InformationWeek Stories by Art Wittmann

InformationWeek Stories by Art Wittmannhttp://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2012-12-10T08:00:00ZDoes Microsoft Really Need To Make Its Own Hardware?Without some fundamental added value, Microsoft's hardware offerings are likely to go the way of the Zune.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/does-microsoft-really-need-to-make-its-o/240143953?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authors  <div id="inlineGreenPromoTop"> <div class="greenBand"></div> <div class="inlineGreenPromoContent"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/121012/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1353/smallcov.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green - Dec. 10, 2012" title="InformationWeek Green - Dec. 10, 2012" align="left" class="greenIssueImage" /></a> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/121012/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/graphics_library/misc/Green_leaf_88x88.jpg" alt="InformationWeek Green" title="InformationWeek Green" align="right" class="greenLeaf" /></a> <div class="greenPromoText"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/121012/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download the entire Dec. 10, 2012, issue of InformationWeek</a>, distributed in an all-digital format as part of our Green Initiative (Registration required.) <center><div class="innerGreenPromoText" align="center">We will plant a tree for each of the first 5,000 downloads.</div></center> </div> </div> <div class="greenBand"></div> </div>    Steve Ballmer says Microsoft is seriously considering <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/windows8/ballmer-hardware-key-to-microsofts-futur/240142950">making more of its own hardware</a>. It seems that even with the old guard of IBM, Dell, Toshiba, Sony and HP, and the new guard of Samsung, Lenovo, LG and Asus, and all those white-box manufacturers, Microsoft just can't find a reliable design partner. Have we come full circle to where we started 50 years ago, when hardware and software were inextricably intertwined and necessarily provided by the same company? Looking at the actions of some of the world's largest software houses, you could easily come to that conclusion. Microsoft now makes Surface, and it has made the Xbox for years. Google bought Motorola's phone division, probably for its patent portfolio but also to make the Droids it thinks people want. Google also makes the Chromebook. Even Oracle had to have its own hardware division, though the performance of Sun doesn't bear out the wisdom of that move. Its real play is purpose-built machines such as Exadata and Exalogic. For the moment, put aside the question of whether the Oracles of the world are doing the right thing and focus on the trend as it relates to end users. Such moves start with Apple envy. After all, if Microsoft works with partners such as Intel or an ARM licensee to create reference designs, it would be hard to believe that manufacturers wouldn't help make prototypes. Microsoft, Intel and system makers have collaborated to good effect in the past. Ultrabooks are a prime example: While they're not revolutionary, Ultrabooks address most every problem users have with laptops, from weight to battery life to processing power to boot time. They're a major improvement over last-generation notebooks and netbooks. Intel produced the reference designs, and a few months later systems showed up from a variety of manufacturers. So what's Microsoft's problem with that model? The biggest problem is that it's not what Apple does, and Apple's share price has outperformed Microsoft's consistently. It's not that Microsoft's products aren't good enough and that better hardware integration is the answer. The problem is that they're not good enough to displace entrenched products tied to an ecosystem investment, namely, Apple's iTunes and App Store. Without some fundamental added value, Microsoft's tablets are likely to go the way of the Zune. That's not because Zune wasn't a solid product; it might have been terrific, I never tried it. And the reason I never tried it is because I have an investment in iTunes and I know the iPod/iPad/ iPhone interface for playing music. What's Microsoft's big value add? For businesses it might be compatibility with Office. For consumers I have no idea what it would be -- Xbox compatibility? This Apple-Microsoft dynamic reminds me of Ford's breakthrough with the Mustang. Chevy was a close follower with the Camaro, and both were big sellers. Dodge made the Dart and Charger, both technically great cars that never really caught on. Microsoft's third to market here. It had better have something more important than its <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/windows8/5-ways-microsoft-can-save-windows-8/240142960">Metro technology</a> if it wants to compete, no matter who makes the hardware. 2012-11-21T09:06:00ZHP's Identity Crisis ContinuesHP's problems go much deeper than poor sales in core businesses and some alleged accounting mischief by Autonomy.http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/hps-identity-crisis-continues/240142477?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsI'm not sure what's worse, the HP earning calls where Meg Whitman just reports progress on HP's slow slide into becoming Dell, or the ones where she drops bombshells like saying Autonomy messed with its books before HP purchased it. Either way, it's a melodrama that mostly confirms the opinion many investors have long held: The road to profitability will lead to a much smaller company -- and one that hopefully has some focus. And not just any focus, either. A smaller HP must find a niche to own, much as IBM hung its hat on high-end services and consulting. But that type of deliberation doesn't seem to be happening. At one time, HP talked about secure, cloud-based information management. Company officials actually referred to it as "anytime, anywhere access," but they were, at least in part, implying cloud. That effort would be led by Autonomy, bolstered by technology from ArcSight, Fortify and TippingPoint, and further enabled by HP services, networking, servers and storage. It wasn't a bad story. Except, that is, that it relied almost completely on software -- something HP has never been known to do well. The way around that is pretty simple: Buy good software companies and do your level best to leave them alone culturally. The road to a cohesive product portfolio is certainly longer than if you have a history of good software lifecycle management, but not as long as attempting to grow that competence from the ground up. To that end, the acquisitions of ArcSight, Fortify and TippingPoint (part of HP's 3Com purchase) all happened in 2010, followed by Vertica and Autonomy in 2011. The good news is that HP's software business is now in fact doing pretty well, growing 14% year over year for the last quarter with an operating margin of 27%. Software services revenue was way up, with a 48% jump. Networking sales improved a bit too. Unfortunately, that's about all the good news. Printing revenue is down, on both the consumer and commercial sides. PC sales are slumping in both markets, too. Yes, these are tough times for all PC vendors, but even so, HP's losses here outpace the average by about 50%. Server and storage sales are also down. But it was the business critical computing, or BCC, systems unit that took the worst hit. No matter that Oracle was smacked down in court over unilaterally pulling support for HP's Itanium; smart IT managers are beating an orderly path to the exits. So in terms of a strategy, HP will still focus on enterprise software and wait a while to see what happens with Windows 8 -- which is what HP management appears to be doing both for servers and desktops/laptops. There seems to be great hope that the HP/Microsoft partnership will bear sufficient fruit to show that HP should still be in the business of making end user devices. HP can bet on it; I wouldn't. In an overall sense, Whitman, while not being particularly bold, seems to be methodically cleaning house. One can argue that current austerity measures are too severe, but buying trends tend to indicate she doesn't have much choice. With no acquisitions in 2012, it's been a year to play out the hand she's been dealt and hopefully get some good news as Windows 8 hits the market.   <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy. </div> </div>   The Autonomy debacle does bring one significant question to the fore, however. After a string of bad purchases and worse staffing decisions, why on earth is Ray Lane still there as board chairman? Coming to HP through its acquisition of EDS is a somewhat dubious start in itself, given the lackluster performance of that acquisition. Though Lane wasn't board chairman at the time of the Palm acquisition, he certainly played out every bizarre possibility with the company -- including attempts to put the PalmOS into the public domain, one assumes in hopes that it would become another Linux. Few thought much of the Palm buy at the time, and while the technology had some merit, the assumption that HP could muscle it into competition with Android, iOS and Blackberry showed a fundamental misunderstanding of what HP customers want from HP. Poor handling of Mark Hurd's firing, a board spying scandal and the ultimate choice of Leo Apotheker was another bizarre string of actions, particularly given that Apotheker had no experience on the consumer or hardware side of the business. Again, the vision that Lane and Apotheker surely must have shared was that of a leaner HP that followed the mold of IBM, serving the needs of elite enterprise customers. The problem is, HP had no business even thinking about making this play given the gaping holes in its product portfolio. And now we find out that on Lane's watch Autonomy was allegedly cooking its books. While that's somewhat shocking, you didn't have to look too hard at the time to find analyst after analyst saying that HP paid too much for that buy. If they could see it, why couldn't Lane and his team? All this seems to add up to HP's board viewing HP the way they want to see it rather than the way it really is. That dysmorphia has led to the horrible decisions I've mentioned. Prior to 2012, HP typically made three to six major acquisitions per year. This year, it's made none. It's doubtful that the company has all the building blocks for whatever management's vision might be for the "new HP." It's also doubtful that growing competency and products internally is the right move, so it's hard to see why it isn't making some acquisitions. Is it the timidity that comes from being insanely wrong on some of its largest purchases, or is it internal disagreements? I have no idea. But if I were a major shareholder, I think I might want a new chairman. Download the new issue of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/101512mr/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Must Reads</a>, a compendium of our best recent coverage on IT-as-a-service. It includes articles on cloud computing myths, how to build an IT service catalog, security problems, and more. (Free registration required.) 2012-11-15T09:06:00ZAs AMD Explores Options, Intel Pain LoomsMoore's Law is changing the rules of the game again. This time AMD and Intel could both be on the losing team.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240134977?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsAMD has retained JPMorgan Chase to explore options for the struggling microprocessor company, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/14/us-amd-jpmorgan-idUSBRE8AC14Z20121114">Reuters reports</a>. These options range from an outright purchase of AMD to a spinoff of parts of the company, or a sale of some of the company's patent portfolio. No matter how it goes down, turning to the markets in this way illustrates just how tough business has been for AMD lately. AMD is currently denying Reuters' talk of an outright sale. AMD is a perpetual underdog, and a scrappy one at that. It recently announced what it calls an <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/29/us-amd-microservers-idUSBRE89S18O20121029">ambidextrous approach</a> to its core CPU market, developing both for the x86 instruction set as well as licensing ARM's technology. Sections of AMD's business are reported to be doing fairly well. Embedded chips for gaming and signage and the company's video coprocessors are doing well, analysts say. Its embrace of ARM is so new it's impossible to tell yet if it will bear fruit. So why hire JPMorgan now? One reason is <a href="https://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:AMD">AMD's stock price</a>. It's under $2 per share right now, and that leaves AMD with little hope of making acquisitions or starting new large-scale products unless it gets a cash infusion from a patent sale or a spinout. The company hasn't seen its stock price this low since early 2009. The cash situation is so dire that AMD has shut down research centers and laid off workers during the past few weeks. Announcing its new ARM strategy for servers in this climate will leave most watchers concerned about AMD's ability to execute. Another reason to explore alternatives now is AMD's also-ran status in pretty much every category in which it competes. While the company has solid technology and can find buyers at the right price, stars like Nvidia outshine AMD in its market specialty. Even when AMD scores big -- like being the chosen CPU in the world's fastest supercomputer, Titan at the Oakridge National Lab -- AMD gets overshadowed by others. In this case, while AMD delivers the CPU, Nvidia provides the coprocessor horsepower with its Kepler compute architecture. Investors want AMD to dominate something. Who are the likely buyers for AMD? IBM is always a good bet for patents; Intel could be too. You could speculate wildly that if Google thinks Motorola was a good deal, AMD should make at least as much sense. Apple has made noises in recent weeks (or perhaps more accurately, others have made noise for Apple) about dissatisfaction with Intel. However, the popular thinking is that Apple may prefer to consolidate on its own ARM-based chips rather than continue to develop for two chipsets. A move like that is years away, but there's obvious appeal for Apple. With AMD setting out to gain expertise in ARM, buying AMD could be an attractive option. Hopefully Apple execs will consider the fortunes of others who've gone a similar route -- including HP and Compaq (which brought HP the Alpha chip) and Oracle with Sun (lipstick on a pig, anyone?). Nvidia or a company like it is another possible buyer. At about five times AMD's size, Nvidia could look to broaden its portfolio and head directly after Intel and ARM. AMD does have an excellent team of engineers.   <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy. </div> </div>   I don't think that's likely to happen. There's one other market force at work here -- one that is ironically also affecting Intel, whose stock price has also taken a beating during the past eight months. Moore's Law has a way of changing what's important. For a couple decades it was clock speed -- until continuing that push meant creating chips that ran way too hot to be practical. Then the race was for core density and on-chip cache. After a decade or so, that race has given way to putting more system components on the chip, such as memory and I/O controllers. But even as these things make their way onto the chip, the single core as a unit of processing is often bigger than workloads demand. On the server side, so-called microserver architectures are increasingly interesting. If you can fit (and power) fifty microservers into a space that could have accommodated eight or sixteen cores on one or two chips, perhaps there really isn't a need for virtualization. On the consumer side, unless you're a gamer, the need for performance has largely been met. CPUs now spend most of their time waiting for the rest of the computing architecture to give them something to do. Power consumption, form factor and unique capabilities on the chip are more interesting. And here's the part that ARM understands that I don't think AMD and Intel do. Because the gate count on a chip is so high, and performance is so good, device manufacturers in the consumer arena will give up some performance in order to customize systems on a chip to their own liking. If AMD and Intel want to compete in the consumer market, they'll have to give up control of the ultimate end design to the manufacturers. If they don't, ARM will be all too happy to eat their lunch. Download the new issue of <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/101512mr/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Must Reads</a>, a compendium of our best recent coverage on IT-as-a-service. It includes articles on cloud computing myths, how to build an IT service catalog, security problems, and more. (Free registration required.)2012-11-07T08:00:00ZWhat's Killing APM?App performance management is seen as less important than it was two years ago, partly because vendors haven't kept up.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240012606?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsIt's not precisely clear that the cloud is killing application performance management, but something is. It could be that cash- strapped IT teams whose application portfolios are changing rapidly can't give APM the time and resources to do it right, so they're using APM, at least as we classically have seen it, less and less. Then there are the tools themselves, which are notoriously hard to set up. And there's the rise of software-as-a-service and apps running from public or private cloud infrastructures. If you had a working APM methodology a few years ago, it has been broken by the use of cloud apps. Whatever the cause, our October 2012 survey on APM shows the tech is now seen as less important than it was in our August 2010 survey (our full report will come later this year). Asked about the importance of APM in 2010, 50% of respondents said it was crucially important. That percentage is down to 42%. At the same time, survey respondents say their users are more tolerant of outages than they used to be. In 2010, 44% were extremely or somewhat tolerant of outages; today 47% are. They have to be: Those experiencing outages on a daily basis went from 8% in 2010 to 10% now, and those experiencing monthly outages went from 24% in 2010 to 27% now. This isn't a result most app managers would be proud of. Assuming that our findings about outages aren't news to anyone, why is APM falling out of favor? In 2010, the reasons given for not implementing APM were: insufficient expertise to use the product (50%), high cost (41%), and it takes too much staff time to do it right (32%). Those are still the top three reasons for not doing APM, but the order has changed. Now a lack staff time heads the list, followed by a dearth of expertise and the cost. As app environments become more dynamic and lifecycles for apps shorten, the substantial effort required for APM isn't worth the already iffy results it provides. And as teams slack on deployments, they get even poorer results, further devaluing APM tools. In 2010, 18% of survey respondents said their APM tool exceeded their expectations, down to 10% today. Today, there's a five-point rise in those saying APM products are falling below expectations. In a more detailed question, customer satisfaction with a range of APM functionality was down. This would all be bad enough news if the APM product dissatisfaction was isolated to IT pros. But the dissatisfaction with executive dashboards is even more acute. In 2010, 21% said they were extremely satisfied and 41% somewhat satisfied with such dashboards; that's down to 12% and 32%, respectively. It's tempting to blame the cloud, but the fraction of apps reported to be running "in the public cloud" is about the same as it was in 2010. It appears that APM simply doesn't provide the bang for the buck, and so not using it isn't seen as an impediment to adopting applications of any sort. We asked specifically whether the lack of APM tools is a barrier to wider use of cloud apps. In 2010, 49% said it wasn't a barrier; 61% say it isn't a barrier today. One area where APM tools definitely have let IT pros down is in keeping up with complexity. As apps take a more service-oriented design, the task of setting up an APM tool to give anything close to meaningful information is much harder than it used to be. As one survey respondent put it: "There is a major conundrum related to the real-world use of APM tools. They work quite well in a static infrastructure environment. Unfortunately, current APM tools do not work well in dynamic Web services, and public and private cloud-based infrastructures, since they depend on statically defined relationships. By the time these relationships are defined to the APM tool, they will in all probability be obsolete, thereby negating the value and relevance of the APM tool." The failure of APM software vendors to keep up with user needs is breathtaking. Because the nature of app life cycles has changed so profoundly, APM as a third-party product has outlived its usefulness for most environments. Service component deployments with their own self-health reporting capability should be preferred.  <center> <div id="printfeaturePDFpromo"><div class="printfeaturePDFCover"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9216/Virtualization/informationweek-november-12-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1350/smallcov2.jpg" alt="InformationWeek: Nov. 12, 2012 Issue" title="InformationWeek: Nov. 12, 2012 Issue" /></a></div> <div class="printfeaturePDFCopy"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/25/9216/Virtualization/informationweek-november-12-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download a free PDF of InformationWeek magazine</a> (registration required)</div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> </div> </center>  2012-10-31T08:00:00ZEnterprise Buyers To Carriers: We're Not ThrilledThe 4G network is fast and mostly adequate for existing enterprise needs, but that's not stopping IT pros from worrying about future viability. Here's how providers and customers see the issues.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240009699?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsWhen our partners atLight Reading came to us with the idea of fielding almost identical surveys to users of enterprise services and carrier providers on the future of mobility, we were at once intrigued and skeptical. We knew InformationWeek's readers would be happy to tell us what they want from mobile services, but could Light Reading really get carriers to say where they're headed? Turns out it could and did. The results from 230 IT professionals involved in determining, procuring, or managing mobile services and from 67 mobile carriers show huge gulfs between what users want and what carriers think they want--and can provide. (The full report will be available in mid-November at <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com" target="_blank">InformationWeek Reports</a>) Surprisingly, very few carriers (9%) said they want to see data prices increase. The largest chunk (50%) would prefer to implement data caps to create a more manageable service. Some 21% said prices are too high, and 20% said they're at the right level. Not so surprisingly, data caps aren't popular with IT pros; 40% were OK with current prices but objected to data caps, and another 50% said prices are simply too high regardless of data caps. When we asked IT pros how they feel about existing caps, 43% said they foresee problems and 37% said they already have had issues. Ninety percent of customers questioning pricing and 80% questioning limits on service don't indicate a happy user base--and data caps just make things worse. If consumers hit such a cap, they can decide on the spot if they want to pony up more money for another chunk of data. But if corporate users hit a cap, they generally don't have permission to whip out the credit card for another 100 GB or so. And even if they did, Murphy's Law says you'll hit your data cap at the worst possible time, like when you're trying to book an order in front of a customer. The result is the need for fairly complex policies and usage monitoring that will come with their own costs. For their part, carriers aren't just trying to drive more revenue--30% of respondents said they're trying to do just that, but another 47% said they want to provide better service and 23% want to reduce network congestion. Clearly, giving unlimited data doesn't mean there's an unlimited supply of bandwidth. At some point, something has to give. Enterprise users expect that their employees will adopt tablets and smartphones somewhat faster than carriers do--though the differences in expected rate of growth are not by any means striking. What's more striking is the difference in opinion of the existing network. Roughly half of both carriers (47%) and enterprise customers (52%) said that 4G networks are adequate but need improvement. A quarter of IT pros said the current 4G network is "very good and meets our needs," while a much larger 40% of carriers said that. Some 20% of IT pros said the existing infrastructure is barely cutting it, while only 10% of carriers come to the same conclusion. This disparity seems like a formula for customer disappointment. IT pros see two areas in particular where existing networks don't cut it. First, for rural/remote usage, where data coverage can be spotty to nonexistent--46% of survey respondents said this is their biggest issue. The second biggest concern, at 29%, is with data caps and avoiding excessive overage fees. There's not much to be done about the first issue, but in the second case, both carriers and IT pros see Wi-Fi as an off-load medium and a way to expand network coverage. Only 12% of the carriers in our survey don't plan to use Wi-Fi this way; just 26% of IT pros said they preferred not to use Wi-Fi where they can to augment 4G services. As carriers improve their mobile networks and enterprise users rely more heavily on apps that require wireless connectivity, how confident is each group that the 4G wireless infrastructure will do the job? Not surprisingly, more carriers are "very confident" than are enterprise planners (38% vs. 15%). However, 70% of enterprise customers said they're at least somewhat confident, while 56% of carriers said the same. The rest--just 15% of enterprise pros and 6% of carrier pros--see a very bleak picture for carrier wireless networking. 2012-10-23T08:36:00ZBusiness Users Satisfied With IT? Think AgainIT has reason to worry, says InformationWeek's new IT Perception Survey that compares attitudes of technology and business pros.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240009535?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authors <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/20-great-ideas-to-steal/240006553"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/860/01_Intro_tn.jpg" alt="20 Great Ideas To Steal" title="20 Great Ideas To Steal" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">20 Great Ideas To Steal</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>  It's been said that IT is the Rodney Dangerfield of the enterprise: IT just gets no respect. To be fair, it's hard to get respect when you're working with a subsistence budget and bound by rules that outside competitors, like SaaS providers, can ignore with impunity. This isn't news. But quantifying how IT thinks it's doing versus how the business really views IT's performance, that's a tougher job, one we tackled with our IT Perception Survey. By comparing 246 IT and 136 non-IT respondents, we found out where business customers are in sync with their IT teams, and where they're not. We asked about everything from the overall importance of internal IT operations to business success to IT's role in innovation to user satisfaction with IT projects. Our goal was to give you insight into where business leaders sympathize, and where they don't. After all, when business units are evaluating new applications, it's tough to compete with SaaS vendors that will provision services within minutes of getting a signed contract--or even with a few mouse clicks. Meanwhile, IT's still figuring out who will be on the team to evaluate the request, weigh options, choose the system that will best meet business needs, find money in the budget, and eventually integrate it into the existing infrastructure. The days of taking weeks or months to spin up a new server may be well behind us, but compared with going to a vendor website and clicking "buy," IT still takes its time and seems slow to respond. As a result, most business pros are not particularly thrilled with how IT delivers on projects. In fact, just 18% say they're very or completely satisfied with quality, timeliness, and cost. What's worse is that IT pros think that number is much higher--29% believe business colleagues are very or completely satisfied. It's like wearing brown shoes with a tuxedo and thinking you're the coolest guy in the room. Don't kid yourself--delayed projects, cost overruns, or even just producing results that look ill-conceived and clunky compared with cool end user apps has got your customers thinking there must be a better way.   <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy. </div> </div>   Sure, there are a thousand factors they aren't considering. Things like compliance, integration, security, all that stuff that's just plain hard to get right, and that will invariably come back to bite any application--no matter how cool--that hasn't been built with an eye to such requirements. But all too often, that's a problem for later. Here's a quick look at some survey findings: -- More than twice as many business users call themselves not at all satisfied with project quality, timeliness, and cost (20%) as IT believes (9% said their business side customers feel this way). <a target="_blank" href="http://clicktotweet.com/a9p8r">(Tweet this stat)</a> -- We'd be dead in the water without IT: 60% of IT pros agree, only 43% of biz pros see it that way. <a target="_blank" href="http://clicktotweet.com/dicya"> Tweet this stat)</a> -- How important will the IT team be in two years? Nine percent of IT pros say less important, only 4% of business respondents agree. They want you to succeed. <a target="_blank" href="http://clicktotweet.com/Kjc6t">(Tweet this stat)</a> -- When asked how important IT is to innovation, 32% of IT pros say extremely important. Only 25% of business pros agree. <a target="_blank" href="http://clicktotweet.com/7m1RF">(Tweet this stat)</a> -- When asked, Is your IT group more innovative than peers at other companies, 69% of IT pros say they are, and 62% of business respondents agree. <a target="_blank" href="http://clicktotweet.com/bevb6">(Tweet this stat)</a> -- Over the past two years, has IT become more important to the organization? IT pros are more likely to say yes, by a 56% to 51% margin. <a target="_blank" href="http://clicktotweet.com/29N7P">(Tweet this stat)</a> You can get full results in <a target="_blank" href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/83/9062/IT-Business-Strategy/research-2012-it-perception-survey.html?cid=soceng_1012">our report.</a> Our conclusions? More IT teams should be polling business customers to see how they're doing. Perception is reality, and you're not the only game in town. The second conclusion is a bit more difficult to discern from our data, but a number of questions reveal that IT policies and practices are simply unknown to business-side partners. For example, when asked whether IT has budget specifically earmarked for new and innovative business projects, 17% of business respondents had no clue. One thing's for sure: Being opaque about how you do things is not helpful in winning business-side champions. No one has had it easy over the past five years. Be open and honest about where your IT strategy is good and where you could use help--and when alternatives make sense, listen.  <center> <div id="inlineReportPromo"> <div class="inlineReportPromo_headline"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/83/9062/IT-Business-Strategy/research-2012-it-perception-survey.html?cid=soceng_1012" target="_blank" style="color:#ffffff;">Research: 2012 IT Perception Survey</a></div> <div class="inlineReportPromo_inner"> <center>How IT's Perceived by Business</center> <img src="http://reports.informationweek.com/assetimages/images/research-2012-it-8200-perception-survey_51927.jpg" width="135" height="82" style="float:right;">Our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/83/9062/IT-Business-Strategy/research-2012-it-perception-survey.html?cid=soceng_1012" target="_blank">full report</a> is available free with registration. Summary: Only 43% of non-IT people consider their IT teams integral to the business, our survey finds, and 54% consider IT a support or maintenance organization and not an innovator. But 59% say technology’s becoming more critical to the business. <center><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/83/9062/IT-Business-Strategy/research-2012-it-perception-survey.html?cid=soceng_1012" target="_blank">Get This </a> And <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/">All Our Reports</a></center> </div> </div> </center>  2012-10-10T08:00:00ZEmployers Are Hot On Application DevelopersIt's the IT job category where companies are looking to hire the most people, and it puts the biggest premium on fresh skills.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240008404?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsIn the movie The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman's character, Benjamin, is famously given one word of advice on his future: plastics. If the 1967 classic were remade today (please don't), the word would be: software. Of course, most graduates (or dropouts) won't be the next Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, or Bill Gates, but in a shaky economy like this one, if there's a safe, bankable major it's in computer science. This conclusion is supported by our recent InformationWeek IT staffing report, which found that companies are anxious to hire security and application development talent, as well as application delivery and database management pros. Our survey also found that the largest needs--where companies are looking to hire the most IT people--are in application development. Among the survey respondents who said developers are a top need, the majority said their companies will increase such staffing by up to 10% over the next two years. Others have much greater needs. Some 7% said they'd increase application development staffing by 21% to 30%, and 11% said they'd increase it by more than 30%. Those are huge percentages, among the highest of the IT job categories in our survey. Companies are generally looking to add staff or contractors to meet their application development needs. Only 21% are looking at retraining as the main way, a third see a mix of retraining and finding new talent, while 27% are looking only outside the company to fill their needs. It's hard to say why retraining isn't more popular. It could be that existing staffers already are fully engaged, and that there aren't too many Cobol programmers or NetWare admins to re-mint as Python experts. It could also be that companies are simply looking for whiz kids who can pound out code in modern languages. Still, it's not necessarily true that you need to be a Ruby or PHP expert to find work. There are still plenty of companies doing C++ and Java programming in hot industries such as financial services and healthcare. In the longer run, companies that ranked application development as a top need aren't necessarily looking to outsource that work. Survey respondents said that in two years, on average, 73% of their companies' internal programming teams would consist of existing employees (47%) or soon-to-be-hired employees (26%), the rest comprised primarily of either short-term contractors (14%) or long-term contractors (11%). We defined long-term contractors as those with stints longer than 18 months. While our survey found concern about the availability of developers, the pressure to find developers isn't necessarily slowing technology adoption. Only 39% of survey respondents said they were slowed because they couldn't find the right people. For those people with the right skills, the high demand results in a pretty good salary. In this year's InformationWeek Salary Survey, the median income for staff developers was $95,000, up from $92,000 last year and $90,000 in 2010. One downside: Application development is a volatile field. Among the companies represented by our IT Staffing Survey respondents, 25% are hiring more in app dev than in any other IT area, but 22% said it was the IT area where they're cutting the most. While every IT area requires a constant refreshing of skills, developers must be extra careful to keep their expertise current. Companies will pay for retraining (61%), and some will offer raises (35%), but all in all this is an area where successful workers are self-motivated to stay on top of their craft. And depending on the nature of the company, it's a good idea for developers to stay aware of the latest skills that are in demand and keep their resum&eacutes up to date. The financial performance of companies that depend heavily on software and applications also tends to be more volatile. That's because their products can be rendered obsolete by new competition (imagine being on the Lotus or NetWare development teams), and the companies themselves are often small and dependent on the success of a single product. Good programmers can almost always find a new job, and in many cases they regularly have to.  <center> <div id="printfeaturePDFpromo"><div class="printfeaturePDFCover"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/83/9095/IT-Business-Strategy/informationweek-october-15-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1346/smallcov2.jpg" alt="InformationWeek: Oct. 15, 2012 Issue" title="InformationWeek: Oct. 15, 2012 Issue" /></a></div> <div class="printfeaturePDFCopy"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/83/9095/IT-Business-Strategy/informationweek-october-15-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os">Download a free PDF of InformationWeek magazine</a> (registration required)</div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> </div> </center>  2012-09-27T13:30:00ZCisco Customers Discuss Its FutureThe shocker is that VMware is getting a look from 38% of Cisco customers who are in search of alternatives.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240007999?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsBack in 1983, the Ethernet market was led by 3Com, Digital Equipment Corp., and possibly Intel. Cisco was still just a gleam in the eyes of Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner. TCP/IP was far from the leading protocol that used Ethernet as its underpinnings. Apple had AppleTalk, DEC had DECnet, Novell had IPX/SPX, 3Com had its own protocol. You get the picture--networking was a mess. Multiprotocol routers were mostly a theory. Cisco jumped into this void with the promise that it would route just about any protocol that could be routed. Its hardware was robust, it performed well, and Cisco's engineering team would find a fix to practically any problem its customers had. IT pros would like that Cisco back. When we asked 588 IT pros (full report available at <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com" target="_blank">reports.informationweek.com</a> next month) what they think about Cisco, and what they think the company needs to do to remain competitive, the top two responses were lower product prices and focus on your roots. When Cisco was entirely focused on routing and later switching, it made great products that, through aggressive sales and pretty darn good customer support, kicked virtually every competitor to third-rate status. Those are some roots. Cisco management tried to keep growing through diversification into everything from set-top boxes and Flip video cameras to telepresence, IP telephony, and now servers. That wasn't such a good move. Over the last five years, the company has watched its market capitalization drop and seen at least some of its customers question the value proposition of its products. Cisco stuff is too expensive to buy, too costly to maintain, too complex to manage, and too proprietary--those are the common knocks against the company. Meanwhile the stock market demands fat profit margins and ever increasing revenue. It's a conundrum that CEO and chairman John Chambers and his team haven't found a way out of. Chambers himself does just fine in our poll: 44% say he's either doing a great job or has stumbled in the past but is now on track. The next most common answer was "don't know" at 29%, followed by the 26% who want him gone. With a tenure as long as Chambers' that's not too bad. Our survey also shows that despite all the grumbling, Cisco customers generally expect to remain so in the future. Our numbers show that 59% of respondents currently use more than 50% Cisco gear in their networks, and in two years, 55% expect to remain that way. While that downtick is subtle, more strikingly, 25% say they'll increase use of Cisco gear, 45% expect their use to remain the same, and 23% are looking to use less Cisco equipment. You can certainly see those numbers from either a glass-half-full or half-empty point of view. We asked just those respondents looking to reduce use of Cisco gear why they wanted out. We offered 12 options, and a whopping 66% picked "prices are too high" among their top three reasons, followed by 36% who chose "product complexity" and 24% who thought Cisco products didn't interoperate well enough with others. So, if not Cisco, whom do they like? We offered 12 options here and one big surprise popped up in the results. The top five included the usual suspects: Hewlett-Packard at 41%, Juniper at 40%, Dell at 24%, and Brocade at 17%. The shocker was VMware coming in a close third at 38%. Should Cisco worry about the software-defined data center rhetoric? You bet. In free-form comments, by far the most common request was for Cisco to be more cost competitive. In reading the comments, you can almost feel the passion from loyal Cisco customers who are getting beat up by their CFOs and in some cases their CIOs to bring down the cost of networking. For most customers, Cisco can come late to software-defined networking, and it can probably even get away with some of its proprietary shenanigans. But if Cisco does both and remains the priciest option, even loyal customers will have no other choice than to look around. And increasingly VMware is giving them an interesting place to look. 2012-08-08T08:00:00ZNicira Buy Validates VMware-EMC StrategyEMC's software-defined, "doesn't matter what's under the hood" strategy sets it apart from Cisco and the big server vendors.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240004984?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsLike a TV miniseries, EMC and VMware are playing out their shared vision of a software-defined data center. The plotline centered on VMware late last month, as the company announced its intention to acquire network virtualization startup Nicira for a whopping $1.26 billion. Just 5 years old, Nicira only recently came out of stealth mode but has a client list that includes major service providers, Internet-based businesses, and cloud providers. Nicira's main product is the Network Virtualization Platform, which is mainly software that runs on servers and gateways attached to a data center network. It provides a logical view and management of network resources, in much the same way that VMware's hypervisor and vSphere provide a logical view and management of compute resources. With NVP, customers can define logical virtual networks for specific workloads. The NVP virtual switches running on each server take care of implementing the virtual network on the physical hardware. Nicira uses a distributed controller and requires no special networking hardware; it can use older two- or three-tier network designs or the new data center fabrics in vogue with most of the networking hardware manufacturers. Currently, Nicira talks of cloud management through either OpenStack or vSphere. Its marquee customers may manage some vSphere clouds, but it's likely that Nicira's primary use is in KVM and XenServer OpenStack environments. It's far too early to know how VMware will treat other cloud management environments, but we're betting this deal is giving pause to some of Nicira's largest customers. While Nicira's software-only architecture fits perfectly into EMC and VMware's shared vision of a software-defined data center, that vision will likely be at odds with VMware partner Cisco--and even with many of EMC's own products. Both VMware and Nicira are working to build smarts into a software layer that in many ways makes low-cost commodity servers, switches, and storage systems perform acceptably for enterprises and service providers. In its product literature, Nicira speaks of its customers often preferring high-performance commodity switches over (one assumes) the high-priced, feature-rich products from the likes of Cisco. With its recent executive shuffle (EMC infrastructure president Pat Gelsinger heads to majority-owned VMware as CEO, while VMware chief Paul Maritz heads to EMC as chief strategy officer), EMC seems to be embracing the notion that growth in sales and margins is likely to come from software-like private cloud management systems rather than from its traditional storage array and backup products. As it does so, it's creating an environment where commodity servers, storage, and networking will perform just as well as name-brand products. In many ways, this is exactly the opposite of what Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Dell, Oracle, and Cisco are doing. The big four server vendors and Cisco are all working to create hardware stacks that implement private clouds with their own servers, networking, and storage gear. All are pursuing a "better together" strategy that encourages customers to buy a complete line of data center gear and management software from a single vender. EMC's "doesn't matter what's under the hood" strategy is particularly problematic for partner Cisco. The strategies are divergent enough that we wonder about the stability of the VCE venture among VMware, Cisco, and EMC. VCE has some solid customers, but it has never quite taken off. As the strategy unfolds, it also leads to concerns about EMC's dedication to its storage hardware business. We don't expect that it'll abandon its storage business anytime soon--or even slow its development. We see in poll after poll that IT pros value reliability and performance above all other features, especially with storage. EMC has plenty to do within its own products to further its software-defined data center vision. Value-added services like deduplication from Avamar and Data Domain may embrace virtualization more strongly, or simply benefit from a more flexible network infrastructure. EMC's late 2010 purchase of Isilon indicates that the company saw the trend to scale out storage systems coming, and Isilon's OneFS software fits well into the software-defined vision.  <center> <div id="printfeaturePDFpromo"><div class="printfeaturePDFCover"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/81/8997/Business-Intelligence-and-Information-Management/informationweek-august-13-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_os"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1340/cov_110w.jpg" alt="InformationWeek: August 13, 2012 Issue" title="InformationWeek: August 13, 2012 Issue" /></a></div> <div class="printfeaturePDFCopy"><a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/81/8997/Business-Intelligence-and-Information-Management/informationweek-august-13-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe_o">Download a free PDF of InformationWeek magazine</a> (registration required)</div> <div class="clearBoth"></div> </div> </center>  2012-08-02T09:47:00ZOracle Loses HP Itanium Court BattleJudge rules Oracle's dumping of support for partner's products was not "business as usual," orders software vendor to support HP's Itanium-based servers. Oracle says it will appeal.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240004797?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsFor the last six weeks, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/240001545">Oracle and HP have been publicly airing their dirty laundry</a> in a court case that resulted from Oracle's 2011 unilateral decision to drop support for HP's Itanium-based servers. On August 1, Judge James Kleinberg issued his decision and order in the case, which amounted to yet another in a string of losses in court for Oracle. In his decision, the judge strongly backed HP's claims that its September 20, 2010, contract with Oracle explicitly said that mutual product support must continue as it had in the past. In deciding a remedy, the judge had two options. The first was to award HP a cash settlement with no requirement that Oracle support HP's Itanium servers. The second option--the one that Judge Kleinberg chose--was to require Oracle to continue support, and for Oracle to pay for damages HP has already incurred. The amount will be determined by a jury, but will be far less than the $4 billion HP was seeking--a figure that assumed an end to the Oracle-HP partnership, and that considered business revenue projected out through the end of the decade. Both parties have 15 days to file objections; Oracle has said it will appeal. The Remedy On the face of it, the judge's order makes sense, essentially saying to Oracle that there's a binding contract to perform, so ... perform. The court order goes further, insisting the releases be complete, fully tested, tuned, supported, and on parity with other platform releases (meaning Oracle can't release software for SunOS, Windows, and AIX, and then six months later release it for HP-UX/Itanium). Oracle is also barred from charging HP for porting and support. Taken in that light, the ruling provides some comfort for those who were going to have a tough time jumping off Itanium. But the damage has been done both to past and future income streams and whatever HP gets, it probably <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/unix_linux/240001813">won't fully compensate</a> for the business lost because of Oracle's actions. HP's quarterly statements show double-digit decline in Itanium business coincident with Oracle's announcement, so it's clear that material damage has been done. This ruling probably won't slow that trend much. Oracle is now racking up a string of high-profile court losses that should indicate to HP/Oracle customers that the company has no problem violating its agreements if it feels there's an advantage. What if Oracle doesn't do a good job on a HP-UX port or doesn't provide adequate support? The two companies would end up back in front of Judge Kleinberg while customers suffer with bad products. Smart IT planners will continue their migration to something--anything other than HP's Itanium. On the other hand, if the judge had opted to provide cash as part of the settlement, he and jury would have had the unpleasant task of attempting to determine how much Itanium business HP lost because of Oracle, and how much it had lost due to other factors, like the bad economy, a shrinking market and the mess that has been HP's corporate management over the past two years. The Contract That a contract for mutual product support exists at all between the two companies is fairly uncommon. Most software and hardware companies enter into cooperative agreements without the need for a contract and, in fact, HP and Oracle had mutually supported Oracle products running on HP's PA-RISC and Alpha processor systems without contracts for decades until those systems were retired. It wasn't until Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems, and HP fired Mark Hurd (now Oracle's President) that the two companies felt it necessary to put their obligations in writing. During the trial Oracle had said that the contract did not pertain to any products in particular and was meant only to be a public "hug" between the companies intended to show mutual good will. The judge was direct in his assessment, saying that while the agreement wasn't specific about exact products, the contract states: "Oracle will continue to offer its product suite on HP Platforms in a manner consistent with [the HP-Oracle] partnership." Judge Kleinberg said that a reasonable person would objectively find that Oracle had intended to support HP's products based on that statement and therefore there was no reason to explore subjective intent of either party. The "plain words" in that statement described the contract sufficiently. The judge ruled that the product suite mentioned in contract meant all Oracle products that run on the Itanium platform at the time the contract was written. In his decision, the judge also cited a joint press release from the companies that was intended to dissuade the concerns of mutual customers. The September 20, 2010, release included a quote attributed to Larry Ellison saying "Oracle and HP will continue to build and expand a partnership that has already lasted for over 25 years," indicating that customers should expect business as usual. Oracle's sudden announcement of discontinued support, done without notice to HP, and made on March 22, 2011, the eve of HP's shareholder meeting was clearly not business as usual.2012-06-25T08:30:00ZHP Without Itanium: A Three-Pronged StrategyRegardless of how its trial against Oracle goes, there will be no new versions of Oracle software on Itanium. Here's how HP might turn the page.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240002572?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsAs Hewlett-Packard and Oracle battle in court over whether <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/240001545">Oracle broke an agreement with HP</a> to continue to port its software to HP's high-end hardware platforms, one thing is clear: Customers who love Oracle on HP-UX/Integrity are going to have to make the hard choice of giving up one or both platforms. If the stronger affinity is to Oracle, then customers have lots of choices. If the affinity is to HP-UX, customers are pretty much out of luck. HP's arrangement with Intel for Itanium is that Intel works as a contractor, designing and manufacturing the chip for HP. According to court documents, HP has shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars to Intel in this relationship. While HP could continue doing that, without Oracle software there's virtually no point, and without Itanium, there's no path forward for HP's NonStop, OpenVMS, and UX operating systems. To make matters worse for HP, SAP has discontinued support of its <a href="http://peopleprocesstech.com/2012/06/05/why-the-hp-superdome-is-as-dead-as-a-dodo/">Business Objects software on Itanium</a>. HP could port its operating systems to Intel's Xeon chip, but there's no chance now that Oracle would support such a move, and it is unlikely SAP would either. Note that HP's external messaging directly contradicts what I'm saying here. Here's what HP said in documents relating to its <a href="http://h20341.www2.hp.com/integrity/downloads/about-kinetic.pdf">Kinetic</a> strategy: "HP is committed to the continued innovation of NonStop, OpenVMS, and HP-UX on Itanium-based Integrity servers. At the same time, HP is developing enhanced services, highly scalable and resilient x86-based servers, and is working with Microsoft, Red Hat, and open source communities to deliver a Unix-like mission-critical experience for the x86 environment. HP has no current plans to bring HP-UX to the x86 architecture." That strategy probably won't stand up to shareholder scrutiny. The loss of HP-UX hurts HP much more than the loss of Itanium since HP supplies the entire ecosystem, including consulting, for HP-UX. A normal end-of-life process for the chip could have resulted in a lot of consulting for HP. Indeed, at one time HP had a plan to port HP-UX to x86, which would have at least provided an avenue to a safe landing for its customers. The time for such a port was long ago, like shortly after Sun ported Solaris to x86, so at least the decision now not to port HP-UX to x86 makes sense. Instead, HP is embarking on a three-pronged strategy to bolster its server business, called Odyssey, Voyager, and Moonshot. Moonshot is by far the most interesting, forward-looking, and potentially disruptive of the three projects. It calls for developing high-density servers using low-power CPUs such as Intel's Atom. Earlier this month, HP and Intel announced that the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/processors/240002354">Gemini line of servers</a> would use an Atom chip called Centerton specifically made for the job. The idea is to put thousands of 64-bit x86 servers in a rack. Think of this approach as undoing the virtualization trend, which broke large servers into small servers. So-called microservers cut out the virtualization middleman and provide scads of cheap servers to use as you will. As interesting as Centerton and Gemini are, they really aren't an answer for HP's Business Critical Systems (BCS) customers.The Voyager project is, in my mind, the least interesting of the three projects. The first instantiation of Voyager are the Proliant Gen8 servers HP released earlier this year. The notion is to make servers smarter so that they're easier to manage--an approach that was disproven more than a decade ago by Compaq, which nearly ruined itself by throwing lots of stuff into the server that did nothing for the system's actual performance. HP says the Proliants can monitor up to 1,600 system parameters so that system admins will know about potential failures long before they occur. The problem is that almost no one wants to pay for much "added value." After all, the system is still running the same Xeon with the same motherboard, bus, memory, and disk subsystems as everyone else. The value add comes from Intel, Microsoft, and the Linux community. Most buyers would prefer that HP just slap in a power supply, add sheet metal, and call it a day. Buyers of these systems are sensitive to price, so there's only so much innovating HP can do without pricing itself out of competition. This project also doesn't do much for BCS customers. That leaves us with Odyssey, which is aimed directly at BCS customers. The goal for Odyssey is provide a path for NonStop, OpenVMS, and HP-UX customers to Windows and Linux running on high-end HP systems such as the Superdome2 and HP BladeSystem C. As part of Odyssey, HP says it will continue to release new versions of NonStop, OpenVMS, and HP-UX on these systems, but that's predicated on the availability of Itanium chips. Given all that's gone on, we expect that the two versions of Itanium now under development will be the last. At least in the long run (past 2016), the Windows and Linux components of Odyssey will be about all that matters. HP's goal for Windows and Linux is to beef them up with some of the features that its users like best on HP-UX and NonStop. In its <a href="http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2011/111122xb.html">press release on Odyssey</a>, HP talks about supporting nPars (its proprietary virtualization system) and a number of diagnostic systems and fault tolerant features, a bit like the Voyager project on steroids but with a more receptive audience. While the audience may listen, they'll also shop around. We suspect that HP will have a hard time holding on to this high-margin business no matter what it does. At this year's <a href="http://informationweek.com/conference">InformationWeek 500 Conference</a> C-level execs will gather to discuss how they're rewriting the old IT rulebook and accelerating business execution. At the St. Regis Monarch Beach, Dana Point, Calif., Sept. 9-11. 2012-06-20T08:37:00ZHP, Intel: Time To Take Microservers SeriouslyHP and Intel are betting on a big market for microservers using the new Centerton chip. Here's why you should pay attention.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240002354?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsYour grandmother probably had a saying like "many hands make light work," which was grandmother-speak for get your butt in here and help out so we can done faster. It looks like server makers are relearning the wisdom of that notion. HP and Intel got together to announce that as HP develops its line of microservers, the first chip it will use is Intel's Centerton. The announcement was something of a non-event, since HP was only saying that it would use the Centerton chip, it didn't announce any systems or configurations. That will come later in the year when Centerton is in full production. The timing of the event was surely intended to send signals that HP/Intel relationship was alive and well, even as HP, along with lots of Intel execs as witnesses, meet Oracle in court over what's now sure to be the ill-fated Itanium chip and HP's Integrity servers. As the sordid spectacle of that trial unfolds, a picture is painted of an unhappy Intel that didn't want to continue losing money on the development of Itanium after an ecosystem for the chip failed to materialize. Indeed, HP is about the only user of the chip now, and had to change its relationship with the chipmaker so that Intel was more of a contractor that would produce the chips as long as HP footed the bill for R&D and production. Oracle released dozens of internal HP emails, presumably gotten during discovery, that illustrated the tension over Itanium. [ What is the opposite of a microserver? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/info-management/240002268?itc=edit_in_body_cross">IBM's Sequoia Is World's Fastest Supercomputer</a>. ] At the press conference this week, we were assured that with the Centerton announcement, the companies are back to their old collaborative selves. Centerton is a member of the Atom family of system-on-a-chip (SOC) products, but it has certain server-class features which previous Atom chips don't. Key features that make it appropriate for microserver use are: a 64 bit architecture that is now common for Atom chips, virtualization support in hardware, ECC memory support, dual-core design, and an extremely low power profile. The Centerton chip draws just 6 watts. Compare that with top of the line Xeon chips that can consume north of 130 watts, albeit with many more cores running. The market for microservers was demonstrated by SeaMicro, which uses low power Xeon and Atom chips to pack lots of servers into a small space. The company claims its systems can take just 1/6 the space and 1/4 of the power of commonly used racked servers from other vendors. AMD purchased SeaMicro for $334 million in February, but the company has yet to release products based on AMD chips. HP's claims at its press conference go well beyond what SeaMirco has done. HP speaks of thousands of systems per rack, with space savings of up to 94%, which works to about a 20-to-1 ratio of its microservers to standard 1U systems. The burning question with microservers is the market size. HP thinks the new systems will satisfy up to 10% of the server market, while AMD pegs the number at 20%. Clearly the systems are intended for "scale-out" environments, where services and applications can meet demand simply by deploying more and more servers running the same software. While there are certainly still many "scale-up" applications that run as single instance and need more memory and faster CPUs to meet an increased demand, but that sort of application design is now largely out of favor. Whether you come from a SOA background or a Web services one, it's been drilled into the architectural mindset to keep services tight and easily replicated. That notion matches up well with microserver designs, so one could imagine such systems being used for everything from Hadoop and MapReduce to Web services and systems to even properly architected enterprise applications. At this year's <a href="http://informationweek.com/conference">InformationWeek 500 Conference</a> C-level execs will gather to discuss how they're rewriting the old IT rulebook and accelerating business execution. At the St. Regis Monarch Beach, Dana Point, Calif., Sept. 9-11. 2012-06-15T01:45:00ZResearch: 2012 SMB IT Salary Surveyhttp://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/166/8780/Professional+Development+and+Salary+Data/research-2012-smb-it-salary-survey.html?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authors2012-06-13T16:02:00ZCisco Describes SDN Strategy, Sets Industry Back 10 YearsCisco says forget about SDN and separate data and control planes, it's about programmability.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240002024?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsAt Cisco Live on Tuesday, David Yen, SVP and GM of Cisco's data center technology group, and a supporting cast finally described Cisco's response to the SDN craze. <a href="http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cisco-announces-open-network-environment-to-unleash-application-driven-network-programmability-2012-06-13">Cisco's message</a> was crafted to detail a highly useful direction for the Cisco faithful, and at the same time shows the company taking a deeply defensive position against the possibility that the technology could disrupt the networking leader's number one position in switching and routing. Cisco's core proposition is that while the industry is abuzz with OpenFlow and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/infrastructure/management/240000297">SDN</a>, what customers really want is programmability of the network. So, while <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/infrastructure/management/240000295">OpenFlow</a> and SDN are important developments, the real thing that will get customers excited, according to Cisco, is exposing all that intelligence that's already in the network and letting users program it. Rather than dealing with BGP and VLAN setups, just tell the network you want a connection between point A and point B, and describe your SLA. The underlying network will do the rest. To that end, Cisco is offering onePK (or One Platform Kit), which is a software developer's kit that gets at a consistent set of APIs exposed on all of Cisco's current operating systems, IOS, IOS-XR and NX-OS. While onePK is only marginally related to SDN, it is, nonetheless welcome, particularly for all Cisco shops and those who've tried to develop networking management systems without such access. The lack of good API access has left network management vendors to use SNMP interfaces, which were not always well documented and varied across products. As a result, network management products have been hamstrung, leaving them to be little more than network monitoring applications. Now, with onePK, at least in an all Cisco environment, network management applications will have a shot at doing some serious management. Cisco And Open Protocols Cisco also announced support for <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/infrastructure/232900628">OpenStack</a> and OpenFlow. For OpenStack, which describes how to get servers, networking, and storage systems working together in a private cloud environment, Cisco will create the necessary APIs for the Nexus switches to participate in an OpenStack environment. Cisco also says it has some unnamed extensions in mind for OpenStack. For OpenFlow, which exposes a networking device's forwarding tables to programming by an outside controller, Cisco said it would support the standard, but primarily for the use of universities engaged in protocol research. Of these two announcements, Cisco's OpenStack support appears to be quite sincere. Cisco seems to see OpenStack as a viable approach for use with its UCS servers. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/infrastructure/221600104">Cisco's joint venture with EMC and VMware</a>, called VCE, is also a proponent of OpenStack. Cisco's rivals here, IBM and HP, are also both OpenStack adherents, which bodes well for the standard, and probably left Cisco no choice but to jump onboard. What SDN Promises So that's Cisco's view of customers want. But it's certainly far from the full story. One of the tenents of SDN is that it doesn't make a lot of sense for every single networking device to have all the smarts necessary for it to do its job. In fact, because of autonomous nature of switches, they can end up making forwarding decisions that might make sense to it, but are simply bad choices further down the road. A reasonable analogy is driving to work. You go the same way every day, but if three lanes of a four-lane road are closed one day, it would have made more sense for you to go a different route. If there was a central controller helping you--think of your navigation system, or Google Maps on steroids--you'd end up taking a better route that avoided the problem. The central controller has turned out to be a better way to manage wireless networks, where congestion or spectral noise can frequently cause localized problems.Cisco wants to rely on the smarts in the router and switch, in part because it's proven to work, and in very large part because most of the value add Cisco provides is in the smarts built into each of those boxes. In a pure SDN network, with the smarts kept somewhere else, the switches themselves quickly devolve into commodity products with commodity pricing. That is something no Cisco shareholder wants to hear about. So Cisco gives you "choice." You'll be able to take a Cisco switch, with all its built-in smarts, and use it in an SDN environment. Of course, if you do, you'll have paid for all that autonomous smart stuff, but you won't use it. In fact, you'll pay someone else for it. Moving from the environment we have today to a fully SDN/Controller model is a huge transition--the sort that happens over a decade or more, with leaders like Google doing it right now, and the rest of figuring it out over time. What Cisco calls "choice"--meaning you can use the same gear in a controller-based network or an autonomous one--is really taking away one of the primary advantages the controller approach, that being cost savings. In an open standards controller environment, not only should the switches be dumb, and therefore cheap, they also must be highly compatible. There's no extensions, no added bells and whistles. Compatibility, performance, and reliability are what will distinguish vendors. Now if you sell controllers, it's a different story. There will be lots and lots of ways to judge those systems, and a company like Cisco would obviously have quite an advantage there, but it's proprietary antics would largely have to work up the stack, and not back to down to the switches. OnePK, while welcome, will also slow down the move to SDNs. First, competitors will have to respond, and it appears as though there's a lot to OnePK. Second, customers will have to determine if OnePK truly does meet their needs for network programmability, and if it does, they'll have to assess whether they really want to jump into a fully blown SDN where they'll have little expertise. Cisco is good at staving off competition of any sort, so this response shouldn't be too surprising. Sure, it's protectionist, and sure, the industry could get to pervasive use of controllers much faster if Cisco was all in on the technology. But that was never likely to happen. Juniper and others aren't yet convinced they should modify their architecture either. Innovation is often a long hard path, and it just got a little bit longer for SDNs. At this year's <a href="http://informationweek.com/conference">InformationWeek 500 Conference</a> C-level execs will gather to discuss how they're rewriting the old IT rulebook and accelerating business execution. At the St. Regis Monarch Beach, Dana Point, Calif., Sept. 9-11. 2012-06-13T08:31:00ZCisco's Cloud Play: Three Strong ExamplesCisco CEO John Chambers talks a lot about listening to customers, and this time it looks like the company really has.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240001965?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsAsk anyone for the top five or 10 cloud vendors, and it's likely that Cisco won't make the list. But as I watched presentations Tuesday at the <a href="http://www.ciscolive.com/us/ustream/">Cisco Live event</a> in San Diego, I was impressed with what Cisco is doing to turn cloud aspirations into something that enterprises can actually use. As he always does, CEO John Chambers went on about listening to customers. And as he talked about the competitor carcasses Cisco has left in its wake, he reminded the audience that not many companies are good at spotting market shifts and changing to accommodate them. I've chided Chambers before about his listen-to-customers mantra, doubting they've ever asked for myriad proprietary standards. But in the cloud offerings that Cisco described, you do see the wants and needs of customers. Here are three examples. -- Cisco's Integrated Services Router, the one that typically goes into remote offices and other small-need facilities such as retail outlets, is now getting a fully functional UCS card. UCS is Cisco's blade server platform, so with such a card, the ISR not only can run Cisco's services, but also your own. Data center professionals can start VM-encased apps in the data center and then use a technology like VMotion to move them to the remote office. With the USC card, Cisco is giving customers the sort of private cloud capability that could be a deal changer. Local apps in remote locations can perform better, and they can show up just when they're needed. Since most of these offices will have no IT expertise, the ISR's proven track record in these environments is critical. -- The second immensely practical technology Cisco introduced is its Cloud Services Router. The CSR is a virtual router that runs in a VM. It can be used on the cloud side of infrastructure-as-service/platform-as-a-service to create a VPN tunnel between the cloud instance and your data center. If you're using Cisco VPN products, then the CSR will help provide data-in-transit security that's otherwise hard to do in the cloud. -- Third, there's Location ID Separation Protocol, or LISP. It's not new; in fact it's been around for a few years. But in 2011, Cisco started LISP-enabling more and more of its products. The intent for LISP is to allow a device to be assigned one IP number and then to use that IP number from wherever you are.   <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy. </div> </div>   As a practical example, you could start out watching a video on your iPad, delivered over your home wireless network, then walk outside, switch to 3G/4G, and then go to a Starbucks and use its wireless without interrupting the video. Cisco has put LISP into the public domain, and in order for it to be useful it'll have to be pervasive. But it's an important capability in a virtualized world. Even if it's not pervasive, it'll have applications--universities, for example, would love it. Cisco has overhyped its share of technologies, but cloud hasn't been one of them. Instead, it keeps adding technologies that should be very useful to those looking to make great use of IaaS and PaaS. If the cloud is a gold rush, then Cisco intends to make money on it by providing the shovels and pick axes needed to do the mining. That approach is smart for Cisco--and helpful for the customers it's apparently listening to. SMBs have saved big buying software on a subscription model. The new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/043012smb?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Cloud Beyond SaaS</a> issue of InformationWeek SMB shows how to determine if infrastructure services can pay off, too. Also in this issue: One startup's experience with infrastructure-as-a-service shows how the numbers stack up for IaaS vs. internal IT. (Free registration required.)2012-06-11T10:50:00ZHP-Oracle Itanium Trial: Why Oracle Can't LoseOracle's larger plan behind its decision to cease porting its software to Hewlett-Packard's Itanium-base servers becomes clearer as the trial proceeds--and it's devastating for HP.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240001813?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsHP board member and former executive VP Ann Livermore is one of the savviest executives in Silicon Valley, and yet she and the rest of HP's upper management were caught flatfooted by an Oracle proposal that has contributed greatly to the situations HP and Oracle find themselves in today. The implications go far beyond the trial at hand and, while probably legal, illustrate the no-holds-barred form of business that Oracle plays brilliantly. What Say We Split It? I have to admit, this trial is not shaping up to be the page 6 <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/240001545">gossip column stuff that I'd originally thought</a>. In Livermore's continuing testimony, she said Oracle had approached HP about a three-way deal to buy Sun Microsystems. In essence, Oracle would take the software, which included Java, MySQL, and a good bit more, while HP would take the hardware, which of course includes the SPARC architecture and its development. While that deal would seem to play to each company's strength, it put HP in a virtual no-win situation. But before we get into the significance and even brilliance of Oracle's move, let's recap. HP is suing Oracle for $4 billion because Oracle decided it would no longer port new versions of its software to HP-UX on Itanium hardware. Oracle is countersuing over anything it can think of, and rather than settling out of court, each party feels it'll get a better shake from the public if it lets the trial go forward. The brilliance here is that by even proposing splitting the Sun assets, Oracle couldn't lose, and in fact it probably realized it could win big no matter what the outcome. Here are two scenarios I see. [ What else is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison up to? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/240001514?itc=edit_in_body_cross">There's Something About Larry</a>. ] First, understand that the once high-flying Sun, which, during the height of the Web boom had declared itself the dot in dotcom, was suffering badly from profit margin pressure on hardware and the breadth and width of its software portfolio, some of which was open source (i.e., low margins). It had no choice but to continue evolving SPARC to keep up with IBM and its POWER chip as well as Intel and its Itanium and even x86 chips. Meanwhile, it didn't have ancillary businesses like HP's printers and supplies to give it some financial relief from the margin pressures. Sun was heading toward being the No. 3 player in a three-dog race, and customers knew it. But customers also had a vested interest in Sun's success, particularly on the software side. Some were highly invested in Solaris and Sun hardware, but they relied far more on Java and MySQL. So much so that Oracle proposed the logical split to HP: "You're a hardware company, we're a software company. You take the Sun server market share and we'll take the software assets." It would be clear to most observers that Oracle was proposing taking the valuable stuff and forcing HP to take what was of little value beyond acquiring market share in a rapidly shrinking business. Mind If I Take The Big Piece? Scenario one: HP works with Oracle, its BFF, and takes on the Sun hardware products. What does it get? First, it gets flashbacks to its acquisition of Compaq in 2002, where it got three platforms that needed to be retired: VMS/VAX, Ultrix/Alpha, and Tandem NonStop. The last thing HP needed was two RISC platforms that, while they came with lots of loyal customers, would be terribly expensive to support.In other words, HP could spend nearly $4 billion and get overlapping storage, OS, and hardware products. Sorting out the mess would cost billions more and leave HP even more dependent on Oracle as a partner. One might even say that HP would end up in the pocket of its partner. On Second Thought… Scenario two: HP realizes the ugly mess it faces, understands the costs, the headaches, and the customer issues, and it opts not to work with Oracle. This probably wasn't Oracle's first choice of outcome, but it's not a bad one. By buying all of Sun, Oracle finds itself as the only soup-to-nuts player in the data center--from servers, storage, backup, and archive to middleware, databases, and enterprise apps. IBM has a lot of it. With SAP, IBM has it all. Microsoft has it all, too, with Dell and HP as partners, though Microsoft's "it" is more appropriate for midsize customers. No matter how you slice it, Oracle has carved itself a nice niche that it can defend. Oracle hasn't made Sun great, but it had made Sun viable, particularly with the addition of its Exa-systems (which aren't SPARC-based, ironically and appropriately). Meanwhile, HP is left to offer platitudes about the software market while its holdings are weak and incomplete, and its financials continue to suffer from its many missteps. HP is a full-service hardware player with holes in its product line (no tablets, no phones), and its software offerings seem arbitrary. The rift between the two companies combined with HP's management debacles have left HP's market value near its book value, while Oracle's stock continues to rise. Since 2010, Oracle's stock is up about 30% and HP's is down about 50%. Can it all be pinned on this dangerous game the two companies are playing? Almost certainly not, but Oracle has schooled HP and its management on the finer points of big business. Sorting Through The Crumbs While Oracle has an impressive win here, one has to ask: Is this sort of bare knuckles business worth it? If stock valuation is the measure, then the answer is no. While Oracle's stock price is up about 30% in about two years, IBM's is up more than 70% over the same period. <center><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/1336/oracles_ibm_chart.gif" width="590" height="263" alt="Oracle and IBM" hspace="0" vspace="0" border="0" style="margin-bottom:7px;" /> </center> IBM's market share in RISC/EPIC systems has been on the rise for a few years now, while both HP's and Oracle's have been declining, just as the overall RISC/EPIC market has been contracting about 15% a year, according to a recent IDC report. When it comes to selling into the data center, most vendors have been pushing to include servers, storage networking, and services--in Cisco's and EMC's case, through a partnership called VCE. While Oracle/Sun lacks the networking, its offers continue up the stack into middleware, database software, and enterprise applications. Given Oracle's animosity toward SAP, the battle lines become clearer: It's IBM and SAP versus Oracle, with Microsoft taking a healthy chunk of the market with partners HP and Dell. The question for customers is whether their choice in partners is attractive, and whether they're willing to put all of their eggs in one vendor's basket. In that context, the HP-Oracle suit is little more than a skirmish in a much bigger war. As their non-x86 market shares decline, both Oracle and HP will at some point dump their RISC systems, but the rising competition may not be the traditional foes. Can the likes of Workday and Salesforce.com move enterprises to give up their on-premises back office software? Fights like the HP-Oracle one and the disregard for customers it displays offer good reasons to look around. But of course, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterprise_apps/240001594">Oracle has that scenario covered too</a>. As of this week, its Fusion line of enterprise applications will all be available in the cloud. Private clouds are more than a trendy buzzword--they represent Virtualization 2.0. For IT organizations willing to dispense with traditional application hosting models, a plethora of pure cloud software options beckons. Our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/5/8682/Cloud-Computing/fundamentals-understanding-private-cloud-stacks.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe">Understanding Private Cloud Stacks</a> report explains what's available. (Free registration required.) 2012-06-08T11:20:00ZHP-Oracle Itanium Suit: Divorce, Silicon Valley StyleHP and Oracle were like Sonny & Cher, The Captain & Tennille, or any other duo that was inseparable--right up until the moment they separated.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240001545?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsIf we had a page 6 gossip column, that's where this story would go. Its motivations and characters are all about the inside baseball of Silicon Valley's elite circles, about decisions made long ago about products that in some cases were brilliant and in others were just bad bets. Of course, there have been twists and turns that could happen only in Silicon Valley. Let's start with where we are today. On June 4, Oracle and HP gave opening arguments in front of Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg, who will decide the case in lieu of a jury. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterprise_apps/232500790">HP is claiming a breach of a contract</a> negotiated between the two companies shortly after Mark Hurd was hired as co-president of Oracle in 2010. The contract's intent was twofold: First, it sought to limit some of the projects Hurd could work on; and second, it introduced a "corporate hug" that ensured that the two companies would continue to cooperate in the marketplace. It's the second part of the contract that HP says was breached. HP is seeking $4 billion for Oracle's decision not to port new versions of its database to run on Itanium-based hardware. So that's where we are today, but how'd we get here? The Disco Era In the late 1980s, every computer company worth its salt had its own line of RISC processors. Sun had SPARC, IBM had POWER, DEC had Alpha, and HP had PA-RISC. Even Intel had the i860, which performed quite will in its time, and there were others too. These processors all came with the premise that Intel's x86 architecture (used in PCs) and Motorola's 6800 architecture (used in Macs and many Unix workstations) were outmoded and in serious need of replacement. Intel's and Motorola's chips had a complex instruction set, or CISC, design, which meant many instructions took more than one clock cycle to execute, in some cases many more. The new designs streamlined the instruction set and for more than a decade were the fastest chips available. Companies such as Oracle had no choice but to support the range of microprocessors available in order to make its database ubiquitous. But like all markets, the fragmentation led to consolidation, and while that happened, Intel took advantage of Moore's Law, which saw gates per chip go from a few hundred thousand in the late '80s to millions in the '90s and now to billions. What seemed like a complex instruction set at one time was now child's play to implement. Not only is there room for lots of CPU cores on the chip, there's also room for memory management, FPUs, GPUs, and huge memory caches. Those and wide execution units make it possible to execute any instruction in a single clock cycle. During the consolidation, HP was the biggest buyer of faltering hardware companies. It bought Apollo and Compaq, and Compaq had previously bought DEC and Tandem Computers. As a result, HP found itself with systems that ran Intel, Motorola, DEC/Alpha, as well as its own PA-RISC chips. That was far too many chips for the company's needs, so it started to end-of-life some of its product lines. The Alpha and Motorola lines were the first to go, and HP was in a tough place with PA-RISC, too. The company thought it needed to make a bold move, and rather than continue down the RISC path, it went a different route. What if you could issue more instructions in a clock cycle and have them all execute in parallel? If you could, you'd get a speed advantage without having to resort to high clock rates, which imply high power usage. HP called it EPIC, or explicitly parallel instruction computing. The instructions were entered by packing many of them into a single "word" (64 bits in the case of Itanium, which permitted six instructions per word).   <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy. </div> </div>   The theory sounded good, but HP didn't want to foot the bill for what was turning out to be a very expensive execution of the EPIC theory. The hardware was tough enough, but the real trick was making compilers smart enough to take full advantage of the EPIC architecture--that continues to be a problem today. To help with costs and expertise, HP started partnering with Intel on the technology as early as 1994, and it eventually handed the whole thing over to Intel with promises to buy Itanium chips well into the future. Many predicted that the IA-64 architecture, as Intel dubbed it, would be the dominant chip architecture for high-end systems, but Moore's Law has a way of making fools of us all. Large caches and multicore designs did more for performance than the basic processor architecture could. So we are where we are today, with x86-64 chips performing on par with other available chips. The Sonny & Cher Years During that time, HP and Oracle were like Sonny & Cher, The Captain & Tennille, or any other duo you can think of that was inseparable--right up until the moment they separated. HP did the hardware, Oracle did the software, and they were a fine rival to IBM. The marriage hit its first major bump in the road when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems. Suddenly, HP hardware didn't look so attractive to the new Oracle/Sun. The second bump came when the HP board, led by former Oracle president Ray Lane, ousted Mark Hurd over some expense reports and alleged illicit extracurricular activity. That ouster was quickly followed by the ultimate insult, HP's naming Leo Apotheker as Hurd's replacement. Apotheker had been at the helm of SAP, the German ERP software giant, during some unsavory clashes with Oracle, so his hiring was a glove to the face of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Ellison didn't like the way HP had treated Hurd, his old friend from the Sonny & Cher days. So he hired Hurd to run sales and consulting, a move seen by HP as violating the non-compete clause in his HP contract. And so HP sued Oracle. The suit was seemingly resolved by a new contract between the companies that calls for, among other things, mutual support of products, which HP has taken to mean Oracle can't stop making its database for Itanium-based systems until HP itself declares them dead. And that's the case that Judge Kleinberg is now hearing. Oracle says it got wind that HP and Intel were going to pull the plug on Itanium anyway, so it was just acting in the interest of its customers and hoping that it might turn a few of them into Oracle/Sun customers. You Hurt Me, I Hurt You Back Customer interests aside, <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/230800004">there's little doubt that the impetus for Oracle pulling support for Itanium</a> was to make life hard for HP. HP's Integrity systems, which use Itanium, will be far less attractive to a great many customers if Oracle won't port new versions of its database to them. However, given the performance trajectory of Intel's x86 chips, it's reasonable to assume that Intel and HP were contemplating a way out, so while it happened in an ugly way, Oracle may have just accelerated a process that was going to play out over the next decade anyway. In the trial's early going Ann Livermore, who negotiated the "breezy contract" between the two companies, along with Oracle's other co-president, Safra Katz, said that HP was completely blindsided by the press release which announced the discontinuation of Oracle support. She's also inferred that Katz seemed blindsided by it too, indicating that was cooked up by Ellison and possibly Hurd. Because the nature of the contract was relatively casual--intending to stress that HP and Oracle remained BFFs--Judge Kleinberg may look closely at the intent of the timing and way Oracle announced its discontinued support. While Oracle is in better straits than HP, the two big winners from this skirmish have been and will continue to be IBM and Microsoft, which will be quite happy to work with customers that now have a bad taste for Oracle, HP, or both. This is a case that would normally be settled by reasonable participants. But Oracle and HP aren't likely to be reasonable. HP is wounded and Oracle smells blood in the water, and so, oddly enough, each party sees this ongoing spectacle as being in its interests. Bottom line, I'd be planning my path away from Integrity systems, and if I could do it in a way that also got Oracle off my back, I'd think about doing that too. Art Wittmann is director of InformationWeek Reports, a portfolio of decision-support tools and research reports. You can write to him at <a href="mailto:awittmann@techweb.com">awittmann@techweb.com</a>. 2012-06-07T12:37:00ZOracle Cloud: Big Bravado, Huge QuestionsAs Oracle CEO Larry Ellison touts the cloud-readiness of Fusion, he needs to deal with some critical questions around pricing and features.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240001682?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsOracle CEO Larry Ellison took to the stage Wednesday to announce that Oracle's entire Fusion portfolio of applications would be available as both cloud and on-premises applications--and then proceeded to spew his uniquely mean-spirited take on reality for two hours. The bizzaro world that Oracle execs seem to live in clashed more than a few times with at least my reality, during the presentation about what looks to be a fine and interesting product. First let's cover the announcement: Oracle will offer more than 100 Fusion applications as a service running from Oracle data centers around the world. Ellison and Oracle were sketchy on pricing details (though the products are supposed to be available as of the announcement). Ellison did say that pricing would be "per month per user, just like other cloud providers." Fusion apps available from Oracle via the cloud will run the same code line as applications run on premises. Databases and object stores will be unique for each user, and the Fusion software will run in a virtual machine on Oracle/Sun hardware. Ellison explained that Oracle's cloud will be elastic, in the sense that when a user needs more capacity, additional VMs can be spun up as needed. One such customer mentioned in a brief promo video was Macy's, where a spokeswoman talked about the ability to seasonally adjust Macy's use of Oracle apps--to run on premises and then use the cloud service to meet peak demand. A perfect example if there ever was one. But pricing is a big point where Oracle's claims cross each other. Is the pricing by user and month, or is it by VM used, or some combination of metrics? In the case of Macy's, certainly if it adds more users, Oracle might need to add a new VM, but this doesn't seem like something that should matter to the end user who's paying by user and month. The users want response time SLAs from Oracle and have probably specifically chosen the cloud to get out from under such things as guessing the right number of virtual machines that will be needed for a busy business day. [ For more analysis on Oracle's cloud announcement, see <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterprise_apps/240001594?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Oracle Cloud Apps Unleashed: The Good, Bad, And Ugly</a> and <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterprise_apps/240001595?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Oracle's Cloud Rivals: Reality Check</a>. ] Pricing is similarly problematic for anyone who's looking for a hybrid operation. Ellison spoke not only to Oracle's ability to offer the functionality, but also to make it elegant. After all, it's all the same code base, so it's just a matter of migrating the VM in question and, we suspect, the end user having very similar hardware (i.e. Sun systems and storage, and maybe an Exadata machine depending on the app). But even if the customer has all that, you now have two competing pricing policies--the cloud one, and the on premises one. How's the billing work for that? Anyone from Oracle who might have been able to answer was immediately out of the room after the presentations Wednesday. But the problem could be a sticky one for a company like Macy's, which might need to frequently cloud burst some workloads. How will Oracle's pricing policy handle such use? We don't know. From an architectural point of view, Oracle has taken one of two reasonable paths. On one hand, a company could build new software from the ground up for its SaaS offering, as Workday and Salesforce have done. Such software has a full understanding of multitenancy, data protection, billing and so on. By running a single instance of the app, Workday and Salesforce gives users new features as they are released (whether a user wants them or not). The vendors get the efficiency of having just one code line to maintain. Oracle has taken the other path, which calls for cloud-readiness being built into the Fusion application suite, so all instances, cloud or on premises, can be based on the same code line. This allows for a hybrid model that either isn't possible with other designs, or is at least highly discouraged, except in the cases of the biggest customers. While the pure-play cloud vendors get operational efficiency, Oracle at least gets some testing and verification efficiency. Just one testing and validation suite is necessary as long as it includes tests for both environments. Now of course code lines rarely remain as lines, customers have special needs and invariably, that line becomes a tree--sometimes with lots and lots of branches. The more branches there are, the more unique testing must be done, and the more likely that errors will crop up. Which model is better? It all depends on what you're looking for, but Oracle's promise to run every software instance in a VM would lead one to believe that its single instance competitors will have a better efficiency story to tell. But no one was expecting Oracle to be the cost leader, even if Sun hardware is the best and most suited to the job. Fusion Features Details? So what are those cloud ready features already baked into Fusion apps that make them all set for the cloud? Well, if multitenancy is built in, which we doubt, it isn't being used by Oracle. But there are plenty of other features that might merit the term cloud-ready. For instance, browser communication might be minimized and made efficient for higher latency networks. The ability to manage hundreds or thousands of pretty-much-similar application instances from a single station might be another. It would be interesting if there were accounting features built in for the purposes of cloud use. But Oracle execs didn't enumerate the cloud ready features built into Fusion; we were told only that they are there and they are important differentiators compared to the competition. In terms of Fusion app features, since this is exactly the same Fusion as the existing on premises version, there wasn't much new to see. The social component is interesting, since all the apps are social-enabled if you're running Oracle's wiki. The big takeaway from Wednesday is if you want to start with Fusion in the cloud, and keep your options open to bring it in-house, you can--for a price. And no one was talking about price. Oracle was too busy bashing competitors in general and SAP in particular. Ellison claimed SAP wouldn't have a single cloud-ready product (with the exception of SuccessFactors) until 2020. Thing is, SAP has bunch of apps it markets under the <a href="http://www.sap.com/solutions/technology/cloud/overview/solutions.epx">OnDemand</a> sub-brand. There are not 100 of them, but there are about 20. We suspect that a definition exists somewhere for what cloud apps should be and that SAP's apps don't live up to it. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ... then spend your valuable presentation time better describing your own products. Ellison's schoolyard shenanigans continued on to comments about Workday (too dependent on Flash) and Salesforce (one-trick pony) until it was time for a demo--well actually, the snubs continued after that, too. The demo was of a set of tools that can be used by marketers for B-to-B and B-to-C social relation management and analysis. Ellison's demo showed how easy it was to add the sale of another product into an existing store--in this case coffee, for an organic grocery store--and then to monitor what people said about it. Sure enough, after 15 minutes or so, the coffee, along with its price, was on Facebook and the grocery store's Web page. Ironically, when we looked to see if Oracle's new products were given similar treatment, I couldn't find a "buy this product" button or price anywhere on the Oracle website. That would be at least one good use for this product.The final trip into bizzaro land came courtesy of Mark Hurd, who got the last 10 minutes of the day to talk about support--something every Oracle customer cares about deeply. Oracle calls it Platinum support, and it specifies a five-minute response, resolution or escalation within 15 minutes, and joint debugging within 30 minutes. Hurd hushed the crowd for the kicker: "And the best part is, it's free!" For just a moment I sat there thinking, wow, Oracle giving away support for free, that's something. But then I reminded myself, as Hurd bragged about how Oracle could do this amazing thing, that we're talking about software-as-a-service. Only Oracle could turn a SLA backwards and tell you how lucky you were that it wasn't going to charge you for debugging its code running on its hardware, all sitting in its data center. Those 5 or 15 or 30 minutes that you aren't getting the service you paid for--it's free platinum support. Typically, SaaS vendors give you a credit when that happens. If I had a choice of SaaS vendors, I'd probably stay away from any with an entitled attitude like this. It's like going to a restaurant and being offered free insurance on your meal because "it doesn't happen often, but sometimes we food poison people." I'll pass. But it gets better. How did Hurd claim it was possible for Oracle to offer such great service? Well it's because they've engineered everything and every component to work together--and no one else in the world can claim that, he explained. First of all, the folks in Armonk might have something to say about that. Second, Oracle doesn't come close to "engineering every component." It doesn't make hard drives. It doesn't make memory chips. It doesn't make the CPUs that go into the Exa-family (Intel makes those.) I'm willing to bet that the InfiniBand switch in the Exa hardware that Larry couldn't stop talking about--mentioning the arcane internal networking between systems at least four times--was made by someone other than Sun. What Sun/Oracle does is integrate some of its own stuff with stuff from others and then take responsibility for it all working together. Sounds pretty much like every other SaaS vendor I know of. So is Fusion in the cloud a good product? Just as good as Fusion itself is, I suppose. Should you want it? That's hard to say, without any pricing information. Should you take Oracle at its word about any of this? Just make sure you do a sanity check on any claims first. 2012-05-23T20:07:00ZHP Cuts 27,000 Jobs, Doesn't Fix Identity ProblemA little more guidance on HP's long-term vision would go a long way right now, with customers and investors.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240000910?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsHewlett-Packard's second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday was a somber affair, as the company revealed that it will be cutting 27,000 jobs--8% of its workforce--during the next couple of years, amid slumping profits. There were some bright spots. Earnings per share of $0.98 came in above HP's earlier guidance of $0.91. But there's no ignoring the fact that HP's stock price hovers around its book value, meaning any significant further slide would imply that shareholders would benefit if the company were sold for its parts. During the earnings call there were items to like and others that <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/240000625">will make shareholders shudder</a>. On the down side, revenue in HP's printing and imaging group fell 10% from the year-earlier quarter, while PC unit revenue rose a paltry 0.4%. There's not a lot HP can do about that softness. Other imaging companies are getting hit as well, and HP's Personal Systems Group simply can't make highly differentiated products. HP does have a strong relationship with Microsoft, so there may be some hope there. But the company won't make tablets or phones running Windows 8, so the story for PSG is pretty bleak. CEO Meg Whitman repeated a few times that HP's strategic pillars are cloud, security, and information management. With the continuing interest in big data and analytics, and the perpetual interest in cloud and security, these seem like good bets, but they got only light treatment during the earnings call. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/info_management/231500395">Autonomy, a major piece of HP's information management pillar</a>, acquired last year for $11.7 billion, is struggling--so much so that HP is replacing the founding management with HP insiders. HP's <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/platform/232800511">latest foray into the cloud</a> is just coming out of beta, so there are no financials on its performance. Whitman made no mention of specific products within HP's security portfolio. Revenues for other groups were down year over year but mostly up from last quarter. HP is reworking its services group, whose revenue was down 1% from the year-earlier quarter, so that it can better leverage its software assets. Revenue from enterprise servers, storage, and networking fell 5.5% from a year earlier. HP said its restructuring plans should generate annualized cost savings of between $3 billion and $3.5 billion by 2014, money that will be plowed back mainly into its cloud, information management, and security businesses and to restructure its services businesses around those areas.   <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy. </div> </div>   The biggest competitor for that savings, however, will be the need to boost the company's earnings per share. HP has promised shareholders north of $4.00 for the full fiscal year, and it will need a strong second half to hit that mark. HP <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/231600254">continues to have an identity problem</a>. Sure, it wants to be the slick purveyor of everything related to cloud, big data, and security, but it's stuck being the pimply faced kid with braces. Whitman's message was steady as she goes. The problem is that steady as she goes is boring the life out of investors. A little more guidance on the company's long-term vision, as it reports progress on the moves it has made toward fulfilling that vision, would go a long way toward reassuring customers and investors alike. The pay-as-you go nature of the cloud makes ROI calculation seem easy. It’s not. Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/031412s/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Cloud Calculations</a> InformationWeek supplement: Why infrastructure-as-a-service is a bad deal. (Free registration required.) 2012-05-18T10:06:00ZHP Layoffs Signal Punishing FallUnless HP can turn enterprise software, cloud services, or some other line into a high-volume, high-margin business, it's in for a world of hurt.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240000625?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsHewlett-Packard's second-quarter earnings call is scheduled for May 23, and news already has leaked that CEO Meg Whitman will announce that the company will <a href=" http://www.businessinsider.com/source-hp-layoffs-are-going-to-be-huge-2012-5">cut as many as 30,000 employees</a>--about 9% of its workforce--as part of a restructuring plan. The news breeds speculation that HP's earnings will continue to be weak, requiring a fairly drastic cut in expenses to prop them up. It also comes on the heels of an <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/232601322">oddly upbeat first-quarter earnings call</a> in which HP announced that earnings had fallen 44% from the year-earlier quarter. As <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/231600254">HP's plight unfolds</a>, it's tempting to compare it to others that have faced down a reinvention problem. There's Cisco, <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/232601496">which has shed products</a> outside its core mission, trimmed staff, and reinvented internal processes over the past two years, all to excellent effect. But that's not a good comparison because Cisco has something HP doesn't: industry leading products that command huge profit margins. Cisco makes a lot of hay with its fancy televideo products, phones, and even mobile devices, but it's the dull products like its hugely successful ISR routers (the little gizmos found in hundreds of thousands of branch offices and retail stores worldwide) that pay its bills and allow the company the luxury of time as it goes through its reinvention process. Sure, investors would always like a company such as Cisco to fix its problems instantly, but even when its performance is down, it's still very good. In the same way, Oracle can absorb the stupidity that was the Sun acquisition, which would have sunk most any other company, because when you've got a namesake product that drives revenue like Oracle's database, the market and everyone else gives you a pass. IBM has its Global Services business. Microsoft, for all its perceived problems, still has its Windows and Office cash cows. For all of these companies, fat margins mean time for reinvention. HP used to have its high-margin businesses, but one by one they've disappeared or dried up--all but ink and toner, and now those are shrinking too. So when it's time for reinvention and what HP calls "cutting to invest," it's a much more public and painful thing than it would be for Cisco, Oracle, IBM, or Microsoft. And so as ugly as 30,000 people losing their jobs sounds, one wonders whether it's ugly enough, and whether, after it's over, we'll understand any better what is HP's vision for the future. It's not hard to visualize a version of HP that looks a lot like Dell. Dell, about a third the size of HP by employee count, finds itself working to be more than a PC maker. Just like HP, it <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/232400489">sees pressure on its traditional markets</a> from the likes of Lenovo, Samsung, and LG, so much so that both companies probably envision a day when it will no longer make sense for them to sell laptop and desktop computers. Both companies have been ramping up their enterprise and professional services groups to make up for the sales and margin losses they'll see from their established product lines. For Dell, that's working out to be a fairly well executed plan, one that keeps in mind its typical midmarket customers. For HP, if it doesn't find a high-margin business to hang its reputation on, the way down will be a bloodbath of layoffs and missed earnings projections.   <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy. </div> </div>   HP's hopes of avoiding that bloodbath lie in two areas: cloud services and enterprise software. Former CEO Leo Apotheker's contribution to that effort was the <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/info_management/231500395">acquisitions of Autonomy and Vertica</a>, which compete in data management and big data analysis, respectively. While Vertica has seen success since HP bought it, InformationWeek's Doug Henschen says that success may have come at the cost of relationships with partners who now view HP as a competitor. The result is that those software providers now more readily mention IBM as their hardware partner. Certainly, HP's relationship with Oracle isn't what it once was, given Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and that mudslinging hasn't helped HP's reputation. As HP ramps up its software portfolio, it will continue to upset its existing partners. Whitman and team will have to do the calculus to determine if that's worth the gain. If HP is serious about becoming a software powerhouse, it will have little choice. The ace in the hole for HP is cloud services. <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/news/cloud-computing/platform/232800511">HP's cloud products</a> are just now coming out of beta, and at first blush they look as if they will compete well with Amazon's. Whether cloud services can be the high-volume, high-margin business that HP needs is a tougher call. No matter what, it'll take time for that business to develop. And that means more rough quarters ahead for HP. From clouds to mobile to software development, threats may be everywhere, but they're not equally dangerous. The new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/050712/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">IT Strategic Security Survey</a> issue of InformationWeek will help you prioritize. Also in this issue: IT must decide how to deal with consumer cloud storage being used in businesses. (Free registration required.) 2012-05-15T11:57:00ZCan IT Be Trusted With Personal Devices?Mobile device management as a path to security is a fundamentally flawed strategy. You must manage the data.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240000398?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authors Most IT teams weren't prepared for the BYOD challenge, and they're not handling it well. This assertion is borne out by our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/21/8792/Security/research-2012-state-of-mobile-security.html">Mobile Security Survey</a>, which shows that security education is still underfunded and underappreciated and that there's an ongoing mismatch between the mobile device management features IT deems to be important and what's in end users' best interests. To illustrate just how pernicious the wrong BYOD policies can be, here's a hypothetical: A worker decides to buy an iPad so that, among other things, he can record and store pictures and movies of important events. Perhaps he manages to catch his baby's first steps or his daughter's piano recital, or he uses the iPad to store hundreds of family vacation pictures. Being a good and proactive employee, he brings the iPad into work, to use for sales presentations and such. The IT organization tells him that before he can put any company data on the device, even what's freely available on the company website, it'll need to install some software that will enforce passwords (No. 1 on our list of most critical MDM security functions). The app will also perform remote locking and wiping of the device, offer some malware protection, and deliver security updates (Nos. 2, 3, and 4 on the list). [ BYOD? Get used to it, says Interop panel. Read more at <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/smart_phones/240000222?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Mobile OS Proliferation Continues</a>. ] The software will require password changes every few months, enforce minimum standards for length and complexity, lock the device after a given time, and if too many failed password attempts occur, wipe the device (the top 5 password policies desired by IT pros). Now, suppose one of the employee's young children plays with the iPad, exceeds the number of failed password attempts, and the device is wiped. No baby's first steps, no piano recital, no pictures from the family vacation. The employee had the best of intentions about iCloud backups but didn't follow through, and needless to say, IT hadn't provided any backup mechanism. The livid employee is left with a blank device and a "Gee, we're sorry about that" from IT. While technology can play a part in protecting the company while letting employees use their own devices for business purposes, most IT teams are creating an insane set of rules for no apparent reason. That same employee could have emailed the sales presentation, which probably isn't encrypted or password protected, to his Gmail account, uploaded some product shots to Dropbox, and used the device for work without IT's involvement. And there's often incentive for employees to do just that, because IT's policies are onerous at best, and at worst downright counter to the employee's interests. If software can't tell the difference between company data and employee data, it has no place on a personally owned device. Further, mobile device management as a path to security is a fundamentally flawed strategy. You must manage the data. The data is what the company owns, and it's what the company values. But of course, data management involves user training and classification and some security finesse. For too many IT teams, it's easier to use a blunt instrument.   <div style="margin:0; padding:0 0 10px 15px; width:244px; float:right;"> <div style="margin:0; border-top:1px solid black; border-bottom:1px solid black; padding:6px;"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/"><img src="http://twimgs.com/infoweek/1217/217ID_GlobalCIO_75.jpg" width="75" height="75" border="0" align="right" alt="Global CIO" style="margin:0 0 6px 6px;"></a> <div style="margin:0 0 6px 0; font-size:1.3em; font-weight:bold; color:#113e53;">Global CIOs: A Site Just For You</div> Visit <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/">InformationWeek's Global CIO</a> -- our online community and information resource for CIOs operating in the global economy. </div> </div>   There's a bit of good news in our survey: While only 32% of respondents have had a security awareness program in place for two or more years, 18% have recently added one, and an additional 25% say they'll get one in place in the next 12 months. Plenty of cloud-based backup services can add a layer of protection for both company and personal data; we recently did <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/5/8779/Cloud-Computing/buyer-s-guide-cloud-storage-backup-and-synchronization%2A.html">a roundup of 13 providers</a>. No doubt users represent a security risk, but they're also your first line of defense--if you take the time to clue them in on best practices. Explain how securing corporate data can help protect them as well; if their smartphone is stolen, they may want to nuke it. But for goodness sake, don't put device-wipe time bombs on their systems unless you want to explain why all of their personal data is gone and that there's nothing they can do to get it back. At this interactive <a href="https://www.techwebonlineevents.com/ars/eventregistration.do?mode=eventreg&F=1004316&K=7TW">Enterprise Mobility Virtual Event</a>, experts and solution providers will offer detailed insight into how to bring some order to the mobile industry innovation chaos. When you register, you will gain access to live webcast presentations and virtual booths packed with free resources. It happens May 17. 2012-05-15T11:41:00ZAMD Trinity: Intel Ivy Bridge's New RivalAMD challenges Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge processors, with an eye to powerful graphics and long battery life for ultrabook-like machines and laptops.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240000396?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authors <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/hardware/handheld/232602971"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/762/01_Tabletsfirstslidet_tn.jpg" alt="10 Things Tablets Still Can't Do" title="10 Things Tablets Still Can't Do" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">10 Things Tablets Still Can't Do</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow) </div>  AMD released its Trinity chips Tuesday, its second generation A-series APU (accelerated processing units.) These low-power chips are intended for ultrabook-like laptops, traditional laptops, and some all-in-one desktops. Trinity offers better performance and lower power utilization than the previous AMD Llano family of chips. The new chip designs call for about 10% more transistors on a slightly larger die, using the same 32 nm manufacturing process as the previous family of chips known as Llano. However the new chip uses AMD's latest CPU core design, called Piledriver, which succeeds Bulldozer. The chip also offers more and better graphics power (using AMD's Radeon technology.) In other words, Trinity is designed for speed and tuned for very high resolution displays. The added transistors and higher performance all on the same process might lead you to believe the chip will be power hungry, but AMD says it has tuned power management so that a 17 watt version of Trinity will outperform the 17 watt version of Llano by a 2:1 factor. AMD also showed charts showing that Trinity chips offer about the same or superior battery life versus Intel's existing i5 chips, which have been shipping since first quarter 2011. Using various popular applications, AMD shows itself neck and neck with Intel in battery efficiency; however the comparison is with Intel Sandy Bridge chips rather than Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge chips for ultrabooks, which are said by Intel to be a good bit more power efficient than Sandy Bridge. Whichever company's chip you choose, battery life is likely to be in the six to nine hour range for most laptop designs, which is a healthy improvement over what most of us are used to now. Much of what's new with Trinity has to do with better graphics support. While the gamers and movie watchers will have an obvious attraction to the better video, there are business applications too, including high definition video chats, and some applications for traders where multiscreen support and high-speed rendering are important. AMD says its new video technologies are already supported by IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Windows media player among others. If you're a gamer, AMD says you'll notice 20 to 50% improvement over Intel's Ivy Bridge chips in performance, depending on the game and the resolution and quality. The higher you have the game's video quality settings cranked up, the better AMD will perform, AMD says. (AMD is citing third party results for Ivy Bridge performance, so the tests are not precisely apples to apples.) Along with improvements in video and core CPU, AMD's big add is to support ultrathin device form factors. Can a mobile device be an Ultrabook if it doesn't have an Intel chip? Probably not, but it can sure look like one. At this interactive <a href="https://www.techwebonlineevents.com/ars/eventregistration.do?mode=eventreg&F=1004316&K=7TW">Enterprise Mobility Virtual Event</a>, experts and solution providers will offer detailed insight into how to bring some order to the mobile industry innovation chaos. When you register, you will gain access to live webcast presentations and virtual booths packed with free resources. It happens May 17. 2012-05-03T16:00:00ZDell/Compellent Wins Our Storage EvaluationIT pros want reliability, performance, and low cost--and they say they’re getting it best from Dell’s recent storage acquisition, Compellent.http://www.informationweek.com/news/232901436?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsIn our latest IT Pro Ranking, we asked users of midrange storage arrays to tell us which products they like best and why. We received enough survey responses on six vendors to ensure statistical validity, and Dell/Compellent was the clear favorite. The other five in our ranking are IBM, NetApp, EMC, Dell/EqualLogic, and Hewlett-Packard. (We offered a list of 15 vendors but received enough responses for only six to be considered in our final report.) Dell/Compellent and IBM tied for No. 1 in our ranking's standardized evaluation criteria (more on those later), while Dell/Compellent and NetApp tied for the top spot in our storage array features evaluation. EMC ranks highly on virtualization integration and performance, but not so well on port density and data deduplication. Dell/Compellent scores high on reliability and performance, but not so well on breadth of product line and service innovation. Dell's EqualLogic line fares well on acquisition costs but lags in innovation. IBM scores big on product reliability, but it takes its knocks on operation and acquisition costs. NetApp does fine on reliability, but it's right down there with IBM on operation and acquisition costs. HP comes in as an also-ran: It does well in reliability and performance, where it should, just not as well as the leaders. With data protection, high availability, and virtualization high on survey respondents' priority list, you'd expect that EMC would have finished higher in our ranking of product-specific features. But users rate it near the bottom of the pack for data protection. NetApp and Dell/Compellent rank the highest for data protection. One of the most important product features in determining vendor rankings is deduplication. That's not because respondents rank that feature as very important--it ranks in the middle--but because most vendors don't rank well on built-in dedupe. HP, EMC, and Dell/EqualLogic score below 3.6 on our 5-point scale for dedupe. Hands-On Evaluations A quick reminder of how the InformationWeek IT Pro Rankings work. Only IT pros who have used or done hands-on evaluations of the products in our survey are allowed to grade them, so on the whole these assessments tend to trail the feature sets of the latest offerings. So if a vendor greatly improved or added a feature, or substantially dropped a price, that's something Gartner analysts could easily fix in their assessments, but we can't. Users are asked to evaluate the products on both a standardized scale (which includes product performance, reliability, purchase cost, operation cost, and breadth of product line) and a product-specific scale (data protection, high availability architecture, virtualization support, and 10 others). But they're also asked to rank the evaluation criteria themselves. By using this methodology, even if we include a dumb evaluation criterion, users will just rank it as inconsequential. Our goal is to keep "experts" and vendors out of the mix and let your peers speak, in a statistically defensible way, about the products they use. Vendors in the rankings don't know that the survey is happening and have no ability to opt in or out of it. We've been doing these surveys for more than a year now. One outcome we hadn't thought of is that by letting participants rank both the criteria and products against those criteria, we end up with vendors ranked very close together. In most cases, product users are usually happy with their product choices, so when an IBM product ranks high for reliability and low for acquisition cost, that finding tends to be reflected in the evaluation criteria. In this survey, users rank reliability as their No. 1 criterion and acquisition cost in the middle. Thus, only three percentage points separate the field on one scale, and five points on the other. The bottom line in our latest IT Pro Ranking is that you're generally getting what you expected from your storage vendors, so very small variations in our data indicate where vendors are either delighting or disappointing customers. Check out what your peers think of their midrange storage arrays at <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/24/8814/Storage-Server/research-it-pro-ranking-midrange-storage-arrays.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe">InformationWeek Reports</a>. 2012-04-24T09:42:00ZIntel Ivy Bridge: What Enterprise IT GainsARM will own the smartphone market, Intel will own the desktop and high-end laptop market, and the space in between the two will likely become more confused.http://www.informationweek.com/news/232900815?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authorsIf you had any doubt that Intel has the ability to turn out the finest core processors in the world, then its <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/processors/232900742">Ivy Bridge announcement</a> Monday should have put those doubts to rest. Unless real-world testing turns up surprises that Intel does not expect, the new processors will delight power users--gamers, graphics professionals, video editors, stock traders--and anyone else who wants a ridiculously fast desktop system with great graphics, fast I/O, inherent security capabilities, and just about anything else you can do with a few billion transistors. That Intel builds the Ivy Bridge chip on a brand new 22-nm process (which will soon turn into a 14- and then 10-nm process) should give power users the sense that they'll be well taken care of through the end of the decade. Yes, even if you just need good speedy desktop systems, this week's announcement should have left you quite satisfied. Moore's Law is alive and well, and Intel is using it to its best advantage for the desktop. If you're an IT pro charged with setting the path for your end users' devices, the announcement was still a good one--with one caveat. On the up side, Intel is over-delivering. It says video performance on the new chips is better than it had predicted, and it's delivering the new core processors a bit ahead of schedule. But what Intel won't deliver, at least until June, are dual-core versions of the Ivy Bridge chip. That's because there's an inventory of Sandy Bridge chips--it seems ultrabooks aren't selling quite as fast as expected. The obvious culprit is the iPad. Now it's certainly not news to anyone that the popularity of the iPad would have a slowing effect on the sales of other portables. It's not that the iPad can easily replace a laptop, but having one could make it reasonable to keep the laptop you have longer than you otherwise would have. Regardless of what that means for Intel and Apple, it means the IT pros will absolutely have two platforms (or more) for end users as far as the eye can see. It seems clear that ARM is going to own smartphone market, Intel will own the desktop and high end laptop market, and the space in between the two is likely to become more confused. That's because the smart engineers at ARM Holdings aren't sitting still either. ARM is pushing into 64-bit technology and adding virtualization features. Both of these developments will be useful on phones, but more critical on tablets and laptops--and appealing to enterprise IT shops uncomfortable with the current mobile device management options. We've even seen vendors demoing laptops and tablets sporting both ARM and Intel processors. That's probably not something that will catch on, but it's an interesting proof of concept. The question is where ARM and Intel will split the end user device market. That'll take a while to work itself out. But as things look now, neither company will get the whole market. There's been some talk about how Intel perfecting its 22-nm technology could be an opening back into the smartphone market. Indeed, the company has at least one smartphone design win--the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/smart_phones/232900595">Xolo X900, which debuts in India</a>. But at this point, unless ARM stumbles in some unimaginably bad way, engineering alone won't be enough for Intel to win over the smartphone market. There's too much ARM-specific software, and the device makers prefer ARM's licensing model to Intel's. Art Wittmann is director of InformationWeek Reports, a portfolio of decision-support tools and research reports. You can write to him at <a href="mailto:awittmann@techweb.com">awittmann@techweb.com</a>. At this interactive <a href="https://www.techwebonlineevents.com/ars/eventregistration.do?mode=eventreg&F=1004316&K=7TW">Enterprise Mobility Virtual Event</a>, experts and solution providers will offer detailed insight into how to bring some order to the mobile industry innovation chaos. When you register, you will gain access to live webcast presentations and virtual booths packed with free resources. It happens May 17. 2012-04-23T12:58:00ZIntel Ships 13 Ivy Bridge ProcessorsIntel's quad-core chips are designed for desktop systems and provide twice the graphics performance of earlier processors.http://www.informationweek.com/news/232900742?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_authors<div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"> <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/galleries/hardware/handheld/232602971"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/762/01_Tabletsfirstslidet_tn.jpg" alt="10 Things Tablets Still Can't Do" title="10 Things Tablets Still Can't Do" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">10 Things Tablets Still Can't Do</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow) </div> Intel Monday officially released its line of Ivy Bridge processors, which are to be built on the company's 22-nm tri-gate transistor process. <a href="http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2012/02/intel-confirms-that-ivy-bridge-is-definitely-delayed/">Announced last year</a>, Intel's new tri-gate technology allows the company to build smaller transistors that run faster and consume less power than ones built with previous technologies. Intel said that 13 quad-core Ivy Bridge processors all aimed at desktop systems would be available immediately. The processors will fall into Intel's Core i5 and i7 families and represent the third generation of the Core architecture. Dual-core chips more appropriate for notebooks such as those built on Intel's ultrabook concept will be released later in the spring, according to company officials. The delay is largely due to excess inventory of Sandy Bridge dual core chips. By using its tri-gate technology, Intel claims a 20% improvement in performance and energy efficiency. Intel says that its tri-gate manufacturing facilities are coming on line more quickly than any of its previous technologies. The company reports that three plants are now producing the tri-gate chips and that a fourth will be online soon. [ What is tri-gate? See <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/processors/229402784?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Intel Makes 3-D Transistors Reality</a>. ] Independent performance numbers are not yet available for the chip, but the Ivy Bridge design includes important enhancements over its Sandy Bridge predecessor. Notable enhancements include: support for PCI Express 3.0, support for faster and lower-power RAM, and more graphical execution units known as GPUs. The most significant improvement in performance is expected to come in the chip's graphics subsystem. Faster technology and an additional four GPUs will allow the chip to handle higher resolution displays. Intel now says to expect two times the performance of its existing subsystem, which is about 30% better than Intel had been promising. Intel says it is tracking over 600 designs based on the Ivy Bridge chips. Our <a href="http://reports.informationweek.com/abstract/24/8697/Storage-Server/research-state-of-storage-2012.html?k=axxe&cid=article_axxe">State Of Storage 2012</a> report highlights promising new technologies that aren't yet on most respondents' radar and offers advice as you plan your 2012 storage strategy. (Free registration required.)