IT-Code-News: IT News HeadLines (InfoWorld) 03/03/2009

Socialtext collaboration platform gains microblogging

Socialtext has built microblogging functionality into its hosted enterprise collaboration system in recognition of the growing popularity among professionals of Twitter, the service that has made microblogging a phenomenon.

The microblogging feature within Socialtext's eponymous collaboration product is called Signals and, like Twitter, lets end users broadcast to their "followers" short text posts, like updates on what they're working on or problems they need help solving.

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Co-workers who subscribe to someone's Signals feed will read the posts at their own convenience, respond if they have any useful tips or information or simply take note of the message if they find it relevant.

Like blogging, wikis, RSS feeds, and social networking, microblogging is the latest Web 2.0 technology that has found its way to workplaces after becoming popular among consumers.

These services have become important elements of enterprise collaboration platforms, expanding the options that employees have for communicating and cooperating, beyond the traditional tools like e-mail, shared files and instant messaging.

Unlike services such as Twitter, which are designed for broad, Internet-wide communications, Signals was built to function within the Socialtext environment, limiting the broadcasting of posts within an organization's boundaries.

MicroStrategy subsidiary Angel.com, which makes Web-hosted call-center applications, has been beta testing Signals, and finds the service to be a very good complement to the Socialtext platform, which it has been using since 2005.

Twitter-like services are appropriate for employees whose jobs require them to communicate company information externally, like public relations staffers and product evangelists, said Angel.com CTO Sam Aparicio.

However, those involved in tasks like product development who manage sensitive and confidential information, are better served by Signals, which lets them microblog in a secure, controlled environment, he said. "With Signals, you can 'tweet' without giving out a secret to the Twitter public," Aparicio said.

Microblogging promotes spontaneous communication that requires little effort, complementing more formal tools like blogs, shared documents, wikis and e-mail, he said. By offering employees a microblogging tool, internal communication and collaboration is increased, to the benefit of the entire company, Aparicio said.

"Each communication and collaboration tool demands a different degree of effort and attention. Writing a Signals entry is a small gesture, so by itself it generates a small amount of value. But put together with everyone else's gestures, you get a collective view of what's going on, which is important for companies that want to execute better," Aparicio said.

In addition to launching Signals, Socialtext is also unveiling the public beta of a rich Internet application called Socialtext Desktop for its collaboration platform

Built using Adobe's AIR technology, Socialtext Desktop offers end users an interface that functions similar to a traditional desktop application, complementing Socialtext's hosted software-as-a-service architecture.

Both Signals and Desktop will be available as of Tuesday at Socialtext's Web site. Existing customers of Socialtext's collaboration platform get Signals at no additional cost. Socialtext offers a 14-day free trial for its collaboration platform, whose price starts at $15 per user per month.

Apple launches new iMacs, MacMinis, Mac Pros

As had been rumored, Apple this morning upgraded its line of iMacs, MacMinis, and Mac Pros, with improved processor speeds and upgraded storage space. All of the new computers are now available in the Apple store.

The new iMacs, available in both 20-inch and 24-inch models, feature double the amount of RAM found in previous models : 2GB for the 20-inch version and 4GB of RAM for the 24-inch. Hard drive space also gets doubled, to 320GB for the 20-inch model, and 640GB and 1TB for the 24-inch model. The prices range from $1,199 for the base 20-inch 2.66-GHz model up to $2,199 for the 24-inch 3.06-GHz model with 1TB or storage space.

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Mac Minis received a speed bump as well with 2.0-GHz processors, more disk space, and Nvidia GeForce 9400 graphics cards. Two new models are available: For $599 you can get a 2.0-GHz Mac Mini with 1GB of RAM and a 120GB hard drive; a version with the same processor speed, 2GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard drive goes for $799.

Two MacPro models are available as well. A $2,499 model features a Quad-Core 2.66-GHz Intel Xenon Nehalem processor, 3GB of RAM, and a 640 GB hard drive, while a $3,299 model brings you two 2.66-GHz Intel Xenon Nehalem processors (8-Core), 6GB of RAM, and a 640 GB hard drive.

Also, both of the company's new wireless devices, Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme now offer simultaneous dual-band Wi-Fi on both the 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz bands, allowing all the devices on the network to use the most efficient band automatically. This will allow them to serve wireless Internet connections to both Macs and PCs, alongside Wi-Fi devices such as iPhone, iPod touch, and Apple TV. Time Capsule costs $299 for the 500GB model and $499 for the 1TB model. Airport Extreme comes at $179.

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Cloud computing: Don't get caught without an exit strategy

When the IT world looks back at 2008, it will certainly remember the global financial crisis. But it will also likely link that time frame with the takeoff of cloud computing, the engine behind more conferences, conversations and marketing collateral than seemingly any other technology in development today.

And amid all the hubbub about whether and how to get into the cloud, there's growing concern about how to get out.

[ Related: "Is cloud computing inherently evil?" It's good to figure out the "evil" quotient of the cloud now because cloud computing is shaping up to be the big trend for 2009. ]

Vendor lock-in is one of the primary fears expressed by IT leaders considering a move to this setup. And the recent announcement that Coghead , maker of a cloud-based enterprise application development system, is shutting its doors has exacerbated that fear.

Cloud computing is an architecture in which companies consume technology resources as an Internet service rather than as an owned system. Much of the fear of lock-in is caused by misconceptions, says John Willis, a systems management consultant and author of an IT management and cloud blog . When people talk about lock-in, they often don't distinguish among the several cloud types that exist, each of which requires varying degrees of commitment.

Moreover, he says, the degree of lock-in needs to be weighed against the advantages of using the system. "People wind up saying things like, "'The cloud is dead because of lock-in,'" he says. "Well, what cloud are you talking about? I can give you five scenarios where lock-in is an issue and five others where it isn't."

But while some vendors debate whether lock-in exists, most agree there are technical reasons for concern.

In general, a lack of standards hampers the portability of data and applications between systems, says James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Research. While the popular hype implies that moving to the cloud doesn't require any heavy lifting, that's not true in some forms of cloud computing.

Particularly with software and platform as a service, vendors use unique and proprietary interfaces, application programming interfaces (API) and databases. To take full advantage of the system, users or third parties need to program to those specifications to varying degrees. If they grow dissatisfied with the service, or if the vendor goes under, data and/or applications would need to be reformatted in order to switch providers or move it back in-house, which could be complex and costly.

"If you deploy to any cloud out there, some degree of your deployment is tied to the vendor, through the unique virtual machine or unique APIs you write to, or the unique configuration or composition of the application," Staten says.

"You've made a choice to be involved in a certain ecosystem," notes Michael Crandell, CEO of RightScale, a cloud infrastructure provider. "There are APIs and platforms in the cloud world that create a walled garden. You get the benefits of that garden, but you're also restricted."

Then, there's fear itself
Technicalities aside, lock-in is also an emotional issue, says Rene Bonvanie, senior vice president at Serena Software, which provides a cloud-based application life-cycle management system and runs most of its own business on the cloud. He argues that data housed in traditional systems such as those of SAP, Oracle, or Microsoft is just as locked in as any cloud system, but people are more concerned because the systems are not on their own premises.

"The common misperception is that because data is within reach, it's somehow more accessible than when it's remote," he says. "But the reality is that it's like money: If it's in a vault, it doesn't matter whether the vault is. It's locked up, regardless."

Exacerbating this fear is the immaturity of the cloud market, Staten says, adding that IT leaders can't help but ask, "When the shake out comes, is this vendor going to make it?"

That's the case for Christopher Barron, CIO at CPS Energy. "We are very concerned about being locked into a specific vendor for a multiyear time period without knowing if they have the capability to serve us properly," he says.

For that reason, Barron is moving into cloud computing slowly, choosing certain business processes that fit into this architecture without having to commit the entire enterprise to the cloud.

"By taking it in pieces, we can experiment, tune and adjust while mitigating a large financial commitment risk," he says.

"Vendor viability is less of a concern if you're using it for a short-term project like a promotional service or an application you want to test," Staten says.

Staying out of the vault
Another way to approach the lock-in conundrum is to use Willis's rule of thumb: The higher you go in the cloud taxonomy, the higher the risk of lock-in.

With cloud storage, for instance, data is easily transportable because it's stored in Linux servers, he says, but with cloud software and platforms come nonstandard APIs, system calls and other proprietary technologies. (Lamia Youseff of the University of California at Santa Barbara offers an interesting look at the cloud computing landscape -- download PDF .)

A case in point is Microsoft's Azure Services Platform , which provides an operating system and a set of developer services to build cloud-based applications.

As Staten points out, with Azure, users write to a set of cloud services in a way that's different from writing to the same services deployed in their own environment. The calls to the SQL database, he explains, are different from the calls in Azure. To move to a different provider, users would have to understand how to translate those API calls into SQL Server calls, he says.

To minimize the complexity and cost of doing that, he says, cloud users should try to touch proprietary and nonstandard elements as lightly as possible. That's what RightScale claims to pull off with its management tools, which work with a variety of cloud infrastructure providers, such as FlexiScale, GoGrid, and Amazon.com.

As Crandell explains, its tools create an abstraction layer on top of these services, which effectively minimizes user reliance on proprietary technology and makes its tools portable across providers. "We shield companies from having to write a specific solution for, say, Amazon and then have to rewrite again for each cloud," he says.

What's more, Crandell says, RightScale's source code is available to users, so if they wanted to move away from RightScale, they could.

This approach makes Christian Taylor, CEO of MeDeploy, feel that his company's infrastructure product offers freedom of choice. MeDeploy offers a system -- based on Amazon EC2 and managed with RightScale tools -- that allows film distributors to build online ecosystems for distributing and selling films.

"If anything, [moving away from EC2] would be easier than [exiting] an on-premise system," he says. "It uses standard hardware, so if a competitor made us think of switching to a different cloud, we could just set up a whole other cloud system, load it up and then switch over."

The risk/benefit dance
Avoiding the proprietary aspects of a vendor's system really comes down to a risk/benefit tradeoff, Staten says. You need to weigh the advantages of using provider-specific technology against the vendor's vulnerability.

Take Salesforce.com, which uses a proprietary programming language and APIs, he says. "Years ago, no one was writing custom applications in Salesforce or leveraging their APIs, because they didn't know if they'd be around," he says. "Now that they've been around 10 years and are well capitalized, those things are in high use."

To determine a vendor's viability, Staten proposes doing in-depth research, asking the vendor to provide under a nondisclosure agreement information such as its cash position. He also talks to the venture capitalists backing the company about their commitment to it. In addition, Staten recommends asking references whether they're just dipping their toes in the water with a vendor or making a bigger commitment.

Serena Software's Bonvanie also advises companies to specify an exit strategy in their contracts. "The imperative is that you agree with your vendor on what the procedures are for abandoning their application, if needed," he says. For instance, how does data come out, and what is the vendor's involvement in making that happen? How much time do you have to get the data out after service nonrenewal?

In many of its contracts, Serena inserts escrows to regulate what happens to its cloud software vendors' source code if the vendors cease operations. Bonvanie says he has found that cloud vendors are more forthcoming about doing this than most traditional vendors.

It's also essential to set policies early on as to how your company is going to use the cloud and under what circumstances, Staten says. This is especially important when it comes to securing data in the cloud, which often requires customization by the user. "You have to do things above and beyond what the cloud vendor provides to be secure or compliant," he says.

So if you want to use five different cloud vendors, for instance, you need to be sure beforehand that you can apply those customizations to all five platforms.

Creating these types of policies is not something many companies are doing yet, "because use of the cloud right now is a bit like the Wild West," Staten says.

However, Staten points out that security customization is yet another way to get locked into a particular vendor, because if you wanted to move to a different provider, you would need to unwind and then redo all that work.

Maturity takes time
Over time, standards will develop, Staten says, most likely driven by customer demand. This won't happen without tension, he says, because customer demand will be offset by the advantages that vendors see in lock-in. For that reason, users need to be adamant about which standards they desire and where they're most important. One crucial area is in using open Web services in application-to-application communication, Staten says.

Gartner analyst Richard Ni contends that IT leaders can encourage standards development by ensuring that their teams consider a wide range of vendors and technologies beyond the obvious leaders. "We will encourage lock-in if we close our eyes to other vendors in the industry," he says. "The CIO has a role to play in ensuring several vendors are involved in the assessment, selection and due diligence process."

As the hype about cloud computing begins to settle down, the hope is that lock-in concerns will grow more rational and less emotional. That will be a welcome development to Bonvanie, who sees just as much risk with traditional computing systems. In fact, his use of NetSuite's Web-based business software and IntAcct's Web-based ERP software has convinced him that they have easier interfaces and procedures to retrieve and unload data than SAP does.

"What gets me nuts is that the same people who are concerned about lock-in in the cloud are not concerned about it behind the firewall or on-premise systems, where people normally run mixtures of three or four different breeds of Unix," Willis agrees. "It's much harder to move from AIX to Sun than to move from Amazon to FlexiScale," he says.

Willis looks forward to the day when people stop asking whether the cloud causes lock-in. "It's the wrong question," he says. "The cloud is just the furniture." Instead, Willis says, remove the word cloud altogether and ask, "Is there lock-in in the choices I'm considering?"

Mary Brandelis a Computerworld contributing writer in Newton, Mass. Contact her at marybrandel@verizon.net . Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Building power-saving networks to get cheaper

The maker of components that link millions of sensors and control devices is launching a new generation of technology designed to make power-saving control networks affordable for small buildings.

Echelon, a 20-year-old company that developed a now-standardized technology for these specialized networks, is introducing on Tuesday a new version that it says is only half as expensive for its customers to put in their devices. It also can carry incoming data from many more sources on a network, according to Steve Nguyen, Echelon's director of corporate marketing.

[ Related: "Four big reasons to get behind the smart grid." | Keep up on the latest networking news with our Networking Report newsletter. | And stay up to date on green tech with InfoWorld's Sustainable IT blog, with our Green Tech Topic Center, and with the Green Tech newsletter. ]

Echelon's LonWorks 2.0 platform updates the whole range of components that the company sells to makers of devices such as lighting controls, security systems and HVAC (heating, ventilation and cooling) systems. That includes a processor, a transceiver, an operating system, and development and installation tools. The transceiver and processor are set to ship in volume in August, and all the components will be available by some time next year.

LonWorks is based on the ISO/IEC 14908 standard, which was approved at the International Organization for Standardization in December. The standard allows all kinds of sensors and control devices to share a single network and exchange data on a peer-to-peer basis, according to Nguyen. For example, a thermometer can send a signal that the temperature in a particular spot has gone over a pre-set limit. An automatic air-vent controller linked to the same network can interpret the thermometer's signal and respond by opening a vent, without the information having to pass through a central computer.

Such mechanisms can now be controlled from beyond the local network using Web services. One key example of this is "demand response" software operated by energy providers, Nguyen said. Using a system from a vendor such as EnerNOC, utilities can send timely information about regionwide demand to individual customers who have subscribed to the service. Based on that information, devices linked to a control network can automatically adjust their operations to reduce energy consumption. Together, those small adjustments may prevent utilities from having to fire up more capacity, Nguyen said.

The U.S. economic stimulus package signed by President Barack Obama last month offers support for demand response systems, Nguyen said. The package provides $4.5 billion overall in funding for "smart grid" technologies.

LonWorks components can be integrated into new building-control equipment, or in some cases retrofitted to existing gear through add-on modules. The ISO/IEC 14908 standard can be applied to networks with a number of different signaling systems, including fiber-optic cable and wireless. Echelon offers the specifications for the ISO/IEC 14908 technology openly without a licensing fee, Nguyen said. About 700 vendors have adopted the technology, he said.

Thanks partly to typical advances in semiconductor design, LonWorks 2.0 is only half as expensive as the earlier version for manufacturers to integrate into their products, according to Nguyen. Each chipset can also process as many as 254 pieces of data from other LonWorks-equipped devices, up from just 64 in the previous version. Given the lower cost, the new version should make LonWorks networks more appealing to small enterprises and buildings, he said. Worldwide, about 98 percent of buildings are less than 100,000 square feet (9,290 square meters) in size, and most of these smaller buildings haven't been equipped with these types of networks, Nguyen said.

Leax Controls makes LonWorks-based building systems, such as light dimmers, that can control objects automatically. For example, the company equipped the Tivoli Lodge, in Vail, Colorado, so the reservations system can turn on the lights, heating and fireplace in a room before guests are scheduled to arrive, said Leax President Alex Hill.

With LonWorks 2.0 on the way, Leax expects to introduce control modules in April that cost between $25 and $50, compared with between $50 and $100 with the current version of LonWorks. The lower cost will make it easier to justify giving each in-building device its own control chip, Hill said. For example, today at the Tivoli Lodge, one chip controls both the heaters and the fireplace in each room. Each can be controlled independently, but that requires extra wiring. If each had its own chip, there would only be one wire around the room to connect everything to the network, he said.

In addition, the more powerful processor offered with LonWorks 2.0 will be able to support more functions, Hill said. For example, a keypad on the wall for adjusting the heat or lighting could have a motion sensor, which would cause it to light up when someone walked up to the keypad. The new modules should also have more capacity for self-installation programs, which would save engineers having to visit every room where a module is being set up, Hills said.

No matter how much energy a building-control system may save, one of the biggest factors in convincing a developer to use it is how long it will take to pay for itself, Hill said. In terms of energy savings, smart lighting systems can pay for themselves in three to four years and heating controls in four to five years. LonWorks 2.0 should help energy-saving systems pay for themselves sooner, he said.

SAP, IBM to showcase tech for cloud mobility

IBM and SAP will showcase technology that automatically balances the workload from an SAP application across multiple remote servers, during a demonstration Tuesday at Cebit in Hanover, Germany.

The technology preview is an early peek at work that stems from the Reservoir (Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers) cloud-computing project backed by the European Union and announced last year.

[ Confused by cloud computing hype? Get the facts from InfoWorld's cloud computing primer. | Follow the cloud with InfoWorld's Cloud Computing blog. ]

Reservoir's aim is a "service-based online economy" that, through virtualization, will allow broad-scale IT application and services deployments that span geographic locations and platforms, according to its Web site. IBM is part of a consortium working on the project that also includes SAP, Sun Microsystems, and a range of European educational institutions.

The technology being demonstrated at Cebit is under development at IBM's research lab in Haifa, Israel. The demo will employ IBM's Power6 servers, which have a capability called Live Partition Mobility that enables users to move individual virtual partitions containing applications to other Power6 servers with no downtime.

IBM and SAP's move is "a significant announcement, no doubt about it," said John Willis, an analyst and blogger analyst who tracks the cloud-computing space.

"Pretty much only serious stuff" comes out of IBM's Haifa lab, he said. "These are IBM's top scientists."

Power6's partition mobility feature is interesting but not groundbreaking, being similar to VMware's VMotion technology, he said.

What's more significant is IBM's willingness to publicly test the new load-balancing technology against a "very sophisticated application" like SAP.

"If you can do it with SAP then you can do it with everything," he said. "I think that's the statement they're trying to make."

Infortrend takes aim at enterprise storage market

Infortrend Technology will show prototypes of new storage products for the enterprise at the Cebit trade show in Hanover this week.

It will show two ranges of Virtualized Scale-out Architecture (VSA) devices: the F series with Fibre Channel interfaces, due for launch early in the third quarter, and the E series, with iSCSI interfaces, due later that quarter.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by InfoWorld's 2009 Technology of the Year Awards. ]

They will ship with a new version of Infortrend's management software, Sanwatch 2.0, with the same management interface as the company's other products. However, the new ranges will also include one of two software packages: Disaster Recovery Suite, offering mirroring, snapshotting and synchronous or asynchronous replication functions, or Virtualization Suite, enabling pooling of storage and the creation of virtual volumes through thin provisioning.

A key feature of the SanWatch software is that it runs on a PowerPC processor within the storage device, taking a load off the main server, said Jon Ashley, the company's director of marketing communications for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The software was developed entirely in-house and represents a year's work by around 200 engineers, he said.

Infortrend's interest in the enterprise market marks a change of direction for the company. Until now, it has competed with the likes of LSI and Xyratex, targeting small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) with storage products such as its EonStor range, Ashley said. Infortrend will also show a new EonStor product at Cebit, the G6, with an 8Gbps Fibre Channel host interface, he said.

The VSA products also herald another change for Infortrend: They will ship with disks already installed. The company's previous products have shipped without disks, giving customers the freedom to choose their own -- but also leaving them with the task of installing and testing them. Infortrend will burn in the disk drives in the VSA devices for at least than 24 hours, a move it expects will reduce unscheduled downtime within the first six months following deployment, cutting costs for customers.

The disks will come from two global disk manufacturers, said Ashley, but he wouldn't name them yet.

There will be four Fibre Channel models: the F20, F40, F60, and F65. Infortrend is still finalizing details of their capabilities and the disk capacities they will ship with.

"The controller design is slightly different from one model to another, so input-output performance can be slightly higher on the higher end models," said Alex Young, Infortrend's director of technology for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

The top-of-the-range F65 will have an 8Gbps Fibre Channel host interface, 8GB of cache and on the drive side two Fibre Channel interfaces allowing the connection of up to 112 drives. It could be sold with a chassis of 16 drives, he said.

The two iSCSI models, the E20 and E60, will arrive around the middle of the third quarter, Young said. While mainstream iSCSI interfaces today operate at 1Gbps, "We will do 1Gbps and 10Gbps," he said. "We assume people will go for 10Gbps."

It's too early to put a price on the new products, Ashley said, but it will be low: "We need to make sure we are more competitive than our competitors."

Microsoft executive says layoffs offset by more R&D

Up to 3,000 employees could be needed for Microsoft's research efforts this year, in part offsetting layoffs announced in January, a top company executive said Tuesday.

Microsoft's Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said during a keynote speech at the Cebit trade show that the remainder of this year will continue to be challenging as the global economy faces a severe downturn.

[ Related: California Governor Schwarzenegger advised Cebit attendees this week to be optimistic and find new ways to stimulate the economy and Intel's CEO recently called on companies to invest in the future as a way to combat an economic recession | Learn more about how the financial crisis is affecting IT and the high-tech industry, plus what IT can do to help, in InfoWorld's special report. ]

Microsoft said in January it would cut 5,000 positions as it saw its net income fall 11 percent for the quarter ending Dec. 31. The company said the job cuts would come in marketing, sales, finance, legal and human resources among other areas over the next 18 months.

Turner said Microsoft plans to spend $9 billion on research this year, $1 billion more than 2008. New positions will be created as the company analyzes its business, he said.

"This alignment and realignment will also allow us to reassign some employees to new priorities and that we may create 2,000 to 3,000 new jobs over the same time frame as we continue to invest in new growth opportunities," Turner said.

Turner said the world economy saw incredible growth for many years but that it was fueled by an increase in consumer debt. He said the economy will have to "reset" itself, centering more on innovation and growth rather than growing private debt.

Part of Microsoft's research efforts are centered in Europe, including the company's U.K. research facility and a search technology center in Munich, Germany. Microsoft said last October it would also do search research in London and near Paris. Microsoft has sought so far unsuccessfully to unseat Google as the most-used search engine.

Turner said Microsoft will focus on so-called cloud computing and software as a service, where remote data centers do the computing and deliver the results to client computers.

Stop whining about economy, says Schwarzenegger

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has some advice for people complaining about the state of the global economy: stop whining.

"It doesn't make any sense for people to sit back and whine and to complain about the economy slowing down because we have to look forward rather than back," he said during a speech at the Cebit trade fair in Hanover, Germany, on Tuesday.

[ Intel's CEO recently called on companies to invest in the future as a way to combat an economic recession | Learn more about how the financial crisis is affecting IT and the high-tech industry, plus what IT can do to help, in InfoWorld's special report. | Keep up on green IT trends with InfoWorld's Sustainable IT blog and Green Tech newsletter. ]

"We have to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. And the only way we are going to do this is by being optimistic and finding new ways to stimulate the economy," he said.

Schwarzenegger is at Europe's largest technology fair to promote investment in his state's technology industry. California is the partner state of Cebit this year. It's the first time a state rather than a country has been named official partner.

Fifty-one small and medium-size business from the state are here to promote their products in several industries including environmental technology, which is an area he is particularly promoting.

"There's great potential," he said of the environmental technologies on show. "There are all kinds of great stuff that we have seen here. Technology that will help us."

Schwarzenegger has good reason to talk up green technology. In the last year the state has seen $3.3 billion in venture investment in green-tech startups, which is half of all venture investment in the sector in the U.S., according to the state.

The governor also spoke out against trade protectionism. Trade barriers thrown up to protect important national industries during times of recession stand to cost California-based companies business.

"It's something we have done in America in the thirties and it has backfired in a huge way," he said. "We should not go in that direction, we should learn from those mistakes. This is now a world where the world is the marketplace."

Eclipse Riena offered for rich client apps

The Eclipse Foundation announced on Monday availability of Eclipse Riena 1.0, a platform for developing multitier rich client applications based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform and the Eclipse Equinox OSGi implementation.

Available for download, Riena offers a platform for developing distributed enterprise applications that simplify user interface development and integration of back-end systems, the foundation said. Riena features an OSGi-based Remote Services Component for building distributed client/server applications.

[ Meanwhile, the Eclipse IDE is at a crossroads. ]

"Projects like Riena help support the growth of Equinox and Eclipse RCP as a solution for developing enterprise applications," said Eclipse executive Ddirector Mike Milinkovich in a statement.

Components of Riena include remote services for communicating between OSGi components, Riena user interface and navigation components for developing the client user experience for business applications, and object transaction for isolating object-level changes on a client application before communicating changes to a server.

Also featured in Riena are authentication and authorization capabilities to extend the Equinox security model, and client monitoring, which is a server component tracking client status in a distributed system.?

Riena has joined the coordinated release train of Eclipse projects called Galileo, due this June. The second release of Riena will include enhanced features and components for developing user interfaces and navigation, Eclipse said.

Rich Client Platform features plug-ins to the Eclipse platform to build rich client Java applications.

Intel opens up the Atom processor to TSMC

Intel announced on Monday a partnership that could provide access to the chip design of its low-cost Atom processor to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

The partnership with TSMC could lead to customized chips that could provide Intel access to new markets it can't reach alone, said Sean Maloney, Intel executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer, during a conference call with reporters.

TSMC will be able to provide its customers with details of Atom's design so that they can design chips based on the chip's core.

Atom chips currently go into low-cost laptops, also known as netbooks, and devices like MIDs (mobile Internet devices) and smartphones. Future Atom chips will include more integrated PC capabilities, such as graphics and Internet connectivity, that could push the processor into embedded devices and consumer electronics.

To date, Intel has alone developed and sold its Atom processors for netbooks and MIDs. The company wants to maintain tight control over the types of products the derivative Atom chips will go inside, Maloney said. Intel will not be transferring Atom's manufacturing process technology to TSMC, so any chips that result from the deal will be manufactured by Intel.

"What we're doing here ... we will be picking the segments we go after," Maloney said.

The companies have collaborated for close to 20 years on products that include WiMax chips.

Intel officials shied away from answering questions on whether the TSMC deal would affect Atom's product road map or future smartphone chips like Moorestown. Details surrounding the deal are still being worked out, Intel officials said.

This agreement is similar to a strategy employed by Arm, which generates revenue by licensing smartphone and embedded chip designs to chip makers, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. Arm has licensed its chip cores to companies such as Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, which provide chips for smartphones.

"This is a direct attack on competing processors, especially the Arm processor, which is trying to move upstream from phones and embedded gadgets, while Intel is trying to move downstream with Atom into this overlapping space. The battleground in the middle will be aggressive and potentially bloody, with huge potential returns," Gold wrote in a research note.

The partnership will help Intel add a revenue stream by licensing out its Atom core, and adds "massive market potential" through TSMC's customers, Gold wrote. TSMC has connections to many consumer and lower-end products like smartphones and embedded device markets, especially in Taiwan and Japan, Gold wrote.

The partnership is a win for both companies, said Rick Tsai, president and chief executive officer of TSMC, during the call. It is mutually beneficial as it will allow both companies to generate additional revenue and reach new markets, especially at a time when the semiconductor industry is struggling.

"People in our industry must work together ... so we can share the benefits," Tsai said.

Intel has taken a number of steps to develop integrated chips that could fit into new products like set-top boxes and TVs. Intel in February said it was prioritizing its move from the 45-nanometer process to the new 32-nanometer process technology, which should help the company produce faster and more integrated chips.

To that effect, the company said it would spend $7 billion over the next two years to revamp manufacturing plants. It will also help Intel make more chips at lower costs and add efficiencies to the production process. Intel will begin producing chips with 32-nm circuitry starting in late 2009.

IT must invest its way out of crisis, say leaders

The surest way out of an economic crisis is to invest -- that was the unanimous view of the dignitaries speaking at the opening ceremony of the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, Monday night.

The signs of the current crisis are everywhere and should not be ignored: "Cebit this year is smaller than last year," said Hanover mayor Stephan Weil, the first speaker. "We shouldn't whitewash the situation."

[ For more from this year's Cebit, see "Vendors see future in iPhone business applications" | Learn more about how the financial crisis is affecting IT and the high-tech industry, plus what IT can do to help, in InfoWorld's special report. ]

But in what to invest?

"We need to invest in 21st-century knowledge skills and in innovation," said Intel chairman Craig Barrett, another of the speakers. Intel's home state, California, is the guest of honor at this year's show, a role that in recent years has been played by countries such as France, India, or Russia.

Investing in education is something that Germany is already doing with a recently voted economic stimulus package -- although it's not doing enough for everyone's taste.

"We would welcome an expanded stimulus package. Our schools need more than a new coat of paint: They also need fast Internet access, laptops, and educational software," said August-Wilhelm Scheer, president of Bitkom, the German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media.

To that shopping list Barrett might have added investment in staff selection and training: "The most important part of education is good teachers," he said. "But giving good teachers the right IT tools can make education exceptional."

German chancellor Angela Merkel was categoric. For German IT companies, "Investment in this Cebit is the right investment," she said.

Her government wants to develop broadband Internet access and has set some ambitious targets: that Internet access at 1Mbps should be available to everyone in Germany next year, and by 2015 connections at 50Mbps should be available to 75 percent of the population.

The government won't be footing the bill for building those connections. "Broadband links are created by private enterprises, but it's up to the state to stimulate that," Merkel said.

Businesses may soon be able to play their part. After years of battling with German regulatory authorities over opening its VDSL (Very high-speed Digital Subscriber Line) access network to competitors, Deutsche Telekom announced at Cebit on Monday that it will sell the service wholesale to other telecommunications operators in a bid to raise the funds necessary to complete its network rollout.

With only 4,300 exhibitors this year, the show is the smallest it's been in years. But the line waiting to get into the opening ceremony seemed longer than ever. The attraction? Former Mr. Universe and now governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The companies exhibiting at Cebit to find new business, rather than complaining about the state of the economy, are winners, not whiners, he said.

Schwarzenegger echoed previous speakers' praise for California's economic drive and entrepreneurial culture.

"California is not just another state, we're more like a nation state. We are the eighth-largest economy and the innovation capital of the world," he said.

Although Schwarzenegger found riches and fame in California, that's not where his winning streak began, he said.

It was on a previous visit to Germany that the foundations of his success were built, he said. At age 19, he moved from his native Austria to Munich in Southern Germany to help manage a friend's gymnasium. "It was there that I learned the discipline and work ethic that still drives me today," he said.

His current trip won't be his last, he said, concluding his speech with the famous phrase from his film, "The Terminator": "I'll be back."

Cloud efforts examined by Microsoft and others

Established vendors weighed in on cloud computing at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices on Friday afternoon, citing it as a dramatic shift but offering caution as well.

During a panel session at the TechCrunch "Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?" event in Mountain View, Calif., vendors ranging from Microsoft and Salesforce.com to Google and Sun offered perspectives on the concept of cloud computing, which has users accessing hosted services over the Internet instead of maintaining their own hardware and software.

[ Find out what cloud computing really means | Cloud computing is shaping up to be a big trend in 2009 ]

"This is the biggest shift we've had in computing in probably two decades," said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, whose company offers on-demand CRM services over the Internet.?

"The opportunity is to re-create the industry," re-establish boundaries, and disable, dis-intermediate, and disrupt existing players, Benioff said.

Google's Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering, stressed how the Web has caused a paradigm shift away from application lock-ins on platforms like Windows. "The Web has changed all that," Gundotra said. "In the war between Windows and the Web, the Web won."

But Yahoo's Scott Dietzen, senior vice president of communications products, cautioned about over-optimism toward the cloud. "I think we're being a little overly optimistic in saying that you can just take an application and put it into the cloud and this magic happens," he said.

For vertical applications, a huge amount of work goes into such tasks as delivering on linear scalability, self-healing, and troubleshooting, he said. "These are really hard problems," Dietzen noted.

Microsoft's Amitabh Srivistava, corporate vice president for Windows Azure, cited the company's planned Azure cloud platform. "[Azure] is designed to be interoperable," leveraging REST protocols and working with clouds from companies such as Amazon, Srivistava said. Azure also was designed to help startup companies launch their offerings, with Microsoft taking away infrastructure headaches, he added.

[ Test Center recently previewed the Windows Azure platform ]

"The startup scenario is one of the key scenarios we designed Windows Azure for," Srivistava said.

The entrance of Microsoft into the cloud space offers "validation" to the cloud concept, Benioff said.

Cloud computing, said Sun cloud computing CTO Lew Tucker, has been the subject of queries from enterprise customers lately. "The downturn in the economy is forcing everybody to take a serious look at what is cloud computing," Tucker said.

Cloud computing will run on everything from micro-applications on Facebook to the Apple iPhone to whatever the next new application is that reaches Google-level proportions, Tucker said. "Sun recognizes that as a systems company, we have to be there," he said.

Meanwhile, the event also featured brief presentations from several startup companies pitching wares for the cloud. These included:

* FathomDB, providing database services.
* Veodia, offering enterprise video development and sharing capabilities.
* Diomede Storage, for storage services.
* BrowserMob, an on-demand service for Web application load-testing.
* Appirio, for services management and viral marketing

Hopeful entrepreneurs look for warm reception at Demo 09

Like the proverbial mail carrier who travels through rain and sleet and snow to keep their appointed rounds, entrepreneurs will not be stopped by the worst of economic storms.

And so it is that more than 60 hopeful companies come to the Demo 09 conference in Palm Desert, Calif., to unveil their latest products and services.

[ For more on AppZero, see "Virtual server appliance tools leave out the OS" | Take a look back at Demo Fall 08 and Tech Crunch 50 ]

Among the hopefuls looking for investors in these hard times is AppZero, a cloud computing infrastructure company with a technology that gives developers the ability to create VVAs (Virtual Application Appliances).

The company claims no competition at this point for its unique capability to take server-based applications and to deliver them to any environment including datacenter, hosting provider, cloud infrastructure, or cloud-to-cloud. The VAAs use virtualization and "encapsulation" technology.

Another Web 2.0 newbie presenting this week is deskNET and its application, dubbed sobees.?

DeskNET hopes sobees will fill an important niche in cloud applications by allowing them to be managed on the desktop. In this case, managing also means giving users the ability to work offline. The application allows for data sharing as well. The program claims to aggregate all of a user's online content and, through the use of screen capture technology, make it available for sharing using drag and drop.?

More sharing is promised from Citrix Online, which certainly is not a startup but is the sole investor in a new service called GoView. The GoView service will allow companies to inexpensively create screencasts for presentation, product demos, and application training.

Still more sharing comes from a company with a very promising name, HowSimple, which is offering not a Web 2.0 application but a desktop application that will allow users to create and share online almost any kind of content. The technology HowSimple calls Q Format provides multiple concurrent panel viewing. Future upgrades will include the integration of online and offline content.

Rounding out the business products and services at Demo is a company that calls itself what it is, DDC (Document Depository Corporation). DDC is a hosted depository for the kinds of documents companies are required to keep due to the latest Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and e-discovery regulations coming down from the feds.

Application modules include Corporate Governance, Contract Tracker, and Multi Entity Legal Negotiation. The names may not cause a flutter in the heart, but having these kinds of documents accessible at a moment's notice could save millions of dollars in fines and court costs. DCC also provides disaster recovery and security, but as always, it is best to check with your attorney before you put any sensitive company files and documents into a hosted environment.

Indian offshoring vendors top list of H-1B recipients

Microsoft was the leading U.S.-based recipient of H-1B visas during the federal government's 2008 fiscal year, getting approval for a total of 1,037 visas -- up slightly from the number it received the year before.

But the the four largest H-1B recipients were outsourcing and IT services firms based in India. And on an overall basis, their use of the controversial visa program also increased in fiscal 2008, according to government data released last week.

[ Related: "Microsoft layoffs add more fuel to H-1B fire." | InfoWorld's Bill Snyder argues the H-1B visa has got to go, but doesn't support the proposal by Sen. Charles Grassley to lay off foreigners first. Meanwhile, the Senate approved strict rules on the hiring of H-1B workers. | Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

Topping the list was Infosys Technologies, with 4,559 visas, followed by Wipro, Satyam Computer Services, and Tata Consultancy Services. The number of visas issued to Infosys was identical to what it received the year before, but the other three vendors all saw their visa counts rise.

The overall number of IT jobs in the United States is declining because of the economic recession, according to an analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data by the National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses in Alexandria, Va. The NACCB found that IT employment declined by nearly 50,000 jobs in December, after falling by almost 34,000 in November.

Janice Miller, a city councilor in Oldsmar, Fla., said that workers from India continue to be brought in to work at a technology center operated in Oldsmar by The Nielsen Co. On the other hand, she said, "there are a lot of [local] people out of work."

Nielsen, which is best known for measuring TV audiences, began laying off some of its employees at the Oldsmar facility last year, on the heels of announcing a 10-year, $1.2 billion outsourcing agreement with Tata in October 2007.

The $787 billion economic stimulus bill signed into law by President Barack Obama two weeks ago restricts H-1B hiring by financial services firms that receive federal bailout funds. But those limits don't affect outsourcing vendors that provide IT services to the financial sector.

Srini Pallia, vice president of business technology services at Wipro, said his company will likely hire more workers in the United States if the restrictions on H-1B use are expanded. But, Pallia added, such restrictions may well drive companies that planned to keep IT work in the United States -- even if it would be done partly by H-1B holders -- to look offshore.

This version of the story originally appeared in Computerworld's print edition. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Downadup worm may hammer several URLs March 13

Computers infected by the Downadup worm will "phone home" to several legitimate URLs this month, including one owned by Southwest Airlines , potentially disrupting those sites, a security researcher said Sunday.

According to a researcher at Sophos, the Downadup worm -- also known as Conficker -- will try to contact wnsux.com on March 13 for further instructions. That URL, however, is owned by Southwest Airlines, and redirects visitors to the airline's primary southwest.com address.

[ Related: "Downadup/Conflicker worm: When will the next shoe fall?" | Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. | Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

"On March 13, the millions of machines infected with Conficker will be contacting wnsux.com for further instructions," said a Sophos researcher identified as MikeW in an entry on the company's blog . "They won't get any [instructions], but that may certainly disrupt the operation of southwest.com."

Once it has infected a PC, Downadup generates a list of 250 possible domains -- the list changes daily -- selects one, then uses that URL to reach a hacker-controlled server from which it downloads additional malware to install on the hijacked computer. The wnsux.com address is one of the 7,750 domains that the worm may use during March, said MikeW.

Previously, researchers had reverse-engineered the algorithm that determines any given day's list of command-and-control routing domains. Then, last month, nearly 20 technology companies and organizations, among them Microsoft and ICANN, the nonprofit group that manages the Internet Domain Name System, combined forces to disrupt the budding botnet by preemptively removing those addresses from circulation.

MikeW spotted several other legitimate sites on March's Downadup list, including jogli.com (Big Web Great Music) and qhflh.com (Women's Net in Qinghai Province), slated for "phone home" use on March 8 and March 18, respectively.

These domains may be affected by the worm itself or by the steps network administrators have taken to protect their PCs, said MikeW. "Those millions of Conficker infected machines contacting the domain on its given day may overload the site and essentially result in a denial-of-service attack," he said. According to F-Secure , at least 2.1 million PCs are currently infected with the Downadup worm. "[Or] they may end up on a blocklist [that would ] prevent users from accessing their services." Microsoft, for example, has posted a list of Downadup's routing domains that IT administrators can use to block outbound "calls" from infected PCs.

MikeW said Sophos had contacted the owners of the domains on March's list, including Southwest. Currently, wnsux.com -- which Southwest Airlines apparently acquired to stymie negative publicity -- shunts users to Southwest Airlines' site and offers a message that reads in part, "Southwest wants to control the release of inaccurate and irresponsible information about the Company via the Internet."

Downadup first gained attention for exploiting a Windows vulnerability that Microsoft patched last October in one of its rare emergency updates . The worm has spread extensively since earlier this year, when a new variant appeared and quickly compromised as many as 9 million PCs within days.

Microsoft has also offered a $250,000 reward for information that results in the arrest and conviction of the hackers who created and launched Downadup, a move it last used in 2004.

Southwest Airlines was not immediately available for comment.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

IT News HeadLines (InfoWorld) 03/03/2009

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