Oracle-AMD Acquisition Speculation Flares Once Again

By Zewde Yeraswork, CRN

Dirk Meyer, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has denied rumors that Oracle may look to acquire AMD.

"AMD is not for sale, but we are happy to listen to any proposal which is in the interest of our shareholders," Meyer said at an industry conference in Barcelona, as reported by Reuters.

The speculation was sparked by comments Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made last month at Oracle's annual financial analyst meeting, in which he said Oracle could soon acquire a chip company in addition to software acquisitions.

But at the Oracle annual stockholders' conference earlier this week, Ellison reiterated his interest in acquiring additional semiconductor and software companies, more so than new service offerings.

"My point really was that we are interested in buying intellectual property of all kinds," Ellison said, as reported by The Wall Street Journal . "We would be interested in certain kinds of semiconductor companies and software companies. Most of our acquisitions and the bulk of our strategy are in creating and acquiring intellectual property, including chips."

By acquiring AMD, Oracle would gain access to the chip company's IP portfolio, adding hardware to its software acquisitions and moving closer to end-to-end control of the entire IT stack.

Oracle couldn't be reached for comment Thursday. An AMD spokesperson offered the following comment to CRN: "As a matter of policy, AMD does not comment on speculations or rumors, but I can confirm that AMD is not for sale."

Synergetics India : Our Database Offerings experience help to reduce the Opportunity cost for our clients in terms of development time specially related to latest in technology.

BSIMM crafts model for building in software security

By David Rubinstein

With the sample size of participating companies having tripled in one year, the folks behind the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM) have found that most have an internal group responsible for security, and that 15 activities to ensure security are almost universally done.

The BSIMM project began in March 2009 as a joint effort between Cigital and Fortify Software to record what organizations are doing to build security into their software and organizations. Starting with input from nine companies, the number of participating organizations has grown to 30, according to Gary McGraw, CTO at security consulting firm Cigital. He said the larger sample size allowed the group to statistically validate the model, and that the levels for measuring security are sound.

McGraw explained that the BSIMM team observed 109 activities that the 30 organizations do to secure their software, and those activities are broken down into 12 “large-scale conceptual buckets,” he said, such as training or code review. Then the activities within those buckets are further divided into three levels: The things that most of the organizations do are at the first level, while level 3 is for “the rocket science, things that are rarely done but are very cool,” he added.

Organizations can download BSIMM2 to compare their own activities to what other groups are doing and plan their security strategy going forward, explained Brian Chess, cofounder and chief scientist at Fortify Software, which makes vulnerability detection software and provides security services.

Chess said that the companies studied all do good hosting and network security. “They all have firewalls, that’s no great revelation,” he said. “But there are 14 other activities that almost all the companies universally do.”

Synergetics India : Our Database Offerings experience help to reduce the Opportunity cost for our clients in terms of development time specially related to latest in technology.

Symbian opens up developer tools for Web platforms

From SDTimes, By Katie Serignese

To open its platform to a wider pool of developers, particularly Web developers, Symbian announced in late April the availability of its new Web application development tools.

The open-source tools are built on top of the Eclipse JavaScript Debug Toolkit project and add mobile-specific capabilities to enable the transition from desktop development to mobile development. The capabilities include mobile application previewing, debugging, project creation and mobile API support.

With these new tools, any Web developer can apply existing skills in CSS, HTML and JavaScript to create an application for the open-source mobile platform, Symbian 3.

The non-profit organization took this approach to ease the creation of apps and widen the pool of developers for them, said Larry Berkin, head of global alliances at Symbian. He also noted that there are a lot more Web developers out there than native developers.

Despite still being the most widely used operating system in terms of the sheer numbers of phones using it, Symbian has fallen behind in popularity since the introduction of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android operating systems, said Theresa Lanowitz, CEO of technology analyst firm Voke.

Lanowitz added, however, that she thought “[Symbian] always had a good road map” as far as development, but it lacks a connection with customers.

Another way Symbian is trying to tap into the reservoir of Web developers is by offering JavaScript APIs as a way to create more-robust applications. This will give developers a means to create more-capable applications with access to contacts, an accelerometer, a GPS and a camera, among other features.

The tools can be used on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows operating systems, and will supplement the Nokia-owned Qt framework that already supports application development for the Symbian 3 platform.

Synergetics is Awarded as the "Best. NET Training Service Provider" by Microsoft.

Cloud development ties code to dollars

From SDTimes, By Alex Handy

Writing applications for cloud environments is a different affair that writing for in-house hosting. At the All About the Cloud summit in San Francisco this week, the focus was on what changes developers need to make to their applications to enable their optimal use in the Cloud. Perhaps the most interesting revelation offered during the event was that of the direct correlation between billing and the quality of source code.

Treb Ryan, CEO and founder of OpSource, said in a keynote talk that Cloud hosting offers “the best margins I have seen in the hosting business.” He added that Amazon has largely played down the profitability of Cloud hosting, and he suggested they have done so to scare off potential competition. OpSource has been offering hosting for software-as-a-service applications for more than five years and has relatively recently entered the Cloud hosting business.

Ryan said that applications hosted in the Cloud are under a performance microscope. If they send too many requests to the database, that will be reflected by a higher bill at the end of the month. He said that developers writing applications for deployment in the Cloud need to realize that “bad code costs me twice as much as good code. I can cut my op costs in half” by optimizing the code.

Thus, said Ryan, developers can see a direct correlation between the code they've worked on all month and the reduction in their Cloud hosting bill. That's something developers haven't really been able to do since the days of mainframes and time-sharing.

Elsewhere at the All About the Cloud summit, attendees and speakers discussed the remaining problems of the Cloud. Integrating Cloud applications with on-site systems was one of the first and most painful points discussed.

Paul Daugherty, chief technologies architect at Accenture, said, “We are at an inflection point where integration becomes more critical. Increasingly we're seeing a big increase in data sources used. Initially integration was about two different applications, but now it's getting into the 10s and 20s.

"There was an interesting piece of research Gartner did: They looked at companies using SaaS applications. One of the less obvious data points out of their sample respondents was that 14% or 15% adopted SaaS, then reversed back out onto on-premise. The No. 1 reason for that is cost of integration, and cost required was too great."

Another remaining Cloud issue is security, said Ryan. “We're still addressing security. The idea that the vast majority of Cloud environments have the same user name and password for all users is ridiculous."

He added that most Cloud providers do not currently offer a way to tie multiple accounts together, and thus whole companies sometimes use the same login and password for their Cloud environments. Instead, Ryan would prefer accounts that could be used by each user, but could also be tied together for collaboration on the same virtual machines within the Cloud.

Synergetics is a premium brand in the Indian IT industry with an experience base of over 15 years in the area of people competency development; engaged in delivering it thru its training and consulting interventions , primarily focusing on their productivity with regards to the project and deliverables on hand

Oracle-AMD Acquisition Speculation Flares Once Again

By Zewde Yeraswork, CRN

"AMD is not for sale, but we are happy to listen to any proposal which is in the interest of our shareholders," Meyer said at an industry conference in Barcelona, as reported by Reuters.

The speculation was sparked by comments Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made last month at Oracle's annual financial analyst meeting, in which he said Oracle could soon acquire a chip company in addition to software acquisitions.

But at the Oracle annual stockholders' conference earlier this week, Ellison reiterated his interest in acquiring additional semiconductor and software companies, more so than new service offerings.

"My point really was that we are interested in buying intellectual property of all kinds," Ellison said, as reported by The Wall Street Journal . "We would be interested in certain kinds of semiconductor companies and software companies. Most of our acquisitions and the bulk of our strategy are in creating and acquiring intellectual property, including chips."

By acquiring AMD, Oracle would gain access to the chip company's IP portfolio, adding hardware to its software acquisitions and moving closer to end-to-end control of the entire IT stack.

Oracle couldn't be reached for comment Thursday. An AMD spokesperson offered the following comment to CRN: "As a matter of policy, AMD does not comment on speculations or rumors, but I can confirm that AMD is not for sale."

Synergetics India: IT consulting and Training services on .NET 4.0, SQL server 2008 BI. Awarded as the Best. NET Training Service Provider by Microsoft.

Microsoft to align BizTalk Server with Azure's AppFabric

From Inforworld News, Microsoft to align BizTalk Server with Azure's AppFabric,

Microsoft plans to make its Business Process Management (BPM) software, BizTalk Server, work very closely with the just-announced AppFabric .Net application server within several years.

Arriving in beta next year, AppFabric will let developers deploy and manage their .Net applications, whether they're running on-site in Windows Server boxes or in the cloud on Redmond's coming Windows Azure cloud platform. That technology was formerly code-named "Dublin."

AppFabric also provides a cache for accelerating performance.

These features all differ from BizTalk Server, which lets companies integrate their .Net apps with non-.Net applications and data streams.

AppFabric "is not a full integration server, a la BizTalk," Mark Berman, a director of product planning for Windows Server AppFabric, said in an interview during the Professional Developers Conference 2009 (PDC09) in Los Angeles on Tuesday. The details of how BizTalk will eventually work together with AppFabric "are to be determined," Berman said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft plans to release a minor upgrade to BizTalk Server next year.

BizTalk Server 2009 R2 will include interface and back-end improvements to make it easier for .Net programmers to connect their apps to other platforms. These include improvements to the graphical process mapper, the ability to manage performance parameters, out-of-box support for event filtering and delivery and the ability to use PowerShell to access management tasks.

Microsoft released the first version of BizTalk Server 2009 this spring. BizTalk Server is now used by 10,000 companies, said Anil Nori, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, including 80 percent of the Global 1000.

Microsoft in the past talked about BizTalk Server and technology codenamed Oslo in the same breath.

Oslo has mostly been deconstructed in the past two years, with features dispersed to other Microsoft products, said Burley Kawasaki, director of product management at Microsoft. It remains a software modeling platform that was renamed SQL Server Modeling earlier this month and offered in Community Technology Preview.

Synergetics India: Our .Net Offerings experience help to reduce the Opportunity cost for our clients in terms of development time specially related to latest in technology.

Aster Data expands SQL for map/reduce

By Alex Handy

Aster Data has built a business out of map/reduce, and the release today of a thousand new SQL query building blocks—what it calls "functions"—is designed to give business users access to map/reduce computed analytics.

Whereas open-source big data solution Hadoop, for instance, is based entirely on its own implementation of map/reduce, as well as a set of homegrown query structuring frameworks like Pig and Hive, Aster Data wants to use SQL right from the start. Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan, executive vice president of marketing at Aster Data, said that this is a significant advantage over Hadoop.

“Hadoop lends itself more to batch-type processing. Most of our customers are running analytics on a daily basis with the expectation of results returned every few minutes," she said. "It's not real-time, but it's near real-time.

"The second advantage is SQL map/reduce. We are literally targeting the business analyst with SQL using full map/reduce underneath.”

Map/reduce is the framework for processing huge amounts of data, and it is the basis of the Apache Hadoop project, as well as of Big Table, which runs Google's search engine. Using map/reduce, huge stores of data can be processed, and the results can be combined into a cohesive set of information.

Stephanie McReynolds, director of product marketing at Aster Data, said the new sets of query-building tools aren't limited to business users. “We introduced many new business analyst-ready functions," she said. "[These] functions address particular business issues, like path analysis for website traffic.

"We also have a series of packages for power users. These are for people building their own SQL map/reduce applications. They want to use Java or C functions to get ahead. These are smaller building blocks."

Shahani-Mulligan said that Aster Data's analytics can be tweaked and queried by business users, a major advantage over Hadoop. She said that many business users already know SQL, which cannot be said of Hive or Pig. She said that with Hadoop, developers likely need to be called in to implement any analytics batches that need to be run, but with Aster Data, the business users can do that themselves.

“With almost any of our [customers] you talk to, one of the big appeals has been that their existing business analysts can work with functions and don't have to use a new language," said Shahani-Mulligan. "This is why we came out with SQL map/reduce. Some of them also have Hadoop, but it requires you to do constant programming in map/reduce versus having a simple-to-use interface."

Synergetics is a premium brand in the Indian IT industry in the area of people competency development engaged in delivering it thru its training and consulting interventions; primarily focusing on their productivity with regards to the project and deliverables on hand . Its primary differentiator has been its solution centric approach and its comprehensive client focused service portfolio.

SAP to purchase Sybase in cash deal

By David Worthington

SAP announced yesterday that it will acquire venerable database company Sybase to bolster its mobile development practice. The deal is valued at approximately US$5.8 billion in cash.

Sybase's board of directors unanimously approved the transaction, which is a 44% premium over its three-month average stock price of about $36 per share. The transaction will close in the third quarter. The agreement was signed by SAP's American subsidiary and underwritten by Barclays Capital and Deutsche Bank.

Sybase will operate as a standalone unit of SAP called “Sybase, an SAP Company.” Its management team will be kept in place, and SAP intends to appoint Sybase's CEO John Chen to its board.

Datamonitor analyst Warren Wilson said in a statement, "The acquisition may also signal a shift in SAP’s long-standing strategy of growth through internal development rather than acquisition—a wise shift, in our view, given the rapid pace of IT innovation overall and the market’s positive response to arch-rival Oracle’s acquisition-based strategy."

The acquisition also broadens Sybase's capacity to develop new solutions for analytics. It will gain access to SAP's in-memory database technology, significantly increasing the performance of its analytics and complex event processing software, as well as enabling it to build those capabilities into its transactional products, Wilson stated.

"The move also furthers SAP’s strategy of supporting customers’ heterogeneous IT environments, because Sybase’s anytime/anywhere/any application approach has resulted in a platform that is versatile enough to connect and mobilize a wide variety of applications and data, both SAP and non-SAP," said Wilson.

Sybase, founded in 1984 as Systemware, began as a database software maker competing with firms like IBM, Informix and Oracle. The company’s main product, called SQL Server, was originally offered for Unix.

Sybase worked with Microsoft to port SQL Server to OS/2 and Windows NT. Both companies marketed and expanded the Windows version; Microsoft SQL Server grew into a dominant player in the database industry, while Sybase SQL Server fell behind.

The companies have since taken their database product lines in different directions; Sybase now calls its database Adaptive Server Enterprise.

Since the late 1990s, Sybase has reinvented itself as a provider of tools for building applications and delivering data to mobile devices.

In 2006, Sybase acquired Mobile 365, a mobile messaging company that handles over 1.5 billion messages per day, ranging from alerts and promotions to transactions, according to Datamonitor. Mobile 365 has relationships with more than 850 mobile providers covering more than 4 million subscribers.

In buying Sybase, SAP has substantially strengthened its hand in mobile applications, Wilson said. Sybase's platform provides versatile deployment options for mobile applications across BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile devices.

The combination of SAP and Sybase is a "transformative event" for the software industry, "revolutionizing" how transactional and analytic applications are built, Sybase's Chen said in a statement. Allowing customers to run their business from many devices will drive enterprise productivity, he added.

Synergetics India:Our .Net Offerings experience help to reduce the Opportunity cost for our clients in terms of development time specially related to latest in technology.