Links List 10.09.09

October 9th, 2009 by Valerie Barber

InformationWeek published a list of the top 50 government CIOs, representing federal, state and local agencies and describing how they are driving change and managing new expectations. The government is the largest buyer of IT, spending $76 billion annually and managing more than 10,000 systems, in support of 1.9 million employees and 300 million “customers.” We’ve been following the call for change in government IT being led by federal CIO Vivek Kundra. You can view their profiles or download the report (free for a limited time).

There are reports that Brocade, with a market cap of $3 billion, is shopping itself for sale and that HP and Oracle are the most like suitors. For either, acquiring Brocade would help fill out their data center LAN and SAN switching portfolios. There seems to be no end in sight to the number of huge acquisitions in the industry as everyone can now afford a McMansion.

Compuware, in a move that shows how bullish they are on the cloud, is acquiring web application performance management Gomez for $295 million. By acquiring Gomez, who delivers its offering through a SaaS model, to Compuware’s SaaS revenues, Compuware becomes the world’s leading SaaS infrastructure management provider. The string of marriages between companies who monitor/manage software and cloud services providers is another indication of how the rapid move to the cloud.

David Linthicum has posted four things that are driving cloud computing, a follow-up to last week’s list of things killing cloud computing. On the good side he lists:

• The cloud computing hype – a true business buzzword; moving to the cloud is now politically correct in most IT circles (except anyone within a 25-mile radius of Larry Ellison)
• Cloud providers (also on the kill-list) – they are progressive and innovative in offering new services via the cloud
• The down economy – by reducing costs
• Quick cloud wins – quick results – enterprises are going from the decision stage to having cloud resources available within days.

NIST has published the “System and Network Security Acronyms and Abbreviations,” a glossary of acronyms and abbreviations of commonly used IT terms. Leave it to the government to take 25 pages to get from A (address resource record type) to Z (zone signing key). So far there are only two acronyms for virtualization (VLAN and VM), none for cloud computing.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) claims its cloud computing service is safer and more reliable than Google’s. Since its launch last year, DISA’s RACE (Rapid Access Computing Environment) has been running at 99.999% availability (vs. 99.99% for Google Apps). For now, these results are for a test environment – will they hold up in production?

Watch out Pepe – Ballmer’s in town! During his visit to France for the opening of Microsoft’s French headquarters and research center, Steve Ballmer delivered his 10-minute speech in “careful, well-pronounced” French.  The love was flowing – Ballmer loves France and France loves Ballmer. His reward? Permanent residency status in France. They just don’t make cartoons like they used to.

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