Cliff Saran’s FUD blog

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Steve Jobs, the  head of Apple, had a liver transplant two months ago after treatment for pancreatic cancer. If we look at how Microsoft prepared for the retirement of Bill Gates, with Steve Ballmer taking a very public role and Gates sitting back as chief software architect, it is clear that Apple has done little to prepare the company, its shareholders and its fanatical users for a suitably charistmatic successor.

Kodak has ceased production of Kodachrome film after 74 years of production. So the digital revolution has won. Thanks to brain-dead consumers and slick marketing, we are now in a situation where people are lured into buying a new digital camera every two years to keep up the megapixel count.

The cost of processing film is obviously more expensive than a camera memory card. But unlike digital image capture where quality is determined at the time the photograph is taken, film is pretty much future-proof. A state-of-the-art film scanner can create a 35mm film scan with more megapixels and higher quality than the very best pro digital SLRs available today, like the £6000+ Nikon D3x.

In September Warner Bros is releasing the 70th anniversay edition of The Wizard of Oz on BluRay. Digital didn't exist in 1939. But we'll be able to experience the best version of the Wizard of Oz to date, thanks to the fact that it was made on 35mm Technicolor, which uses three back and white negative film strips  to create red, green and blue colour frames. These film strips have been rescanned and remastered 70 years later using the latest technology to produce a BlueRay print.

Basically, digital is a compromise. Once a photograph is taken, it cannot be resampled to produce a higher quality image in the future. Digital has won, but ultimately, I think the consumer has lost out.

I recently switched from digital back to film and purchased Kodak's excellent Ektar 100 film. I encourage anyone who thinks film is inferior to digital to buy a roll, dig out their old 35mm film camera (or buy one on eBay), and take some pictures. Choose the best shots and get them scanned in professionally as TIF files. Now you have digital images like the ones that come out of your digital camera, only far better. You can now PhotoShop them to your heart's content and print massive enlargements. You'll be suprised at how good the prints from Kodak Ektar 100 look.

 

 

TNS's Mark Hobart has written a piece for Computer Weeklypiece for Computer Weekly that contends the netbook will disappear, squeezed between smarter smartphones and shrinking notebooks.

I think he's got it wrong.

I've got a Nokia N95 and an Asus 701 eeePC that runs Linux. The Nokia is great for phone calls, for recording podcasts, and for taking snaps and videos. The Asus is great for reporting on the move, for getting onto the web, and for editing hi-res images from my Canon G9. It's also pretty good with Skype phone calls. Together they are dynamite.

What's more I pick up the costs myself. This is because my boss offers me the same functionality via a spine-twisting lump of iron called a Dell portable, a battered tri-band Nokia that didn't work in the US last time I tried, a bulky box called a Marantz digital voice recorder, and finally another bulk box that contains a Sony digital video camera. Hannibal crossed the Alps with less kit than me on assignment.

So I sacrifice some image quality, which isn't readily noticable on the web,  for weight and convenience. But the advantge I get, as a professional journalist, is so great that I don't mind picking up the tab. And it's not like I'm that well-paid. So far my boss hasn't complained either, although he does sometimes look a little embarrassed.

But all this only makes Mark's real but unstated point: that end users can now afford to buy a lot or even more than the functionality that their employers need. This has big implications for the employers as well as equipment makers.

Churchill said, Give us the tools, and we will finish the job. But I doubt I'm going to get anytime soon a device with a 12MP still/video camera with network access that allows me to touchtype and still fits in my pocket.

Intel looks like it is trying to kill off NetBooks. The chipmaker has unveiled a new processor to enable manufacturers to create low costs thin laptops Companies like Sony and Apple may find it hard to justify the high cost of their ultra notebooks if mainstream laptops are just as light, thin and good looking. Hopefully, some smart manufacturers will use the processor to power NetBooks.

As an owner of an Atom-based NetBook, I'm very pleased with the way the device handles and performance is pretty darn good. But clearly a bit more horsepower will help. So if Intel's new ultra-low voltage (ULV) processors are used in NetBooks we end up with the ultimate portable computer.

The Royal Holloway Information Security Group has identified a fatal flaw in OpenSSH v4.7 running on Debian Linux, which causes 32-bit encrypted text to appear as plain text.

This morning the Computer Weekly team were all excited trying Wolfram Alpha, the new serach engine from Stephen Wolfram, whose company makes the Mathematica tool. There has been a huge buzz about this serach engine. Some pundits describe it as "Google Killer", but from the feedback among the Computer Weekly team, Wolfram Alpha looks like it's still in beta.

 

When Wolfram presented the product last week, he demoed how it could compute search results, pulling in useful information from public and private databases. The searches we tried today left a lot to be desired.Wolfram Alpha is certainly no Google killer...it was never destined to be one anyway. But now that it's gone live, after all the hype, I'm not really sure how useful it will be.

Oracle's acquisition of Sun shows that everything is up for grabs Oracle has spent $35 billion since 2005 on major software acquisitions including Peoplesoft, Hyperion and Siebel. In 2008 HP bought EDS for $13.9 billion. Last year IBM acquired BI specialist Cognos for $5 billion. Symantec now owns Veritas, paying $13.5 billion for it and EMC has quietly been building a portfolio of strategic technologies by acquiring companies like VMWare, RSA and Documentum.

 

If anything, chief information officers and IT directors can expect more acquisitions this years. Even well established brands, are not immune. Poor financial results and weak share prices make even the bigger IT companies targets for acquisition.

 

Further consolidation leads to less choice, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. One could argue Oracle is a better home for Java even if Sun did invent it. Who can doubt Oracle's track record on M&As? It has already integrated Hyperion, Peopesoft and Siebel. Ronan Miles, chairman of the UK Oracle User Group is confident Oracle will be a safe bet for Java.

 

Consolidation is also an opportunity. First, the new owner can integrate products and services, simplifying IT purchasing and deployment. Second, it can potentially offer attractive licensing across its product portfolio.

 

There are now four major suppliers of IT, namely HP, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. Through their acquisitions, these four take up a large chunk of the major IT purchases businesses make. CIOs have relied on a diverse procurement strategy to lower risks and obtain better pricing through competitive tendering. Now, due to industry consolidation, there is less competition and the CIO is spending more with a smaller group of suppliers.

 

IT procurement teams need to take into account how the industry has changed and what this means in terms of purchasing.

 

This is an opportunity for CIOs to simplify procurement and negotiate better licensing terms and conditions and even an enterprise-wide licensing agreement, covering a diverse range of products from the same supplier

 

Oracle is buying Sun for $7.4 billion a move which Oracle CEO Larry Ellision says, will give Oracle two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris.  He says, "Java is one of the computer industry's best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired.

Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle's fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun's Java language and software.

Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community."

But what about all the other stuff: Oracle doesn't need another Java application server; it doesn't need MySQL and it certainly doesn't need Sparc-based hardware, given that the whole world is moving wholesale to x86 commodity servers.

Oracle could use Sun servers to power its database applance, but it already has a relationship with HP for that.

Oracle is a software company now dabbling in hardware. Why? Maybe it wants to be like HP and IBM and build a cloud computing service for enterprise software.

$7.4 billion on Sun, doesn't look good value, given that the hardware market is tough and margins are tight. Oracle spent over $8.0 billion on BEA in 2008 - now that made sense - buying the market leading web application server platform provider.

It would have been better for Oracle to spend the money on boosting Oracle Consulting.

It is possible that it will sell hardware as a loss leader - to ensure Oracle databases on Sun hadware are cheaper than Microsoft.SQL Server on x86 hardware. This is highly unlikely. Only time will tell what happens to Sun's hardware division now that Ellison has control.

Although trimmed down to a single day, this year's Salesforce.com conference, Cloudforce at the ExCel centre on Tuesday 7 April, was proved to be as interesting and vibrant as ever.

 

Salesforce had indicated over 3,5000 people had registered and given the very few spare seats available in the main auditorium for Marc Benioff's keynote speech, it certainly appeared that most people attended.

 

The keynote was certainly one of Marc's best and although some might consider his style a little evangelical for a UK & European audience, the Customer Service presentation was very powerful and convincing (which is the fourth video in the link, in case you don't want to watch the whole thing, but would recommend you do watch this!)

 

At Capgemini, we have extensive experience working and configuring the RightNow solution and although we knew Salesforce.com had purchased InStranet last August, even Salesforce I think would admit, that there were stronger Customer Call Centre solutions on the market in 2008.

 

But did Tuesday change all that? The seamless integration of the Salesforce Call Centre solution with discussion groups and social communities like Twitter, Facebook and Google, has suddenly brought customers, partners and call centre staff together like never before. They can interact with each other in real-time, even join in online conversations and share knowledge like never before, delivering answers quickly from an almost limitless knowledge base. When you consider that the New York Times published an article on Twitter, which stated; "No other communications channel can match its capacity for real-time person-person broadcasting". This capacity to reach and interact with your customers from your call centres anywhere in the world, is surely going to help companies retain and build customer loyalty.

 

Salesforce, like most other SaaS vendors release major product updates several times a year, so it is staggering to think, this is just the start. When you combine the ability for the solution to rapidly embrace and deploy new technologies, with the fact that Gartner's most recent Magic Quadrant report for Customer Call Centre, now rates Salesforce as the lead visionary, can SAP, Oracle and other traditional packaged based solutions ever catch up again with likes of Salesforce.com? And will Tuesday's announcement, at last move SaaS and Salesforce.com to a strategic provider of IT solutions to even the most conservative corporate organisations?

 

 Calum Murray is Head of SaaS Practice at Capgemini UK

Tags:

• call centre solutions
• cloudforce
• saas

Intel looks like it's fed up with the success of the NetBook. Anand Chandrasekher, Intel senior vice president and general manager of the Ultra Mobility Group has said that NetBooks are for kids. Apparently grown-ups need a grown-up laptop.

This is utter rubbish. I travel every day into London on Southern Trains. Many grown-up commuters actually prefer them to larger laptops that don't fit easily on the tiny amount of table space we have on the train.

 

I've used a 7 inch Linux-based Asus eeePC and now an 8.9 inch Windows XP-based Fujitsu Amilo. I've used both machines abroad and in the UK, to send and receive Word and Open Office document; I have edited and uploaded 70 MByte WAV audio files using Audacity and today I imported a 48 MByte raw image file into Gimp...and three other applications were runnig  at the same time. Earlier this week I used the Citrix ICA client on a fast LAN to access our corporate systems seamlessly. I wasn't running a heavyweight laptop - the Amilo uses a 1.6 GHz Atom processor, and  has just 1 GByte  of RAM and a 60 GByte hard disc.

 

Intel is worried that we are happy with NetBooks. It is worried people won't buy machines that use its expensive Core 2 mobile processor chips, rather than the cheap and cheerful Atom-based NetBooks 

 

Don't be fooled into thinking the NetBook isn't particularly powerful. They are not as fast as a state-of-the art laptop, but I think they do most things reasonable well. Okay, so the screen may not be that great, sound may be tinny, touch-typing is tricky but all of these problems are not show stoppers, particularly when a device that costs around £200 and weighs 1 kg is revolutionionising portable computing..