Articles by James Hamilton

TechTarget Gets Caught Spying on SYS-CON Media

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 10:30:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events' sales team replied to Scott Kelly's exhibitor inquiry, but when they never heard back from Scott, they decided to do a little Googling and here is what they found out. Mr Kelly is actually the 'Director of Product Management at TechTarget,' a technology media company that is struggling to produce a competitive show (with no luck) and compete with AJAX World RIA Conference & Expo. No wonder TechTarget is in pitiful shape as a competitor of SYS-CON Events. Look at the actions of their senior management - they can't even spy on their competitors, forget about putting together a show. :- ))

Cuil is Stupid and Has No Chance to Compete with Google

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Associated Press reported this morning the launch of Cuil. IMHO, as much as the search results are displayed on a slick and 'cool' page, these guys have little or no chance to compete with Google but a real chance to be bought by Microsoft for 500 bucks before the end of this week. What Microsoft does with it is another matter no one knows.

You Can Not Make Money Online With Kontera

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:45:00 EDT

SYS-CON Media ripped all Kontera links off of its website yesterday, after a brief trial period. SYS-CON's circulation manager Engin Sezici said: "It was not worth for us to mess up our Website and pages for the actual amount of revenue share we observed during the trial period. Google advertsing has been generating roughly 16 times more revenue for us ass compared to Kontera, for the same time period, same page views, and visitor traffic."

The Next Cloud Computing Company To Be Acquired

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 12:45:00 EDT

Yesterday we read the news of B-hive's acquisition by VMware. Also this week Microsoft closed the Kidaro acquisition, which had been announced earlier in the year. Both of these companies participated in SYS-CON's second international Virtualization Conference & Expo last November in San Francisco. This event was also the last conference BEA Systems sponsored, days before their Oracle acquisition news hit the press. PlateSpin is one of the Gold Sponsors of the upcoming 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo in New York City. Novell bought the company before this event has even taken place. In the past six months, four out of nine Virtualization Conference sponsors were acquired.

Virtualization Conference Keynote Webcast Live on SYS-CON.TV

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:45:00 EDT

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.

Citrix Virtualization Exec Hired as CEO to Sell Sourcefire?

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:45:00 EDT

Burris, who joined Sourcefire's board in March, is head of worldwide sales and services at Citrix Systems. Sourcefire CEO Wayne Jackson said in February that he would step down, with the company saying he was leaving to pursue other opportunities. In a statement, Sourcefire chairman Joseph Chinnici said Burris would bring to the company the discipline and inspiring leadership it needs to grow profitably. Chinnici called Burris' selection 'the culmination of a thoughtful and disciplined process of succession planning.'

Free Guest Passes for the Virtualization Conference & Expo in New York City

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:45:00 EDT

as: Al Aghili (Managed Methods), Alan Chhabra (Egenera), Andi Mann (Enterprise Management Associates), Andrew Conte (APC), Andy Astor (EnterpriseDB), Ariel Cohen (Xsigo Systems), Bill O'Conell (IBM), Bob Lozano (Appistry), Bob Quinn (3Leaf Systems), Brian Martin (IBM), Carlo Innocenti Ph.D. (DataDirect Technologies), Chris Shayan (Ashna Samane), Chris Wiborg (Cisco), David Kleidermacher (Green Hills Software), Doc D'Errico (EMC Corporation), Donato Buccella (Certeon), Dror Gill (Ceedo), Etay Bogner (Neocleus), George Pradel (Vizioncore), Geva Perry (GigaSpaces), Gordon Hunt (Real-Time Innovations), Gregory Brail (Sonoa Systems), Greg Lyon (Egenera), Harry Petty (Brocade), Hezi Moore (Reflex Security), Hubert Yoshida (Hitachi Data Systems), Ian Thain (Sybase), Jacek Kruszelnicki (Numatica Corporation), Jeremy Geelan (SYS-CON Media), Jerry Melnick (Marathon Technologies), Joe McKendrick (WebServices.org), Johan Nordin (Software AG), John Goodson (DataDirect), John Senor (iWay Software), JP Morgenthal (Avorcor), Julian Weinstock (Desktone), Keith Swenson (Fujitsu), Ken North (Computing, LLC), Kenon Owens (VMware), Kevin Epstein (Scalent Systems), Koen Aers (Red Hat/JBoss), Kurt Daniel (Parallels), Kurt Ziegler (SIMtone), Kyle Gabhart (Web Age Solutions), Mark Davydov Ph.D. (Blue Cross Blue Shield), Mark Hapner (Sun Microsystems), Mark Milligan (VirtualLogix), Matt George (Fidelity Investments), Michael CareyPh.D. (BEA Systems), Michael Gorman (Whitemarsh Information Systems), Mike Pizzo (Microsoft), Miko Matsumura (Software AG), Nikita Ogievetsky (Morgan Stanley), Parviz Peiravi (Intel), Paul Lipton (CA), Paul Vasquez (VMware), Peter Manca (Egenera), Phil Morris (Sun Microsystems), Pierre Fricke (Red Hat / JBoss), Ravi Gururaj (VMLogix), Rich Lechner (IBM), Rich Schreiber (Nastel Technologies), Richard Mark Soley (OMG), Rick German (Stoneware), Robert Steward (DataDirect), Ron Williams (Tivoli Software), Sean Derrington (Symantec), Shai Fultheim (ScaleMP), Simon Crosby (Citrix), Stefanos Damianakis (Netrics), Stephen Herrod (VMware), Stephen Pollack (PlateSpin), Tom Bishop (BMC Software), Ursula Sinkewicz (Fidelity Investments), Victoria Livschitz (Grid Dynamics), Yakov Fain (Farata Systems).

Virtualization Conference Keynote Webcast Live on SYS-CON.TV

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:30:00 EDT

Microsoft Will End Up Buying Yahoo Anyway

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:15:00 EDT

Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo received stupid advice from their investment bank advisers and blew their chance to close the deal with Microsoft as of this Sunday morning. Neither Yang nor Filo are experts on how to sell a company in a multi-billion dollar deal. They have relied on their investment bankers and advisers since the negotiations started with Microsoft. The difference between the offered price of $33 and the asking price of $40 per share is roughly $1.4b per share, so it's not small potatoes.

Virtualization Mania - Is Virtualization the Biggest Hype Ever?

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:30:00 EDT

David Marshall in his InfoWorld 'Virtualization Report' blog writes: 'Despite a sharp slowdown in U.S. business software spending, an April 2008 survey report from ChangeWave Research shows that virtualization may be spared as virtualization software spending has increased.' Marshall continues: 'The fact is, a troubled economy is probably yet another reason why virtualization software sales continue to grow. Virtualization is a technology that helps a company reduce its datacenter costs, such as less spending on server hardware, server maintenance, datacenter space, power, and cooling. So it makes sense for companies to continue to spend IT budget on virtualization software during troubling economic times.'

Red Hat Named "Platinum Sponsor" of Virtualization Conference & Expo

Thu, 29 May 2008 14:30:00 EDT

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.

Steve Jobs Loses His Mind - Sues "The Big Apple"

Tue, 27 May 2008 21:15:00 EDT

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.

This Man Should Be Fired from His Job as a Magazine Editor

Thu, 22 May 2008 08:15:00 EDT

This man, whose name is Keith Ward, should be fired from his job for basic incompetence as the editor of a magazine, and here's why. He posts a blog entry on May 6, 2008, in which he writes: 'Virtualization Journal, coming in second, declares itself the winner,' and he continues 'I have no problem with competition. I think it's good for Microsoft, VMware, Cisco and AT&T. It's just as good, and healthy, for IT publications. I do have a problem, however, with publications that either a) Outright lie, or b) Are woefully ignorant, and don't check facts before they publish something.' What are you Keith, are you on drugs?

Wal-Mart To Sell $399 Ubuntu Linux-based Laptop with Google Operating System

Wed, 07 May 2008 16:45:00 EDT

The Ubuntu Linux-based gOS operating system from Good OS LLC (www.thinkgos.com) includes so many Google applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google News Google Maps and YouTube that it's often referred to as the Google operating system. It also includes Firefox, Skype, Facebook and OpenOffice 2.3.

1105 Media Wishes to Launch Virtualization Website and Conference

Wed, 07 May 2008 16:30:00 EDT

So, the geniuses in Chatsworth, California, who picked up the remains of Fawcette Technical Publications from the bank in Virginia, and the remains of 101 Communications, another platform play that went seriously south, sat down in a room this afternoon and said 'What is SYS-CON up to these days?' The guy left over from Fawcette days and still employed said, 'Well we used to follow their news announcements and announce the same products, but by the time we could get around to what needs to be done, we were usually one year behind SYS-CON. And then we went out of business pretty much.' So the guy who makes the decisions in the room, as in the FedEx commercial, said: 'OK, we will announce a Virtualization Website and a Virtualization Conference!'

Remember the Monkey Business? McCain Is History!

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:45:00 EST

The New York Times quoted anonymous aides as saying they had urged McCain and lobbyist Vicki Iseman to stay away from each other prior to his failed presidential campaign in 2000. In its own follow-up story, The Washington Post quoted longtime aide John Weaver, who split with McCain last year, as saying he met with lobbyist Iseman and urged her to stay away from McCain. Donna Rice Hughes (born January 7, 1958) was a figure in the 1987 sex scandal that ended the first 1988 presidential campaign of Gary Hart. Since the mid-1990s, she has worked as an anti-pornography activist.

European RIA Technology Leader Canoo Releases Java RIA Library, UltraLightClient for AJAX

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 08:30:00 EST

AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, March 18-20, 2008, in New York City will provide an overview of Canoo's RIA technology as compared to its other European competitors. Upcoming AJAXWorld Conference is demonstrating a stronger interest and participation from delegates around Europe. Canoo announced a new release of its Java library for Rich Internet Applications (RIA), UltraLightClient (ULC). This new 6.2 version offers addons to test UltraLightClient-based applications more easily.

The Next SOA Company to Be Acquired After Oracle's BEA Dinner

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:30:00 EST

Since we last looked at the SOA marketplace this past April, BEA has finally found its match, in spite of their fearless leader and leftover CEO. After the ORACLE / BEA news we now read rumors that TIBCO may be the next target; perhaps Microsoft should be taking a good look at them so they don't miss the enterprise SOA opportunity completely. IONA is still trying very hard to get some attention; however, one of their biggest problems is perceived to be a weak management team as well as their positioning too far over the edge with open source. You are either a pure open source player like JBoss or MySQL, or you're not. You either vote Republican or Democrat. The following are our observations from nine months ago:

Android Competitor Adds Members to Deliver a Mobile Linux Platform

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:30:00 EST

Trolltech, Acrodea, ETRI, Huawei and Purple Labs have joined the LiMo Foundation started a year ago by Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics and Vodafone to deliver a mobile Linux platform. Said platform would perforce have to compete against the Linux-based Google-organized Android platform.

The First Virtualization Company to be Acquired in 2008

Sun, 06 Jan 2008 08:30:00 EST

Any software company headquartered in the United States whose 'About' paragraph contains the three magic letters 'S,' 'O,' and 'A' is either currently negotiating the terms of a deal or getting ready to walk pretty on the auction block to meet their happy highest bidder. I don't believe there is a single exception to this theory. Forget about the 'Irish Imports' though, the entire dozen of them. They first need to learn how to conduct business in America; no one cares about what they do over in Europe with the funds they receive from the Irish Government to keep them afloat.

Virtualization Cannibalization Starts with Red Hat: Wall Street

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 06:45:00 EST

Red Hat is losing market share to VMware according to Wall Street analyst Katherine Egbert of Jefferies & Co, who downgraded Red Hat's stock Monday. She says Linux isn't needed to replace Unix, that Windows and VMware are more prevalent, and that Red Hat's going to have to diversify away from Linux and make acquisitions to maintain growth. And she thinks that the shopping spree will cut into earnings and dilute its stock price. Red Hat's stock took a hit.

Sauers Technologies Releases Public Beta of BundleWorks Application Management Tool

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:30:00 EST

For building applications, BundleWorks includes ant tasks and command line tools to allow developers to build standard bundles for both custom and third-party applications. For testing, BundleWorks allows a developer to create and manage multiple environments to test multiple versions of applications. For deployment, BundleWorks supports local and remote deployment and provides a library of functions to handle common deployment tasks. For maintentance, BundleWorks tracks all bundle actions and configuration changes providing a complete history of activity.

Sun Catches Up with the Virtualization Game

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 11:15:00 EST

A critical part of Sun's virtualization portfolio, Sun xVM Ops Center reduces datacenter management complexity by combining a range of lifecycle management functionality into an all-in-one tool. Sun xVM Ops Center helps simplify discovery, monitoring, operating system provisioning, comprehensive updates and patch management, firmware updates, and hardware management from power up to production in cross-platform Linux and Solaris(TM) Operating System-based x86 and SPARC(R) environments. As a result, Sun xVM Ops Center allows enterprises to streamline their data center operations, helping to lower costs and more easily manage rapid growth, data center consolidation and compliance requirements.

Can You Believe These Shameless Head Hunters?

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:15:00 EST

Why are you opening private message directed to someone else? This is a private message not directed or intended for you. As I'm a long time member of the HR community - shame on you! Eileen Sirrell

Web After AJAX - Yahoo! News Ranks Number One

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 15:45:00 EST

The study contains two parts: an in-depth examination of the online customer experience and an in-depth examination of technical quality or 'service levels' (site responsiveness and site reliability) of the leading news Web sites including AOL News, CNN, FOX News, Google News, MSNBC, USA Today, and Yahoo! News. The unique data and insights uncovered by Keynote Competitive Research are acquired through the use of the company's commercially available Web performance and customer experience test and measurement products. The study is available for purchase from Keynote.

VS 2008 Builds AJAX-based Web Apps

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 12:30:00 EST

VS 2008 can also be used to build AJAX-based web apps. It can be used to target multiple versions of software like existing .NET 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 programs and continue to deploy them on .NET 2.0 machines. .NET Framework 3.5 supports Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). It can handle SOA, Web 2.0 and SaaS applications.

Mobile AJAX and Web Performance in Europe

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:00:00 EST

Keynote Competitive Research announced Europe's first performance index for the mobile Web. The Keynote Europe Mobile Index is a weekly performance ranking of 10 popular European mobile sites compiled from more than 26,000 measurements taken on multiple carriers from different geographical locations. Keynote recently announced a U.S. mobile index. The Keynote Europe Mobile Index provides insight into the overall performance and availability of popular mobile sites and can be used by customers to benchmark their mobile site performance against the biggest names in the industry.

ORACLE BEA - Is Oracle the New Microsoft?

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 12:30:00 EST

Oracle owns PeopleSoft and JD Edwards; they own SleepyCat; they own BEA; and of course they have their own enterprise database. This means they have the stack from top to bottom, with the exception of an operating system. They can take the CRM and banking and insurance and end-user apps that they now own, host them on an entire stack, and basically squeeze the middleware vendors out of existence.

ORACLE BEA - What Larry Wants, Larry Gets, Always!

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 12:30:00 EST

Here are my thoughts on this. I was expecting Alfred - who is known to be an arrogant and incompetent CEO - to run away from Larry as fast as he could. But this movie usually ends as follows. First, history repeats itself. By that I mean that Alfred should remember Larry's PeopleSoft hunt, which ended up with the PeopleSoft's CEO's head on a stick. In my humble opinion, in Act 2 of Larry's BEA hunt, we will see Alfred's head on a stick and the BEA shareholders will make the wedding plans, as always happens when Larry plans another marriage for his baby Oracle.

ORACLE BEA - BEA's Alfred Is Off the Hook, Larry Should Just Buy Red Hat

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:00:00 EST

I think Larry should just buy Red Hat for cash and no questions asked. Forget BEA and forget TIBCO. Larry should take a week off after this week's OracleWorld and get back to his office in his yacht, and type up his next press release (which is saved in his laptop as a form letter anyway) fill in the purchase price for Red Hat, and buy his round-trip ticket to Delaware to finish up the transaction. Since Peoplesoft, doesn't he buy these companies at the Delaware court anyway?

WSO2 Announces "Extended SOA Support" at the SOA World Conference & Expo

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:45:00 EST

WSO2, the open source SOA company, announced at the SOA World Conference & Expo, that it has significantly extended the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to support the heterogeneous, enterprise-scale demands of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The WSO2 ESB 1.5 adds the ability to run scheduled tasks, caching and other performance enhancements, message augmentation using standard databases, and a wide variety of file systems and FTP. Also new to Version 1.5 are support for XQuery and a simplified Plain Old Java Object (POJO) model based on the Command pattern.

Oracle Takes Over San Francisco, 45,000 Attendees, Tents on Streets!

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 12:00:00 EST

Oracle OpenWorld will open tomorrow in San Francisco with 45,000 people in attendance, a far bigger crowd even than CA's New Orleans cruise ship hotel accommodation days. I saw the photo below in my friend Ian Thain's blog entry from this afternoon. The city says they closed off one of the main streets for Oracle for 9 days. They expect OpenWorld to inject $80 million into San Francisco's economy, most of which will go to the fully-booked hotels citywide.

Red Hat & Sun Cut Java Deal

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 09:30:00 EST

Red Hat, which has made its fortune displacing Solaris, is now going to collaborate with Sun to advance open source Java, which Red Hat is particularly partial to given its JBoss investment. This is the third time this year that Sun has laid down with one of its enemies. It also cut deals with Microsoft and IBM. Red Hat will get a fully compatible open source Java Development Kit (JDK) for its Linux operating system out of the deal. All it has to do now is build it - and that includes a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) - and optimize the runtime for JBoss-on-Linux. Red Hat's IcedTea project - which brings together Fedora, the early access version of Red Hat Linux, and JBoss.org technologies on Linux - gets pushed. It's supposed to supply free alternatives to some of the pieces of the OpenJDK project that are still proprietary.

ActiveGrid Re-brands as WaveMaker

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 20:15:00 EST

WaveMaker, formerly known as ActiveGrid, has announced a new corporate brand and product strategy that will address the growing demand for technology that simplifies the assembly of Web applications, while meeting the architectural, security and governance policies of CIOs. WaveMaker will bring to market software enabling the visual assembly and rapid deployment of scalable, enterprise Web 2.0 applications that are both Web Fast and CIO Safe.

AJAX Market Throughout APAC Is Exploding!

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:45:00 EST

Dave Wolf, vice president, Cynergy stated, 'With the opening of our new Taipei office, we are building on the continued demand for Cynergy designed and developed rich Internet applications, as well as expanding our global presence. Business applications users have come to expect the same user experience they get as consumers of Web applications so the market for RIAs throughout APAC is exploding. Our new Taipei offices give our growing customer base throughout this region ready access to native speaking RIA experts who can quickly and skillfully address their business needs.'

XAware Introduces Open Source SOA Solution

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:45:00 EST

XAware has announced the creation of an open source project and the availability of XAware 5, open source data integration software that increases the productivity of development teams. XAware transcends existing data integration offerings with its ability to 'service-enable' data for reusable real-time connection to applications and business processes.

The Future of Rich Web Apps: Melding the Web and the Desktop

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 10:30:00 EST

Experts at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania have been considering the future of Web apps vs desktop apps. While they predict that any gap between web and desktop software will narrow in the future, they note that one wild card is how well hybrid webtop/desktop applications will match the features of their desktop cousins.

Genuitec and ICEsoft Round Out Enterprise AJAX Development

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 09:45:00 EST

Genuitec, provider of the MyEclipse integrated development environment and a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation, announced a new partnership with ICEsoft Technologies. ICEsoft is the creator and provider of ICEfaces, an open source framework for simplified development of AJAX-enabled Java EE applications.

Ruby-on-Rails Start-up Gets $6.2m in Funding

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 12:45:00 EDT

FiveRuns Corporation, a pioneer of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails, described by some as the new Java, has gotten $6.2 million in funding from Austin Ventures. The money is earmarked for acceleration product development, sales and marketing and the company's partnership efforts. Since it kicked off a year ago August, FiveRuns has secured $9.2 million in funding. It claims a customer base of 65 organizations or so that it says are monitoring hundreds of servers, with 'hundreds' in evaluation.

I Would Buy Active Endpoints Stock If They Were a Public Company

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 21:30:00 EDT

I personally don't know Mark Taber. It looks like he is an IBM'er with an impressive background. I did, however, meet Fred 12 years ago, at the first Powersoft User Conference in Orlando while he had his LexiBridge company. Those were the days with Mitchell Kertzman, David Litwack and the Powersoft team. Fred stayed along with the same gang after the Powersoft acquisition by Sybase. Kertzman, CEO of Powersoft, took the helm at Sybase, replacing Mark Hoffman, founder and CEO of the company. It looks like Fred built another company, GemLogic, and sold it to SilverStream. I see Chris joined Fred at Active Endpoints.