Entries tagged with “ibm” from Paul Lopez Unwired

Beyond the hype around cloud computing and its variants, there is growing acceptance of the notion that the buying criteria of end customers has moved from a discussion of how the technology chosen and provided to a discussion of what value the technology is providing. This provides the new frame of reference for customers and IT providers alike.  We are finally getting to fully connect the business objectives and requirements with IT services delivery. Given IBM's announcement today of a new data center in Auckland and a Cloud Computing application research center in Hong Kong, there is growing evidence that organizations are increasingly more interested in moving much of their data center operations to off-premise providers. When we set aside details such as massively scalable processing, virtualization, service orientation and always-on access; we have nothing short of a major evolution of business itself. The key will be in pricing strategies of such services because smart IT shops can always reverse engineer your cost structure for standard cloud platform offerings as they consider the option of "private clouds" (a term I utterly detest). IBM references "private clouds" as those configurations where customers have dedicated computing and resources for their own business. They are compute and infrastructure technology stacks, nothing more magical than that. The provider profit margin and value will result from their ability to optimize everything behind the service boundary while hiding complexity from the end customer. That is something worth paying for!

Dell introduced the new Dell Precision workstations based on the Xeon product line from Intel today. As the master of PC industry road-map, Intel tells IBM, Dell, HP and other PC manufacturers what they are building next and when. These processors also power the new Mac Pro and Apple has a nice summary of the architecture on their site. Nehalem (Xeon 3500/5500) utilizes the 45nm process and features the latest micro-architecture. The next stop will be the shrink of the die called "Westmere" in a 32nm process. Intel has a well thought out roadmap - shrink, then innovate, then shrink again (Tick/Tock). This gives OEMs a good runway for product planning and price/performance curve forecasting. Now with Cisco's entry into the datacenter space, they will also be a key stakeholder in the future generations. Much has been said about virtualization enhancements with this architecture but the real key is on-chip memory control. Improved memory management is the key to supporting more VM instances on the bare metal. We'll see the rest of the industry show their hands on Monday.

Sun is a company that has been in transition from a legacy hardware business to one based on open-source and services. Their exit ramp led to IBM, but will this be a traditional IBM "tuck-in" acquisition or something more? Acquiring Sun for a mere $6.5 billion is only two quarters of $JAVA revenue and if you factor in the $2 billion in cash on their balance sheet, the offer is closer to $4 billion. Sun is exposed to financial services, telecom & manufacturing. They also face secular decline of their Unix servers and tape storage. Newer technology offerings are not scaling up fast enough to offset margin and revenue erosion. IBM will ave difficulty monetizing Sun's open-source software portfolio too. Many application vendors support Linux faster than Solaris, and even with MySQL, they've not been able to get critical mass for OpenSolaris. Maren Mickos, former MySQL CEO bailed from Sun because of the bureaucracy. IBM gets Java but will they keep the way the Java community directs the development of the language? So now IBM will have dueling UNIX banjos. What's the future of AIX? IBM gets an installed base that they can migrate over time but those customers will open up to other competitive choices, so it's no slam dunk. I believe Sun's NetBeans development environment goes by the wayside in favor of IBM's Eclipse. Sun's purchase of Q Layer bolsters their cloud computing offering, but they were just getting started with innovations like Project Caroline. Still, Sun could never show CIOs why they should pay a premium for their products. Sun sells to developers, IBM sells to CIOs. Not sure which one is Billy Redden in this case.

Cisco is taking virtualization from the network layer up as an alternative approach from a data center architecture perspective. These are not ordinary blade servers being announced today. The new Unified Computing System from Cisco will have a simplified infrastructure, meaning fewer management modules, I/O bays and a more open backplane. Nehalem-EP processors can support half-blade or full-width blade configurations providing a great deal of flexibility. The release states "patented extended memory technology" to support applications with large data sets. They've taken an approach to economically address large logical memory requirements with better physical DIMM utilization (think lower cost). Supporting iSCSCI, Fiber channel and Fiber Channel over Ethernet gives customers the option of NAS or SAN support and a built-in upgrade path.  Much of the news most likely will focus on HP, Dell and IBM and what this means for Cisco's large strategic partners. The blades could cut both ways. 

Yahoo announced yesterday it is acquiring Zimbra for $350 million, some industry observers think Zoho may be next. We have seen an uptick in the drive toward integrated collaboration applications among the big players either organically or through acquisitions. Zimbra supports MS Exchange and Apple Mail clients and servers. They also have mail support for Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Google Gmail already has many of the features that make Zimbra interesting for Yahoo. For example, Gmail can enable users to retrieve package tracking data; all using AJAX popups and rich-client UI's sans postbacks. Many Web 2.0 features already present in Google, for example Maps, have just appeared in Yahoo platforms. Even Apple is gearing up iWork 2008 for the enterprise, I have seen an increase in Apple within the enterprise lately. IBM announced today they will offer free open-source programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations based on Symphony and OpenOffice.org.  All of these applications are geared toward sharing and collaboration. Using standards such as XML, and direct-drive publishing to social networking sites using web services provides formidable competition to Microsoft Office 2007. Microsoft notes (no pun intended for Lotus Notes!) they have 500 million users of Office worldwide. Last count, Zimbra had about 6 million paid mailboxes. There is still a big market and most users have more than one email client in use. Microsoft has not been successful in establishing Office Open XML as a standard with the International Organization for Standards (Geneva). IBM, Google and Sun support the OpenDocument format based also on XML and has been approved as an international standard. Use of AJAX and even VOIP is nothing new here but Zimbra has done a good job briefing key analysts and showing how their applications are used in a corporate setting. They have a good customer base and group of loyal users, especially in higher education. Their offline tools and mashups are particularly useful in a corporate environment for distributed teams. Yahoo in most people's minds is still focused on the consumer and this makes sense for home and personal use.

The financial backing of Yahoo should help Zimbra drive further into commercial environments. Most enterprises have their own well-established email, contacts and calendaring infrastructure. Now IT has to contend with business users demanding richer collaboration tools with better web user interfaces and performance. Interoperability among email platforms is becoming more essential to widespread adoption of newer web-based, client-side enhanced applications such as Zimbra. Document conversion is not completely error prone either which forces some level of standardization among major enterprises.