Good news for Cisco channel members from Ingram Micro
here.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/19/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Another one is biting the dust. As you know if you've been reading industry news at all this week, IBM is in talks to buy Sun Microsystems.
The Wall Street Journal, as it tends to do,
broke the story -- but if you want to read the whole article, you'll have to subscribe online. There's no need at this point, though, because there are
plenty of takes floating around on the proposed acquisition. And we
do mean plenty. That's just a small sample. Really small.
Just what the tech world needs, of course, is another one...so we'll keep it (relatively) short. Rumors, speculation and general buzz about IBM setting its sights on Sun have been around for a while. And the two really could be pretty good for each other. Sun, from which a cloud platform rose just this week, could provide a spark for IBM's cloud strategy. Beyond that, IBM has long been a proponent of Sun's technology, and both companies seem fairly enamored with Linux.
Sun has long been a classic old-school tech company: innovative and interesting but not particularly well-managed. Its current CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, even has a ponytail, which gets a "thumbs up" from your editor but which also perpetuates the tech-first, money-second stereotype.
Sun has been on shaky financial footing for a while and, before finally going through with layoffs in the last couple of years, was unbelievably fat for a company whose best days, revenue-wise, are getting to be a good decade behind it. IBM, of course, despite its ups and downs in the early 2000s, is still a fairly financially disciplined organization and has recently reported impressive earnings. And it has some pretty useful technology, too.
So while some see a clash of cultures, we see opposites potentially attracting. IBM could be the financial savior that keeps Sun's technology shining bright, and Sun could illuminate IBM's cloud plans as well as warm up Big Blue's button-down ethos a bit and provide some rays of technological innovation. (And we're just about out of plays on the word Sun, thank goodness.)
For Microsoft partners, an IBM-Sun combo could be a little scary. Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, arguably not off to the best of starts, would have a major competitor in an IBM-Sun combination. And a Sunnier IBM (you knew there'd be another one) might very well continue the growth of Linux in the enterprise, which wouldn't necessarily be the best of news for Windows.
Then again, putting companies like IBM and Sun together, or absorbing one into the other, isn't the easiest thing to do. (Right, HP and Compaq?) And acquisitions can sometimes lead to less innovation, not more, as the act of squashing two companies into one takes precedence over actually cranking out great new stuff.
Of course, at the time of this writing, the buyout wasn't official yet, so anything can happen. But it looks as though Sun might be the latest big, formerly influential vendor to fade to...well, in this case, Blue, within another organization. And it's probably about time.
What's your take on IBM potentially buying Sun? Sound off at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/19/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
If cloud computing in the enterprise were, well, a cloud, it would be forming in the distance, just coming over the horizon. Sure, some companies are making money with it and others are saving money by using it, but it's still an evolving model.
Two pieces of news this week showed the negative and positive potential of cloud computing. Let's start with the bad news, or at least with the negative-potential bit. Azure crashed late last week.
OK, we know -- it's still a work in progress, and cloud computing as a model is prone to outages. But this was a 22-hour outage, a disaster-level interruption in service, and it occurred just days before Azure was to be the star at this week's MIX conference in Las Vegas.
That won't do much for confidence in cloud computing, confidence that remains shaky in a lot of enterprises and even in many smaller businesses, as well. People like to be able to get to their stuff whenever they want it, which doesn't seem like an unreasonable request and is pretty much what we've been used to with client-server computing.
Of course, the outage makes both Microsoft and the cloud model look pretty bad, perhaps unfairly, no matter how early Azure is in its evolution. There will no doubt be some pressure on partners to reassure customers who've bought into or were thinking of buying into Microsoft's Software Plus Service plans that this sort of thing is unusual and is the result -- probably, since nobody seems to actually know yet -- of a fledgling platform hiccupping.
We at RCPU would not want to be in the role of providing that reassurance right now, frankly. And while we believe in cloud computing as a concept, we understand that it has its potential pitfalls. Inability to access, say, a critical ERP application for 22 hours could cripple some companies. That's why the cloud is still the horizon right now; companies might dip their toes into a cloud app here or there, but few are ready to dive into the model head-first. And that's OK -- smart, actually -- as long as partners and customers keep an open mind and remember that this stuff is still in development and could still end up being incredibly useful and reliable in lots of scenarios.
And then there's the other side of cloud computing, the cool stuff it produces. Here we come to the new baby of tech hype, Hadoop, which is now available in open source commercial form by a company called Cloudera. Companies like Google and Yahoo use Hadoop to mine massive amounts of data from the Internet and sort it, delivering targeted content and advertisements and the like. Now that capability is coming to enterprise datacenters in the form of a product that costs nothing. Read (a lot) more about it in the old gray lady herself, which could probably benefit from this technology.
The bad news for partners might be that since Cloudera plans to make its money off of services, add-ons and the like with Hadoop, it's hard to see a clear channel play right off the bat. But the cool news -- we won't call it "good" necessarily -- is that this thing sounds really powerful and should give companies the ability to actually make use of petabytes (but only if they want to be petted...) of information and build really useful apps in the cloud. We just hope partners can find a way to get a piece of this action. How that's going to work, we're not sure.
We're also not sure when, or if, cloud computing will feel as normal in the office as cubicle walls and water coolers, but we can see something on the horizon. Exactly what it's going to bring, we're not sure. But it's coming this way.
Where do you stand on the cloud model? Let us know at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Yeah, times are sort of tough, but not as tough as analysts thought they would be...which is
good news for Adobe.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
Apparently, Chrome
isn't exactly polished and Firefox (your editor's choice) isn't burning as brightly as it once did. Oh, and, uh, not many people are going on Safaris or listening to Opera, either.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/18/2009 at 1:22 PM2 comments
OK, it's kind of a gotcha headline, but part of the stimulus plan for the Seattle area really does include a "
bridge to Microsoft."
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/17/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments
It's St. Patrick's Day, so there must be a party somewhere. (Keep in mind that we're writing from suburban Boston, where the party just sort of rages on all around us this time of year.) And who likes to
rock the party? Cisco does, apparently.
Not content with being an absolute monster in networking hardware, Cisco is now...a server company. Or at least a provider of blade servers for big datacenters, meaning the company is now in competition with the likes of HP, IBM and Dell in that space.
Keith Ward, editor of Virtualization Review, offers a more comprehensive analysis here than your editor could ever hope to create, so you'll just have to click Keith's story if you really want to know more about this announcement.
From what we at RCPU can tell, Cisco figured it was time to branch out into something new, as pretty much every company is well-stocked on stuff like routers and switches these days. So Cisco is going for the old Microsoft approach of integration, calling its offering the Cisco Unified Computing System (that's UCS, in case you needed another set of initials in this industry) and touting storage management and, well, networking as part of the deal.
As Keith explains, it's all underpinned by virtualization, which more or less can turn one server into many servers, as you know, and can exponentially increase scalability and help cut the costs of running a big datacenter. Of course, Cisco isn't the only company doing this kind of thing, and it's just getting into the blade server business for the time being.
But we like having another company rocking the server party. Cisco's got a big list of partners lined up, including Microsoft and VMware, so channel players who aren't currently Cisco partners might be able to wedge themselves into this business somewhere. Beyond that, more companies in a market mean more innovation and, possibly, lower costs as a result of cheaper prices. It might sound -- it might be -- cliché, but it's still true. So, Cisco, welcome to the party. It's about time you got here.
What's your take on Cisco's server play? Share it at [email protected].
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/17/2009 at 1:22 PM1 comments
The anticipation that built for Vista was the manufactured kind, created mostly by marketing types and by newsletters like this one that got sucked into the hype only to end up disillusioned. But the Windows 7 hype that's building is more organic, coming from beta testers, partners and IT professionals. Anyway, Windows 7 got some bug fixes and some new updates this week. More details
here.
Posted by Lee Pender on 03/17/2009 at 1:22 PM0 comments