IBM adopting Harmony for production Java systems

IBM has begun to use libraries from the Apache Harmony project in some of its production-level Java software, it was revealed at JavaOne last week. The move comes after years of IBM quietly contributing code to the Apache Harmony project, and it marked the first time IBM had publicly discussed its use of the software.
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When Craig Hayman, vice president of WebSphere, took the stage at JavaOne, he was ostensibly talking about hosting Java application servers in the cloud and backing them up with what he called “extreme transaction processing” through creative caching. Then Hayman spoke about Apache Harmony.

“In our regular shipping offerings, like WebSphere CE and Lotus Notes, we're using many of the Harmony libraries inside our JVM, and inside our core code. We contribute a lot to the Harmony codebase,” said Hayman.

While Hayman and Ted Ellison, vice president of the Apache Software Foundation and an IBM senior technical staff member, demonstrated what they categorized as “not your father's runtime,” they were also quietly showing the world that there was, in fact, an open-source Java ready for production environments, and that it did not come from Sun Microsystems (in the form of the OpenJDK).

Since Harmony reached near-completion in 2007, Sun has refused to allow the Apache Foundation access to its Test Compatibility Kit, essentially relegating Apache Harmony to the status of “un-certified Java.”

When asked whether he felt that a lack of TCK access would harm Harmony's image, Hayman said, “I think that's somewhat in the hands of the customers and whether they care or not. If you were to take [Apache] Geronimo running on [Apache] Harmony, what do you care about: Harmony or Geronimo?”

If users only care about running Geronimo, he said, the certification levels of what's underneath don't really matter to the users, as long as they work.

Jeffrey Hammond, senior analyst for application development at Forrester Research, said that IBM's move to Harmony is similar to its move toward Eclipse.

“I would call it a risk mitigation move,” He said. He also said that a lack of certification from Sun shouldn't scare users away. “IBM has had its own JVM inside its products for years, and nobody has complained about that."

Hayman elaborated on IBM’s plans for Harmony. “First, we want to show people that we think it's ready for prime time. The second is we want to show off some of the tooling to get developers interested in using and contributing to Harmony.

"The community is at that tipping point where it's important for us to be more vocal about what we're doing. We're shining a light on the capabilities and how it can be used."

Miko Matsumura, vice president and chief strategist for Software AG, said at JavaOne: “The thing that's wonderful about how open Java is as an economic system is that it's a checks-and-balances system. IBM deserves to have some power, in the sense [that] you don't want Oracle to be the exclusive steward of Java. It's almost at the level of an Apache-style meritocracy."

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BY Alex Handy
Source：SDTimes

Copyright © 1999-2009 BZ Media LLC, all rights reserved.

IBM expects Linux to make money

IBM has combined its “church” and “state” Linux functions under Bob Sutor, whose title now reads vice president of open source and Linux. (Picture from the resume page of Sutor’s Web site.)
##CONTINUE##
In the latest installment of his podcast interviews, Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin found Sutor focused mainly on opportunities for server and cloud Linux, through partnerships with Red Hat and Novell.

A rush transcript has been posted to the Linux Foundation web site, for those who find reading faster than listening.

Sutor’s latest promotion gave him not only corporate responsibility for Linux but profit responsibility also.

“If it’s IBM software, and if it runs on Linux, I care about it, and from a software company perspective, we want to sell more of it,” he told Zemlin, and much of the discussion involved IBM’s search for Linux profits.

Sutor described Linux as a secret sauce that lets it sell complete systems which may include Tivoli management, Rational tools, Websphere web servers, and IBM hardware. He said IBM currently has over 500 software products running on Linux and over 30,000 Linux desktops.

Still, IBM is tightly focused on server sales and the development of clouds, which can be sold, rented, or deliver profitable services.

For cloud computing, “why wouldn’t you run it on Linux?” he asked, because Linux can deliver all kinds of virtualization and those who want Windows desktops need never know they’re not.

(Picture of tux in a suit from IBM developer Tung-Sing Chong.)

Thanks to clouds IBM can profitably deliver thousands of desktops that look like Windows but have Linux on the back-end. It can also sell servers that are compatible with its clouds at the deepest level. Its alliance with Novell assures Windows file compatibility, and the one with Red Hat helps it in the corporate market.

Sutor also said IBM’s intense efforts on behalf of the Open Docuement Format are centered on interoperability:

by driving something like OpenDocument Format, it means you could have an organization that used these tools, and some people could be on Windows, and some could be on Linux, and some could be on the Mac, and some could be on iPhones, and some could be on Android phones, and so forth and so forth.

Thanks in part to IBM’s work, Sutor said, some 16 governments are now either mandating ODF or “suggesting it very strongly,” which can be almost as good.

Sutor and Zemlin also discussed what might be called the “corporate-cloud boundary,” the point in the growth of an enterprise system where building a cloud starts to make economic sense. Clouds start to make sense when heavy virtualization takes place, Sutor said, and there are new problems to solve.

But Sutor also defended the enterprise model:

if you’re purely looking at Enterprise workloads, no—it’s not all going to go to a cloud. It may not even be the majority of it goes to the cloud.

One final point Sutor made is that cloud computing will not always be a Linux lake. There will be clouds that, for technical or billing reasons, run things other than Linux. IBM will be happy to build them, if it can make money at it.

And that’s the real bottom line here. For Sutor today, the bottom line is the bottom line. I see nothing wrong with that. Having profit going to vendors who use Linux may be the best possible advertisement for open source. And IBM is doing that.

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BY Dana Blankenhorn
Source：ZDNet

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.

Microsoft Tops IBM And Oracle On R&D Spending -- Combined

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says his company will spend $9.5 billion on R&D this year. That's almost 50% more than IBM's $6.5 billion, and it's more than the combined R&D spending of IBM and either Oracle ($2.7 billion) or Google ($2.8 billion). And almost nine times as much as Apple's $1.1 billion. Is Microsoft deriving equivalent multiples in business value?
##CONTINUE##
Microsoft says the answer is yes, and extols its world-leading R&D budget in the "Shareholder Letter" in its 2008 Annual Report, which says the following in a section titled, "Transformation Through Innovation":

"At the heart of our success lies our commitment to innovation. No company in our industry invests more in research and development or has the same depth and breadth of talented researchers, scientists, and engineers working across the globe to create new technology breakthroughs. In 2008, we invested $8.2 billion in research and development, an increase of almost 15 percent compared with fiscal 2007."

But an investment manager who holds a long position in Microsoft says its R&D spending is out of control – he believes Microsoft needs to vigorously reassess its R&D philosophy, cut back on spending, and demand greater ROI from its R&D.

"Spending a lot on R&D would be a good thing for Microsoft if it was generating a large return from that investment. But that's not the case and it hasn't been the case for a long time," writes investment manager Eric Jackson on Seeking Alpha.

In a provocative investment-side analysis of the R&D situation at Microsoft – and remember, Jackson is writing as an investor with a strong and very direct financial interest in the company's share price – he poses some tough questions about R&D that would be relevant at any time but are particularly so during today's troubled economic times that are accelerating the evolution – and sometimes the collapse – of a range of business models.

Noting that Microsoft in the past 10 years has invested $62 billion in R&D, Jackson says, "It's hard to know exactly what Microsoft has delivered for its R&D investment; it doesn't break out the numbers according to its five business segments."

Jackson then exercises his right as an investment manager to do a little speculating to try to see inside the numbers: "However, the two smallest business segments -- Entertainment & Devices, which includes the Xbox, Zune, and Windows Mobile software groups, and Online Services, which includes Search, and the Microsoft MSN, Hotmail, and Messenger properties - likely have taken the lion's share of the investment. Combined, these two divisions have delivered $71 billion in revenue for Microsoft over those 10 years and $15 billion in losses."

And then Jackson, in what is otherwise an intelligently reasoned piece, gets way too caught up in his own speculative somersaults and comes up with this baseless doozie: "So, what Microsoft's $62 billion R&D investment has led to is a $15 billion loss for at least those two businesses in 10 years." Like I said, remember his one and only POV on R&D is ROI.

But a short time later Jackson has regained his intelligent grounding and offers a compelling analogy:

"R&D spending can lead to blockbuster returns. And Microsoft has a big advantage relative to its competitors in that it can invest enormous sums for future product development. But Microsoft, in being proud of the fact that it can spend almost $10 billion a year on R&D, is like a driller of oil and gas being proud of the fact that it can drill thousands of dry holes. It doesn't matter what you spend on R&D; it only matters what return you make from that investment for your investors. So far, Microsoft hasn't delivered on its promises."

Again, Ballmer and Microsoft would no doubt beg to differ, and here's another excerpt from that 2008 Annual Report about the impact its R&D has had on the company's products and processes:

"We launched Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. We released Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and introduced advances in our search and online advertising technologies. We rolled out Surface—a groundbreaking new device that transforms a tabletop into a computing surface that enables people to interact with digital content using gestures, touch, and physical objects—in a number of retail and hotel locations. We unveiled new products and services for the healthcare industry. We announced important changes to our technology and business practices to increase the openness of our products and drive greater interoperability and choice for developers, partners, customers, and competitors."

A large portion of that Shareholder Letter is devoted to Microsoft's sprawling R&D operations and commitments, with the company saying it opened four research or development centers in 2008 while investing heavily in many new technologies.

So there's no question that Microsoft is making massive and even unprecedented investments in people, products, facilities, technologies, novel approaches, new collaborations, and other facets of R&D – no one could convincingly dispute that. But it would be revealing for the company to offer some tangible financial links between those staggering R&D investments and the financial payoff of customer acceptance in the marketplace.

As Jackson says in his closing comment, "The onus should be on the company's management to articulate why its status quo approach for running this function will lead to different results in the next 10 years. Otherwise, I can think of several better ways to spend the next $62 billion of cash flow."

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BY Bob Evans
Source：Informationweek

Copyright © 2009 United Business Media LLC, All rights reserved.

IBM cloud chief: Private clouds a fit for test and development

A private cloud network that uses virtualization to provision new resources can dramatically improve efficiency.
##CONTINUE##
Enterprises are embracing private cloud networks to improve the efficiency of test and development organizations, IBM cloud computing software chief Kristof Kloeckner says.

Test and development systems are generally not highly utilized, he notes. IT provisions servers and storage for specific purposes, but then doesn't reclaim them when that purpose has been fulfilled, leading to a shortage of resources. Secondly, procuring servers and setting them up takes longer than users would like.

Therefore, a private cloud network that uses virtualization, service automation technologies, and a self-service interface to provision new resources can dramatically improve efficiency, Kloeckner said in a recent interview.

"We've talked to virtually dozens of companies that have sizable test and development organizations, who say, 'I realize I have resources that are underutilized, and that aren't managed properly. Can a private cloud help me improve utilization, improve my processes, and drive down capital expense?'" Kloeckner says.

While many experts expect private clouds to be used more in production roles as enterprise grow comfortable with the technology, Kloeckner says test and development is a good starting point.

Kloeckner, officially the CTO for enterprise initiatives and vice president of cloud computing platforms at IBM, notes that Big Blue is trying to provide many of the provisioning and service automation features needed in private clouds through its Tivoli software group, as well as products like the recently announced WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance.

"We introduce virtualization, we introduce service automation, and we introduce self-service access to the resources," he says.

Instead of test and development teams submitting a request for new physical hardware, a private cloud strategy lets them call up a service portal and find a catalog of preconfigured, virtualized test systems. Under the covers, the system automatically provisions the storage, operating system, and middleware needed to make the test environment run.

When building private clouds, clients typically want to reuse existing hardware in a more efficient manner, rather than buy new systems, Kloeckner says. For x86 shops, the key virtualization technology must be acquired from VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, or another vendor. But IBM does provide virtualization for mainframes and Unix servers.

While the phrase "private cloud" is new, the problems solved by the approach have been recognized for several years. But virtualization, service automation and self-service technologies are only now becoming sophisticated enough to adopt the approach en masse, according to Kloeckner. Moreover, financial pressures are greater today, forcing IT shops to reevaluate inefficient processes.

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BY Jon Brodkin
Source：Network World

©1994-2009 Infoworld, Inc.

IBM Is No. 1 in Portal Software, Report Says

Gartner ranks IBM as the market share leader in the portal products and user interaction tools segment of enterprise software for 2008. IBM says health care clients contributed to its portal and Web 2.0 success.
##CONTINUE##
Market research company Gartner has ranked IBM as the market share leader in the portal products and user interaction tools enterprise software segment for 2008. The ranking is based on 2008 revenue for portal software.

IBM officials on May 22 said growth in IBM's health care client engagements contributed to its portal success. Indeed, "More than 6,500 IBM customers use IBM's Web 2.0-enhanced WebSphere Portal software. And IBM has experienced "an especially large jump in new portal business from health care clients worldwide, including Catholic Healthcare West, Children's Medical Center of Dallas, Healthways, MedStar Health, Memorial Health and Trillium Health Centre," the company said. "IBM WebSphere Portal is also used by four of the top five U.S. health care insurance companies, Blue Cross Blue Shield organizations in 33 states, more than 30 major hospitals, clinics and delivery networks worldwide, and more than 12 online health care provider sites servicing more than 20,000 users each," IBM said in a news release. According to the release:

IBM WebSphere Portal software, Version 6.1, is designed to securely combine information from both corporate enterprises and the Web. The new software has Web 2.0 features that help people be more productive and find information faster. Its live text feature allows a user to click on text—in the context of the business process being used—and see supporting information related to the job at hand. For example, when a salesperson clicks on the address of a client, a map with driving directions could appear, or an electronic business card could pop up when clicking on a person's name.

"Portal software connects all stakeholders, enables communication, collaboration and process efficiency, and promotes better workflow and information sharing," said Benoit Long, vice president and CIO of Trillium Health Centre, a hospital that has developed multiple portals over the last five years. "We connect thousands of staff and clinicians at our multiple locations, and we are now in the process of connecting patients involved in chronic disease management, particularly diabetes, and their providers through patient and provider portals."

"IBM portals have also been well received in the financial industry," the company said in the release. "This IBM software is being used by the top 10 global banks, nine of the top 10 U.S. banks, seven of the top 10 European banks, and eight of the top 10 Asia Pacific banks."

"Portal technology is exploding due to the unique combination of cost savings and exceptional Web experiences achievable with the latest technologies. IBM WebSphere Portal software has delivered Web 2.0 innovations and preserved customers' existing investments, all with reliable security and manageability," said Larry Bowden, vice president of IBM Portal and Mashups. According to the release:

IBM portal customers in other industries include Abbott Labs, Australian Social Security, Bayer Schering, Bombardier, Border States, College.gov, Isuzu, Finnish Defense, Harley Davidson, Knoxville Utilities Board, Lamborghini, Nissan, the Navy Federal Credit Union, Prudential, Volkswagen, University of London, Yulon Motors and TRI-WEST, a flooring company. IBM clients that use IBM WebSphere Portal for [SOA] service-oriented architecture-based IT systems include the Stockholm-based Swedish Road Administration and Atlas Air Worldwide Holdings of Purchase, N.Y.

"IBM's portal and Web Content Management software has helped Slumberland survive and thrive in a challenging economy," said Jamie Page, director of information services for Slumberland, a "Minnesota-based company that does business in 10 states." The IBM release said:

Slumberland corporate headquarters needed a better way to communicate with its more than 100 geographically dispersed stores.

It had been relying on phone calls, faxes and the postal service, but those methods were inconvenient and sometimes expensive. In addition to a better communication option, Slumberland sought a Web-based portal that would enable store agents to access the company's critical information and applications.

Using IBM WebSphere Portal software, Slumberland developed an intranet portal that enables its headquarters to disseminate corporate messages to stores. It also allows employees to access several of the company's applications. Slumberland also installed IBM's Web Content Management application to act as the Web content repository for the portal. In addition, the client deployed IBM Lotus Sametime for instant messaging.

By installing IBM software, Slumberland changed the way it works by allowing automated work flow and updates to critical software. The stores benefit from faster, simpler communication among stores, reduced paper consumption and operational costs. Self-service functions within the portal reduce the number of calls to the corporate help desk and afford each store a personalized view of the intranet for every store through an easy-to-access, easy-to-use interface.

Most importantly, Slumberland has created a foundation for all future applications and activities on IBM software.

The IBM statement concluded, "In addition to its use by health care, insurance and financial organizations, IBM WebSphere Portal is also popular with governments worldwide. IBM WebSphere Portal is used by every G8 country, 10 of the 16 Middle East countries, 22 U.S. states and 40 U.S. Federal agencies. IBM prospective clients can experiment with the latest version of WebSphere Portal software through IBM Lotus Greenhouse, a Website where anyone can register to try out IBM WebSphere Portal, IBM's new Mashup Center, Lotus Connections, Lotus Forms, Lotus Quickr and Lotus Sametime. This provides clients with a safe and easy way to evaluate these products without installing them in their own environments."

And IBM has recently delivered "a new offering called Industry Toolboxes for WebSphere Portal, which provides a resource forum for customers and partners to give best-practice guidance for specific industry challenges. This vertical industry focus aligns with the way customers are purchasing IT today," the company said. More information on that is available here.

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BY Darryl K. Taft
Source：eWEEK

Copyright ©1996-2009 Ziff Davis Enterprise Holdings Inc. All Rights Reserved.

IBM looks at acquisitions

Deal-making is very much in the cards for IBM, Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge said after the company recently lost an opportunity to buy Sun Microsystems Inc to Oracle Corp.
##CONTINUE##
"I go through a deal review every week," Loughridge said at the Reuters Global Technology Summit in New York.

"And every week we go through what our strategies are and how we're going to roll them out, and fundamentally move the corporation into new opportunities and value spaces."

With about $12 billion of cash on its books and plummeting values of potential target companies, International Business Machines Corp can afford to go on an acquisition spree.

Since 2000, IBM has spent US$20 billion on more than 100 companies, said Loughridge, who was named senior vice president and CFO in 2004. On average, that works out to more than 12 deals a year.

Loughridge declined to say if IBM will continue or step up that pace this year, but said the economic climate provides a "fertile" hunting ground for acquisitions.

"Valuations are attractive," he said, adding that cash-rich companies have an advantage over other buyers because they do not need to take on debt to do deals.

Technology investors may be cheering that thinking.

"You've got a lot of cash, you're faced with the prospect of slowing double-digit growth," Richard Parower, portfolio manager of the Seligman Global Technology Fund, said of tech giants like IBM, Cisco Systems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co. The two factors make dealmaking inevitable, he said last week.

But Parower expects mostly small and medium-sized deals below US$500 million in the next few months, as companies adjust to the downturn and make cautious overtures. He said IBM could be interested in a security company such as Symantec Corp or McAfee Inc.

Loughridge said deal sizes for his company could range anywhere between US$50 million and US$100 million for technology startups, to multibillion-dollar acquisitions such as IBM's 2007 purchase of business analytics company Cognos.

IBM had offered roughly US$7 billion to buy Sun earlier this year, but talks between the two companies fell apart on deal guarantees and the fear of extended regulatory scrutiny, sources said earlier.

Instead, Oracle swooped in at the last moment to seal a deal with Sun for US$7.1 billion.

IBM has focused on buying companies that flesh out its software offerings in recent years, and Loughridge said it would continue to do so. But deals could also cut across the other categories – hardware and services – that IBM does business in, he added.

Despite IBM's aggressive stance on dealmaking, the company maintains "strong discipline" when making the decision to buy, said Loughridge.

Technology bankers who have sold companies to IBM before say Big Blue is among a handful of tech titans, including Cisco, that are especially diligent about examining a company's books, fit and culture before buying it.

"'Know your candidate' is a bit of a mantra for us," said Loughridge, who has been at IBM for more than 30 years.

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BY Reuters Staff
Source：Reuters

Does Your Database Have The Need For Speed?

Microsoft, IBM, and SAP add event processing to their data platforms.
##CONTINUE##
Three major data platform providers revealed this week key additions to their offerings that will support the processing of large volumes of records or the analysis of real-time, event-driven data.

The first came Monday from Microsoft, which disclosed that an updated version of its SQL Server 2008 database, code-named "Kilimanjaro," will support real-time data feeds for business intelligence (BI), reporting and analytics. The company made the announcement at its Tech-Ed conference in Los Angeles.

SAP announced yesterday at its annual Sapphire conference in Orlando that it launched BusinessObjects Explorer, which initially will let users search SAP-based data warehouses running on SAP's NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) and, later in the year, all data within the enterprise.

Using traditional Web-type searching techniques such as entering key words, SAP says users can query millions of records and render information and reports in a matter of seconds, based on in-memory processing technology co-developed by Intel.

The third announcement came today from IBM. Big Blue announced what it calls System S. IBM, which made the announcement at its annual investor briefing today, says System S lets business users analyze massive amounts of data in real time. The initial release will link to its DB2 database server, WebSphere Front Office and solidDB caching infrastructure and will run on Linux-based blade servers. What remains to be seen is when IBM will link it to its InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse.

The notion of complex event processing is nothing new. Many companies in life sciences and in financial services use CEP for various high-volume applications such as algorithmic trading. Companies such as Aleri (which recently acquired Coral8), Progress Software and Streambase, among others have offered such tools for several years.

Streambase founder and CTO Richard Tibbetts tells me he believes Microsoft's entry will be well suited for real-time data warehouses. "But it's not the same as building applications that detect event patterns and respond with low latency," Tibbetts says. That IBM, Microsoft and SAP are going down that path is not surprising. "There's a lot of interest in complex event processing," he says, "so they are trying to find ways to lead with that."

Nagui Halim, director of stream computing at IBM, says Big Blue is hardly just jumping on the bandwagon. Some 80 developers, engineers, and scientists have worked together on this project since 2003. "We have a more than average component of academic and research kind of activity going into this whole thing," he says, noting that IBM has several hundred patents on System S and a number of customers including The Marine Institute of Ireland, TD Securities, and University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

"The fact that there's lots of interest in the community is indicative of the fact that we really probably are at an inflection point that there are many systems going to be designed to go after these topics," he says.

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BY Jeffrey Schwartz
Source：RedmondDeveloper

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of ADTmag.com and news editor of Visual Studio Magazine.

Copyright © 1105 Media, Inc.

IBM confident in outlook despite slow economy

IBM reaffirmed its earnings outlook for this year and 2010, saying its focus on high-margin software and its geographic diversity would help buffer the impact of a weak economy.
##CONTINUE##
Chief Executive Sam Palmisano said on Wednesday that International Business Machines Corp is still targeting earnings of $10 to $11 per share for 2010, slightly above the average analyst estimate of around $9.90, according to Reuters Estimates.

The company also repeated its earnings forecast of "at least $9.20" per share in 2009. That compared with the average analyst forecast of $9.11.

Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge said IBM's targets were possible even if revenue at constant currency, which excludes the impact of currency fluctuations, fell 7 percent in 2009, or was flat in 2010.

Over the past decade, IBM has been shifting its focus to software and services from increasingly commoditized hardware. Palmisano said this means it can rely on a steadier stream of revenue, rather than more volatile equipment sales.

Software and services account for around 80 percent of IBM's revenue, compared to around 50 in 2000.

"We are not like the other companies in the IT industry," Palmisano said at an annual meeting with analysts in New York. "We don't have the dependency."

IBM's first-quarter revenue fell 11 percent, or around 4 percent at constant currency, from a year earlier, but cost cuts helped limit the fall in net profit. Analysts are expecting revenue to fall 7.5 percent in 2009 and rise 2.1 percent in 2010, according to Reuters Estimates.

Palmisano also believed it was now a perfect opportunity to invest in future growth, but the company would not do "crazy deals." The priority of any acquisition would be successful integration rather than deal size, he said.

"It's not about size, it's about success odds -- can we integrate this, can we get the financial returns," he said.

IBM last month failed to clinch a deal for server and software maker Sun Microsystems Inc , which agreed to be bought by Oracle Corp instead for more than $7 billion.

IBM shares fell 1.62 percent to $102.26 on the New York Stock Exchange, a more moderate decline for key U.S. indices.

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Reporting by Ritsuko Ando; Editing by Dave Zimmerman, Andre Grenon, Richard Chang
Source：Reuters

© 2009 Thomson Reuters. All rights reserved.

IBM touts 'stream computing' for real-time data analysis

IBM is bringing "stream computing" to the IT industry with new software that the company says analyzes thousands of simultaneous data streams to provide insight that helps businesses solve their most challenging problems.
##CONTINUE##
Stemming from seven years of development and technology from more than 100 IBM patent filings, stream computing is moving out of the prototype stage and into the commercial market with an offering called System S, IBM said Wednesday. IBM stream computing takes a fundamentally different approach to business analytics by analyzing data in continuously updated streams of information from multiple sources, rather than static files pre-loaded into a data warehouse.

"System S can analyze hundreds or thousands of simultaneous data streams – stock prices, retail sales, weather reports, etc. – and deliver nearly instantaneous analysis to business leaders who need to make split-second decisions," IBM says. "The software can help all organizations that need to react to changing conditions in real time, such as government and law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, retailers, transportation companies, healthcare organizations, and more."

Several institutions including the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, the Marine Institute of Ireland and TD Securities are already using stream computing.

"TD Securities is using System S to ingest more than 5 million bits of trading data per microsecond to make faster financial trading decisions," IBM says. "To match the capacity of the system, a trader would have to be able to read the entire works of Shakespeare 10 times in less than one second and then identify and execute a stock trade faster than a hummingbird flaps its wings."

The stream computing project, first unveiled two years ago, was spearheaded by System S chief scientist Nagui Halim, who says the software is designed for clusters of commodity Linux servers. List price is about $400,000, but prices can range anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million, depending on the size of the system, he says.

Instead of files and directories, System S processes data in the namesake streams, which Halim compared to the windows in Microsoft Windows because they provide the means with which users interact with the system. "Here the stream becomes a live entity you're connected to, and that's what you process," he says. You can say "give me a stream, or ten streams … name them, turn them on and off, monitor them. The streams become the underlying key element."

The stream project began in 2003, and included contributions from more than 80 people, Halim says, noting that it posed challenges in many areas, including mathematics, communications, scheduling, failover and networking.

"One thing that was interesting in retrospect is it took several iterations to get the language right," he says. "We tried a number of different approaches, but I'm extremely confident that after the third or fourth try we hit on something very powerful."

There are other systems that process data in real time as it arrives from external sources, but IBM built System S with a high degree of sophistication in terms of performance, scalability and analysis, according to Halim.

IBM has also opened a Stream Computing Center in Dublin, Ireland, to focus on research, customer support and advanced testing. A trial version of the System S code is available, with developer tools and adapters to help customers understand the software's capabilities and how it might help their businesses.

IBM has not announced plans to make System S available over the Web in a hosted model, but Halim said to stay tuned.

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BY Jon Brodkin, Framingham
Source：Resellernews

© Fairfax Media Business Group
Fairfax New Zealand Limited, 2009.

IBM clouds its SOA strategy

While IBM's core message this year is “A Smarter Planet,” the announcement of several cloud-based offerings stole the spotlight at its annual SOA Impact conference this week. They included CloudBurst, a new appliance for automating deployment of WebSphere images to private clouds, and BlueWorks, a new cloud-based BPM offering for simplifying defining and modeling business processes. In these cases, the cloud is the means, not the end, towards the goal of simplifying key aspects of developing and deploying SOA. However, IBM still has some work to do. In their first iteration, these two products add some complexity to the goal of making things simple.
##CONTINUE##
CloudBurst is a promising first step towards simplifying SOA
Given all the recent attention on cloud computing, it shouldn't be surprising that two of IBM's most prominent announcements coming out of its annual SOA conference were cloud-oriented. However, the tie-in was purely coincidental. The real goal of both offerings is to attack the complexity for which SOA and business process management (BPM) are known.

IBM's new WebSphere CloudBurst appliance stores up to a few hundred pre-loaded images of the hypervisor edition of WebSphere, which can then be deployed to what IBM terms a “private cloud.” That refers to an undifferentiated group of servers anywhere inside the firewall where WebSphere images could be provisioned or killed as appropriate. Although IBM is currently restricting deployment to the private cloud use case, there's no reason this couldn't be targeted at public clouds like Amazon EC2 if additional security and management measures were added.

CloudBurst uses several IBM software pieces, including Rational tools for configuring WebSphere images, and Tivoli agents for provisioning them, if the customer uses Tivoli. Alternatively, CloudBurst also provides its own change management capabilities; they could make the appliance self-managing, but at the potential cost of adding yet more management overlap if the organization already has some infrastructure management automation. Although built on similar hardware to IBM's existing DataPower XML appliances, CloudBurst uses different firmware.

CloudBurst could simplify the often arduous process of deploying new WebSphere virtual images. However, as organizations that must manipulate large numbers of WebSphere images are also likely to have significant XML message traffic, it is highly likely that CloudBurst appliances will be used by the same customers that also use DataPower boxes. In such instances, CloudBurst would contribute to appliance sprawl, making infrastructure management more complex.

Nevertheless, we should credit IBM for a first step here, as deployment of middleware has never proven simple. However, if you're going to make things simple, why go half way? How about putting the DataPower and CloudBurst boxes together? And while we're at it, why not throw in WebSphere Registry/Repository (WSRR) so there's no need to add yet another layer for service lookup and management.

Although it would be tempting to call it “SOA in a box,” that misses the point that SOA is architectural practice, not product. But placing all of the functions that are useful to deploying and operating an SOA architecture in a box may not be such a bad idea as long as developers don't forget about the architecture.

BlueWorks is also a good first step towards simplifying BPM deployment
Another hurdle associated with SOA is the complexity of modeling business processes as part of a BPM implementation. Although you can have BPM without SOA, or vice versa, they are quite complementary, as SOA architecture provides the flexibility that can make BPM implementation effective.

IBM's introduction of BlueWorks is the latest in a string of offerings from vendors aimed at simplifying how the business defines what it does and what it requires from software. Like Software AG's recently announced AlignSpace, BlueWorks is a cloud-based offering that combines social computing collaboration with easy-to-use tools for defining business process artifacts. It supports the creation of strategy maps representing goals, actions, and measures for a business activity, and provides access to community content and pre-built templates for BPMN process definitions. Resulting process maps are then exported to an SOA sandbox which contains a BPM modeling tool, and there is a capability to simulate execution of the process as well.

Again, this is a good start. But, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, why not go all the way and make this a complete platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment, where you could develop and then execute your business processes?

-----------------------------
BY Tony Baer
Source：Ovum

© Datamonitor - Ovum is a Datamonitor company.

IBM tries to seed its own cloud computing platforms

INDUSTRY giant IBM is attempting to seed its own cloud computing platforms, as the market for online software and services accelerates.
##CONTINUE##
But instead of sharing pictures of the latest beer bash on Facebook, or pitching a fragment of gossip on to Twitter, IBM wants the user community inside its new cloud computing hopeful to collaborate around the serious world of enterprise computing.

IBM's BPM BlueWorks is a cloud computing platform aimed at those in the business process management game.

According to Jerry Cuomo, chief technology officer for IBM WebSphere, BPM BlueWorks is in customer testing now and is being readied for a mid-June launch. He described BlueWorks as a series of experiments and said more features would be added through the year.

"Were saying, 'Hey, business user, go build business processes. We want you to rigorously build business processes, not build them on napkins'," he said. "'And when you build them we want to have you build them in a community of other builders'.

"This is our answer to Salesforce.com meets Facebook. Instead of exchanging images you are building up a community where you can exchange business strategy and business processes, whether it's in your company or across your supply chain or maybe it's a group of bankers who met at the Impact 09 conference and want to stay in touch."

-----------------------------
BY Stuart Kennedy
Source：AUSTRALIAN IT

Stuart Kennedy travelled to the Impact 09 conference in Las Vegas as a guest of IBM

Copyright 2009 News Limited. All times AEST (GMT +10).

IBM wants to make a ‘smarter planet’

The planet, according to IBM, is getting smarter. Things like GPS and RFID collect information that tell us where things are and even where we are. Refrigerators can place orders when items run out. Traffic lights are automated to adapt to different patterns at different times of day. And software, the company believes, is the invisible thread that ties all this and so much more together.
##CONTINUE##
So today, the company is releasing the IBM Rational Team Webtop, a new user front end for the Jazz platform, along with updates to its Doors, Synergy, Change and Rhapsody software that follows a road map for the former Telelogic products that was mapped out in November.

The releases are part of IBM’s “Smarter Planet” initiative, which recognizes that the world is becoming more interconnected, more instrumented and more intelligent. One of the keys is getting software intelligence in products, such as global positioning devices, medical imaging software, and automotive controls that can collect and analyze all kinds of data, according to Dominic Tavassoli, IBM program director.

Developers creating the software for these devices can use Team Webtop, which employs widgets that extract relevant information from the various software delivery tools in use for display in a single Web-based view that’s meaningful for the user, Tavassoli said.

“Companies need to develop software competencies they didn’t have before,” he said. “Embedded development is changing from functionality and moving up to be key to business value. It’s getting more airplay with executives and teams that think of the business strategy. They’re realizing that embedded software needs the same kind of governance, business decisions and accountability as a component of [an organization’s] ‘system of systems.’ ”

To support this, several of the company’s development tools have been enhanced. The Doors requirements tool has been given a new Web interface, so requirements can be reviewed and modified by teams around the world, and it has better management features—with change control—for large-scale hierarchies of requirements.

Synergy has a new architecture defined for global use, and it brings configuration management into one central server with low-footprint clients, so distributed teams working on systems development, especially component-based development, can access project tasks.

Change now helps organizations set change processes and work with defects in complex, multi-step processes, Tavassoli explained. And the Rhapsody modeling tool now has the ability to support agile workflows, which he said enables design validation to occur earlier and more often.

“We’re seeing a major surge in the focus on embedded software and systems engineering,” Tavassoli said. “That’s where the world is going.”

-----------------------------
BY David Rubinstein
Source：SDTimes

Copyright © 1999-2009 BZ Media LLC, all rights reserved.

Don’t tell IBM that SOA is dead

The biggest product launch at this year’s IBM Impact 2009 conference in Las Vegas was a cloud branded deployment app called CloudBurst, but the real talk of the conference was how SOA projects have fared in the downturn economy
##CONTINUE##
Despite all the talk that the recession has left service-oriented architecture projects on the shelves, IBM Corp. said that most projects are still moving along. The key to success, according to Big Blue, is that size doesn’t always matter.

The theme of this week’s IBM’s Impact 2009 conference in Las Vegas has been working smarter through emerging and interconnected technologies. To highlight this, the company officially launched a new internal cloud deployment appliance that can roll out SOA and WebSphere apps in “private cloud,” which it dubbed CloudBurst.

But in the midst of this cloud computing buzz, company executives spent much of their time stressing the benefits of service-oriented processes and why companies must continue investing in the philosophy during the foundering economy.

“What is rising to the top now are projects with short payouts,” said Steve Mills, senior vice-president and group executive at IBM Software. “Two- or three-year ROI investment targets have scaled back to short, incremental ROI targets.”

The poster child for this new SOA philosophy might just be Standard Life Insurance, a company that has been on the SOA bandwagon for nearly a decade.

Russell Irwin, group technology strategy and assistance manager at the firm’s Scotland-based offices, estimated that the company has saved more than US$40 million in development costs since 2004 via reuse services. Irwin calculates the savings by putting monetary value on every instance of service reuse.

“It’s all about measuring everything,” he said, adding that it is the only way to ensure your company will have strong executive support.

“Your SOA story should strongly appeal to those interests and you should emphasize the commercial advantages every chance you get,” he said. That means that instead of embarking on a long-term project and trying to build “one service to rule them all,” IT managers should pick a specific service that will allow them to demonstrate benefits and recruit advocates quickly. It should also be a service that will be used with some degree of regularity, he added.

For the insurer’s IT staff, SOA allows the company to utilize its legacy databases by adding front-end functionality to these useful systems. For example, Standard Life’s pensions databases have a long shelf life, and using SOA to harness this data without scraping the whole system has saved the company bundles.

“You don’t want to service enable everything and hope to get value,” said Tom Rosamilia, general manager of application and integration middleware division at IBM’s software group. “It’s about paying as you go.

“Russell started small with quick wins and quick returns, (using SOA) where he thought it could get value.”

According to Sandy Carter, vice-president of SOA, business process management and WebSphere with IBM, SOA customers grew 28 per cent year-over-year in 2008. The biggest difference in the numbers from previous years, she said, is “smaller projects and smaller companies” is the new order of the day.

Mills agreed, saying that SOA will continue to flourish as a way for companies to optimize their business processes.

“Nobody gets up with the idea that they want redundant IT assets,” he said. “You don’t want to acquire more IT for the sake of IT. You want to know how to run a business more effectively.”

Mills said there is no alternative to the SOA concept. “It doesn’t matter if the buzzword is SOA, business process integration or anything else. It all leads to the same place.”

-----------------------------
BY Rafael Ruffolo
Source：Computerworld Canada

©2009 ITworldcanada.com All rights reserved.

IBM's Mills: 'Find me a company not interested in SOA principles'

At a press conference at this week’s IBM IMPACT SOA gathering, I asked Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of the IBM Software Group, for his take on the ‘SOA is Dead’ debate that has been raging this year. He very passionately pushed back against those questioning SOA’s value proposition. Here’s most of what he said:
##CONTINUE##

“I challenge anybody in the room to bring forward a company anywhere in the world who’d say that they’re not trying to make their IT operation more efficient, more effective, and that’s inclusive of their application assets.

“Companies all over the world say they want to optimize their business processes. They want to have the appropriate number of application assets to support their business processes. They don’t want redundancy. They don’t want 30 ledgers. They don’t want dozens of supply chain systems. They don’t want five CRM systems. They want one set of application assets that effectively and efficiently serve their business needs and requirements. And they want to use those assets to the fullest.

“That’s what service orientation is about. I can’t name a single company in the world that does not have interest in this. And I can’t name a company that would not say that they’re not on some kind of journey to improve the service orientation, the structure of their application environment for better economics and better efficiency.

“Because the alternative is that all your applications are disconnected from each other. Your processes don’t work effectively. Your business ratios are the worst in your market segment, and your company is on the verge of bankruptcy.

“So there’s no other choice. There’s no alternative to this idea. It doesn’t matter if your buzzword at the end of the day is service oriented architecture, or business process integration, or enterprise application integration… It all leads to the same place.

“Nobody gets up in the morning with the idea that they want to accumulate more redundant IT assets. What they want to do is they want to run their business more effectively. CEOs don’t get up in the morning thinking about acquiring more IT for the sake of IT. they don’t get up in the morning thinking about IT architecture, they get in the morning thinking about, how do they run their business more efficiently and effectively. They turn to the experts in their business, they guys that know how to do that. Notions of sharing are obvious in very company are obvious in every company. Governance, shared service, shared capabilities, shared resources.

“This is a dominant conversation globally today. Because of the fundamental lack of available capital dollars to run a company. So everybody is on a path towards greater efficiency. Everybody is on a path to share things of all kinds. Everybody is on a path to share services, which is the very essence of what service oriented architecture is about. There’s no alternative. [The 'SOA is dead' debate] is a useless debate.”

Lots of good insights on IBM’s SOA and cloud computing announcements are also provided by Dana Gardner here at the ZDNet community, Jack Vaughan at SearchSOA and Tony Baer at his OnStrategies site.

-----------------------------
BY Joe McKendrick
Source：ZDNet

Joe McKendrick is an author and consultant with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in the technology industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

© 2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.

IBM Gives Developer Site a Social Network Feel

Long-running developerWorks site will now look a little more like a professional social network, such as LinkedIn.
##CONTINUE##
For a decade, IBM's developerWorks site has been a gathering place for developers that use IBM tools to perform research and get answers to their programming questions. Beginning today, the old site is going to get a little more social.

As it turns out, users wanted the change. IBM (NYSE: IBM) recently surveyed hundreds of software development professionals around the world and found nearly three quarters said they use forums, blogs, wikis, and online newsletters to gain skills and communicate with each other.

Nearly 65 percent said they want to start using social networking capabilities like those found on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace as a primary way to build new skills and collaborate with peers on one easy-to-use destination. So IBM responded.

The revamped site will be known as My developerWorks, but don't worry, IBM isn't turning developerWorks into MySpace. Instead, the company is adding social networking features that borrow mostly from the professional networking site LinkedIn, which allow developers to let their resume and reputation do the talking.

Thus, developers can seek out professionals who are experts in Rational or C++ or Java development and see their actual work history. When you find a person that has the credentials you are seeking, you can either engage them directly or follow their activities throughout My developerWorks, such as viewing their comments, reading their blog, following the blogs they like and tracking their favorite bookmarks.

"It's all about people connecting and collaborating. In places like LinkedIn, you have to look for people and start developing a relationship. Through interaction on the site, not only will you know who you are talking to, you will know all of their attributes because everyone has a virtual business card," Stephanie Martin, director of My developerWorks, told InternetNews.com.

developerWorks has a library of 30,000 resources and eight million users, but it's not always easy to navigate. IBM will add comments and tags and recommendations to documents and other content, as well as a bookmarking capability to the content, so people can quickly return to documents they previously read.

However, Martin said the site will not have the job hunting/position posting section that makes LinkdIn so popular. Professionals can promote themselves and state their availability in their profile but there won't be job postings.

The new page will feature a personalized home page that serves as a dashboard for the developer, where they can build a customized page of widgets with newsfeeds, for everything from outside news sources to discussions taking place within My developerWorks.

Developers can form groups with activities, and as people find each other around some commonality, they can form groups. It will even have some of the project management elements of SourceForge and other online developer sites. Developers can communicate, set assignments, establish a project plan, set milestones, assign todos, and send e-mail reminders.

My developerWorks is live effective today.

-----------------------------
BY Andy Patrizio
Source：internetnews.com

Copyright 2009 WebMediaBrands Inc. All Rights Reserved.

How IBM Plans to Destroy Google

IBM (NYSE: IBM) wants to master Jeopardy!, the popular TV game show. If it succeeds, Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) PageRank indexing search engine could be in some peril of its own.
##CONTINUE##
Can you hear me, Watson?
Big Blue has created a software program called "Watson" that professes to understand and synthesize plain-language queries fast enough to compete with human contestants on the quiz show.

The showdown is not yet scheduled, but plans are already underway to ship a Blue Gene supercomputer to Los Angeles for the contest, The New York Times reports. Among the potential challengers for Watson is former Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, who earned worldwide acclaim by winning on the show 74 consecutive times.

In that sense, Watson -- named for IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, Sr. -- is reminiscent of the Deep Blue chess-playing supercomputer that initially defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in a contested 1997 match.

Deeper thoughts
The ability to understand and synthesize endless combinations of moves made Deep Blue unique. Watson will have to do better. Not only will it draw on a massive database connected to the Blue Gene supercomputer, but the software itself will also have to understand meaning and context in order to know what to search for.

Therein lies the threat to Google, though you won't hear that from IBM, Google, or Jeopardy!'s producers. "Isn't this just Google on steroids? No, it is not," Jeopardy! producer Harry Friedman said in a demonstration video posted to YouTube yesterday.

He's wrong. Watson is disruptive in its proposed alterations to the search process. In Google, users supply meaning and context, and winnow results accordingly. Can't find the answer you're looking for? Try new search terms. Watson aims to be both pervasive and precise, right from the start.

At the heart of the new system is a natural language technology that seeks to better understand questions. Do that, the creators of Watson reason, and the size of the database behind the query engine matters a lot less.

In simpler terms: If today's version of Google is a howitzer, Watson could be a high-powered sniper rifle. Both do the job, but one is far more efficient than the other.

The search for better search
Yet there are good reasons to be skeptical that Watson will disrupt Google, or Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), or IAC's (Nasdaq: IACI) Ask.com, or Kosmix, or any of the budding search-engine stars in the making. The history of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and expert systems is mixed and not particularly well-understood.

Part of the problem is that we often erroneously link A.I. research, a software-driven process meant to teach machines to reason as we humans do, to the rise of giant supercomputers. That's understandable. The very A.I.-sounding Thinking Machines was a Massachusetts maker of supercomputers that failed in 1994. Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) acquired its few remaining assets shortly afterward. Soon, those assets -- if any remain -- will become part of Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL).

Meanwhile, both governments and private firms continue to apply computational horsepower to the world's biggest problems as if that sheer brute force were a form of A.I. That's why IBM, Cray Research (Nasdaq: CRAY), and their peers continue to sell massively parallel supercomputers, systems that feature a lot of chips working in tandem.

Cray, in particular, generated $283 million in sales in 2008, according to Capital IQ, a division of Standard & Poor's.

Be better, Google
Google operates differently. Instead of investing in these sorts of "big iron" systems that Cray and IBM produce, its search engine is supported by hundreds of thousands (or perhaps a million) small servers, some of which are reportedly homemade. Algorithms capture the collective horsepower of these systems to index and present a lot of data -- the entire Web, in this case.

The problem with Google is that it's a compass, rather than a guide. Rarely can it answer a complex question as Watson promises -- it's search 1.0 to Watson's potential search 2.0.

Your move, Google.

-----------------------------
BY Tim Beyers
Source：The Motley Fool

© 1995 - 2009 The Motley Fool. All rights reserved.

Software's Big Four: Cisco, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft

Enterprise software is coming down to four big choices: Cisco Systems or IBM or Oracle or Microsoft.
##CONTINUE##
Hewlett-Packard? HP is doing very well in hardware, but it lacks the overarching software strategy that fuels these other four.

Even as the industry consolidates into these big ecosystem vendors, it's becoming ripe for a new kind of hegemonic, all-out war.

It's a fun time to be in the industry. For one thing, it's fascinating to watch (and, in some cases, assist) each of the Big Four to use open source as a strategic club with which to pummel their neighbors. Open source, thy name is capitalism.

But open source is just one part of it. The bigger part is conflicting product-level competition. Microsoft dominates the desktop and uses it as a "home base" from which to compete in other markets. Cisco spreads the power of the network into a wide variety of complementary businesses. Oracle uses the database as the center of the enterprise-computing universe, but surrounds it with a host of exceptional software.

And IBM? Well, IBM enriches its massive software business with integrated hardware and services that no one has yet been able to match.

Each, of course, is starting to infiltrate the others' safety zone with new initiatives. IBM, as announced on Monday, is pairing up with Brocade to go after Cisco's core networking market. Cisco, for its part, is stepping on just about everybody's toes with collaboration initiatives that veer toward Microsoft's SharePoint, even while it adds a server line to compete with IBM.

Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun Microsystems to help give it a leg up on IBM and Microsoft through Java, Sun's hardware lines, and MySQL. Microsoft, for its part, is expanding into everyone else's markets with the ubiquitous SharePoint.

This is only the beginning. The question is, "The beginning of what?" In some ways, this dramatic industry consolidation reduces customer choice. But in other ways, it enhances it.

Given the centrality of software to this enterprise cage match, it also begs the question, "When will SAP join the fray?" Last week, I spent time at the Open Forum Europe conference, where I repeatedly heard the question raised, "When will Europe produce a dominant software company?"

SAP's strength in enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software could serve as a nice complement to one of the Big Four's product lines--or as a beachhead for the assembly and deployment of an additional, independent software ecosystem.

Red Hat could do the same, fostering an open-source ecosystem to rival that of the Big Four, mostly proprietary software vendors. While the company has shown little ambition beyond infrastructure software, there are hints of a growing interest to sell (and build?) solutions. Red Hat's recent channel expansion through Synnex suggests that it may be toe-dipping its way toward a larger vision of being the hub of the open-source "wheel."

Given this waxing and waning of competition in enterprise software, I suppose that the real question is, "On which ecosystem are you betting your business?" Enterprise IT is a study in heterogeneity, but for how long?

-----------------------------
BY Matt Asay
Source：cnet

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

©2009 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved.

IBM's 'Jeopardy' Challenge: A Test for Search?

IBM said Monday that it plans to produce "Watson," a computing system designed to parse questions intelligently and respond in the manner in which it was intended.
##CONTINUE##
The goal? To knock off human contestants in "Jeopardy," in much the same way IBM's "Deep Blue" computer beat Garry Kasparov in chess.

Watson will be forced to interpret the question, process puns and other word games, search through its database and determine the correct answer, all within less than a second -- the reaction time of "Jeopardy" players. The machine will not be connected to the Internet, but will have to parse its own database of content.

While IBM has apparently convinced Sony Pictures to stage a match against a Watson system, details of the taping (or if it will be taped) have yet to be disclosed. A Sony spokesman could not be reached for comment.


"The essence of making decisions is recognizing patterns in vast amounts of data, sorting through choices and options, and responding quickly and accurately," said Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM's chairman, president and chief executive officer, in a statement. "Watson is a compelling example of how the planet - companies, industries, cities - is becoming smarter. With advanced computing power and deep analytics, we can infuse business and societal systems with intelligence. This project is the latest example of IBM's longstanding commitment to fundamental research and to overcoming 'grand challenges' in science and technology."

Like Deep Blue, IBM plans to take a massively parallel approach toward the problem, considering solutions, prioritizing some and discarding others. It's a sort of holistic solution to a problem: part hardware, part software, brute force plus intuition.

It's also an interesting test of what search is evolving towards: not just matching keywords, but trying to intuit what the questioner is also asking. Getting to the heart of the question is also a part of what's known as "business intelligence," or trying to find the interesting needles in a haystack of seemingly random data.

One can imagine similarities between these two phrases: "This highly prized form of corundum gets its red color from minute amounts of chromium." "This product commanded the highest margin during the month of June from our "'Lifestyle' product line." In this case, the answer could be the same for both: "rubies".

But could "Watson " also parse this clue: "Apes might enjoy eating these legumes." On its own, no. But under the heading of "anagrams," possibly. (The answer? "Peas".)

The New York Times reported that the Watson prototype for some reason interpreted a "sheet" as a fruit. Small glitch or fatal flaw? We'll find out when the show airs.

-----------------------------
BY N/A
Source：APPSCOUT

Copyright © 1996-2009 Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. All Rights Reserved.

IBM: At Least We’re Winning Sun Customers

International Business Machines may have lost out on the opportunity to buy Sun Microsystems when Oracle swooped in over the weekend with a $7.38 billion bid. But IBM says it’s still winning over a lot of Sun customers.
##CONTINUE##
In a statement prepared for release Wednesday, Big Blue said that in the past quarter, more than 100 customers around the world migrated from Sun or Hewlett-Packard to IBM mainframes or high-end Unix servers in the past quarter. It said half the deals were worth more than $1 million, but it declined to provide more financial information.

In the high-end Unix market, IBM said it won over 34 customers from H-P and 28 from Sun. It said it moved 40 customers to its mainframe computers, with most of them shifting from a mixture of Sun and H-P servers. The sharpest growth was in emerging markets where IBM has had surprising success selling mainframe computers.

IBM is trying to downplay the idea that it’s at a competitive disadvantage, now that Sun appears to be in the hands of Oracle. During a conference call with analysts Monday, IBM chief financial officer Mark Loughridge said the company isn’t concerned about Oracle and Sun teaming up because IBM has long competed against the two. He said that since 2000, IBM has expanded its share in the high-end Unix market to 32% according to IDC, up 14 points.

A spokeswoman for H-P said that H-P servers are the most popular choice among organizations running “virtual environments” that make the machines run more efficiently and that 250 customers have migrated from IBM mainframes to H-P’s servers over the last two years. A spokesman for Sun declined to comment.

The competitive wins in the quarter weren’t enough to make IBM’s hardware business grow. Overall, it fell 23% to $3.2 billion. Mainframes fell 19% and System P, the Unix servers, fell 2%.

-----------------------------
BY Bill Bulkeley
Source：THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Copyright ©2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

IBM focuses on software and services to meet targets

IBM has continued to outperform its technology peers during the downturn, relying on wider services and software margins in the first quarter to make up for a continuing slump in hardware sales, its results showed yesterday.
##CONTINUE##
Although net income dipped 1 per cent to $2.3bn from a year earlier on an 11 per cent drop in revenue, IBM's share repurchases from what is now a cash hoard of $12.3bn pushed earnings per share up to $1.70, from $1.64. The stock buy-back reduced shares outstanding by 4 per cent.

Mark Loughridge, chief financial officer, said that he was "if anything, more confident" than three months earlier that IBM would meet the target it set then of $9.20 per share full-year earnings.

Asked about IBM's loss of its quarry, Sun Microsystems, to its key rival, Oracle, in the acquisition announced yesterday, Mr Loughridge said he had no regrets.

"Oracle and Sun have been partnering for two decades, and what's the result?" he said. "We've picked up 14 percentage points of [market] share [in high-end servers] since 2000, and we have 32 points now."

IBM had negotiated down to the fine details with Sun before talks collapsed, but sources close to IBM pointed to problems that came up during Big Blue's extensive inquiry, including employee and customer contract terms.

"We run a very disciplined process," Mr Loughridge said. "When we run a disciplined process, we get good results."

Mr Loughridge said that IBM would cut a further $1bn of expenses out of its system during the year, on top of the $2bn in savings from restructuring last year and in the first quarter.

Total gross margin expanded to 43.4 per cent in the quarter, from 41.5 per cent a year earlier. That was largely due to an 84.2 per cent software margin, where revenue slipped less than in the computer business.

IBM, headed by Sam Palmisano, predicted that revenue would go up in its services business in the second half of the year. Service contract signings increased 27 per cent in the most recent quarter after adjusting for currency fluctuations.

IBM said its latest results benefited from its continuing "transformation" to a services company. While in mature markets a lot of the services contracts it has been securing concern saving money, the developing world's deals include infrastructure build-outs.

Those markets are supplying a growing percentage of IBM's total revenue and profit.

Revenue from growth markets reached 17 per cent in the first quarter.

IBM and Oracle have long been rivals in the sale of database software, while IBM and Sun compete on servers and data storage.

The combination with Sun will make Oracle more of a full-slate contender, just as Cisco is expanding its own mission with the introduction of servers, on top of its core networking gear.

-----------------------------
BY Joseph Menn in San Francisco
Source：The Financial Times

© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2009.