Learning the Lessons from Google’s Failure in Los Angeles

Is Google serious about its push to sell Google Apps to big companies and government agencies? Is the world’s leading online advertising firm really committed to becoming a major player in enterprise software? Based on the evidence so far, the answer is unclear. In this article we examine the pros and cons of Google Apps in the enterprise. After defining what Google Apps is, we review recent research by Gartner about the rise of cloud-based solutions in the enterprise email market and Google’s early success in that market. We then look at the reasons for the stalled deployment of Gmail at one of Google’s largest public sector accounts to date, the city of Los Angeles. We conclude that while Gmail is a first-rate consumer email product, Google does not presently have the right products, the corporate culture or the sales volume required to be a significant player in enterprise software.

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Oracle to Red Hat: It’s Not Your Father’s Linux Market Anymore

You have all undoubtedly heard the news that Oracle launched its own branch of the Linux kernel a few weeks ago. Now Oracle generally ties with Microsoft as one of the world’s least popular software companies (though if Google were selling software instead of search ads it might be up there too). So it’s not surprising that Larry Ellison’s big announcement has met with some skepticism in the Linux community. Red Hat responded with a press release that struck the tone of a matronly aristocrat affronted by the uncouth antics of some money-grubbing interloper trying to snatch the string of pearls from her neck...

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Larry Ellison on Java Freedom: “I was for it before I was against it”

I hate to say “I told you so”, but this is one of those occasions when nothing else is appropriate. A little over a year ago I wrote a couple of blog posts about the danger Oracle posed for Java. I got busy on other projects and stopped blogging for a while. Now, a year later, Oracle’s suit against Google over Java’s use in Android brings the issue back to the front burner.

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Oracle, do the right thing, set Java free

To nearly everyone’s surprise, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division has thrown a last-minute banana peel in front of Larry Ellison’s bid to buy Sun and Java.

Oracle is about to acquire Sun’s monumental collection of Java intellectual property rights. This includes not just the Java name and the silly coffee cup logo, but also – much more crucially – the patents and copyrights to the code embodied in the Java platform editions (EE, SE and ME) and in dozens of critical Java standards (JSRs) associated with the platforms, as well as the all-important test suites (JCKs and TCKs) that determine what software can claim compatibility with these standards and thus receive these IP rights.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the Java community to wrest some concessions from the new owner of Java before the deal is set in stone.

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Can Oracle be trusted with Java?

By Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research, Peerstone Research

What will happen when Oracle assumes Sun’s role as the strategic power behind the throne in the JCP?

Will conflict erupt with the other tenor of the Java world, IBM, which has long chafed under Sun’s domination of the JCP and may harbor a grudge over its humiliation at Ellison’s hand in the battle for Sun? Will Oracle try to manipulate the Java standards making process or, more plausibly, leverage its control over Java IP and TCK licenses to gain advantage for itself,or maybe - just maybe - do the right thing and set Java free?

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Microsoft embraces AMQP open middleware standard

By Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research, Peerstone Research

The surprising word out of Redmond is that Microsoft is about to make a small but remarkable overture toward the open standards world. They are about to embrace a very interesting though relatively little known enterprise messaging standard known as the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol, or AMQP for short.

What is AMQP, and why should anybody care whether Microsoft adopts it? Suffice it is to say that AMQP is to high-value, reliable business messaging what SMTP is to e-mail. The proprietary message oriented middleware (MOM) products on the market today like IBM’s MQ or Tibco’s Rendezvous fulfill the same function as AMQP. But they operate exclusively in single-vendor fashion and utterly fail to interoperate with each other.

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Making identity work the same way on Windows and *nix

By Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research, Peerstone Research

According to IDC, Windows Server, Linux and Unix now account for 67%, 20% and 9% respectively of a worldwide server installed base of nearly 33 million units. But if we consider just the sheer number of Windows and *nix systems installed, then a very clear picture emerges. We now live in a world where most organizations of any size have large numbers of users logging in every day on servers that live in parallel universes.

Clearly the task of bridging the gap between the two worlds must fall to third party vendors who have the knowledge and the agility to plant a foot on both sides of the divide. This is exactly the approach taken by software vendor Centrify, which has transformed Microsoft’s previously Windows-only Active Directory into a tool for cross-platform Identity and Access Management. I recently had the opportunity to chat with Centrify’s CEO and Founder, Tom Kemp. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

"DirectAuthorize takes the role based management features in DirectControl to the next level. It’s the next step in policy-based access control."

Tom Kemp, CEO of Centrify

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Standards, open standards and double standards

By Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research, Peerstone Research

In my last post I took Big Blue to task for its announcement that it intends to wage war against Microsoft in the world’s standards bodies. The motivation for this bellicose declaration was IBM’s stinging defeat last Spring in its battle to prevent the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) from ratifying Microsoft’s de facto office document standard (OOXML).

IBM charges that Microsoft won at the ISO only because it packed the national standards organizations that make up the ISO membership with its pals. The suits in Armonk are shocked (shocked!) to discover that Microsoft actually tried to influence the outcome of a debate where its vital interests were at stake, namely its ability to sell Office to the world’s governments.

But the thing that galls me about IBM’s position – and the reason I wrote my post – is not its goody-two-shoes stance about lobbying. No, it’s the flagrant hypocrisy behind this whole open standards campaign. In a nutshell, Big Blue conspicuously fails to practice what it preaches.

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The emperor of standards has no clothes

By Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research, Peerstone Research

The suits at IBM are in a snit. According to the Wall Street Journal, the world’s largest computer company is threatening to pull out of certain international standards bodies because it has “become frustrated” by what it views as their “opaque processes and poor decision-making.” IBM’s press release on the subject is somewhat milder in tone, being a tree-hugging, planet-loving paean to the virtues of open standards and, just as important, open standards making processes. Who could object to that? However, beneath the velvet glove there lies a fist of some decidedly more ferrous material. IBM wants everyone to know that if it doesn’t like the quality of certain standards bodies’ work, it will lobby for changes in the way they operate, incite local governments to force them to reform, or even drop out of them altogether.

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How to make a killing in the mainframe market

By Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research, Peerstone Research

The following is a hypothetical case study of the market for enterprise-class computer systems. To the best of my knowledge the events described herein have not yet occurred. However, it is possible that they may do so in the near future. If they do come to pass, they are likely to be the subject one day of exhaustive case studies in America’s leading business schools. Like all good case studies, this one is open ended, because its outcome will depend on the choices and actions of the players involved.

Suppose you are the CEO of a computer manufacturer who has decided to present an exciting new business idea to your board of directors. You propose nothing less than to turn your company around by entering the lucrative multi-billion dollar market for high-end machines that run IBM’s 64 bit operating system z/OS.

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How to build an open source mainframe in your kitchen

By Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research, Peerstone Research

Can you build a mainframe computer at home in your spare time? On your kitchen table? Using only common utensils and your bare hands? And no, I don’t mean a toy mainframe, but a real one – one that runs all of IBM’s most powerful software, including CICS, DB2, the classic MVS operating system and the newer 64 bit z/OS, and even the mainframe version of Linux (z/Linux). Well, can you?

This question may sound insane to you. But the answer to it happens to be yes, you certainly can, if you are named Roger Bowler. Bowler is a mainframe systems programmer who decided in the late 1990s that he wanted to have a “real computer” at home instead of some dinky PC. So he fired up his text editor and his C compiler and set to work. The result was the Hercules mainframe emulator, that is to say, a mainframe built entirely in software that runs on off-the-shelf Intel-based hardware, typically under Windows or Linux.

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The mainframe isn’t dead after all

By Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research, Peerstone Research

Last week I had the occasion to visit SHARE, the premier mainframe conference, which was held in San Jose just down the road from where I live. Based on what I saw, there is one thing I can tell you for sure, and that is that Cobol is not dead. And neither is the mainframe.

When I mentioned to one of my friends that I had been to SHARE, he joked that it must have looked like an AARP convention. But this turned out not to be so. While there were certainly a few 60-somethings strolling around the halls, the under 40 generation was also well represented. What struck me the most was not the advanced age of the people but the relative youth of a lot of the software being discussed.

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IBM says 99.8% of mainframe market not enough, we want it all

By Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research, Peerstone Research

Here’s an interesting story about a guy who has had several horses shot out from under him by IBM, and has finally decided to shoot back.

Steven Friedman is the President of Tampa-based T3 Technologies, which has been in the business of selling IBM-compatible mainframe systems to low-end users for 16 years. For the first 14 of those years T3 worked hand-in-hand with IBM to build out a segment of the market that was too small for IBM’s own royally compensated sales force to bother with.

But in the fall of 2006 IBM abruptly terminated its long-standing relationship with T3. The trigger seems to have been T3’s plan to resell another line of mainframe-compatible systems based on technology from a hot new VC-funded Silicon Valley startup, the now defunct Platform Solutions.

Overnight T3 went from a booming business with over 600 installed customers worldwide to a company that literally had nothing to sell. Since the Department of Justice had decided in 2001 to dissolve the famous Consent Decree which had for more than fifty years compelled IBM to play nice with competitors, there was apparently nothing to prevent Big Blue from getting away with this egregious instance of squashing the little guy.

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Governator stubs toe on antique computer

By Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research, Peerstone Research

The New York Times and the Sacramento Bee are reporting an amusing story out of California about how Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attempt to knock some sense into the state’s free spending legislators is being stymied by an antiquated mainframe computer system.

You see, California is having its annual summer shouting match between angry pols who can’t agree on next year’s budget. Democrats want to raise taxes and spend more, while Republicans – guess what? – want to put the kibosh on new taxes and cut spending instead. Schwarzenegger – known in these parts as the “Governator” – is standing between the two warring camps, with the rock steady firmness of a Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 Terminator.

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The AMQP debate continues

By Jeff Gould, CEO & Director of Research, Peerstone Research

I’m happy to report that my long post last week on the new enterprise messaging protocol AMQP has stirred up an interesting debate among members of the open source messaging community. Check out Bryan Che’s blog for a series of comments. Bryan works in product management at Red Hat overseeing the MRG project I mentioned in my original post (i.e. Red Hat’s productization of messaging, realtime and grid which includes the Apache Qpid implementation of AMQP). Thanks to Bryan for calling out my post.

The debate boils down to one issue: Has the AMQP spec grown so complex that it’s become too hard to implement? Given the freewheeling spirit of the open source software community, it comes as no surprise that opinions vary, even among people working closely together.

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