Many users were not happy with the installation process for Silverlight verses the seamless viewing of flash.

Streaming Media has a post that has them wondering about this deal.

Adobe got a big customer win this week when they announced that MLB.com would move from the Silverlight platform back to Flash for all their live and on-demand video. The two-year deal, which kicks off in 2009, will also see MLB providing a rich Internet application (RIA) built using Adobe AIR that will give viewers access for yet to be announced features outside of a browser. The new rich Internet application will not replace the current MLB TV Mosaic app and will be a completely new piece of software.

That being said, there are quite a few interesting questions one has to ask based on this new deal, which unfortunately MLB won’t answer at this time. For starters, since the majority of content delivery networks still charge more to deliver Flash streaming over Silverlight, is MLB’s cost to deliver video now going up? And if it does, will it have any real impact on the cost of MLB TV? Looking at the MLB.com website, I can’t find any pricing yet for the MLB TV service in 2009. Also, since the Flash Media Server can’t scale as well as Windows Media in a live environment, I think a real possibility exists that MLB could move to a dual-vendor strategy for their video delivery. While Akamai has all of MLB.com’s video business today, I would not be surprised if over time, some of MLB’s traffic was split between Akamai and another provider.

My question is “IsVoiceCon a viable conference?”  or should it be called “AppCon” - Voice is only a feature of Unified Communications.  In fact one of the most impressive things that I saw was IBM’s presence integration within Sametime to accomadate social networks.

Here is Blair’s post and some snips.

Regarding who are the key UC professional services firms, there are several types of organizations – the UC vendors themselves, system integrators, professional services organizations, and large management consultancies. Some of the key professional services providers are Dimension Data, INX, Touchbase, IBM Global Services, and of course the Accentures and companies like Avanade (IT consultancy dedicated to the Microsoft platform). Many vendors recognize the importance of professional services in UC implementations, and several are revving up their practices for UC. Aspect recently announced its foray into UC professional services and systems integration with a new practice designed to assist organizations with the planning, implementation and support of UC products across their enterprises and into their contact centers.

IBM Global Services (IGS) is an important part of IBM’s overall UC program, offering a comprehensive suite of strategy-and-assessment and architecture-and-design services, as well as integration, deployment and managed services. IBM is one of the few companies that really emphasizes its professional services organizations – as well it should. This group provides an important competitive edge to IBM, which recognizes the complexities of UC and how important it is to integrate with existing business processes and applications.

Another question I didn’t really get time to respond to was about mobile UC and the role of fixed mobile convergence (FMC) and UC. Mobile UC capabilities include the ability to transfer mobile calls to a landline phone and vice versa with the click of a mouse. Extending enterprise telephony features to the mobile environment generally involves integration with the corporate IP PBX. Some UC offerings make it possible to transfer mobile calls to your landline phone and vice versa with the click of a mouse. Mobile UC capabilities make it possible to extend the desktop communication environment to the mobile device when needed, giving mobile workers access to features like conferencing, unified messaging, integration with the calendar and enterprise directory, and other communication capabilities – so mobile workers can be just as productive when out of the office as when in the office.

When those two issues are lock solid then the era of cloud computing will be mainstream.

Here is the information on Amazon CloudFront.

Hello Amazon CloudFront, the new Amazon Web Service for content delivery. It integrates seamlessly with Amazon S3 to provide low-latency distribution of content with high data transfer speeds through a world-wide network of edge locations. It requires no upfront commitments and is a pay-as-you-go service in the same style as the other Amazon Web Services.

Amazon CloudFront has been designed to be fast; the service will cache copies of the content in edge locations close to the end-user’s location, significantly lowering the access latency to the content. High sustainable data transfer rates can be achieved with the service especially when distributing larger objects.

Amazon CloudFront will be useful for many different application scenarios such as giving your customers low-latency access to popular objects and protecting your site from popularity surges; other popular examples are low-cost delivery of rich media and sustainable fast transfer rates for software distributions.

See also the posting on the AWS Developer weblog and at Rightscale.

Amazon has seen success with the scalability, reliability and cost-effectiveness of Amazon S3 and now with the integration with Amazon EC2 it is easy to distribute Amazon S3 content world-wide. The combination of the two services is really powerful: Amazon S3 will give you durable storage of your data, and the network of edge locations on three continents used by the Amazon CloudFront will deliver the content with low latency from the most appropriate location.

The network of edge locations

To ensure low-latency delivery, Amazon CloudFront uses a network of edge locations world-wide:

• United States: Ashburn (VA), Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle and St. Louis
• Europe: Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt and London
• Asia: Hong Kong and Tokyo

These edge locations work together to direct customers’ requests to the edge location that can provide the response with the lowest latency.

Simplicity

Because Amazon CloudFront follows the core principles of all Amazon Web Services it is a unique content delivery service. The simplicity in getting started has been described by many of our early customers as a very important feature.

Using Amazon CloudFront is dead simple:

1. Put your objects in an Amazon S3 bucket.
2. Call the CreateDistribution API with the name of the S3 bucket, which will return your distribution’s domain name.
3. Use the new domain name in urls on your web or in your application. Whenever these urls are accessed CloudFront will determine the optimal edge location from where to serve your content.

The second Amazon Web Services principle that sets Amazon CloudFront apart is that no upfront commitments are necessary and you only pay for what you have used. There are no upfront fees or high volume requirements and no negotiations are necessary because we have published low prices from the start. This brings content delivery in the hands of all businesses, and you can exploit the benefits of Amazon’s world-wide network of edge locations, regardless of whether you are a highly popular website, a small blog, a complex enterprise application or a developer doing some prototyping.

A core distributed systems component

It is not uncommon to think about a service for content delivery such as Amazon CloudFront only in the context of media distribution for web sites, but it actually plays a more fundamental role.

There are two main technology components to such a service; the first is intelligent request routing, which routes requests to the location that can best serve the user given a series of requirements and the status of the network. The second technology component is that of object caching, which is a fundamental building block in both operating systems and in distributed systems.

Caching is an essential technique that is used to make sure that components can operate at the fastest speed possible, to overcome the performance differences that exist in systems. For example CPU’s have caches that are much faster than memory, memory works as caches for disks, local disks can function as caches for remote disks, etc.

In distributed systems caching is primarily used to provide fast access to popular objects that are located in remote storage servers. These systems of caching servers often cooperate to create massive aggregate world-wide capacity to provide low latency access. And by using globally decentralized cache servers for distribution, very high data transfer speed can be achieved.

Caching technology has long been the center piece of computer systems research and in Amazon CloudFront we use the type of highly advanced algorithms for reliability and scale that you have come to expect from our Amazon services.

Innovation coming from startups again and getting assets from Transmeta will help Novafora.

The acquisition agreement provides, among other things, that Transmeta may not enter into any future licensing transaction prior to closing of the merger without Novafora’s consent. The acquisition is expected to close in the first quarter of 2009. After the closing of the merger, Transmeta’s common stock will cease to trade.

Formed in 2004, Novafora is a video processor company enabling OEMs to deliver on the promise of the digital video revolution.  Zaki Rakib is CEO and co-founder of the startup. Before Novafora, Zaki co-founded Terayon Communication Systems in 1993.

Shlomo Rakib is chairman, CTO and co-founder of the firm. He also co-founded Terayon and served as its chairman and CTO. At Terayon, he is said to have invented the S-CDMA technology that fueled Terayon’s initial success and which was incorporated into the widely-adopted DOCSIS 2.0 cable data standard.

My good friend and VP and GM of Newsgator Jeff Nolan had live notes.

Here is the official Microsoft release on Online Exchange and SharePoint - Exchange Online and SharePoint Online Out of Beta and Ready for Purchase.

Microsoft announces new customers, partners, and online services.

SAN FRANCISCO — Nov. 17, 2008 — Today, at a launch event in San Francisco, Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division at Microsoft Corp., was joined by customers and partners to announce the availability of Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft SharePoint Online for businesses of all sizes in the United States. These subscription services offer businesses a new way to purchase, deploy and manage the industry-leading e-mail and calendaring solution, and the industry-leading solution for portals and collaboration.

“Customers are embracing Microsoft’s software and services strategy en masse because of the choice and flexibility it gives them,” Elop said. “Today, we bring business-class communications and collaboration technologies to the cloud, and we are committed to delivering more capabilities in the months ahead. No one has done what we are doing at this scale, and I’m certain that our customers will continue to take on these solutions as our offerings grow.”

Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division, speaking about the new Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft SharePoint Online to business customers and industry partners. San Francisco, Nov 17, 2008. Click for high-res version.

Businesses can buy or try the new services at http://www.microsoft.com/online. As part of the Microsoft Online Services product family, Exchange Online and SharePoint Online are available separately or as a suite together with Office Live Meeting for conferencing, Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services and Microsoft Office Communications Online for instant messaging and presence.

Customers Embrace Microsoft Online Services

A growing number of companies, from small businesses to large enterprises, are adopting Microsoft Online Services. In just the past year, Microsoft has sold more than a half million seats for Microsoft Online Services, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Office Communications Online. New customers include Pitney Bowes Inc.; CG Healthcare Solutions LLC, an affiliate of Cowan, Gunteski & Co., P.A.; Clean Power Research LLC; Corefino Inc.; and Fair Isaac Corp. To help businesses plan, deploy and operate the services, Microsoft is releasing new Microsoft Solution Accelerators for Microsoft Online Services. These include new automated tools and guidance, such as the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit, the Infrastructure Planning and Design Guide and the Microsoft Operations Framework Companion Guide. More information about Microsoft Solution Accelerators for Microsoft Online Services is online at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd277934.aspx.

“With Microsoft Online Services, Eddie Bauer was able to improve associate productivity in a cost-effective manner — and that translates to a high return on our IT investment,” said Rich Mozack, chief information officer at Eddie Bauer Inc. “The online aspect of the solution enabled us to transition from our old environment to the Microsoft tools very quickly and smoothly. On a Friday, 1,400 of Eddie Bauer’s associates went home as Lotus Notes users, and on Monday they came to work as Outlook users with Microsoft Online Services.”

Partners See Opportunity in Microsoft Online Services

Since July 2008, more than 1,500 companies have enrolled in the Microsoft Partner Program for Microsoft Online Services, with 100 more joining every week. These companies are realizing a wide range of revenue opportunity that spans reselling, migration, customization, consulting, training, support and application development, and integration services.

Many partners are delivering customized capabilities for Microsoft Online Services. To increase awareness of these solutions, Microsoft today announced the Partner Solutions Showcase Program for Microsoft Online Services, and a Partner Solutions Showcase Program Award that is given to two partners annually. This award is designed to recognize outstanding application and integration work on the part of partners. Microsoft presented the first Partner Solutions Showcase Program Award to ThoughtBridge, which has built a human resources application on top of SharePoint Online. Partners can learn more about the showcase and award at http://www.microsoft.com/online/partner/solutions-showcase.mspx.

“ThoughtBridge recognized an immediate opportunity for building unique, vertical capabilities on top of Microsoft SharePoint Online, and we see tremendous opportunity to grow our business around this model,” said Tim Tisdale, chief technology officer and co-founder of ThoughtBridge. “Already, we’re seeing strong customer demand for migration, customization and integration services. Microsoft Online Services give us the agility to address this demand with fewer resources. We think this opportunity will bring us the bulk of our revenue moving forward.”

New Products in the Microsoft Online Services Family

Microsoft also outlined its plans to offer new solutions as a part of Microsoft Online Services in the next year. In addition to Office Communications Online, Microsoft is planning to offer a Microsoft Online Services solution that will provide IT management and security capabilities for businesses, enabling IT managers to secure and manage desktops using a Web-based subscription service. These online services will be based on components from existing systems management, identity and security offerings, and will complement Microsoft’s on-premise solutions, as customers begin to adopt cloud-based computing to address specific needs.

More information on Microsoft Online Services is available at http://www.microsoft.com/online and in the new software plus services virtual pressroom for the Microsoft Business Division at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/Officesoftwareplusservices/default.mspx. In addition, a webcast of today’s event can be viewed at http://wm.istreamplanet.com/customers/ms/300_ms_usosl_081117.asx.

While cruising through the feed-reader, I came upon Eric Sieberts recent post regarding the release of the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), version 1.2. Eric notes that “… the specification dictates what must be done to secure a server that may store or process cardholder data, but if that server happened to be a virtual guest the host server would not be considered in the scope of the specification.” He then wonders (out loud) what could be the cause for this lack of attention (see quote below).

This post reminded me of a conversation I had in August with Scott Loftesness of Glenbrook Partners, who arguably knows more about technology and the payment card industry than any five persons on the face of the planet. He pointed me to this article as to why failure of PCI DSS 1.2 to address virtualization won’t matter. The author, David Taylor, is certainly no slacker. He’s the VP Data Security Strategies at Protegrity , as well as the founder of the PCI Knowledge Base, Research Director of the PCI Alliance, and a former E-Commerce & Security analyst with Gartner. He takes a pragmatic approach, urging the reader to not wait for standards, and is pretty clear that he’s a believer in the value of virtualization. But there still seems to be some “buck passing.” He seems to be saying to the merchants who are subject to the PCI DSS standards:

• You need to prove to prove to an assessor that virtualization is secure enough to pass PCI audits.
• You need to cost-justify the amount of money required to do so.
• You need to push on your application software vendors to warrant the security and functionality of their products in virtualized environments … something they, apparently, are often unwilling to do.

To the first point, it seems to me that best practices, standards and compliance tools or other means by which assessors can address the issue with uniformity are necessary. There are a number of security specifications for virtual hosts (one of which Eric Siebert references in his post), which, if adopted, would be a reasonably objective basis for the standards and best practices.

With these standards in place, there seems little reason why the application vendors could not address the issues of security with respect to the use of virtualized infrastructure (the hosts and networks) as well as the virtualization of the applications themselves.

This same tale is going to be told multiple times. It’s not just about PCI, but also will impact a standards and regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, as well as (here it comes) the standards for data security and processing security in SaaS and IaaS environments … Yes, I mean “cloud computing.” The PCI industry has a chance to do this right up front, without the buck passing. I think I’m with Eric on this one.

Update:

Seems that while I was heads-down with a product launch, I missed Christofer Hoff’s post on PCI, virtualization and clouds .

Just to be clear — I agree with most of the points that David Taylor has made, but to follow along with this reference to the OSI standards vs the TCP/IP development of standards … what we’re missing today is the moral equivalent of the TCP/IP definitions of best practice and standard. If the PCI DSS folks won’t step up to it, let’s figure out who will.

And, in another interesting addition to the conversation, VMware has joined PCI. We’ll now see whether (and how) they can improve the situation.

VMware makes the case for PCI DSS compliance
…Today, with a nod to millions of merchants worldwide that accept credit card payments, VMware Inc. announced that it has joined the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) to incorporate awareness of virtualization into forthcoming versions of PCI regulations.

The company has also launched the VMware Compliance Center, a website dedicated to educating merchants and auditors about compliance in a virtualized environments, and the resource includes links to relevant white papers and webcasts. …

PCI Data Security Standard updated, but still does not address virtualization — Server Virtualization Blog

I am puzzled as to why they would continue to ignore virtualization. After all, isn’t just about every company virtualizing in some fashion these days? Are the people that write the specification parameters just ignorant of what virtualization is, and that it has a direct impact on their regulations? Or are they just trusting that we are all securing our virtual hosts properly and there is no need to address them? If that’s the case then they have misplaced a critical amount of trust as I am sure there are a great many virtual environments that are not properly secured. Likewise, ignoring virtualization completely greatly reduces the effectiveness of their efforts to secure environments that deal with cardholder data. It’s essentially fortifying everything within a castle, but leaving the front gate open.

StorefrontBacktalk - Why PCI 1.2 Ignoring Virtualization Won’t Matter

… The issue is more than just PCI compliance. It’s about reliability, performance and data integrity. The point is that deciding whether to deploy virtualized servers broadly throughout the enterprise should not hinge on PCI compliance. Once the larger application and management issues are addressed to the satisfaction of the head of IT infrastructure, and the controls documentation is put in place, then PCI compliance becomes a minor issue by comparison.

Meet the new guard - Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford. Both are industry experts in the area of policy, technology, and innovation. More importantly they both have a global view. Both Kevin and Susan have long been proponents of ‘broadband everywhere’ and the impact to innovation and global leadership.

I’m excited to see this announcement and throw my hat in as a volunteer to the efforts of Kevin and Susan. This is a fresh change and a big day for broadband and all the innovation behind what broadband offers.

Crawford is a professor of law at the University of Michigan, teaching communications law and Internet law. She was a partner with Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale) until the end of 2002, when she left to become a legal academic. Crawford recently ended her term as a member of the board of directors of ICANN.

Werbach is an assistant professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the organizer of the annual Supernova technology conference. His research explores the legal and business dynamics of information and communications technologies. During the Clinton administration, he served as counsel for new technology policy at the FCC.

“The teams will begin their efforts today, and will ensure that senior appointees have the information necessary to complete the confirmation process, lead their departments, and begin implementing signature policy initiatives immediately after they are sworn in,” the Obama transition office said.

The pending deal has to do with an interoperability deal between Microsoft’s Office Communications and Sametime. Word has it that there will be a major customer implementation (one IBM UC large customers and one large Microsoft customers) to showcase this new partnership. Specifically I understand that IBM and Microsoft will federate their presence across platforms. I’ll let the two companies talk more about it tomorrow. Bottom Line the conversation was very positive yesterday on the Microsoft and IBM Unified Communications partnership.

Today’s business reality business challenges and current climate
- speed and agility verses cost cutting
- gorwth and innovation verses project freezing
- collaborative culture verses immediate ROI
- change management verses extract more value from current investments
- social responsibility verses green business

Talking about communications and collaboration overload. Instead of making life easier many Unified Communications solutions introduces more complexities. New sets of tools being used by new generation of users (e.g. blogging and twitter).

Bruce talks about a new challenge: instead of focusing on the back end focus on the front end - to make it easy and intuitive to find others and connecting with them. Goal: to share information among users. Key to success ease of use for users.

Find, Reach, and Collaborate = Unified User Experience

IBM is looking at new social tools and technologies to integrate into their UC platform. Integration social networking (not sure what he means by that). Critical to IBM is delivering a software platform. They (IBM) think of Unified Communications as a system not a product.

IBM’s platform is SameTime. Bruce is talking about Lotus and how this isn’t the old Lotus. I’ve said it before (and other agree) that Lotus is bad for the IBM Sametime brand. The data that Bruce is saying is that they have more implementations on non-Lotus environments. (my opinion: please rebrand this and get rid of the Lotus Brand).

IBM UC is Open - Bruce is touting the openness of their APIs and technologies. They are multiplatform. They support all environments in big and secure environments. I think this is the big story with IBM. They are being very humble on their technology leadership.

IBM is now giving a demo… Showing off the presence information in a fully loaded enterprise environment. In an email client they are are loading up presence information to do a real-tme chat but it’s not just chat - it has other features that leverages the chat and adds other UI features.. (I wonder how it works in non enterprise environments - how do they federate the presence??)

Konrad Lagarde is showing his prsence and how it can be manipulated for his needs. He is advertising one phone number that he sets up policy to redirect calls based upon rules. This speaks directly to the trend that the users are in charge of their environment. Very cool feature doesn’t sound sexy but very important. Just showed video support but the buddy list and presence is nice. I wonder what their XMPP support will be.

Demo of social features: Now IBM is showing social software support - can link into communities. Users can subscribe to communities a sort of “vertical twitter”. From a twitter like community a call can be initiated - a conference call - fully integrated. I really like this feature. Community tools are awesome. Not much more demo’d there. I wonder how communities can be constructed or do they leverage external communities like Twitter and Facebook among others. I wonder if they would be interested in OpenSocial or non-enterprise version of this system. I’ll see if I can get Bruce to talk about that.

Bruce is back to slides talking about the benefits (IBM pitch) - he is talking about cost reduction impact of IBM UC. Now he just referenced Facebook in how employees are using Facebook in sharing unsecured information but that is the preferred user experience for those users. Sametime has been used to integrate external Facebook apps into the enterprise rather than the “lock down” policy others have deployed.

Bruce is basically saying that IBM Sametime is being positioned and used as an integration fabric across multiple environments like IM and Facebook among other enterprise legacy systems and products.

Communications enables business process is the big buzzword that ties all this together. With collaboration tools as the focus on the front end and applications and business processes as the focus on the backend.

Ron Sebastian is now giving a demo around the real time capabilities to update data based upon the UI and presence information and integrating it into other system (databases, email, ..etc). Now demoing widget support that is the container for presenting other information within apps.

The keynote is being twittered by the elite twitter force here @blairplez @danyork @alexlewis @furrier @ccrowson @dnm54 @nora_freedman @VanessaAlvarez1

I came in a bit late but she is touting the awards and customers that are using Microsoft’s Unified Communications products. I see a video guy so I’ll keep the blogging short since a video from TechWeb will come out later.

Communication Server will come out in February 2009. She is introducing Eric Swift now. Eric is giving a demo. Demo of UC is showing the collaboration workflow of handling a basic conference call. Authentication is handled by Active Directory. They are adding IM capability into the conference call in context. Now Eric is adding video live as well in addition to the conference call. I really like how you an mute individual participants who are in noisy environments.

Eric is showing Firefox compatibility for non-Microsoft platforms. This is a must have feature for the world that is migrating over to cloud services and other non-Microsoft platforms. More impressive is the capability to mute land lines that integrate into Communicator. This is a pretty big deal to pull off and it makes the offering mainstream not a ’silo’d Microsoft’ offering - traditional telephony coming together with IP based software services.

Betsy is back on touting all the cost efficiencies that UC offers. She is talking about one open infrastructure to work well with existing systems. Betsy is asking for feedback and emails at voicecon@microsoft.com

She is talking about how the experience from the Office group and what they bring to the table in UC. Some have been saying that Office is dead and that cloud computing and things like Google Apps is killing Microsoft Office….(Hmmm this could be the cloud and edge based software model…hmmm more on that later).

Betsy admits there are implementation challenges. She is opening up and asking for input (very sales oriented). The major update is coming in February - Office Communications Serve 2007 R2 on February 3, 2009. (why is it called Office Communicator 2007 we are in 2009???)

I wonder if the all this open discussion will be related to the IBM rumors - I am trying to confirm that Microsoft is going to announce a deal with IBM on a common platform.

End of Microsoft Unified Communications Keynote

UPDATE: I spoke with Microsoft’s Betsy Frost Webb about the rumor that I heard this morning and she neither denied or admitted the ’so called’ deal with IBM which tell me that a pending deal is coming. A source told me that an announcement will come Thursday from Microsoft and IBM here at VoiceCon about a Unified Communication partnership. On Twitter Damien Mulley was saying that there was rumblings about a IBM and Microsoft ‘cloud deal’. I’m not sure this is the same thing.

PeerApp a Intelligent Media Caching and bandwidth arbitrage solutions for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), today announced that it has raised US$ 8 Million in Series B funding. The round was led by existing investors Pilot House Ventures, Cedar Fund and Evergreen Venture Partners. The funds will be used to expand sales and marketing operations worldwide to meet increasing demand for PeerApp’s products from the broadband and wireless markets.