Brian Stevens, the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of Red Hat, delivered his Virtualization Keynote 'The Future of the Virtual Enterprise' at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference & Expo 2007 West in San Francisco. 'Virtualization is the hottest subject today,' said Stevens, an industry luminary, who is credited with having pioneered new technologies that contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform.

Bluewolf announced the availability of new insurance and banking industry Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions built on the Force.com platform. Bluewolf has implemented and developed more than 1,000 SaaS solutions for organizations worldwide, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, First Citizens Bank and Hartford Insurance Company. Financial services are looking to best of breed solutions that enable their teams to get up and running. Return on investment figures for SaaS solutions are powerful, as industry analyst Forrester Research cites a recent 170% return from one bank's deployment of SaaS CRM as representative of typical results.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

The Ubuntu Linux-based gOS operating system from Good OS LLC (www.thinkgos.com) includes so many Google applications like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google News Google Maps and YouTube that it's often referred to as the Google operating system. It also includes Firefox, Skype, Facebook and OpenOffice 2.3.

Locus has been selected by the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners to perform environmental site assessment, soil and groundwater investigation and cleanup, environmental compliance assessment and environmental information management services for The Port of Los Angeles. The agreement with Locus is valued at $1,890,000 for a 3-year period.

Trubiquity (formerly Autoweb) has launched its new software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture. Trubiquity's new software architecture, named TRUcore, improves communications among global business teams, from an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) level down through a company's global supply chain. The new architecture also streamlines customers' internal business processes and offers better coordination, data management and process execution between a company's business units and its global supply chain partners.

Epicor announced Boot Barn has selected the Epicor Retail Software as a Service (SaaS) solution to streamline its retail operations and support its long-term growth plans. Boot Barn was one of four Retail SaaS deals Epicor signed during the first quarter of 2008. To support its current growth strategy, Boot Barn sought an end-to-end fully integrated, retail solution to replace existing disparate systems and in doing so, eliminating the manual processes required to integrate and share data among these systems. To this end, Boot Barn chose the Epicor Retail SaaS solution over a number of competitors to provide the infrastructure and retail best practices to support its strategic growth.

SAP has run into a nasty little rollout problem with its new on-demand Business ByDesign widgetry, the stuff that's critical to its future growth and competes with, oh, say, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Microsoft. Seems ByDesign isn't properly automated and so SAP's grand plan to get 10,000 small to mid-sized companies up and running on the stuff and generate $1 billion in revenue by 2010 has fallen by the wayside.

IBM claims to have created new species of custom-built, industry-standard, Linux-based rack server for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing companies with massive data centers and tens of thousands of servers, like online gaming, social networks, search and Internet firms. A relatively limited marketplace of maybe a thousand companies with fat wallets capable of shelling out tens of millions for such system. IBM means to replace the white boxes they use now or build themselves like Google does.

Parallels announced that Solar Virtualization Technologies Group (VTG), a Platinum partner in the Parallels Service Provider Partner Program, is using Parallels technologies to launch new software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs). Parallels Automation datacenter software provides a centralized operations and business management system, which enables Solar VTG to offers its customers integrated mobile and messaging services that include Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SharePoint and Blackberry Enterprise Server. Solar VTG provides a single interface to its customers who are actually accessing services that rely on several internal and external application servers and systems.

EquaTerra announced that its Governance WorkPlace tool, which automates the management of multiple service providers and enables informed decision-making in support of back-office processes in both shared services and outsourced environments, is now available as a hosted, Software as a Service (SaaS) solution.

HCL Technologies announced the launch of its new SaaS Service Delivery Platform (SDP) AGORA. Service disruption and Web 2.0 have resulted in a sudden outburst of participation by the user and developer communities. This, along with increasing collaboration between independent service providers, communications service providers, application service providers and content service providers have resulted in the service value chain becoming larger.

After a $1.5 million angel round, Desktone, which was started in 2006 by Eric Pulier, who also started SOA Software, US Interactive and IVT, picked up $17 million in first-round funding about a year ago from Highland Capital Partners, SoftBank Capital, Citrix Systems and the China-based Tangee International. SoftBank as well as Deutsche Telekom could become service providers. Ruda says the brains behind the technology is Paul Gaffney, the former CIO of Staples. The company has maybe 40 people, more than half of them in Shanghai doing development, which explains Tangee's involvement.

Sun Microsystems announced Solaris On Demand, its software as a service (SaaS) program for the independent software vendor (ISV) community. This program provides ISVs with the technology, hosted infrastructure and services needed to offer their software as a service. It is targeted at ISVs with a traditional, on-premise license model who want to offer their existing application on-demand without having to use a multi-tenancy application architecture. To provide the hosting services, Sun is working with several partners such as NaviSite for U.S.-based and European Union companies, AT&T's USi for U.S.-based companies and NTT Europe Online for European Union companies. With the Solaris On Demand program, ISVs can create offerings that meet the application availability, security, scalability and cost requirements of their own customers.

BT is going to distribute and support both SugarCRM, the commercial open source CRM people, and its rival NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company. Both companies are competing against salesforce.com, the brainchild of former Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff, with on-demand CRM applications. No terms were disclosed. BT is supposed to go chase SMBs and divisions of large companies, targeting its roughly1.6 million business customers in the UK and EMEA with NetSuite's stuff.

Zoho announced it has partnered with Baihui to re-brand and distribute Zoho's online collaborative productivity and business applications to users in China. Baihui's parent company, PC Stars, is one of the largest software online distributors in China with more than 2,400 software resellers across China and more than 1,000 system Integrators.

The way business applications are evolving, enterprises are learning to accept and embrace the notion of applications that they neither control nor host. Now enterprises are leveraging applications that run a business through the Internet platform. As these applications become core to many businesses, so does the need to incorporate these applications into the enterprise's existing infrastructure and make them work together.

AXIGEN and Parallels announced the launch of a strategic technological partnership, in which the companies will offer an integrated AXIGEN Mail Server and Parallels Virtuozzo Containers solution for Service Providers offering virtualized hosting environments. The new AXIGEN-Parallels Virtuozzo Containers integration presents a high-end, flexible solution that enables Service Providers the ability to offer customized mail server solutions for customers via a SaaS model.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Gemalto and Alternative Technology are allowing small and medium enterprises to achieve the high levels of security in network access and identity management. Alternative Technology will now be offering Gemalto's new on-demand Device Administration Service (DAS) through its network of 3,000 resellers in the United States and Canada. Developed and hosted by Gemalto and supported by Alternative Technology, the subscription-based DAS is a comprehensive online service for issuing and administering authentication devices. Following the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, DAS eliminates the need to purchase a server or software.

Morph Labs announced the availability of a virtual application infrastructure subscription. The service will allow independent software vendors (ISVs) and entrepreneurs to simplify the deployment, delivery, and management of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications while reducing upfront investment costs and speeding time to market.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

Service providers that use Parallels Automation software can now easily deliver real-time spam and virus filtering, attack blocking, and e-mail traffic monitoring using a Google Apps security and compliance package. Parallels Automation is integrated with the Google Message Filtering e-mail offering, so service providers can streamline delivery of hosted services to their customers and provide automated billing and provisioning of the Google services through Parallels.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

What does Software as a Service (SaaS) have to do with open source? Not much, you might think. SaaS, as you probably know, is a delivery - and business - model for software that has been proving quite disruptive to the traditional software business - just as the open source model has been. The two combined may turn out to be even more so.

Akamai announced a global increase in the amount of end-user geographies it is serving on behalf of its SaaS clientele. Akamai-accelerated SaaS transactions have grown ten-fold over the past two years, delivering optimized performance and availability of its customers' SaaS offerings to geographically-dispersed users residing in nearly 150 countries.

Parallels announced it is offering service providers an Application Packaging Standard (APS) Certification Service, which is administered by the independent firm Tier 1 Research. The certification recognizes SaaS (software as a service) application providers with either an APS Gold or APS Silver Certification, which designate that service providers offering APS-compliant applications have the highest quality service.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

Parallels announced that Swyx Solutions has selected Parallels Virtuozzo Containers 4.0 to deliver a cost-efficient and scalable hosted PBX application via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Using Parallels software, Swyx delivered 'Hosted SwyxWare,' a hosted solution based on its 'SwyxWare' telecommunications system for Microsoft Windows.

For the past ten years application developers have been stuck with only two desktop client choices. Traditionally, they can choose either a very thin Web-client technology implemented in HTML and CSS, or a very heavyweight thick client experience implemented using traditional client/server (C/S) technologies (e.g. Java Swing, MFC). It wasn't until the introduction of RIA technologies (e.g. AJAX, Adobe Flex, Curl, and Silverlight) and widget engines (e.g. Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadgets) that we were given more options.

Acquia has yet to price its maintenance and support subscriptions - there should be a variety of SLAs - but they're supposed to include an electronic update notification system code named Spokes for updates that have been reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia. Acquia is currently at 12 people, expecting to be 25 by the end of the year. Its Series A money comes from Northbridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. According to Dries' blog, Drupal 7 should offer the ability to create, share and mashup managed content, letting Drupal be a data repository accessed by tools and web sites across the network.

Microsoft, if nothing else, has become a problem for Yahoo's $350 million Zimbra acquisition and Google's rudimentary Sites contribution to the advance of software-as-a-service announced last week by throwing open the more sophisticated Exchange Online and SharePoint Online to any business anywhere that wants to use the software as a service.

CMS Watch released research finding that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) web content management vendors are on the rise in North America. This conclusion stems from the most recent release of The Web CMS Report 2008, in which CMS Watch interviews web content management customers around the globe to evaluate 40 solutions in the marketplace.

Microsoft, if nothing else, became a problem today for Yahoo's $350 million Zimbra acquisition and Google's rudimentary Sites contribution to the advance of software-as-a-service announced last week by throwing open the more sophisticated Exchange Online and SharePoint Online to any business anywhere that wants to use the software as a service.

OpSource and Boomi announced that the companies have expanded their partnership to include an OEM agreement whereby OpSource will embed Boomi On Demand within its software-as-a-service (SaaS) application delivery system. Boomi On Demand will be built directly into Opsource Connect, the newly launched application that helps companies consume and publish Web services and integrate SaaS applications. Within the product, Boomi On Demand will be branded as Boomi for OpSource Connect.

OpSource announced that AVOLENT has selected OpSource On-Demand to deliver its new software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. As a provider of enterprise software, AVOLENT was able to accelerate its transition to SaaS with OpSource, enabling B2B and B2C companies of any size to begin moving to paperless billing and settlement.

For years, the telecom industry has been aggressively expanding into IT services to offset declining revenue from traditional voice and data services. Today telecom's infrastructure-focused IT services such as computer hosting are already commoditized. Telecom companies are trying to figure out how to climb up the IT stack towards application-focused software services where the business value is more direct and the margins higher.

Server virtualization firm, Parallels' offerings, have reached over 100 applications, certified according to the Application Packaging Standard (APS), in a packaging format designed to facilitate hosted application delivery by independent software vendors (ISVs). APS-certified applications can be plugged into hosting platforms that conform to the standard. According to a recent survey of 400 service providers worldwide by Parallels, more than 70 percent plan to offer SaaS applications this year, nearly double the number that currently offer SaaS.

The advent of SOA and standard-base Web services together with Internet based delivery models has provided the essential base for facilitating new software platform innovations. One of these innovations is a breakthrough software componentization technique that we have coined Service Oriented Programming (SOP). While SOA focuses on communication between systems using 'service operations,' SOP provides a new technique to build agile application modules using in-process, native service operations as the 'units of assembly.'

and Service Division that will include the four-year-old start-up EMC just agreed to buy off of him. EMC is paying cash for the Seattle-based Pi Corporation and its 100 engineers. EMC didn?t say how much but Pi was founded using Warburg-Pincus ($$$) money and EMC says the acquisition will likely dilute its EPS this year by a penny.