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BetaNews.Com (4 non lus)

Dozens of corporations float to the Amazon cloud on RightScale

Publié: avril 15, 2009, 3:56am CEST par Jacqueline Emigh

By Jacqueline Emigh, Betanews
Big businesses are now moving to the clouds "en masse," through a deal between Capgemini and RightScale. The 50-or-so corporations are all clients of IT consulting firm Capgemini's emerging Cloud Computing Center of Excellence, said RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, in a briefing with Betanews.
After starting to migrate the customers' existing Web sites to "cloud-style, elastic-type applications and grids" in Amazon's EC2, Capgemini turned to RightScale's pre-configured templates for assistance.
"There's a large demand among enterprises to use clouds more effectively to their own advantage," Crandell told Betanews. "Capgemini's Cloud Computing Center of Excellence gives them a focal point for figuring out issues such as cost reduction and agility."
In unveiling the Cloud Computing Center of Excellence last year, Capgemini announced Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the initial focus. The center's services range from "technical services focused on migrations, deployment and integration of AWS into existing applications and infrastructure to more business-oriented services, such as understanding the return on investment to be gained from leveraging cloud computing and facilitating change management," said Ben Pring, an analyst at Gartner Group.
Crandell told Betanews that RightScale's templates provide pre-configured cloud solutions -- including initial server configurations -- based on best practices. "You've got predictable performance," according to the CEO.
With 50 big businesses involved, Capgemini's customer migration represents one of the most significant deals yet for RightScale, a well funded start-up that also provides Linux-based tools for ongoing monitoring, alerts, auto-scaling, and front end load balancing in both single- and "cross-cloud" environments.
"We're really excited about the market reach this will provide. It is a magnifier, and another sign of the incredible growth we've seen in the cloud market," Crandell contended.
Although RightScale initially targeted only Amazon's public EC2 cloud, support has since been added through the company's plug-in API architecture for GoGrid and FlexiScale, with additional support now on the way for RackSpace and Eucalyptus clouds.
While many RightScale customers have already started using RightScale's tools to support "hybrid" mixes of public and private clouds, lots of customers in this category at the moment -- such as ForeclosureRadar.com -- tend to be on the small side.
But Crandell said it's his understanding that some of Capgemini's corporate cloud clients might ultimately expand into cross-cloud deployments.
Capgemini's establishment of its cloud center "shows good timing -- worsening economic conditions are adding further momentum to the cloud-computing trend," Gartner's Pring wrote in a research note. "This is also a smart move by Amazon, which will face greater interest but also greater scrutiny from enterprises during the next few years as the scale, reach and traction of its offerings increase. Capgemini will provide Amazon with enhanced credibility among Capgemini's typically cautious, conservative clients."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
It's Office 2010: First technical previews due in Q3

Publié: avril 15, 2009, 3:36am CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
Microsoft confirmed to Betanews Tuesday that the first technical previews of the applications suite we can now call Office 2010, will be distributed to special participants -- probably in limited number at first, just like before -- in the third quarter of this year.
Julie White, a product manager for the Exchange Server team (which also has a major announcement this week), told Betanews that this limited number of initial testers will probably still number in the hundreds of thousands, suggesting that it will go beyond the usual MSDN and TechNet subscriber crowd. In tandem with this development track, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 will all also enter technical preview during the same timeframe, especially since they will need to be tested together in order to take advantage of new features.
Today's news is piggy-backed alongside the announcement, made official Tuesday night, that Exchange Server 2010 will enter its first public beta phase on Wednesday. Betanews will have more information to share about this news the moment the gates are officially opened, though we were told that many of Exchange Server's new features will make use of what could be a dramatically changed Outlook 2010 component.
That could make Exchange difficult to test for now, especially since Outlook 2007 -- many of whose originally planned changes didn't make the final cut -- will not have facilities for new Unified Communications features. Many of those UC features have yet to be announced, though we can expect them to turn up in Outlook 2010. Radically improved handling of voice mail capability is slated for both ES 2010 and the next Outlook, White told us. Even the very first betas of ES 2010 will include the ability for Outlook to show textual previews of voice mails, with the server translating voice messages into text.
As a result, your first peek at what Outlook 2010 could actually look like may come from ES 2010's Outlook Web Access. As ES admins know quite well, OWA is a management console for Web browsers designed to look and work just like Outlook. In the case of ES 2010, OWA will look just like Outlook 2010 is supposed to look.
It's not the optimum state of affairs for Microsoft, which had to delay Office 14's progress last February for still undisclosed reasons. But it does show the company has had the courage to proceed with its Exchange rollout plan on schedule, including its emphasis on the server as a development platform for communications tools, using a newly turbo-boosted PowerShell as the basis for that platform.
The first technical previews of Office 2010 will include native support for OpenDocument Format as an alternative default for the first time, along with revised support for the new ISO 29500 format that arose from Microsoft's OOXML standardization effort.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
ODF, PDF become part of Microsoft Office on April 28

Publié: avril 15, 2009, 1:11am CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
In a post this afternoon in an unusual location -- the Microsoft Update blog rather than the Office blog -- the company officially gave its heads-up message that Office 2007 SP2 will be officially released in two weeks, on April 28. In it, users will have the ability to export their open OOXML and "compatibility mode" documents to Open Document Format and to Adobe's PDF format, in the company's first implemented stage of its support for alternate and interoperable document formats.
This will not yet be the same as adopting .ODT documents, .ODS spreadsheets, and .ODP presentations as alternate standard formats for Office applications -- that feature is coming in the next edition of the suite, now due sometime next year. Up to now, the ability for Office 2007 apps to save to PDF and to XPS -- Microsoft's own try at an interoperable display format -- has been available as a downloadable add-in. Now, that functionality will be available to new users without the add-in needing to be installed.
"The 2007 Office Suite SP2 has been tested and is supported for Internet Explorer 8," reads today's announcement. "Windows Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows 7, and Windows Server [2008] R2 will all be supported upon their release."
Amid other enhancements in SP2: Long-time testers will recall how the new charting object model created for Excel 2007, failed to make the cut for Word and PowerPoint 2007, and then failed the cut again for SP1. Finally, SP2 bridges that gap, so the charting functionality for the main three applications is now evened out.
And in an improvement that has been even longer in coming, the newly patched Access for business users will include the ability to export reports to Excel spreadsheets. Access is no longer among the more widely used database management products, being highly localized in this world of distributed data; yet many business classes including legal and real estate need a way to produce reports from queries that filter a database, in order to export that data yet again to a new line-of-business application. This addition will help those businesses lay stepping stones for such transitions.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
The pendulum swings toward Microsoft in the Alcatel-Lucent IP battle

Publié: avril 15, 2009, 12:20am CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
The intellectual property war which at one point had Microsoft owing Alcatel-Lucent a penalty of over $1.5 billion, may end up with the latter actually owing the former. First that penalty was reduced in light of new Supreme Court guidelines, and then last September an appeals court overturned the jury verdict, ruling in favor of Microsoft.
Yesterday, Microsoft was handed another victory, as first reported by my friend and colleague Liz Montalbano at PC World, with the US Patent and Trademark Office overturning the validity of two Alcatel-Lucent patents, concerning methods for how a user selects calendar entries from an onscreen menu. Microsoft had owed the France-based holder of the Bell Labs patent portfolio some $357.7 million, which has since accrued interest.
But should a federal court act on the USPTO's decision and throw out that verdict -- the last chunk of that billion-and-a-half -- all that may be left is the subject of Microsoft's counterclaim, for which it seeks a half-billion: a way to charge remote multimedia users for quality of service rather than for bytes downloaded. Whether Alcatel-Lucent would have any fight left in it to be willing to play defense, is doubtful.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009