WHEN: Feb 5-8, 2012

eXtremeCRM is ALL about building technical capacity so you can keep driving phenomenal CRM growth!

eXtremeCRM 2012 Berlin will deliver 300 – 400 level technical content in our Deploy and Extend tracks geared towards the technical people in your organization.  Here are just a few of the highlights!

We have a great line up of speakers from the Microsoft Dynamics CRM product team in Redmond!

Mike Ehrenberg, Microsoft Technical Fellow and Chief Architect for Microsoft Dynamics will deliver a technical vision keynote giving insights to the future of Microsoft technologies.

Craig Dewar, Director, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Product Management and Eric Boocock, Sr. Technical Product Manager will to go deep on the recent fall release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (R7) and the future roadmap of Microsoft Dynamics CRM!

Murat Ozturan, Principal Program Manager Lead, will also be in Berlin to deliver technical sessions.

Marco Amoedo and Fadi El-Hennawy, both expert Technology Specialists from Microsoft EMEA will be presenting as well.

We also have a superior group of technical experts from within the Microsoft Dynamics community, who will be speaking including Ramon Tebar Bueno (Barclays), Sebastian Waksmundzki (AlfaPeople), Giorgio Garcia-Agreda (Crionet) Matt Parks (Avanade), Shan McArthur (ADXStudio), Jakub (Kuba) Skalbania (Netwise Sp. z.o.o.) and Dino Esposito, well know author and .Net expert. And the list keeps growing…

There is a fully packed agenda that can benefit partners and customers alike – here are just a few of the highlights:

• Fall release (R7) plus a look ahead at R8 and beyond
• Azure & Microsoft Dynamics CRM Better Together
• Web Services & Code Generation Deep Dive
• Advanced SharePoint Integration
• Agile Project Management with SureStep
• Software Development Lifecycle with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Silverlight & Microsoft Dynamics CRM Development Tips & Tricks
• JavaScript Best Practices
• Outlook Client: Deployment, Performance & Security
• Patterns & Practices

There is not a better opportunity to go eXtreme in building your technical capacity! Don’t miss this once a year chance to build your skills.

For more information: http://extremecrm.com/eXtremeCRM2012BerlinH.aspx

Copyright ® 2011 by CRM HELP DESK Software .com. All Rights Reserved.

3M, ASG Software, CA Technologies, Capgemini, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, Gale Technologies, IBM, Jericho Systems, Morphlabs, Red Hat, SAP, Software AG, TELUS, and Others Collaborate on Standard for Deploying Interoperable Cloud Applications

The OASIS international consortium has launched a new open standards initiative to enhance the portability of cloud applications and services. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee will advance an interoperability standard that will make it easier to deploy cloud applications without vendor lock-in, while maintaining application requirements for security, governance, and compliance.

"IDC’s research shows cloud initiatives are top priorities for many enterprise IT teams," says Mary Johnston Turner, IDC Research Vice President, Enterprise Systems Management Software. "The goal of these cloud programs is to reduce costs and improve business agility by creating highly flexible IT environments that can quickly respond to changing business priorities. To date, however, most cloud implementations have been unable to easily migrate applications across heterogeneous public and private infrastructure resources. TOSCA’s aim is to enable broad cloud portability by providing an open standard to describe a complex application running on a complex environment. This is a critical missing link for customers that want to take full advantage of hybrid cloud architectures and the full range of available cloud services."

TOSCA will enable the interoperable description of application and infrastructure cloud services, the relationships between parts of the service, and the operational behavior of these services (e.g., deploy, patch, shutdown)–independent of the supplier creating the service, and any particular cloud provider or hosting technology. TOSCA will also make it possible for higher-level operational behavior to be associated with cloud infrastructure management.

"By improving service and application portability in a vendor-neutral ecosystem, TOSCA will streamline the migration of existing applications to the cloud as well as cloud-bursting," said Paul Lipton of CA Technologies, co-chair of the OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee. "It could also facilitate the evolution towards more dynamic, multi-cloud provider applications."

"TOSCA will be the first standard to describe IT services that go beyond infrastructure as a service. It will define service templates across *aaS layers, connecting them to the resource abstraction layer," added Simon Moser of IBM, who also co-chairs the TOSCA Committee.

An initial draft specification for TOSCA was jointly authored by Capgemini, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, IBM, NetApp, PwC, Red Hat, SAP AG, Software AG, Virtunomic, and WSO2. This specification will be contributed to the OASIS TOSCA Technical Committee for further development and advancement within the open standards process.

"Similar to the advent of the World Wide Web, cloud computing is creating new possibilities and enabling more efficient, flexible, open and collaborative computing models," said Laurent Liscia, executive director, OASIS. "Having open standards around cloud will help achieve an IT environment with fewer boundaries, increase the speed of adoption and add a new level of flexibility. The beneficiaries of TOSCA will be consumers, developers and providers of cloud-based solutions."

Support for TOSCA

ASG
"Freedom of choice is part of ASG DNA. Being able to participate in the elaboration of the TOSCA standard is for us a fantastic opportunity to ensure our current and future customers take advantage of seamless interoperability of Cloud environments." –Pascal Vitoux, Senior VP, Development

CA Technologies
"With this effort, OASIS is breaking new ground with the first significant standard focused on the lifecycle of cloud applications and services across a wide range of infrastructure platforms. TOSCA shows great potential to facilitate higher levels of cloud application and service portability without vendor lock-in, which is what our customers need to achieve the full benefits of cloud computing." –Adam Famularo, General Manager, Enterprise and Cloud Solutions

Capgemini
"As one of the market leaders in SaaS and cloud computing, Capgemini is well versed in the chal-lenges of cloud computing. We are delighted to see the industry coming together to help drive standardisation and interoperability in the provisioning and management of next generation envi-ronments."–Steve Jones, Global Head of Master Data Management

Gale Technologies
"Gale Technologies applauds the creation of the TOSCA Technical Committee and looks forward to working with fellow committee members to advance the open standards that will facilitate out-of-the-box interoperability between cloud technologies. We fully expect that TOSCA will enable complex automation and orchestration between cloud applications, services, and infrastructure, and will ultimately accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies, which has been hampered thus far by the lack of open standards for interoperability." –James Thomason, CTO

IBM
"This effort is about helping organizations to extend their business leveraging model-driven Cloud Service Management – using open standards – to get the greatest benefits from cloud. TOSCA ena-bles standardized development, deployment and management of Cloud Services across develop-ment-, test-, acceptance- and production environments hosted on a single Cloud or multiple Clouds." –Gerd Breiter, IBM Distinguished Engineer

Morphlabs
"Cloud users today are making large investments migrating their businesses to the cloud, and, given our history and commitment to removing barriers to efficient computing, it’s exciting for Morphlabs to contribute expertise to the development of standards that will help extend our customer’s investment into the future." –Lee Thompson, CTO

Red Hat
"Red Hat’s ongoing work in the cloud is focused around providing powerful open cloud technolo-gies and enabling an ecosystem of developers, tools, scripts and applications that can interoperate across public and private clouds. TOSCA’s efforts to contribute to an open approach for cloud environments align well with our cloud goals, and we feel this organization will provide benefits for many enterprises looking to deploy open clouds today." –Scott Crenshaw, VP, Cloud Business Unit

SAP AG
"As one of the initial co-authors of the TOSCA input specification, SAP is pleased to see it advance towards industry standardization. SAP is committed to helping its customers run enterprise software on cloud infrastructures, and the TOSCA specification will enable customers to enjoy more cloud choices through easier portability between clouds." –Claus von Riegen, Program Director, Industry Standards and Open Source

Software AG
"Software AG has been closely involved at the forefront of leading industry standards, recognizing the need for interoperable and portable solutions for our customers. A standard and interoperable way to describe cloud applications, portable across disparate cloud providers, is essential for the success of cloud applications of the next generation and for smoother migration of existing applications to the cloud. As a co-author and co-submitter of the TOSCA specification to OASIS, we are happy to see the TC work launched successfully." –Hans-Christoph Rohland, Senior VP, R&D

TELUS
"With the ongoing propagation of ‘Cloud Computing’ and expected ubiquity of this paradigm, a standard mechanism for customers to avoid vendor lock-in and to be enabled to churn is in their best interest. A day may come when governments mandate ‘Cloud Portability’ in a similar fashion as telephone number portability of decades past. TELUS intends to take a proactive stance in pre-paring for the projected future mode of operations in this area." –Shane Logan, Director, Services Enablement

About OASIS:

OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) is a not-for-profit, international consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of open standards for the global information society. OASIS promotes industry consensus and produces worldwide standards for cloud computing, business transactions, security, privacy, SOA, the Smart Grid, content technologies, emergency management, and other applications. OASIS open standards offer the potential to lower cost, stimulate innovation, grow global markets, and protect the right of free choice of technology. OASIS members broadly represent the marketplace of public and private sector technology leaders, users, and influencers. The consortium has more than 5,000 participants representing over 600 organizations and individual members in 100 countries.
http://www.oasis-open.org

Copyright ® 2011 by CRM HELP DESK Software .com. All Rights Reserved.

iDashboards, the global leader in business intelligence (BI) dashboard software, today announced the availability of iDashboards v7.5.  This product release redefines the dashboard experience, providing users with stunning presentation options, an expanded chart library, interface enhancements and new development features.

“Organizations around the world are adopting business intelligence and taking charge of their data,” said Shadan Malik, CEO of iDashboards. “We have seen a growing market need for an enterprise dashboard platform that provides engaging visuals, intuitive navigation, low complexity and quick implementation.  iDashboards v7.5 meets this demand, providing users with an interactive and visually rich dashboard solution. “

New features available in iDashboards v7.5 include:

• Presentation Chart Library: Image Gallery and Slideshow Charts provide users with a variety of image display options that function intuitively with iDashboards’ patented interactive intelligence.  The creation of the ViFrame enables users to implement visually interactive text data.
• Updated and New Chart Types: The iDashboards Chart Library has been expanded to include several new charts and chart formatting options.  New chart types include: Multi-needle Speedometer, Metrics Target, Metrics Bar Target and new country maps.  Additionally, chart properties have been created to enhance the overall esthetic of both dashboards and charts.
• New Dashboard Development Features: Development enhancements include the introduction of dynamic picklists, drilldown data diagnostic functionality, HTML panel, pre-defined date formats, and background images and transparency charts.

The availability of iDashboards v7.5 sets a new benchmark in the business intelligence dashboard space, driving innovative dashboard design and fostering an evolving end-user experience.

About iDashboards

Through its award-winning engineering and patented technology, iDashboards helps companies leverage information assets through visually rich, real-time and personalized business intelligence dashboards to analyze, track, and drilldown through a wealth of information. iDashboards’ global customer base consists of organizations ranging from large, Fortune 500 companies to small and medium-sized businesses, all of which are making quicker, and better, decisions with the help of iDashboards.

Applications include: executive dashboards, business dashboards and excel dashboards.  The company is privately held and headquartered in Troy, Michigan. To find out more about iDashboards’ solutions, please call 248-528-7160 or visit www.iDashboards.com.

FinancialForce.com, the cloud applications company, today announced it has launched a new mobile app on salesforce.com’s AppExchange Mobile, extending the marketplace built for the social enterprise.

FinancialForce Timecards for the iPhone is among the first apps to leverage AppExchange Mobile, tapping into the power of the proven Force.com platform, salesforce.com’s social enterprise platform for employee social apps.

San Mateo, CA — FinancialForce Timecards for the iPhone helps professional services organizations stay connected no matter where they work.

Completely integrated with FinancialForce PSA and Salesforce Chatter, FinancialForce Timecards taps into the social, mobile and open capabilities of cloud computing, helping customers transform into social enterprises.

FinancialForce.com, the cloud applications company, today announced it has launched a new mobile app on salesforce.com’s AppExchange Mobile, extending the marketplace built for the social enterprise. FinancialForce Timecards for the iPhone is among the first apps to leverage AppExchange Mobile, tapping into the power of the proven Force.com platform, salesforce.com’s social enterprise platform for employee social apps. FinancialForce Timecards for the iPhone is currently available for test drive on AppExchange Mobile to all users of FinancialForce Professional Services Automation (PSA), FinancialForce.com’s leading services management application based on Force.com.

FinancialForce Timecards for the iPhone leverages the form factor of the iPhone and unique capabilities of iOS allowing professional services organizations to stay connected while on the road or at a customer’s site. With FinancialForce Timecards for the iPhone, consultants can quickly and easily enter their time, view the status of timecards, match time to each assignment and post to project walls enabled by Salesforce Chatter. Because timecards are collected more quickly, the downstream activities become more efficient including billing, project reporting and resource management. Additionally, consultants utilizing Chatter on the project replace emails, voice mails and conference calls with Chatter streams that become part of the audit trail for each project. This increases awareness of all the team members involved with the project, making the team more efficient and able to provide a higher level of service to clients.

FinancialForce Timecards for the iPhone is free to all FinancialForce PSA customers and requires the latest release, FinancialForce PSA Summer ‘11.

About the Force.com Platform and AppExchange

Force.com is the trusted social enterprise platform for building and running any employee app in the cloud. Force.com powers the Salesforce CRM apps, the more than 250,000 custom apps used by salesforce.com customers such as Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and Sprint Nextel and the more than 1,300 ISV apps built by partners such as BMC, FinancialForce.com and Fujitsu.

About FinancialForce.com

FinancialForce.com is the cloud applications company. We focus 100% on building business applications for Force.com, the world’s leading cloud computing platform from salesforce.com. Our applications include Accounting, Billing, Professional Services Automation (PSA) and Services Resource Planning (SRP). We serve fast-growing organizations and dynamic enterprises, helping them to align Finance, Sales and Service in a way that enables profitable growth. We are backed by two of the biggest and best players in the business, UNIT4 and salesforce.com.

Even second-, third-, and fourth-generation investments in CRM yields significant returns

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications continue to deliver high return on investment (ROI), with an average benefit of $5.60 returned for every dollar spent, according to a Nucleus Research analysis.

Where other software areas show smaller incremental returns after reaping the greatest benefits in initial deployments, CRM was found to deliver significant ROI throughout its lifecycle, often enhanced by further investment. Organizations effectively deploying secondary applications, such mobile, social, marketing optimization and sales analytics can see triple-digit ROI while greatly increasing employee productivity. By deploying applications that run on top of existing CRM, companies have also seen an improvement in business forecasting and an increase in sales.

"With a return of $5.60 for every dollar spent, investing in CRM is a no-brainer. Further, that investment has significant staying power. As vendors add social, marketing, analytics, and mobile access capabilities to their offerings, organizations have an opportunity to gain even more returns from CRM," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research, Nucleus Research.

With reductions in the cost of deployment via the cloud, a focus on end user productivity, and a push towards social and mobile applications, there have been fundamental shifts in the goals of the CRM market that contribute to maintaining a high ROI. This has driven vendors to produce more rapid deployments that are developed through continued innovation in this space.

The full research note is available at NucleusResearch.com.

About Nucleus Research

Nucleus Research is a global provider of investigative, case-based technology research and advisory services that provide real-world insight into maximizing technology value. For more information, visit NucleusResearch.com.

The top 10 IT trends and technologies that are going to be most important for you in 2012, include:

(click image to download larger chart)

STRATEGIC IT Technologies – in Detail

1. Media Tablets and Beyond. Choose between various form factors when it comes to mobile computing. No single platform, form factor or technology will dominate and companies should expect to manage a diverse environment with two to four intelligent clients through 2015. So, you and other IT leaders need a managed diversity program to address multiple form factors, employees bringing their own smartphones and tablet devices into the workplace. You and other companies will have to come up with two mobile strategies: one strategy to address the business to employee (B2E) scenario and another strategy to address the business to consumer (B2C) scenario. On the B2E front, your IT must consider social goals, business goals, financial goals, and risk management goals. On the B2C front, which includes business to business (B2B) activities to support consumers, your IT needs to address a number of additional issues such as surfacing and managing APIs to access enterprise information and systems, integration with third-party applications, integration with various partners for capabilities such as search and social networking, and delivery through app stores.
2. Mobile-Centric Applications and Interfaces.   The user interface (IU) paradigm in place for more than 20 years is changing. UIs with windows, icons, menus, and pointers will be replaced by mobile-centric interfaces emphasizing touch, gesture, search, voice and video. Applications themselves are likely to shift to more focused and simple apps that can be assembled into more complex solutions. These changes will drive the need for new user interface design skills. Building application user interfaces that span a variety of device types, potentially from many vendors, requires an understanding of fragmented building blocks and an adaptable programming structure that assembles them into optimized content for each device. Mobile consumer application platform tools and mobile enterprise platform tools are emerging to make it easier to develop in this cross-platform environment. HTML5 will also provide a long term model to address some of the cross-platform issues. By 2015, mobile Web technologies will have advanced sufficiently, so that half the applications that would be written as native apps in 2011 will instead be delivered as Web apps.
3. Contextual and Social User Experience. Context-aware computing uses information about an end-user or objects environment, activities, connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end-user or object. A contextually aware system anticipates the user’s needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. Context can be used to link mobile, social, location, payment and commerce. It can help build skills in augmented reality, model-driven security and ensemble applications. Through 2013, context aware applications will appear in targeted areas such as location-based services, augmented reality on mobile devices, and mobile commerce. On the social front, the interfaces for applications are taking on the characteristics of social networks. Social information is also becoming a key source of contextual information to enhance delivery of search results or the operation of applications.
4. Internet of Things. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as sensors and intelligence are added to physical items such as consumer devices or physical assets and these objects are connected to the Internet. The vision and concept have existed for years, however, there has been an acceleration in the number and types of things that are being connected and in the technologies for identifying, sensing and communicating. These technologies are reaching critical mass and an economic tipping point over the next few years. Key elements of the IoT include: – Embedded sensors: Sensors that detect and communicate changes are being embedded, not just in mobile devices, but in an increasing number of places and objects. – Image Recognition: Image recognition technologies strive to identify objects, people, buildings, places logos, and anything else that has value to consumers and enterprises. Smartphones and tablets equipped with cameras have pushed this technology from mainly industrial applications to broad consumer and enterprise applications. – Near Field Communication (NFC) payment: NFC allows users to make payments by waving their mobile phone in front of a compatible reader. Once NFC is embedded in a critical mass of phones for payment, industries such as public transportation, airlines, retail and healthcare can explore other areas in which NFC technology can improve efficiency and customer service.
5. App Stores and Marketplaces. Application stores by Apple and Android provide marketplaces where hundreds of thousands of applications are available to mobile users. Gartner forecasts that by 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile application downloads from app stores every year. This will grow from a consumer-only phenomena to an enterprise focus. With enterprise app stores, the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support entrepreneurs. What this means that you should use a managed diversity approach to focus on app store efforts and segment apps by risk and value.
6. Next-Generation Analytics. Analytics is growing along three key dimensions: 1. From traditional offline analytics to in-line embedded analytics. This has been the focus for many efforts in the past and will continue to be an important focus for analytics. 2. From analyzing historical data to explain what happened to analyzing historical and real-time data from multiple systems to simulate and predict the future. 3. Over the next three years, analytics will mature along a third dimension, from structured and simple data analyzed by individuals to analysis of complex information of many types (text, video, etc…) from many systems supporting a collaborative decision process that brings multiple people together to analyze, brainstorm and make decisions. Analytics is also beginning to shift to the cloud and exploit cloud resources for high performance and grid computing. In 2011 and 2012, analytics will increasingly focus on decisions and collaboration. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action.
7. Big Data. The size, complexity of formats and speed of delivery exceeds the capabilities of traditional data management technologies; it requires the use of new or exotic technologies simply to manage the volume alone. Many new technologies are emerging, with the potential to be disruptive (e.g., in-memory DBMS). Analytics has become a major driving application for data warehousing, with the use of MapReduce outside and inside the DBMS, and the use of self-service data marts. One major implication of big data is that in the future users will not be able to put all useful information into a single data warehouse. Logical data warehouses bringing together information from multiple sources as needed will replace the single data warehouse model.
8. In-Memory Computing. Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. In addition, it offers a new layer of the memory hierarchy in servers that has key advantages — space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Besides delivering a new storage tier, the availability of large amounts of memory is driving new application models. In-memory applications platforms include in-memory analytics, event processing platforms, in-memory application servers, in-memory data management and in-memory messaging. Running existing applications in-memory or refactoring these applications to exploit in-memory approaches can result in improved transactional application performance and scalability, lower latency (less than one microsecond) application messaging, dramatically faster batch execution and faster response time in analytical applications. As cost and availability of memory intensive hardware platforms reach tipping points in 2012 and 2013, the in-memory approach will enter the mainstream.
9. Extreme Low-Energy Servers. The adoption of low-energy servers — the radical new systems being proposed, announced and marketed by mostly new entrants to the server business –will take the buyer on a trip backward in time. These systems are built on low-power processors typically used in mobile devices. The potential advantage is delivering 30 times or more processors in a particular server unit with lower power consumption vs. current server approaches. The new approach is well suited for certain non-compute intensive tasks such as map/reduce workloads or delivery of static objects to a website. However, most applications will require more processing power, and the low-energy server model potentially increases management costs, undercutting broader use of the approach.
10. Cloud Computing. Cloud is a disruptive force and has the potential for broad long-term impact in most industries. While the market remains in its early stages in 2011 and 2012, it will see the full range of large enterprise providers fully engaged in delivering a range of offerings to build cloud environments and deliver cloud services. Oracle, IBM and SAP all have major initiatives to deliver a broader range of cloud services over the next two years. As Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offering, and these traditional enterprise players expand offerings, users will see competition heat up and enterprise-level cloud services increase. Enterprises are moving from trying to understand the cloud to making decisions on selected workloads to implement on cloud services and where they need to build out private clouds. Hybrid cloud computing which brings together external public cloud services and internal private cloud services, as well as the capabilities to secure, manage and govern the entire cloud spectrum will be a major focus for 2012. From a security perspective new certification programs including FedRAMP and CAMM will be ready for initial trial, setting the stage for more secure cloud computing. On the private cloud front, IT will be challenged to bring operations and development groups closer together using "DevOps" concepts in order to approach the speed and efficiencies of public cloud service providers.

Definition of Strategic Technology

Strategic technology = "a technology with “the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. “

“A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. These technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives.”

 

source: gartner.com, press release

AbiResearch today released new research findings today, in a report called

“Media Tablets Cannibalizing Netbook Spend with 75% Share of US Ultra-Mobile Device* Shipments in 2011”

Ultra-mobile devices (UMD) are mobile computing devices on a continuum, bordered by laptop PCs and smart phones.  This market has 4 segments:

1. ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs),
2. mobile Internet devices (MIDs),
3. netbooks, and
4. media tablets.

Findings Summary:

* 2011: Estimated 37 m ultra-mobile devices will be shipped (US)

* 2011: 75% of which are expected to be media tablets (in particular Apple’s iPad 2s).

* 2015: Forecasted UMD revenue to top $24 billion.

Research Commentary:

“While the near-term opportunity is all about media tablets, no UMD segment type has ever sustained a lead for longer than 36 months in any part of the world,” says ABI Research group director Jeff Orr.  “Is the next device trend beyond media tablets just around the corner?”

NETBOOKS: shift out

Netbooks continue to be an important segment, though US volumes will steadily decline over the next five years from all-time highs of 9.9 million units shipped in 2010.  Netbook value will shift from highly competitive computing and mobile broadband markets, including the US, to countries where low computing and home broadband penetration offers the greatest potential for mobile computing.

ULTRA-MOBILE DEVICES: shift in ?

UMDs are well-positioned inside the edges of the mobile device landscape, though end-user audiences are driven to newer form-factors on emotion and promises and less on consumer needs and business roles.  “For UMDs in the US to take the PC or smartphone markets head-on, there needs to be a fundamental shift in buying behavior driven by lifestyle enhancements and workplace requirements,” says Orr.

ABI Research’s new study, “Ultra Mobile Devices in the US Market,” examines the market and technology issues facing ultra-mobile devices (UMDs) in the US, including device segment definitions, sales channels, average selling price, application processors, operating system software, and connectivity.  UMD segments covered include media tablets, netbooks, UMPCs, and MIDs.

During the entire Oracle-Salesforce duck and dive show with the cancelled keynote, it was obvious to me that this was not a spontaneous act.  It must have been orchestrated weeks before, because both parties would gain so much free marketing.

And they did.

For Salesforce, the Twittersphere and Facebook world were swarming with feeds and the live webcast presentation drew over 5000 views and 2000 concurrent viewers.

But you knew Larry Ellison would have the last word.  He’s the King and doesn’t like to be dethroned at his own game.

People like Larry Ellison do not like to lose, and he countered his punch with Oracle’s version of a public cloud.

Yes, you read that right, a public cloud. (not a private cloud)

Ellison is claiming Salesforce is the one with vendor lock-in and non functional inter-operability among other cloud vendors.

"Beware of false clouds," Ellison said, referring to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. "That is such good advice. I could not have said it better myself."

Ellison also lashes out against multi-tenant architecture, and that virtualization is the way to go.

He claims a separate virtualized database reduces the risk of your data contaminating with others.

With Fusion Applications, the infrastructure is built into the virtual machine along with the OS operating system and the database. And that is where your security is based from… bottom up from the infrastructure.

But what about Fusion Apps?

Fusion Applications are now in general release after six years of development.

"It took a little longer than we planned but it was a huge, huge engineering project to present a huge integrated suite … with all the different pieces rebuilt on top of modern technology. It’s complete, integrated and finally here," he said.

Ellison did not reveal when the service will be available

Hopefully it will not take another 6 years!

And finally, Ellison announced the Oracle Social Network, which adds social-networking functionality into Fusion Applications. 

Now, we are back to Round 1 of the heavyweight fight with Marc Benioff in one corner, and Larry Ellison in the other.

Let the Games Begin.

New offering runs in Dell datacenters and offers enterprise class, secure public, private and hybrid clouds and includes consulting, application and infrastructure services

Delivers robust Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering based on Dell servers, storage and security technologies

At VMworld 2011, Dell and VMware jointly announced the availability of the Dell Cloud based on VMware vCloud® Datacenter Services designed to provide a seamless multi-tenant environment for running virtual systems. Dell is one of the first providers authorized to provide VMware vCloud Datacenter Services for enterprise-class, secure, public, private and hybrid clouds.

Today’s announcement is the first public and hybrid cloud offering by Dell and supports Dell’s strategy to provide customers next-generation computing solutions composed of hardware, software and services. Dell will also offer consulting, application and infrastructure services to help companies transform their legacy IT environment and integrate these cloud services effectively in their business.

Dell and VMware will provide Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) choice for customer organizations, hosting and outsourcing firms, system integrators and service providers. The offer provides automation, multi-level security and availability in order to manage on-demand capacity, workload scalability, or as a platform to respond to changing business needs more rapidly.

To address one of the greatest concerns customers have with cloud implementations, Dell delivers a complete, multi-layer enterprise security solution. Through the acquisition of SecureWorks and strategic partnerships with VMware and Trend Micro, Dell’s top priority is securing critical IT assets for the customer through the multi-layer provisioning of services. Dell protects the datacenter’s infrastructure through the management and monitoring of network firewalls, web application firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and vulnerability scanning. Virtual datacenters are also protected with security boundaries allocated to specific organizations. Log monitoring and reporting provides visibility into relevant security controls to help customers demonstrate compliance with industry standards.

Dell powers many of today’s top global search engines and largest web sites. In addition, Dell has one of the largest install bases of VMware customers and is very well positioned to offer comprehensive support from the datacenter to the cloud for VMware environments.

Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Services includes several options for customers:

• Public – Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service is an enterprise-class, secure offer of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IAAS) hosted in a secure Dell datacenter. This service provides access to vCPUs, memory, storage networks, IP addresses, firewalls, and catalog capabilities.
• Private – Utilizing the same expertise, service and technology delivered in its own datacenters, Dell will build private clouds at either our customer’s datacenter or Dell datacenters leveraging VMware offerings including VMware vSphere^® and VMware vCloud Director™ as well as Dell’s vStart offering.
• Hybrid – Dell and VMware provide a single source to substantially simplify the management of customers’ physical and VMware vSphere-based virtual data center infrastructure adding flexibility to customer requirements. Utilizing VMware vCloud Connector, the hybrid cloud solution provides management of on- or off-premise private cloud and Dell’s Public cloud offering.

In keeping with Dell’s principles of open, capable and affordable, the cloud offering is based on open standards and interoperable technologies that enable the seamless portability of workloads between public and private clouds. This offering is optimized to IT outsourcing capabilities for customers wanting to leverage their standardized VMware data centers to achieve greater business transformation results at lower costs.

This is the first offering of Dell’s cloud vision that is based on providing next generation end-to-end solutions to address customers’ requirements.

Solution Availability and Beta Program

Dell is currently offering the Dell Cloud with VMware vCloud Datacenter Service with beta customers. The offering will be generally available in the U.S. in the fourth calendar quarter this year with rollout planned for EMEA and APJ in 2012.

Partnership

Dell and VMware have enjoyed a strong and strategic relationship for almost 10 years. Dell is one of the largest VMware resellers in the world and the companies’ combined products are used worldwide to help organizations drive efficiency. VMware hypervisors are certified as a component of Dell’s converged infrastructure offering, vStart, and can be managed by Dell’s Advanced Infrastructure Manager offering, which enables businesses to manage physical and virtual resources from a single console.

Mobile Clinical Computing

Also at VMworld 2011, Dell is announcing that its Mobile Clinical Computing (MCC) is now certified under the VMware Ready™ Desktop Solutions program. The MCC solution builds on Dell Desktop Virtual Solutions architecture adding tools, features and services designed to enhance clinical workflow by simplifying doctor and nurse access to critical patient care applications and information. VMware View™ centralizes clinical desktops and point-of-care applications into the private cloud or datacenter enabling them to be delivered as a secure managed service to any qualified end point device. This increases security, simplifies desktop management and increases the level of availability of clinical desktops for Dell’s MCC customers. Hospitals that have implemented MCC are reclaiming thousands of hours a year per clinician for patient care thanks to the solution’s robust clinical efficiency features that streamline authentication procedures, enable workstation sharing, provide persistent compute sessions despite location changes and, ultimately, reduce the number of clicks and the amount of time it takes for clinicians to access information they need for their jobs. For IT departments, MCC simplifies the configuration, deployment and management of client systems, virtually eliminating the need for time-consuming desk-side or bed-side support. MCC is being demonstrated at Dell’s VMworld Booth #901 and is being presented at Dell’s VMworld Booth #901 at 10:45 am on Tues., Aug. 30 and 12:15 pm on Wed., Aug. 31.

About VMware

VMware (NYSE: VMW) delivers virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes. With the industry leading virtualization platform – VMware vSphere® – customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2010 revenues of $2.9 billion, more than 250,000 customers and 25,000 partners, VMware is the leader in virtualization, which consistently ranks as a top priority among CIOs. VMware is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

About DELL

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers worldwide innovative technology and business solutions that give them the power to do more. Dell Services develops and delivers a comprehensive suite of IT and application services, business process solutions and consulting services designed to help customers succeed.

Dell is a trademark of Dell Inc. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.

VMware, VMware vCloud, VMware View, VMware vSphere and VMworld are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.

Ye Olde debate on whether companies should issue all IT equipment including laptops, tablets or mobile devices is an everlasting argument.

Perhaps employees should use their own personal device, and charge back the company a fixed sum on a monthly basis?

I know many procurement departments who would be thrilled with this idea with less inventory and tracking headaches.

You can even argue employees will take better care of their own devices, for example, like dropping their mobile phones into the urinals?  When it’s yours, you take better care of your goodies.

And then there is security.  Losing your phone.  Or terminating an employee with all that IP and customer lists. (Don’t worry, they have them anyways).  That’s another ball game.

Below is a press release from United Planet to help businesses benefit from the ‘Bring your own Device’ initiative.

United Planet helps businesses to benefit from the ‘Bring your own Device’ initiative

London – The ability to develop web-based applications for all mobile devices will be the key to the emerging ‘Bring your own Device’ (BYOD) initiative, according to United Planet (www.unitedplanet.com), one of the leading developers of Enterprise Portal software in Europe.

Employees are increasingly using personal mobile devices in the business environment but whilst this ensures that staff are able to use their preferred mobile device and are therefore contactable outside of the office, it does present certain problems. Although BYOD can reduce the purchase and maintenance costs associated with mobile contracts, it requires companies to think carefully about how they provide access to business applications via multiple device types such as the iPhone, Android devices, BlackBerry, iPad and others.

Axel Wessendorf, managing director of United Planet, explains that: “It is vital that employees are provided with the same access to mission critical applications as each other, regardless of which mobile device they use. Companies can only profit from the advantages of BYOD when they are able to provide the same information from the company’s existing ERP or CRM system, for example, to each and every employee – without having to invest in separate software solutions for each device. That’s simply not cost efficient.”

United Planet’s platform-independent software, Intrexx, is designed to solve this problem. Intrexx not only allows the creation of web-based applications without the need for programming. Special page wizards also enable companies to generate mobile application pages for any mobile device with a few clicks of the mouse. One simply selects the target device, the data to be displayed and the required navigation elements – the mobile page is generated automatically. This enables visually stimulating web applications that are optimised for the relevant mobile device to be created in only a few minutes.

“Even applications designed to be accessed using an older Internet-capable device can be created with our software,” adds Wessendorf.

To find out what a complete mobile Enterprise Portal looks like, enter www.intrexx.com/tsum into the address bar of any mobile phone browser.

About United Planet

United Planet is one of the leading developers of Enterprise Portal software in Europe. Its Java based, standard software Intrexx enables companies to create Enterprise Portals, Intranets and Web Applications cost effectively, without the need for programming by using ‘drag and drop’ technology and pre-created solutions for quality management, document management and process management to optimise internal workflow. Intrexx runs on Windows as well as on Mac OS X, Linux and Sun Solaris, and incorporates several Business Adapters to ensure that third-party data from Lotus Notes and other ERP solutions can be easily integrated in the Intrexx Portal. A special Business Adapter for MS Office also makes it possible to integrate and edit Microsoft Office Documents without the need for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS). United Planet is headquartered in Freiburg, Germany and also has offices in Windsor. The company is supported by over 100 Business Partners worldwide.