Pages

Friday, April 11, 2008

ScaleMP - Powering high end x86 systems

www.scalemp.com ScaleMP is the leader in virtualization for high-end computing, providing higher performance and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The innovative Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture aggregates multiple x86 systems into a single virtual x86 system, delivering an industry-standard, high-end symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) computer. Using software to replace custom hardware and components, ScaleMP offers a new, revolutionary computing paradigm.

ScaleMP's solutions provide significant benefits throughout the compute chain, allowing customers to:

AGGREGATE several systems to create large x86 systems

SCALE application compute, memory and I/O resources in a near linear fashion resulting in top performance

SIMPLIFY system installation and ongoing management by reducing the total number of systems

SAVE money by leveraging standard components to deliver SMP at cluster prices

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

rPath - Software appliances

www.rpath.com A software appliance is an application combined with Just Enough Operating System (JeOS) that readily installs on industry standard hardware or inside a virtual machine. Software appliances simplify server applications and deliver dramatic top-line and bottom-line benefits to Application Providers:

* Eliminate OS/platform certification costs that suck up 40% or more of your R&D budget yet don't add value
* Open markets/increase license revenue by increasing the accessibility and usability of your application for a broader audience – including your channel
* Eliminate support costs squandered on resolving OS or platform issues, which drain 40% or more of your support budget
* Get to revenue sooner by avoiding release delays caused by OS/platform certification
* Avoid the next big headache – certification of multiple hypervisors for virtualized environments

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Punchscan - See your vote count

www.punchscan.org David Chaum (www.chaum.com) is the inventor of many cryptographic protocols and has contributed to the advancement of electronic cash. Chaum founded DigiCash, an electronic cash company, in 1990. Additionally, in 1982 he founded the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), which currently organizes some of the most important academic conferences in cryptography research.

Now he is applying the same base of research, mathematics and thinking to other real world problems, such as e-democracy.

Punchscan is the first vote capture system to offer fully end-to-end (E2E) verifiability of election results. Punchscan moves beyond ordinary paper audit trails offering a far more robust and available way for voters to become involved in the election oversight process.

There are many other applications one could envisage.

Also see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chaum

http://idtrail.org/content/view/28/43/

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Open Span - SOA for the Desktop - Pioneering "Surface" Integration

www.openspan.com The OpenSpan Platform SOA Desktop Edition accelerates the realization of SOA strategies by enabling the rapid integration of desktop, legacy, virtualized and rich internet applications and the expression of those integrations as web services. As a result, enterprises can SOA-enable more of the enterprise infrastructure faster so that they achieve the intended business benefits of SOA more rapidly.

OpenSpan Studio provides a visual environment for rapidly creating integrations, automations, and new composite applications.

OpenSpan and Microsoft have partnered together to drive a quality customer experience. The Microsoft Customer Care Framework (CCF) 2008 aggregates information from disparate line of business applications into a unified desktop with efficient workflows without requiring replacement of existing systems.

The OpenSpan Platform SOA Desktop Edition allows you to rapidly consume web services within legacy applications or business process automations and, for the first time ever, to service-enable desktop and other legacy applications as well as the business process automations that span these applications. Effectively, the OpenSpan Platform SOA Desktop Edition enables you to more quickly roll out Web services to business users as well as to expose application functionality and business process automations as web services for consumption within SOA environments.

Common uses for the OpenSpan Platform SOA Desktop Edition:

* Integrating a new web service into an existing legacy application – OpenSpan enables you to extend an existing application with web services functionality instead of limiting you to delivering services via web portals or rich internet applications. For example, a legacy CRM application can be extended to call a address verification web service whenever a customer address is entered

* Exposing “closed” legacy application functionality as a web service – service-enable desktop and other legacy applications including host, Windows, Java, PowerBuilder; even DOS or other applications with an available API

* Expose business process automations as a web service – rapidly create automations within an application or across virtually any new or old legacy application and then expose the automations as a web service

* Extend enterprise business process management (BPM) to the desktop – enable enterprise workflows to call a service on a users’ desktop that can span all applications; not just web-based applications. Bridge enterprise BPM workflows and the business users that need to participate

* Support virtualized environments – overcome the hurdle of integrating data between virtualized and non-virtualized applications or between two virtualized applications operating in different virtualized “bubbles” beyond copy-and-paste. Expose functionality from virtualized applications as web services consumable by desktop and other legacy applications

* Sanction peer-to-peer communications – permit client systems to communicate directly with each other by publishing and invoking services. For example, enable a “warm transfer” between a customer service representative and their manager whereby customer data and status is transferred to ensure a smooth transition for the customer

Friday, March 14, 2008

Ambient Audeo - Speak your mind

www.theaudeo.com The Audeo is being developed to create a human-computer interface for communication without the need of physical motor control or speech production. Using signal processing, unpronounced speech representing the thought of the mind can be translated from intercepted neurological signals.

By interfacing near the source of vocal production, the Audeo has the potential to restore communication to people who are unable to speak. The proposed solution is a featherweight wireless device resting over the vocal cords capable of transmitting neurological information from the brain. Using data analysis, this information can be processed into synthesized speech or a menu selection capable of conveying the basic necessities of human life.

Current Applications of the Audeo:

Speech – After a recent breakthrough, we have developed a method to exceed individual words and have shown the ability to produce continuous speech with high accuracy from the neurological signals.

Wheelchair Control – By incorporating the Audeo with additional hardware, we have successfully controlled a wheelchair without the need of physical movement.

Michael Callahan and Thomas Coleman founded Ambient Corporation to help people with speaking disabilities regain their ability to communicate. Our mission is to improve the quality of life for people with disabilities through utilization of the mind and advanced communication.The following paragraphs describe each cofounders' vision and hope that led to the formation of this company.

"The Audeo will allow people with disabilities to express their thoughts and ideas, an aspect of life which is often taken for granted. ALS patient, Stephen Hawking accomplishes this through the movement of one of his fingers which has remained controllable despite his disease. By being able to move his finger, Stephen Hawking has been able to propose some of the most intelligent ideas of our time. Without that ability, those ideas would be confined to his own mind. Unfortunately, most patients lose all motor control and have no way of conveying their ideas. It is our hope that the Audeo will give people back this ability and allow many more profound ideas to change the world through communication."

Neteeza - Data warehouse analytics appliance

www.netezza.com As the global analytic appliance leader, Netezza is transforming the way customers use business intelligence. For Michaels Stores, the Netezza Performance Server® appliance is providing an EDW that can support hundreds of concurrent users across 900 stores, running up to 22,000 complex analytics each day.

Netezza, the global leader in analytic appliances, enables business users across the extended enterprise to leverage the power of high-performance analytics on all their data, simply and affordably, for competitive and operational advantage. The Netezza Performance Server® (NPS®) family of streaming analytic™ appliances brings appliance simplicity to a broad range of complex data warehouse and analytic challenges.

Organizations today need to do more than just collect and analyze large amounts of data. To hone their competitive edge in today's information-intensive markets, organizations need to put the power of analytics into the hands of business users across the extended enterprise for informed, timely decision making. With the Netezza family of streaming analytic appliances, companies are gaining real-time insights into their customer and operational data. Now they can not only understand past trends but also make rapid line-of-business decisions and predict future patterns — fundamentally changing the way they leverage information to transform their business. Customers including Ahold, Amazon.com, CNET Networks, Debenhams, Department of Veterans Affairs, Epsilon, Nationwide, Neiman Marcus, Orange UK, Premier, Inc., Ross Stores, Ryder System, Inc., The Carphone Warehouse, Virgin Media and others now have the ultimate competitive advantage — the power to question everything.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Layered Technologies - Grid Layer

www.layeredtech.com Layered Technologies, a self managed dedicated server solutions provider, announced the release of its 32 node grid-server network called "The Grid Layer" (TGL).

This is based on 3Tera.

The benefits of "The Grid Layer" are rapid deployment of utility based services and platforms with scalable CPU, memory and storage. The TGL system allows administrators to design, edit, configure, and control multi-tier applications using the intuitive web based drag and drop editor.

"Grid-based solutions empower administrators with basically the ease of flipping a light switch in order to plan, build, migrate and deploy entire internet based infrastructures" said Todd Abrams, President of Layered Technologies. Applications running on the TGL can scale from 1 to 32 servers without any code changes. Plus, in the case of a down hardware node, TGL will re-deploy the application and IP resources to the next available node to allow for quick recovery with no human intervention.

"Think of TGL being like an Electric Power Utility Company where each user pays for the electricity they consume," said Abrams. "However, with TGL, customers pay for the on-demand CPU, network, server and storage capacity utilized. Plus, TGL provides clients ultimately with more flexible hosting options. For customers wanting more than a traditional dedicated server, they will be able to purchase the specific amount in virtual nodes on the grid."

On TGL, clients handle their web based customers through CPanel or DirectAdmin, just like on dedicated servers. "Unlike other grid service providers, TGL allows our clients to use the popular control panels available today. We plan on porting every major control panel and open source application on to the TGL platform" said Jeremy Suo-Anttila, Chief Technology Officer of Layered Technologies.

Apistry - At the convergence of Grid Computing, Virtualization and SOA

www.appistry.com Appistry is the leading provider of application fabric software. Appistry's flagship product, Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (Appistry EAF), is a software-based environment for running large-scale, time-critical applications across a network of commodity-grade computers, without sacrificing dependability or manageability. Pioneering the next-generation of grid computing, Appistry is enabling enterprises to quickly, easily and cost-effectively deploy and manage strategic applications, thus minimizing operational complexity and increasing business agility.

Appistry Enterprise Application Fabric (EAF) is a grid-based application platform that dramatically simplifies the development and deployment of highly scalable applications in Java, Spring, .NET or C++.

Unlike traditional application servers, Appistry EAF is built from the ground up for scalability. And unlike traditional grid computing, it's extremely easy to fabric-enable your applications. With Appistry EAF, customers are able to quickly and inexpensively bring new capabilities to market, with the agility, reliability and scale demanded by their businesses.

Janeeva - Service Outsourcing Relationship Management

www.janeeva.com Janeeva provides a comprehensive set of software to both users and providers of outsourcing services for Outsourcing Relationship Management (ORM).

Despite their promise, many outsourcing arrangements fall short of expectations because buyers and providers pay insufficient attention to relationship management. Successful outsourcing relationship management (ORM) requires effort on many levels. Clear processes must be established for effective communication, decision-making, conflict resolution, performance monitoring and contract management. Individuals must have a clear picture of these processes even as they change over time.

The Janeeva Assurance family of products provides a one-stop shop for governance activities of outsourced operations. With Janeeva Assurance, governance groups, providers and internal customers know exactly where to go to arrange for additional resources, raise or manage an issue, track SLAs, or compare performance across multiple providers. The transparency that can be achieved with Janeeva Assurance and the institutional memory it creates, increases efficiency of interactions, promotes trust and minimizes missed opportunities. And the wealth of data collected by Janeeva Assurance can be mined to identify trends, process bottlenecks and best practices.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

ServiceMix - Open Source ESB and JBI

servicemix.apache.org Apache ServiceMix is an Open Source ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) that combines the functionality of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and an Event Driven Architecture (EDA) to create an agile, enterprise ESB.

Apache ServiceMix is an open source distributed ESB built from the ground up on the Java Business Integration (JBI) specification JSR 208 and released under the Apache license. The goal of JBI is to allow components and services to be integrated in a vendor independent way, allowing users and vendors to plug and play.

Mulesource - Open Source ESB and SOA

www.mulesource.com MuleSource is the leading provider of open source service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure software. Founded by the creators of the Mule project, the world's most reliable and widely used open source enterprise service bus (ESB) and integration platform, MuleSource delivers enterprise class software, support and services to the thousands of organizations that have downloaded the open source project worldwide.

The open source Mule project was founded in 2003 by Ross Mason, CTO of MuleSource Inc. Frustrated by integration "donkey work" Mason set out to create a new platform that emphasized ease of development and re-use of components. He started the Mule project to bring a modern approach, one of assembly, rather than repetitive coding, to developers worldwide.

Liferay - Open Source Portal

www.liferay.com Created in 2000 for the non-profit sector, the award winning Liferay Portal now delivers the same low TCO and flexibility to enterprises across all industries.

Today, Liferay Portal is in its 9th year of development and is the portal platform of choice for organizations worldwide.

Unlike many open source projects, it is backed by a fast growing, profitable business, Liferay, Inc, which also houses a professional services team with comprehensive hands-on product knowledge.

The Green Grid - Green Data Centers

www.thegreengrid.org The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems. In furtherance of its mission, The Green Grid is focused on the following: defining meaningful, user-centric models and metrics; developing standards, measurement methods, processes and new technologies to improve data center performance against the defined metrics; and promoting the adoption of energy efficient standards, processes, measurements and technologies.

Comprised of an interactive body of members who share and improve current best practices around data center efficiency, The Green Grid's scope includes collaboration with end users and government organizations worldwide to ensure that each organizational goal is aligned with both developers and users of data center technology. All interested parties are encouraged to join and become active participants.

The Green Grid Board of Directors is comprised of the following member companies: AMD, APC, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Rackable Systems, SprayCool, Sun Microsystems and VMware.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Nimbus Partners - From strategy to reality

www.nimbuspartners.com Understanding the end-to-end processes of an organization is at the heart of delivering high performance, compliance and robust operations. The challenge is to develop a process framework that is common to these goals.

Control 2007 enables organizations to capture, analyze and communicate a common set of processes that can be used to manage and transform your business. The use of Control 2007 dramatically reduces the time, effort and cost required to deliver effective process management.

SigmaFlow - Best Practices Execution System

www.sigmaflow.com SigmaFlow's enterprise and desktop software solutions elevate corporate process improvement and best practice initiatives to a significantly higher level, reducing learning curves and project completion time, while improving results and cost efficiency.

SigmaFlow allows capture and implementation of best practices, and uniquely aggregates data from multiple projects into a central repository for result analysis and reporting. Our "online/offline" architecture allows project teams to work where they are most efficient.

With SigmaFlow’s graphical Roadmaps as the basis of your project workspace, your task-specific references and tools are LINKED.

The Roadmap: illustrates what to do next, automatically populates status to a Repository, and provides the best standardization of your work.

The Repository: provides executives real-time knowledge of where each initiative is, for portfolio reporting of project status, cumulative financial savings and multi-project resource allocation.

The Result: shorter project cycle time, higher quality, easier communications, and improved knowledge transfer.

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Seadragon - Now Microsoft Photosynth

labs.live.com/photosynth/ Photosynth is a collaboration between Microsoft and the University of Washington based on the groundbreaking research of Noah Snavely, Steve Seitz, and Richard Szeliski.

The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. The software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next. Now think of doing that at Internet scale! This is a 3D view of the world.

In Microsoft photo collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.

Simply amazing. I might try doing this for CSC HQ EMEA

Android - Open Source Handset Platform

code.google.com/android/ The Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies, is developing Android: the first complete, open, and free mobile platform. To help developers get started developing new applications, Google is offering an early look at the Android Software Development Kit. The idea is, instead of one Google Handset GPhone, Android will allow hundreds or even thousands of GPhones.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Caucho Resin - Open source high performance Java-PHP solutions

The app server that serves Salesforce.com. www.caucho.com Caucho Technology is an engineering company devoted to reliable open source and high performance Java-PHP solutions. Caucho products include Resin application server, Hessian web services and Quercus Java-PHP solutions. Caucho Technology was founded in 1998 and is based in La Jolla, California.

Caucho is a globally recognized leader in open source Java-PHP server technology that delivers fast and stable performance. Resin is the application server of choice for over 7500 companies including Fortune 500, innovative startups, government and educational institutions needing reliable and fast Java-PHP solutions.

Dave Moellenhoff, CTO of Salesforce.com, describes his experience with Resin...
"Salesforce.com has relied on Resin to run our market-leading CRM services for years. After evaluating competing products, we found Resin to be the most reliable, scalable and cost-effective solution.”

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Azul Systems - Java Compute Appliance - 5x Faster - 50x Simpler

www.azulsystems.com Azul Systems is a global provider of enterprise server appliances that deliver compute and memory resources as a shared network service for transaction-intensive applications, such as those built on the Java platform.

Azul Compute Appliances enable transparent, massively scalable infrastructure to support the business priorities of today’s most demanding enterprise environments and deliver increased capabilities, capacity, and utilization at a fraction of the cost of traditional computing models.