Author: Barb Darrow

It hasn’t been a great day for Twitter, but life goes on and the company just put code for a JavaScript component framework up on Github for folks who want to use it in their own web applications, or heck, maybe even build their own Twitter, as was suggested on (where else?) Twitter.

Twitter down for you right now? Fear not, we open sourced our JavaScript component framework so you can build your own. twitter.github.com/flight/—
Ben Ward (@BenWard) January 31, 2013

The Github post describes Flight as a “lightweight, component-based JavaScript framework that maps behavior to DOM nodes.”

It differs from other frameworks because it doesn’t dictate the approach developers must take to providing data to the application.

“It’s agnostic to how requests are routed, which templating language you use or even if you render your HTML on the client or the server. While some web frameworks encourage developers to arrange their code around a prescribed model layer, Flight is organized around the existing DOM model with functionality mapped directly to DOM nodes.”

DOM refers to the Document Object Model – which is the standard representation of a web page and its elements — links, images etc. —  in the browser available to JavaScript.

Flight is the latest of several projects Twitter has put up on the shared Github code repository and versioning system.

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Dr. Nic Williams, a “developer’s developer” who was also VP of engineering at Engine Yard, is on to new things and a new Platform as a Service. He’s founded Stark & Wayne, a consultancy that will focus on helping companies deploy the Cloud Foundry PaaS that VMware spun off to the Pivotal Initiative.

Williams appears tightly aligned with Cloud Foundry —  one of two customers mentioned on his web page is the Pivotal Initiative and he is working out of the Pivotal Labs office in San Francisco. Pivotal Labs, now part of EMC, is contributing technology to the Pivotal Initiative. Confused? Sorry.

Stark & Wayne is thus far a one-man show. According to  Williams blog post, the company name comes from “the two most famous fictional tool creators – Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne. Every developer can be a super hero. You just need the right tools. Batmobile optional.”

The goal of the startup is to help companies adopt PaaSes. And that’s important — many developers within companies love the freedom and flexibility of building and deploying their applications on a third party pay-as-you-go platform but often their corporate IT overlords are not so enamored of the model. That’s because sticky questions arise if, for example, your PaaS of choice goes away. 

Per Williams’ blog post announcing his move:

“If you’ve used Heroku for your pet projects, then we want to bring you Cloud Foundry for your work projects. We also want to work with you on your projects. If your workplace cares about continuously improving development and operations, then you qualify.”

VMware pushed Cloud Foundry as an open-source foundation for other PaaSes  like AppFog, Uhuru, Stackato, and others. Presumably the Pivotal Initiative will continue down that path although it’s not saying.  Salesforce.com’s Heroku is another market leader. It is unclear how much traction Engine Yard has relatively speaking although Oracle bought a stake in it in November.

Secretive startup DataGravity wants to give customers an easy all-in-one way to wring value from their data and has $30 million in fresh cash to make that happen. Andreessen Horowitz led a new Series B round with contributions from Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst Partners. The latter two ponied up $12 million last April to back the startup founded by EqualLogic veterans Paula Long and John Joseph.

The new money will fund sales and marketing activities for the product that has not yet reached beta. The Nashua, N.H. company now has 30 employees and will probably hit 45 to 50 within the year as it biulds out those go-to-market activities, Long said in an interview.

Goal: make info analytics easier for the masses

Long is coy about product details — it took quite a bit to get her to say they’re working on an appliance — but DataGravity is ripping a page out of EqualLogic’s playbook. Take a tech area that is now way too hard and too expensive for many smaller businesses to use productively and then make it easier for them to buy and deploy an all-in-one solution. The idea is that solution — whether it’s an EqualLogic SAN or a DataGravity information appliance, meets the needs of 80 percent of the market.

Putting a data scientist into every array

“The idea at EqualLogic was that storage was really complicated and you needed expensive storage admins who understood foreign protocols. We wanted to make it simple enough that an IT admin with broad knowledge could do storage. Now it’s really expensive to do data intelligence without a putting a staff together including data scientists and four or five products,” Long said.”In EqualLogic we put an A+ storage admin into every array, now we want to put an A+ data scientist into every array.”

Indeed, most companies doing advanced data analysis need the database, an ETL tool, analytics software and some sort of data visualization tool set, not to mention very pricey data scientists.

Andreessen Horowitz partner Peter Levine is sold. “DataGravity is all about going from dumb storage to intelligent storage. Now storage is just blocks and files with no contextual meaning until an app or a database does something with that dumb data. These guys are moving into the world of intelligent storage,” he said in an interview.

As part of this funding Levine will join General Catalysts’ David Orfao and Charles River’s Bruce Sachs on the DataGravity board.

The strategy certainly worked for EqualLogic, which was founded in 2001 and sold to Dell  six years later for $1.4 billion in cash. Now we’ll see if Long and Joseph can replicate that success.

VMware’s future is all about hybrid cloud, software-defined data center and end-user computing, and not so much about other things in its portfolio which will be “de-emphasized” this coming year, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told analysts on the company’s fourth quarter earnings call Monday night.

“I’ve learned the importance of prioritization and execution,”  said Gelsinger, an Intel and EMC veteran executive who came aboard as VMware CEO five months ago. ”We will focus first on a portfolio rationalization around the products our customers care most about. Our decision to  commit our cloud application efforts to Pivotal is an example. And we will realign resources as we scale back in some areas,” he said.

The Pivotal Initiative, a spin off of VMware and EMC that will provide cloud and big data applications will draw on VMware’s Cloud Foundry platform as a service, vFabric Java framework, and Cetas big data resources as well as Greenplum analytics and Pivotal Labs agile development expertise from EMC.

Key to VMware: Focus, focus, focus

Gelsinger did not name areas that will be subject to cutbacks, but CFO Jonathan Chadwick said Sliderocket will be sidelined. VMware bought  SlideRocket and its slide presentation software in 2011. It was seen as a complement to the Zimbra productivity software purchased earlier from Yahoo. Depending on how VMware defines end user computing — my guess is it means desktop virtualization rather than desktop apps — I’d expect more cuts in this area.

The company will also cut 900 jobs. “VMware added 6,700 people over three years and we’ll continue to grow, invest and hire in support of our focus areas,” Gelsinger said. “We expect to close fiscal 2013 up 1,000 people.”

There was no information given about the Pivotal Initiative spin out but Gelsinger promised more discussion of that will come at a March 13 at VMware EMC Strategy Summit in New York.

As for earnings, for its fourth quarter, VMware logged a profit of $206 million, or 47 cents per share, up from $200 million, or 46 cents per share, for the year-ago period.  Revenue grew 22 percent year-over-year to $1.29 billion with adjusted net income at 81 cents a share, beating estimates of 78 cents  per share on revenue of $1.28 billion.

More to the point though was low guidance for the upcoming quarter. VMware expects first quarter revenue to come in between $1.17 billion to $1.19 billion, short of  consensus estimates of $1.25 billion and that spooked investors who drove the price down in extended hours trading.

Moving on from server virtualization

VMware is at a crossroads. It continues to lead the market in server virtualization but faces increasing competition there from Microsoft Hyper-V, and open-source Xen and KVM alternatives there. So it’s changing the conversation to network virtualization which is a key underpinning of the aforementioned software-defined data center. VMware is counting on its $1.26 billion buyout of Nicira to give it a leg up in that network virtualization quest.

What happens if the local police, the FBI or any government agency asks Google for information about your Gmail or YouTube account? Good question and one Google is trying to address with a new FAQ posted to its corporate blog. It also added a new page to its “transparency report” on how it deals with user data.

The post, by Dave Drummond SVP and chief legal officer, is fairly straightforward. It says the company evaluates any request to make sure it complies with its own guidelines and is not overly broad. Typically requests must come in writing and notify customers when possible if such requests are made.

And, in criminal investigations, Google requires a search warrant before providing a user’s search history and any private information stored in his or her Google account — that includes Gmail messages, documents, photos and YouTube videos. (This requirement is remarkable because federal law lets authorities  get this information without a warrant in many situations; as Wired reports, the warrant request appears to be Google standing up to the government).

Google said it is also pushing the government to update information privacy laws for the internet age and is seen as a powerful lobbying force in Washington D.C.  Last year, Google helped lead the charge by many tech companies to derail the proposed Stop Online Piracy (SOPA) legislation that was ostensibly geared to stop online trafficking in copyrighted materials but was also seen as an attempt to put limits on the internet and curb free speech. Now it’ s reportedly working to overhaul the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

This statement by Google  is no small matter in an era of warrantless searches and data collection on private citizens for legal and commercial reasons. One legal expert said Google is being more upfront than many companies with its FAQ. Chris Hoofnagle, director of  Information Privacy Programs at Berkeley Center for Law & Technology told National Public Radio that most companies keep mum on civil and criminal requests for user information.

“Google’s going out on a limb, here. Because, by making these statements, they might be creating customer expectations, that certain process will be followed, when their data is revealed to law enforcement,” Hoofnagle told NPR.

 Feature photo courtesy Flickr user Affiliate

New research by the Financial Times indicates that the value of an advanced business degree is eroding — at least as measured by the rate of pay increases for recipients. Bottom line is that graduates of the top US programs in the mid 1990s tripled their salaries in five years on average, but grads from the same schools saw half that increase in 2008 and 2009.

That can’t feel good — though I’d wager those salaries are still pretty robust to begin with. But there is growing skepticism about whether a masters degree in business administration pays off the way it once did. This decline in pay hikes comes at a time when students pay 7 percent more per year for their degrees. In 2012, the fees for MBA programs were up 44 percent in real terms compared to 2005.

Whether an MBA is worth the effort and expense is a recurring debate especially among startups that value technology expertise above all else and many of which are led by geeks that didn’t stick around for their undergraduate diploma, let alone a graduate degree. The topic cropped up several times at the Harvard Business School’s Cyberposium 2012, in November where several startup panelists were asked whether they were hiring MBAs. (One exec with a big data startup said no, he preferred tech skills instead. That went over like a lead balloon.)

Harvard Business School was the priciest school — costing $126,000 over two years — but its graduates command the highest pay three years after finishing at about $190,000 per year. Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business was number two. The London Business School was tops in Europe and fourth overall while the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology came in first among Asian schools.

The top ten schools are below but check out the full FT Global MBA survey.

Moving and shaking at VMware, EMC, Pivotal Initiative

There’s some personnel shuffling going on over at the EMC-VMware-Pivotal Initiative axis. As reported here on Friday, star engineer Mark Lucovsky is now back at VMware, having handed the Cloud Foundry PaaS over to the Pivotal Initiative spin off. At VMware, he is working on an unspecified  ”mega” cloud project according to a now-defunct Twitter profile. Since then we learned that Scott Lowe,  virtualization expert at EMC is now part of the Nicira virtual networking team at VMware working with Martin Casado.

A lot of folks are watching who goes where from VMware, EMC since the two companies offloaded cloud-related IP and people to the Pivotal Initiative, more details of which will be disclosed this quarter. There has also been a flow of high-level VMware people leaving the fold — most recently CTO Steve Herrod is moving to VC firm General Catalyst.

NetApp and Cisco cinch ties

Cisco and NetApp are working on more FlexPod converged hardware designs for use in branch offices and in the public cloud settings, both companies said last week.  FlexPods incorporate Cisco servers and networking and NetApp storage. The companies are also working to incorporate fast flash storage into FlexPod designs.

Since Cisco is also part of the 3-year-old VCE alliance that combines its networking and server hardware with EMC storage and VMware virtualization into converged hardware, people watch developments on the Cisco-NetApp side carefully.  VMware’s purchase of Nicira and its software-defined networking prowess last summer, has further stressed a relationship that many say was already strained.

Here are some other quick hits from the week.

Beware 7 sins of cloud computing.

What happens if your PaaS  passes?  

Big data super powers: IBM, Cloudera, General Electric??

Big data and cloud computing take human jobs

Citing Superstorm Sandy, Xand adds disaster recovery space

IBM claims huge cloud growth off of unknown base

Cisco’s private cloud: pain and profit

Joyent fires up Hadoop as a Service

Mark Lucovsky has moved from  Cloud Foundry, the open-source Platform-as-a-Service effort that is being spun off from VMware as part of the fledgling the Pivotal Initiative and apparently back to the VMware mothership.

This is how Lucovsky’s Twitter profile appeared Friday morning:

“Done with Cloud Foundry. Hand off to Pivotal Labs complete. Now hacking a mega-cloud platform for VMware with Vadim, Skaar, Oleg, Ben, and Doug.”

 According to a profile update later in the day, Lucovsky is “working on big cloud stuff at VMware.”

The timing is unclear, but last fall Lucovsky was the top gun at Cloud Foundry. A source close to Pivotal says he actually transitioned months ago, although people outside Cloud Foundry circles don’t seem to know it. VMware formally announced the Pivotal spin-off — to be headed by former VMware CEO Paul Maritz.

Lucovsky is a veteran developer. He became VP of engineering at VMware after stints as director of engineering for Google and distinguished engineer for Microsoft. His name may be familiar to non-developers because it was his exit from Microsoft to Google that caused the notorious chair-tossing incident by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Lucovsky could not be reached for comment. In other Cloud Foundry staffing news, Jerry Chen, another top figure with the effort is on sabbatical, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The Pivotal Initiative draws on tech assets from VMware and its parent company EMC.  The goal is to bring together expertise in big data, analytics, Java frameworks and agile development, the latter from Pivotal Labs, a company acquired by EMC last year.  Since the spinoff still evolving it’s natural that there be some ebb-and-flow of personnel. Along with Maritz, Pivotal Labs president Rob Mee is helping to  manage effort.

It sure looks like General Electric — the conglomerate that builds stuff ranging from appliances to jet engines — is spending a ton of time and resources to boost its profile in high (as opposed to “low”) tech. In fact it looks like it’s waging a massive PR campaign to show that it is not some grimy industrial relic but a force at the cutting edge of big data and “the internet of things.” If you don’t believe it, just download its November report on the industrial internet, which we covered here.

The latest evidence of this push? An interview with William Ruh, VP of software for GE Research, in ComputerWeekly.com. In the piece, Ruh appeared to take a veiled swipe IBM — which loves to portray itself as the thought leader in bleeding-edge tech and the kingpin in tech patents. (For the record, in 2012 GE came in ninth in patents with a total of 1,652 compared to IBM’s 6,478 — but who’s counting?)

Ruh said the airline industry has gathered tons of data about how jet engines have performed over the past two decades and that historical data should help guide predictive maintenance going forward. Ruh told ComputerWeekly:

“In emerging markets, we are seeing dirt and sandy environments … How are these affecting aero engines? [Business intelligence] cannot answer this. Nor can a supercomputer … Watson cannot tell me when this machine part will break.”

Watson is IBM’s much-hyped computer that boasts human-like thought processes and beat the human champion in Jeopardy a few years back.

GE is banking on the growing acknowledgement that machine data — information generated and collected by the types of industrial gear it makes — gives it an entry into the booming world of big data. That’s probably why GE CEO Jeff Immelt has been cropping up in a lot of interesting venues, including in an interview with Om Malik last month. And why GE came to San Francisco to announce its “Industrial Internet Quests” and tap into the wealth of software and data expertise there. As my colleague Katie Fehrenbacher put it at the time, the quest “calls on developers, data scientists and designers to make algorithms and applications that can increase productivity for the health and aviation sectors” — all sectors where GE plays.

It may be easy for folks in the valley to forget that GE has thousands of its own software developers on staff and builds sophisticated medical imaging and other high-tech gear: it does have credibility. And, at a time when the emphasis on making and building actual products is more valued, GE has lessons to teach.

The conglomerate obviously wants to be seen as a leader in this realm and won’t be content to let the likes of IBM hog all the glory in the internet of things era. After all, it builds an awful lot of those “things.”

Swept blade photo courtesy of Flickr user Bleucho