Lisa Evans

Oracle may have accumulated a vast array of products, but it has also added value and tightly integrated them, executives said during a keynote address Monday at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. One demo showed how Oracle has tied the Primavera project planning products it acquired last year back to its ERP (enterprise resource planning) software. Through a series of demonstrations, Oracle officials seemed intent on answering critics who say the vendor's acquisition spree has resulted in a Frankenstein monster-like mish-mash of components.

Primavera business unit head Joel Koppelman showed how the integrations could be used to balance the availability of skilled workers against project timelines. "The minute you start to delay a project, they're all affected. Another demonstration showcased a product aimed at helping fashion companies maximize their profits. What you really want to be able to do is model those changes," he said. The software uses Fusion middleware to tie together the ProfitLogic retail software Oracle acquired in 2005 with BI (business intelligence) tools and the WebCenter portal. "The pieces matter, but fitting it together is where all the value is," said Oracle president and CFO Safra Catz. The release includes 10 new "cross-industry" packs and six new packs aimed at specific verticals.

Beyond the keynote and demonstrations, Oracle on Monday also announced Application Integration Architecture Release 2.5, the latest installment of its prebuilt packs for tying together processes and applications. Not everyone at the show was buying into Oracle's middleware pitch. Representatives of ActiveVOS, which makes a product that competes with Oracle's SOA Suite, capered on street corners outside the Moscone Center wearing comical black-and-white prisoners' garb, begging passers-by to "free" them from the alleged higher cost and constraints of owning SOA Suite.

Let's be honest – keeping track of your favorite Web sites has become a real pain. Fear not, though, because a little cartoon blob named Digsby is here to help. Slideshow: 13 hot products from DEMOfall '09 Between Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Gmail and a whole slew of instant messaging protocols, the Internet has become a fragmented mess where you must constantly check for updates and shuttle between tabs and windows.

Digsby, which is the brainchild of the Rochester, N.Y., company dotSyntax, is essentially a mass aggregator of social networking, e-mail and instant messaging sites. At DEMO this week, Digsby announced that it has added Twitter to its already considerable arsenal of integrated social networking sites. But Digsby goes one step further than most aggregation applications because it actively notifies you every time there is an update to one of your e-mail or social networking accounts. However, Digsby didn't just incorporate Twitter into its platform but also made some significant changes to the Twitter format in the hopes of making it more accessible to users. If you can, try to sum up Digsby in 100 words or less. After the DEMO presentation, dotSyntax CEO and founder Steve Shapiro sat down with Network World to discuss how Digsby can make Internet use more efficient and what its designers plan on tackling next.

Digsby helps you manage your instant message, e-mail and social networking accounts from one easy-to-use desktop application. The key is that it serves more as a notifying application than an aggregator, as it gives you a real-time snapshot of e-mails, tweets, status updates and so forth. It helps you save time because you don't have to keep checking for updates. How is Digsby able to integrate all of these IM and social networking sites into one platform? The social networks have published APIs, which is phenomenal from our perspective. It's a lot of work.

For instant messaging, there are multi-protocol IM clients that have been around for a while, so that also helps. When Digsby set out to improve Twitter, what did it identify as the platform's chief strengths and flaws? We haven't tackled Skype yet; that's supposed to be the toughest one to integrate into an application like Digsby. The great thing about Twitter is that it's like a giant chat room where you can choose who you want to listen to in that room. Instead you interact with the whole online community whether they're your personal friends or not. It's not like Facebook where it's a closed social network.

From a weakness standpoint, a lot of people that join Twitter don't get it because it's not like a lot of social networking sites they've used before. To address the issue of people not understanding how Twitter works, we've reframed it more as a chat technology that people have been using for a decade. And the other problem is that once you follow more than 50 or so people, that noise just becomes tremendous and hard to keep track of. So when you use Twitter on Digsby, the most recent tweets appear at the bottom with previous tweets at the top of the screen. The other thing we did was to give you the ability to make subgroups of people on Twitter that you want to listen to a little bit less than your core group of friends.

We thought that making this more like a traditional chat system would make it more accessible for average users. On the Twitter Web site you have main timeline, and with everybody you're following, it starts to get pretty cluttered. So for instance, you can create a group called 'news' where you can place the tweets of journalists you have to be following. So to fix this we let you make different groups. Then those people you've added to this list no longer show up on your main page where you would keep your friends or people whose tweets you really want to read. The next big thing we're doing is adding supports for group chat protocols and also releasing a version of Digsby that works for Mac and Linux computers, since right now Digsby is only available for Windows.

Finally, does Digsby plan on integrating any other IM protocols or social networking sites in the near future?

Another busy week for Google included a Blogger meltdown, Google Voice tweak, word about Social Search, net neutrality lobbying and a dive into the music selling business. Since its launch in March, Google Voice allowed users to post voice mail transcripts on public Web pages, so that they could share the content of the messages with others. Here's a recap of the news from Network World and its sister publications, including IDG News Service.   Keeping Google Voice mail out of search results After transcripts of some voice mail messages from Google Voice users appeared in search results, Google has modified the telephony management service to prevent this from happening, the company.

Google thumbs its nose at SharePoint  Google took the wraps off of more than 10 new features for its Google Search Appliance aimed at the enterprise, including better SharePoint integration. Note the timing of this news though: the news coincided with Microsoft's sold-out SharePoint conference in Las Vegas, where the company was trying to wow customers with search and SharePoint news of its own.   Google's Blogger service suffers widespread outage Google's popular Blogger blog-publishing service crashed early on Friday and remained unavailable to most users for about 90 minutes, the type of broad system outage that Google has been trying to eradicate from its Web-hosted applications. Perhaps the coolest feature is the Self-learning Scorer, which lets the device fine-tune and improve itself. Google acknowledged the crash in brief statements posted to the Blogger Status site and to the Blogger Help Forum. Google will let users stream songs from Lala and iLike.com, which is owned by MySpace, according to a report in the The Wall Street Journal.

Google to offer music sales Google will let users sample and buy songs directly from its search results page via a new service. A Lala link will let users stream a full song once for free and pay about $1 to download a copy, the report said. For Google, this included a deal with Twitter to include Tweets in search results, plus the intro of Google Social Search.   Slideshow: 10 great Google Apps add-ons for the enterprise Google, Verizon make for strange bedfellows on Net Neutrality As usual, Google was at the center of the Net Neutrality discussion last week, pre-empting the official FCC opening of a rule-making process by issuing a joint statement with Verizon outlining their similarities and differences on the issue. Google, Microsoft search battle heats up PC World reported that Google and Microsoft used the Web 2.0 Summit to unveil details about their latest plans to integrate social networking and search results. Their statement begins: "Verizon and Google might seem unlikely bedfellows in the current debate around network neutrality, or an open Internet. For starters we both think it's essential that the Internet remains an unrestricted and open platform-where people can access any content (so long as it's legal), as well as the services and applications of their choice."   "Gone Google" goes global  Google, not known for using conventional marketing to promote its wares, has nonetheless found that such an approach is effective for its enterprise products and will roll out internationally a campaign it launched in the U.S. in August.

And while it's true we do disagree quite strongly about certain aspects of government policy in this area-such as whether mobile networks should even be part of the discussion-there are many issues on which we agree. The "Gone Google" campaign is reaching the U.K., France, Canada, Japan, Australia and Singapore.   Google and Virgin to offer free onboard Wi-Fi  People all over Earth can already access Google's services online. Holiday travelers flying with Virgin America from Nov. 10 through Jan. 15 will get free in-flight Wi-Fi, thanks to a promotional deal with Google. For the next three months, some of them will be able to access those same services from above Earth too.

NASA's space shuttle Atlantis is loaded and ready for takeoff from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this afternoon. They're scheduled to deliver equipment, including two gyroscopes, to the International Space Station . NASA is focused on building up a reserve of spare parts on the space station in anticipation of the retirement of the space shuttle fleet. "You'll see this theme in some of the flights that are going to come after ours as well," said Brian Smith, the lead space station flight director for the mission, in a statement. "This flight is all about spares. The six-man crew is set to launch at 2:28 p.m. EST today. Basically, we're getting them up there while we still can." The equipment is considered highly critical to the operation of the space station, according to NASA. At this point, there are only six flights left for the space shuttles before they're scheduled to be retired.

Since this is the first mission to deliver what scientists hope will turn into a trove of spare parts, they're taking up the most important pieces. The equipment that needs to go up is being delivered in order of highest priority. The astronauts are expected to make three space walks during the 11-day mission. The equipment being delivered includes two pump modules, two gyroscopes, two nitrogen tank assemblies, an ammonia tank assembly and a high-pressure gas tank. The astronauts will work with the robotic arms onboard the shuttle and the space station to move two platforms loaded with spare parts out of the shuttle's cargo bay to where they'll be attached on either side of the station's truss or backbone. Parts going up for the robotic systems onboard the station include a latching end effector for the station's robotic arm and a trailing umbilical system reel assembly for the railroad cart that allows the arm to move along the station's truss system.

As of 10:30 a.m., a NASA inspection team was studying the exterior of Atlantis , its solid rocket boosters and the external tank for ice or other debris. NASA reports there are 27,250 pounds worth of parts being delivered in this mission. Space agency crews also have loaded the shuttle's external tank with about 535,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, which will power the shuttle's three main engines during launch. NASA forecasts a 70% chance of weather good enough for a launch this afternoon.

Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank has chosen to standardize on IBM Corp.'s Lotus collaboration software, IBM said Tuesday, displacing Microsoft Corp.'s rival SharePoint-based platform. Quickr and Connections provide a file-sharing repository allowing employees to create profiles, wikis and blogs. U.S. Bank plans to roll out the Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections social Web platform for corporations.

U.S. Bank is also standardizing on the latest Lotus Notes 8.5 client for all 58,000 employees, as well as the Lotus Sametime messaging app, Bob Picciano, general manager of IBM Lotus Software, told Computerworld . "The focus is for them to get everything migrated by 2010," he said. While Quickr and Connections will be new deployments, Notes and Sametime are technically upgrades. U.S. Bank is also looking into IBM's LotusLive cloud collaboration software, said Picciano, and is even considering switching off Microsoft Office to IBM's Lotus Symphony productivity suite. "Discussion for that continues to be under way," he said. U.S. Bank was already using versions 6.5 of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino for most of its employees. According to Picciano, IBM and Microsoft both bid to provide collaboration and messaging for U.S. Bank, which is ranked the sixth-largest American bank with $266 billion in assets. But U.S. Bank was also running 5,000 SharePoint sites - some department level, some much larger, according to Picciano - throughout the bank, which was created out of a number of mergers about 10 years ago.

Despite IBM's apparent incumbent's edge, Picciano said the battle between the two vendors was "largely competitive." "I wouldn't be arrogant enough to call U.S. Bank an IBM shop," he said. Microsoft did not dispute IBM's characterization of its deal with U.S. Bank, but it maintains that it is an exception that proves the rule. "Last year, more than 4.7 million people began the switch to Exchange and SharePoint from Notes," Julia White, director of Exchange product management, said in an e-mail. "We count our switchers in millions, while Notes counts their switchers in tens of thousands." "We expect this trend to accelerate with Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010," White said. IBM's win, he said, was the result of superior technology, not heavy discounting. "This wasn't a 'our bundle will beat up your bundle' situation," he said. "Our software was a better choice and fit." Picciano declined to disclose financial terms. "It's a very big deal," he said. Citing large customers such as HSBC, Colgate-Palmolive, Teach for America and others that are deploying the latest Web 2.0 components of the Lotus platform, Picciano says IBM is making a successful counterattack. "We are displacing Exchange, displacing Outlook," Picciano said. "Despite what the people up in Redmond might say, we are taking share."

Force10 Networks is forging deeper into the carrier core by adding MPLS to its high-end Ethernet routing switches. But Force10's ExaScale switch/routers will attain MPLS traffic engineering capabilities to enable the system to perform the same steering and forwarding capabilities as Cisco and Juniper core routers, but at dramatically lower cost, Force10 claims. The company's ExaScale E-Series switch/routers are currently used in the networks of two of the top five global wholesale carriers as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) peering nodes. The ExaScale system will function as an MPLS Label Switch Router (LSR), a transit router that switches packets based on MPLS labels.

The software, which will be included in updated licenses of the ExaScale operating system, is in beta testing with general availability in December. This is in contrast to a Label Edge Router, which attaches and detaches MPLS labels before and after receiving packets from LSRs. 7 reasons MPLS has been wildly successful MPLS on the ExaScale will allow carriers using the Force10 system to scale core capacity at up to 20% of the cost of traditional core routers, which Force 10 says is about $100,000 per single line-rate 10Gbps Ethernet port. Force10 will face significant challenges in the core router market, however. Also, the core router market has shrunk. Cisco, Juniper and Huawei had a combined 98% share of the $569 million market in the second quarter, according to Dell'Oro Group.

A year ago, it was an $843.5 million market in Q2; this year, it's 33% lower because service providers have reduced investments in large-scale core projects as capacity has met demand, Dell'Oro notes. And vendors that have come into the market long before Force10 - namely Avici Systems and Foundry Networks, which was acquired by Brocade - either failed outright or didn't make a significant dent in the market. The market watcher expects the market to grow less than 5% over the next few quarters. Nonetheless, Force10 is undaunted. This will be especially true, the company says, as the industry migrates to 40G/100G Ethernet. Company officials say they can carve out a niche by offering a compelling proposition built around Ethernet optimization, both in performance and economics.

Products are already emerging, and the standard is expected to be ratified in mid-2010. Also, the growth of multimedia content delivered over the Internet - such as video from Hulu and Youtube, social networking, online gaming and peer-to-peer file sharing and presence applications - to fixed and mobile devices is demanding a new generation of low-cost,capacity-expanding platforms, the company says. "There's no technical reason you couldn't have a switch [like Force10's ExaScale] in the carrier core just transporting packets," says Zeus Kerravala of the Yankee Group. "But there are legacy router architectures there, and changing operator behavior and architectures is hard. And it's not going to start with the Tier 1 [carriers]; it's going to start with the Tier 2s and 3s." Force10 is going to need to build up a beachhead of clients with a compelling price advantage.

In many IT organizations, the WAN does not matter. One of the primary roles of the WAN is to enable acceptable application delivery. What you do with the WAN, however, matters greatly. As will be discussed in this newsletter, we are entering a new ear of application delivery – one that we refer to as Application Delivery 2.0. As will be discussed in the next two newsletters, the challenges of the Application Delivery 2.0 era will be notably more complex and challenging than are those of the current era.

That changed a few years ago when IT organizations began to focus on ensuring acceptable application delivery. While ensuring acceptable application delivery has always been important, it historically was not a top of mind issue for most IT organizations. They did this by deploying a first generation of solutions that were intended to mitigate the impact of chatty protocols such as CIFS (Common Internet File System), to offload computationally intensive processing (for example TCP termination and multiplexing) off of servers, and to provide visibility into the performance of applications. Jim and Steve try to avoid cute marketing clichés. Hence, we are hesitant to use the phrase Application Delivery 2.0 as it sounds so much like just one more marketing cliché. However, we see distinct evidence, both from vendors and from IT organizations that we are indeed entering a second generation of application delivery. Unfortunately, the IT organization of a few years ago typically approached application delivery from a tactical, stove-piped approach. Part of the characterization of Application Delivery 2.0 is that IT organizations are beginning to face a new set of challenges.

As is so often the case in our industry, IT organizations have to support traditional or legacy technologies and challenges at the same time that they have to respond to new technologies and challenges. That does not mean that the traditional challenges of supporting chatty protocols or maximizing the performance of servers have gone away. One of the new challenges facing IT organizations stems from the changing role of the mobile worker. That is no longer the case. A few years ago, there were relatively few mobile workers and the communications needs of the mobile workers of that era were satisfied with simple cell phones. Now it is common to have 25% or more of employees be mobile at any point in time.

This introduces all of the performance and security issues associated with wireless networking into the mix of application delivery challenges. These employees have smartphones or other wireless devices that they routinely use to access business-critical applications. In the next WAN newsletter we will continue to discuss the challenges that are driving Application Delivery 2.0. We will also mention some steps that IT organizations are taking to respond to these challenges.