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.

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.

After a $1.5 million angel round, Desktone, which was started in 2006 by Eric Pulier, who also started SOA Software, US Interactive and IVT, picked up $17 million in first-round funding about a year ago from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital, Citrix Systems and the China-based Tangee International. SoftBank as well as Deutsche Telekom could become service providers. Ruda says the brains behind the technology is Paul Gaffney, the former CIO of Staples. The company has maybe 40 people, more than half of them in Shanghai doing development, which explains Tangee's involvement.

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.

BEA Systems announced that it was selected by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) to join the solution delivery team for the Defense Information Systems Agency's (DISA) Service-Oriented Architecture Foundation (SOAF) program. CSC, in partnership with BEA, Raytheon and Sun Microsystems, was awarded the SOAF contract under the US Army's ITES-2S contract to support the Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) program.

BEA Systems announced that Procter & Gamble implemented a service-oriented architecture (SOA) powered by BEA technologies. The SOA powers a new on-line workspace at Procter & Gamble. It has been designed to help improve and support decision making while increasing access to knowledge assets.

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!).

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.

BEA announced the availability of BEA WebLogic Portal 10.2. This new release solidifies the mission- critical enterprise portal capabilities and introduces enhancements designed to build more dynamic and interactive experiences. Numerous improvements are focused on developer and end-user productivity including AJAX development, dynamic tools for modifying portal content and style and increased security capabilities. Additionally, BEA continues to innovate in the presentation layer architecture by adding support for Web 2.0 interactivity, portal federation, mashup, and composite application capabilities.

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.

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that, readers can themselves infer: where is AJAX headed next?

Being held for the first time on March 18, 2008 at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, AJAXWorld Security Bootcamp is a compelling, intensive, one-day, hands-on training program that will teach Web developers, Web designers, and other Web professionals how to build secure AJAX applications and demonstrate what the best practices are to mitigate security problems in AJAX apps. It is led by one of the world's foremost AJAX security experts and popular teachers, Billy Hoffman.

Then suddenly at the beginning of December - after canceling a meeting at Icahn's offices in New York - BEA and Oracle are each marking up a draft merger agreement without any sweetened price being agreed - or even extended - and then without so much as a by your leave Icahn calls BEA advisor Goldman Sachs on January 11 with the Eureka price and by January 16 Oracle and BEA were executing a definitive agreement.

Key opinion-formers in the field of infrastructure and pioneers of virtualization technologies of all types have already begun submitting speaking proposals to Virtualization Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City, 23-24 June, 2008. Topics covered will range from Server Virtualization, Application Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, Network Virtualization, I/O Virtualization and Storage Virtualization, to Virtual Machine Automation, Physical to Virtual (P2V) Migration, Management Applications, Tools and Utilities, and Virtualization Scripts and Procedures.

Arcturus released Applicare 3.5, a significant upgrade to its powerful artificial intelligence based Application Performance Management suite. Applicare 3.5 adds many exciting new features including user extendable knowledge base, pluggable knowledge modules 'Knoms' framework (patent pending), automated performance tuning, complete support for all versions of BEA WebLogic and AquaLogic platform, Derby/Java DB support, and the Grinder load generator.

Sun is offering ten grants of US $11,500 - equivalent to several months of pay for developers in some countries - for the best NetBeans projects submitted by open source developers. Conceived as a means of increasing general awareness around the NetBeans project as well as rewarding good work done by the NetBeans Community, the 'Dreams of Reality' contest is described in detail by worldwide NetBeans Community Manager Bruno Souza, the charismatic Brazilian developer, in a special audio webcast currently playing on SYS-CON.TV.

Google, which does not give guidance, missed both Wall Street's top and bottom expectations for its December quarter by a hair and the punters turned vicious pounding it down around 50 bucks after-hours. Consensus demanded non-GAAP earnings of $4.44 on revenues of $3.45 billion. Google came in with $4.43 on revenues $3.39 billion. Those revenues figures are net of what's called TAC, Google's traffic acquisition costs, the money it pays its partners, which it this case amounted $1.44 billion or 30% of its ad revenues.

It said this morning that it had reached a compromise price with BEA and that the acquisition would go through after all, having been resisted by BEA, demanded by BEA's biggest stockholder, the dangerous Carl Icahn, and walked away from by Oracle. Oracle is going to pay $19.375 a share, less than the $21 that BEA wanted but more than the $17 it put on the table back in October. That works out to $8.5 billion, less the $1.3 billion that BEA has in the bank, as Oracle pointed out, for a grand total of $7.2 billion cash to be paid for by a combination of cash on hand and a short-term loan. Oracle has $8.4 billion in the bank so the financing's no problem. Its original bid valued BEA at roughly $6.66 billion.

Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), SMTP and POP3, and IRC.

BEA Systems announced the release of BEA AquaLogic Service Bus 3.0, a comprehensive enterprise service bus (ESB) that is designed to improve the integration process for enterprise-wide service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments. The solution is an SOA integration platform designed to connect, mediate and manage interactions between heterogeneous services, legacy applications and multiple ESB instances across an enterprise-wide service network.

'BEA established itself as the enterprise Java leader in being the first major vendor to market with Java EE 5, and we're doing it again for application composition with Service Component Architecture,' said Guy Churchward, BEA's vice president of WebLogic products and a past speaker at Virtualization Conference & Expo. He was speaking as BEA announced this week a preview release for WebLogic Server 10.3 of SCA, a set of open standards that can help enable developers to leverage SOA to assemble composite applications from heterogeneous components.

In keeping with the longstanding SYS-CON tradition of being at the very forefront of software development with all its online and offline resources, SYS-CON Media & Events jointly today announced a double whammy, launching both 'Open Web Developer's Journal' (htt p://openweb.sys-con.com) and 'Open Web Developer Summit' (http://openweb.s ys-con.com) - to be held for the first time in New York City April 21-22, 2008.

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.

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

The WebLogic Communication Platform also reportedly delivered its strongest quarter ever. BEA has seeded WebLogic Server Virtualization Edition in key accounts and says it got referenceable results. These products, along with Project Genesis for the next generation of dynamic business applications, are supposed to give BEA growth opportunities. BEA has scheduled its annual shareholders meeting for February 14. Its largest shareholder Carl Icahn may have something to say about that.

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.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

BEA's Deputy CTO Theo Beack, who joined the San Jose, CA-based company in May to do 'all the cool stuff,' according to an exclusive interview with SYS-CON at the time, shared with delegates at SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 in San Francisco today his current thinking about Web 2.0, SOA, and Virtualization technologies, and how all three fit within BEA's evolving 'blended' application strategy.

BEA Systems is a leader in enterprise infrastructure software. BEA Enterprise 360 is the industry's most advanced approach for building a Liquid Enterprise. This comprehensive offering combines our product technologies, people, best practices, and broad network of partners to deliver maximum business value to BEA customers. BEA Enterprise 360 gives the customers the ability to harness the convergence of: 1) Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) 2) Business Process Management (BPM) 3) Enterprise Social Computing.

The three-year-old Dojo Foundation has put out version 1.0 of Dojo, an open source JavaScript toolkit for AJAX development meant for building rich Web 2.0 applications without proprietary plug-ins or single-vendor solutions. The widgetry makes use of Google Gears, Google's solution for making applications work both on- and offline. What Dojo calls Dojo Offline is based on it. The toolkit is all of 25K in size and supports progressive enhancement and animations and is supposed to open the door to a wealth of high-quality widgets and extension modules. Dojo also supports the Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera browsers and the OpenAjax Alliance Hub 1.0 to guarantee interoperability with other toolkits IBM, Sun, BEA and AOL are Dojo backers.

Egenera, which claims it's the archetype Virtualization 2.0 company to VMware's Virtualization 1.0 - and is going put its PAN Manager software on other people's hardware to prove it - has convinced Fujitsu Siemens, which OEMs Egenera's BladeFrame servers, to put PAN on its own industry-standard Primergy servers. It's Egenera's first PAN partnership since the American company said last week that it was setting up a software line of business around PAN and would move the software out through fellow OEMs. Fujitsu Siemens says the widgetry will form part of its FlexFrame Infrastructure, its latest milestone in its Dynamic Data Center strategy of creating business-responsive IT using the latest virtualization and automation technologies.

In an unusual move, BEA says it's giving activist stockholder Carl Icahn confidential information that it can't give other people 'cause it's, well, confidential and is supposed to prove to him that the company is worth more than the $17 a share ($6.7 billion) that Oracle offered for it. They've signed an NDA and much could depend on his reaction. He could find the cupboard bare. BEA's board claims the company is worth $21 a share, some $8.2 billion. Icahn wants BEA sold. He also wanted more from Oracle but is still ticked that BEA blew off negotiations with Oracle. He currently owns 13.2% BEA, more than anybody else, and is threatening a proxy fight to overturn the board.

Watching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envyWatching VMware stock and its market cap spike since it IPO'd must have had Red Hat positively pea green with envy - so green in fact that it's gonna try taking VMware on by pushing the Xen virtualization integrated in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat's new goal is to underpin 50% of the world's servers by 2015. And since virtualization is projected to take over the world by then that's a lot of Xen virtualization - and there's no extra cost in it like there is with VMware since it's bundled with RHEL. (Red Hat's telling people they'll save $20,000-$30,000 a server.) Red Hat claims it's got its first 18,000 virtualized servers - although it's a little fuzzy about whether those 18,000 are actually in production - anyway, it's confident they'll get there eventually after all the testing and evaluating is done.

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.

SOA and Virtualization has existed, in various forms, and have been adopted with varying degrees of success within the modern enterprise. SOA especially has reached the point where it generally is considered to be a good idea! As a result of the wide adoption applications, services and infrastructure have been linked to form a new kind of 'organism', which is a critical part to the ongoing operation of these systems. As a result of this success a new kind of 'infrastructure fatigue' has been exposed. The stability, scalability, performance and reliability of this 'organism' is absolutely essential as the degree of interdependencies increases. Ironically, much of the resources dedicated to this infrastructure are under utilized and there is much untapped potential within the typical enterprise. This is where the combination of SOA and Virtualization appears to be a natural fit. In this presentation we'll explore the role of virtualized containers and the notion of 'adaptive infrastructure'. We'll take a look at the emergence of new ideas and capabilities of how SOA infrastructure has to change to meet the growing demands being placed upon it.

Since its emergence, Web Service technology has gone a long way towards perfecting itself and finding its right application in the real world. With the maturity of the specifications, Web Service technology, with its power of interoperability, is now the major enabling technology of SOA, which is being adopted by more and more enterprises to build their application integration infrastructure.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.