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  • Developers' Dilemma: Mobile Website or Downloadable Application?


    Despite the rapidly increasing interest in mobile content – and the revenue generating potential it offers – uncertainty often exists over whether to develop mobile websites or create downloadable applications.

    Ameet Shah, sales and business development director with Five Mobile, has raised some interesting points for those considering producing content for smartphones.

    He said that having been in the mobile space for a number of years he is often asked by prospective customers whether they should develop a mobile website or create a downloadable application that runs on the handsets.

    Five Mobile creates mobile applications for brands and enterprises across different platforms and handsets.

    Shah, who writes regularly on Five Mobile’s blog, said the answer depended on what you were trying to accomplish.

    "Web development on mobile phones has long suffered from a very rigid platform and the inability for mobile browsers to keep up with current web technologies," he said.

    "This is slowly changing, partially due to the recent spikes in Smartphone handset sales.

    "With many handset manufacturers attempting to clone the iPhone’s usability and appeal, a larger focus has been placed on the content on mobile phones.

    "This in turn requires better software to render this content."

    Shah said that, for example, both the iPhone and Blackberry Bold browsers can view HTML pages and process JavaScript.

    While technologies such as Flash have long been rumored to be coming in the near term, he said it will take some time before it’s supported on a large number of devices.

    For a full list of Shah’s Pros and Cons for developing mobile web applications, please click here.

  • Intel's X25-M SSD Judged Insufficient For "Heavy Use"


    Intel’s much-hyped X25-M SSD is being marketed as a quicker and much more energy-efficient option for laptops than the traditional hard disk drives, but a review site finds it slower under heavy use, writes M Asim for storage-biz.news.

    According to PC Perspective, this solid-state drive has problems in the sector relating to wear leveling algorithms and remapping that are considered relatively effective to boost performance.

    PC Perspective says that they it does the opposite and becomes fragmented when used heavily.

    The problem becomes even worse with usual defragmentation programs.

    "If a laptop user places light workloads on its X-25 M, it may not find such issues",the review says.

    "But there are some users who are opting for SS drive for the OS partitions, and these drives can be fragmented by a standard power user workload."

    Intel responded by saying that its labs couldn’t duplicate the reviewers’ tests results.

    "We have contacted PC Perspective’s reviewers to find out about their method to duplicate and scrutinize the data," an Intel spokesman said.

    "We think that the imitative workloads they have tested do not represent real world use."

    According to the chip maker, almost every storage device can prove a fiasco if tested for anything other than normal use.

    PC Perspective’s reviewers, meanwhile, say that this performance problem can be fixed with a firmware update from the chip maker.

    Intel unveiled the X25-M last December and has already lowered its price.

  • EMC Being Investigated by the Feds


    The Federal government has just announced in a statement that Data Storage giant, EMC is being investigated over its pricing and improper contract practices.

    EMC revealed in its annual report with the SEC several days ago that the US justice Department had filed a lawsuit against the company, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    According to the Justice Department press release, the lawsuit accuses EMC of failing to disclose its commercial pricing practices during negotiation of its General Services Administration (GSA) contracts.

    It also says EMC provided improper payments and other things of value to Systems Integrators and other Alliance Partners on contracts with government agencies.

    The lawsuit alleges that EMC tendered false claims for hardware and services on “numerous government contracts from the late 90s to the present”.

    It is believed that the lawsuit is based on insider information as the suit was filed in US District Court in Little Rock, Ark under the Whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act.

    Among other allegations in the lawsuit are that EMC, "made payments of money and other things of value (alliance benefits) to a number of systems integration consultants and other alliance partners with whom it had alliance relationships".

    The Justice Department further states "that these alliance relationships and the resulting alliance benefits paid by EMC amount to kickbacks and undisclosed conflict of interest relationships".

    The government press release also declares that EMC has been charged with making false statements to the General Accounting Service about its profit-making pricing customs to collect better proceeds on contracts, "thereby overcharging federal agencies purchasing EMC products and services".

    The report filed by EMC to the SEC mentions that the Justice Department is scrutinizing the company’s fee planning with systems integrators and other associates in federal government dealings.

    It is also looking at the company’s "compliance with the terms and conditions of certain agreements pursuant to which we sold products and services to the federal government, including potential violations of the False Claims Act".

    The investigation partly covers a previous audit by the GSA "concerning our recordkeeping and pricing practices under a schedule agreement we entered into with GSA in November 1999, which, following several extensions, expired in June 2007".

    To date, EMC says it has worked together with the inquiry and assessment and engaged in discussions aimed at resolving this matter without any admission or finding of liability on the part of EMC.

    "We believe that we have meritorious factual and legal defenses to the allegations raised and, if the matter is not resolved and proceeds to litigation, we intend to defend vigorously," the company said.

    "If the matter proceeds to litigation, possible sanctions include an award of damages, including treble damages, fines, penalties and other sanctions, including suspension or debarment from sales to the federal government."

    To keep things in perspective, EMC is not the first IT Corporation to face such allegations. Just a year ago IBM did clear up similar charges with a $ 3 million fine. Other companies that have gone through the same process include Accenture, HP and Sun Microsystems.

    StorageIO Group founder and senior analyst Greg Schulz speculates if the new Administration is just getting started.

    "If that’s the case, one has to wonder who’s next, and how big the boiler will be when the government finally gets around to the really big fish," he said.

  • Results Poor for Silicon Storage Technology – CEO Remains Confident


    Silicon Valley continues to take a pounding on the markets.

    The latest stock market news for Silicon Storage Technology, Inc was all bad news, writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz.news.

    Net revenues for the 4th quarter were USD $58.4 million, a drop of nearly USD $40 million from the 3rd quarter of 2008.

    In 2007, the company had net revenues of USD $107.4 million in the 4th quarter alone.

    To add to its woes, product revenues for the 4th quarter of 2008 were USD $46.3 million, which is close to USD $30 million less than in the 3rd quarter of 2008.

    Only technology licensing revenues remain steady, at USD $12.1 million for the 4th quarter of 2008.

    These numbers have not changed much over the past 2 years.

    Rough estimates indicate that loss from operations for the 4th quarter was close to USD $10 million compared with income from operations of USD $4 million in the 3rd quarter of 2008.

    The loss in the 4th quarter of 2007 was double that approximating close to USD $19 million.

    The net loss for SST continues to mount.

    SST’s shares were estimated at $0.31 per share based on approximately 95.5 million diluted shares in the 4th quarter of 2008.

    Incorporated in the 4th quarter 2008 net loss was the price of streamlining fee estimated at USD $2.5 million, an impairment charge connected to the company’s venture in Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation of USD $5.6 million and an impairment cost associated to the company’s assets in ACET of USD $9.7 million.

    By contrast, the company recorded a net income of USD $4.9 million or 40.05 per share based on about 99.7 million diluted shares.

    SST finished the 4th quarter of 2008 with USD $131.7 million in cash equivalents, short-term investments and long term marketable debt securities.

    These numbers are down by 1.1 million from the estimated USD $131.8 million at the end of Sept 2008.
    So what does SST management have to say about this continued decline in profits?

    Bing Yeh, president, and CEO of SST said: "The unprecedented sudden drop in demand of semiconductor products during the fourth quarter resulting from the deepening global financial crisis has caused significant decline in our revenues."

    He goes on to add that: "This persistent difficult economic environment necessitated that we accelerate our planned changes to our business and focus in late 2008.

    "We took important steps to reduce our inventory, streamline our organizational structure, and cut our expenses by focusing our efforts on our most strategic initiatives with the goal of returning the company to profitability.

    "With these organizational changes, we believe that we can control our expenses while continuing to execute our product and technology roadmap and position SST for growth as the economy recovers."

    For the first Quarter of 2009, revenues for SST are projected to be in-between USD $39 million and $45 million.

    All this depends on the gross margin discrepancies, which is expected to very between 38-40 per cent.

    However, the way 2009 has started, the markets remains unpredictable and the above projections mean little.

  • Sun Microsystems and The World's First Open Storage Appliance


    Just a few months ago, Sun Microsystems revealed the availability of its new Unified Storage System – the Sun Storage 7000 family.

    Described as the world’s first Open Storage Appliance, Sun claims the Storage 7000 family is the "biggest thing to happen to storage in decades", writes Samantha Sai for storage-biz-news.

    Quite a brag – though the product’s creativity and innovation speaks volumes for Sun’s group of engineers.

    The Storage 7000 family has three different versions – the 7110, 7210, and 7410 – which have an overall capacity ranging from 2 Tbytes to 288 Tbytes.

    However, the 7410 offers a collected configuration (for advanced accessibility) and is typically aimed for enterprise class configurations, whereas the 7110 and 7210 are better designed for less significant fittings.

    The Sun Storage Unified system can run both NAS and SAN solutions, and Sun pulls seriously on its well-respected ZFS (Zettabyte File System) in the Storage 7000 family.

    Unified storage space rivals EMC Corp, NetApp Inc and IBM Corp have so far focused their attention on IT environments that have a strong NAS presence – but they would very much like to manage SAN as well.

    Sun, meanwhile, has put a major emphasis on facilitating the Storage 7000 family to provide universal function storage requirements.
    The major thrust of Sun’s message for the Storage 7000 is that it makes life a lot easier for storage administrators.

    Sun caims the installations process only takes a few minutes, but persists with key courses of action such as thin provisioning, a function which is embedded in ZFS (as logical storage pools can be enlarged or diminished transparently as long as there is sufficient physical storage to carry them).

    Another feature of the Storage 7000 technology that is of benefit to administration is the concept of DTrace, a collection of analysis that permits real-time system diagnostics.

    Engineers at Sun feel that DTrace can significantly advance storage system troubleshooting to a level never seen before in the industry.

    Another aspect of the Sun Storage 7000 is its performance.

    The company appropriately calls it Hybrid Storage Pools, which shares DRAM, read, and write optimized flash devices that work in working in combination with hard disc drives.

    Sun maintains that the innovative use of SSD technology can help flash memory combine with disc technology resulting in a mega performance that is very cost effective.

    While all that is great, Sun Microsystems continues to show a financial downturn having lost more than USD $1.7 billion in the first quarter of 2009 that ended in Sept 2008.

    With the ongoing financial crises and global recession, the question remains – how well does the Storage 7000 system fit in with other Sun storage products and how does the company plan to market and sell them in a cost efficient method?

    Only time will tell.

  • Texas Memory Systems Introduces Highest Capacity PCI-Express Solid State Disk


    Texas Memory Systems has announced its latest PCI-Express Solid State Disk aimed at mainstream businesses and applications.

    The RamSan-20 offers 450GB of usable grade Flash – which the company claims makes it the highest capacity enterprise class PCIe Flash card on the market.

    Described as a complete storage system on a PCIe card, the SSD accelerates server-resident applications that require large, fast buffer areas and those that are random access intensive.

    Texas lists databases, video editing, financial modeling, data acquisition, scientific computing, and web content as examples of applications likely to benefit from the RamSan-20.

    Woody Hutsell, president at Texas Memory SystemsAs a PCIe Flash card, said the RamSan-20 minimizes latency between the server’s processor and storage and is easily installed in minutes.

    He said users are increasingly looking to SSD as they demand greater application performance.

    "Beyond the Enterprise data center, the technology and cost improvements in Flash are stimulating demand," he said.

    "These factors, coupled with a growing desire to reduce space and power requirements with greener storage, led us to develop the RamSan-20."

    He said that to maximise performance and reliability, the RamSan-20 utilizes Single Level Cell (SLC) Flash.

    It delivers 120,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) for random read operations – and Texas claims it transfers data faster than other Flash drives and "hundreds of times" faster than traditional mechanical hard drives.

    A comprehensive on-board management suite ensures the RamSan-20 does not impact host resources, yet Hutsell said it delivers extreme reliability and durability, ensuring data preservation even in the event of a server crash or power outage.

    The RamSan-20 is scheduled for general availability in early Q2 2009. No pricing information was available.

  • VoIP Solutions Provider Codima Expands Operations Into France


    Codima has announced the launch of operations in the French market.

    The VoIP software tools provider is to offer sales, marketing and support to new and existing resellers throughout France from offices in Paris.

    Codima, a Microsoft Certified Partner, delivers an end-to-end solution that helps organizations manage their VoIP and data networks cost efficiently.

    Codima’s CEO, Christer Mattsson, said the solution reduces IT costs while improving the end user quality experience.

    He said this encourages organizations urgently looking to reduce IT costs to invest in the software based solution.

    Commenting on the opening of the new Paris office, he said: "Our strategy is to always act locally, which enables us to adapt to new markets quickly and benefit from local relationships."

    Mattsson said Codima develops and markets a solution that is built from the ground up to be VoIP specific, in comparison to other products on the market developed from existing platforms.

    According to ARPEC, the French regulator, France had 11.9 million subscribers to a VoIP service in Q1 2008.

    This represented 30 per cent of all fixed telephony services and was growing at the rate of 1 million new subscribers per quarter.

    The rapidly increasing usage of VoIP technology by French end users indicates an uptake in the market for products managing VoIP networks.

    Gheorghe Moga, who will lead the Codima operation in France, said VoIP technology is driving IP communications growth in the French market.

    He said the Codima offering responds to the growing demand for ensuring and improving VoIP call quality.

    "With in-depth local knowledge and strong channeling support to partners, we are ideally positioned to take advantage of the uptake in VoIP technology usage," he said.

  • Hosted VoIP Approaches One Million in the US – and Climbing


    The US had almost one million installed hosted IP telephony lines at the end of 2008.

    This figure is expected to grow to about 3.6 million lines in 2014, according to a report by Frost & Sullivan.

    It suggests that integration with other unified communications (UC) applications – chat, presence and conferencing – will provide the most opportunity for the hosted IP telephony market, which it believes is being challenged by the economic downturn.

    Elka Popova, Frost & Sullivan’s global program director, said small businesses will continue to be attracted to hosted IP telephony offerings primarily for cost-efficient voice communications.

    However, she said some of them will also choose a hosted offering for the ability to gain access to a complete UC package from a single provider.

    "Medium and large businesses will also appreciate the economies provided by hosted IP telephony, but will seek such solutions mostly so they can focus on core business processes and gain access to applications and capabilities that they can test without making a capital investment," she said.

    Popova said that integration with other applications can help the hosted IP telephony market plough ahead.

    Barriers to Market

    However, significant technology enhancements to premise-based solutions and extensive private branch exchange (PBX) vendor channels present significant barriers to further market penetration.

    The report said that IP telephony vendors will have to develop astute channel strategies since most market participants are small, next-generation providers with limited geographic presence and service support capabilities – and with no established customer base or brand-name recognition.

    It recommended that service providers should seek to expand and diversify their channels and strengthen relationships.

    Moves that will need to be based on specific portfolio requirements, it added.

    "Meanwhile, the low barriers to entry will cause the North American market to remain extremely fragmented," said the report.

    "The incumbent local exchange carriers (LECs) are reluctant to grab larger market shares due to the fear of cannibalizing legacy service revenues and limited demand for next-gen hosted telephony services among their existing Centrex base."

    Diverse Competitive Landscape

    The competitive landscape is also likely to become increasingly diverse with competitive LECs (CLECs), software as a service (SaaS)/hosted application providers, value-added resellers (VARs) and system integrators (SIs) competing for a share of a slowly growing market.

    In such a scenario, channel support will determine each provider’s chances for success.

    Popova said that in order to ensure extensive customer reach and superior customer support, service providers need to develop stronger relationships with various VARs, SIs, and agents that may include real estate companies, IT consultants, and moving companies.

    "Further, providers should seek to develop an eco-system of partnerships to jointly enhance market awareness and be able to offer customers a range of interoperable solutions and capabilities," she said.

    Other recommendations made in the report include:

    • Telephony providers should cooperate with hosted contact center, email, customer relationship management (CRM), Web 2.0 and other communication and business application providers.
    • Service providers may choose to adopt diverse business strategies. For instance, some may focus on businesses seeking inexpensive voice communication packages, while others may choose to target businesses that seek advanced communication solutions such as UC, where application integration provides considerable productivity benefits.
    • Providers could also take advantage of merger and acquisition opportunities based on complementary technologies, expertise or channels, since consolidation can help improve customer awareness, margins and the value proposition of hosted IP telephony.

  • Google Launches Free Voice Service


    Google today launched a free service in the US called Google Voice that gives users access to all their phones, voicemail and text messages through one phone number.

    The move is being seen as a threat to Skype – but also to telecom operators and technology firms.

    Initially Google Voice will only be available to existing users of GrandCentral, a service Google acquired in July 2007.

    But it is expected to be rolled out to the general public in the coming weeks.

    Google says the application helps users manage their voice communications better by improving the way they use their phones.

    It provides transcripts of voicemail and allows all SMS text messages sent and received to be archived and searched.

    The service can also be used to make low-priced international calls.

    Google says the new service will be similar to GrandCentral but with many new features.

    GrandCentral gives users a single number to ring their home, work, and mobile phones, a central voicemail inbox that you can be accessed on the web, and the ability to screen calls by listening in live as callers leave a voicemail.

    The service has been invite-only for nearly two years and has a sizeable waiting list.

    It’s too early to say for sure whether Google Voice is the beginning of the end for operators as a "voice pipe".

    What’s certain is that combined with Android it could begin to make life very interesting for them.

    The fact yet more data could soon be passing through Google’s hands is also making privacy activists just a little concerned.