At it’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver Colorado,  Microsoft recently announced that Windows Server  2008 is to be launched with Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 on February 27.

So should businesses choose to upgrade to the server also known as Longhorn?

The Microsoft marketing machine touts its newest server as one that simplifies Web server management, simplifies virtualization (which is built in to the system), provides supreme security ( “the most secure server ever” ) and one that provides a rock solid foundation for business work loads.

I decided to go find the word on the web and I didn’t find a whole big bunch of opinion  – but what I did find was overwhelmingly positive:

Techwarelabs.com, a site that exists to provide impartial reviews, says “Longhorn is what
Vista should have been, as most users are looking for a fast, secure and easy to use OS,” calling it the “best server operaating system that Microsoft has ever released.” It also says that Longhorn may set the standard for server operating systems.

Tom Yager of InfoWorld writes, “…Window’s Server ‘Longhorn,’ … looks like its been hit with a mega-dose of growth hormone since beta 2. And I mean that in a good way.”

What Yager appears to mean is that the new server provides stronger versions of features that were “wobbly” in prior releases and new across the board functionality. He touts the addition of PowerShell – Microsoft’s first scriptable command-line shell, its security measures – the firewall and the built-in virtualization.

The one criticism I found was that of Barbara Darrow, a SearchSystemsChannel contributor who wonders if Microsoft’s 2008 release date is more “marketing ploy than true launch.”

Perhaps Microsoft has ironed out Vista wrinkles (security problems, confusing interface) with Windows Server 2008. What do you think? We’d love to hear from you!

Recently IT Business Edge published a blog titled is IT Integration a National Health Care Crisis. Journalist Loraine Lawson points out that, despite a Bush administration stated goal of having a health care industry with 100 % electronic management records adoption by 2014, the progress has been slow due to inadequate funding.

Lawson points to an article from Baseline Magazine which depicts the story of Bernard Burks – a man who was waiting for Kaiser Permanente hospital to replace his failing kidney. Apparently, his medical records were lost along the credit he had accumulated after spending three years on Kaiser’s kidney transplant waiting list. Kaiser moved their treatment to another medical center.

It turned out Lawson was not alone in his frustrations. A whistle-blower reported increasing wait times and other problems at Kaiser to the media and a subsequent audit exposed a number of information management problems — including a lack of specified procedures in regard to information transfer and no master list or database for patient names.

Lawson’s article points out that at present, the health care industry only invests two percent of its revenue in IT. However, that needs to change. According to a Wisconsin Technology Network article, Without fuller IT adoption, health costs might drain America’s wealth, it needs to change soon. In the article St. Luke’s health systems information officer and vice president John Wade says that healthcare costs now “consume 15.2 % of the nation’s G. D. P.” If left unchecked, those numbers could rise to 28 percent in the next ten years.

Channel professionals could benefit from paying attention to this argument, for obvious reasons. The healthcare industry needs you! You might even want to get in on the debate. What do you think? Please let us know.

An eWeek article recently reported that Connecticut’s Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is suing Best Buy for deceptive advertising practices. According to the article, the prices listed on the in-store kiosks were higher than prices advertised on Bes tBuy.com.

In the article Blumenthal is quoted as saying, ” The in-store site was an internet look-alike, commonly with higher prices, that were charged to customers.”

The lawsuit asks restitution be paid to customers who paid the higher price because of Best Buy’s misrepresentation.

I decided to peruse the blogosphere; this is what I found.

A Techdirt blogger named Joe Weisenthal posted an expose dated February 9th. Best Buy’s in-store Web site might not be BestBuy.com reports that customers who were drawn to a sale advertised on BestBuy.com were told — once they were at the store– that the sale was over. Employees pulled up price information from the in-store kiosks. One savvy customer got on a computer in the store and checked on the actual BestBuy.com, which listed the sale as ongoing. This customer concluded that the electronic megastore had a secret internal Web site that looked like the real site. 

On March 2nd, techdirt blogger Mike Marsnick wrote, “We had more than a few Best Buy employees confirm that such an internal site exists.”

A Hartford Courant article, also dated March 2, reported that state investigators pressured the company into admitting to the fake  site.

Things aren’t looking good for Best Buy; however blogger Kyle Mom’s wrote “Best Buy is a great company.” He pointed at untrained empoyees who “don’t know how to access the external site” and posted this clip from a Best Buy employee newsletter.

“Have you ever had a customer come in with a BestBuy.com printout that reflected on price on a product, but when you looked it up on your in-store kiosk it was another price. That’s because the BestBuy.com kiosk in your store reflects your store’s pricing, not necessarily the online BestBuy.com offers….Be aware of the differences, so you can price match the prices the customer sees on BestBuy.com and avoid confusing the customer.”

My question is why the difference in price? Comments, questions, enlightenment? We’d love to hear from you.

Wednesday, May 16^th, Concord MA. based company InBoxer Inc. launched a virtual appliance for email archiving, electronic discovery  and real-time leak alerts on Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange. The press release headline reads Inboxer launches world’s first virtual appliance for email archiving, electronic discovery and data leaks.

“By going virtual,” the release reads. “We bring flexibility and scalability to the archiving, discovery and data leak markets. Without special hardware, we can cut costs and re-define the market.”

It’s a bit late to release the “world’s first” virtual email archiving product and “redefine the market.” Network World article InBoxer announces virtualized version of compliance appliance — which mainly reiterates InBoxer’s press release material– also points out that  Proofpoint released Messaging Security Gateway, a virtualized email security appliances,  last September.  This product offers protection against spam and viruses from inbound messages, emerging viruses, harvest attacks and a veritable potpourris of compliance, data filtering, search and management tools.   

According to Technology research giant, Gartner, Inc. application integration trends are pointing at service oriented architecture (SEO). Interoperable, customer-centered systems are becoming the norm, giving end-users more choice and power.

In 2006, a Gartner press release identified five application trends that would change business applications: service oriented architecture (SEO) and event driven architecture would be the dominant design style; enterprise service bus (ESB), which provides secure interoperability between enterprise applications, would become the dominant communications service; integration logic would be separated from presentation; middleware appliances would impact the market – sometimes competing and sometimes complimenting; and event processing would improve real-time analysis and insight into business operations.

Recently, SearchSystemsChannel.com interviewed Gartner analyst, Darrell Plummer, about what these trends mean to the channel. He said interoperability opportunities and customer empowerment present resellers opportunities to work directly with vendors on specific operations, or create new products by adding to existing systems, based on what end-user needs. A more detailed article about application integration trends will be posted on the site in the near future.

This trend seems to be blanketing other IT industries, too. It mirrors business intelligence (BI) and analytic trends. Last year, SearchDataManagement.com posted a Q & A with Howard Dresner, the self-proclaimed “father of business intelligence” in which he talked about coining the term, “information democracy” and defines it as getting information into the hands of constituents.”  Today, many BI tools such as dashboards that track performance and up-sell opportunities, are embedded into user-friendly software programs

Web sites such as Ebay,  UTube and MySpace have set the tone for internet culture in general, it seems time for the enterprise to join the choir. How do you plan to turn this trend into an opportunity? We’d love to hear from you.

Esther Friedman

Esther Friedman

Certain politicos may not take Global Warming seriously, but the IT industry certainly does.

Last April, our sister site SearchDataCenter.com reported that IT heavyweights IBM, Hewlitt-Packard and Sun Microsystems sponsored a “new initiative called the Green Grid” who were to focus on data center power management and cooling.

The non-profit environmental consortium was launched early this year. Last week I posted a boiled down version of Green Grid’s energy saving guidelines. On April 10th they announced their inaugural technical summit, to be held April 18-19 in Denver Colo. The release also welcomed Brocade Communications, Cisco and Novell; these industry giants join Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, VMware and Dell.

SearchDataCenter.com recently posted Dell pushes green computing initiative; the company is introducing two low power AMD Opteron-based servers, PowerEdge 2970 and PowerEdge Energy Smart 2970D. Dell claims that these servers draw up to 34% less power than a Dell Power Edge and can deliver up to 105% greater performance per watt over the previous generation of Dell servers featuring dual-core processors.

Are we seeing an environmental trend in the IT industry? It looks that way to me, given whose involved. What do you think?

Esther Friedman

In a recent interview about Business Process Management Solution (BPMS) channel opportunities, industry expert AndreTruong said that BPMS hasn’t hit the mainstream yet but presents fruitful future possibilities.

A  recent study on BPM from Forrester Research echoes Truong’s opinion and praises BPMS as a tool which provides the agility required for success in today’s business processes.

According to the report, Forrester defines digital business architecture: as “an IT architecture centered on business metadata on which IT solutions act in a unified and consistent way to deliver rapid business change.” The report then lays out two core requirements for the technology supporting digital business architecture:

1. Business policies must be constructed in such a metadata friendly way, which will make it easy for it to be electronically stored, accessed and manipulated.
2. The metadata must work consistently across heterogeneous environments.

The report touts BPMS solutions as creating a “major paradigm shift” by capturing business models “…inside the BPMS solution in an executable format, providing direct alignment between business design, technology implementation and business measurements.” Furthermore, BPMS’s graphical process model makes it easy to change processes.

The following bullet points are a boiled down version of Forrester’s findings:

BPMS allows standards-based, model-driven, design, development and execution:

• Captures business process flows
• Supports model-driven development
• Enables process orchestration
• Stores service definition
• Provides SOA infrastructure

BPMS features add value:

• Captures business metadata beyond process models
• Stores business metadata
• Provides real-time user visibility into business process

BPMS features support digital business architecture including:

• Integrated analytics and inside business intelligence
• Complex event processing (CEP)

BPMS puts the business in digital business architecture:

• Increased business collaboration in process modeling
• Enhanced communication between business units and BTs.
• Alignment of business process role-models
• Allows flexible adjustment of business rules
• Improved focus on business process ownership

Are you a BPMS consultant, or are you interested in becoming one? Are you a business-owner with BPMS experiences? If so, we would love to hear from you.

If you work with blades and are curious about virtualizing blades servers, this year’s Server Blade Summit is called Blades & Virtualization: The Perfect Marriage. It runs from May1-3, in Anaheim, Calif.

In a recent soon-to-be published interview, the summit chair and author of the book Blades Server and Virtualization, Barb Goldworm, touted the benefits of this marriage. According to Goldworm, the low-power, overheated blade server is a thing of the past. The blades technology which has evolved over the past five years has produced the space-saving, power-efficient server of the future, and it’s partnership with virtualization offers new storage options, high availability and user-friendly management tools.

I thought it might be worthwhile to consult the blogosphere and this is what I found: An unsigned blog titled, HP reduces customer administrative costs and wait time with blade network virtualization technologies, on WindowsNetworking.com, echoes Goldworm; it sings praises for Hewlett Packard’s, ProLiant xw460c Blade Workstation. According to this blogger, HP’s blade/virtualization marriage, “Dramatically simplifies network connectivity and server management tasks.”

Blogger, Pete Manca, of Egenera, however, says deploying a hypervisor is a strategic decision: it benefits utilization and agility at the “sacrifice” of performance and security.

“When I say sacrifice,” Manca writes, “I mean that hypervisors will never perform the same as native systems. They will have lower security… and they will add complexity from a management perspective. However, in many cases, these are trade offs worth making for some customers.”

Is the tradeoff worth it for you and your customers? Is server management simplified or complicated by this partnership? What is your blades/virtualization server experience? Let us know.