Enterprise 2.0

Scaling fast-growing Facebook

In this video interview, Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations at Facebook, talks with about managing Facebook's hypergrowth. Heiliger is a rock star infrastructure geek. He was the CTO of Global Crossing at age 23, worked at Marc Andreessen's Loudcloud and spent time as the head of Web engineering at Walmart.com.

During the interview, Heiliger said that Facebook has more than 10,000 servers and leverages mostly open-source software across a distributed architecture, with thousands of MySQL instances. "It's almost a new challenge every day," Heiliger said regarding the challenges of keeping up … Read more

Practice Fusion delivers free, hosted apps for doctors

If you want more proof that software as a service and ad-supported business models are shaking things up, check out Practice Fusion. This week the small company announced the availability of its free, on-demand suite for physician practices.

Practice Fusion CEO Ryan Howard touts the software suite as Google Apps for physicians. It's a radical departure from the established and costly software packages used by physicians to manage their offices and patients records.

Practice Fusion includes practice management, scheduling, patient management (electronic medical records) and e-mail applications. The Web interface takes advantage of Flex 3, Adobe's rich Internet … Read more

The war for talent

According to JP Rangaswami, managing director of BT Design, there is a genuine war for talent.

But the way to attract talent isn't with the most money or best perks but through openness, he said, speaking at Supernova 2008. Companies need to be open to competition, such as partnering with competitors in some areas; open to innovation in terms of creating an environment that encourages new ideas; and open to changes, Rangaswami said.

The talent pool comes from both inside and outside a firm. "Open, multisided platforms are the only way to get to the talent pool," … Read more

Jonathan Schwartz's free software foundation

Sun Microsystems has become its own free software foundation, open-sourcing everything from Java to Solaris, and acquiring the open-source MySQL database for $1 billion in January of this year, as a way to grow its revenue.

It seems counter-intuitive, but Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has been betting the company on that strategy. Speaking at the Supernova 2008 conference, Schwartz explained that free software brings the marginal cost to acquire a customer to zero and helps drive revenue.

Schwartz showed a world map with clusters of dots representing all the people who registered with Sun when they downloaded ZFS (an open-source … Read more

Switch Communications gambles in Las Vegas

It's Sunday morning on Memorial Day weekend in the U.S. The technology industry is relatively quiet. Nothing new has been leaked or announced so far about negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo or Yahoo and Google, but I ran across a fascinating and in-depth story by Ashlee Vance of The Register on a new data center service, Switch Communications.

The company is opening a 407,000-square-foot data center in Las Vegas that CEO Rob Roy claims will house four times as much gear as facilities from companies such as Google and Microsoft. He boasts:

"This building will be … Read more

Aster Data Systems offers cluster for deep insights

Taking a cue from Google, Aster Data Systems has come up with an massively parallel processing analytical engine and cluster of commodity hardware for extracting insight from hundreds of terabytes of data. MySpace has deployed 100 nodes of the Aster "nCluster" to load millions of rows per second to surface trends that can help the company fine-tune its services.

Aster nCluster nodes consist of 16GB of RAM, four 250GB SATA disks, and dual-processor quad-core Intel Xeon systems interconnected via 24-port 1Gb Ethernet switches. It works with the popular business intelligence and ETL tools, and it can talk to … Read more

Ellison: On-demand software growing slowly

This weekend I attended a book party in San Francisco for Jonathan Zittrain. His book, The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, was recently published and received good reviews. I will be interviewing him at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society 10th anniversary conference on the future of the Internet this week.

At the party, I talked for a few minutes with Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison. The book party was hosted by Ellison's novelist wife, Melanie, and HuffPo's Arianna Huffington. It turns out that Zittrain and Melanie Ellison met in junior high school.… Read more

IBM and the resurrection of the mainframe

Steve Mills runs IBM's $20 billion software business. He obsesses about large enterprises running thousands of transactions per second with terabytes of data and a need for absolute certainty of execution. It's a stack of enterprise software writ large, but don't get the idea that Mills has his head in the cloud. The 34-year IBM veteran doesn't put a lot of stock in the latest IT disruptor--cloud computing--for his customer base.

I met with Mills at IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles this week and asked the senior vice president of the IBM … Read more

SAP's Business ByDesign taking the slow road

SAP announced that its on demand enterprise suite Business ByDesign roll out is moving slower than previously expected.

The company said that it would take 12 to 18 months longer than the original target of 2010 to reach $1 billion in revenue and touch 10,000 customers in the mid-market globally. For 2008, SAP expects to have less than 1,000 customers across six countries.

SAP wants to make sure it doesn't flub Business ByDesign, which represents the future of the company. The company pioneered client/server ERP software, but has been slow to enter the rapidly growing on … Read more

Tim O'Reilly: We are in a 'soup of computing'

SAN FRANCISCO--Tim O'Reilly kicked off the keynote sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo here, pacing the stage and evangelizing the power of the Internet.

"The Internet is becoming the global platform for everything," he said, and it will make everyone in the world smarter. "It's an amazing revolution in human augmentation akin to literacy or the formation of cities," he continued. "It's a huge change in the way the world works."

We are entering the world of ambient computing, he proclaimed, as everything is wired into the Internet. "We … Read more