IBM Expands Overseas Cloud Computing Centers: The race of the cloud has started

IBM is expanding its plans for creating new types of cloud computing infrastructures and data centers by opening four new facilities in Brazil, South Korea, India and Vietnam. The move combines IBM's drive to create a worldwide cloud computing infrastructure with its need to create more business in emerging market economies.IBM has been very quiet about this in the past, now I have started to see more and more announcements how they are in the process of building cloud computing centers around the world. This change and move towards new IT is exciting and will provide new opportunties to vendors. IBM has already centers in 13 different places and the four new ones will be built in India, Brazil, South Korea and Vietnam. It is obvious that the traditional/classic infrastructure development will go away and software vendors will be looking into cloud computing instead of having servers in their own locations.

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RIM tripped, stock stumbles: where is the new BlackBerry Bold?

BlackBerry maker's second quarter numbers disappoint adding worry to the smartphone success story. RIM is in dire straits. The stock plummeted more than 11% afterhours. The lauch of BlackBerrry's new smartphone, Bold was originally scheduled for June. Now it is due in November. I suspect that AT&T made this decision so they would not confuse it with the lanuch of new Apple 3G iPhone version.

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RIM to Launch Touch-Screen BlackBerry 'Soon': is it too late?

Verizon Wireless says Research In Motion will soon launch a touch-screen version of its BlackBerry smart phone. Media reports say RIM's touch-Screen BlackBerry will be called Thunder. The race of touch-screen version of smartphones is just increasing. Now RIM is saying that something is coming out soon. They call if for BlackBerry Storm 9530. Today, RIM's share price plummeted, because of almost 200.000 less sold units the last quarter. Analysts are saying that the financial markets are putting smartphone purchases on hold.

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The T-Mobile G1 (Google Android) Is No iPhone: Google G1 is not a sexy phone after all?

Google and T-Mobile have built an effective mobile Web device with a promising applications marketplace—but something's missing.This is what PCmag.com concludes in an article today. The article lists some of the pros and cons of both iPhone and G1, and is is perpexing to me that the market does not seem to get one perfect phone that would have all of the goodies plus a good keyboard included. The Google G1 keyboard is lackluster based on the article and does not include support for Microsoft Exchange server. That is a big minus in my books as we use Microsoft Exchange Server in our business. There was a recent review of Nokia E71 which I will check into and soon At&T will bring out RIM's new BlackBerry Bold to US stores.

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SAP's social-media strategy: traditional software vendors are starting to pay attention to social-networking and media

Steve Mann is helping SAP chart its online marketing and customer-engagement strategy. So just what is his job, what is SAP's social-media strategy and what have they learned so far? According to the article in CIO.com, Steve Mann is SAP's global vice president of marketing. He is an active blogger, he is using Linkedin.com, Twitter, Social Media Collective extensively and the main thing that Steve is trying to get through is to make sure SAP listens to its clients and his blogs also provides a mean to interact with SAP clients.

I was meeting a marketing executive during my trip back from India a couple of days ago. This executive is from the more traditional space and we had a very, very interesting discussion of how the new generation of users will expect companies to interact in a new manner. Gone are the days of paid "PR" where PR agencies assume that people will listen to the crap that they are trying to funnel to us as consumers. If one is not exposing him or herself, consumers will go to the ones that will. I am very excited to see that the old fashioned media is understanding that social-networking in different forms will be the future. I also believe in micro social-networking sites will be the way people want to interact in the future.

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RIM Unveils Spate of BlackBerry Mobile Application Deals: differentiation in the works

Research In Motion lines up deals with MySpace, Ticketmaster, Tivo, Slacker and Microsoft to bring BlackBerry users Live Search, social networking, free radio and more. This is yet another example of furious competition that handset vendors such as RIM, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and many others have to do to get to the hands of consumers. I am using the Facebook application from my smartphone, so I am sure the MySpace will be appealing to people that use it.

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Social Networking: From the Cradle to the Grave: micro social networking sites on the rise.

Until fairly recently, social networks have largely catered to a specific demographic. When Facebook opened its doors to the world outside of college, however, it helped demonstrate that perhaps the appeal of such sites extended beyond high school halls and dorm quads.Yet again, the amount of social networks is on the rice.

Dan Costa argues in the lastest PC Magazine that socalled micro social networks are on the rise. I fully agree on this and this is why I started http://www.isvcommunity.com/ for independent software vendors (ISV) to collaborate across the world about topics around software business. The more generic social networking sites such as LinkedIn.com for professional networking and Facebook.com for more personal networking do not address any specific niche and it will be interesting to see if they will survive in the long run. Steve Rubel in his blog Micro Persuasion has an interesting entry about threat and opportunities in social networking and the change of behavior in new generation of people.

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Microsoft social-networking licensee on the rocks? Mary-Jo Foley reports

High-profile Microsoft-technology licensee Wallop may be calling it quits, at least on the social-networking-platform side of its business. I have been studying different social-networking sites extensively the last few weeks and I have to say that this space is overly crowded. There are lots of players and eventually things have to consolidate or some might go out of business due to non-existent business model. I am sure that we will see things happen in the next year or so. The unfortunate thing is that this could really disrupt lots of social networking sites especially if the vendor has hosted them.

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iPhone 3G Doesn't Raise the Bar

Web, it's a notebook or netbook replacement. But, as a mobile phone, iPhone 3G hugely disappoints. This is what Joe Wilcox says in his September 8th, 2008 comment in eWeek.com blog. However, I have been complaining to my collague in Atlanta of dropped calls with other than iPhone device, so I am not completely sure it is only the phone that is not working. It could also be AT&T's network that is failing. It is always easier to blaim the vechile that one is using, and not the infrastructure itself...

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Social networking hype 2.0: new social networks vendors are popping up right and left

Clever social networking-related startups with obscure taglines -- including Causecast ("Change your world, and the world will change"), Qik ("See what happens"), and Joongel ("Internet the easy way -- we have chocolate") -- line the showroom of TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. If you want to find out what these companies do, you'll have to ask the one of the beautiful people manning the tables. New social networks are being published on daily basis and new software vendors are coming to the market as well. The question that we all have is when the market is going to be saturated with too many players with the result of consolidation. That is something that we will see for sure.

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Oslo: How 'Easy' Is Easy? Time has come for the new modeling platform.

Microsoft is working to make distributed computing easier and to make building distributed applications easier. The software giant is driving toward this goal via software modeling and its new “Oslo” platform. The company will be providing an early look at the first Oslo deliverables at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in October.

I have been tracking the development of "Oslo" platform in my blogs and now it is ready for prime time according to Microsoft. It is going to be different than UML (the traditional way of modeling) and based on the information from Microsoft, teh Microsoft technical fellow Brad Lovering says "if you know Microsoft's Access application, you will be right at home using the new Oslo tool to create applications.

Oslo is aimed at power users and analysts and it lowers the boundary to build applications. With Oslo, there is going to be a new modeling language as well and PDC will have sessions that demonstrate how to build Domain Specific Languges and how to "apply your DSL to create an interactive text editing experience" according to Microsoft. The industry has tried to make development easier for years and it remains to be see how Oslo will change the languge. The good news is that DSL is beeing recognized and DSM (domain-specific modeling) has been discussed for quite a while in different communities. Verticalization on given domains is the way to go, there is no question about it.

Mary-Jo Foley (author of Microsoft 2.0) adds Live Mesh, a software development kit (SDK) as part of teh new things that Microsoft is launching at PDC. According to Mary-Jo Foley, both Live Mesh and Oslo purport to be all about Software+Services and this is what will be one of the biggest changes and challenges that Microsoft partners will undergo the upcoming months and years. Business models in software are changing, there is no question about it.


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Sony Ericsson courts Windows Mobile developers

Sony Ericsson announces a software development kit for its upcoming Xperia X1 smartphone. According to Sony Ericsson, it is not trying to create a developer ecosystem, but to utilize what already exists. The new Xperia X1 was announced at Mobile World Congress in February 2008 and there has been some rumours that it has been delayed, but according to Sony Ericsson, the phone should be available in fourth quarter. When you look at the specs, this is close to a perfect phone. IT has HSPA, A-GPS, and a great 3-inch display. It is going to be interesting to see how it takes off.

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How does business intelligence (BI) and SaaS fit together?

The discussion of BI and SaaS is something that I expect to increase going forward. There are new players that have entered the business intelligence space with their solution. BI as a Service is going to be a trend to watch and this will also cause serious pressure on traditional vendors such as BusinessObjects (now SAP), Cognos (now IBM), Hyperion (now Oracle) and Microsoft. There are many new SaaS entrants that are trying to enter the markets such as Oco, LucidEra, BlinkLogic, myDIALS, PivotLink, and many others. Diby Malakar writes about SaaS and BI explaining what On-Demand BI is and how BI SaaS solutions look like from an architectural perspective.

The question that most organizations are going to ask when it comes to BI and SaaS is how the backend integration is going to work and how a SaaS solution is going to scale up in environments with millions of transactions. SOA arhitecture for client reporting is not going to be a problem as this has already been solved many years ago, but how is the backend data going to be managed is going to be the biggest question. I have worked with BI and data warehousing solutions for almost 20 years and I am convinced that SaaS is going to be a major player in the next few years. Technology adoption in SaaS world is very close of being there and it is just a question when end user organizations will require from vendors to present a reliable solution. This is going to be a fun software niche to track and report on!

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The web is better when it's social and when common stardards exist: the case of OpenSocial

The problem with Web 2.0 concept is that there are too many sites to maintain and we sometimes we ask ourselves why we can't utilize information that already exist in some other application. Fortunately the software business community has (some have) agreed to use OpenSocial as a method to utilize services that exist in the cloud. This type of SOA architecture is definetely going to increase in the future: Why invent the wheel again? End-users will benefit from this trend by having a better coherent view to their data as different applications pull information to the application that is used. SOA gives software developers an opportunity to provide value and not to reinvent the wheel. What would be better than that? This how OpenSocial is defined:

The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn. OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.

Google Chrome Makes a Good First Impression according to eWeek.com article today

REVIEW: Based on initial tests, Google Chrome looks to be an exciting and impressive new entry into the Web browser field according to eWeek.com online report. I heard about this on Monday (US Labor day) when in route from Helsinki, Finland to Dallas Texas. Yesterday, on Tuesday I tried to go to the download site http://www.google.com/chrome but the site changed back to Google search. Today, it seemed to work. I downloaded, I tested for a few minutes and on my laptop, it is slightly slower than my Internet Explorer 7.0.. the "connecting" phase takes longer. And as the article says, there is nothing specific about this browser, but it keeps the others on their toes. It is fascinating times for software researchers as the business models are changing, the ecosystems are changing and this change might even bring new entrants to the field that we have never heard of. Those types of weak signals is what we researchers want to find and analyze.

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Microsoft Working On Secret "App Store" Called "Skymarket"

Microsoft is secretly planning an "app store for its own Windows Mobile platform, called Skymarket. How do we know this? Microsoft has been advertising for a Skymarket Senior Product Manager, that's how. Apple came with its app store for IPhone applications, Android is planning of having its own, so there was no question in my mind that Microsoft had to take the same path. I have been emphasizing many times that competition drives innovation and this is exactly what is happening now. Nokia is not very known (at least in the US) for its app store (Symbian applications) and therefore appilication development is mainly focused on iPhone, Microsoft Mobile and RIM's BlackBerry.

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Cisco Buys PostPath to Compete with Microsoft Exchange

PostPath, a Microsoft Exchange e-mail storage competitor, and heads down the path of a big-time "co-opetition" to handle enterprise e-mail against a longtime partner, Microsoft. PostPath uses augmented open-source software and an optional appliance that plugs directly into a data center to offer a lower-cost, in-the-cloud e-mail server alternative. Yet another example of the move to cloud computing. Cisco and Microsoft are competing head-to-head in SaaS-based collaborative platforms. This acquisition is an extension to WebEx Connect that Cisco acquired a while ago. I happened to be one of the first customers that WebEx has almost 10 years ago. The market is getting more heated who will become the king of the cloud. Google annouced its own Internet browser on labor day and I am sure that there are many new things to come this fall.

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