interoperability

A group of regional wireless carriers is calling AT&T's bluff when it comes to claimed interference issues in the lower spectrum bands of the 700 MHz frequency.

On Tuesday, Cavalier Wireless, C Spire Wireless, Continuum 700, King Street Wireless, MetroPCS Communications, U.S. Cellular, and Vulcan Wireless filed a report to the Federal Communications Commission detailing results from a test conducted that shows there are no interference issues between devices operating in other parts of the 700 MHz spectrum frequency bands and the broadcast TV channel 51, which is right next to the lower A block portion … Read more

Microsoft is moving its Interoperability Strategy team into a new, wholly-owned subsidiary, the company announced on April 12.

The new group, known as Microsoft Open Technologies, will be headed by Jean Paoli, who is currently the general manager of the team. It will be comprised of about 50 to 75 full-time and part-time employees and contractors. A board consisting of Microsoft managers from other business units will oversee the new entity.

Paoli said in a blog post on the Microsoft Port 25 blog that the idea behind the creation of the new subsidiary is to facilitate Microsoft's relationships with … Read more

Talk of "cloudbursting" makes Chris Hoff angry.

"It's used by people to describe a use case in which workloads that run first and foremost within the walled gardens of an enterprise, magically burst forth into public cloud based upon a lack of capacity internally and a plethora of available capacity externally," he wrote recently on his personal blog. Hoff is director of cloud and virtualization solutions of the security technology business unit at Cisco Systems.

More colorful language follows. But the gist is that, if an application passes the hurdles of being able to run … Read more

Microsoft announced on Monday two open-source projects that let developers view data from Outlook without the need for the e-mail and calendar program itself.

One is a software development kit for reading the .pst files that Outlook uses to save personal files; the other is a graphical tool for viewing the internal data structure of the .pst files.

"Combined, the documentation and tools advance interoperability with data stored in .pst files, reflecting customer requests for greater access to data stored and shared in digital formats generated by Microsoft Outlook and for enhanced data portability," Microsoft said on its … Read more

The overall market for enterprise spending may be weak, but Novell and Microsoft insist they are signing plenty of joint customers.

In a statement, the software makers say they have signed more than 100 joint customers in the past six months. That's twice the rate at which they had been signing folks as part of an 2006 accord, the two companies said. In total, the two companies say they have sold $200 million worth of Novell support and maintenance certificates to more than 300 customers.

Microsoft says the economy is helping this piece of its business. "In today'… Read more

While most readers probably think "portability or mobility" when they think of cloud interoperability, the vendor community sees a shorter-term opportunity in standardizing the operation of clouds and cloud infrastructures. It's not that vendors don't care about image portability; it is an especially critical opportunity for so-called "cloud operating system" vendors.

However, the cloud operations opportunity--building a full-featured operations API and user interface for a cloud--is a daunting task, requiring tools for provisioning, management and monitoring, among others.

(Note that I am calling the term "operations" tools, not "management" tools. … Read more

Earlier, I talked through the three key categories of cloud interoperability as I see them, and the promise that each holds for increasing the agility and value of IT. One of those categories was Image/Data interoperability, which I defined as follows:

This is the one that most people assume when they say "cloud interoperability." How do you define a virtual server image, or a Java application, or a customer relationship management (CRM) database, such that it can be deployed on another host, often a competitive host, without modification?

In reality, Image/Data interoperability can be further divided … Read more

The announcement by the Distributed Management Task Force (a systems management standards group) that they were going to build an "incubator" to research and develop interoperability standards for cloud-computing management is just the latest step in an accelerating effort to unify "the cloud." Everyone is getting involved, from virtualization vendors to public cloud providers to the major enterprise IT systems vendors.

But what exactly is cloud interoperability, and what exactly are each of these efforts addressing? Where are the standards going to be created, or (perhaps more importantly) where is the technology going to come from?… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian kicked off Open Source Business Conference 2009 here on Tuesday, highlighting Linux momentum, even as the economy craters.

Despite some negative news in its recent earnings announcement, Novell's Linux business has been growing by roughly 30 percent every quarter.

Importantly, Hovsepian discussed innovations that Novell has released in SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 that make Linux the engine of a bold move into the data center and beyond.

Hovsepian highlighted some recent analysis from IDC suggesting that Linux and open-source software will continue to grow through the recession, but he emphasized that this growth isn'… Read more