CA announced an OEM partnership intended to enhance CA’s Data Center Automation offerings with the process automation technology from Opalis. The joint technology solutions are intended to help IT groups implement policy driven automation for change, configuration, and provisioning processes, as well as for automation of complex, high volume work loads. This allows customers to anticipate demand fluctuations and adjust the infrastructure before service is impacted.
Our take: Were impressed with the way that CA is determined to address bread-and-butter issues for IT groups. Over the past few years, CA has really focused and its showing up in a suite of products that make sense. CA is becoming a rare fluff-free zone in an industry full of vaporware.

IBM At a kickoff event at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, five of IBMs top scientists met with students and alumni of the school, along with other invitees from the entertainment industry, to Imagine the World in 2050. The event is the first phase of an expected collaboration between IBM and USC to explore how combining creative vision and insight with science and technology trends might fuel novel solutions to the most pressing problems and opportunities of our time. The event was also aimed at giving filmmakers access to IBM scientists for new ideas about the trajectories of science and technology as they create new films and for IBM to tap into the ideas of Hollywoods current and future creative minds.
Our take: Somebody at IBM has too much time on their hands.

MICROSOFT announced a data storage and Web software system, called Live Mesh, intended to blur the distinction between software running on Windows and services that will be delivered to various electronic devices. The term Live Mesh refers to the movement of software applications and services from PCs to centralized data centers, where they are made available via the Internet.
Our take: Based upon Microsofts past performance with computer architectures that combine the Internet with PCs, Live Mesh will create massive security problems, open doors to hackers, and make PCs less stable. Unfortunately, that all too likely scenario is probably unavoidable due to Microsofts industry clout.

ORACLE announced nine new and five updated ISV Solution Maps for Oracle Applications spanning critical vertical industry and horizontal business processes. These provide customers with a complete view of the vertical industry and horizontal business process solutions available from Oracle and complimentary offerings from its ISV partners. The new maps cover semiconductors, consumer electronics, manufacturing services, media/entertainment, natural resources, oil and gas, and a new horizontal business process map for on-demand CRM.
Our take: Our impression is that Oracle marketing is trying to get some sort of conceptual handle on the various kinds of activities that are going on in the real world. In our experience, this kind of positioning, while popular among marketing professionals, has very little importance to anybody who actually builds or buys software.

SAP announced the formation of an enterprise virtualization community that supposedly unites AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, Intel Corporation, NetApp, Novell, Red Hat, Sun, and Vmware. The community aims to develop new strategies for business process driven virtualization to help companies cut costs while increasing efficiencies.
Our take: Much ado about next to nothing. As far as we can tell, the term virtualization is almost meaningless. According to techencyclopedia.com, there are precise meanings for the terms when it comes to hardware (i.e., multiple operating systems on the same hardware) and when it comes to storage (i.e., consolidating multiple devices into a logical view) but when it comes to everything else, vendors use the term for virtually anything [and] numerous technologies fall under the umbrella of application virtualization, some of which have been around for decades.