Industry News News & Articles

Swedes, Norwegians, Danes and Finns, it’s time to flex your open source muscle. The Open Nordic Conference is happening in Norway on June 19-20. Brought to you by a formidable team consisting of eZ Systems, ICT Norwary, National Center for Open Source, and ICT Grenland, the Open Nordic will actually be three different, but related conferences running in parallel. They’re all related to open source and promoting the use of free software — something we can definitely vouch for.

Continuing it’s expansion into the Nordic Market, EPiServer has announced it’s newest office now opened in Finland. They are a provider of web content management based on the Microsoft.Net platform.

Although it’s their first Finnish office, they are not new to the market, having a number of existing customers and several partners located there for the last two years.

“Finland is a natural next step for us and we see great possibilities for a quick expansion. We stand by our established sales process via our partner network, which allows us to keep our focus as a product company,” says Peter Larsson, CEO at EPiServer.

The work EPiServer has done has proven that Finland is very similar in needs to the rest of the Nordic market. Areas including accessibility and the need to provide e-services that integrate with back-end systems are key to business-based websites.

In addition, EPiServer has recognized a trend towards more up-to-date content by a wider range of editors — something that speaks volumes to the needs for a CMS.

This is EPiServer second office opening announcement in the last couple of weeks. At the end of April, they announced a new hosting office in Sweden. Early in April they also announced the acquisition of Netstar, a community platform provider.

It would appear they are driving forward, strengthening existing markets and offering new integrated services that should help push their Web CMS further into European organizations.

Gilbane Group Inc. an analyst and consulting firm that has been writing and consulting about the strategic use of information technologies since 1987 has announced the general release of Digital Magazine and Newspaper Editions: Growth, Trends, and Best Practices, a comprehensive study of the growing market for digital editions of periodical publications.

Before we divulge the results of the study, let’s take a moment to make an educated guess about what revolutionary information could have been gathered about newspapers and their online counterparts. Would it reveal, per chance, that more people than not are reading the news online? Or perhaps that more technology publishers are going online and abandoning print? What about advertising revenue? – could it be that it’s more lucrative online?

Virtualization has been taking the IT field by storm, but where is it headed? The theme of November’s 4th International Virtualization Conference and Expo is “The Next Generation of Virtualization”. They are welcoming submissions from exceptional speakers with high-quality use cases not just on how virtualization maximizes the use of resources and thus saves companies money, but also of how it is altering the way businesses run IT in a fundamental way.

Coming off the heels of recently announced low cost and free hosted web application services such as Amazon’s S3 and Google Apps, UK based digital asset delivery network Velocix have announced that they are releasing the world’s first free content delivery network called Velocix Accelerator, currently in private Beta.

It’s now official, Microsoft has finalized it’s tender offer for Fast Search & Transfer. They’re pretty excited over at Microsoft these days knowing this deal is done.

FAST will operate as a Microsoft subsidiary and will have a dedicated research and development center in Norway.

John Markus Lervik, FAST CEO will be transitioning to the role of Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Search. He gets to work with all the latest and greatest Microsoft search technologies like MS Search Server Express 2008, MOSS search and FAST ESP — the end result potentially being a single enterprise search platform.

The FAST product will retain it’s own FAST sales, service and support teams, they’ll just have a wider range of products to sell and support.

Open Source enthusiasts fear not, Microsoft is still very pro-proprietary. According to Kirk Koenigsbauer, General Manager for the SharePoint Business Group, “We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice.”

Now Microsoft can renew it’s full focus on Yahoo! — if it isn’t already too late.

If you like to review W3C standards before they become official, here’s one you need to take a close look at. The W3C Web API Working Group has published the Last Call Working Draft of “The XMLHttpRequest Object” specification.

Google’s done it again, to the surprise of few, coming in as the top brand out of a list of 100 composed by research and consulting company Millward Brown. This is the second year in a row Google has topped this list, and if you want our two cents, it won’t be the last.

Another of the big guns gets in on the mashup craze that is growing like wildfire. With the recent mashup news from IBM (not to mention strings of vague promises) Microsoft is set to jump on the bandwagon.

InfoWorld’s Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) in San Francisco has released the results of the North Bridge Venture Partner’s annual “Future of Open Source” survey. The results were discussed by a panel of top experts in the commercial open source industry, including executives from Acquia, Ingres, SugarCRM, Sun Microsystems and Ubuntu.

The share price of EMC fell sharply on Tuesday, dropping 7% despite beating analyst predictions for Q4 earnings. The market was reacting to news that virtualization vendor VMware, which is 86% owned by EMC and has hitherto been a star performer, is enduring serious competitive pressures.

EMC’s fourth-quarter profits were up by one third over Q4 2006, and revenues jumped almost 20% over the same period to $3.83bn. This growth came largely from the software side of the business, which grew 20%, although the company also saw strong growth from its storage business. Meanwhile EMC’s professional services wing, a relatively minor division of the company, saw a stunning 27% increase in business.
EMC, which makes the Documentum Enterprise CMS, also released an initial financial forecast for 2008, showing an expected revenue growth of 13% to around $15bn.

From the creators of the popular desktop virtualization software, Parallels, comes the beta version of hypervisor-powered virtualization solution Parallels Server , the first virtualization solution designed to run on Apple hardware.

For years the war for the enterprise has raged between Microsoft and Java with the heaviest battles occurring since the inception of .Net. However, recent research indicated that .Net is now coming out on the winning team.

This news is from Info-Tech Research Group - an IT research and advisory firm. According to an article on InfoWorld, Info-Tech’s research indicates that in a survey of over 1,850 organizations of all sizes and industries: .Net is the choice over Java most often.

The report indicates that 12 percent of the surveyed companies focus exclusively on .Net, while only 3 percent are exclusively Java. That’s a big difference and should spark some lively debate in the Java community.

To throw the Java community a bone, Info-Tech compares Java to legacy code in that it will always be around just like the infamous Cobol. Not sure if that’s a postive thing or not.

The report (which is not sponsored so it should be vendor neutral) is entitled It’s Official: .Net Roasts Java’s Beans and is available for a fee on the InfoTech site.

The combination of a balanced portfolio of business lines and the performance of virtualization trailblazer VMWare results in EMC’s strongest financial quarter ever.

If you are numbers person, try these on for size:

• US $3.3 Billion - total consolidated revenue for the third quarter of 2007
• US $718 Million - operating cash flow
• US $189 Million - revenue for EMC’s Content Management and Archiving business representing double-digit growth

Do these numbers surprise you? They shouldn’t as this makes seventeen consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth.

Congratulations to EMC on yet another remarkable quarter financially.

While it remains to be seen if EMC will be able to maintain this rate of growth during the looming economic downturn, there is no denying their self-proclaimed title of “world leader in information infrastructure solutions”.

For more information about all of EMC’s products, please visit the website.

When we last left our coverage of the W3C’s soon-to-be standard for widget development, there was naught but an incomplete list of requirements.

My my, how things have changed as the World Wide Web Consortium has recently released an updated version of the Widgets 1.0 Working Draft.

Not to be confused with items that might be cranked in a factory, the W3C’s idea of a widget is a small application (e.g. code snippet) that runs in a web browser as part of a web page. Examples include: clocks, stock tickers, newscasters, weather forecasters, and games.

The usefulness of widgets notwithstanding, the important thing to remember is that widgets can update and display remote data - like your Facebook status.

The goal of the Widgets 1.0 standard is to specify “widgets’ packaging format, their configuration and processing model, launching by the user agent, version control, DOM APIs and events including communication between widgets, digital signing, accessibility, and discovery within HTML documents.”

Here’s to the W3C in their effort to standardize widget use before another innocent website is senselessly defaced.

For more information about the Widgets 1.0 specification, we encourage you to visit the W3C site.