Finding Zune-Fi: Ina Fried of News.com wanders the polite streets of San Francisco in search of Zune connections over Wi-Fi. She finds a few, and has a good experience. One cafe owner sees the ease with which she can stream music and calls it cool. She can't connect at the long-running Google-sponsored free Wi-Fi at Union Square, however, which means the Wi-Fi likely has an accept button that must be pressed. Surely Microsoft could insert a little technology that would allow a browser-free acceptance of terms? Probably involves Yet Another Protocol: the Wi-Fi Terms Browser-Free Presentation Protocol (WTBFPP).

Kodak adds interesting Wi-Fi enabled all-in-one: The new Kodak ESP 9 is a multi-function printer (fax, scan, print, copy) that connects to a network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. The $300 device spits out 30 pages per minutes in color, 32 ppm in black only. Kodak claims that the model line to which the ESP belongs uses ink in a vastly more efficient manner than the "average of comparable consumer inkjet printers."

While advertisers have expressed concern over the potential market power the formidable pair might wield, both firms are quick to note that the proposed arrangement would be a nonexclusive revenue sharing deal in which Google gained rights to run ads on Yahoo sites. Yahoo and Google would continue to compete for advertising dollars, and prices would be set by auction.

Many observers see the hand of perennial search-wars Bronze medalist Microsoft looming in the background here. Redmond made its own abortive bid to acquire Yahoo outright, arguing that the union would create a counterweight to Google’s dominance.

Read the full article here.

At the moment, event correlation and event analysis is Gartner’s closest magic quadrant (MQ)  that relates directly to complex event processing (and event processing in general).    

A number of our friends and colleagues would like to position CEP as BRE, BRMS, BPM, SOA, algo trading and just about every other technology under the sun, except event correlation!

In a nutshell, the state-of-the-state of CEP/EP is that a number of firms in the software industry have found some “uncharted magic quadrant waters” and are positioning themselves to be “chart worthy”. Instead of competing head on with the experienced players (event correlation and analysis) that have been in the event processing field for many years.   

As I have mentioned a few times here on The CEP Blog, if the current generation self-described CEP engines were leading the industry in event correlation and analysis (CEP’s core technology domain) they would be either be on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IT Event Correlation and Analysis, or possibly acquired by a one of these large giants in event processing to solve complex event processing and event correlation problems that remain, for the most part, still unsolved!

Earlier this week in a joint press release, Microsoft and BearingPoint announced the new BearingPoint Enterprise Governance, Risk, and Compliance product offering. Ok... it will be a while before the more veteran enterprise GRC vendors start really losing sleep over this deal. But BearingPoint continues to be a top risk consulting firm, and Microsoft’s reach through the business user community will be an attractive benefit for compliance and risk professionals trying to get hundreds or thousands of staff members to contribute to the GRC program. There’s potential here for sure.

With software giants IBM, Oracle, SAP, and now Microsoft increasing their level of commitment in the enterprise GRC space, the 2-3 year market outlook continues to change. The risk and regulatory landscape is only going to get tougher to handle, and the more GRC programs can run seamlessly with existing business processes and applications, the better. The vendors focused solely on GRC still have the advantage for now, but market consolidation is on its way... and it’s coming maybe just a tiny bit faster than it was at the start of this week.

By now you have probably heard that Brocade is making a big push from storage networking switches into Ethernet switches by buying Foundry Networks for almost 3 billion in cash.  Actually the deal is valued at about 2.8 billion.  However, Foundry has about 800 million or so in cash and liquid assets.  So taking that into account, the deal is for about 2 billion really, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Still that is quite a number when you consider that $18.50 of the $19.25 price per share is in cash.  That works out to about 2.7 billion.  Considering Brocade only had about 700 to 800 million in cash itself, that means someone is lending them about a billion and half.  Again according the Mercury News, it is Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. This is a 41% premium over Foundry's closing price.  Pretty sweet!

The real question is what does Brocade do with this.  With all of that debt, do they have what it takes to go on and take on Cisco now?  The highways and byways of Silicon Valley are littered with companies that have tried to take Cisco out of this market.  What about the 7 dwarfs who currently compete in this market.  Companies like HP ProCurve, Extreme Networks, Nortel, Enterasys, Alcatel-Lucent and Force 10 are not small little companies. These are companies with 100's of millions, if not billions of dollars of market cap themselves.  They are not going to roll over and die here. Will this set off a round of consolidation for these players to bulk up in order to compete in this brave new world of networking? I think so. What about next gen secure switches like ConSentry, Nevis and Napera? Or some of the other smaller switch vendors like D-link?  Do they view this a a good opportunity to get bought by one of the giants or do they think they can run through the legs of these giants?  I don't know but it is going to be a high barrier of entry into this market.

Ultimately though I don't think Cisco will lose its place of dominance very easily. Brocade will be another competitor among the other switch vendors fighting over 25% of the market. But it sure will be interesting in the switch market for a while.

By now you have probably heard that Brocade is making a big push from storage networking switches into Ethernet switches by buying Foundry Networks for almost 3 billion in cash.  Actually the deal is valued at about 2.8 billion.  However, Foundry has about 800 million or so in cash and liquid assets.  So taking that into account, the deal is for about 2 billion really, according to the San Jose Mercury News. Still that is quite a number when you consider that $18.50 of the $19.25 price per share is in cash.  That works out to about 2.7 billion.  Considering Brocade only had about 700 to 800 million in cash itself, that means someone is lending them about a billion and half.  Again according the Mercury News, it is Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. This is a 41% premium over Foundry's closing price.  Pretty sweet!

The real question is what does Brocade do with this.  With all of that debt, do they have what it takes to go on and take on Cisco now?  The highways and byways of Silicon Valley are littered with companies that have tried to take Cisco out of this market.  What about the 7 dwarfs who currently compete in this market.  Companies like HP ProCurve, Extreme Networks, Nortel, Enterasys, Alcatel-Lucent and Force 10 are not small little companies. These are companies with 100's of millions, if not billions of dollars of market cap themselves.  They are not going to roll over and die here. Will this set off a round of consolidation for these players to bulk up in order to compete in this brave new world of networking? I think so. What about next gen secure switches like ConSentry, Nevis and Napera? Or some of the other smaller switch vendors like D-link?  Do they view this a a good opportunity to get bought by one of the giants or do they think they can run through the legs of these giants?  I don't know but it is going to be a high barrier of entry into this market.

Ultimately though I don't think Cisco will lose its place of dominance very easily. Brocade will be another competitor among the other switch vendors fighting over 25% of the market. But it sure will be interesting in the switch market for a while.

Giants have very strange sexual behaviour where the male has a metre-long muscular penis that he uses a bit like a nail gun and shoots cords of sperm under the skin of the female's arms and she carries the sperm around with her until she is ready to lay her big jelly mass of a million eggs.

These days every one wants to be seen as green.  Larry Seltzer over on PC Mag has an interesting story from McAfee Avert Labs that using anti-virus on your computer is green. The reasoning goes that by keeping your computer free of malware, your CPU usage stays lower, thereby using less energy and lowering your carbon footprint.  OK, I get it.  My question is what about all of the extra CPU cycles that some of the bloated endpoint security suites use on all of these machines they are installed on.  I would bet that they far outweigh any energy savings from clean machines. 

I guess in place of wrapping yourself in the flag, the thing to do now is wrap yourself in the green thing. How long will it be until some company hires Al Gore to hawk thier technology. In the meantime I would beware of Jolly Green Giants.