Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW) and Storage Technology Corporation (NYSE: STK) announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Sun will acquire StorageTek. The combination will create a new global leader in comprehensive network computing and data management which collectively had total annual revenues of more than $13 billion in the past four quarters. The aquisition will deliver a systems approach to Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) to help customers better manage their growing privacy, security, compliance and policy requirements. Under the terms of the agreement approved by both boards of directors, StorageTek stockholders will receive $37 per share in cash for each StorageTek share for an aggregate value of approximately $4.1 billion, including the assumption of employee stock options. The completion of the proposed transaction is expected to occur in late summer/early fall 2005. http://www.sun.com, http://www.storagetek.com
Category: Computing & data (Page 94 of 95)
Computing and data is a broad category. Our coverage of computing is largely limited to software, and we are mostly focused on unstructured data, semi-structured data, or mixed data that includes structured data.
Topics include computing platforms, analytics, data science, data modeling, database technologies, machine learning / AI, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, augmented reality, bots, programming languages, natural language processing applications such as machine translation, and knowledge graphs.
Related categories: Semantic technologies, Web technologies & information standards, and Internet and platforms.
Dan Farber raises the issue of Longhorn adoption and quotes a Jupiter analyst who claims the challenge is that XP is “good enough”. There is actually a more fundamental reason the question of adoption is interesting. What is that and what does it have to do with content technology?
I’ll start the answer with a little history. In 1994 at our first Documation conference, I moderated a debate between Tony Williams, Chief Architect of COM at Microsoft, and Larry Tesler, Chief Scientist at Apple. The Microsoft COM and OFS/Cairo and Apple OpenDoc efforts both recognized the need for operating systems to provide more support for the richness of unstructured information than is possible with the primitive file systems we had then.
Before the debate I preferred the OpenDoc approach because it seemed more consistent with my view that new operating systems needed to be able to manage arbitrary information objects and structures that could be described with a markup language (like SGML at the time). However, Tony convinced me that OpenDoc was too radical a change for both users and developers at the time. Tony agreed with the ultimate need to make such a radical change to file systems to support the growing need for applications to manage more complex content, but he said that Microsoft had decided the world was not ready for such a shock to the system yet, and defended their strategy as the more realistic.
Eleven years later and we are still stuck with the same old-fashioned file system in spite of the fact that every modern business application needs to understand and process multiple types of information inside files. This means that database platforms and applications need to do a lot more work than they should to work with content. I am no expert on Longhorn, but the file system that will be part of it (although maybe not initially), WinFS, is supposed to go a long way towards fixing this problem. Is the world ready for it yet? I hope so, but it will still be a big change, and Tony’s concerns of 1994 are still relevant.
5/18/04
Industry Veterans on Board to Manage Growth of Content Technology Works™ Program and Industry Consulting Services
Contact:
Mary Laplante
mary@gilbane.com
(630) 820.3007
Cambridge , MA , May 18, 2004. Bluebill Advisors, Inc. and the Gilbane Report announced the appointment of two highly respected industry veterans to meet the rapidly growing demand for the company’s consulting services. Mary Laplante has joined the company as Vice President, Consulting Services, and will be responsible for the management and operations of the Content Technology Works Program, Gilbane Report webinars, white papers, and consulting projects. Mary is well known throughout the content technology industry from her extensive industry sales, marketing, and management experience, from her work as an analyst, writer, and consultant, and from her role as Founding Executive Director of OASIS (www.oasis-open.org/). Mary’s experience and exceptional management and organizational skills will help grow the Gilbane Report CTW program and consulting activities to the next level. Mary will also chair the CTW Track at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies Conference in Boston.
Bill Zoellick has also joined the Gilbane Report as Senior Analyst, and will be devoting his considerable analytical and writing skills to the Gilbane CTW and White Paper programs. Bill is a highly regarded author whose books include CyberRegs: A Business Guide to Web Property, Privacy, and Patents, and Web Engagement: Connecting to Customers in e-Business, both from Addison-Wesley. Bill’s insightful and penetrating analysis has informed his many roles as a manager, researcher, developer and author in the content and information management industry.
“It is great to be working with Mary and Bill again,” said Frank Gilbane, CEO of Bluebill Advisors, “Bill, Mary, and Adina Levin worked with me as analysts at CAP Ventures in the mid-nineties where they developed a prodigious amount of sought-after analysis for the industry, including the very first research report on Content Management in 1997. Their experience and knowledge will be a great resource for all our customers.” Sebastian Holst, founder of the Gilbane CTW program, will continue to be a valuable contributor to the Gilbane Report.
About Bluebill Advisors, The Gilbane Report
Bluebill Advisors, Inc. serves the content management community with publications, conferences and consulting services. The Gilbane Report (www.gilbane.com) administers the Content Technology Works™ program disseminating best practices with partners Software AG (TECdax:SOW), Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ:SUNW), Artesia Technologies, Atomz, Context Media, Convera (NASDAQ:CNVR), INSCI (OTCBB:INSS), Trados, Vasont, Venetica, and Vignette (NASDAQ:VIGN).
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Snapbridge Software announced Snapbridge XStudio 2.5, a drag-and-drop development environment for building information processing solutions based on XML technologies. The improved development tool allows drag and drop development to choreograph the integration and publication of data and content with no coding or data schema required. In addition to availability on a stand-alone basis, XStudio is bundled with each version of FDX Information Server to provide developers with tools to build, test, debug, and deploy information integration solutions built with XStudio 2.5 for deployment to a full production environment. Snapbridge FDX Information Server is available in 3 editions, scaled appropriately to meet organizational needs. Both XStudio 2.5 and FDX Information Server are based on Snapbridge FDX, a technology for federating large amounts of heterogeneous kinds of data in real-time, including data from relational databases, flat files, mainframe data, Web services, digital images from content repositories, streaming feeds, etc., to create composite objects that can be viewed, or updated as part of a transaction. XStudio 2.5 retail price is $199 USD per seat and can be downloaded at www.snapbridge.com
Mondosoft announced enhancements to its third generation search activity and visitor behavior reporting software, BehaviorTracking. BehaviorTracking 5.1 offers insight into web site visitors’ behavior and identifies new trends on the web site, and new content demands. It gives a picture of the site performance, success in meeting users’ expectations as well as a number of success metrics. The information is available online and sent directly with individual content to the inboxes of management, marketing, and web editors. BehaviorTracking 5.1 was built using .NET technology and has been integrated and tested to support Microsoft’s Enterprise server product suite. Along with the BehaviorTracking enhancements, Mondosoft offers an InformationManager tool kit that use search best practice metrics, to apply findings from the search and visitor behavior data for continual site tuning and optimization. www.mondosoft.com
InQuira, Inc. announces the availability of Web analytics embedded as part of its InQuira 6 customer search and navigation application. InQuira 6 enables Web site visitors to ask a question in natural language and then interprets the real intent of their query, automatically responding with the answer and guiding the user to additional related information and opportunities to buy products and services. InQuira 6 utilizes content diagnostics to measure the quality of each users’ Web experience, enabling businesses to identify content gaps and add new content to improve the Web site. InQuira 6 contains a new analytics architecture and an extensive set of new reports. The architecture features an OLAP engine, a normalized reporting database, a star-schema analytics database, and a built-in business intelligence tool. The reports provide enhanced information, ranging from aggregated management information to drilldown into individual users, questions and sessions. www.inquira.com
eXcelon Corporation introduced eXcelon Portal Server 3.0. Portal Server 3.0 includes a new integrated XML development environment, support for the latest XML standards, and enhanced scalability and performance. Portal Server 3.0 includes new tools and capabilities that make it easier for companies to aggregate data and content from any source into a common XML-based business information model. Stylus Studio provides a visual debugging platform for XSLT, greatly reducing the time to deploy new client or server applications that include both XSLT and user-defined Java extension functions. Stylus Studio also includes an XML Editor to load and manipulate large XML files, a DTD and XML Schema editor, as well as a visual XML-to-XML mapping facility for easily defining XSLT transformations between XML documents with sup-port for DTD and XML Schemas. Portal Server aggregates data from as many as 30 disparate sources, such as structured, semi-structured and unstructured data, as well as legacy data for-mats such as COBOL files and mainframe data, and makes it available to new e-business appli-cations. Portal Server converts the data from the sources and manages it as XML so developers can build applications using standards-based XML languages. The beta version of eXcelon’s Portal Server 3.0 is available now as part of eXcelon’s official open beta test (www.exceloncorp.com/beta/b2bps.html). Portal Server 3.0 will be available on the Windows NT, Windows 2000, Solaris 7 and Solaris 8 platforms. Portal Server 3.0 is expected to be gener-ally available within 45 days. eXcelon Stylus Studio is expected to be available as a stand-alone product in the second quarter of 2001. A beta version is available for download at www.exceloncorp.com/beta/studio.html. Pricing will be announced closer to availability.
The Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (DMTF) announced the completion of the specification for Common Information Model (CIM) Operations over HTTP v1.0. This specification, which is available on the DMTF Web site at www.dmtf.org/wbem/index.html joins CIM and XML in providing the base of technologies for the DMTF’s WBEM initiative. The CIM Operations over HTTP specification defines a mapping of CIM operations onto HTTP that allows implementations of CIM to interoperate in an open, standardized manner and completes the technologies that support WBEM. With all three of the component pieces of WBEM now in place, CIM, xmlCIM, and CIM Operations over HTTP, vendors can now build WBEM based management solutions. CIM is an object-oriented information model standardized within the DMTF for the purposes of providing a conceptual framework within which any management data may be modeled. Allowing CIM information to be represented in the form of XML brings all of the benefits of XML and its related technologies to distributed management. WBEM is a set of management and Internet standard technologies developed to unify the management of enterprise computing environments. It provides the ability for the industry to deliver a well-integrated set of standards-based management tools, leveraging ubiquitous technologies such as CIM, XML and HTTP. www.dmtf.org
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