Happy New Year! Hope you enjoyed your break and are ready for, what some are calling, the most momentous year in IT. 2010 is set to bring to the mainstream a couple of technologies that were not quite ready for businesses yet. It’s also the year of a myriad of product launches and announcements so hang tight.

There are two podcasts @ the IBM developerWorks site (one by Todd Watson and one by yours truly) that touch upon what we’re likely to see in the year. You might also find interesting two other podcasts (one by Arvind Krishna, GM of Information Management @ IBM and one by Dave Laverty, VP of Information Managment Marketing @ IBM) that discuss Information Led Transformation (ILT) and Business Analytics and Process Optimization (BAPO).

If you haven’t already checked out the brand new My developerWorks site, do so now, or just watch this video on why this is by far the most collaborative and innovative site for developers on the internet.

Here’s to the year of the geek!

Great news on the virtualization front – VMWare just announced that IBM DB2 is VMWare Ready. IBM DB2 is the first database software to receive the coveted mark that is given only to those that “deliver outstanding performance and reliability when deployed on VMware vSphere (TM).” By virtue of its exclusiveness, the VMWare Ready logo “simplifies the purchase and deployment process for customers and prospects.”

This announcement comes at a time when numerous industry leaders have cited virtualization as an important, if not the most important, IT initiative for 2010. With the stress on both greens (environment + dollars) to continue into next year, it’s important that CIO’s align purchase decisions to those priorities. In the words of Bernie Spang, Director, Information Management Strategy, IBM: “We are living in an age in which businesses must have access to vast quantities of information as a tool for making smarter and faster decisions, at a lower cost. Through the VMware Ready(TM) program and the long-standing collaboration between our two companies, our mutual clients can confidently enjoy the cost and energy savings both IBM DB2 software and VMware virtualization technologies deliver.”

This is a sweet deal for IBM DB2 ISV’s who can take advantage of many FREE offers, by joining the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) Program – Free Licenses (Enterprise, vCenter, and Workstation for 1 year and Lab Manager for 6 mo.s) and Free Technical Support (technical training and online assistance).

Try VMware with DB2 Today!

Useful Links:

• Case study on how IBM DB2 Development uses VMware
• Redbook on DB2 Virtualization
• IBM DB2 and VMware technical whitepaper
• IBM Virtual Appliance page
• Informix Virtual Appliance in VMware virtual appliance marketplace

Just when you thought that the Oracle bashing would quiet down a bit after their impressive quarterly results, Information Week came out with a great blog that puts Oracle’s financial success in perspective. According to author Bob Evans, VP and director of the publication’s Global CIO Unit, who wrote a piece in the July 6th issue of the magazine, the number don’t quite add up –  Oracle 22% maintenance fees, 51% operting margins and up to 10 years until Oracle offers non-traditional models to customers. Simply put, there’s not enough value for what they’re charging customers.

For those of you who read the abridged printed version, you missed out on a set of five hard-hitting questions that Evans asks, that I’ve paraphrased here:

1) Will Oracle be able to continue to deliver value and innovation to its customers that is worth the 22% annual maintenance fees?

2) Has Oracle limited customers to few software delivery options without delivering full value for the prices they charge?

3) Will Oracle’s self-confessed decade-long evolution toward more-diversified offerings be too late to match the needs of customers looking to lower infrastructure costs and transform businesses and IT operations in the near term?

4) If customers chafe as they gain greater understanding of Oracle’s business model, will Oracle reconfigure its up-front “price” and annual fees to more accurately present a value-for-value exchange for customers?

5) In the new and different economic reality, will customers be willing to do business as usual with Oracle, when in fact the global recession has forced almost every other IT vendor/partner to alter long-standing terms and conditions?

Given the marketplace, the offerings from competitive vendors and the dynamics of the IT industry, Evans has, in essense, created a gut check for every Oracle customer. He asks them to “take a long, hard look at the fundamental building blocks of Oracle’s business model…because you’ll see that the cornerstone — the piece on which everything else sits and everything else depends — has become the annual maintenance fees that you pay to Oracle.”

Please be patient – high quality video may take a moment to download. It’s worth the wait!

Sun shareholders file suit to block sale to Oracle

Posted using ShareThis

For more videos visit ibm.com/db2/thepitch

If Microsoft was trying to reinforce the perception that SQL Server does not scale, they did a bang up job of it during the public release of Windows 7 on their MSDN web site today. According to Ed Bott’s Microsoft report on ZDNet, “the glitch was caused by a SQL Server database that reached excessive fragmentation levels because of the tremendous surge of queries. How massive was the demand surge? The number of requests to the MSDN and TechNet databases in less than an hour was equal to more than a week’s traffic under normal circumstances.”

You’d think that by now the good folks over at Microsoft would have been able to estimate incoming traffic for a new Windows release. Maybe that’s why some are calling this the ultimate marketing gig – botch your database on purpose; create buzz for your new OS release and let your database’s rep take a hit. The argument actually holds water coz there’s really not much lower SQL Server can go in its notoriety for poor scalability. The truant database in question is not even Kilimanjaro - the upcoming release of SQL Server - who knows what heights (or depths) MS will scale when it launches later this year.

The piece I loved most about the Bott report was this graph from an “internal Microsoft document” that plots the CPU usage of SQL Server during the hour or so this morning before the fixed the isssue, most likely by throwing more processors or memory at it.

SQL Server CPU Usage During Meltdown (Image courtesy: ZDNet)

What was really amusing was that the graph could so easily represent CPU hogging of *ANY* Microsoft product! Got to give them credit for consistency.

CIO’s around the world regularly cite database costs in their top three IT budget killers. Learn from real life customers how IBM has dramatically reduced the TCO and TCA of data with ground breaking innovations and optimizations built right into the heart of their databases.

Register for a FREE webcast that will help you learn how you can get more bang for your buck from existing hardware, eliminate mundane and costly database administration tasks, dramatically lower your storage costs, and slash database support and maintenance costs.

Details:

Date:  Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Time: 9:00 AM ET/6:00 AM PT AND 2:00 PM ET/11:00 AM PT

Speakers:

Conor O’Mahony, Program Director, DB2 Product Marketing
Robert Donaldson, Database Architect, LSSiData
Leroy Hill, Manager of EDW Engineering, Fiserv

Register Today for free

Find out if millions of other users thought of the same word that you did. (I thought of “red” – kinda dumb I know – surprisingly, it was higher on the list that I imagined). Click here for Coke’s brand perception tag cloud.

Brand ranking has been around a while. We now have Brand Tagging – a unique way to figure out what associations your audience might be making when they see your logo, company name or merchandise. I see a lot of value in rectifying the negative or undesirable associations your audience might be making, which may be a bigger deterrent to sales than any other factor. Similarly, it’s worth understanding what positive connections have worked in your favor and re0inforcing those further in your messaging and brnading tactics going forward.

Noah Brier, strategy lead at the Barbarian Group, is one of the brightest minds of our generation. He’s put together, among other web sites, a brand tagging site where you can not only tag brands yourself, but also view tags for your brand.

Then there’s the reverse brand lookup game – you have to guess the brand from the tags presented to you. When presented ScotchGuard, I typed in “tape”, only to realize right after I hit Enter that it’s the fabric protector not the scotch tape, also made by 3M. Interestingly enough, tape was by far the most popular response to ScotchGuard! Let me know if you come across some interesting ones. Have Fun!

If you’re interested in the business implications of this announcement, check out “How IBM Plans to Destroy Google”.