growth.

What else could they do? Not much more than they already are. In fact, they ended up the second highest scoring company on the list after salesforce.com. Not bad for a company I wasn’t planning on including. But they belong here - and - if their path stays as clear as it is and Tien’s subscription economy vision bears out, they are going to be the enterprise that they want to and do it the way that they want to do it - something not seen that often in the roller coaster world of software and high tech.

Simple. I’m beat. This is nearly 7000 words and that is as big as anything I’ve written so far. However, there is one thing that stands out here that I would be remiss if I didn’t mention it. The only thing that any of these companies have in common is that they are able to serve Social CRM with their specific specialties. They don’t have much in common with each other. But SCRM leads us to this new, fertile, areas that give a wide range of products, services, tools, and experiences play.

Next and final Watchlist will be the consulting companies and systems integrators. Then its them.

Rackspace, Akamai forge partnership

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:12:00 -0800

Rackspace will offer Akamai’s technologies—content delivery network services, secure sockets layer and other web optimization tools—as part of its cloud hosting services.

Under the partnership, Rackspace said it will integrate Akamai features in its Cloud Files, an online storage system.

In a statement, Rackspace noted that it frequently works with Akamai customers. Now the two companies will have a more integrated approach.

Rackspace will include Akamai products as an embedded part of services or as an add-on for its dedicated, cloud and hybrid hosting. The first part of the partnership is to integrate Akamai’s content delivery services into Cloud Files.

Sony Vaio S laptops can now be 'custom built'

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:10:00 -0800

As an additional little, post-CES present, Sony has announced thatrecently updated Vaio S notebook series can be customized.

The following custom, optional specs are available for these super slim, 13.3-inch laptops:

Up to a Intel Core i5-580M processor
Up to 256GB SSD
Up to 8GB RAM
Backlit keyboard
Blu-ray disc writeable drive
Windows 7 Professional (Automatically gets you upgrade to Core i5 CPU)
NVIDIA GeForce graphics card with 512MB of VRAM
Intel graphics options also bring WiDi support

Pricing starts at $874.99, and pre-built and custom built machines can be ordered now.

Intuit drops monthly fees, offers free credit card reader until February

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:10:00 -0800

Hoping to attract new customers in the new year, Intuit is offering a free credit card reader and no monthly service fees for its GoPaymentmobile payment service through mid-February.

Intended for small business owners, the promotion is only valid for new subscribers. For reference, GoPayment permits users to swipe and process credit cards within seconds rather than enter card data manually. The system never saves sensitive information, but it does keep track of frequently sold items and can send customized receipts via text or email. Funds are deposited into the business owner’s bank account within two to three business days.

For those with a “lower or intermittent credit card processing volume,” the monthly service free is dropped through mid-February (no specific date given, but expect prior to Presidents’ Day), and a $0.15 transaction fee. Higher volume users will have to fork over a $12.95 monthly fee and pay $0.30 per transaction.

How 3D will evolve

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:08:00 -0800

CES 2011 a convinced me that 3D has a 70% chance of becoming mainstream consumer tech. But there’s 2 conditions: 3D will be glasses-free; and it will take 10 years, not 3.

CES in 3D
3D was big at CES. Sony was all in, with 3D from the cool Bloggie HD video camera for $250, to crisp giant rear projection screens using polarized glasses.

Every other major TV maker was also in. Accessories makers were showing 3D glasses, both the more expensive LCD shutter glasses and the simpler and cheaper polarized type - and one had a combo design.

But large screen 3D push has already failed. Sales are dismal. Vendors are realizing that there won’t be a quick transition to 3D among consumers - especially during the Great Recession.

Problem
Some blame the dorky glasses and put their hope in glasses-free screens. But that isn’t the problem.

3DTV is in a chicken and egg situation. Hollywood has a steep learning curve to develop cost-effective production techniques for high quality 3D content. But where is the audience?

On the consumer side, after screening a 3D copy of Avatar a couple of times, where is the 3D content? Back in the 1950s color TV got a major boost when a big network, NBC, gambled on an all color format. But with all the networks today, who has that clout? ESPN maybe, if anxious wives go along.

Future
The near-term future of 3D is not in the large screen world. Its mobile. Why?

Small screen glasses-free 3D displays are higher quality than big-screens. I saw a half-dozen different small screens, ranging from an inch and a half to 4 inches, and they all provided a comfortable view.
As mobile devices continue to evolve into general-purpose entertainment and communication systems, thousands of application developers will have an opportunity to experiment and to perfect 3D UI and content. 3D won’t be a mass market until it is both fun and useful.
Technology for large screen glasses-free 3D needs to evolve with consumers. Glasses-free is not as immersive: it is like looking into a 3D box rather than the leaps-at-you experience of classes-based 3D.

The large-screen 3D glasses-free screens suffered from irritating visual artifacts. For example, slight head movement would create momentary dark vertical bars.

Enhancements are needed. For example, 3D splits the screen resolution between two eyes, screens need 4K resolution to provide the equivalent of full HD today.

The lenses that split the picture to each eye need refinement too. With a higher resolution display the lenses can become finer and better aimed.

The Storage Bits take
Consumer video is one of the fastest growing applications for consumer storage, and 3D could double that. But 3D adoption needs more than a few blockbuster movies.

3D handhelds are the obvious way to go. Content producers get a low-cost platform for experimentation and development. And consumers get a low-cost way to ease into 3D.

Massive 3D adoption will be a bottom-up evolution, not a top-down vendor-driven coup. The rapid turnover in mobile devices is the perfect laboratory for 3D research and development.

Comments welcome, of course. All in all, this year’s CES seemed to be more creative than last year’s. That’s reason for optimism.

5 fascinating facts you probably didn't know about America's new $1.5 billion cyber-security center

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 17:01:00 -0800

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers broke ground last week on what promises to be one of front lines in America’s defense against cyber attack, Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative Data Center.

Gallery: Iconic secret government data centers in the movies

While much of what’s going on at the Camp Williams, Utah construction site can’t be discussed, there are some amazing details you might find interesting.

Fact #5: Thousands of new construction jobs, but only a few permanent jobs

While the facility will bring 5,000 to 10,000 new construction jobs to the Utah project, only about 100 to 200 permanent jobs will be created on-site. Those folks who make the cut to work at the data center, of course, could include ZDNet readers, so go ahead and dust off your resumes.

Fact #4: The facility will be big, a million square feet big

Even though the raised floor server room facilities will only be about 100,000 (only!) square feet, another 900,000 square feet has been allocated to administrative staff.

To give you a rough idea of how that compares, the Pentagon is about 6.6 million square feet and is one of the biggest buildings in the world. The new Utah Data Center will be about a sixth its size.

Put another way, it’s about the size of 20 football fields.

Fact #3: It will be able to be self-sufficient

Data centers are often power hogs. Undoubtedly the Utah Data Center will also consume a tremendous amount of power. The big difference: the Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative Data Center will be able to generate all of its own power through backup generators.

According to the Army Corps of Engineers (PDF):

Support facilities include an electrical sub-station, a vehicle inspection facility and visitor control center, fuel storage, water storage, and chiller plant.

Fact #2: The facility will be environmentally friendly

The U.S. Green Building Council has developed a series of environmental rating levels that rate how green new buildings are. This certification system is called LEED, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

There are different LEED ratings. Second from the bottom is LEED Silver, which is what the Utah Data Center is aiming for. Now, don’t misinterpret LEED Silver as bad by any means. While the top LEED rating, Platinum, essentially means the building can essentially pass gas that can create a new Garden of Eden, any LEED rating is a far improvement over the environmental sustainability of most modern buildings.

So, for a data center of the size of the Utah Data Center to be LEED Silver is a big accomplishment — if they actually earn the rating once the facility is built.

Fact #1: Information Redacted

Wow! The number one amazing fact is, in fact amazing. It’s just sad that I can’t share it with you. Sorry, some things have to remain secret and I’d have to have someone kill you if I told you.

That said, I can tell you what the National Security Council’s The Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative says are the goals of the CNCI:

To establish a front line of defense against today’s immediate threats by creating or enhancing shared situational awareness of network vulnerabilities, threats, and events within the Federal Government—and ultimately with state, local, and tribal governments and private sector partners—and the ability to act quickly to reduce our current vulnerabilities and prevent intrusions.
To defend against the full spectrum of threats by enhancing U.S. counterintelligence capabilities and increasing the security of the supply chain for key information technologies.
To strengthen the future cybersecurity environment by expanding cyber education; coordinating and redirecting research and development efforts across the Federal Government; and working to define and develop strategies to deter hostile or malicious activity in cyberspace.

Stay tuned. Although this site is still arguably smaller than what Google or Amazon operate, it’s going to be an important part of our national defense.

Dell Vostro 460 is first business desktop with Intel's Sandy Bridge processors inside

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 17:00:00 -0800

Most of the desktops that have been announced that feature Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors have been gaming computers, but Dell has just launched the Vostro 460, the first business-class desktop using the new chips.

Clearly designed for biz users who need more power than from the typical corporate desktop, the Vostro 460 packs the Core i5-2400 quad-core processor by default, but you can also upgrade to the Core i7-2600 for some hyperthreading action. The base $599 configuration is otherwise pretty spartan — just 1GB of DDR3 RAM, 320GB hard drive, integrated graphics, and no monitor — but you can customize to your heart’s content. That includes discrete graphics options like the AMD Radeon HD 5450 or 5670 and the Nvidia GeForce GT 420 or a pair of hard drives with up 3TB of storage space.

The Vostro 460 is already available to order on Dell’s Web site. You can click here to check out all the details.

Storing it up: New York town using 8MW energy storage system

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 17:00:00 -0800

If the past two weeks are any indication, energy storage technology advances will be a big topic this year for us green-tech and cleantech blogger types. Last week, many of you were interested in an item I posted about some ultracapacitor research being undertaken by Maxwell Technologies that could have applications in the mobile space and next week, I’m gearing up for a briefing about available battery technologies related to electric vehicles.

This week, I’m reading about a lithium ion-based energy storage grid in Johnson City, N.Y. The project, spearheaded by AES Energy Storage, is currently offering 8 megawatts of electric capacity as a potential way to ease excess demand on the power grid. When phase 2 of the system becomes operational later in 2011, it will provide a total of up to 20 megawatts of reserve capacity. AES Energy Storage is working together with the New York Independent System Operator. A $17.1 million federal loan guarantee from the Department of Energy is helping to fund phase 2 of the project.

I recently spoke with Chris Shelton, the president of AES Energy Storage, about the opportunity in energy storage, and he says it is more diverse than one might think. It’s not just about helping renewable energy systems more reliable, its about evening out the capacity in a given region, kind of like a massive uninterruptible power supply (UPS). “Power plants are not as fast as batteries,” he says. “Even the fastest power plant could take up to a minute to respond.”

Projects like this intrigue me, because I’ve often wondered why the electric grid can’t act more like a distributed computing network — with nodes of microgrids kicking in as appropriate or as necessary. Right now, as you know, everything has to be pushed out via transformers. One of the biggest challenges of any renewable energy project, aside from the intermittent nature of the fuel involved, is actually hooking that capacity into the traditional gridlines. I’m not an electric engineer, so I may be suggesting something that is technically impossible. Then again, as the IT community is well aware, there are many things that are not as technically impossible as they seem.

In any event, watching for more information about energy storage experiments such as these. AES Energy Storage itself already has 24 megawatts of similar capacity in operation, with another 100 megawatts in advanced development. Here’s a complete list of the projects it talks about publicly.

Google Chrome to drop H.264 support; roadblock to HTML5?

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:59:00 -0800

Just when you thought the World Wide Web was cruising smoothly toward a standards-compliant HTML5 Promised Land, Google decided to break away and head into uncharted territory. Today, in an innocuous-looking post on the Chromium Blog, Google Product Manager Mike Jazayeri announced that support for the popular H.264 codec would be dropped from Google Chrome:

[W]e are changing Chrome’s HTML5 support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.
These changes will occur in the next couple months but we are announcing them now to give content publishers and developers using HTML an opportunity to make any necessary changes to their sites.

That puts Google at odds with Microsoft, which has publicly declared its support for H.264 as the default video codec in IE9. More importantly, it puts Apple between a rock and a hard place. Google still publicly supports Adobe Flash, which offers a supported path for developers to deliver H.264 encoded content in Google’s browser. But Apple’s bitter public feud with Adobe means it has banned Flash from all iOS devices, leaving H.264 as the only supported codec.

Google’s primary argument in favor of its own WebM and Theora codecs is that they’re “open.” Unfortunately, they’re also late to a party where the momentum is seriously in favor of H.264. As I noted back in May, when this battle first began brewing, H.264 has serious performance advantages over its competitors: Just about every modern graphic processing unit (GPU) now has H.264 decoding built into the silicon, and IE9 is going to take advantage of hardware acceleration for graphics and text.” That has a huge impact on performance, battery life, and heat, all of which are crucial to the next wave of computing platforms.

For big companies, licensing H.264 costs a relative pittance (I broke down the costs back in May). In exchange, licensees get the right to use an enormous portfolio of patents from 26 companies in the pool administered by the MPEG Licensing Authority (MPEG-LA). That provides security against patent-related lawsuits. Indeed, it was a key reason for Microsoft’s decision to adopt H.264. As IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch explained last May, “H.264 … provides the best certainty and clarity with respect to legal rights from the many companies that have patents in this area.”

Going forward, this is unlikely to be an issue for Windows users. H.264 codecs are included with Windows 7 and, presumably, in the next version of Windows, which means that video clips encoded using H.264 can be played back on any modern Windows PC. Microsoft’s decision to support H.264 natively in the browser doesn’t preclude third parties from adding their own codecs and plugins. Because the VP8 ad Theora codecs are open source, they can easily be added to Windows. And, of course, the Windows platform supports other browsers besides Internet Explorer, including Google Chrome.

One big question that remains unanswered in Google’s announcement today is whether future versions of Chrome will actively block the installation of H.264 support via plug-ins, especially in devices running the Chrome OS. If Google takes that drastic approach, it risks alienating content providers and developers.

The other big question is how MPEG LA, which administers the H.264 patent portfolio, will respond. As open-source patent expert Florian Mueller noted today via Twitter, “the jury is still out … seriously out” on whether Google’s VP8 format is truly free of patent issues. The CEO of MPEG LA, Larry Horn, has already hinted that it is looking carefully at Google’s patents:

[N]o one in the market should be under the misimpression that other codecs such as Theora are patent-free. Virtually all codecs are based on patented technology, and many of the essential patents may be the same as those that are essential to AVC/H.264. Therefore, users should be aware that a license and payment of applicable royalties is likely required to use these technologies developed by others, too.

It could be that Google’s plan is to tip the hand of MPEG LA and force this issue into the courts as quickly as possible. If that happens, the road to a standards-compliant web will be blocked for a long time to come.

Microsoft to launch Webmatrix Web-development tools this week

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 16:59:00 -0800

Microsoft is planning to launch its WebMatrix Web-development tool bundle this week at the CodeMash event, according to multiple tweets.

Microsoft’s ISV Developer Community site confirmed the January 13 launch will happen at CodeMash in Sandusky, Ohio.

WebMatrix is Microsoft’s newest Web development tool for creating new Web sites. Developers can use templates (provided by Microsoft or pre-built) or “any of the free popular open source ASP.NET or PHP web applications, such as WordPress, Joomla!, DotNetNuke or Umbraco, located in the online (Microsoft) Web Applications Gallery,” according to the Microsoft Developer site.

Microsoft launched the first WebMatrix beta in July 2010.

WebMatrix is a bundle of a lightweight version of Microsoft’s IIS Web Server, known as IIS Express; an updated version of SQL Server Compact Edition; and a new “view-engine option” for ASP.Net, known as “Razor,” which enables developers to embed Visual Basic or C# within HTML.

The goal of WebMatrix, according to its developers, is “to make it really easy to get started with web development.” The new tool “minimizes the number of concepts someone needs to learn in order to get simple things done, and includes and integrates all of the pieces necessary to quickly build Web sites,” Microsoft officials have said.

NextComputing debuts Radius portable workstations with Intel's Sandy Bridge

noreply@blogger.com (Tech Buzz) — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 08:52:00 -0800

NextComputing has announced the introduction of Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processors to the Radius portable workstation series.

Some of the other major specs to be found on a Radius all-in-one computer include Intel’s Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading technologies, full-height PCI Express slots, “multiple terabytes” of onboard space as well as removable storage.

Just looking at the photo above, it’s debatable just how portable these machines are. Sure, you can physically pick up the all-in-one system and move it. But expect these to be used for military operations and other field uses rather than for work done on the tray table behind the seat in front of you on an airplane.