Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Mike Neil is general manager for virtualization strategy in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. Mike is focused on the delivery of the Windows virtualization technology, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Virtual PC 2007. Mike also directs the technical enablement of Microsoft's broader vision for virtualization, to include virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure. Prior to this role, Mike was responsible for Microsoft?s server and PC virtualization efforts since 2003.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

HP Tuesday named Don Grantham, Sun's global sales and service boss, and an ex-IBMer, its chief sales officer responsible for enterprise accounts and public sector sales as well as sales to the communications, media and entertainment, financial and manufacturing and distribution industries. He will report to Ann Livermore, head of HP?s Technology Solutions Group and run worldwide alliance sales, sales compensation, global pre-sales, sales support, sales operations and go-to-market 'effectiveness.' Grantham, who was at Sun for the last nine years, replaces Andy Mattes, who is now going to run HP's outsourcing services business.

Red Hat is a trusted open source provider. Red Hat offers enterprise customers a long-term plan for building infrastructures on the quality and innovation of open source. Combining open source operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management, and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite.

Friday morning the local Fox television station in New York City broke the news - Apple was suing New York City. Six out of 100 of their viewers thought Apple had the right to sue the City, but 94 out of 100 viewers are now calling for New Yorkers to drop Apple and its products, including the iPhone and Macs. New Yorkers are pissed off! New York City, universally known as The Big Apple, is facing a lawsuit from Steve Jobs' Apple Computer Inc. for, of all things, copyright infringement.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

Ulitzer, Inc., which initially made the headlines with its 'job descriptions from the future,' announced today that it will launch its Ulitzer 'beta' site on July 4, 2008, with 5,500 authors and 600,000 original articles, published in more than 5,000 topic-specific online journals. Each journal offers up to 14 content-specific sections, written by the world's most respected authors, who are experts in their particular fields. All Ulitzer authors will get paid for their contributions.

HP's acquisition of EDS for $13.9BN - announced today - will, the company claims, double sales in its services business (already $16.6BN in fiscal 2007), but that didn't stop HP shares tumbling today on the New York Stock Exchange. The price of $25 a share represents a 32.5% premium to the EDS closing price of $18.86 on Friday.

It's only taken Borland two years but it's finally dumped its CodeGear tools division, responsible for Borland's hereditary JBuilder, Delphi and C++ Builder lines as well as its new web ventures into PHP and Ruby, said to be used by 7.5 million developers. Embarcadero Technologies is buying it for about $23 million and the transaction's supposed to close in 30-60 days. Thomas Cressey Bravo the private equity house that bought Embarcadero and took it private last year, is fronting the money.

An on-the-beach IT executive who's been watching a lot of political coverage lately called to ask what cabinet post Carly Fiorina was likely to get if John McCain is elected because Carly, now the so-called 'victory chairman' of the Republican National Committee, has become McCain's Siamese twin - in every shot, he said.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

The work of Billy Hoffman, lead security researcher for SPI Dynamics (www.spidynamics.com), which was purchased by Hewlett-Packard last year, has been featured in Wired, Make magazine, Slashdot, G4TechTV, and in various other journals and Web sites. Today though he is in full flow at the inaugural AJAX Security Bootcamp, an all-day deep dive into Web application vulnerabilities being held on Day One of the 5th International AJAXWorld Conference & Expo in New York City.

HP Labs is reorganizing to focus on research that brings in money. Its priorities are now the Information explosion (getting the right information to the right people), dynamic cloud services (dynamically personalized based on a person's location, preferences, calendar and communities), content transformation (analog-to-digital, device-to-device, digital content-to-physical products), intelligent infrastructure (smarter, more secure devices, networks and scalable architectures that work together) and sustainability (lower carbon widgetry).

Acquia has yet to price its maintenance and support subscriptions - there should be a variety of SLAs - but they're supposed to include an electronic update notification system code named Spokes for updates that have been reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia. Acquia is currently at 12 people, expecting to be 25 by the end of the year. Its Series A money comes from Northbridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. According to Dries' blog, Drupal 7 should offer the ability to create, share and mashup managed content, letting Drupal be a data repository accessed by tools and web sites across the network.

In a press event today at HP company headquarters, HP announced that it has sharpened the focus of its advanced research group, HP Labs, to address the most complex challenges facing technology customers in the next decade - dividing its efforts into 5 areas of interest: the information explosion, dynamic cloud services, content transformation, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability.

Sun closed on its acquisition of MySQL today, calling the billion-dollar purchase the 'most important acquisition in Sun's history' - oh, heck, make that the 'modern software industry' - with Sun preening that it completed the deal in less than six weeks convinced that it is now a proven open source leader ready to hustle platforms into the 'Network Economy.'

Somewhere out there an ode is being written to HP - and some lady investor is explaining to her husband about her abiding crush on HP's CEO, the 'Great Deliverer' - after HP dropped better-than-expected first-quarter results on Wall Street Tuesday and upped its fiscal 2008 forecast despite all the defeatist talk of economic slowdown and a slightly more wide-awake Dell. It's been a long time since a tech stock ended up (close to 5%) in after-hours trading after the conference call.

HP has added a second Itanium blade to its IBM-whacking BladeSystem arsenal, its first quad-socket (eight-core) Montvale blade, its earlier year-old Montvale blade being a dual-socket. The new entry is for large memory-intensive data center workloads, promising power savings of up to 25% and space savings because 2.5 times as many BL870c blades can fit in the same space as a comparable rack-mount configuration.

and Service Division that will include the four-year-old start-up EMC just agreed to buy off of him. EMC is paying cash for the Seattle-based Pi Corporation and its 100 engineers. EMC didn?t say how much but Pi was founded using Warburg-Pincus ($$$) money and EMC says the acquisition will likely dilute its EPS this year by a penny.

Microsoft today attempted to exorcize the interoperability bogeymen that have haunted it since it was first discovered to be using secret APIs 20 years ago, bogeymen that now quote European antitrust law at it and carry writs from the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. To avoid further confrontation with the European Commission, which opened a broad investigation of Microsoft's interoperability last month, the company said it would voluntarily open up all the APIs and communications protocols in its biggest revenue producers now and forever. To be clear, it said that these are the APIs and protocols 'used by other Microsoft products.'

I am glad to introduce you to a new set of resources to help surface scalability and performance issues in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA.) The SOA Knowledge and Performance Kit is a free open-source resource to show you what it really takes to build services using today's leading SOA development platforms. The Kit delivers an SOA use case design, source code to the implementations of the use case on Oracle, IBM, BEA, and TIBCO platforms, developer journals describing our experiences step-by-step, a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator, and performance and scalability tests that leverage the PushToTest test automation platform.

So it's kicking off an 'Enterprise Acceleration' initiative. It means to add products to its middleware portfolio, sponsor new open source projects, grow its partner ecosystem, and offer new enterprise-class performance and interoperability resources. It also means to buck up sales and marketing. It said it would set up facilities for performance tuning. testing applications, live certification and migration. JBoss, which cost Red Hat around $325 million a couple of years ago, runs on Red Hat, Windows and other Linuxes.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

'It is very important to me that Acquia has a marketing leader who understands the importance of growing and sustaining a community and who is passionate about the principles of open source software,' said Acquia co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert as Jeff Whatcott joined the company as vice president of marketing, responsible for all marketing activity. Whatcott arrived from Adobe, where he led marketing for LiveCycle and Flex.

HP is about to put out a novel 1GHz Celeron laptop it calls a mobile thin client, its first, apparently the result of its acquisition of Neoware. Wyse, the other remaining thin client maven, beat HP, now the market leader, to the punch a few months ago and added two more models the other day looking much like HP's. HP's thing, which starts at $725, has no drive or fan or any moving parts at all; it's thoroughly solid-state including the 1GB flash module.

Remember two odd years ago when Oracle went and bought InnoDB, the source of MySQL's crucial storage engine, and there for a heart-stopping minute or two it looked like MySQL was toast? Well, MySQL founder Monty Widenius says the company is moving along toward replacing its own MyISAM default storage engine with a new one called Maria after one of his children.

Under a bit a pressure now that HP has open sourced its own IP identification system as FOSSology, Black Duck says it will roll out a thing called Code Center by the end of the quarter. It's described as a software component selection, approval, and tracking system eyeing reuse and aimed at early in the architecture development cycle before the code is set in stone and possibly subject to lengthy legal review.

Google doesn't like the idea of Microsoft buying Yahoo any more than Microsoft likes the idea of Google buying DoubleClick. Today in a blog Google general counsel David Drummond said Microsoft?'s $44.6 billion hostile bid for Yahoo 'raises troubling questions.' 'This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another,' he wrote. 'It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet' openness and innovation,' throwing in Microsoft's face allegations of possible monopolization and antitrust leverage onto 'new, adjacent markets.'

Sun is offering ten grants of US $11,500 - equivalent to several months of pay for developers in some countries - for the best NetBeans projects submitted by open source developers. Conceived as a means of increasing general awareness around the NetBeans project as well as rewarding good work done by the NetBeans Community, the 'Dreams of Reality' contest is described in detail by worldwide NetBeans Community Manager Bruno Souza, the charismatic Brazilian developer, in a special audio webcast currently playing on SYS-CON.TV.

Google, which does not give guidance, missed both Wall Street's top and bottom expectations for its December quarter by a hair and the punters turned vicious pounding it down around 50 bucks after-hours. Consensus demanded non-GAAP earnings of $4.44 on revenues of $3.45 billion. Google came in with $4.43 on revenues $3.39 billion. Those revenues figures are net of what's called TAC, Google's traffic acquisition costs, the money it pays its partners, which it this case amounted $1.44 billion or 30% of its ad revenues.

Microsoft this morning made a $44.6 billion hostile bid for the floundering Yahoo, striking at a point when it has become evident to all and sundry that Yahoo doesn't have a pray of turning things around on its own let alone getting competitive. Yahoo's first official reaction was basically to say it'll think about it. It said it would evaluate the offer 'carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo's strategic plans.' It did not give a timeframe for a response. Although it looks pretty boxed in, it could of course try for more money.

This is the kind of stuff IBM, EMC, Google and even the poverty-stricken Xerox want to be able to do but HP figures it's gotten a jump on the so-called Semantic document. The Kentucky-based Exstream will become part of HP's Web Services and software business in its Imaging and Printing Group. Currently banks - other than those making use of its credit rating skills - use it for printing statements, utilities for printing bills and government for printing whatever it is government prints. It brags that it makes communications as much as 85% faster, reduces the cost of document production as much as 80% and possibly triples customer response, but that ain't the half of it. The deal is supposed to close sometime between February and the end of April.

See, HP is open sourcing widgetry very much like theirs, widgetry that it developed for itself over the last seven years at the cost of 'millions of dollars,' it says, and 60 man-years work that sorts out the various licenses that govern open source software - imagine, there are 1,700 licenses in OpenOffice alone - and lets you know if said licenses have been tinkered with in any way. It calls it FOSSology and has made it available at FOSSology.org under the GPLv2. It's designed, it says, to address the acquisition, tracking and licensing of FOSS. It can detect code reuse and provenance even if the code has been changed.

Sun, Oracle's sometimes best friend, turned into an Oracle competitor this morning when it said it was buying MySQL, the open source database that's part of the famous LAMP stack. It's paying a billion dollars. MySQL was supposed to go public this year but picked the easier monetization route. Sanford C. Bernstein estimates MySQL?s financial position at breakeven on $60 million-$80 million on trailing 12-month revenues although over 100 million copies of the database have been downloaded. Sun is paying $800 million cash for MySQL's stock and assuming about $200 million in options. But Sun has been known to overpay for acquisitions before. Remember its fatal $2 billion Cobalt Networks deal?

If you listen to IDC, PCs were up a solid but still less-than-expected 15.5% worldwide in Q4. If you listen to Gartner the number was 13.1%. If you listen to Credit Suisse, which is a lot more buoyant, you hear that the IDC-Gartner results 'were largely at odds with one another, calling into question the validity of the results,' something you don't often hear. The brokerage generally prefers Gartner's numbers but says its 13.1% figure is below normal seasonality of 13.2% and way off Credit Suisse's own estimate of 17.7%.