Cloudera is working with Quest Software to provide a connector into Oracle for Hadoop , the open-source, distrbuted data management platform. The connector, called “Ora-Oop,” provides a way to transfer data between Oracle and Hadoop. The service will be available in the fourth quarter for download through Cloudera and Quest. Sponsor Quest is a tools provider for Oracle while Cloudera is known as the leading commercial Hadoop provider. Hadoop is increasingly used by companies to keep data efficiently managed over an extended, distributed environment. It is known for its robust analytics. Yahoo! uses Hadoop to manage much of its infrastructure, optimize content and place advertisements. Facebook and many of the largest technology companies use Hadoop to manage the vast amounts of data in in its networks. The enterprise faces its own issues as the social Web is making it vital for companies to deal with its information such as blogs, video and other media such as audio and images. This data is not easily fitted into a relational database. That’s where Hadoop comes into the picture. By allowing for the bi-directional transfer of information, users can transfer the data between Hadoop and Oracle. Ora-Oop will complement Sqoop, an open source tool designed to import data from relational databases into Hadoop. Discuss

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Cisco has launched its own enterprise collaboration platform that puts it in league with multiple other providers that are here in force at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this week. Cisco’s collaboration suite is focused on video and instant messaging. “Presence,” is baked into all aspects of the service, which distinguishes it apart in this increasingly crowded space. Sponsor The collaborative environment has three core components: Cisco Quad is a collaborative service that will be available later this year. Cisco Prosumer Video integrates Cisco FocalPoint, an online video workspace with a business-class Cisco Flip MinoPRO camcorder. Cisco WebEx Connect IM is now browser-based with capabilities for integrating the IM service into third-party web applications. Cisco Quad A core tenant of Cisco Quad is its cross-integration with the company’s voice and video business. Cisco’s goal is to make video a communication that is as easy as video. it includes an activity stream and other standards that we are seeing emerge. For example, people may use Quad as a microbloging tool for internal use. Messages can go to Twitter, too. Altimeter Group’ s analyst Ray Wang compares Cisco’s efforts to unified strategies from other major players in the space. Project Vulcan is an IBM initiative launched earlier this year: But competition means a wholly different thing these days. Competitors are collaborators, too. Cisco’s software collaboration tools will eventually integrate with Microsoft Sharepoint, Oracle and other document management environments like Documentum. Cisco Quad will also eventually wok with Google’s OpenSocial. Prosumer Video It’s perhaps the Flip camera integration that reflects most about Cisco’s foray into the social technology landscape.Video is core to the Cisco mission, complementing its dominance in the networking space. Video bolsters use of the network, making the Flip camera a tool to strengthen Cisco’s data services. In some respects the Flip is like a loss leader, acting as the means for delivering data to the network. Cisco sees video as a core collaborative exercise. It is increasingly used as a means for providing context, be it personal or for showing products. Prosumer Video includes a new online video workspace called FocalPoint and a new camera designed for business use: the four-hour Flip MinoPRO camcorder. The Focal Point service is designed for groups to share video over a cloud-based network. Its an end-to-end secure network. The Flip, like all previous models, has its editing software built-in to the camera. Cisco WebEx Connect 6.5 Cisco WebEx Connect is now in the browser, making it a fully accessible IM environment. It’s like GTalk or any other browser-based IM service. It’s localized now for several languages. Logs can be compiled for purposes of compliance. Jabbr makes the latest update of most interest. Developers may now integrate Jabbr into Web application with Cisco’s Ajax XMPP library. That’s a step for Cisco into the murky and shifting currents that come with building a developer community. How Cisco builds a developer community is a big question mark. Murali Sitarem has lead the effort for Cisco’s enterprise collaboration development. It has been a two year process, marked recently by the acquisition of Tandberg . It’s acquisitions like that of Tandberg and Jabbr that Sitarem says will be the key to building a developer community. Sitarem says the company will see systems integrators and developers with deeper IT experience. But from our view, Cisco will have to provide incentives, which they appear to be doing. Their recruitment program gives fresh technology graduates from the top engineering schools the option of working on any project they wish when joining Cisco. Recruiting young people makes sense as they are digital natives who inherently understand the social networks that stand as models for today’s enterprise social technology initiatives. But how is Cisco going to make it appealing to attract a wide network of developers? The answer may come with Jabbr and Tandberg. But it will take a lot more to build a developer community. A network is not born overnight. Discuss

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For the Enterprise 2.0 conference next week we will take a look specifically how the enterprise is adopting enterprise technologies. What services are companies using and why? Dachis Group is one of the fastest growing consulting organizations in the Enterprise 2.0 space. In the past several months they’ve made a series of acquisitions, including the purchase of the Hinhcliffe Group . So, it’s noteworthy what technologies Dachis Group is adopting for its clients. Recently, the company adopted MindTouch as a platform for its collaboration laboratory. Sponsor MndTouch is a collaborative platform. It is used to aggregate data from multiple sources. Late last year, MindTouch launched an open-source, SaaS service that integrates business data from any number of sources, including Oracle, Sugar CRM and Salesforce.com. MindTouch is designed for a business community to create their own dashboards. It allows users to collaborate with a familiar wiki environment with the capabilities of an enterprise platform. Dachis Group says too often collaborative technologies are either specialized point applications or monolithic platforms. The specialized applications are difficult to extend and integrate. The monolithic platforms are often hard to use and expensive to use for third-party development. Bryan Menell, Collaboratory Director, Dachis Group, said they were able to use the MindTouch platform to create and iterate custom applications with more flexibility than other applications. Menell: “We chose MindTouch for several reasons, but among them was the ability to customize pretty much anything we want, the ease of integration with any external systems that support API’s, the granular level of permissioning (so we can invite clients into our workspaces), and in general the way it gets our people collaborating together to deliver outstanding services to our clients.” Enterprise applications are becoming increasingly complex. We spent the past week at the IBM Rational conference where the discussion centered around the issues with integrating mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and increasingly more embedded software. These included interconnected networks that connect everything from cars, mobile devices and homes. In addition, the Internet is moving to the center of a new dynamic supply chain that requires information to reach people in real-time. Services like that from MindTouch will become critical for the enterprise in its move to a web oriented architecture. Enterprise 2.0 is a conference that has a focus on customer stories. We will use this perspective in our coverage next week as we look at the technologies available in the market for the enterprise and how they are being applied. Discuss

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Where there are definitions, there are reasons to bend them. Outsourcing, the practice of bringing outside organizations to manage a part the business process, is one of those concepts. In this post, we’ll take a brief stroll through the work of Caliber Point in mixing up both outsourcing and cloud computing. We look at where it touches on major shifts in enterprise software architectures and franchises like Oracle which this software-as-a-service product is built on. Sponsor In a way, the very definition of “corporation” suggests the creation of sensitive information. By having the purpose of bringing people together to generate profit, actions such as retaining employees, building strategies, and defining products create information boundaries within a company, and within the competitive landscape. It is in the context of outsourcing sensitive information and processes that we analyze a product called Republic, by Caliber Point that has technology to merge Oracle R12 core technology with a software-as-a-service offering for outsourcing Human Resources. This product enables companies to have a product and set of services to run the basic business processes such as HR payroll and administration. Disruption is In: The Back Office In all the virtualization and cloud computing change occurring, sometimes it is easy to forget about arguably the hardest to distribute resource, the database tier. And, where the database tier is tightly interwoven with software (like enterprise packages) it can become a sedimentary set of infrastructure. Although not normally associated with the movement of cloud computing, Oracle in itself has been disrupting the layers of software and infrastructure in the back office with its heavy acquisitions and merger of Siebel, PeopleSoft, BEA, and now Sun. In a way, the company has faced some of the hardest integration challenges by thinking about enterprise services bus, which is an enterprise version of software-as-a-service that is used extensively in cloud computing. Both small companies and large companies support this movement, Caliber Points notes here: “….Larger clients such as Cadbury (50,000), BNP Paribas (65,000), Astra Zeneca (70,000), IKEA (67,000), Philips (110,000) etc. have implemented their HR systems on a multi-tenanted model.” Multi Tenant: Just Makes Sense We took a moment to sit down with Caliber Point CEO RU Srinivas to discuss how the company has been working within the Oracle innovation model to help figure out where cost-savings, SaaS, and enterprise licensing meet – and innovating to offer a multi-tenant solution in the midst of the evolution underway for the entire market. In the one pager, the company offers these human resource services: Administrative HR: Employee Database, Workforce Administration, Employee Self-Service, Reporting Manager, Self Service. Compensation – Records and Updates Payroll and Employee Benefits Time Entry and Management HR Regulatory Reporting and Analytics The companies Republic product release offers customers a solution that both extends as well as fits into Oracle’s business product offering. In their brochure , Caliber Point stresses the overall value of mulit-tenant solutions and how the combination of configuration patterns lead to more effective software deployment – an easy place to gain cost savings. We believe this gives Oracle opportunities to look into the future of where PeopleSoft and Oracle database technology future lies. If we live in a “multi-tenant or whither” world, it is key for Oracle (and others) to position themselves for a dominant solution like has been enjoyed in the past in the enterprise. Unhost: ( Verb ) We’re not sure if to “unhost” is an official term, but if it was, we’d suggest this definition: “Reduce technical footprint and save money by leveraging outsourced commodity services that you used to manage yourself”. It could be argued that public cloud computing (Amazon) is a part of the outsourcing movement. Instead of taking people processes however, cloud computing starts with resources and works its way down by wrapping compute, storage, and networking into service definitions that are accessible by credit cards. Caliber Point’s CEO, RU Srinivas “RU” shared with us the base case for cost savings with the models of outsourcing. Here, in the company’s Republic white paper the case is being made on the pressure of change to pricing for SAP and Oracle and the benefits of the next wave of outsourced infrastructure. We asked RU if it was possible to break it down the cost savings in a simple way for large enterprises who pay for licenses for platforms today would be tempted to “un-host” their infrastructure. RU explained that it wasn’t quite that simple, considering the depth of solutions with tools like PeopleSoft and other factors, but as a basis, cost savings of 30% were a reasonable starting point. However, as noted in the companies outsourcing products, it is also possible to gain similar cost reductions in human resource outsourcing offerings Caliber Point offers. This brings us to the conclusion that multi-tenant may mix well with multi-continent support like that offered by big outsourcing organizations. The opportunity for both hosting and supporting becomes a big win for companies looking reduce expenses in core business functions such as human resources. We wonder if offerings like Republic will emerge out of cloud computing and compete with Amazon (and others) as the new center of the cost-savings universe. What comes to mind when you think of outsourcing and cloud computing today? Discuss

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HP bought Palm today, as you no doubt have heard , for more than $1 billion. What does it mean when a company among the most venerable in Silicon Valley but outside the consumer tech limelight of the day, acquires another company that created the handheld computing market and continues to innovate radically, but has fallen far out of public favor? HP is a company with extensive social software experience, so I’m excited to see what it can do with Palm’s widely admired WebOS mobile platform. Below we’ve posted some of most interesting short ruminations on the news, from the first few moments after the announcement, from smart industry thought leaders. There are a lot of different reactions out there, what are your thoughts about these ones? Sponsor Tim Bray , who recently left Sun after the Oracle acquisition, joined Google and blasted Apple in a blog post calling the iPhone a “a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers.” Dion Almaer, well known innovative web developer at Palm, is excited. Joe Hewitt, the man who built the Facebook iPhone app, gives Palm’s mobile OS a thumbs up. Hearst Digital Media’s Seamus Condron is not so sure. That’s a great question, so we asked it of HP. Senior VP of Strategy Brian Humphries told us today that “the issue over the years has been Palm’s ability to prove financial viability and with HP in the picture those concerns go away. We’ll invest substantially in building a developer community. Further, you take this OS onto other platforms and you give people an opportunity to participate in an ecosystem play.” Mobile developer Tim Sears sees a potential iPad competitor. Blogger Mark Hopkins points out that HP is on an acquisition roll. Deals we’ve spotted over the last 12 months include: cluster file storage software vendor IBRIX, global consulting company EYP Mission Critical Facilities and network infrastructure manufacturer 3Com $2.7b. Lon Seidman , startup founder, points to a missed opportunity by Microsoft. Many people agree. Business Insider says this is all about HP trying to “end its reliance on Microsoft Windows as the basis for its hardware gadgets.” Was it a bad deal for the investors? Leading financial blogger Dan Primack does some quick evaluation of the impact for Elevation Partners, the VC firm that singer Bono is a part of that put hundreds of millions into Palm. Primack says the sky has not fallen. Former Autodesk and Edelman PR exec Caroline Kawashima is unmoved. Tech media guru Sam Whitmore retweets. Online comedy guy Justin Kownacki is appropriately meta. Huffington Post’s Adam Clark Estes makes a good joke. Discuss

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