| This week's sponsor is CA Technologies. |  | Webinar: Rethinking Enterprise Mobility Management – Beyond BYOD
Thursday, May 29th, 12pm ET / 9am PT Our panel of experts will help you understand how to develop effective strategies that accelerate mobility transformation and prepare your organization for the mobile future. Register Today! |
Also Noted: RAMP
Spotlight On... A post-Heartbleed debate on whether open source has failed
Red Hat wants one OpenStack; Al Franken wants zero Comcasts; and much more...  Follow @fierceentcomm on Twitter
News From the Fierce Network:
1. Rumor mill: Apple iPhone 6 could be coming this summer
2. State CIOs take cybersecurity, broadband concerns to Washington
3. Focus on data value, not its 'bigness'
| This week's sponsor is Mashery. |  | Delight & Engage Customer with Mobile APIs Read this success story and learn how a robust API and secure API Management powered Keep's iOS app to become one of the most popular apps in the Lifestyle category in the iTunes App Store. Read now! |
Today's Top News 1. Microsoft TechEd 2014: The move from Windows Server to Azure
The key question for IT admins and developers going into today's Microsoft TechEd 2014 in Houston has been, "what role will Windows Server play as the world's data centers move to hybrid clouds powered by Linux kernels?" The answer came swiftly, in perhaps the first TechEd keynote that downplayed the Windows operating system and the System Center management platform to the point of near omission. A complete newcomer to Microsoft or to planet Earth would come away from this keynote thinking "Windows" is just one brand of applications among many, and may not even attribute it to Microsoft right away unless she noticed the similarity of the logos on the slides. Azure has become the factory floor for nearly all the services that Microsoft used to attribute to Windows Server and its System Center management console, including the file system, identity management, access policies, anti-malware, single sign-on, application hosting, application development and mobile device management. Whereas Windows Server 2008 tried to cement Windows' place in the enterprise as the host for every imaginable role for IT in the data center, Microsoft now appears quite content to drive its revised cloud strategy for a world in which Windows is just one method for running applications among many. "The cloud is going to enable our users to do things they've only dreamed of in the past," stated Microsoft corporate VP Brad Anderson, speaking to an overflowing convention hall. The crowd here at Houston's Brown Convention Center is statement enough that admins need direction on how Microsoft has chosen to evolve, and how their systems will inevitably work. But when I asked Anderson whether Azure takes over the role that Windows Server played in the enterprise data center six years ago--specifically, fulfilling the roles performed by people in the data center, as Microsoft phrased it back then--Anderson had a response in mind. "Azure is built on Windows Server," Anderson responded, explaining that Azure's key technologies are built on Windows Server platforms. The Hyper-V hypervisor for virtualization, he went on, is the very same abstraction layer used by Azure to run applications in the cloud. Microsoft cloud and security technical fellow Mark Russinovich then stepped in to remind Anderson to include System Center in the mix. The mechanisms that admins will be using to manage and enforce policies in the Azure cloud, Russinovich said, are essentially System Center provided as a service. But let's be honest: The relocation of services from on-premise to a hybrid or public environment, and the facelift of those services to something that doesn't resemble System Center's seemingly endless array of dialog box and forms controls, will be treated by IT as a complete replacement. Microsoft has clearly repositioned its competitive focus, away from on-premise systems and applications, and toward the new wave of mobile-focused services championed by Dropbox and Salesforce. Even the SharePoint brand is being de-emphasized, as the new Azure Files enables document distribution with policy management, access control and logging; OneDrive for Business provides a new front end for business users to dial up collaboration and file sharing and Yammer serves as the company's new business social stream. Related Articles:
Microsoft TechEd 2014: Keys to the conference
HP to battle Red Hat, IBM in OpenStack space, bottling up Microsoft Read more about: azure, OneDrive
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| This week's sponsor is CPL. |  | FastCast Webinar: Reduce Datacenter Energy Costs by up to 15%: Software Meets Datacenter ROI
Friday, May 15th, 2pm ET/ 11am PT
Join us for a look at two Intel Datacenter Software solutions, sample use cases, and implementation overviews. Intel Data Center Manager (Intel DCM): Energy Director provides device-level power and thermal monitoring and management for groups of servers, networking, storage, and other IT equipment. Register Today! |
2. AT&T's Stephens: We need strategic services to drive total enterprise growth
AT&T's strategic business services suite, including cloud and Ethernet, will be the key growth engine for the enterprise services business, but they have yet to surpass legacy service losses. "We have a collection of high quality new services, but the challenge for us is that it's 27 percent of the 100 percent and not 50 or 60 of the 100 percent," said John Stephens, senior SVP and CFO of AT&T, during the Jefferies 2014 Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference. "We need strategic services to continue to grow, accelerate our growth, and get it up above that tipping point to cause total enterprise growth."
During the first quarter, the telco reported that strategic business services grew 16.1 percent year-over-year. These services represent an annualized revenue stream of more than $9 billion and are more than 26 percent of wireline business revenues. However, overall business services revenues declined 2.7 percent to $8.7 billion due to ongoing declines in legacy products like ATM and Frame Relay. Besides the ongoing declines in legacy services, the U.S. economy continues to be a challenge. "What we are seeing is the economy is not necessarily helping anyone," Stephens said. "While unemployment rates are going down, we see that as much more of a function of the change in the participation rate so it's not generating people at call centers that demand and drive our business services." Stephens said it is also not seeing businesses make new investments in technology or they are delaying purchases. "We are not seeing business fixed investment," he said. "Corporate investment in the United States capex is low, and when it gets higher they demand more telecom services." AT&T is hardly alone in seeing slow business buying patterns. Verizon's CFO Fran Shammo expressed a similar trend in their first-quarter earnings call. Despite the near-term slowness, AT&T is seeing some signs of life in the business segment as service revenues grew slightly during the quarter. Stephens cautioned that "I don't want to oversell or point to a transformational point, but it's a sign that we're starting see some green chutes when you combine business with wireless we're seeing that grow." He added that our "integrated carrier model is leaving us with some real positive views, but the real story in the enterprise space not only for telecom and most American industries is you have to get capital investment going into the United States to drive jobs and you'll drive demand for everybody's products and services." For more:
- hear the webcast (reg req.) Related Articles:
AT&T gives cloud service control to businesses, enhances SDN, NFV ecosystem
AT&T consumer wireline revenue up 4.3% to $5.7B on strong U-verse video, broadband adds [FierceTelecom] Read more about: AT&T
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3. Live beta of browser-based SIP conferencing without plugins
One of the long-promised rewards of HTML5, the perpetually evolving set of standards for rendering Web content, has been the initiation of voice and later video chat from inside the Web browser without installing plug-ins first. With JavaScript development moving Web-based apps outside the browser's window, the potential for the WebRTC portion of the HTML5 standard has recently expanded. For mobile devices, it could enable a Skype-like communication app with one-touch launching, without the developer having to build its own Skype first. Taking advantage of this prospect is a private backbone provider headquartered in Brussels, named Voxbone. Already, Voxbone is a private IP backbone provider, linking more than 50 countries and providing customers with toll-free, intercontinental phone numbers. Last week, Voxbone began a private beta of a browser-based audio conferencing system. It doesn't have much of a front end right now, but that's not the real point. Using ordinary hyperlinks, users can launch WebRTC conferences and begin chatting without installing new apps or plug-ins. But that's not the real point either. If the originator of the hyperlink is a Voxbone subscriber, then by way of API calls, the Voxbone page links the recipient's browser to the company's private session border controller. That SBC then acts as a gateway to Voxbone's private network, where it initiates a SIP connection to the subscriber's Voxbone number. What this means is, if you've built your own IP-based phone company, you don't need to make an app to get customers talking. "The model that Voxbone is pursuing is, we're going to make some sample code available, and libraries that customers can reference and leverage," explains Hugh Goldstein, Voxbone's vice president for strategic alliances, in an interview with FierceEnterpriseCommunications. "Then we expect they're going to develop their own applications, and they're going to integrate it into their own services. A lot of our customers already have mobile apps, and they have a wide range of services. So we hope they will use this as an opportunity to experiment with WebRTC in a very high-quality way." The typical WebRTC implementation, Goldstein explains, uses P2P communications just like Skype and Google Hangouts. Usually the way customers would upgrade their WebRTC call quality (which, let's face it, could use all the improvement it can get) is by purchasing a gateway that converts the call into SIP, from a provider like Mavenir or WIT Software. Voxbone replaces that gateway with a cloud service. "The call will start as a WebRTC session," Goldstein explains, "and then we will divert the SIP, and they'll be able to have that call flow into their pre-existing services with no additional development." For Voxbone subscribers, those pre-existing services may include the regular PSTN phone network. The call initiation takes place with an API call, and use of Voxbone's APIs by developers will not require a license, I'm told. A code sample using the key API call appeared to be in standard JavaScript syntax, and very simple to implement. I edited a publication called Betanews for about four years, so unexplored and even under-developed territory is practically my home base. In my test of Voxbone service... well, I ran into a few hitches. Using version 28 of Firefox on two test PCs (one Windows 8, the other Windows 7), at first, I was unable to launch a Voxbone client-side conversation on either one. Voxbone may not be to blame here, though: Although WebRTC as a technology is several years old already, it isn't exactly mature thanks to a lack of hard testing that leads directly to a lack of adoption. For me, the Voxbone conversation did eventually work, but only if I launched Firefox from scratch, visited no other page than my home page first, and opened no other tabs. That took me about 15 minutes of fiddling, but as a veteran beta tester, I'm familiar with that feeling--and this service is, let's face it, in the early beta stage. Once the call did come through, it was loud and bold with heavy noise reduction and a resounding bass. Echo cancellation wasn't working every second, and when it wasn't, I could hear my own voice after a half-second delay. These are the types of technical issues common with early betas. Yet the fact that the problems could be resolved with tweaks to the browser suggests that developing new businesses around browser-based technologies may always be a tricky affair. For more:
- see Mavenir's WebRTC page
- Wit Software's WebRTC page Related Articles:
Chat for free with NTT's WebRTC, if you don't mind being a bloated, dancing cat
Cloud solutions, WebRTC to accelerate videoconferencing in 2014 Read more about: Voxbone
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4. Advantage Oracle: Appeals Court finds APIs can be copyrighted
In a stunning reversal of fortune in a case where reversals have happened before--just not this big--the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has handed Oracle a complete victory; the equivalent of a double-header shut-out in the latest leg of its fight against Google. The central issue in that fight is whether Google had the right to create the Dalvik bytecode compiler to run Java apps, by any other name, in the Android operating system. The case itself is far from over. But while the ruling is big news for Oracle, it may establish a legal precedent that impacts the software industry as a whole, including the way Web services communicate with one another--and whether those communications may require a license in the future. The three-judge panel ruled unanimously to overturn a district court's determination that some 37 Java API packages were not entitled to copyright protection. While the Appeals Court could have simply found fault with the proceedings and remanded the case to the district level without making findings of its own, the judges ruled the basic determination to have been in error. Underlying that finding of error is the basic assertion made by the judges that computer code of all kinds, including APIs, can be copyrightable as creative expressions, even though their basic purpose may be to perform functions. In U.S. copyright law, the functions of mechanisms or programs are not subject to copyright, but original expressions of ideas written in a language (this article, for example) certainly are. It's a long story, and hopefully this summary captures the gist of it: Back in 2005, when Java was a product of Sun Microsystems, Google started the process of assembling the components of a Linux operating system. It acquired Android, Inc., but to make its Android OS run programs, it needed a runtime interpreter. Sun's take on whether Java should be considered free could be considered, at best, as wavering. While Google was working to license Java, its developers were working to create a Java compiler of their own, under the premise that the Java language itself was allowed to be free by Sun. That compiler is called Dalvik, and it's a part of every Android smartphone and tablet today. Though the legal arms of Google and Sun never came to a licensing agreement, Google's developers not only created Dalvik openly where everyone could see, but demonstrated it at Java conferences where Sun's own engineers expressed optimism and even encouragement. Anything that extended the reach of Java, it seemed to them, was a good thing. There was no formal agreement to that effect. So when Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, literally within a few months, Oracle began fighting Google in court, saying that the lack of an agreement or a license with Sun did not translate into freedom from a license with Oracle. Google literally copied huge swaths of Sun's Java API bytecode for Dalvik, even leaving in the names of variables and comments--that much is not even in dispute. But Google's defense is that the expressions of what are fundamentally functions and not poems or paragraphs, cannot be copyrighted anyway. In 2012, despite a jury's decision, District Judge William Alsup made a determination in Google's favor, agreeing with that assertion. The Federal Circuit judges narrowed down Oracle's appeal of the district court's decision to four arguments, and gave the advantage for each one back to Oracle. Their decision reads: "Oracle argues that its Java API packages are entitled to protection under the Copyright Act because they are expressive and could have been written and organized in any number of ways to achieve the same functions. Specifically, Oracle argues that the district court erred when it: (1) concluded that each line of declaring code is uncopyrightable because the idea and expression have merged; (2) found the declaring code uncopyrightable because it employs short phrases; (3) found all aspects of the SSO [structure, sequence, and organization] devoid of protection as a 'method of operation'...; and (4) invoked Google's "interoperability" concerns in the copyrightability analysis. For the reasons explained below, we agree with Oracle on each point." The district court jury had found in Oracle's favor prior to the determination, on the question of copyrightability. Now that verdict has been reinstated, though the remainder of the case is remanded to the district level for a new trial to settle the question of whether "fair use" applies in determining copyrightability. Related Articles:
Oracle wants 30% of Google's Android ad revenues [FierceMobileIT]
Google says it rejected $100M royalty deal to use Java in Android [FierceMobileIT] Read more about: Oracle
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Also Noted | This week's sponsor is RAMP. |  | eBook | Finding the Payoff in Enterprise Video Video is a powerful medium for communication. Its potential uses range from sales and marketing through employee communications, training and more. But enterprise use has grown in fits and starts. In this eBook, FierceCIO explores the capabilities, culture and infrastructure to find the payoff in enterprise video. Download this eBook today. |
SPOTLIGHT ON... A post-Heartbleed debate on whether open source has failed Here in FierceEnterpriseCommunications and throughout the Fierce family of publications, we've chronicled the debacle of Heartbleed--the gaping hole in OpenSSL that garnered its own logo and publicity tour. For way too many years, an exploitable flaw existed in the open source implementation of SSL, and we're not sure even now whether it actually was exploited since such an exploit would not have been logged. We can say the lack of accountability in the development process may have been partly to blame. But let's face it, the community of implementers beyond the open source contributors had years to spot this flaw, and didn't. So was this a cascade failure? My friends Ed Bott and Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet explore two of the many angles of this story... and if you know these guys, I'll bet you can guess which angles these are. Read more: Heartbleed: Is the open source development model broken? [ZDNet] > Reduce Datacenter Energy Costs by up to 15%: Software Meets Datacenter ROI - Friday, May 16, 2014 - 2 pm ET / 11 am PT Join us for a look at two Intel Datacenter Software solutions, sample use cases, and implementation overviews. Intel Data Center Manager (Intel DCM): Energy Director provides device-level power and thermal monitoring and management for groups of servers, networking, storage, and other IT equipment. Register Today! > WEBINAR: Rethinking Enterprise Mobility Management ? Beyond BYOD - SPONSORED BY: CA Technologies Enterprise mobility management is about more than just getting handle on the flood of BYOD devices coming into the organization. It is about managing the explosion of new devices, applications, content and transactions, which threatens to overwhelm IT managers. Our panel of experts will help you understand how to develop effective strategies that accelerate mobility transformation and prepare your organization for the mobile future. Register Today! > Developing for the Internet of Things: Challenges and Opportunities - Wednesday, June 18th, 2pm ET / 11am PT Cisco estimates that 50 billion devices and objects will be connected to the Internet by 2020. Will there be a role for developers in this area? And if so, how can developers position themselves in the months ahead on this nascent but potentially explosive opportunity? Register Today!
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