Links List 11.13.09

November 13th, 2009 by Valerie Barber

Gartner sees huge adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) in 2009, with revenues reaching $7.5 billion in 2009 – a slight drop from the $8 billion predicted earlier this year. With 17.7% growth over last year, Gartner analyst Sharon Metz says there are “more large deals, more new installations, and some legacy installations…SaaS will continue to be strong and grow well.”

Phase 2 of corporate open source adoption has been accelerated by the current economic conditions. Open source software is entering a new phase of acceptance, especially those focused on cloud computing, collaboration and security:

• Cloudera: focused on making Hadoop easier to use and available to a wider audience
• Eucalyptus Systems: lets users implement a cloud environment using existing network infrastructure without requiring modification
• MindTouch: cited by Forrester Research as the best alternative product to SharePoint and Lotus, is part wiki, portal and application server

Cisco has extended its $3 billion offer to buy Cisco for nine additional days to November 18^th at 5:30 pm CET, with an announcement soon thereafter. Cisco CEO John Chambers said that he expects to close the $3 billion deal but hinted that he would drop the offer after investors holding 30% of Tanberg shares demanded a higher price. Cisco’s offer is conditional on 90% acceptance – as of Tuesday, they were at 9.37% acceptance. Hmmm – wonder if Cisco is staging a big telepresence announcement for day one of Interop NY. Stay tuned…

Oracle-Sun hearings with the European Commission are scheduled for November 25^th in Brussels. The antitrust arm of the 27-member European Union informed Oracle and Sun that it was filing an official objection to the transaction because it includes ownership of MySQL, citing a major conflict of interest in Oracle owning its largest open source competitor.

A recent survey points to the challenges of managing heterogeneous servers, leading many to outsource server management. The survey found:

• One third of IT staff time is consumed with server management tasks
• 60% of IT managers said the hassle of managing servers is a challenge in their organizations
• 61% found it difficult to find “time to drive innovation”
• IT teams spend 60% of their time troubleshooting and managing servers and 27% of their time on “strategic and value-add activities”

Richard Marcello, president of technology, consulting, and integration solutions at Unisys said cloud computing can save money by eliminating US jobs. Speaking at the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Marcello told how Unisys has deployed a private cloud internally and cut provisioning times from 10 days of manual provisioning time down to five minutes, adding, “We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization.”

Perhaps Marcello should take a few cues from Booz Allen Hamilton on a better approach to showing how agencies can save as much as 70% in operational costs by moving applications to the cloud. They crunched the numbers to show the potential cost savings:

Life cycle costs of running 1,000 servers:

• In-house: $77.3 million
• Private cloud: $31.1 million
• Hybrid cloud: $28.7 million
• Public cloud: $22.5 million

Since CEOs fro HP, IBM and Oracle hate the term “cloud computing”, InformationWeek is soliciting new names. The nominees are okay to read, but I like the ones in the reader comments, including:

• Marketing Computing – yet another solution driven by how it can be marketed…
• “HAL’s Rent-N-App” aka “HAL Has An App for That!”
• “WebDooData” – the use of the web for nonsense data harmonized to a lead user

Conan predicted that in the Year 3000 social media would converge to create “one super time-wasting website”. Well, he was off by 991 years, as Twitter and LinkedIn announced their partnership. I guess at some point I am going to have to start liking the concept of Twitter…just not today!

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