egoboss

RiverMuse | RiverMuse Launches Enterprise Class Open Source Fault Management Platform

RiverMuse launches an enterprise class open source fault management platform built upon a next generation architecture designed around maintaining a very low total cost of ownership when applied to modern service delivery infrastructures.

RiverMuse’s agile architecture is specifically designed to support virtualized and abstracted network infrastructures where constant change and complexity of business logic administration typically means an increased cost of ownership that is significantly higher than the realizable benefits.

The visionaries behind RiverMuse include: Philip Tee, Predrag (Fred) Mutavzdic, and Mike Silvey, who were the team behind the inventions of Micromuse and RiverSoft (now IBM Tivoli Netcool and HP OpenView Advanced Edition) and Phil Blades, one of the first Netcool customers and a pioneer of the early service management community.

The team recognized that the management of today’s service delivery infrastructures needed a new approach to management tools, in terms of:

• Platform architecture: to allow cost effective support of modern infrastructures and,
• Breadth of application functionality: offering every customer what they specifically need when they need it.

This inspired them to invent a next generation agile architecture and gift the platform to the service management community to enhance features and extend functionality, thus enabling delivery at the time customers require them – removing the dependence on vendor roadmaps and business principles.

Gifting RiverMuse as Open Source marks a significant change of approach in the service management arena. Features and functionality within the RiverMuse offering will evolve in line with the needs of modern service delivery infrastructure requirements.

Guardians of Service Level Management will now benefit from an enterprise class agile architecture without compromising on functionality or suffering the stealth tax in the form of increased administration charges, since RiverMuse sets a new standard in total cost of ownership.

Background – Current Challenges for Fault Management Users

Fault management is not a new discipline, however innovation has stagnated at the expense of increased administration complexity. Where once, root-cause analysis (RCA) tools reduced the time to isolate faults in client-server architectures, RCA is ineffective in modern virtualized and densely abstracted service delivery infrastructures due to the inability to codify the environment.

Although legacy fault management tools do enable their users to isolate the wood from the trees, maintaining business logic rule integrity is costly to manage in-line with service delivery infrastructure changes.

More ...

http://www.rivermuse.org/static/category/news-events/

VentureBeat | Cloud9 Analytics - Aggregated BI for Salesforce.com, et al

Cloud9 Analytics, maker of software that aggregates business intelligence for company leaders, has raised an undisclosed amount in second-round capital from InterWest Partners and Leapfrog Ventures, reports VentureWire. Both firms had also supplied the San Mateo, Calif. company’s $5 million first round of financing in 2007.

Cloud9’s software is based on change detection. For example, its primary application crawls data on Salesforce.com, alerting managers to any changes occurring on their teams and in their sales pipelines. But the software doesn’t have to be used with Salesforce, the company emphasizes — it can be used to detect changes in any database. It also says it has several new products in the works that will integrate with its current offerings.

More ...

http://deals.venturebeat.com/2009/07/15/new-funds-puff-up-cloud9-for-business-intelligence-software/

ReadWriteWeb | Essential Applications for Distributed Teams

Distributed teams. Virtual work. Placeless offices. Whatever you want to call them, groups who work from geographically separate locations are more common than ever.

Despite how widespread this mode of coordinating work has become, there are those still wondering just what tools are absolutely crucial to making a distributed team work. Here's a list of the four types of applications you'll need, and some examples of the popular places to get them.

Of course, the following list is missing something: email. Truth be told, we won't waste your time by outlining why email is indispensable. What we will say is that the following four utilities are all things that will pare down your daily email burden.

One: IM & Chat

Instant messaging and chat are one item, practically speaking, but they tend to serve different, equally-important social functions in the enterprise.

One-to-one IM is the best way to ping your virtual coworkers, and is really the only app that comes close to the easy access you'd get from collocation. Cross-platform apps like Adium and Pidgin are extremely popular, in addition to utilities packaged with whatever OS you work from. Enterprise instant messaging services like Microsoft Office Communications Server and Lotus Sametime have been around since the late 90s.

Group chat is slightly less common a need than IM, and is less useful for informal access in your daily workflows. But for certain use cases, only group chat will do. Skype and Campfire from 37Signals can't be beat from our perspective, though there are enterprise-specific options out there. If you're looking for a network that's dead reliable, you could go old school and opt for an IRC channel.

Two: Wiki

We pointedly chose not to mention the generalized notion of a "knowledge base" or document repository. A fully-collaborative space for documents is a necessity, not an experimental accessory to your tool set. What's more, wikis are by-and-large either free or relatively cheap.

In terms of getting one, wikis offer some of the most diverse (and confusing) options out there. You can get free software like MediaWiki or DokuWiki. You could also go with a hosted provider such as PBworks, Wikispaces, Zoho Wiki or EditMe. Options for the enterprise often do a lot more than just wiki besides, and the leaders in that sense include Confluence, Mindtouch, Socialtext, and XWiki.

Three: Task Tracking

By task tracking, we mean any tool that exists to keep track of the group's work. These can be issue trackers like JIRA, Trac, or Redmine. For those less-development oriented, it might be something tailored only to project management, like Basecamp, LiquidPlanner, or the offerings from Microsoft and Oracle. 

Four: Web Conferencing

Web conferencing is the most formal of these four applications. It might seem like a fairly dull use of the Web to be conducting meetings over it, but often as not it's the only application to come close to replacing face-to-face meetings.

If you're looking for full video and audio capabilities, conferencing is the most resource-heavy of the quartet, which is why there are more options available from big vendors. The most popular these days include: WebEx from Cisco, GoToMeeting, and Adobe Connect.

More ...

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/07/four-essential-apps-for-distributed-teams.php

GigaOM | Cisco Outlines How to Move The Enterprise to The Cloud

Cisco today outlined its plans for delivering IT services over the web (aka cloud services), and as part of a conference call, showed off a great slide that illustrates exactly how many companies this former networking gear maker wants to take on. If I were to boil it all down, I’d say the company’s cloud strategy relies heavily on its hardware to make its WebEx-branded collaboration software run economically. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s CTO, said the company sees the cloud as having four layers, with thebottommost layer being the hardware infrastructure provided by Cisco’s new servers. The top three are the more traditional infrastructure-as-a-service offerings, platforms as a service and software as a service (see slide).

The only area where Cisco doesn’t want to play (most likely because it’s where its service provider customers want to build their own businesses) will be the infrastructure-as-a-service layer. However, Cisco will host its own services, and will do so on the new UCS hardware.

Warrior said the company has seen a 30 percent reduction in capital expenditures and a 20 percent decrease in operating expenses tied to IT, thanks to hosting its WebEx platform on Cisco hardware. She also spent some time describing new features and how Cisco is building its PostPath and Jabber acquisitions into its WebEx brand to offer email and IM integrated with WebEx’s meeting capabilities.

However, as Cisco moves deeper into the cloud, it will be interesting to keep an eye on the questions that weren’t answered. I asked how Cisco plans to interoperate with Amazon’s computing and storage platform. Instead of giving an answer, Warrior started talking about how there will be a variety of clouds, including public and internal private, and how Cisco wants to provide an “inter-cloud” system for communications among the various clouds in five to six years. In order to do that, Warrior said, the technology world will have to work on open standards for naming, directories, and presence awareness, as well as protect corporations that don’t want to have such openness between clouds. But most folks want their clouds to interoperate today, not half a decade from now, so all of this is more hype than help.

More ...

http://gigaom.com/2009/06/30/cisco-shows-off-its-hit-list/

VentureBeat | Analytical Database - ParAccel - Raises $22m in 3rd Round of Funding

ParAccel, maker of database technology that allows users to see broader patterns in massive data sets, has raised $22 million in a third round of funding from Menlo Ventures, Bay Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Tao Venture Partners and Walden International. The money will be used to expand its marketing efforts, VentureWire reports.

Based in Cupertino, Calif., ParAccel says it will reach profitability in 2011. In allowing companies to slice their data many different ways, the company competes with heavy hitters like Oracle and IBM. It also rivals smaller players like Green Plum, Vertica Systems and Aster Data.

More ...

http://deals.venturebeat.com/2009/06/30/paraccel-brings-in-22m-for-analytical-databases/