AJAXWorld News Desk

Jinfonet Announces JReport 10

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 11:35:00 EDT

Jinfonet Software, a provider of Java reporting solutions, on Thursday unveiled JReport 10. This new version adds rich visualization and interactive reporting to a robust, agile BI platform, providing embedded operational reporting to developers and self-service reporting to end users. JReport 10 brings Agile Business Intelligence to the next level with rich visualization features. Web 2.0 self-service reporting allows highly interactive reports to be accessible across the enterprise with superior performance and scalability.

Cloud-based Web Application Testing for Hybrid Web Applications

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 09:00:00 EDT

Sauce Labs on Wednesday announced testing support for Adobe Flex and Flash technologies. Based on Selenium, Sauce OnDemand enables cross-browser web application testing of Adobe Flex and Flash technologies in the cloud. This is the first functional testing product that supports test automation for hybrid web applications that include HTML, JavaScript, Flex and Flash technology. "Now it's easier and faster to do cross-browser tests for our web and Flex based Integrated Online Marketing solution," said Keith Davidson, vice president of engineering and operations at Lyris, Inc. "With testing support for Flex and Flash technology from Sauce Labs, we can write one test for all our Flex and web application functional testing and run it on multiple browsers in the cloud via Sauce OnDemand. Having this automation is an important component of our continuous integration strategy to deliver quality products to our customers."

[Updated] Google Twists in the Wind over Beijing

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 11:15:00 EDT

Google's quixotic and poorly executed attempt to do business in China on its terms rather than the Chinese government's has suffered another serious setback. Google's Internet Content Providers (ICP) license to run google.cn expired on Wednesday and the Communist regime told the company it won't be renewed if Google keeps automatically redirecting google.cn search traffic to its uncensored Chinese language site in Hong Kong. That's where Google unilaterally retreated to in March after the government called its bluff on leaving the country if search was going to be censored. Now Google hopes that if it puts up an intermediate "landing page" where users have to click on the message "We have moved to google.com.hk" it won't get kicked out of the largest, fastest-growing Internet market in the world on its ear. If the gambit doesn't fly, well, as its general counsel David Drummond blogged, "without an ICP license, we can't operate a commercial web site...so Google would effectively go dark in China."

Cloud Expo Announces CloudCamp @ Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:15:00 EDT

Further cementing its position as The Largest Cloud Computing Event in the World, the organizers of the 7th Cloud Expo, being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA, announced today that the event will also feature – on November 2nd, 2010 – a CloudCamp unconference. CloudCamp @ Cloud Expo is aimed at anyone working with, or interested in working with, cloud technologies. "With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions," said CloudCamp co-founder Dave Nielsen, who will personally be facilitating the process on site at the Jacob Javits. "At CloudCamp," Nielsen continued, "participants will be encouraged to share their thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing."

Two Million iPads Sold to Mounting Competition

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 17:00:00 EDT

Apple said Monday that it has sold over two million iPads in less than two months. It began shipping the dingus, which only launched April 3, in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK over the weekend. Reuters says Japanese and Australian buyers "stormed" the shops while others in London, Munich and Paris stood in all-night queues. The hot new device will be available in nine more countries in July including Ireland, Austria and Mexico with broader distribution slated for later this year. Bootleg devices are selling in China. Internal targets are said to be to move 10 million units this year, a number iPad will exceed if the pace keeps up.

Streamline Workflows Using Barcodes

Thu, 27 May 2010 11:45:00 EDT

With the availability of fast, accurate barcode reading and writing toolkits, it’s quite easy to include barcodes within your applications to reliably transfer information. With some basic information about barcode technologies, you can determine how their use could streamline your document-processing workflows, which symbology best suits your specific needs, and how to maximize their reliability.

Google To Buy Key VoIP House

Tue, 18 May 2010 16:17:00 EDT

Google said Tuesday that it means to buy Norway's publicly traded VoIP codec house Global IP Solutions Holding AB (GIPS) for $68.2 million cash, a move that could put it in contention with Skype not to mention the telecom companies that are selling its phones. The deal, which represents a 27.5% premium over GIPs' closing price Friday, will also give Google ownership of parts of the technology underlying the instant messaging systems used by Yahoo, AOL and Baidu. Global IP Solutions makes the real-time processing software for voice and video calls over the Internet, widgetry used by IBM's Lotus Sametime as well as Cisco's WebEx scheme under a shiny new deal.

Failure as a Service

Sat, 15 May 2010 18:15:00 EDT

A recent seven hour outage at Amazon Web Services on Saturday has renewed the discussion about cloud failures and whether the customer or the provider of the services should be held responsible. The conversation stems from two power outages on May 4 and an extended power loss early on Saturday, May 8. Saturday’s outage began at about 12:20 a.m. and lasted until 7:20 a.m., and affected a “set of racks,” according to Amazon, which said the bulk of customers in its U.S. East availability zone remained unaffected.

In one of the most direct posts, Amazon EBS sucks I just lost all my data, Dave Dopson said "they [AWS] promise redundancy, it is BS." Going on to point to AWS's statement " EBS volumes are designed to be highly available and reliable. Amazon EBS volume data is replicated across multiple servers in an Availability Zone to prevent the loss of data from the failure of any single component. The durability of your volume depends both on the size of your volume and the percentage of the data that has changed since your last snapshot. As an example, volumes that operate with 20 GB or lessof modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% –0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of around 4%, making EBS volumes 10 times more reliable than typical commodity disk drives."

Like many new users to cloud computing, he assumed that he could just use the service and upon failure AWS's redundancy would automatically fix any problems, because they do (sort of) say that they prevent data loss. What Amazon actually states is a little different in that "the durability of your volume depends both on the size of your volume and the percentage of the data that has changed since your last snapshot" placing the responsibility on the customer. On one hand they say that they prevent data loss, but only if you use the AWS cloud correctly, otherwise you're SOL. The reality is that AWS for most users requires significant failure planning -- in this case the use of EBS's snap shot capability. The problem is that most [new] users have a hard time learning the rules of the road. A quick search for AWS failure planning on the AWS forums resulted in little additional insights and really appears to mostly about trial and error.

In the case of hardware failures Amazon expects you to design your architecture correctly for these kinds of events by use of redundancy, for example use mutliple VM's etc. They expect a certain level of knowledge of both system administration as well as how AWS itself has been designed to be used. Newbies need not apply or should use at you're own risk. Which isn't all that clear to a new user, who hears that cloud computing is safe and the answer to all your problems. Which I admit should be a red flag in itself. The problem is two fold, an over hyped technology and unclear failure models which combine to create a perfect storm. You need the late adopters for the real revenue opportunities, but these same late adopters require a different more gentle kind of cloud service, probably one a little more platform than infrastructure focused. As IaaS matures it is becoming obvious that the "Über Geek" developers who first adopted the service is not where the long tail revenue opportunities are. To make IaaS viable to a broader market, AWS and other IaaS vendors need to mature their platforms for a lesser type of user. (A lower or least common denominator) One who is smart enough to be dangerous, otherwise they're doomed to be limited to the only for experts only segment.

The bigger question is should a cloud user have to worry about hardware failures or should these types of failures be the sole responsiblity of the service provider? My opinion is deploying to the cloud should reduce complexity, not increase it. The user should be responsible for what they have access to, so in the case of AWS, they should be responsible for failures that are brought about by the applications and related components they build and deploy, not by the hardware. If hardware fails (which it will) this should be the responsibility of those who manage and provide it. Making things worst is promising to be highly available, reliable and redundant, but with the fine print of "if you are smart enough to use all our services in the proper way" which isn't fair. If EBS is automatically replicated why did Dave lose all his data?

In a optimal cloud environment any single server failures shouldn't matter. But it appears at AWS it does.

Cloud Expo, Inc. Names Jeremy Geelan President & COO

Wed, 12 May 2010 08:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON announced today that Jeremy Geelan was named President & COO of Cloud Expo, Inc. "Cloud Expo, Inc." was spun out of SYS-CON Events, Inc. as a startup events management company which produces and presents Cloud Expo (TM) events worldwide. Jeremy Geelan served as Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series, the Virtualization Conference series, and of the upcoming UlitzerLIVE! event. He's founder of Cloud Computing Journal, Web 2.0 Journal, AJAX & RIA Journal and other leading SYS-CON titles. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm. Today he has complete responsibility for the content of SYS-CON's entire portfolio of Events.

Laszlo Systems Introduces Webtop Cloud

Thu, 06 May 2010 10:00:00 EDT

Laszlo Systems, a provider of Rich Unified Internet Applications for consumers and businesses, on Thursday announced the launch of Laszlo Webtop Cloud, a web-based platform that merges email, voice and messaging with social networking and other applications to deliver an integrated communications and real-time collaboration experience for consumers. Laszlo Webtop has been adopted and deployed by many of the tier-1 service providers to provide subscribers with engaging personal portals for unifying and managing information, collaboration and communications on the web. The launch of Laszlo Webtop Cloud extends this Web 2.0 capability to companies of all sizes with an affordable suite of robust capabilities and services for creating captivating personal portals that function across devices and foster greater brand affinity and deeper levels of customer engagement.

Apple on Flash: Hey Steve, "C'mon Man"

Thu, 06 May 2010 07:00:00 EDT

Remember Hamlet and the quote, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks"? While in this case it isn't a lady, the question still applies to Apple's CEO. Steven P. Jobs posted a 1,700-word letter on Apple’s Web site on Thursday, explaining the company’s decision not to allow the multimedia software Adobe Flash on Apple’s mobile devices, including the iPhone and iPad. The letter titled "Thoughts on Flash" ran the gamut from philosophical issues about the nature of closed platforms to complaints about performance and crashes.Why would Steve go to the trouble of sharing his "diatribe"? Think back to the Hamlet quote.

Apple Checkmates Adobe

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 10:45:00 EDT

Adobe introduced its Creative Suite 5 (CS5) Monday, the thing on which nearly 60% of its revenues depends, the thing that’s got to sell better than recession-tossed CS4 did, in the middle of a hailstorm that drew more attention to it than it normally would have gotten. Last Thursday Apple quietly rewrote its rules for developers and barred the backdoor that Adobe was figuring on using to get Flash onto iPhone, iPod and iPad, having already been barred from using the front door because Steve Jobs, as everyone must know by now, loathes Flash. CS5 includes – or is supposed to (we’ll see when it ships in 30 days) – an Adobe-advertised write-once Flash-to-iPhone compiler that was supposed to dodge the Apple police. But the latest Apple Developer Program License Agreement says in clause 3.3.1 that developers can’t use any foreign tools or cross-platform interpreters or compiler, only Apple tools. Any apps that don’t conform won’t be allowed in the iTunes store.

My-Channels Nirvana Adds Support for HTML5 Web Sockets

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:02:00 EDT

My-Channels, a provider of unified enterprise, web and mobile middleware, today announced support for the HTML5 WebSocket protocol in their Nirvana Enterprise Server and the Nirvana JavaScript client API. My-Channels' Nirvana API for JavaScript has been updated to include underlying support for Web Sockets, an HTML5 technology for full-duplex communication between web browsers and servers. The Nirvana JavaScript API will now use WebSocket communication by default. Browsers yet to adopt this new standard will continue to function using Nirvana's Comet-based streaming implementatio

Adobe Introduces Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 08:05:00 EDT

Adobe introduced on Monday Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5, the new professional interaction design tool that allows designers to rapidly create expressive Web application interfaces and design interaction without writing code. With Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5, Flash Professional CS5 and Flash Builder 4, designers and developers will be able to collaborate and work more productively together. Full details of the announcement and a list of new features in Flash Catalyst can be found in the press release for your reference.

IBM Reads Orwell’s “1984,” Tries Rewriting History

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:30:00 EDT

Once the news got out that it had welched on its 2005 patent pledge to the open source community and had threatened TurboHercules (TH) with patent infringement, IBM had to come up with some cover story or another to contain the fallout. So it switched places with many of its observers and turned conspiracy theorist, accusing Turbo Hercules of guilt by association. Besides calling TurboHercules a couple of dirty names - a stock response to any threats to its monopoly in order to scare away its rivals' customers...

Flash Player Will Be Packaged with Google Chrome

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 08:00:00 EDT

Adobe has announced that they made a deal with Google: the new releases of Chrome Web browser will be packaged with the latest version of Flash Player. Even though the only person I know who uses Chrome is my younger son (he just says it's cool), this is an important announcement. When I say that Flash Player is a great VM and an excellent choice for delivering rich Internet applications, thousands listen. But when Google makes a commitment to make Flash Player a part of its browser it has even more weight. Google states loud and clear that Flash Player is a valid software that can and should be used.

Adobe’s Creative Suite 5 Scheduled

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EDT

The unveiling of the next major release of Adobe’s flagship Creative Suite apps is due on April 12 with availability of the kit in English following a month later. There hasn’t been a rev since September of 2008. Adobe named the date when it reported fiscal first-quarter earnings down 19% to $127.2 million, or 24 cents a share, on revenue up 9.2% to $858.7 million including $432 million from CS4. Product sales were up 7.7%, service and support up 34%. Adobe’s new Omniture acquisition kicked in about 10% of total revenue. CS didn’t do so well at the height of the recession but with demand on the rise Adobe forecast Q2 revenues of $875 million–$925 million above Wall Street expectations. Otherwise, Adobe’s next-generation Flash Builder, Flash Builder 4 and the latest edition of its ColdFusion, tools for building multi-platform rich Internet applications (RIAs), are out now.

The Evolution In Enterprise Communications Continues

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 12:30:00 EDT

The VoiceCon 2010 event, now called, “Enterprise Connect!” is underway this week from Orlando, Florida; broadcasting keynotes from Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Siemens, which you can watch for free on VoiceCon TV. As I mentioned previously, in my last unified communications blog post, “Telepresence – The Face of the Cloud“, the [...]

Are You Scrubbing the Twitter Stream on Your Web Site?

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EDT

Web 2.0 is as much about integration as it is interactivity. Thus it’s no surprise that an increasing number of organizations are including a feed of their recent Twitter activity on their site. But like any user generated content, and it is user generated after all, there’s a potential risk to the organization and its visitors from integrating such content without validation. A recent political effort in the UK included launching a web site that integrated a live Twitter stream based on a particular hashtag. That’s a fairly common practice, nothing to get excited about. What happened, however, is something we should get excited about and pay close attention to because as Twitter streams continue to flow into more and more web sites it is likely to happen again.

Adobe Advances Web Application Development

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 05:19:00 EDT

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the immediate availability of Adobe® Flash® Builder™ 4 and ColdFusion® Builder™ software, next generation Flash Platform tooling for building multi-platform rich Internet applications (RIAs). In addition, Adobe added a new Social service to the recently introduced Adobe® Flash® Platform Services. The Social service streamlines integration between Web applications and 14 leading social networks using Facebook Connect, Sign-in with Twitter, MySpaceID and LinkedIn.

betterFORM lightSteelBlue Released

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:10:00 EDT

betterFORM is a full implementation of the W3C XForms 1.1 standard which "represents the next generation of forms for the Web". Even complex and highly dynamic web applications can be built in a declarative way without writing a single line of script code. betterFORM will generate complete AJAX-enabled applications for you that are attractive, accessible and run in all major browsers without the need for plug-ins or installations. Openness, flexibility and extensibility are the cornerstones of betterFORM. It is based completely on open standards like XML, XPath 2.0, XSLT and CSS to name a few, easily integrates with any application and can be extended in various ways either client- or server-side. Ready-made layout containers, a steadily growing set of UI-controls, a rich set of built-in functions and a powerful dependency engine give the page author an efficient tool for rapid development without the need to learn all underlying technologies.

JackBe Launches Cloud Computing Mashup Platform

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:15:00 EST

JackBe enterprise mashup software company, on Thursday announced that its award-winning Presto Enterprise Mashup Platform is now running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. ‘Presto Cloud (Community Edition)’ is immediately available at no cost to all members of JackBe’s Mashup Developer Community. Presto Cloud (Community Edition) combines agile mashup creation with the instant accessibility of a cloud service, enabling mashup developers to connect Internet-based data sources in their own secure workspace and easily share their mashups with community members around the world. With Presto Cloud (Community Edition), users can also take advantage of a public mashup catalog consisting of hundreds of mashable data sources from JackBe Preferred Partners as well as shared mashup applications created by other community members.

Jobs Has a Few Words for Google & Adobe & They Ain’t Pretty: Reports

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST

"We did not enter the search business. [Google] entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them... I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing. This don't be evil mantra - It's bullshit." - Steve Jobs at an employee Town Hall the other day according to Wired, MacRummors et al although he may have said "load of crap" not "bullshit"; sources vary. Jobs reportedly means to use "aggressive updates" to stay way out front of the Android phone.

Microsoft WebsiteSpark: Get New Business Leads to Grow Your Business

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:00:00 EST

Did you know that PHP runs on Windows?? Run Drupal, WordPress, SugarCRM, or other PHP-based apps on Windows today with the free Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Microsoft WebsiteSpark is a specially designed program for PHP Web developers and designers to help you explore running on Windows. This program enables you to get new business leads to grow your business, and receive the software, support and trainingyou may need, at no cost for 3 years. To find out how to start getting new business leads, and leveraging the benefits of WebsiteSpark please enter your information here to download the Program Guide and receive enrollment instructions.

PivotLink Named Cool Cloud Computing Vendor

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:00:00 EST

PivotLink, the leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS), announced that Everything Channel's CRN has named its business analytics solution one of the "100 Coolest Cloud Computing Products." The Top 100 Cloud Computing products include 20 storage vendors, 20 security vendors, 20 productivity vendors, 20 infrastructure vendors and 20 platform vendors. PivotLink's on-demand reporting and analysis solution powers roughly 2,000,000 ad hoc reports for over 15,000 business users each month. PivotLink's secure, collaborative reports and dashboards offer unparalleled performance, flexibility and simplicity to make business decisions in less time at a dramatically lower cost than traditional on-premise BI systems.

Apple iPad in 3rd Place Behind iPhone and Android For Application Developers

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:00:00 EST

Appcelerator, a platform which is used to develop Apple Tablet applications, on Tuesday, announced the findings of a new poll taken of application developers about their plans to build applications for the Apple Tablet. Taken last week from a pool of 18,000 of Appcelerator's application developers, 554 developers weighed in with responses about their plans, interests and preferences around Apple's forthcoming Tablet. Appcelerator also announced that its flagship cross-platform product, Appcelerator Titanium, would support the new Apple Tablet. Titanium enables web developers to use industry-standard, open-source Web technologies such as Javascript, HTML, and CSS to quickly build rich, fully native applications that run on the iPhone, Android, Apple Tablet, PC, Macintosh, Linux platforms from a single code base.

Whatever the Apple iPad Is, It Apparently Leaks Like a Sieve

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:45:00 EST

There may be little left for Apple to announce about its purported tablet or iSlate come January 27, a date change since January 26 was noised about. The rumor mill is slowly teasing out all its secrets. The great unveiling, according to the Financial Times, is still supposed to be at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco but now it’s supposedly on the last Wednesday of the month rather than the last Tuesday.

UPDATE: Adobe & IE Implicated as China’s Spy Holes

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:45:00 EST

A zero-day Acrobat security hole in the buggy Adobe Reader, software that’s on practically every PC in the world, may be how Chinese hackers pulled off the cyber-attack on Google that has Google threatening to pull out of China, the world’s largest Internet market, according to iDefense, the VeriSign managed security unit.

VMware Reportedly Buying Zimbra

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:15:00 EST

VMware is reportedly branching off into the groupware business. According to All Things Digital, the Dow Jones blog that majors in Yahoo’s doings, VMware is gonna take Zimbra, which has been on the block for at least a few months now, off of Yahoo’s hands, having been persuaded that it should move up the software stack and not be so focused on virtualization.

View Cloud Power Panel on SYS-CON.TV Live From Times Square

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

View the live panel discussion taped on December 8, 2009 at SYS-CON.TV's 4th-floor studio overlooking Times Square in New York City a very special "Power Panel" in which Cloud Computing Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan and three top industry guests from EMC, Intel and Unisys will be looking “under the hood” of the fastest-growing new trend in all of Enterprise IT – Cloud Computing.

Free Virtual Appliance for Cloud Computing

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 06:15:00 EST

up.time represents a quantum leap forward for companies that need to drive both IT performance and cost-savings, while ensuring a consistent quality of service. The technology provides IT managers with an unobstructed view of the datacenter to efficiently manage distributed applications and global services levels, while maximizing enterprise-wide IT resources. The solution's ability to provide dashboards that deeply monitor, measure, and manage IT infrastructure and applications in virtual, physical and Cloud environments, as well as across multiple/remote locations, platforms, databases, and more has helped hundreds of customers achieve new levels of performance and immediate cost savings.

Oracle Maps Its Cloud Computing Strategy During Cloud Expo Keynote

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:15:00 EST

"We've been fairly quiet," said Rex Wang, VP of Infrastructure and Management at Oracle, this morning as he gave the Morning Keynote at the third and last day of the 4th Cloud Computing International Conference Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Wang was referring to Oracle's relative silence to date vis-a-vis Cloud Computing. His intention, he said, was to share with the assembled delegates Oracle's thoughts on the space...

Cloud Computing Growing Pains in 2010

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 15:00:00 EST

Market Disruptions will Accelerate into 2010. Just as the recession provided fertile ground in which cloud computing could take root, the rebounding economy in 2010 will provide the nutrient—end-user investment—that cloud needs to grow. The influx of buyers will put increasing pressure on infrastructure price points, accelerating the “race to zero.” Within the enterprise, IT acquisition models begin to shift, especially around software and support, demanding that vendors align prices and pricing models against a new time constant, the hour.

Adobe Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2009 Results

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:30:00 EST

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) on Tuesday reported financial results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year ended Nov. 27, 2009. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009, Adobe achieved revenue of $757.3 million, compared to $915.3 million reported for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 and $697.5 million reported in the third quarter of fiscal 2009. Fourth quarter fiscal 2009 results include the impact of the Company’s acquisition of Omniture, Inc.

Streaming Media in the Cloud by Amazon and Adobe

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:45:00 EST

Amazon Web Services announced, on Wednesday, streaming media delivery for Amazon CloudFront, the content delivery service from AWS. This new feature enables streaming delivery of audio and video content, providing an alternative to progressive download where end users download a full media file. Amazon CloudFront streams content from a worldwide network of 14 edge locations, ensuring low latencies and providing cost-effective delivery. Like all Amazon Web Services, Amazon CloudFront requires no up-front investment, minimum fees or long-term contracts, and customers only pay for what they use. To learn more about Amazon CloudFront and to start streaming content, visit http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront.

rPath Offers Eight Safe 2010 Predictions They Can't Miss

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:45:00 EST

rPath announced “Eight IT Predictions for 2010,” an animated short video that offers a lighthearted view of what the future holds for enterprise IT. The video is available now at http://bit.ly/6lCjug. “For many organizations, 2009 was a painful year,” said Jake Sorofman, vice president of marketing for rPath. “But in IT, pain usually precedes progress, and that’s what we’re forecasting for 2010 — progress borne of necessity and informed by the struggles of 2009. For 2010, we’ll see many of the lessons of a down economy play out in the form of fundamentally leaner approaches to enterprise IT.”

Amazon Announces New EC2 Pricing Options

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:15:00 EST

Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced Spot Instances, a new option for purchasing and consuming Amazon EC2 compute resources. With Spot Instances, customers bid on unused Amazon EC2 capacity and run those instances for as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. The Spot Price changes periodically based on supply and demand, and customers whose bids exceed it gain access to the available Spot Instances. Spot Instances are complementary to On-Demand Instances and Reserved Instances, providing another way to obtain Amazon EC2 compute capacity. To get started using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

Actuate Extends Community Collaboration with BIRT Performance Scorecard 9

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST

Actuate Corporation has announced BIRT Performance Scorecard 9, the latest iteration of its Performance Management solution. BIRT Performance Scorecard 9 is a Rich Information Application (RIA) that fully integrates BIRT to bring the simplicity and collaboration of consumer internet applications to the Performance Management process. With Version 9 comes BIRT Scorecard Exchange, a pioneering business to business site that grants BIRT Performance Management practitioners no cost access to best practices, frameworks, prebuilt measurement criteria and community links. BIRT Performance Scorecard 9 offers customers a completely new user interface, flash-based dashboard charts and an expanding number of newly designed out-of-the-box BIRT reports.

Adobe Discusses Cloud Computing

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:00:00 EST

In the midst of significant growth in interest and usage of online computing in government, Focus Washington's Karen Hanretty interviewed Kumar Vora, Vice President and General Manager for LiveCycle at Adobe Systems Incorporated, as part of Focus Washington's TechView series. They discussed cloud computing, transparency, and Adobe's approach to this key aspect of the government market.

Social Media Newest Playground for Cybercriminals - Cisco

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 20:30:00 EST

While 10 years ago it would have been unthinkable for businesses to keep sensitive data outside the corporate firewall, today, with the advent of cloud computing and hosted applications, doing so is increasingly common. Many users are so trusting of cloud computing that they do minimal due diligence on who's hosting their sensitive data, and how secure the data is. The Annual Security Report recommends that organizations looking to use externalized services ask providers to explain their data security measures thoroughly.