When you think of ERP bigwigs, you probably conjure up SAP and Oracle. But Microsoft is also in this (very big) business. Microsoft didn't build its way into ERP -- it bought its way. Redmond bought Great Plains, Axapta, Solomon and Navision, four separate ERP vendors. That left Microsoft with four separate ERP platforms. Microsoft tried to turn the four into one through Project Green, which it gave up on. Computer scientists know that merging four huge platforms may not be impossible, but it's clearly implausible.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/19/20112 comments
The IEEE has been around for eons. It is the George Burns of standards bodies. Now this esteemed and rather elderly group has cloud religion. The august body recently announced two new standards, one for interoperability and the other for application portability.
The standards are aimed at application developers. Write to IEEE specs and you stand a better chance of working with other programs and moving your software from one cloud provider to another.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/12/20110 comments
Dell says it will spend $1 billion this fiscal year alone on datacenters to support cloud services. Dell plans to open 22 "solution centers" in the next year-and-a-half.
While Microsoft remains a key partner, VMware software will drive much of Dell's new datacenters. Dell did strike a three-year agreement with Microsoft to support Hyper-V and System Center.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/12/20116 comments
ZeroDesktop made a bold promise late last month, claiming that its ZeroPC will last a lifetime, and the apps and data that constitute the "PC" can be accessed nearly anywhere and by almost anything with a processor and display.
ZeroPC is basically a virtual desktop, delivered through a browser, where all your apps and info are stored in a central place (like Amazon) in the cloud. Sounds like the old Network Computer concept promoted years ago by Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy. (Is it any wonder Oracle ended up buying Sun?) Beyond serving up productivity apps, ZeroPC offers a single log-on into social media sites, e-mail systems and online consumer storage sites. And like Google Docs or the Web versions of Microsoft apps, others can share your files. Some of this sharing can apparently be done through ThinkFree Online, a productivity suite that comes with ZeroPC.
Posted by Doug Barney on 04/05/20115 comments
If you have anything to do with health care, you know more than you ever wanted about HIPAA, the regulation that is supposed to ensure patient privacy.
The cloud raises a few issues in regard to HIPAA. First, is the data secure? Second, does the provider provide true HIPAA protections? IT outfit Logicalis is offering advice on what to look for in a cloud provider to meet HIPAA demands. Most of it is fairly obvious -- well, obvious once it is all put into words. (Hey, I would have thought of that!) According to Logicalis, a cloud provider should:
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Posted by Doug Barney on 04/05/20110 comments
One of my peers, Jeff Schwartz, took an in-depth look at how Google and Microsoft cloud enterprise apps and infrastructures compare.
We did the same thing nearly five years ago and the lineups were completely different. Back then, we did a head-to-head review of Gmail versus Hotmail, Windows Live Search (now Bing) versus Google Search, the two companies' desktop search offerings, IM, mapping, calendaring and more. The battle was pretty even.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 03/29/20116 comments
I'm spending a lot of time covering the cloud, and I like much of what I see. 2011 will be a year of steady progress. IT will evaluate, test, plan and, in some cases, implement. For many, it will be a year of watching how new cloud solutions mature, and defining the exact economics of these alternatives.
We always like to think that technology changes overnight, and it can in terms of offerings. But actual use is based on lots of testing and lots of analysis. The cloud may be a revolution, but it won't be nearly as quick as the Bolsheviks.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 03/28/20117 comments
Virtacore recently announced a new on-demand service based on the VMware cloud tool, vCloud. With vCloud Express Virtacore built pools of virtual servers, with users renting capacity on a monthly basis. Plus, customers can ratchet up or down their capacity and simply pay for what they use. According to the company, the service is well suited to two different scenarios: companies that are simply running out of server capacity, and those looking for a quick and easy way to develop and test applications.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 03/22/20111 comments
Citrix is a pioneer when it comes to serving up Windows apps on the iPad. Now VMware is joining the fray with a free app, VMware View for iPad. With View you can get at Windows through 3G networks or, if you have a hotspot nearby, a wireless network (which should be faster and cheaper). While the client app is free, your shop will have to have VMware View 4.6 desktop virtualization software installed.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 03/22/20111 comments
Microsoft just released the second beta of Visual Studio LightSwitch, a tool that lets power users turn what they do in Excel, Access and other apps into full-fledged, albeit lightweight, .NET apps. The tool uses wizards and GUI tools to help these users rapidly build line-of-business apps. In this latest beta, Microsoft is allowing these apps to be published to the cloud through Azure.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 03/22/20115 comments
VMware's vCenter is the company's main virtualization management tool. Now a new edition, vCenter Operations, aims to do for the cloud what vCenter did for virtualized servers. The Operations tool gathers data from both vSphere and vCenter and lets this all be monitored and analyzed in one new place.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 03/15/20112 comments