1-meter simulated resolution from aerial imagery of Colorado Capitol and Downtown Denver

.5-meter simulated resolution from GeoEye

Ten days before VMworld and VMware still can’t get good press. First their CEO, Diane Greene, gets ousted, then a high-profile licensing bug is found and now the Director of R&D, Richard Sarwal, leaves his $1.25 million salary after just 7 months. (Note to self: get into R&D) It will be interesting to take the pulse of the VMware community at the show and in person. And in the meantime, Microsoft Hyper-V comes out of the gate with customers already touting its benefits.

The hypervisor is the “new” operating system. If you didn’t think that before, take a look at Red Hat’s purchase of Qumranet for $107 million. With Qumranet, Red Hat gets KVM, described by CTO Brian Stevens as an extension to the Linux kernel that allows it to be used as a bare-metal hypervisor, running directly on the underlying hardware and hosting guest operating systems. But according to Brian Madden, the “press” around the purchase is all focusing on the not-so-interesting part. Along with KVM, the SolidICE product includes Spice, a remote display protocol for VDI.

I wonder if this will be like Symantec buying Altiris or Microsoft buying Softricity, where the portion that we care about sort of loses focus as The Borg concentrates on the parts of the acquired technology that are more relevant to them?

(I’m a sucker for quotes that reference The Borg)

Network World publishes “10 open source companies to watch”. On the list, Qumranet!

Also on the list: Kickfire, Marketcetera, Vyatta, Sonatype, Untangle, XAware, SnapLogic, Acquia and Openmoko. What’s best about the list: Matt Asay gives it a thumbs up.

I agree that these gentlemen are top notch researchers, witnessed by the fact that the authors do not mention nor claim to be “complex event processing” anywhere in their paper!  This paper is not about CEP, nor does it claim to be about CEP, it is about stream processing and unifying SQL standards.

ABSTRACT: This paper describes a unification of two different SQL extensions for streams and its associated semantics. We use the data models from Oracle and StreamBase as our examples. Oracle uses a time-based execution model while StreamBase uses a tuple-based execution model. Time-based execution provides a way to model simultaneity while tuple-based execution provides a way to react to primitive events as soon as they are seen by the system.

Asmentioned on numerous occasions, stream processing is a very important area in CEP/EP.   It is important not to confuse the higher situational knowledge from object-object correlation and state management with the single-object event refinement that occurs in stream processsing.    Event stream processing is fundamentally different than complex event processing. 

Event stream processing performs operations on streaming event objects.   In almost all advanced CEP/EP applications is is necessary to perform robust track and trace operations on streaming event objects, like tracking the position of an airplane.    Tracking the position of an aircraft can be modelled very nicely with event stream processing.  Tracking individual event objects is a precuror to multiclass object situation refinement.

When we manage the state of all the aircraft in the skies over New York, you need more than a stream processing construct.  You need to manage the state of all the aircraft.  Paul Vincent of TIBCO Software being to address this important point in The Value of State…  

Again, we will be better equiped to solve complex distributed event processing problems if we do not confuse the notion of event stream processing and complex event processing.   These technologies are indeed complimentary, both very important, but they are not the same.

I applaud Oracle and StreamBase’s work toward a unified standard for SQL extensions for streams.

"We are looking at something verging on the incredibly bizarre. As she got older she got shorter and broader and was reduced to a giant gelatinous blob, carrying many thousands of eggs," he says.

"Her shape was likely to have affected her behaviour and ability to hunt. I can't imagine her jetting herself around in the water at any great speed, and she was too gelatinous to have been a fighting machine.

"It's likely she was just blobbing around the seabed carrying her brood of eggs, living on dead fish, while her mate was off hunting."

I arrived in Austin Sunday night to get ready for a factory tour on Monday, a kickoff dinner and then two days of briefings from Dell executives, including Michael Dell himself! Dell’s ISG business is growing at a very fast pace and continues to build momentum and focus within the broader organization.

We had a nice overview of the product roadmap, including some of the exciting enhancements Dell is making to their storage products such as the MD3000 and the new EqualLogic PS5000 series iSCSI solutions.

I really enjoyed the Council meeting and it reminds me all over again; what I admire about Dell is the way they and Michael Dell himself stay close to the customer. The entire purpose of this event is to “get it right” and determine meaningful ways to embrace change (including change in the manufacturing process) in order to make their customers more successful. Ah shucks, you may say that all companies behave this way… well I must tell you that is not true and at times, I find it difficult as we continue to grow to stay as close as I would like to all of our customers varying needs and directions.

This concept of gathering, internalizing and embracing customer feedback is a simple principle of Business Success stories. Always trying to improve the pace of change and build meaningful sticky relationships with customers. Dell’s very successful Ideastorm site where customers post product feedback and are active participants in the Dell community is a great example of how to do this right. No other hardware vendor that we have worked with or attempted to work with has ever gone to the extent of embracing change that Dell has during our 5-year relationship.

From the custom factory integration services to the attention to detail in the order and manufacturing, and logistics processes, Dell helps us execute for our customers and I must admit that we could not have built the business as quickly or efficiently without Dell!

So thank you Michael Dell for building a business that embraces change and is focused on helping your ISG customers succeed.