Amazon and Utility Computing

Fascinating article here about Amazon's new bet on utility computing. Jeff Bezos is now going to sell computing power and storage to companies looking to access these resources over the web. Utility computing (or Cloud computing) is nothing new. Sun Microsystems launched its own hosted services based on N1, nearly 3 years ago. What is interesting in this announcement, is that Amazon has been able to integrate computing power, storage, network and provisioning software and offer it as a service while other companies are only starting to implement or talk about convergent IT infrastructure. I'm not sure if this is going to skip one adoption cycle but if Amazon (and other large companies or service providers) is going to be successful, this is going to upend the IT industry in a very significant way. I'm always wary of believing in quick adoption rates and this is going to take time. The route to utility and cloud computing will need more salesforce.com companies first before a move to a hosted converged infrastructure. As any platforms, you need developers to make it meaningful.

Data Center Evolution

Over the last 40 years, the data center has gone through a tremendous evolution. From mainframe to distributed computing, the challenges have remained the same: Manage complexity, reduce operational expenses, optimize utilization of assets and make the business and its employees more productive and flexible. Telecommunications, like no other industry, has been a key driver in this evolution. For many years, Sun has been working with our customers to deliver data center consolidation products and services. These are organized around server, storage, network and application consolidation.

Sun recently announced that the UltraSparc T1-based servers will be able to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. This is significantly changing the way data center will be run in the near future. Vendors like VMware have also been working hard at virtualizing data centers and desktops. Sun's Solaris 10 already is an option for running on VMware, and the Sun Blade 8000 will be certified to run VMware ESX Server 3.0.1. With Xen, though, multi-OS virtualization will essentially be built into Solaris.

Google acquires YouTube

I discovered YouTube a little bit over a year ago and thought this was going to change the video network landscape quite significantly. To be very honest, I believed a TV network would have been the acquiring company, because I initially saw parallels with Napster. Video is clearly becoming the de facto digital content on the web and will continue to dominate as innovation brings increased bandwidth and improved digital cameras and phones. Phones will inevitably become the main production and consumption point for video as these innovations take place.
The players around the network triangle are at work again. I wouldn't be surprised to see handset manufacturers integrate software into their devices to facilitate the use of services like YouTube.

Ubiquitous Network Triangle

A picture is worth a thousand words. What are the components of the ubiquitous network? I drew this picture to illustrate the dynamics at play in the new converged network.Three different players are fighting for one customer. Names are self-describing. Historically, the equipment manufacturers used to make the network and handheld equipment but this is now changing. The key question for all these companies is: Who ultimately will control the customer experience? Who will become a commodity?


Now a quiz: Where is Google on this picture? Apple? Yahoo? RIM?

New dates for daylight savings time

On August 8, 2005, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 was signed by the President of the United States. This Act changed the dates of Daylight Saving Time (DST) in the U.S. Beginning in 2007, DST will begin on the second Sunday of March and end the first Sunday of November. Congress retains the right to revert the Daylight Saving Time after a study of the Department of Energy is complete. Canada is likely to follow the change as well. In Australia, last April, the end date was postponed by one week because of the Commonwealth Games (got their priorities right down there). I haven't found any other upcoming changes like this elsewhere (complete list of worldwide DSTs).
At first, this change seems to have all the ingredients of a Y2K Bug re-run and its expensive consequences. The main difference, in the DST case, is that the majority of applications relies on the operating system to provide the exact time instead of hard-coding it in the case of dates (YY format). After the signature of the new act, Sun made available a Solaris patch to address the new change of date. Like any other patch installation, this would require regression tests, but based on our previous experience, this date change can happen very smoothly as long as it is planned properly. Since Solaris is the de-facto carrier-grade operating system, our support teams are ready to assist our telco customers for this critical transition. I've created an alias to help answer questions regarding the DST change in the telecommunications industry.

Sun takes center stage at largest TeleManagement World ever

This year's TeleManagement World (TMW) edition drove nearly 3,000 attendees to Nice in France, where the TeleManagement Forum (TMF) announced the creation of a new go-to-market program (Prosspero) joining forces with the OSS Through Java initiative which will now be part of TMF. Keith Willets (TMF's CEO) and Glenn Edens from Sun unveiled the new market initiative during the opening session of TMW.

At the conference, Sun demonstrated the first integration of last year's SeeBeyond acquisition (now Java Composite Application Platform Suite) and the OSS/J-based trouble ticket integration hub which created a lot of interest from the customers attending the conference. The integration demonstrated the benefits of a flexible IT infrastructure based on Business Process Management (BPM) integrated with an existing OSS/BSS platform. Sun and our partners have submited the OSS/J trouble ticketing hub as one of the first Prosspero solution pack.

On another important topic, Nokia announced their support for the Solaris 10 platform in their OpenEMS suite which demonstrated increasing momentum for Sun's carrier-grade Operating System to enable true interoperability and support for convergent telecommunication protocols.

IPTV deployments

Last week, our partners at Tech Mahindra organized a dinner/presentation with Clive Selley CIO, BT Wholesale to discuss key challenges in IPTV deployments. Clive shared some of BT's plans, competitors, assets and challenges for IPTV. BT's DSL network services more than 8 million subscribers across the UK and is working aggressively to roll-out IPTV services in the next months. The OSS/BSS integration was one of the key challenges that BT is looking at. It's important to note that Tech Mahindra was one of the early supporters/adopters of the OSS/J initiative who recognized the value of using open standards for OSS/BSS integration - their main expertise.
Content (interactive service, video-based applications), customer experience (programming guide, personalized content/identity, and communications services including presence, voice, IM) are other clear challenges that need to be addressed to make IPTV a real business model for carriers. I shared with the group, how carriers like BT can help content creators promote their content, maximize their advertising revenue, and accurately track usage in a way that is unique to IPTV technology. This will provide a clear business differentiator in delivering television services to the projected 53 millions IPTV subscribers by 2009.
In the coming months, I will share details of Sun's initiatives and products that are helping carriers successfully deploy and manage IPTV services by harnessing participation on the network and the power of Java on the STB, network infrastructure, and back-end systems.