10 things Windows 7 must do to succeed

I recently attended a briefing where Microsoft Corp. explained some of the new features in Windows 7 to reviewers from different publications. At the end of the meeting, the Microsoft folks asked the half-dozen of us present what it will take for the new operating system to be a success.

“Injecting about $3 trillion into the economy to end this recession,” was my initial response. It’s hard to imagine that any new operating system will be a success, especially with business customers, until the economy improves. What we are already using works just fine, thank you. It will have to see us through.

So, let’s fast-forward in the economic cycle to the inevitable uptick, when investing in business computing becomes easier. Here are 10 things Windows 7 will have to do.

1. Windows 7 should not be positioned in relation to Windows Vista, which is nonexistent in most businesses. Windows 7 needs to be related back to Windows XP, to which I think it is the legitimate successor.

2. I don’t see Windows 7 as Vista SP2 or “Vista Lite” or anything like that. Windows 7 looks like a new operating system to me and deserves to be treated as such. (Readers: Give Windows 7 a chance, OK?)

3. Windows 7 needs to run just fine on hardware that runs Windows XP just fine today. My sense, playing with Windows 7, is that this is possible. Vista grabbed an early reputation as a resource hog. Windows 7 must avoid this.

4. Because Windows 7 can’t upgrade an existing Windows XP installation, Microsoft needs to provide easy transition tools. A copy of Windows 7 and a flash drive or small stack of DVDs needs to move all my data and my applications and my settings to the new OS. This may mean Microsoft needs to send an applications disc with Windows 7.

5. Just for emphasis: If I have to reinstall my applications, Windows 7 will not be a welcome upgrade.

6. If Microsoft doesn’t or can’t accomplish the previous items, then it should not promote Windows 7 as an upgrade and offer it on new hardware only. This will avoid one of the major factors in Vista’s failure — its inability to run well on what people already owned.

7. Fortunately, the Windows 7 user experience is not wildly different from XP the way Vista is. This will make it easier for companies (or households) to have a mix of Windows XP and Windows 7

8. I like what I have seen of Windows 7, but I have yet to hear Microsoft offer a good reason besides “a wide range of improvements” for me to upgrade. If it comes only on new hardware, that’s fine. And, yes, some people will then decide they like the new OS and upgrade older machines as a result. But if Microsoft hopes to sell an upgrade, it needs to look at how Apple Inc. sells its upgrades.

9. Speaking of which, Apple sells features and applications that are included with Mac OS as major upgrade benefits. If Microsoft included more significant applications with its operating system, maybe it could make them as important as the iApps are to Apple customers. Apple manages to charge its best customers up to $300 per year for upgrades of some sort.

10. I think we have solved the problem of linking Windows 7 too closely to the release of Office 14 now that the timing between two seems clearly offset. Delays, economic or technical, should not bring the two releases back together. At least, not until it’s clear from seeing the software that one won’t drag down the other.

I won’t say those are the top 10 things that Microsoft needs to do to make Windows 7 a success. My experience with the operating system is too limited for me to feel I’ve considered all the angles, but these suggestions are a good place for the company to start.

David Coursey has already installed Windows 7 in a virtual machine on a Mac. And it works quite nicely, so far. Write him at david@coursey.com.

Popularity: 5% [?]

T-Mobile refreshes the BlackBerry Curve

T-Mobile's update of the BlackBerry Curve, the 8900, isn't an earth-shattering revision of one of Research In Motion Ltd.'s most successful QWERTY keyboard models. But for those who are content to browse over T-Mobile's somewhat pokey EDGE network when Wi-Fi isn't available, it offers an improved camera, a sleeker design and a snappier processor than its predecessor, the Curve 8320 (which is still available from T-Mobile but for $100 less than the 8900).

Like the 8320, the 8900 is a quad-band phone, meaning you can use it on pretty much any GSM network worldwide. For data, it supports EDGE, the 2.5G network technology that approximates dial-up in real-world performance. That's fine for e-mail, but Web browsing is somewhat sluggish (although the desktop-style browser does a good job of rendering large pages and then letting you zoom in on sections of interest).

Black with silver accents, the 8900 is slightly skinnier, a tad more lightweight and more sculpted looking than earlier Curves, with some of the design motifs we've seen in the BlackBerry Bold and Storm. I'm on the fence about the use of red type for keypad numbers, which is more subtle but also makes them slightly less legible than on the 8900's predecessors, which used black on silver. Still, when the phone screen is on, the red numbers do glow, so I had no problems dialing. RIM continues to refine its keyboards, and thumb-typing on the Curve is eminently doable. Of course, you get the terrific corporate and Internet e-mail features RIM is known for.

Voice call quality was solid in my tests, Like its predecessor, the 8900 uses UMA technology to let you make voice calls over Wi-Fi when a Wi-Fi network is present. However, you must sign up for T-Mobile's Hotspot at Home service to enable seamless transition from Wi-Fi to cellular calls.

The supplied media clips looked good, given the smallish but bright high-resolution screen. The 8900 comes with the updated media manager introduced since the last Curve, a definite plus. The 3.2-megapixel camera with built-in flash and autofocus is also an upgrade from the previous 2-megapixel model, and it definitely shows in the improved images; shutterbugs will appreciate the difference.

Overall performance on apps definitely seemed snappier thanks to the upgraded CPU that RIM is touting. Wi-Fi setup was easy and quick. The Global Positioning System location function, on the other hand, wasn't so hot with my production-level unit. The device hung for quite some time on its own requests for satellite fixes, and it ultimately appeared to give up. I'm trying to figure out what happened here and will update as needed.

That glitch aside, the Curve 8900 should appeal to T-Mobile BlackBerry fans who feel the original Curve is starting to get a bit tired — and who have no particular need for a handset that supports faster UMTS/DSMA data networks. The rather high $300 price tag (with a two-year T-Mobile contract) can be lowered to $200 via mail-in rebate when the device hits T-Mobile's retail outlets next week (business-to-business customers can start ordering now).

Popularity: 3% [?]

President Obama already Googlebombed as ‘failure’

A few years ago, online Bush bashers ganged up to link the term “miserable failure” from their blogs to the 43rd president’s home page. As a result, a Google search for “miserable failure” returned the White House’s Web site as top result.

Today, though, it’s President Obama who has been targeted for the search term “failure” at Google and “miserable failure” at Yahoo. Search Engine Land editor Danny Sullivan says he tried to warn Obama’s staff through several channels but was ignored.

That’s probably the right response. But here in San Francisco, there’s an obvious unanswered question: Is this the work of Republican bloggers, or was it our local left-of-left progressives unhappy with “Barry O.’s” lack of support for medical marijuana and rent control?

Popularity: 4% [?]

Microsoft may shutter Popfly Web mashup tool

Microsoft Corp. on Friday said that it may discontinue its free Popfly service that lets nonprogrammers build Web 2.0 apps.

Popfly “is in a transitional phase,” said a Microsoft spokeswoman on Friday. “We have no other details at the moment.”

A free programming tool built on Microsoft’s Silverlight rich media platform, Popfly lets novice coders build powerful Web 2.0 apps or casual games simply by dragging and dropping prebuilt services such as RSS or Flickr image feeds, all represented on the screen as icons or blocks.

CEO Steve Ballmer demonstrated Popfly at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco in the fall of 2007.

Popfly was created by the developer division inside the server and tools division at Microsoft. The service was still technically in beta.

According to an anonymous posting Thursday at the Mini-Microsoft site, Microsoft “disbanded” the team behind Popfly as part of Thursday’s layoffs of 1,400 employees.

Popfly was one of a pair of products that appears to have fallen victim to those cuts.

Microsoft confirmed Friday that it also closed down the group that built its venerable Flight Simulator software, though the technology or the game itself may reappear on the Web.

Mark Frydenberg, a programming instructor at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., uses Popfly to teach introductory programming. Popfly is ideal for teaching students who are savvy with the Web but have little experience at coding, he said, and it’s “friendlier” and easier to use than Yahoo’s similar Yahoo Pipes.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Microsoft extends Windows 7 beta download deadline

Microsoft Corp. yesterday extended the deadline for downloading the public beta of Windows 7 by more than two weeks, citing continued interest in the preview.

The move suggests that fewer than 2.5 million copies of the beta have been downloaded since Microsoft launched the Windows 7 preview Jan. 10.

Although Microsoft had originally capped the downloads of Windows 7 beta at 2.5 million, after a rocky launch — the company’s servers were overloaded as frustrated users tried to download the preview — the company lifted the limit and said it would offer the beta through today, Jan. 24.

Late Friday, Microsoft changed its mind again.

“Because enthusiasm continues to be so high for the Windows 7 Beta and we don’t want anyone to miss out, we will keep the Beta downloads open through February 10,” said company spokesman Brandon LeBlanc in a post to the Windows 7 blog.

LeBlanc didn’t say whether the 2.5-million cap had been reached, noting only that, “We are at a point where we have more than enough beta testers ??? so we are beginning to plan the end of general availability of Windows 7 Beta.”

According to comments made earlier this month by a Microsoft IT evangelist, the decision to keep the beta download open is a clue that download demand has not yet reached the 2.5-million mark. Two weeks ago, Kevin Remdes, a company evangelist, said that if the cap was not reached by today, downloads would continue “until the limit is reached.”

Microsoft was not available for comment Saturday on whether the cap had been reached or surpassed, or to answer questions about how many copies it has provided users to this point.

Windows 7 beta availability will be shut down in stages, LeBlanc said. While the beta will be pulled from Microsoft’s servers at the end of the day Feb. 10, users who have already begun the download by then will have two more days, through Feb. 12, to complete the process.

Users can pause the Windows 7 beta download and resume it later; an interrupted download — perhaps due to a severed Internet connection — can also be resumed at the point it was halted.

Activation keys will be available indefinitely for users who finished downloading the disk image file before Feb. 12. Even users unable or unwilling to activate the beta, however, can install and run Windows 7 for up to 120 days without a key by using the same “slmgr -rearm” command that gained notoriety after Windows Vista’s debut.

Subscribers to the TechNet and Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) will be able to download the beta after the February deadlines imposed on the general public, LeBlanc added.

Users can download Windows 7 from the Microsoft site after selecting the 32- or 64-bit version, and the desired language.

Popularity: 6% [?]

E-discovery vendor revamps pricing model

Kazeon Systems has rolled out a range of pricing plans for its e-discovery products, hoping to entice customers amid lean economic times.

E-discovery software is used in the course of collecting, organizing and storing information expected to be used in legal or regulatory proceedings.

Kazeon customers can now choose from subscription, per-gigabyte and per-case options, along with traditional perpetual licenses.

Users who want to avoid big up-front costs can start using Kazeon's software for about US$10,000, which provides a license to start a new case and some gigabytes to get started. Companies then pay between $100 and $150 for each additional gigabyte, a spokesman said.

Subscriptions are also available, with pricing varying depending on the length of the contract. The company is also offering licenses based on a specific case, since many companies begin e-discovery projects only as legal issues arise, the spokesman said.

Standard perpetual licenses cost $80,000.

While offering customers more flexibility, Kazeon's new pricing options could also help the Mountain View, California, company land more deals.

E-discovery companies face "several key challenges" in selling their wares, 451 Group analyst Brenon Daly noted in an October blog post.

Forrester analyst Brian Hill is predicting that e-discovery adoption will increase this year as government bodies around the world enact new regulations and toughen up enforcement amid the economic downturn.

In an interview Wednesday, Hill said that pricing models such as Kazeon's are coming into vogue among other e-discovery vendors but are not yet mainstream.

That echoes the e-discovery market overall, which is "large but still in a fairly early stage, and it's fragmented," he said.

E-discovery projects are complicated as well, involving legal departments, IT staff and other stakeholders, and can take a while to get up and running, he said.

But at the same time, integration with existing systems is a key challenge for customers. "While it could be advantageous to get something up and running very quickly, there's the risk of having this not work well with what you've got installed," he said.

However, signs of maturity are beginning to appear, Hill added: "One thing I'm seeing is that organizations are starting to rationalize the e-discovery process, and looking at it like any other business process."

Popularity: 2% [?]

Senator questions, prods Microsoft on inclusion of H-1B workers in layoffs

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) told Microsoft Corp. this week that U.S. citizens should get priority over H-1B visa holders as the software vendor moves forward on its plan to cut 5,000 jobs.

“These work visa programs were never intended to allow a company to retain foreign guest workers rather than similarly qualified American workers, when that company cuts jobs during an economic downturn,” Grassley wrote in a letter sent Thursday to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The letter asked Microsoft to detail the types of jobs that will be eliminated and how those cuts will affect the company’s H-1B workers.

Microsoft didn’t respond this afternoon to a request for comment about the letter sent by Grassley, who last fall released an internal report by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency documenting large amounts of fraud in the H-1B program.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Meeting virtualization management challenges

October 28, 2008 (Network World)
The sprawl of management consoles, the proliferation of data they provide and the rising use of virtualization are adding challenges to corporations looking to more effectively manage mixed Linux, Windows and cloud environments.

Traditional standards are being tapped in order to bridge the platform divide, and new ones are being created to handle technologies such as virtualization that create physical platforms running one technology but hosting virtual machines running something completely different.

The goal is better visibility into what is going right or wrong — and why — as complexity rises on the computing landscape.

Some help is on the way. The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) last month began hammering out virtualization management standards that it hopes will show up in products next year. Those standards will address interoperability, portability and virtual machine life-cycle management, as well as incorporate time-honored management standards such as the Common Information Model (CIM).

Vendors such as Microsoft, VMware and Citrix are on board with the DMTF and are creating and marketing their own cross-platform virtualization management tools for x86 machines. Linux vendors, including Novell and Red Hat, and traditional management vendors such as HP also are joining in.

To underscore the importance of heterogeneous management, Microsoft is supporting Linux within its virtualization management tools slated to ship by year’s end rather than relying on third-party partners.

And the vendor said in April that it will integrate the OpenPegasus Project, an open-source implementation of the DMTF’s CIM and Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) standards, so it can extend its monitoring tools to other platforms.

The trend toward services is forcing IT to think about management across systems that may have little in common, including the same LAN. Services are increasingly made up of numerous application components that can be running both internally and externally, complicating efforts to oversee all the pieces, their platforms and their dependencies.

The big four management vendors, BMC, CA, HP and IBM, are handling the mixed-environment evolution by upgrading their monolithic platforms to better manage Linux as its use grows. And a crop of next-tier vendors, start-ups and open-source players are angling for a piece of the pie by providing tools that work alone and also plug into the dominant management frameworks

“We are starting to see IT put more mission-critical applications on Linux, and from there you only start to see the stronger growth [of Linux],” says Ute Albert, marketing manager of HP’s Insight management platform. In January, she says, HP will boost its Linux support with features HP already supports for Windows platforms, such as capacity planning.

Analyst firm Enterprise Management Group reports that use of Linux on mainframes has grown 72% in the past two years while x86 Linux growth hit 57%.

In the trenches, users are moving to suck the complexity out of their environments and make sense not only of individual network and systems components but of composite services and how to aggregate data from multiple systems and feed results back to administrators and notification systems.

Console reduction

At Johns Hopkins University, managers are trying to reduce “console sprawl” in a management environment that stretches across 200 projects — many with their own IT support in some nine research and teaching divisions, as well as health care centers, institutes and affiliated entities.

Project leaders pick their own applications and platforms, with about 90% to 95% running Windows and 5% to 10% running Linux. There are also storage-area networks, network devices, Oracle software, Red Hat, VMware, EMC, IronPort e-mail relays, and hardware from Dell, HP and IBM.

John Taylor, manager of the management and monitoring team, and Jamie Bakert, systems architect in the management and monitoring group, are responsible for 15,000 desktops and 1,500 servers, nearly 50% of the university’s total environment.

“Our challenge is we do not want to create another support structure,” says Taylor, who has standardized on Microsoft’s System Center management tools anchored by Operations Manager 2007 and Configuration Manager 2007.

Because Taylor doesn’t control what systems get rolled out, he is using Quest Software’s Management Xtensions for System Center to support non-Windows infrastructure.

“Quest allows us to bring in anything with a heartbeat,” Bakert says.

And that allows for managing distributed applications, which incorporate multiple components on multiple platforms.

“Microsoft has a limited scope of what they are bringing into System Center at this point,” Bakert says.

For instance, he uses Quest Xtensions to monitor IronPort relays that work with Microsoft Exchange to ensure that everything in the e-mail service is monitored in one tool.

The Quest tools also let Bakert store security events on non-Windows machines so he can report on both Windows and non-Windows platforms, which helps with collecting compliance data.

Taylor and Bakert also are beta-testing Microsoft’s System Center Service Manager, slated to ship in early 2010, with hopes they can reduce System Center consoles from five to one.

Eventually, Service Manager’s configuration management database will host data from Configuration Manager and Operations Manager, as well as incorporate ITIL, a set of best practices for IT services management, and the Microsoft Operations Framework.

Taylor and Bakert also are testing System Center’s Virtual Machine Manager, slated to ship by year’s end, which will manage Windows, the VMware hypervisor and SUSE Linux guest environments.

Virtualization getting mixed management workout

Microsoft ironically had the title as first to support mixed hypervisor environments because it was last to release a hypervisor — Hyper-V.

Without the benefit of the in-development Microsoft code, VMware, Novell, Red Hat, HP and others are momentarily playing catch-up on cross-platform management support.

Novell is using its February 2008 acquisition of PlateSpin to support management across both physical and virtual environments. The company’s existing partnership and interoperability agreement with Microsoft has yielded virtualization bundles, and the company’s recent acquisition of Managed Objects will give IT admins and business managers a unified view of how business services work across both physical and virtual environments.

“In the data center, we see that people are not saying, ‘Consolidate [on a platform].’ They are saying, ‘Give me a universal remote,’ ” says Richard Whitehead, director of product marketing for data center solutions.

Red Hat also is developing its portfolio. Its February 2008 launch of the open-source oVirt Project has a stated goal of producing management products for mixed environments.

“The oVirt framework will be used to control guests in a cloud environment, create pools of resources, create images, deploy images, provision images and manage the life cycle of those,” says Mike Ferris, director of product strategy for the management business unit at Red Hat.

HP has aligned its HP Insight Dynamics-Virtual Server Environment (VSE) with VMware and plans to add support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V in the next release, according to Albert. In addition, HP is increasing the feature set of its Linux management and monitoring support.

And while the vendors work on their tools, the DMTF is working on standards it hopes will be as common as existing DMTF standards CIM and WBEM.

The Virtualization Management Initiative (VMAN) released by the DMTF Sept. 16 is designed to provide interoperability and portability standards for virtual computing. The initiative includes the Open Virtualization Format for packaging up and deploying one or more virtual machines to either Linux or Windows platforms. Tools that are based on VMAN will provide consistent deployment, management and monitoring regardless of the hypervisor deployed.

“The truth is, we have been working on this whole platform independence since 1998,” says Winston Bumpus, president of the DMTF, referring to the organization’s goals.

Virtualization is only one of the DMTF’s initiatives. In the next month, the group will start its interoperability certification program around its SMASH and DASH initiatives. The Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware, used to unify data center management, includes the SMASH Server Management Command Line Protocol specification, which simplifies management of heterogeneous servers in the data center. The Desktop and Mobile Architecture for System Hardware provides standards-based Web services management for desktop and mobile client systems.

Open source

Standards efforts are being complemented by open-source vendors that are aligning their source-code flexibility with the interoperability trend.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Top five IT spending priorities for hard times

November 19, 2008 (InfoWorld)
No company is immune to the economy’s ebb and flow. So it’s no surprise that, in the face of a fearsome downturn, IT shops are scrambling to figure out where they should cut.

The big three analyst firms — Forrester Research, Gartner and IDC — are busily slashing their IT spending projections. Just last week IDC predicted that in the United States, IT spending will decline to negative 0.9%, down sharply from a pre-crisis forecast of 4.2% growth.

Just how severe is the impact of the economy on IT? Find out in “Is tech in more trouble than we think?”

“There are some things that just won’t go back in the bottle,” says Gartner analyst Mark Raskino. “Storage is one of those.”

Data keeps piling up and regulatory compliance mandates require that companies hold on to data longer than they’ve ever had to. To that end, IDC continues to estimate that spending on disk storage will double every two years, at least through 2012.

Another growth area will be “storage management tools that help IT get better use out of the hardware they already have,” says Steve Minton, vice president of worldwide IT markets at IDC.

Forrester’s Reichman suggests that thin provisioning, data de-duplication and storage virtualization will prove worthy of investment. “Data de-duplication can improve performance, success rates, these types of things, while storage virtualization is a way to be more flexible and move data nondisruptively.”

[Morgan Keegan is one of the top 10 companies in the 2008 InfoWorld 100 Awards. Check out "Morgan Keegan invests in resilience" for a complete case study.]

Morgan Keegan’s Threadgill agrees, saying that spending on storage and security will be his top IT priorities for 2009. “Our biggest spend next year is going to be storage. Data doubles yearly,” he says. “With what’s happening in the last 30 to 60 days, we also might see new regulatory requirements and have to keep our data forever.”

2. Business intelligence: Niche analytics

As data continues to accrue, the need to glean insights from it grows, agree analysts from Forrester, Gartner and IDC.

CIOs will keep spending on general business intelligence, but more resources will go toward very focused analytics, explains Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels. The “analytics that help companies identify and retain their most profitable customers will be key,” he says.

Gartner analyst Jackie Fenn adds that companies always need behavior analytics. In the supply chain, for instance, analytics that trigger alerts when suppliers are running into problems, such as delaying supply or payment, can deliver real value to companies.

“The broader range of data sources will lead to greater need for analytics,” Fenn explains. “There are many different masters, as companies tap analytics to cut costs, avoid errors, predict behavior of customers before they lose them, grow market opportunities.”

Michael Khan, CIO of international eye care service Specsavers, says that he is continuing to invest in technologies that improve customer insight and retention because “it’s easier to keep those customers now, even at a cost, than to try and win them back later.”

3. Virtualization: Optimizing resources

Virtualization is the data center version of getting the most out of what you already have. Upfront investment in virtualization tends to be fairly low, but can deliver quick and substantial returns. “Virtualization will continue to be popular because it allows companies to defer other costs; in this case, that’s mostly hardware,” IDC’s Gens says.

Specsavers began tapping virtualization before the downturn. “Virtualization is a key tactic we’ve been doing for some time to minimize hardware acquisition costs,” Khan says, “and that will continue.” 

[For more on the security risks of virtualization and how to address them, read "Virtualization's secret security threats."]

Virtualization has advantages beyond hardware cost reduction. “Everybody’s moving to virtualization,” Forrester’s Reichman says. “You’re likely to be more efficient with server and storage resources in the long run, and if you have expertise, that return is likely to come fast. A down economy might be the right time to throw down and do it, especially if you can time it with hardware refreshes.”

Transplace, a $2.5 billion transportation logistics provider, is reaping the benefits of moving to 90% virtualized infrastructure, according to CTO Vince Biddlecombe. “Converting from a physical to a virtual infrastructure is particularly beneficial during tough economic conditions,” Biddlecombe says. “Virtualization has allowed us to save on power and cooling costs as well as the amount of time our IT staff spends on server admin. It provides us with more efficient use of capital as well as increased flexibility during challenging times.”

But CIOs should also expect virtualization to force security investments because, as Threadgill explains, “the virtual machine environment has to be as secure as the physical environment.”

4. Security: Data and end points

No surprises here. IDC’s Gens, in fact, says that security is “always the No. 1 concern of IT. As you see more resources out there on the Internet, there’s concern that they’re secure.”

Companies will have a particular focus on securing network end points, devices and those applications that serve them, according to IDC’s Minton. “Whether you’re in a recession or not, no company wants to be on the front page of The Wall Street Journal because their data was breached,” he adds.

Threadgill lists security as the second of Morgan Keegan’s top two spending priorities, behind only storage. And Specsavers’ Khan adds that his budget will include security technologies, namely firewalls, tools for securing end points, and data encryption for mobile devices and remote PCs. “There’s no reduction in security expenses,” Khan says. “If anything, we’re increasing our security spending.”

Gartner and Forrester agree that companies will continue to ratchet up security. Raskino adds that layoffs and, in turn, new hires will be yet another driver. “An economic downturn and recovery create massive churn,” he says. “The processes and tools for managing and disabling access are going to be critical.”

5. Cloud computing: Business solutions

Analysts from Forrester, Gartner and IDC say that certain pieces of cloud computing will continue to expand — and perhaps even accelerate during the downturn.

IDC predicts that cloud computing will account for 9% or 10% of IT spending by 2012, up from the 4% allocated in 2008. “That’s a conservative forecast made before the Dow tanked,” Gens adds. “So that’s going to accelerate cloud offerings from the big vendors.”

[Times of turmoil are times of opportunity. Check out "Will the downturn accelerate cloud computing?"]

Gens sees many companies moving to the cloud for the applications and services most often sought by business types, who are actually circumventing the IT department to get what they need. These include such business solutions as sales force automation, productivity and marketing campaign software. “The more pure IT stuff — infrastructure, infrastructure software, application development — those are tech buyers, so there are fewer potential customers,” Gens says.

Tech buyers are taking a hard look at such cloud services as Amazon’s EC2, which allows businesses to scale capacity dynamically by uploading virtual machines to Amazon’s servers. But other less glitzy areas are getting traction, too. Cloud-based data backup and file storage services are “a really good idea that can be much more cost-effective” than going it the old-fashioned, in-house way, Forrester’s Reichman says.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Three ways client virtualization can help stretch your dollars

November 26, 2008 (CIO)
Could the stretched-out replacement cycles for desktop machines be a boon for client computing? In a recent Wall Street Journal Business Technology blog post, Ben Worthen noted that a survey from sister publication CIO Magazine found that companies will forgo traditional three-year replacement cycles for desktop machines (both traditional desktops and notebook computers).

According to the CIO survey, 46% of businesses will defer replacing machines for the next year or two.

Worthen says that this will be a problem for people who are already suffering from overloaded machines, bogged down by big apps and too much data. I'm not so sure about that. Any machine purchased in the past three years should be capable of holding at least 2 gig of memory, which should be plenty for most people's workloads. On the data side, most three-year old machines should have at least 40 gig of storage, and probably more. It's hard to imagine most work environments requiring more than 40 gigs of storage.

However, I think he's onto something — not so much from today's workloads, but from tomorrow's. Specifically, the looming (semi) forced shift to Vista or Windows 7. Both of these versions of the OS require a significantly larger hardware footprint than XP does. Consequently, there's a collision course between the operating system of the future and the hardware of the present — which presents an enormous opportunity for client virtualization.

There are three ways that client virtualization can help out in a capital-constrained environment:

If the current hardware really is overloaded by heavyweight apps, presentation virtualization is a possibility. This technology puts the application back on the server and merely shunts the user interface out to the client machine. Instead of having to host the entire application process and store the data, the machine acts as a rich client.

If the client hardware is insufficient to run Vista or Windows 7, move to a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environment, with a virtualization server hosting multiple desktops. There's no need to outfit end-point machines with 4 gig of memory and 200 gig of storage. It's not even necessary to scale that level of resource onto the server

For example, if you have 10 desktops on a single server, you don't need 40 gig of memory. Because end user machines are very spiky in terms of usage and, frankly, under-utilized 99% of the time, a smaller amount of resource is required on the server. In other words, the resources can be multiplexed. This is financially savvy for two reasons: (1) Due to the multiplexing effect, you don't need to buy as much total resource capacity as you would if you were provisioning individual end points, each with sufficient capacity to support a Vista environment; and (2) buying in bulk for servers is, up to a certain point, less expensive than buying the same amount of capacity for individual end devices — in essence, you're paying wholesale rather than retail (so to speak) for hardware capacity. There is a finite ability to play this "wholesale vs. retail" tradeoff; typically when you start putting very large memory sticks into servers the price for it escalates wildly.

Popularity: 3% [?]