Again, Amazon is growing

10 years ago when we talked about Amazon, we meant "book store." Apparently Amazon's ambition is easily growing up in these years. An example will be the recent acquisition of Zappos, an online shoe-seller. Seems that Amazon's market focus is moving towards multiple angles. What is more interesting here is that this acquisition happens during this market time. It is easily undertandable that Zappos may be passing through a hard time. But on the other hand, Amazon seems to be in really good shape, right?

How is skype?

Well there has been quite a few years since skype first came into my ears, more than 400 million users have been living with Skype in their globalized lives. What we have been enjoying is the possibility of talking to the other side for free or at a lower price and with a decent phone quality at the same time. Skype allows multiple people to chat in the same session. Some kind of conferencing, right? A newbie in the market, oovoo, has been dragging more than 7 million users (most of them in the business domain) in the unified communication market. Oovoo's starting point is to provide video-conferencing functionalities which are very much used in the all kinds of business sectors. In the ression time, internet is a way to save the communication cost. Skype also starts to put its focus on the online collaboration and video conferencing functionalities.We will see what happens in the next 6 months.

What's interesting here, is that a start-up like oovoo still had the courage a few years ago to make an online communication business with the large popularity of existing tools such as skype and other commercial tools. That is the spirit of innovation and courage to challenge.

Hadopp matters

First time when I heard of this "hadoop," I was still puzzling around the 90's when great ideas about software is normally protected by individual enterprises. In the cloud computing time, open source real matters. Hopefully I am not too old to get used to these.

Apache Hadoop is a free Java software framework that supports data intensive distributed applicatoins. It enables applications to work with thousands of nodes and petabytes of data. Hadoop was inspired by Google's MapReduce and Google File System papers.

Not in the far future, we will see more IT business initiated from Open Source systems.

Stop Buying More Storage!

As the CEO of Symantec, Enrique Salem, said at the Storage Networking World conference in Orlando, Fla., April 7 that enterprises should stop buying new storage and focus on obtaining better mileage from their existing systems. "Stop buying storage. You heard me right: Stop buying storage," Salem said. "How? Reduce the amount of information that you store in the first place, and make the storage you do have more flexible and efficient."

Most giant enterprises tend to allow different subsidiaries to buy extra storage from different vendors in order to maintain the IT requirements triggered by business growth. People are now realizing the importance of having an integrated management practice to control the different usage (or, waste) of money on establishing yet-another instance of information which has already been in the whole enterprise information portfolio somewhere else. It's the politics, human relationshops, and lost communication that cause us most money in this scenario.

Who's gonna get Sun?

It has been a rumor that Sun Microsystem is going to be acquired by someone in the IT market. IBM is one of those in the listings. Someone else suggests that perhaps Cisco should get Sun in order to keep the market balanced. If it is IBM, I see a lot of confusions to both Sun and IBM technical people as they have been doing overlapping (or, competitive) works over the years. Oh, where is Microsoft in these days? Maybe they should take Sun and ensure that the "Java" technology dies out in the next few years.....

"Green" documents

A lot of people talk about Green IT nowadays. One straightforward way is to replace the current paper documents with "electronic document" in our computers. How the government and people backup this concept takes years. But it is a promising business direction. For example, EU is now considering a proposal of asking its countries to legally support electronic document. Due to a rough estimates, these proposals could save European organisations around EUR€18 billion, although this is calculated from the standard EU cost model to give the maximum mid-term reduction potential, and the real cost-saving figure is probably more conservative, but still significant.

There are many interesting directions for new business, in the "Green IT" world.

Microsoft and Open Source

Interesting title, right?
After years and years of battle with open source community, MS is now changing its strategy towards the open source world. Throught its "Microsoft Web App Gallery," MS is deploying a "one-stop" site for all kinds of open source assets for web developers. It's a good start for the software giant to penetrate into open source developers' land. Interesting items on the site, www.microsoft.com/web/gallery, are, for example

• WordPress WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.
• DotNetNuke® Community Edition DotNetNuke® is the ideal platform for building professional websites and web applications with dynamic content and interactive features.
• ScrewTurn Wiki ASP.NET-based Wiki Software; allows to build a lightweight Intranet/Internet knowledge base, supporting article versioning and rollback, a basic authorization scheme and simplified file sharing. More information.
• SilverStripe CMS Modern, user-friendly content management system. Extendable by web developers through PHP framework. More information.

How about Microsoft EDW solution?

Microsoft, as a new comer in the EDW giant club, is struggling to put is SQL Server system as an Enterprise Data Warehouse tool. Can SQL Server qualify for the job? Well, compared to its competitors like Teradata, IBM, and Oracle, MS SQL Server 2005 is only capable of managing several terabytes. Hopefully, SQL Server 2008 can manage upto hundreds of TBs. Another problem with SQL Server, is that it works only on MS operating systems. Issues with MPP technolgies may be partially solved by the acquisition of DATAllegro. But how about the data federation, data quality, and metadata management tools?

In this game, MS is far away from being the market influencer.