The software sold by Nexenta Systems of Mountain View, Calif., builds on a trend the industry calls “virtualization,” a broad term for pooling computing resources across physical hardware to make the gear more efficient. Virtualization is a key technology for companies that sell computing services over the Internet to business customers, a growing market known as “cloud computing.”

Nexenta’s software virtualizes data-storage systems but with a twist: the software can run on basic server systems from any hardware vendor. That makes the start-up a competitor to both storage behemoths such as EMC, which sells hardware-software systems, and providers of on-demand computing resources such as Amazon, Nexenta executives said. Amazon, the 800-pound gorilla in cloud computing, uses storage software it built in house to maximize the capacity of its gear, they said.

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The company is looking for a new vice president of IT security who will report directly to CIO Bill McGrath. A source who obtained a copy of the eight-page job description being circulated by executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles was kind enough to send it along to me.

AOL is of course on an acquisitive tear, adding new properties all the time, and thus making the job of a new head of security ever more complex. It recently spent $315 million to acquire The Huffington Post and five months ago acquired TechCrunch.

The document below doesn’t mention compensation, but my source was told the pay range is in the mid-200s. It’s been awhile since AOL itself has been the target of a security breach, at least of the kind that makes headlines. Of course there was today’s distributed denial of service attack against WordPress.com which apparently affected Techcrunch for some time today. If you think you’re the one who’s up to the task, the job description is below. Enjoy.

aolvpsecurity

Serguei Beloussov, the company’s founder and outgoing CEO, will continue his full-time role as executive chairman of the board and chief architect.

Steen joined Parallels from Microsoft, where he was VP of Small and Medium Business and Distribution at Microsoft. Before that, he ran Microsoft’s business in Norway and in Russia.

Parallels is a privately held company that’s been around since 1999, that counts Intel Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and Almaz Capital Partners as its investors. Its rise generally coincided with Apple’s migration to using chips from Intel on the Mac. By giving new Mac users an easy way to run Windows on their computers, it gave people accustomed to Windows, or who needed to continue to use a particular application on Windows, little excuse when the opportunity came to switch to the Mac.

But what I didn’t know is that Parallels is also a player a big player in selling software to service providers. It sells Plesk, a popular server automation tool, and it’s also a player in the server virtualization business.

I talked with Steen about all this last week.

NewEnteprise: Birger, I’m a Mac user and so of course I know about and even use Parallels once in awhile. But I had no idea Parallels was so closely involved with Web hosting and cloud providers. How big is that business?

Birger Steen: We’ve been working with service providers since 1999, and then over the last 10 years you’ll find companies like Rackspace and Media Temple and some of the biggest hosting providers are customers of ours. In most cases they run some version of our virtualization technology.

So when people think of virtualization of server, they think of VMWare. How are you different?

Partly it’s a different technology. Our technology virtualizes in a different way that’s uniquely suited to service providers that have large numbers of systems that they want to run with as much efficiency and density as possible. We have a market share of about 37 percent in that market.

And you also sell the Plesk control panel software for servers.

Control panels are very complementary to server virtualization. In the same way that control panels let you contol the computing resources on a desktop Windows machine or a Mac, you need to do the same thing on a server. If you were to rent the server from Rackspace or some other service provider, you need something to control it remotely and manage the resources. That’s the other business we’ve been in for about 10 years. As the hosting business became more complex, that product had to become more complex. A lot of our service providers sell servers to customers who then turn around and re-sell them to other end customers. So the control panel now manages resources at the reseller level, and the end-customer administrative level, and then at the end-customer user level. That’s become a very interesting business. It’s very fragmented with lots of companies reselling services from larger companies. Today we have something like 5,000 customers that are everyone from the smallest local hoster with a few servers, all the way up to some of the biggest telco companies in the world.

So what are your priorities this year?

We’re going to continue to drive hard on the Parallels desktop product, particularly on the Mac. It has a huge group of fans and we want to continue developing it. The first group of users were a lot of people who were devout Mac users where someone just had to use Windows or another OS some of the time. What we see now are a lot of users who are not switching to the Mac so much as they are adding Apple hardware. It’s a a market where people are using many different technologies and we want to continue to make that easy. We also want to continue to build out our international markets. We’re really strong in Germany, where we sell our product attached to 25 percent of the Macs sold there, whereas worldwide we’re hovering at about 5 to 6 percent. So there’s room for a lot of upside there.

So your business is profitable, and you’re growing fast. What kind of an exit do you anticipate for your investors? Will you take Parallels public?

We’re building the company to become a lot bigger, and to grow for a long period of time. We certainly aspire to have a both all the corporate processes and infrastructure that a public company would have. I’d ask our investors at Bessemer and Intel what they’re thinking. But I certainly have a long-term ambition for this.

Today’s the day we all find out. The two are showing the first fruits of their combined quarter billion dollars worth of labor. The pair announced they have built four enterprise-focused appliances that they say will combine applications, infrastructure and productivity tools into a single unified system. The first half of this quartet is being announced today, with more to follow.

One is the HP Business Decision Appliance, which is intended to run business intelligence applications. The appliance, they say, greatly reduces the time and effort for companies to deploy and manage business intelligence, which is a fancy way of saying you’re analyzing the data from the operation of your business, and looking for patterns or trends that might not otherwise be apparent. It’s optimized to run for Microsoft’s SQL server database software and its SharePoint collboration software, and takes less than an hour to install, they promise.

The second is the HP Business Data Warehouse Appliance, a data store designed for small- and mid-size companies that they say delivers performance that’s suitable for a big enterprise, but doesn’t require an administrator to run it. It’s a smaller version of the HP Enterprise Data Warehouse Appliance, which the two first previewed in November and is available now.

Next up is a messaging appliance geared toward making it easy to install Microsoft Exchange 2010, the server piece of Outlook, Microsoft’s all-purpose email, calendar and contact software that’s so widely used in companies around the world. Its formal name is the HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and the two companies say it’s the industry’s first self-contained server for enterprise-class messaging that can be deployed in only a few hours. It comes pre-configured and with “best practices” designed in. The mailboxes are large, centrally archived and available to any device. It will be available in March.

What’s after that? HP and Microsoft are also working on something they call the HP Database Consolidation Appliance, which can bring hundreds of databases into a single appliance. This one will run SQL server and Microsoft’s Hyper-V Cloud.

It’s all about making IT projects easy to deploy, says Mark Potter, HP’s senior vice president and general manager for industry standard servers and software. “It can take anywhere from one to 18 months to roll out a sophisticated service to end users,” Potter told me in an interview yesterday. “About 32 percent of all IT projects are rated a success. It takes our customers a lot of time, planning and risk. We’re trying to bring a solution to the market that does for business applications what Microsoft Office did for desktop productivity.”

Why spend so much to team up? Microsoft and HP think that by 2015 there’s a combined market worth $55 billion for business intelligence, data warehousing, messaging and online transactions, making that quarter billion potentially worth it. Now they just have to prove these appliances can sell.

Slootman had helmed Data Domain from its founding in 2001 through its public offering in 2007 and sold it to EMC for $2.4 billion in 2009 following a bidding war with NetApp.

Data Domain’s claim to fame is a technology called deduplication that allowed hard drives to get competitive with tape systems for backup. When making daily backups if only 2 percent of your data has changed why back up the other 98 percent every day? The amount of data you have to manage quickly explodes, and the only way to manage it in a cost-effective manner was to use tape systems. Data Domain changed that. “We neutralized the cost advantage that tape had and tore down the tape storage business in the process,” Slootman told me.

Data Domain was one of the early targets in the string of enterprise storage deals that included the bidding war between Dell and Hewlett-Packard over 3Par, and another EMC deal for Isilon. After EMC closed its deal for Data Domain, Slootman stayed on for 18 months in order to help with the transition.

And though Greylock is best known for its investments in two giants of social networking LinkedIn and Facebook, Slootman said he’s joining to “bring more firepower” to its enterprise team. “There’s basically two activities in venture capital these days, enterprise and consumer,” he said. “There’s a lot of opportunities in data center storage and infrastructure technologies, networking, virtualization, enterprise apps. Basically stuff that gets sold to companies,” he said.

He says he’ll be on the lookout for companies that can repeat the what Data Domain did: Tear down an industry. “There’s only so much money in the world or in an industry. People are not going to spend net incremental money unless you can reduce their spending somewhere else,” he told me. “Your game is to move the money from point A to point B. You’re looking for wholesale replacement of things that people are already doing, but doing it better, cheaper or faster.”

Cloud computing presents an interesting opportunity he says. Unlike the pre-cloud days with applications were tied to specific hardware, cloud-based services tend to require that everything in the data center be standardized. Getting all that gear to run efficiently requires virtualization — essentially allowing one machine to act like many. Virtualization makes it easy and efficient to get services up and running without a lot of hassle, but also to shut things down easily when they’re not needed. “Big companies are looking for ways to pay by the drink. They want to be able to scale up and down.”

Greylock’s most recent enterprise investments was a $6.3 million stake in Proferi, a cloud based enterprise performance management firm that’s still in stealth mode. Andreessen Horowitz and Peoplesoft founder Dave Duffield also participated in that round. Others include Pure Storage, another company in stealth mode, and Cloudera. All three were led by Aneel Bhusri, who was an early investor in Data Domain and served as its chairman.

The company, backed by Grotech Ventures and New Atlantic Ventures, sells software that builds a virtual environment for running a Web browser or PDF reader, so that in the case of a malware attack, the virtual environment can be shut down without the malware ever coming into contact with the operating system of a computer or the corporate network.

It identifies malware based on behavior, rather than the signature-based approach used by anti-virus programs, enabling it to detect malware that it has never seen before. Once malware is detected, the secure environment shuts down and reloads malware-free, the company says. It also shares the details about attacks with intrusion-prevention devices on the network.

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In a buzzword-riddled press release, they said they “will collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings; and integrated management tools.”

Translation: HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform.

“This agreement, which spans hardware, software and services, will enable business customers to optimize performance with push-button simplicity at the lowest possible total cost of ownership,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement.

“Our extended partnership will transform the way large enterprises deliver services to their customers,” Ballmer added, “and help smaller organizations adopt IT to grow their businesses. Microsoft and HP are betting on each other so our customers don’t have to gamble on IT.”

Under the terms of the deal Microsoft and HP will collaborate on:

Virtualization
• Microsoft is now a preferred provider of virtualization solutions for HP, which will make it easier for a broader set of customers to deploy virtualization solutions that can improve server utilization by as much as 10 times and reduce provisioning ties from months to minutes.

• Microsoft and HP will deliver “smart bundles” for small and medium businesses. These are a combination of hardware and software, including HP server, storage and networking solutions, coupled with Windows Server Hyper-V and HP Insight software, delivered in a single, cost-effective package.

Management
• HP now has the rights to resell and ship System Center as part of HP’s solutions. This solution will be tuned, integrated and ready for customers.

• And coming soon, HP’s Insight Software and Business Technology Optimization solutions will begin to integrate and interoperate with Microsoft’s System Center suite of products. This means that customers with heterogeneous computing environments will be able to more easily and more cost-effectively manage hardware and software from Microsoft and non-Microsoft operating systems and applications.

Business Applications
• The companies will deliver a set of prepackaged and preconfigured data management and email solutions (“machines”) that will deliver data warehousing, business intelligence, online transaction processing and messaging solutions.

The Cloud
• HP and Microsoft will collaborate on the Windows Azure platform, with HP offering services, and Microsoft continuing to include HP hardware for Windows Azure infrastructure.

As BoomTown previously reported, VMware officially confirmed today that it is buying Yahoo’s Zimbra open-source email unit.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but sources said the price was well below the $350 million Yahoo (YHOO) paid for the start-up in late 2007.

Sources also said there is a large employee-retention element to the sale to encourage Zimbra’s 110 employees to make the move to VMware (VMW).

Under terms of the deal, which has been brewing between the two Silicon Valley companies for some weeks, VMware said it will “purchase all Zimbra technology and intellectual property. Yahoo! will have the right to continue to utilize the Zimbra technology in its communications services, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar.”

“We’ve been simplifying the data center,” said Brian Byun, vice president and general manager, cloud services, at VMware, in an interview with me this afternoon. “With this move, we are expanding to another area…which is part of a larger strategy.”

Said Jim Morrisroe, who has been running Zimbra for Yahoo: “This is another step in a mission we’ve been on at Zimbra and we are very excited about what’s next at VMware.”

A week ago, BoomTown reported that the sale of Zimbra was likely.

BoomTown had reported in late September that Zimbra was for sale by Yahoo, which has been targeting for “de-acquisition” assets that are not central to the strategies of the company’s new management.

Zimbra and Yahoo’s small business and jobs sites have been on the block.

One source I spoke to last week noted that the reason VMware was interested in nabbing Zimbra is that its execs want to expand “up the stack” from the software company’s position in virtualization.

And Yahoo is no longer interested in running Zimbra’s white-label, open-source email commercial product, which serves the university and ISP markets. There, its main rival has been Google (GOOG).

VMware said the acquisition is expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2010.

VMware to Acquire Zimbra

Company Expands vCloud Portfolio with Next Generation Email and Collaboration Software

PALO ALTO, Calif., January 12, 2010–VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra, a leading vendor of email and collaboration software, from Yahoo! Inc.

This acquisition will further VMware’s mission of taking complexity out of the datacenter, desktop, application development and core IT services, and delivering a fundamentally more efficient and new approach to IT.

Zimbra is a leading open source email and collaboration solution with over 55 million mailboxes. As an independent Yahoo! product division, Zimbra achieved 2009 mailbox growth of 86% overall and 165% among small and medium business customers.

Based on a modern, flexible architecture designed for virtualization and cloud-scale infrastructure, the Zimbra technology provides substantially lower total cost of ownership than traditional solutions. Zimbra products offer a full enterprise feature set, excellent interoperability with legacy email environments and have been deployed across small and large environments; as on-premise software at thousands of small and medium businesses, distributed enterprises, and as a hosted service at major service providers such as Comcast and NTT Communications.

“Over the coming years, we expect more organizations, especially small and medium size businesses, to increasingly buy core IT solutions that deliver cloud-like simplicity in end-user and operational experience,” said Brian Byun, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Services, VMware. “Zimbra is a great example of the type of scalable ‘cloud era’ solutions that can span smaller, on-premise implementations to the cloud. It will be a building block in an expanding portfolio of solutions that can be offered as a virtual appliance or by a cloud service provider. We are excited to welcome the Zimbra team and community to the VMware family.”

VMware plans to support existing Zimbra products and open source efforts while further optimizing Zimbra products for vSphere-based cloud infrastructure, alongside Microsoft, IBM and other messaging and collaboration solutions.

Under the terms of the agreement, VMware will purchase all Zimbra technology and intellectual property. Yahoo! will have the right to continue to utilize the Zimbra technology in its communications services, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar.

“The Zimbra technology has played and will continue to play an important role in our communications services products. The technology is core to Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar and a key differentiator for these leading products,” said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president, Yahoo! “The customers and partners of Zimbra’s industry-leading product and successful enterprise business will be well served with VMware.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the first calendar quarter of 2010. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Speaking at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans this past July, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said of Google’s forthcoming Chrome OS, “Who knows what this thing is?”

Today, he found out. The operating system, a direct challenge to Microsoft Windows, was on display at a media gathering at the Google HQ this morning.

Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Matthew Papakipos, engineering director for Google Chrome OS, presided over the event, which the company described as a “technical announcement.”

That meant that Google (GOOG) was not releasing a beta of the operating system this week, as had been rumored.

That said, it was an overview of Chrome, as well as Google’s plans for its launch in 2010, so let the Chrome OS liveblogging begin:

• There will be no beta today. Pichai says Google is still a year away from an official launch. However, the company is making the code available today.
• Pichai says that a year after launch, the Chrome browser has some 40 millions users. He boasts about the browser’s speed, noting that it handles Javascript 39 times faster than Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer. There will be three more big Chrome announcements sometime in the future: Chrome for Mac, Chrome for Linux and the debut of Chrome Extensions.
• Google’s goal is to ensure that Web applications function as well as desktop apps. Pichai says that the company is figuring out a way for Web apps to safely take advantage of the operating system in the way desktop apps do. A few examples: Graphics, video/audio applications, real-time communication, notification and local storage.

  “By 2010 we expect to have all these things built into Chrome,” Pichai adds.

• The advent of Chrome coincides with a perfect storm of converging trends, Pichai says, noting the tremendous popularity of netbooks during the recession, the growing acceptance of cloud apps and the rapid innovation in mobile devices. Smartphones are becoming more like laptops, Pichai adds, and laptops are becoming more like smartphones. Is there a better level of computing available for these devices?

  There is, according to Pichai, and Google believes it is Chrome OS.

• Among Chrome OS’s advantages, Pichai says: Speed, simplicity and security. Every application will be a Web application. There will be no desktop apps. Chrome OS is essentially a browser with a few modifications. All data in the Chrome OS resides in the cloud. Pichai: “We want all of personal computing to work that way….If I lose my Chrome machine, I should be able to go out, buy a new [one] and re-create my previous computing experience easily.”

  Chrome OS will run completely inside the browser security model, he adds, noting that security is one of Google’s top priorities along with speed. “Turning on a PC should be like turning on your TV,” he says.

• Chrome OS is very similar in appearance to the Chrome browser. “Chrome OS is Chrome,” says Pichai. Google made it look like a browser, because the browser is familiar.
• And indeed, Chrome OS does look quite a bit like a browser. Multiple apps load into tabs, for example. It also features “Panels,” which Pichai describes as persistent lightweight windows. “All Chrome data resides in the cloud. Anything you put in the machine is immediately available to you anywhere.”
• As netbooks become more advanced and battery life improves, they will evolve into entertainment devices, says Pichai, who notes that via Google Books, a netbook can become an e-reader, and, through YouTube, a video device.
• A quick demo of the user interface, which seems very simple and intuitive. “It just works,” says Pichai in an unintentional nod to Apple (AAPL).

  An interesting remark: Anyone who writes an app for the Web has written an app for Chrome, says Pichai, joking that Microsoft is already developing for it.

• Speed, simplicity and security, says Pichai. We’re trying to make the computing experience delightful.

With that, Pichai hands the stage over to Engineering Director Matt Papakipos.

• Papakipos, too, offers the “we want to make computing delightful” sound byte and notes once again that turning on the PC should be like turning on the TV.
• Chrome OS eliminates the bootloader, auto-launching the browser. The OS also auto-updates itself, making sure that it’s always current with security patches, etc. Everything from the firmware to the kernel is secured with a cryptographic signature to ensure a secure boot. In the event malware is detected, the system repairs itself automatically.
• The basic application security protocol for current operating systems allows apps the same privileges as the user. This presents obvious security issues. Whenever you install a new app, you’re taking a risk, says Papakipos.

  But Web applications like those that Chrome OS use, are different. They are Web apps, so they don’t have system-level privileges. Additionally, all apps run in secured sandboxes that are separate from one other and from the OS. Finally, all apps must be signed and verified before each use.

• In terms of file systems, Chrome’s is locked down. It’s a read-only root-file system, obviously quite different from other operating systems. All user data are encrypted and synched to the cloud. Essentially, Google uses the PC for caching. Again, if you should lose your machine, you buy a new one, fire it up and it synchs with the cloud, restoring your previous computing experience.
• How will Google bring Chrome OS to market? The company is working with vendors to specify reference hardware. You cannot download and install Chrome on just any device, you will have to purchase a Chrome device. Google is looking at a launch window of late 2010, before the holidays.
• Google sounds very concerned about the end-user Chrome OS experience. Pichai says the company wants to ensure that the displays, keyboard, etc., on the netbooks that run Chrome are robust and easy to use.
• Pichai wraps things up, but before the Q&A, we’re shown a short explanatory video. “The first thing I want to do when I fire up my computer is browse the Internet….If there isn’t any Internet, I might not even use my computer….What if when you pressed on, your PC turned on, what if your operating system was more like a Web browser…what if it was a browser?…Chrome OS is a totally rethought computer that lets you focus on the Internet, which is what most of use our computers for these days anyway.”

Q&A

At this point, Pichai opens the event to questions:

If you’re specifying hardware components, do you must have an idea of what they’ll cost?

A: We expect Chrome netbooks to be in the price range of what people have come to expect….We are not specifying a price target. Price will be determined at the OEM level.

Will the APIs support W3C standards?

A: We’re working very closely with the W3C to standardize as much as we can….In general, we want to see everything standardized across multiple browsers.

Will there be an application store?

A: The Web offers hundreds of millions of applications. Our job is to make people aware of them.

What about desktop applications that are not available on the Web?

A: We expect most of our users to have a second machine at home….Chrome OS is about a delightful experience on the Web….If you’re a lawyer spending your entire day on contracts, etc., this is not the machine for you.

Will you support Microsoft Silverlight?

A: In the case of certain selection plug-ins, we are working to integrate them. No comment beyond that.

Since Chrome is open source, could people build their own variations?

A: Yes. We expect people will do many interesting things with it.

Do you see Chrome running on laptops or desktops?

A: We’re initially focused on netbook-like form factors–clamshells, etc. That said, the OS is being developed to work on other devices.

Is there any level of offline access? What happens when I’m on a plane and don’t want to pay for Wi-Fi?

A: Chrome devices are primarily intended to be Internet-connected. That said, it will have some caching abilities so, for example, you could play a game offline.

Virtualization?

A: Yes. You could run Chrome today on a virtual machine.

Are you working with outfits like Adobe to, say, build a Web-friendly version of Photoshop?

A: We’re very excited by things like Photoshop on the Web and we’re working hard to make that possible.

Will Android apps work on Chrome? Are there plans for third-party apps?

A: [Pichai dodges this one.] If it’s a Web app, it will work on Chrome. The Web works very, very well for our purposes.

Will Chrome work on both X86 and ARM?

A: Yes.

Is there a direct business model for Chrome OS or is this another variation of the-more-people-that-use-the-Web-the-better-for-Google?

A: We are working with partners. No plans for advertising. That said, Pichai notes again that anything that runs on the Web will run on Chrome. And of course, AdWords does, indeed, run on the Web.

[Sergey Brin joins the Q&A]

Do you want Android Apps to run on Chrome?

A: We are focused on creating the use case in which everything is a Web application, but hopefully we can do more in the future.

How does Chrome handle peripherals? Can it print?

A: Most keyboards, cameras, phones, etc., will work. In terms of printing…yes, Chrome OS will print and we’re working hard to make that possible.

What is Chrome’s strategic position for Google?

A: [Brin]: Call us dumb businessmen, but we really focus on user needs rather than focus on business strategies. We believe that the Web platform is a much simpler way of computing for individuals to use, and that’s a very important need in the market right now. That’s what we’re trying to fulfill.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091119/a-first-look-at-googles-chrome-os-on-thursday/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091104/cisco-posts-lower-profit/ http://allthingsd.com/20091104/cisco-posts-lower-profit/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:15:02 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=28198 As its recent buying binge–three acquisitions in October, alone–suggests, Cisco’s business is in decent shape these days. Posting earnings after market close Wednesday, Cisco reported a fiscal first-quarter profit of $1.8 billion, or 30 cents a share, compared with a profit of $2.2 billion, or 37 cents a share, for the year-earlier period. Sales were $9.02 billion, down from $10.331 billion the company managed last year.

Excluding one-time items, Cisco (CSCO) said it earned 36 cents a share, down from 42 cents a share in the same period last year. Still, that was better than the consensus estimate. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected the company to deliver a profit of 31 cents a share on sales of $8.745 billion.

“Building off what we saw as a clear tipping point in Q4, our Q1 results continued to reflect strong sequential growth trends that meet or exceed expectations during normal economic times,” CEO John Chambers said in a statement.

“We view the improving economic outlook, combined with solid execution on our growth strategy, as creating unparalleled opportunity to drive more value into the core of the network,” Chambers continued. “Simply said, we believe that key market transitions across collaboration, virtualization and video will drive productivity and growth in network loads for the next decade, and are evolving even faster than expected.”

At $24.20, shares in the company are trading up nearly four percent on the news.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091104/cisco-posts-lower-profit/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091103/acadia/ http://allthingsd.com/20091103/acadia/#comments Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:47:31 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=28085 The long-rumored data center partnership between Cisco, EMC and VMware is at last a reality. The three companies have formed a new joint venture called Acadia. Its purpose: To sell and support V-Block, an integrated data center product that combines Cisco’s (CSCO) Unified Computing System, EMC’s (EMC) storage equipment, and VMWare’s (VMW) virtualization technology.

With V-Block, clients can build “private clouds” from which to draw computing resources. It’s an ambitious effort designed to capture a bigger piece of the IT infrastructure market by offering large unified systems designed to handle most of a business’s computing needs. As Cisco CEO John Chambers noted earlier today, the goal here is to more effectively target the market for cloud infrastructure and services, a market that could be worth as much as $350 billion.

It’s also a market loaded with with fierce competitors, IBM (IBM) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) among them. Not that this worries Chambers much. “Will this change the industry?” he asked during a conference call today. “Time will tell. I believe that it will be the partnership that people will look back on and say it changed the data center and clouds forever.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091103/acadia/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091028/running-windows-programs-on-macs/ http://allthingsd.com/20091028/running-windows-programs-on-macs/#comments Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:57:15 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://mailbox.allthingsd.com/?p=479 If I purchased an Apple Mac that runs both Apple’s OS and Microsoft Windows, is there a way to move my Windows files and applications over to the Mac side? If that was done, would those applications need to be run in Windows? Is there a way to “convert” them so they could run under the Apple OS?

A: Windows programs cannot be “converted” to run directly in the Mac operating system, which is called Snow Leopard. But, if you use virtualization software like Parallels or VMware fusion, and install Windows, then a Windows program like Microsoft Outlook can run simultaneously with your Mac programs. Technically, you are running it in Windows, but the two operating systems are active at the same time. With both of these virtualization products, you can even hide the entire Windows desktop, so that the Windows program you are running simply occupies a window on your Mac like any Mac program does. You don’t even notice that Windows is running.

In the case of files you created in Windows, the situation is even simpler. Most of the common types of files consumers use—including Microsoft Office documents, MP3 music files, MP4 video files, JPG picture files, text files, Adobe PDF files, and others—can be run in native Macintosh programs without conversion and without the need to run Windows programs. So you can just copy them to the Mac side and use them in Mac programs like iPhoto, iTunes, or the native Mac version of Microsoft Office, which uses the same file formats as the Windows version.

If you have an unusual or proprietary Windows file for which there isn’t an equivalent program on the Mac, you would run it in a Windows program, as described above.

If I am planning to upgrade a Windows XP machine to Windows 7, can I buy the upgrade copy of 7 or must I buy the full version?

A: According to Microsoft’s Web site, XP is one of the older versions of Windows upon which you can indeed indeed use the less expensive upgrade versions of Windows 7. The company’s online store says: “All editions of Windows XP and Windows Vista qualify you to upgrade. So, if you’re running either on your PC today, buy a package labeled ‘Upgrade’.”

I’ve been holding out (for what feels like forever) on purchasing a Netbook because I read that Apple was coming out with one. Can you tell me anything about when they might really begin selling them?

A: Apple executives have said repeatedly and emphatically that they don’t plan to offer a netbook, which is essentially a cheap, small laptop. Instead, Apple is widely believed to be working on a small slate or tablet device that would be controlled via a fingertip touch screen. This would be sort of like a larger iPhone or iPod Touch. The company hasn’t confirmed that such a product is in the works, but many analysts and Apple bloggers predict it will debut early next year.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the All Things Digital web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091028/running-windows-programs-on-macs/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20090827/whats-up-with-isilon-systems/ http://allthingsd.com/20090827/whats-up-with-isilon-systems/#comments Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:06:30 +0000 Eric Savitz http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=14814 Big move today in Isilon Systems (ISLN): shares of the storage systems company have jumped $1.08, or 19.9 percent, to $6.49, on volume of more than 660,000 shares, or more than 4x the daily average. Today’s rise boosts the company’s three-day rally to 33 percent.

So, what’s going on here?

Well, here’s what I know.

Chris Blessington, the company’s senior VP of marketing and communications, notes in an interview with Tech Trader Daily that management has been on the road getting the word out to investors, press, analysts and customers about the company’s big push into the virtualization market, where it is taking on NetApp (NTAP). Blessington notes that the company was in New York on Monday and Tuesday talking to potential investors in a series of meetings arranged by Needham & Co.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090827/whats-up-with-isilon-systems/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090826/arista-networks-zooms-out-with-vmware-announcement/ http://allthingsd.com/20090826/arista-networks-zooms-out-with-vmware-announcement/#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:40:13 +0000 Ben Worthen http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=14765 VMworld, the annual conference hosted by software maker VMware, is fast becoming one of the hot tech conferences, in large part because VMware’s technology has become an important selling point for tech-equipment makers like Dell (DELL) and Cisco (CSCO) Systems. There are likely to be dozens of new product announcements made at the conference, which kicks off Monday.

One company isn’t waiting. Arista Networks on Wednesday announced it has developed software for its gear that makes it easier to manage servers that run VMware’s “virtualization” software. A virtualized server can run up to 20 times the number of programs as one without the software, which is a big efficiency improvement for information-technology departments. But it’s also created a new problem: How do you keep track of everything running on these servers and make sure they can be accessed through the network, which is made up of physical devices called switches?

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090826/arista-networks-zooms-out-with-vmware-announcement/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090810/vmware-forks-over-420-million-for-springsource/ http://allthingsd.com/20090810/vmware-forks-over-420-million-for-springsource/#comments Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:22:54 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=17271

It’s certainly acquisition fever in Silicon Valley today.

After it was announced that that social networking giant Facebook had bought online content sharing start-up FriendFeed, now comes the news that VMware has purchased SpringSource, a privately held enterprise and Web application development and management cloud computing start-up.

The price? That would be $420 million in cash and stock.

While the blogosphere–including BoomTown–will inevitably find the FaceFeed deal more riveting, this one is obviously more important.

With the purchase of San Mateo, Ca.-based SpringSource, Palo Alto, Calif.-based, VMware (VMW)–which is a top player in the virtualization space–is adding to its cloud-computing application-management strength and its ties to the open-source community.

Said VMware in a press release about the five-year-old SpringSource buy:

“VMware will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource’s stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.”

Here’s the full press release from VMware (plus, here is a link to a blog post by SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson:

VMware to Acquire SpringSource

Company Adds Modern Application Platform to Cloud Infrastructure Strategy

PALO ALTO, Calif., August 10, 2009–VMware, Inc., (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced a major step forward in its journey to help simplify IT by entering into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held SpringSource, a leader in enterprise and web application development and management. VMware and SpringSource plan to deliver compelling new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures.

“Today’s modern computing environments are moving to an application and data-centric world powered by state of the art virtualized and cloud computing platforms,” said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer, VMware. “The combination of SpringSource and VMware capitalizes on this shift and places us right at the intersection of the most important forces in the software market today–virtualization, modern application frameworks and cloud computing.”

VMware will acquire SpringSource for approximately $362 million in cash and equity plus the assumption of approximately $58 million of unvested stock and options. The acquisition has been approved by SpringSource’s stockholders and is expected to close in the third quarter of 2009, subject to customary closing conditions.

SpringSource is the innovator and driving force behind some of the most popular and fastest growing open source developer communities, application frameworks, runtimes, and management tools. In just five years, SpringSource has established a presence in a majority of the Global 2000 companies, and is rapidly delivering a new generation of commercial products and services. VMware plans to continue to support the principles that have made SpringSource solutions popular: the interoperability of SpringSource software with a wide variety of middleware software, and the open source model that is important to the developer community.

Together, VMware and SpringSource plan to further innovate and develop integrated Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that can be hosted at customer datacenters or at cloud service providers. These solutions will allow customers to rapidly build new enterprise and web applications and run and manage these applications in the same dynamic, scalable and cost-efficient vSphere-based internal or external clouds that can also host and manage their existing applications, providing an evolutionary path to the future. Forrester Research expects the emerging and rapidly growing PaaS market to expand to $15B by 2016. (Platform-As-A-Service Market Sizing, July 13, 2009)

“VMware has led the modernization of datacenter infrastructures through innovative virtualization and cloud architectures, providing customers with cost savings, agility and choice,” said Rod Johnson, chief executive officer, SpringSource. “The SpringSource team and community are committed to revolutionizing the way companies build, run and manage applications. By combining forces, I’m confident that we’ll be able to deliver a set of truly remarkable solutions that dramatically simplify enterprise IT.”

Background on SpringSource

SpringSource is at the forefront of “lean software,” a concept that is being rapidly adopted by enterprises focused on dramatically cutting cost and complexity, increasing productivity, and accelerating the delivery of high-quality, business-critical applications. SpringSource’s offerings and their underlying open-source technologies are uniquely able to address a wide range of corporate, web and commercial applications through a dynamic, yet consistent architecture. SpringSource counts a majority of the Global 2000 as current customers, and has a rapidly growing business delivering support, training and commercial software based on the well-known open source technologies and communities led by SpringSource:

The Spring Framework is the leading enterprise Java programming model; currently supporting half of all enterprise Java projects and used by approximately two million developers worldwide. The Spring Framework provides a high productivity, lightweight programming environment that makes applications portable across open source and commercial application server environments from IBM, Oracle and others.

Apache Tomcat is the world’s most widely used Java application server, deployed at more than 60% of all organizations running Java server applications. SpringSource is the key contributor to and maintainer of Tomcat and is responsible for more than 95% of the bug fixes over the past two years.

SpringSource leads Groovy and Grails, a rapidly growing dynamic language and Web application framework, each with more than 70,000 downloads per month. Together, Groovy and Grails deliver the rapid application productivity of Ruby on Rails for web applications, while maintaining skill-set and infrastructure compatibility with Java Virtual Machine (JVM) environments.

With more than 3,500 deployments worldwide, SpringSource’s Hyperic application monitoring and management tools are recognized as among the leading open source offerings in the space. In March, SpringSource/Hyperic was named one of Gartner’s “Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing Management and Professional Services.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090810/vmware-forks-over-420-million-for-springsource/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090724/vmware-gets-a-lift/ http://allthingsd.com/20090724/vmware-gets-a-lift/#comments Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:01:30 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=22058 Shares of VMware are on the rise this morning, spiking seven percent thanks to some decent earnings.

On Thursday, the virtualization software firm reported a second-quarter profit of 20 cents a share, topping the 19 cents projected by analysts. And while sales fell to $455.7 million, they still exceeded the $452.4 million the Street had been expecting.

In a conference call with analysts, VMware (VMW) execs warned not to read to much into that though, saying they are still cautious about the economy.

“It is clear the global economy has not yet recovered and there is still some uncertainty,” CEO Paul Maritz cautioned. “In a recent survey of 150 CIOs of large businesses, 40 percent expected some downward revision in their budgets in the second half of 2009. That said, there were some signs that customers were moving on with business, even if it was buying just enough just in time.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090724/vmware-gets-a-lift/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090427/entrepreneur-turned-vc-satish-dharmaraj-speaks-about-his-very-first-vc-investment/ http://allthingsd.com/20090427/entrepreneur-turned-vc-satish-dharmaraj-speaks-about-his-very-first-vc-investment/#comments Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:00:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=12690

Little known factoid: Every time a penny drops onto a start-up, a venture capitalist gets his wings.

Well, OK, not so much, but it’s one way to look at it.

An example of that, though, is this video interview I did with serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Satish Dharmaraj, who has been on the ground floor of a number of tech start-ups–such as Zimbra, which sold to Yahoo (YHOO) for $350 million in late 2007–and has now made his first investment as a new VC.

It’s in virtualization company VMOps, which was founded last year. VMOps, according to its Web site, “develops software that allows companies to launch an elastic computing cloud and offer it as a service to end-users.”

Dharmaraj left Yahoo early this year.

But he decided not to start another company, instead opting to take a spot as a partner at Redpoint Ventures. There, he is focusing on business software, the enterprise arena and infrastructure.

It’s an interesting move for an entrepreneur like him since way too few VCs have started companies and because it will be interesting to see how a more experienced operator like Dharmaraj does.

Here’s the interview, where we talk about all that and more:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090427/entrepreneur-turned-vc-satish-dharmaraj-speaks-about-his-very-first-vc-investment/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090316/cisco-to-rivals-tonight-you-sleep-in-hell/ http://allthingsd.com/20090316/cisco-to-rivals-tonight-you-sleep-in-hell/#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:06:48 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=14963 Cisco has finally crossed the Rubicon.

Long a partner to the big server makers, the networking equipment giant today became a competitor, announcing an aggressive push into the server market. No longer content to peddle switches and routers alone, Cisco (CSCO) is now selling what it calls a unified computing system–a full-blown data center solution that encompasses everything from servers and storage to connectivity and virtualization services. The move is a brazen challenge to IBM (IBM), HP (HPQ) and other vendor partners with whom Cisco had once cooperated. “We’re going to compete with HP,” Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior told The Wall Street Journal. “I don’t want to sugarcoat that. There is bound to be change in the landscape of who you compete with and who you partner with.”

Of course, but “change” is rather a tame word for a potentially market-disrupting expansion of Cisco’s business. This is a power grab, plain and simple. A game-changer. Cisco is offering an integrated approach to what’s long been a multivendor arrangement. Whereas before, CIOs would purchase servers from one company, virtualization software from another and networking from yet another, the networking giant is proposing they now purchase them together from a single vendor: Cisco. And that puts it on a collision course with IBM and HP.

“H-P, IBM and Cisco are the new four horsemen of IT infrastructure and they are all fighting to increase their share of the enterprise IT wallet,” Forrester Research analyst James Staten told Marketwatch. “They have all benefited from growth of the market and by taking share from weaker players, but are now needing to go after each other’s strongholds to keep growing. They are definitely leveraging technology evolutions that drive unification, so customers win through this competition, but it’s going to be a bloody fight.”

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