[Video] VMforce: VMware Spring Framework Brings Java To Salesforce.com Cloud2

April 27, 2010

VMware's Spring Framework is the force behind VMforce, Salesforce.com's Java extension

When you listen Salesforce.com top chief Marc Benioff speak about VMforce, you sure would think the San Francisco, Calif.-company launched yet another Godzilla-esque “trusted” cloud platform.

Yet, after you get rid of the boat-load of marketing speak delivered this morning at the launch event, what you end up with is actually a very simple proposition: with VMforce, Salesforce.com is adding a second computing language, i.e. Java, to its existing application cloud, Force.com; which so far is using its proprietary Apex code language.

So why all the fuss?

In supporting Java, Salesforce.com hopes to lure some of the 6 million Java developers to start building their enterprise apps on its Force.com platform.

With VMware, Force.com becomes an easy to use Java Application cloud platform provider

“Force.com is fundamentally extended with VMware’s technology. And now Java runs on Force.com. That is really powerful [sic!]. And Java now runs in the Cloud. And not just in the cloud, but at the enterprise level, with the security, the reliability, the availability, the scalability that developers need to be successful,” said Benioff.

And everybody will love it, boasts the Salesforce.com co-founder.

“Force.com developers are going to love VMforce because they can now use Java for the first time. Force.com developers can incorporate Java into their apps… And Java developers will love VMforce because it means that they can easily write and deploy enterprise quality apps into the cloud: 5 times faster, and half the cost than traditional environments.”

And the vision?

“To take these 6 million Java developers and transform them through VMforce to deliver the next generation of Cloud 2 apps.”

Java developers, Salesforce.com wants to transform you! You have been warned!

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[Video] RSA, VMware, Intel Unveil Trusted Cloud Vision

March 2, 2010

EMC collaborates with VMware and Intel to deliver proof of concept for business-critical security, compliance and control in the cloud

RSA Chief Art Coviella at the conference media reception

At a media reception tonight, RSA president Art Coviello unveiled a proof of concept for measuring and monitoring the security of a cloud infrastructure.

The concept that will make its debut tomorrow, at this week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco comprises of a hardware root of trust provided by Intel in its next-generation server processor (Westmere), a secure virtualisation environment and a security information and event management.

“What is more important, because this is about virtualisation (the enabling technology for the cloud infrastructure), is that we are building the security in [the cloud infrastructure] before we have massive deployments of cloud infrastructures. That was not happening 14 or 15 years ago. That, I think, is the biggest news that is coming out of this conference,” explains Coviello.

The goal is to:

  1. provide a better visibility into actual conditions within the bottom-most layers of the cloud, within physical and virtual machines, giving organizations the ability to verify secure conditions in what was formerly the “black box” of the cloud;
  2. enable finer controls to enforce differentiated policies in private clouds, such as what types of physical hardware virtual machines may run on and which tenants or business units may co-reside and share resources;
  3. streamline Compliance by providing automated processes for collecting, analyzing and reporting infrastructure-level activities and events.

Follows, a video excerpt of Coviello’s introductory comments.

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DEMOfall To Honour 15 Tech Stars

September 20, 2009
For the very first time, Demo will honour some of its previous presenters that became Tech stars

For the very first time, DEMO organisers will honour 15 of its previous presenters that subsequently became some of the biggest success in Tech

For the first time this year, the DEMO award ceremony will be held during the lunch’s dessert – instead of the usual dinner ceremony – , followed by the Lifetime Achievement awards given to some high-power individuals, including (I wonder how many of them will actually show up?):

  1. Shai Agassi, Founder, TopTier Software, currently Founder and CEO, Better Place
  2. Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, salesforce.com
  3. Donna Dubinsky, Founder, CEO & Board Chair, Numenta
  4. Jeff Hawkins, Founder, Numenta
  5. Subrah Iyar, Founder and former CEO, WebEx
  6. Keng Lim, Founder, Chairman and CEO, NextLabs
  7. Kevin Lynch, Chief Technology Officer, Senior Vice President, Experience & Technology Organization, Adobe Systems
  8. Andy Rubin, Co-founder, Danger Inc., currently Vice President, Engineering, Google
  9. Mike Cassidy, Co-founder, Xfire, currently Co-founder & CEO, Ruba.com
  10. Diane Greene, Co-founder, VMware
  11. Colin Angle, Chairman, CEO and Co-founder, iRobot
  12. Helen Greiner, Co-founder, iRobot, currently Founder, The Droid Works
  13. Teresa Meng, Founder, Atheros Communications, currently Reid Weaver Dennis Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University
  14. Ben Trott, Founder & CTO, Six Apart
  15. Mena Trott, Founder & President, Six Apart

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VMware CEO: Intel X86 Is A Power Hog, Not Good Fit For Mobile Devices

June 24, 2009
VMware CEO Paul Maritz case study of the evolution of Intels X86 architecture

VMware CEO Paul Maritz case study of the evolution of Intel's X86 architecture

Despite the fact that the first X86 chip started its life as a microprocessor for watches, Intel’s architecture is just not fit for mobile devices.

“It’s a power hog, it loves electricity, all those [unused] gates are basically consuming power,” said VMware CEO Paul Maritz in a keynote at the last Tiecon conference in Silicon Valley.

For the former Intel executive, the problem boils down to Intel’s instruction set inherent complexity that has accumulated over the years to support functions that nobody uses anymore.

“It’s all junk silicon,” Maritz adds.

Intel first jumped on the ultra-mobile device bandwagon experimenting with the ARM processor but finally decided to bail out from that market.

“These devices were kind of low end, low power, low profit. And eventually Intel decided to get out of that business and go back to their roots of high performance, complex microprocessors,” explains Maritz. “But they made a mistake leaving that market alone as it got better and better and now this ARM thing is a real problem.”

And probably an insurmountable problem for Intel, as ARM increases its domination of the ultra-mobile market (from feature phones to smartphones and soon MIDs).

Here’s a video excerpt where VMware CEO Paul Maritz explains why the X86 architecture is just not fitted for the cell phone market:

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VMware CEO Paul Maritz: From $600 To Multi-Millionaire

May 14, 2009
Tiecon organizers chose Maritz to kick off the self-proclaimed worlds largest entrepreneurs conference on bold entrepreneurship

Tiecon organizers chose VMware CEO Paul Maritz to kick off the self-proclaimed world's largest entrepreneurs conference

VMware CEO Paul Maritz kicked off Tiecon’s conference in Santa Clara, Calif. as the opening keynote speaker.

Maritz started his speech on entrepreneurship by drawing on his own experience, as a young computer graduate freshly arrived in Silicon Valley – on January 1st, 1981 – from South Africa, with his wife, a 9-months old baby and about $600 in cash!

“I’ve walked the path that many of you had the privilege to walk. The fairy tale and an incredible experience that all of us know of being part of a society that fosters entrepreneurs and has given us such tremendous rewards,” said Maritz.

But before joining Intel and then Microsoft as one of its top executive, Maritz had to go through some mainframe years. The computer landscape in 1981 was very different from what we know today.

“The [mainframe] world was dominated by IBM and the 7 dwarfs (Burroughs, Sperry Rand, Control Data, Honeywell, General Electric, RCA and NCR). I have left South Africa to work in the computer industry and in those days IBM was the Microsoft of these days: it was the uncool place to go in those days! Instead I went to work for Burroughs because they had a very cool instruction set,” recalls Maritz.

Today’s cool places to work in Silicon Valley are Apple (still), Google or Facebook, replacing the likes of H-P, Sun or Yahoo. But with unemployment soaring, does it matter really anymore?

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Tech History 101: VMware CEO Is Citrix Godfather!

May 7, 2009
Citrix CEO Mark Templeton reflecting on VMware CEO Paul Maritz during a press conference at the Citrix Synergy press conference

Citrix CEO Mark Templeton reflecting on VMware CEO Paul Maritz during a press conference at the Citrix Synergy press conference

With all the bad blood happening between virtualization rivals, Citrix and VMware, it’s hard to imagine that both companies CEOs were actually friends and partners.

Answering a question about rival company VMware, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton revealed that his now staunch competitor Paul Maritz (VMware’s CEO) was actually Citrix’s best advocate when he was an executive at Microsoft.

If it was not for Maritz, who convinced Microsoft’s top brass to invest early in the company and later on, sign a licensing agreement that end up being a much needed lifeline for Citrix, the Florida-based company would not be here today admits Templeton.

“He’s really Citrix’s godfather,” reflects Templeton during a media conference at the Synergy conference this week in Las Vegas.

But despite the historical link, Templeton has not warmed to the idea of establishing closer relationships with his Palo Alto, Calif.-rival. “I’m not sure what we can bring to VMware at this point.”

What about a cheaper alternative to virtualization? :-)

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Citrix XenClient Could Disrupt Desktop Virtualization Market

May 7, 2009

Citrix’s announcement this week of XenClient could radically change the desktop virtualization landscape.

Unlike VMware’s hypervisor, XenClient is a “bare metal” software – or hypervisor type 1 – that loads in the computer’s memory, even before the operating system (MacOS X or Windows) does.

Enterprises would most likely use this to create separate and totally independent virtual desktops on the user’s PC: one for the workplace and one for private use for example.

“This is becoming important as more companies allow users to bring their own equipment in the workplace but still need to make sure it provides the necessary level of security to access corporate data,” explains Citrix CEO Mark Templeton, in a conversation at the company’s Synergy user and partner conference this week in Las Vegas.

Having several virtual machines on a single PC is nothing news. VMware does it, so does KVM and Parallels. But because these solutions use hypervisors type 2 – running on top of the operating system that can be hacked – it’s clunky, not as secure and complex.

Although, Citrix is the first to go the “bare metal” route on desktop computers with XenClient, nothing prevents VMware to follow suit as the Palo Alto, Calif.-company has all the technology in-house.

“VMware seems to be believe that virtual machines is the solution for everything they do. I guess it comes from their name (VM stands for virtual machine). It doesn’t have to be,” jokes Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix’s virtualization business.

Citrix refused to say when XenClient will be available, but did several demos of the technology during the Synergy conference, including the hypervisor installed on a MacBook computer and running both MacOS X and Windows, side-by-side.

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Citrix Demonstrates Windows 7 On iPhone, One Laptop Per Child

May 5, 2009
With the free Citrix Receiver application, one could run any Windows application, on any device

With the free Citrix Receiver application, one could run any Windows application, on any device, like the One Laptop per Child

The promise of running any software, on any device is not as far away as one would think.

Today, at Citrix’ Synergy conference, CEO Mark Templeton showed an iPhone and a One Laptop per child device running a full Windows 7 desktop.

To make this possible, the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.- company developed a piece of software, the Citrix Receiver, that displays a Windows desktop (XP, Vista or 7) stored on remote servers, in a datacentre for example.

The Citrix Receiver is available today free for a PC (Windows or Mac), the iPhone and soon for Blackberry and Android phones.

Although, it looks remarkable, this remote desktop feature is nothing new for Citrix and VMware customers.

“We could do that with VMware View since 2007,” responds Jerry Chen, senior director of desktop virtualization at VMware.

But it was a good opportunity for Templeton to show off the new “universal client” that includes all the company’s protocols (ICA, password…).

“We want to make things simple and what better way to show it then on a very simple machine like the OLPC,” said the Citrix CEO.

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How RSA Security Defies Recession

April 23, 2009
RSA Security President, Art Coviello, explains the secret behind the companys success despite the economic downturn

RSA Security President, Art Coviello, explains the secret behind the company's success despite the economic downturn

Despite the current financial services meltdown, RSA Security managed to increase both overall revenue and its market share within the finance category.

“In a record [fourth] quarter with the financial services industry down, we had the higer percentage than ever in financial services,” explained RSA President, Art Coviello, in a fireside chat late yesterday with other RSA and VMware executives.

So is computer security recession-proof?

When asked, Coviello came up with 2 reasons:

  1. Return on investments, as RSA products help finance institutions reduce the amount of fraud, giving them an immediate ROI;
  2. And cost effectiveness.

“The security vendors that will be successful during this financial crisis will be the ones that can offer both cost efficiency with their solution and some level of ROI through fraud reduction,” adds Coviello.

Here’s a short video excerpt of my conversation with RSA President, Art Coviello:

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VMware Improves Virtualization Performance With vSphere; Targets Enterprise Critical Applications

April 21, 2009
With vSphere, VMware claims to bring the benefit of cloud computing without the disruption of having to rewrite the application

With vSphere, VMware claims to bring the benefit of cloud computing without the disruption of having to rewrite the application

VMware unveiled today vSphere 4, the new name for its virtualization infrastructure previously called VMware Infrastructure or VI.

“The old name wasn’t a great name: it was too long, generic, undifferentiated and was too close to its product category of virtual infrastructure,” admitted to me Bogomil Balkansky, vice-president of Product Marketing at VMware.

Cloud OS will not require to rewrite applications

VMware touts vSphere as the Cloud OS (operating system), that brings the benefits of cloud computing – lower cost, reliable, pay-as-you-go model – to the enterprise data centre, but without the disruption.

“Today enterprises hesitate to jump on the public cloud bandwagon because it forces them to rewrite all their applications using those public clouds APIs (programming interfaces). With vSphere, enterprises do not have to rewrite anything. They just have to move their existing applications to this upgraded virtualization infrastructure,” adds Balkansky.

Improved performance allows virtualization of critical applications

But what vSphere really is a vastly improved virtual machine with much better performance and reliability features than its prior generation.

“We’ve made huge improvements in terms of the size and scalability of the individual virtual machines. And that’s very important to enable to run business applications, including critical applications. All the speeds and feeds of virtual machines have increased 2 to 4 times: like the processors, the memory, the storage speed and the network connectivity per virtual machines. Now applications that run on vSphere are as fast as if they were running on a native server. Today, there’s no excuse not to virtualize a 100% of your datacenter,” pounds the VMware executive.

vSphere will require server shutdown

The migration to vSphere will not be trivial as it will require to shut down the physical servers, install the new virtual machine and restart. To prevent downtime during the upgrade, VMware recommends to use its Vmotion migration tool to move around the virtual machines while servers are been updated.

High price is no hurdle!

Although VMware has a version of vSphere targeted at small and medium businesses – limited to 3 physcal servers – for less than $1,000, prices can quickly jump to more than $3,000 per processor.

“When customers look at our solutions, they get so much value and such an ROI that prices is not typically a hurdle. And honestly, we have free products like our hypervisor is free,” replies Balkansky.

With a $995 edition, VMware hopes to accelerate small and medium businesses adoption of virtualization

With a $995 edition, VMware hopes to accelerate small and medium businesses adoption of virtualization

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