SiliconANGLE http://siliconangle.com Just another Siliconangle.com weblog Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:56:14 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Twitter to App Developers: Don’t Make Too Much Money Off Our Platform http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/twitter-to-app-developers-dont-make-too-much-money-off-our-platform/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/twitter-to-app-developers-dont-make-too-much-money-off-our-platform/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:29:13 +0000 Tom Foremski http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/twitter-to-app-developers-dont-make-too-much-money-off-our-platform/

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]]> image I recently wrote about Twitter's business model as ultimately enveloping ever greater parts of its developer community. [Twitter Is The Black Hole Of The Twitterverse...]

After all, why leave money on the table? Why not produce the best desktop client, or mobile client? Why let others build lucrative businesses out of your community?

That seemed to be the way things were moving for Twitter after one of its engineers Tweeted:

"If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)"

Khris Loux, co-founder of JS-Kit Echo, a commenting service, writes that Twitter has a choice of being a tyrant, or a benevolent king.

How Twitter Can Become A New Breed Of Technology Company | paidContent

Twitter has an opportunity to create either value or angst for the developer community. The Twitter platform has led to countless third-party innovations, resulting in a rich set of applications that enhances the core platform. And Twitter has publicly encouraged these developers to join in the “gold rush” of opportunity and build businesses on its platform.

Indeed, the staggering growth of the service and a healthy ecosystem of complimentary applications have made Twitter a sort of benevolent king.
Now the hard part: building a business without becoming a tyrant.

Twitter’s recent release of Twitter Lists, for example, undercuts the work of partners like TLists and shows the tightrope that Twitter (indeed all proprietary platforms) must walk to both grow their core platforms while also making sure that developers have an incentive to build on top of those platforms. Twitter’s failure to strike that balance could alienate a prime engine of its long-term value and growth.

Well put. But where is that balance?

How does it balance making money and letting others make money too?

How much money is it appropriate to let others make from your platform?

A young company such as Twitter, doesn't have the time to exploit all the business opportunities. That's why third-party developers have moved quickly to generate a plethora of Twitter apps: desktop clients such as Seesmic and Tweetdeck are two top examples.

But why let others profit from your community?

Twitter has investors, its management has a duty to maximize shareholder profits. And with each new round of investors, Twitter has to be able to promise new revenue growth.

Where's that going to come from?

It will come from looking at its developer community and seeing where the low hanging fruit is, where maximum bucks can be made from minimum development costs.

Twitter can decide to buy a business or develop a look-a-like. That's a simple decision: cost to buy the business versus development costs and time-to-market.

This is the way the way the world works, and it has nothing to do with being a tyrant or a benevolent king.

If you have a profitable business you will attract competitors. If you have a successful Twitter apps business, if it's not Twitter coming after you, it will be other developers.

If your business is small enough, it's probably not worth the development costs for Twitter to replicate it.

So the message to developers is: don't make too much money from your Twitter apps otherwise your star will be sucked in and extinguished by the black hole at the center of the Twitterverse.

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]]> http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/twitter-to-app-developers-dont-make-too-much-money-off-our-platform/feed/ 2 March Madness – Shifting Tides in the Data Center http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/march-madness-shifting-tides-in-the-data-center/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/march-madness-shifting-tides-in-the-data-center/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:26:03 +0000 Dave Vellante http://siliconangle.com/?p=14227

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Data Center Madness

It’s been an interesting first quarter. Cisco and HP dumping on each other last month, 3PAR turns up the heat in automated storage tiering and then HP’s two-day analyst event in March, followed up by EMC’s grand vision for federated storage and then LSI’s analyst event in NYC. Next week is Iron Mountain in Boston where we’ll hear about the Mimosa acquisition. Then it’s SNW in April which will bring a ton of announcements.

It looks like 2010 is shaping up as a good rebound year. Earnings reports in December were optimistic and the year-on-year comparisons with Q1 2009 should be excellent because Q1 2009 was so miserable. Tech companies are exiting the downturn with outstanding balance sheets. Keep an eye on the relationship between housing starts and unemployment.

Major themes have of course been virtualization and cloud computing. The Wikibon community heard in early March from business continuity practitioners how the cloud has the potential to transform disaster recovery and business continuance, dovetailing with EMC’s vision of federated storage.

Shifting Data Center Landscape

The subtext to all this high level action these past couple of months is a shifting landscape in the data center. We’re seeing big players like Oracle, IBM, HP, Microsoft, Intel and Cisco position for the next wave of innovation; and we’re seeing companies like VMware and EMC trying to get a seat at the big dance…while NetApp stays focused on doing what it does best—making storage simpler.

The sub-sub-text here is the competitive developments in the Fibre Channel business. The vendor community wants to keep users locked into FC without it looking like a lock-in so they’re giving customers a dual FC and FCoE path. Users are uneasy about FCoE but ultimately they will have little choice to adopt as costs come down and the technology moves from CNAs in servers to top-of-rack switches and ultimately converged switches and native FCoE devices. While networks might not converge in the near term, technologies will—around 10 Gb Ethernet and FCoE.

Fibre Channel Ripple Effects

We’re also seeing a new wave of competition in the FC switch business. HP recently dumped Cisco (they’d never admit this) and began private labeling QLogic FC switches. Yesterday QLogic announced that its switches are seeping into EMC (EMC is of course playing Switzerland saying it sells Cicso, Brocade and QLogic products). HP’s move to private label QLogic switches essentially funds QLogic’s entry into a market that’s dominated by Brocade (~80% market share according to Dell’Oro). Every market needs competition and the FC switch business really needs more competition.

Of course QLogic is only focused on edge switching and doesn’t have an edge-to-core offering so perhaps the threat to Brocade is benign. But something’s happening in this space and it’s important because a lot of these big data center, federated, cache coherent installations will be running on FC or FCoE. FC won’t die. Wikibon estimates there are $25B in FC assets installed and CIO’s are not going to rip and replace that infrastructure—it would be crazy. That means there’s a good business still to be had and because it’s a mature business the logical way to grow is to gain share. Who has the share? Brocade.

Wither Brocade?

Two blogs got my attention yesterday. First was one posted on Silicon Angle pointing out that Brocade is under pressure. John Furrier wrote:

Recently Brocade has been under fire for lack of performance due to pressure from Juniper and QLogic. Vendors are broadening the ecosystem to create more competition and accelerate the convergence of storage and networking and servers.

I doubt QLogic has had an impact on Brocade yet but there’s clearly some friction brewing there. But in another blog yesterday, StorageMojo’s Robin Harris was even more cutting. Entitled Brocade’s unraveling, Harris argued that Brocade’s strategy has painted it in a corner because its OEMs had diverging objectives to those of Brocade. Harris wrote:

Brocade’s troubles reflect the dangers of an OEM strategy when your partner’s strategic interests are different than yours. None of them wanted Brocade to succeed as a networking company.

The FC business is not growing. FCoE is a measure to keep the business alive for another 10 years and lock-in customers to a path that is safer than alternative protocols. Sure, eventually the world will go all Ethernet—the operative word there is eventually. The only ways to grow in this business are to raise prices or steal share from Brocade. And because Cisco is at war with the world it seems as though companies like HP are willing to become benefactors to QLogic which creates more pressure on Brocade. The company is getting squeezed by a backlash from SAN complexity and competition from Cisco, QLogic and Ethernet generally. What's more, no one seems to want to shell out the $2.5B+ to buy Brocade even though the company has been shopping itself. Yes it has cash on the balance sheet (~$500M) but its debt is also high (~$1B).

Complexity

All this near term posturing underpins the bigger issue—users want things to be simpler. SAN was supposed to deliver that. It didn’t. And now there’s so much installed storage network infrastructure that users can’t get rid of stuff easily. Everyone understands that the ‘Google Effect’ is changing everything and all companies need to figure out how to simplify infrastructure management. That’s why all the arms dealers are trying to figure out an Ethernet strategy; EMC is riding VMware and guys like HP are trying to add value by simplifying outside of the hypervisor.

Bottom line: Simplify or die…what’s your strategy?

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]]> http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/march-madness-shifting-tides-in-the-data-center/feed/ 6 Phonebooth.com: The Google Voice of Hosted PBX’s [#SxSWi] http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/phonebooth-com-the-google-voice-of-hosted-pbxs-sxswi/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/phonebooth-com-the-google-voice-of-hosted-pbxs-sxswi/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:36:18 +0000 Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/phonebooth-com-the-google-voice-of-hosted-pbxs-sxswi/

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]]> image I’ve been lucky enough to meet with a swath of companies this year, almost all of which excite me on various levels. One of the more interesting infrastructure conversations I’ve had is with a company called Bandwidth.com, who this year in Austin launched a new service over at Phonebooth.com. The service, like much in the telephony business, isn’t immediately exciting (due mostly to the utilitarian nature of telecom), but is really quite interesting at first brush, and looks to have the signs of a service offering with staying power once you delve beneath the service.

Bandwidth is a company that’s been around for ten years, involved (unsurprisingly) in the bandwidth business. Starting out as a reseller, they’ve long since transitioned to owning lines free of legacy traffic of any kind, which allowed them to dip into the VoIP business as well.

The offering this year is certain to shake things up a bit, since they’ve essentially committed to being the Google Voice of hosted PBX, with Phonebooth.com’s imagefree hosting  offering. The site allows the user almost all the options standard in any hosted or non-hosted PBX solution (call attendant, multiple extensions, voicemail, voicemail transcription and such), with the pricing model similar to Google Voice / GrandCentral.

When choosing a hosted PBX solution (or even a unified messaging solution like Google Voice, or VoIP solution like Vonage), the key question generally is: “Will the company continue to exist once the giant companies they’re disrupting unleash the legal hounds?” The answer in this case is ‘most likely, yes.’ Bandwidth is an organization with a proven ten-year track record not only in the infrastructure management business, but technology innovation. Holding patents on key telephony technologies (and having executive leadership with strong legal expertise) has staved off the attacks thus far, and doesn’t show signs of abatement.

Over the course of the week, I think I’ve spoken to just about every executive at the company – yesterday, I spoke with company founder, CEO (and “recovering lawyer”) David Morken, who gave a great synopsis of what they’re doing. Check it out below.

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]]> http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/phonebooth-com-the-google-voice-of-hosted-pbxs-sxswi/feed/ 3 IT Expansion in China: Thoughts from My Recent Trip to the Mainland http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/it-expansion-in-china-thoughts-from-my-recent-trip-to-the-mainland/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/it-expansion-in-china-thoughts-from-my-recent-trip-to-the-mainland/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:08:00 +0000 Jeff Nolan http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/it-expansion-in-china-thoughts-from-my-recent-trip-to-the-mainland/

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]]> image Last week I wrote a post that covered many of the observation I made on my recent trip to mainland China. Given my background in IT, a natural area of interest for me was the build out of IT in China businesses that are not directly aligned with U.S. or European counterparts… in other words, what are the independent businesses doing when left on their own.

I don’t believe it is surprising to assert that growth in China to date has come independent of any investments in technology made by the government or business. Cheap labor has made possible productivity gains that would require substantial technology investment in developed countries, but as a I pointed out in my last post, wage inflation is no longer a hypothetical, it is happening as we speak therefore it is timely to consider what the IT implications are in China.

I’m tempted to write about telephony solutions but will resist the urge because irrespective of any other factor this is a given growth area, it simply has to be and growth estimates for 3G network expansion over the next couple of years are in mid-double digit rates. Consumers will be the primary beneficiary of 3G network expansion with businesses lagging as mobile applications are dependent upon a centralized IT methodology that does not currently exist in small and mid sized China businesses.

That last point was the key takeaway I learned in my site visits, the enterprise application market in China for everything but the very large and multinational businesses does not exist. When you visit a mid sized manufacturer, say 1-2k employees, what you will find is a networked PC environment rather than a server based environment. White collar workers use personal productivity applications, email, and file sharing to conduct business.

I did see some rudimentary data center buildout, mostly focused on networking and file storage, and interestingly the rack-based equipment I saw was predominately coming from U.S. based secondary markets rather than purchased new in China. The expansion of data center capability could foretell a scenario where server based applications expand but I believe that is still remote given the lack of local support and consultancy options and significant expenditures for the acquisition and support of such applications.

If on premise server applications are an unlikely growth area then does that mean SaaS and other hosted applications have an advantage? I think that this is unlikely because regional data networks are spotty in terms of robustness and the trust issue related to data storage.

Salesforce.com has been hosting a China edition for several years but in reviewing their materials it is evident that their successes are coming in the Hong Kong region which might as well be a separate country from Mainland (you still have to go through a border crossing when entering Mainland from Hong Kong and the internet in HK is far different from Mainland). You simply cannot run a Mainland focused business from Hong Kong… different language, cultures, governmental controls, etc.

In reviewing the current and near term IT capabilities I believe it is plausible that workgroup solutions will expand that enable better project management and collaboration with near-network and far-network resources. Centralized financial management solutions are less likely given the cost and specialization required for such applications, and server based solutions that control factory shop floor resources are so far off that I wouldn’t even try to predict what the future holds for them.

Shop floor automation will develop over time, and point in fact I did see an expansion of CNC equipment in operation from my last visit. Labor cost inflation is also causing manufacturers to expand CNC investments in areas beyond core milling and machining; I saw a pretty cool CNC carving machine that produced wax moulds for lost-wax bronze casting, a process previously done with a small staff of highly experienced craftsman.

So what would I do if I were running a mid-sized enterprise software company targeting manufacturing sectors? For starters I would establish a base of operations in Mainland with strong local or Taiwanese partnership (never underestimate the influence of Taiwan in businesses operation in China). I would also focus on offering low cost and quick to implement solutions that target workgroup constituencies with business benefits firmly rooted in team efficiency and workflows. Lastly, on pricing you have to start from scratch… whatever you are selling your products and services for in other markets won’t apply in Mainland China, whether on a per user or per server basis.

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]]> http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/it-expansion-in-china-thoughts-from-my-recent-trip-to-the-mainland/feed/ 3 Opsource Cloud Exits Beta, Sets Standard for Cloud SLA’s http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/opsource-cloud-exits-beta-sets-standard-for-cloud-slas/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/opsource-cloud-exits-beta-sets-standard-for-cloud-slas/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:17:21 +0000 Nate D'Amico http://siliconangle.com/?p=14210

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]]> As the CloudConnect event finishes up today after a great four days of presentations and gathering of some of the top people in the Cloud Computing sector, infrastructure and service provider Opsource has two major announcements today, both around their cloud computing efforts.

First, Opsource is announcing that their cloud offering is exiting its public beta phase and is now available to all to purchase their computing services by the hour.  Although this represents a nice milestone for the organization, the bigger news is around the second announcement around the Service Level Agreement's (SLA's) that OpsourceCloud customers will enjoy.

These SLA's that Opsource is delivering set the bar mighty high for the standard cloud realted SLA, the kind that are required by the most demanding enterprise and service provider customers.

Where a start up that is running their service on top of Amazon, or other public cloud provider, might be able to tollerate a little downtime and latency here and there as they are in the early phases of their organization and growth, a lot of enterprise and SaaS providers cannot allow a single moment of downtime, or increased latency due to load on their servers and network traffic.  To appeal to these high demands OpsourceCloud SLA's are as follows:

  • 100% availability of the OpsourceCloud network (border routers, firewalls, load balancers, and switches)
  • 100% availability of servers running within the cloud environment
  • < 1 millisecond latency for data packet transfer between two servers within the cloud environment and within the same VLAN
  • 30 minute response time for "emergency" cases, and 120 minute response time for all others

This year is the year enterprises in general stop talking about cloud and start acting.  It is SLA's such as this that sets the bar high enough for cloud offerings where enterprises can feel more at ease with looking at external providers such as Opsource.

We speak with potential cloud customers on a regular basis here at SiliconAngle and besides the usual data privacy and control issues they have, Service Level's are the other main item a top their lists.  We look forward to seeing how other providers respond to step up and match what Opsource is delivering to the market.

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]]> http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/18/opsource-cloud-exits-beta-sets-standard-for-cloud-slas/feed/ 7 Cisco Says Its All About Security & Video – Announces Borderless Network Vision and New Switches http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/cisco-says-its-all-about-security-video-announces-borderless-network-vision-and-new-switches/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/cisco-says-its-all-about-security-video-announces-borderless-network-vision-and-new-switches/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:15:57 +0000 John Furrier http://siliconangle.com/?p=14176

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]]> image According to Forbes online, Cisco is announcing specifics on their Borderless Network vision with specifics on new switches.

These specifics come one week after Cisco's overblown router announcement that was supposed to change the Internet forever.

We at SiliconAngle were reporting that Cisco was going to provide more 'edge' products as part of that big announcement which they never did. We stand by that original report and are sure those things will materialize eventually. With that in mind today's announcement shows clearly that Cisco is pushing the value at the edge of the network both in mobile and other devices.

In today's announcement Cisco revamped their Ethernet switches, added new services, and enhanced routers for it's recently announced vision around Borderless Networks. Borderless Networks according to Cisco is designed to give users access to Cisco networks from any device.

Analysts are saying that HP might have the price advantage. Specifically the Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala pointed out that Cisco's new product pricing will likely add up to about 10% more than equivalent products from HP. Additionally many are seeing the HP 3Com acquisition as a big force for Cisco to deal with. We covered the HP 3Com acquisition here on SiliconAngle with audio from Marius Haas.

Here are some specifics from Sam Daiz from Between the Lines CNet blog:

Those network services are:

* EnergyWise is a technology that allows users to extend power management to PCs and laptops, as well as Power over Ethernet devices. The company also released the SDK for EnergyWise so developer can implement support for it into their products.
* TrustSec allows users to deploy security policies across all access technologies, including wired, wireless and VPNs to further the authenticity of those access data remotely.
* Medianet is the technology that detects and optimizes video - as well as the allocation and prioritization of network resources - so that video can move between different types of devices.

My Angle on Cisco News: Move Fast

Cisco has to move fast to upgrade all their gear to make their performance and speed meet the expectations set up by their marketing hype machine. Two keys to Cisco's announcement are security and video.

On the notion of borderless networks just last night at the Stanford VLAB event called "The Internet of Things"Dr. Peter G. Hartwell, Senior Researcher of HP Labs, was showing real examples of deployed sensors for their customers. At the VLab event the question about the ability to secure traffic on non-compute devices such as phones, surveillance networks, RFID readers, video conferencing systems, and anything else with an IP address was brought up. Trying to find out actual examples of customers having networks of things as described above.

I wanted to get a feel from folks deep in the trenches on this subject so I polled some folks on Twitter. After checking around on Twitter some key questions came up regarding borderless networks. Those questions were:

- the ability to address unmanageable devices such as VoIP phones or any other IP-based device that is unable to accept a client?
- can thy employ media access control (MAC) address authentication via RADIUS in combination with MAC address whitelisting and blacklisting, and leverages existing policy and profile stores (through LDAP interfaces)
- how does all this play out with multi-vendor network equipment players like HP and EMC

Again this notion of security and video are very important. More important are the "religious views" on the network architecture and will it be a Cisco only network or a multi-vendor network. No debate here that the edge is where the action is. Light Reading has a deep angle on this calling this QoS for video and more analysis.

The important questions are what elements of core networking and edge make up the solution. The debate will continue.

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]]> http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/cisco-says-its-all-about-security-video-announces-borderless-network-vision-and-new-switches/feed/ 4 IE9 To The Corporate Rescue? http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/ie9-to-the-corporate-rescue/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/ie9-to-the-corporate-rescue/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:43:35 +0000 Anthony Farrior http://siliconangle.com/?p=14138

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]]> image In the corporate world, we still use Internet Explorer 6.

Yes, I know how shocking and lame that is, not to mention how slow GMail is on it but in a software environment, IE6 has been the most stable. I'm not saying it's the best, just that it plays nice with the multitude of web apps used in a work ecosystem. While it’s true many of the users complain about not having the latest and greatest, once they do upgrade to IE7 or IE8 (without permission typically), trouble ensues.

I like IE6 when trouble shooting because I can right click on it and run as an admin inside a user's profile. IE7 doesn't do that. IE8 is bust because trying to tweak some of it's ActiveX settings leaves that nasty banner chasing you back to the settings they want. Is Firefox any better? Actually I prefer Chrome over Firefox when it comes to browsing in a corporate platform, opens quicker and it's a little safer.

So how about the new MSFT IE9? Will it be the Microsoft browser war come back story? Perhaps. It does have HTML5 capabilities so that's a programming plus.

I only hope they didn't change everything around again. I’ve watched grown people in Philadelphia cry because they upgraded to Office 2007 and had no clue how to use it.

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]]> http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/ie9-to-the-corporate-rescue/feed/ 4 What the Heck is Cyber-Anthropology [#SxSWi] http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/what-the-heck-is-cyber-anthropology-sxswi/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/what-the-heck-is-cyber-anthropology-sxswi/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:16:51 +0000 Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins http://siliconangle.com/?p=14171

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]]> image Cyber-anthropology.

What?

That was just about my reaction as well.  I met Diana Martin in the SxSWi Bloggers Lounge early Saturday morning, who is a UX (user-experience) specialist at The Planet (a large web host local to Dallas).  As we at that particular table were sipping our wake-up juice and making our introductions and card exchanges, she initially introduced herself not as a Planet employee, even though it was pretty clear from the large block lettering on her t-shirt that she was, but as a cyber-anthropologist.

Naturally, that’s a pretty decent cue that you’re about to hear a pretty interesting introduction.

Obviously, the etymology of the word indicates that the use of the study of anthropology is somehow involved in the investigation of online cultures, but how that’s useful for someone who works at a hosting company isn’t immediately clear.

In speaking with her,  I learned that it was her intense and academic study of the sociology and habits of users of the various online subcultures (such as World of Warcraft players and members of the various open source movements like the Fedora project) which was applied to making online user experience and common work habits more efficient.

She has a very unique perspective and approach to solving the problems of efficiency and communication in the workplace.

Below is her quick talk with me.

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]]> http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/what-the-heck-is-cyber-anthropology-sxswi/feed/ 4 Why SxSW Doesn’t Suck http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/why-sxsw-doesnt-suck/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/why-sxsw-doesnt-suck/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:42:43 +0000 Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/why-sxsw-doesnt-suck/

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]]> image Like many of you, I woke up yesterday to a bitter post on Jolie O’Dell’s personal blog entitled “Why SxSW Sucks,” which has acted as some sort of magnet for many of the non-attendees of SxSW to unload their sour grapes sentiments about being unable to attend the festival. I had initially planned to respond in print yesterday when I read the post originally (and I did address some of her points directly in the closing statements of the SiliconANGLE SxSW live broadcast with Michael Sean Wright), but the more I thought about it, I didn’t get less calm, only more irritated. I woke up this morning fairly well rested after a grueling week of interviews and running around and didn’t feel less irritated, but more so.

Let me preface any comments I make with the statement that I normally respect Jolie O’Dell.  I monitor thousands of feeds daily, and her work has a way of standing out from the crowd. She’s had interesting perspectives and landed very respectable interviews.

Having said that, her statements about SxSW are making me re-think everything I thought I knew about Jolie. How can someone who has technical chops like her have such a myopic view of what’s going on there? I would have expected someone like her to actually, you know, seek out the best of the best and capture their stories. I mean no disrespect to the country of New Zealand, but that country allotting $900 Million to build broadband was not the most interesting nor cutting edge story of the week, and that was her sole actual bit of news submitted to ReadWriteWeb the whole event.

Meanwhile, Michael Sean Wright and I brought two to four hours a day of live programming, literally packed with guests and guest panelists, most of which had startups (both previously unannounced previously known offerings) with incredible and impressive technologies to display.  I could go down the list: Nova Spivack’s new LiveMatrix, or the always impressive WolframAlpha, or the Phonebooth offering from Bandwidth that could change telephony for the enterprise.

image Or I could point to the AI app Siri.  You know, a simple app you download to your mobile phone that can easily answer the question “give me the show times for that Johnny Depp movie tonight,” when asked with your voice.  The app that, you know, won that contest that her boss Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb judged?

For that matter, and I don’t bring up each one individually because I wasn’t present for the whole contest, but weren’t there 24 other startups largely unrecognized by most of the rest of us being judged in that contest? Wasn’t there a trade show floor showing new technology from companies like Rackspace, Microsoft, ThePlanet, AT&T and other giants of the tech space?

Aside from incidents that could happen in any major US city (like a hit-and-run, stolen property, or crowded rooms), her main gripes seem to be the following: she can’t find bloggable content and that all attendees of SxSW are “douchey.”

If she couldn’t find “bloggable” content, she wasn’t looking. I’m not exaggerating in the least here. Everywhere I turned I found interesting stories, and interesting image people to chat with. She clearly spent a great deal of time socializing (in her “[w]alking and skating around the city over the past few nights”), and with all the people she ran into there wasn’t a single one who had something interesting to say? ReadWriteWeb contains stories that don’t necessarily relate to direct company offerings. It’s a platform from which editorial and interviews can be launched.  She couldn’t turn on a camera and interview one person while she was there? Was everyone who interacted with Jolie O’Dell in Austin “too douchey” or something?

Then there’s the fact that a large portion who comes to Austin every year at SxSW come from the San Francisco area. If there’s truly unsafe streets and an overabundance of doucheyness, as she says, where do you think that comes from? Her sector in her city. Perhaps it’s time to rethink her profession?

Come to think of it, maybe this blog post was really all about her wanting to quit the business altogether. I can certainly understand burnout and on top of that being irritated over a couple of unfortunate incidents that take place at a conference, but if I was able to fill up fifteen or twenty hours of video with what I consider to be “bloggable content,” and she couldn’t find any? Then she’s a lot less good at her job than I previously imagined.

More to the point, I’ll be spending the next few days unpacking, editing and uploading that twenty hours or so of content and unveiling it here at SiliconANGLE. Keep your eyes peeled. For those of you who weren’t able to attend with me, you’ll soon agree that Jolie O’Dell was way off base.

[Editor’s Note: Photo credits (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com and (cc) adrants. –mrh]

Why SxSW Doesn’t Suck is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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]]> http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/why-sxsw-doesnt-suck/feed/ 17 EMC Does Deal with QLogic – Fibre Channel Switching Finding It’s Place In Datacenters – Data & Storage Networking http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/emc-does-deal-with-qlogic-fibre-channel-switching-finding-its-place-in-datacenters-data-storage-networking/ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/03/17/emc-does-deal-with-qlogic-fibre-channel-switching-finding-its-place-in-datacenters-data-storage-networking/#comments Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:57:57 +0000 John Furrier http://siliconangle.com/?p=14136

EMC Does Deal with QLogic – Fibre Channel Switching Finding It’s Place In Datacenters – Data & Storage Networking is a post from: SiliconANGLE
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]]> The convergence story is playing out on the main stage with the moves in the Fibre Channel market as reported by Network World this morning.

EMC does deal with QLogic adding them to the list of approved EMC vetted solutions (thanks @stu from EMC for the clarification).  EMC's sales force will now be able to sell QLogic as well as Cisco and Brocade.  However, QLogic is the only 8Gb FC stackable switching option at EMC.

What's Happening Here - Blow to Brocade

This announcement is really a blow to Brocade because this is now two Tier One OEMs carrying the full portfolio of QLogic switches--two customers where Brocade had no competition from QLogic in the past.

I got a tip from an source close to the deal who emailed me that this is about QLogic becoming very relevant in the Fibre Channel switch market.  Another person close to the deal said "This is a blow to Brocade who was sitting on their hands in terms of product innovation and QLogic has been sneaking up on the field gaining share and big deals".

Recently Brocade has been under fire for lack of performance due to pressure from Juniper and QLogic.  Vendors are broadening the ecosystem to create more competition and accelerate the convergence of storage and networking and servers.

Just 30 days ago during the famous Cisco HP formal breakup we had HP going with QLogic.  Now we have EMC adding more QLogic stackable switches to its portfolio.

EMC is now getting into the 8G Fibre Channel product area with a deal with  QLogic.  Fibre channel is not going away any time soon and it's looking like the the preferred solution today for "dynamic" storage environments for enterprises and big datacenter infrastructure including internal and private clouds where data sits at the center of the value proposition.

QLogic and fibre channel switching is continuing to gain mainstream data center customers for its stackable Fibre Channel switching technology particularly the 8Gb switches.  Storage and networking are converging. Inside organizations, CIO’s are looking toward networking and storage groups and saying we need to pull these together.

First it was HP and now EMC going with Fibre Channel player QLogic in an deal that will allow EMC to sell and rollout the highest end Fibre Channel switches for their unified storage offering.

Here are some details on QLogic from Network World

QLogic's 5800V 8Gb Fibre Channel switches do not waste switch ports for interswitch links (ISL) like switches from other vendors. This feature makes them particularly attractive for consolidation projects where the cost of each port used is a factor.

In addition, the 5800V Series include 10Gb Fibre Channel stacking ports that can be upgraded when necessary to 20Gb performance. Higher bandwidth connectivity options are necessary in this world of increasingly virtualized data centers. The 20 dedicated 8Gb Fibre Channel device ports per switch can be scalable to over 100 device ports in a fabric. And because the switches have stacking ports, IT is able to non-disruptively expand by adding switching cables.

The Big Data Trend -Storage Networking

Recently, EMC’s President of Information Infrastructure, Pat Gelsinger (ex Intel executive now at EMC) unveiled a vision for federated storage as reported here on SiliconAngle by new contributor and analyst David Vallente.

Seeing all the action in the fibre channel switch (and adapters) area points to a big trend - datacenters are converging around anything that can gain a performance improvement without disruption.  Fibre channel has not been know for something cutting edge, but it certainly speaks to the mindset of enterprise networking folks - data is driving this value proposition.

EMC's Big Vision - What This Deal Means

Fibre channel is shaping up to be at the center of federated storage - meaning the interconnect for spreading data around enterprise networks and private clouds.  EMC recently announced a vision that talks about federated storage by Pat Gelinger.  Fibre channel continues to playing a big part in virtualization and expanding the effectiveness of data and networks.

*It means you never go down

*It means you never lose data

*It means you can move resources around the network instantaneously

*It means you virtualize these resources and connect to the cloud for backup, overflow and business continuity…on demand

To achieve this organizations will leverage their Fibre channel infrastructure and that means cards, cabling, and of course switching. As organizations scale they’ll converge networks, deploy 10gig E – stackable switches and virtual IO.

Datacenter Wars

All the recent activity in this area centers around the datacenter war for the big vendors like Cisco, HP, EMC, and others.  Organizations need to set up disk systems at multiple locations and pre-allocate space and communications lines and essentially purpose build replica systems to support specific applications.  New networking architectures and cloud are driving this.

Federated storage enables a general purpose virtualized pool that can be established to migrate workloads, free up disk space, end of life assets and bring on new resources much more quickly and at substantially lower costs. The big benefits will be at synchronous distances but federated storage will also help improve the efficiencies at asynchronous distance.

This organizational consolidation is representative of a broader industry trend toward convergence of storage, network and servers. We see this with HP (we wrote about this last week after seeing HPs vision - HP V8 Moment), and we’re seeing this with Fibre channel switching.

Here is more background on stackable switches which have been gaining attention via these high profile deals with HP, Cisco, and now EMC.

My Angle - Costs and Performance with Cloud Tie-in

It's clear that Fibre channel is something isn't going away anytime soon and it is a core installed technology that has a place in the datacenter as a data storage networking solution.

EMC’s vision needs this kind of ecosystem as does cloud generally. Now by cloud we mean the private cloud. The public cloud won’t touch this (we'll see) - they’ll be object based, REST, Citrix,..etc. But the data center cloud or private cloud or virtual data center or whatever you want to call it will rely on a variety of technologies including FC, iSCSI, 10Gig E, etc.

Why should CIO’s care about switching and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)? Because it’s all about networking and these technologies will cut networking costs. You won’t be able to afford the cloud without them.

Enterprises have been avoiding the rip and replace strategy with a focus on leverage existing technologies already available if those technologies can deliver.  There is demand hence the action from the big players.

Impact is Cloud and Virtualization

Reading the "tea leaves" it's clear that EMC want to push their market position from big data storage to showing that it will be adding "Big Data over and across networks" - hello cloud and virtualization.

By adding QLogic EMC gets more speed and performance to sell in the storage networking equation something Cisco and Brocade didn't have.

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