Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

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.

Eaton Steel is relying on the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Database and Oracle SOA Suite, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, to gain insight into its supply chain network and financial results, simplify transactions with its network of partners and help reduce costs by automating key business processes.

Oracle announced the first in a series of free Oracle business applications for the Apple iPhone. Oracle Business Indicators will be available on the Apple App Store beginning July 10th. These new Oracle business applications address how busy executives and managers work today -- requiring targeted, intelligent and task focused information to make informed decisions with ease and simplicity with today's increasingly mobile work style.

To help organizations more readily institute hardware and software changes to their Oracle Database systems, including upgrades to Oracle Database 11g, Oracle announced that Oracle Real Application Testing now features support for all releases of Oracle Database 10g, and Oracle9i Database Release 2.

Oracle's earnings, better than expected, were up 27% to $2 billion or 39 cents a share in its fourth fiscal quarter on revenues up 24% to $7.24 billion and good thing too considering Oracle is this week's roundly watched harbinger of what's happening in the economy at this very, um, nasty intersection. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison thinks Oracle's results said more about Oracle's execution than the macro economy.

To no one's particular surprise, Oracle has claimed that it suffered hundreds of millions, if not 'at least' a billion dollars worth of damages because of SAP and the IP hacking theft of its TomorrowNow PeopleSoft/JD Edwards customer support subsidiary.

Oracle announced new releases of Oracle Berkeley DB, Oracle Berkeley DB XML and Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition. The new releases and enhancements signify Oracle's commitment to continued innovation across the Oracle Berkeley DB product family, while maintaining the open source dual license business model.

Bluenog announced that it has become a Certified Advantage Partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork. Under the program, Bluenog will resell Oracle software, including Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion middleware, and will provide associated services and integrated solutions. Bluenog's core competencies include enterprise portal, enterprise content management, and business intelligence solutions.

Parallels virtualization and automation software is powering a new offering for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) from STRATO. The STRATO Oracle Server XE offering uses Oracle Database 10g Release 2 Express Edition, Parallels Virtuozzo Containers, Parallels Plesk Control Panel, and Parallels Automation.

Mike Neil is general manager for virtualization strategy in the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. Mike is focused on the delivery of the Windows virtualization technology, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Virtual PC 2007. Mike also directs the technical enablement of Microsoft's broader vision for virtualization, to include virtualization management tools and virtualized desktop infrastructure. Prior to this role, Mike was responsible for Microsoft?s server and PC virtualization efforts since 2003.

ComScore has upped Google's US search share. It was 59.8% in March and now for April it's 61.6%. It gave Yahoo 20.4% and Microsoft 9.1%. HP and Foxconn International, a unit of Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry, the big contract manufacturer, are building a $50 million factory outside St Petersburg where they will produce a half-million PCs a year for the Russian market starting next year. It could become a hub for the Baltic states and Scandinavia. Hon Hai, meanwhile, is going to start making laptops.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

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.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

Faster adoption of technologies has resulted into heterogeneous information systems. Gleaning and processing of complex information is of increasing importance in today's diverse environments. A built-in, infrastructure-level capability to process and correlate high volumes of events, and the resulting visibility can prove to be key business differentiators for any business.

Luciad announced that it has released LuciadMap Version 8.0 with substantial new functionality and increased performance, enabling developers to build and deploy high-end mission-critical systems. Luciad's partnership with Oracle is reinforced in the seamless integration with the latest edition of Oracle Spatial. LuciadMap is a suite of customizable software components that system integrators and original equipment manufacturers can easily integrate into their existing systems. The product has a global user base in aviation, security and maritime sectors.

Hewlett-Packard is supposed to be this close to buying Electronic Data Systems for somewhere in the heady neighborhood of $12 billion-$13 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, a pretty premium over its $9.5 billion market cap Friday. The paper thinks there could be an announcement on Tuesday. Buying the consultant is meant to help HP compete on the services side against rival IBM.

Building on its November 2007 preview, Oracle previewed additional planned feature enhancements of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. Based on feedback resulting from close cooperation with customers testing in real-world environments, the latest preview of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g includes planned features intended to provide Java developers with a unified design and development experience based on new open standards for Java, SOA, AJAX, Web 2.0 and Security and to help reduce the time, effort and cost of developing Rich Enterprise, Web and mobile applications.

Founded in 2006, SYS-CON Media's 'Virtualization Journal' is the world's first magazine devoted exclusively to what Gartner has earmarked as the single highest-impact IT trend through 2012: virtualization. And now it will be available on newsstands worldwide, as SYS-CON Media seeks to support the world-beating 'International Virtualization Conference & Expo' series produced by SYS-CON Events with top-quality print collateral, available at newsstands wherever fine-quality technical journals are sold.

Likewise, pretty much the de facto standard in cross-platform authentication these days, has added Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Oracle's version of Red Hat, to the list of some 110 Linux, Unix and Mac platforms that it supports on a Microsoft network using Active Directory. Oracle Linux now claims 2,000 customers give or take.

BT is going to distribute and support both SugarCRM, the commercial open source CRM people, and its rival NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company. Both companies are competing against salesforce.com, the brainchild of former Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff, with on-demand CRM applications. No terms were disclosed. BT is supposed to go chase SMBs and divisions of large companies, targeting its roughly1.6 million business customers in the UK and EMEA with NetSuite's stuff.

Since the launch of the Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) last April, Oracle's partner ecosystem has embraced Oracle's pre-built integration products and stepped forward to deploy and extend them for specific customers. The combination of pre-built integration products from Oracle and expert services from partners provides return-on-investment and better business value by helping customers to reduce the cost and risk associated with typical custom, one-off integrations.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

Oracle, the center of much Wall Street anticipation this week, came in $100 million and change shy of expectations on the revenue front but gave the punters the 30% increase in profits they expected. It took a nasty 7% hit and passed the tailspin on to the rest of tech as a skittish Wall Street worried about the fate of spending. CFO Safra Catz said that Oracle had some difficulty closing deals towards the end of the quarter, which finished February 29 - some deals took longer, some simply didn't close. She blamed it on customer caution.

Oracle is throwing its Clusterware software at its paying Unbreakable Linux support customers for free. Unbreakable Linux being Oracle's controversial year-old version of Red Hat, which it now claims has won 2,000 customers. Previously only part of Oracle's Real Applications Clusters (RAC) widgetry, Clusterware is portable cluster software that groups together individual servers so they can cooperate as a single system.

Oracle announced that Oracle Unbreakable Linux support customers at the Basic and Premier support levels can download and deploy Oracle Clusterware at no additional license fee or support cost. Oracle Clusterware is portable cluster software that groups together individual servers so they can cooperate as a single system. A fundamental component of Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Clusterware can operate independently and helps ensure the protection of an application, Oracle or third-party.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

Oracle zeroed in on Salesforce.com the other day when it rolled out the latest version of Siebel's rechristened on-demand software, now called Oracle CRM On Demand 15 and targeted up to run on Blackberries with fashionable social networking and collaboration capabilities to help users find the right guy in their organization to help them close a sale.

For the past ten years application developers have been stuck with only two desktop client choices. Traditionally, they can choose either a very thin Web-client technology implemented in HTML and CSS, or a very heavyweight thick client experience implemented using traditional client/server (C/S) technologies (e.g. Java Swing, MFC). It wasn't until the introduction of RIA technologies (e.g. AJAX, Adobe Flex, Curl, and Silverlight) and widget engines (e.g. Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadgets) that we were given more options.

Acquia has yet to price its maintenance and support subscriptions - there should be a variety of SLAs - but they're supposed to include an electronic update notification system code named Spokes for updates that have been reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia. Acquia is currently at 12 people, expecting to be 25 by the end of the year. Its Series A money comes from Northbridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. According to Dries' blog, Drupal 7 should offer the ability to create, share and mashup managed content, letting Drupal be a data repository accessed by tools and web sites across the network.

Doesn't Oracle have its own virtualization scheme? Isn't it Xen? Well, Oracle's soon-to-be takeover, BEA - the feds just okayed the merger - said Wednesday that it had teamed with VMware to deliver Java virtualization to the enterprise.

and Service Division that will include the four-year-old start-up EMC just agreed to buy off of him. EMC is paying cash for the Seattle-based Pi Corporation and its 100 engineers. EMC didn?t say how much but Pi was founded using Warburg-Pincus ($$$) money and EMC says the acquisition will likely dilute its EPS this year by a penny.

Microsoft today attempted to exorcize the interoperability bogeymen that have haunted it since it was first discovered to be using secret APIs 20 years ago, bogeymen that now quote European antitrust law at it and carry writs from the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. To avoid further confrontation with the European Commission, which opened a broad investigation of Microsoft's interoperability last month, the company said it would voluntarily open up all the APIs and communications protocols in its biggest revenue producers now and forever. To be clear, it said that these are the APIs and protocols 'used by other Microsoft products.'

I am glad to introduce you to a new set of resources to help surface scalability and performance issues in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA.) The SOA Knowledge and Performance Kit is a free open-source resource to show you what it really takes to build services using today's leading SOA development platforms. The Kit delivers an SOA use case design, source code to the implementations of the use case on Oracle, IBM, BEA, and TIBCO platforms, developer journals describing our experiences step-by-step, a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator, and performance and scalability tests that leverage the PushToTest test automation platform.

Remember how Oracle got ticked off that Red Hat wound up buying JBoss? And remember how Oracle poached Red Hat's operating system to sell as Oracle's own? Well, what goes around comes around. Red Hat is now setting out to attack Oracle through its pending takeover of BEA. Seems Red Hat has this open source project called BlackTie that it's organizing so it can migrate and replace legacy BEA Tuxedo transaction processor installations. Red Hat says it'll be Tuxedo-compatible, support Tuxedo APIs, run high-speed Tuxedo applications and before you know it turn into a commercial Red Hat product.

The Silicon Valley Watcher blog claims to have it on good authority that that shrine to software-as-a-service Salesforce.com has approached Oracle looking to get bought for $75 a share, something like $9 billion, roughly a 50% premium. And if such a deal were done, it foresees Salesforce CEO and erstwhile Larry Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff as Ellison's natural successor.