Links List 11.24.08

November 24th, 2008 by Julia Lim

The hunt for the nation’s first CTO continues. Although names have been suggested, such as standout nominees include Bruce Schneier, founder of Counterpane and now chief security technology officer at BT; Mark Cuban for his obvious business sense – and in spite of the insider trading indictment – and Carly Fiorina, former controversial CEO of HP, the next question is what policies should this CTO pursue? Visit ObamaCTO.org to view and vote for policies.

SaaS is taking a bite out of the $18 billion IT management market. A new Forrester Research report forecasts SaaS-based IT management accounts will be 10% of the market by 2013. The reason: high level of interest from medium-sized and large enterprises. Forrester also predicts that enterprises with 1,000 or more employees will account for 50% of SaaS installations in 2009. We’ve seen this on the service desk side with the rapid growth of upstart Service-now.com. Companies are looking for easier and rapid deployment, lower upfront and capital costs and rapid time to value – all benefits of SaaS as well as our own appliance model.

IBM snapped up Transitive this week. Their QuickTransit software dynamically translates native code between architectures, enabling apps compiled for one processor to be run on another without any modification. Apple was the first licensee and used it to build Rosetta, a translation system that allowed users of Intel Macs to seamlessly run legacy PowerPC apps. IBM plans to use the technology to move workloads onto IBM systems without recompiling, allowing customers to “save on energy costs due to hardware consolidation and reduced TCO.”

At CA World, CA announced a partnership with Amazon to provide “management capabilities around Amazon’s EC2 utility computing platform, potentially including discovery of software running on EC2 instances, performance monitoring, configuration management, software deployment capabilities and provisioning”. John Willis, in spite of some pretty funny potshots and stories about CA (don’t we all have them), writes that “CA is the first of the Big Four to take the cloud serious”.

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November 24th, 2008