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DMTF to Develop Standards for Managing a Cloud Computing Environment

 

Hopefully a cloud initiatve that does work. Interoperability is a key component in Cloud Computing. Glad to see Microsoft is one of the active participants.

Open Cloud Standards Incubator Created to Address Management Interoperability for Cloud Systems

… The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced that it has formed a group dedicated to addressing the need for open management standards for cloud computing. The "Open Cloud Standards Incubator" will work to develop a set of informational specifications for cloud resource management.

As virtualization technology continues to be more rapidly adopted, it is emerging as a common enabling foundation for delivering software solutions into IT environments along with the potential to lower IT costs and improve operational efficiencies. While deploying virtualization technologies it is also critical to have comprehensive management capabilities associated with the implementation. Along with the adoption of virtualization, more and more enterprise IT customers are looking at the cloud computing paradigm to better deliver services to their customers.

No specific standards currently exist for enabling interoperability between private clouds within enterprises and hosted or public cloud providers. DMTF's Open Cloud Standards Incubator will focus on addressing these issues by developing cloud resource management protocols, packaging formats and security mechanisms to facilitate interoperability.

"Cloud computing will have a major impact on IT management," said Winston Bumpus, DMTF president. "With the DMTF's track record for leading the industry in the development of proven standards for management interoperability, along with its extensive network of Alliance Partners, this Open Cloud Standards Incubator provides an ideal setting for initiating work on specifications to enable interoperable cloud management."

The work of the Open Cloud Standards Incubator will focus on ways to facilitate operations between private clouds within enterprises and other private, public, or hybrid clouds by improving the interoperability between platforms through open cloud resource management standards. The group also aims to develop specifications to enable cloud service portability and provide management consistency across cloud and enterprise platforms.

The Open Cloud Standards Incubator was formed as part of the DMTF Standards Incubation process, which enables like-minded DMTF members to work together and produce informational specifications that can later be fast-tracked through the standards development process. The incubation process is designed to foster and expedite open, collaborative, exploratory technical work that complements the DMTF mission to lead the development, adoption and promotion of interoperable management initiatives and standards.

The current incubator leadership board consists of AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Savvis, Sun Microsystems, and VMware. Please click here for more information, or to learn more about participating. …

Continue at source

ServerWatch: "Exchange 2007 aka 'The One That Got the Biggest Market Share'"

Good and realistic view on the email market and its players ...

... Well-made and highly popular, if Microsoft Exchange were a TV show, it would undoubtedly be Friends, and Exchange Server 2007 would be an episode called "The One That Got the Biggest Market Share." The Redmond giant's latest iteration of its e-mail platform is expected to win a great many customers — mainly at the expense of IBM's Domino and Novell's GroupWise. The catch, however, is that future versions of Exchange are unlikely to be as successful.

That's certainly the opinion of Matt Cain, lead e-mail analyst at Gartner. "We forecast that Microsoft will get 70 percent of the commercial e-mail market by 2010. That will be the high point, and Microsoft's market share will decline after that," he said.

Who will be taking market share away from Microsoft at the end of the decade? Not IBM or Novell, Cain believes. Serious competition is more likely to come from new vendors (such as Zimbra) whose current offerings will be mature enough in three years to be viable alternatives to Exchange for many organizations.

Competition will come from another source as well. "The biggest threat to the Microsoft Exchange franchise will be software as a service. In three years time, Google's e-mail platform will have become mature and competitive, and will also pose a serious threat," Cain said. ...

Its seems clear that IBM and Novell are not seen as major players moving foward; for IBM history repeats itsself ...

... The e-mail market is likely to look dramatically different in four of five years time — when the new breed of open source-based products and hosted services have had time to get their acts together more effectively. Once this happens, it's unlikely Microsoft — or anyone else — will be able to dominate the market to such an extent ever again. ...

This vision is too early days I think. Sure SaaS and Open Source will have an effect on the market, but so will other functionality completing the communications and collaboration needs of an organisation. It remains to be seen which companies, able to provide software and services, will be main players in this market. Google will play an important role, as will Microsoft ...

Source : Serverwatch.com

InformationWeek : More on the Yankee report : Exchange growing marketshare due to "continuing migration away from legacy systems from Novell and IBM"

InformationWeek also did an article on the still not yet released Yankee Group report about the email market. It contains some additional insights and some nice quotes by Yankee analyst Laura DiDio.

... "Some say, 'We don't need all the functionality in Exchange,' but you're not going to find unified messaging or integrated security or voice access for just as cheap in Linux," DiDio says. "You may need three to five packages or build something customized" to get the kind of functionality you find in Exchange. DiDio cites a 5,000-end user New York City media company that will stick with Exchange because it estimates higher costs to support and make feature-ready an open source e-mail platform.

Even if Microsoft loses a significant portion of its existing Exchange customers to open source, there's a chance it could maintain or even grow its market share with new potential customers coming online all the time in the developing world and a continuing migration away from legacy systems from Novell and IBM. "The pie is not static," DiDio says. ...

Source: InformationWeek.com

This puts things in a slightly different perspective already. The " legacy systems from Novell and IBM" will loose marketshare to Exchange due to the continuing migration. Thanks for clarifying Laura ;-)

An iPod for your TCO numbers

Yes, Radicati again ... I received an email yesterday in which Radicati offers and iPod Video (30gb) if you fill in a TCO survey on behalf of your organisation.

Now that Loti sort of have banned Radicati from their world, could mean more iPod for Exchange 2007 users :-D

Hi,

We are contacting you because you have previously requested to receive correspondents from The Radicati Group. We are conducting a new survey for the following e-mail platforms:

-Lotus Domino 7

-Microsoft Exchange 2007

-Novell GroupWise 7

This survey pertains to Total Cost of Ownership data, including number of users, acquisition/maintenance cost, administration costs, etc. The survey should take between 5 and 10 minutes to complete.

Respondents that complete surveys will be given a free Video IPod (30GB) for their time.

If you are interested, please reply with the following information:

-Name

-Title

-Platform (either Domino 7, Exchange 2007, or GroupWise 7)

-Number of Users on that platform

Selected respondents will need to complete our survey and possibly speak with an analyst to confirm their results.

No company-specific information will be included in this survey, your name and organization will remain confidential.

Thanks in advance for your time.

The Radicati Group

The emailaddress to reply to : list@radicati.com

Disclaimer : No, Radicati did not ask me to post this, I just wanted to be funny this time. Now go get your iPod.

Novell brengt OpenXML-vertaler voor OpenOffice

Goed nieuws van het open source front. Zowel MS Office als OpenOffice ondersteunen nu zowel ODF als OpenXML als dan niet via een plug-in.

Novell heeft een conversiehulpmiddel uitgebracht dat OpenOffice-documenten in het OpenXML-bestandsformaat, gebruikt in Microsoft Office 2007, laat inlezen. Eerder kwamen Microsoft en Sun Microsystems al met ODF-vertalers (Open Document Format) voor Office.

Link to Novell brengt OpenXML-vertaler voor OpenOffice

Novell to support Open XML format to advance document interoperability

WALTHAM, Mass.—04 Dec 2006—Novell today announced that the Novell® edition of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite will now support the Office Open XML format, increasing interoperability between OpenOffice.org and the next generation of Microsoft Office. Novell is cooperating with Microsoft and others on a project to create bi-directional open source translators for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office, with the word processing translator to be available first, by the end of January 2007. The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell’s OpenOffice.org product. Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. As a result, end users will be able to more easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites.

“Novell supports the OpenDocument format as the default file format in OpenOffice.org because it provides customer choice and flexibility, but interoperability with Microsoft Office has also been critical to the success of OpenOffice.org,” said Nat Friedman, Novell chief technology and strategy officer for Open Source. “OpenOffice.org is very important to Novell, and as our customers deploy Linux* desktops across their organizations, they're telling us that sharing documents between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office is a must-have. The addition of Open XML support reflects Novell's commitment to providing enterprise customers the tools they need to be successful, from the desktop to the data center.” ...

Read on : Novell.com

Good news from an interoperability perspective. If you absolutely *have* to use OpenOffice, there's now ways of better sharing information with the rest of the world ...

New developments on the interoperability front

In case you missed last weeks announcements in the field of interoperability between the Microsoft platform and various other platforms / technologies :

• Microsoft and Novell Announce Broad Collaboration on Windows and Linux Interoperability and Support

Companies also announce a patent agreement covering proprietary and open source products.

... Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. today announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft^® products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012. Under this new model, customers will realize unprecedented choice and flexibility through improved interoperability and manageability between Windows^® and Linux.

“They said it couldn’t be done. This is a new model and a true evolution of our relationship that we think customers will immediately find compelling because it delivers practical value by bringing two of their most important platform investments closer together,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. “We’re excited to work with Novell, whose strengths include its heritage as a mixed-source company. Resolving our patent issues enables a combined focus on virtualization and Web services management to create new opportunities for our companies and our customers.”

You can view an on-demand Webcast of the News Conference with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Ron Hovsepian, president and CEO of Novell, held Nov. 2. ...



View the Webcast (53 min. 34 sec.)

Source : Microsoft PressPass

• Old Foes Microsoft, Novell Join Forces 
  ... Microsoft Corp. has embraced Novell Inc.'s open-source software platform, forming a technological truce between two longtime antagonists who want to make it easier for the still-dominant Windows operating system and the increasingly popular Linux system to work together. ...
  Read on : Redmondmag.com

• Microsoft and Zend Collaborate To Improve PHP on Windows

... Microsoft and Zend Technologies are joining forces to improve the performance of PHP-based applications running on Windows Server 2003, the two companies disclosed on Tuesday. ...

Read on : Redmondmag.com

Microsoft, Novell Wrangle over NetWare Migration

Wow 3.3 Million customers from Novell to Microsoft ... maybe this says something about the uptake of SuSe or Linux in general ?

... Just as the Novell BrainShare conference gets under way, Microsoft is claiming that it has migrated 3.3 million customers off NetWare and onto Windows over the past two years.

The software giant, based in Redmond, Wash., has also launched a new program to lure customers in the education and state and local government sectors off NetWare and onto Windows.

This battle underscores the larger war going on between the two companies for customers. Microsoft is aggressively trying to lure NetWare customers on to its proprietary Windows platform, while Novell is trying to convince them to move to its Open Enterprise Server, which it says protects the prior investment they made in NetWare while extending the freedom and flexibility of Linux.

This is not the first time that Microsoft has released figures for migration off Novell's NetWare and onto Windows during BrainShare, with the apparent goal of diverting attention away from Novell's conference news.

Last year during BrainShare, Microsoft announced with its partner Quest Software that they had successfully migrated more than 1.5 million Novell NetWare users to Microsoft Windows Server 2003. ...

Read on : eWeek.com

Novell overweegt forse ontslagronde

Novell overweegt een fors deel van zijn personeel te ontslaan. Dit zegt de nieuwe coo Ron Hovsepian. Berichten doen de ronde dat maar liefst 20 procent van de 5800 werknemers de wacht aangezegd zou worden.

[Via Computable RSS]

New York City Agencies Reduce IT Costs by 67 Percent with E-Mail System Migration

The New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) provides IT services for more than 65 government agencies. The agencies previously used a variety of messaging systems, including IBM Lotus Notes, Novell GroupWise, and Netscape. Employees found it difficult and time-consuming to communicate with workers in other departments. And because many of the agencies lacked the funds and expertise to manage the systems themselves, DoITT spent a lot of time providing support. DoITT decided to migrate the agencies to a centralized system based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Twenty-five agencies currently use the solution, which has simplified IT operations and improved productivity. The agencies have also reduced the number of mailbox server computers from 45 to 4 and lowered IT costs by 67 percent.

Complete casestudy at source
(thanks Marcel)

Novell maakt flinke winstduikeling

Novell rapporteert over het derde kwartaal van 2005 een winst van 2 miljoen dollar. Dat is schrikbarend veel minder dan de 24 miljoen die het over dezelfde periode vorig jaar kon bijschrijven.

[Via Computable RSS]

More on marketshares for Groupware products in The Netherlands

Earlier this week I already posted some information by MarketCap with regards to the marketshare of the major Groupware solutions. This research shows Microsoft leading with 65,1 % marketshare.

The following article is somewhat older (November 2004), but shows a similar picture and also includes the marketshare in the various vertical markets. Although the text in the Article is in Dutch, I think the grpah shows all the relevant information; in particular Microsoft's position over Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise.

The source for this article is the Automatiseringgids of November 12, 2004. Source for the research is MarketCap and Computer Profile.

Marktaandeel Groupware produkten in Nederland

Eerder deze week heb ik al een blog gepost mbt zeer recente informatie mbt het marktaandeel van de diverse Groupware produkten.

Bijgaand artikel stamt al uit November 2004, maar geeft wel een goed overzicht van de marktaandelen in de diverse vertikale markten. Ook dit artikel is afkomtig uit de Automatiseringgids (12 november 2004)

What is the marketshare of Groupware Solutions in The Netherlands ?

Marketshare information specificly for The Netherlands is very scarce. The Dutch ICT magazine Computable Automatiseringgids regularly publishes statistics / market researchinformation by MarketCap. The actual artcle is only in Dutch, but I gladly took the time to translate the highlights.

First the chart, which says it all basicly :

This research is undertaken by MarketCap in preparation for a new report on th use of Open Source Software and Linux. The initial results of this research show a big difference in markshares for Groupware in the market for Linux users compared to non Linux users.

This research shows the overall marketshare for Microsoft Exchange at 65,1% which is by far the largest compared to Lotus Notes (16,2%) and Novell GroupWise (18,6).

The research is done in the business market in 600 companies of 50+ FTE.

Source : Computable Automatiseringgids, Friday June 3, 2005

IBM Lotus Notes or Novell GroupWise Migration and Coexistence: Frequently Asked Questions

Microsoft TechNet: IBM Lotus Notes or Novell GroupWise Migration and Coexistence: Frequently Asked Questions: "Puzzled about how to migrate from other messaging solutions to Exchange Server? Got questions about how to get your diverse messaging environments to interoperate? The frequently asked questions (FAQs) on this page can help."