Bill Roth

IBM and the Apache Foundation announced that IBM is contributing the Cloudscape product it acquired from Informix to the Apache open source program. The project name for the effort will be "Derby." The contribution amounts to more than 500,000 lines of Java code. In related news IBM also clarified its Linux distribution strategy. An IBM press release said that Derby will be "a Java-based relational database with a two megabyte footprint that is fully embeddable and requires zero administration support." In conversations with IBM executives, they repeatedly emphasized that Cloudscape/Derby is targeted at embedded database usage. IBM already embeds Cloudscape in many of its Java products. "We have 100 Java products," said Scott Handy, IBM's director of world-wide Linux strategy and market development. The majority of those products already had Cloudscape embedded. Th... (more)

CIA Falls for Cloud Computing in a Big Way

Cloud Computing Expo on Ulitzer The most anticipated talk of the day yesterday, at the 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, was by the deputy CIO of the CIA, Jill Singer. Her talk was entitled, "Enterprise Cloud Computing, the Infrastructure’s Final Revenge." She acknowledged the problem with defining Cloud Computing, and then went on to give her paragraph-length definition of “the cloud”. Her talk focused on the part of the Cloud behind the firewall. “Today’s CIO must increase the flexibility of the infrastructure,” said Singer. “Today’s CIO must manage cost to... (more)

LinuxWorld, San Francisco: "We Lead App Server Market on Linux," Says BEA

BEA was named the application server market leader in a recent IDC report entitled "Worldwide and North American Application Server Software Platform 2003." BEA was named the leader in application servers on Linux in terms of license revenue and maintenance fees for the third year running. The report paints a picture of the Linux application server market in the throes of hyper-growth. BEA's license revenue grew 166% year over year. IBM and Oracle saw 148% and 122% growth in their Linux-based application server business, respectively. Dave Cotter, Director of Developer Marketing a... (more)

Cloud Expo: Way Cool Stuff and Seven Versions of the Same Company

I have a love/hate relationship with trade shows. On the one hand, I love them. I love meeting customers and prospects, and I love the shameless boosterism that it entails. On the other hand, as someone who has to manage to a budget and deliver ROI, I hate them. The ROI never works out. From a numbers point of view, they are nearly always a waste of money. (Except in Europe. I am still looking into that one). We recently attended the Cloud Expo/Virtualization Expo in Santa Clara, put on by my old friends at SYS-CON. The traffic was good, and the content was too. In the past, I h... (more)

LinuxWorld, San Francisco: More Buzz Around Beehive

BEA announced yesterday that additional companies will endorse its "Beehive" open source effort. Beehive received support from Hewlett-Packard, Red Hat, and from the JOnAS and Apache Geronimo application server projects. The project, which was first announced May 19th 2004, purports to be an "easy-to-use, open source foundation for building service-oriented architecture (SOA) and enterprise Java-based applications," according to BEA's Web site. In fact, it is the source code for a large portion of BEA's application development framework for its WebLogic Workshop product. BEA annou... (more)