New Simple Cloud Storage API Launched

PHP/Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, GoGrid and Nirvanix have launched a new low level cloud API for PHP called the "Simple Cloud API http://www.simplecloud.org/".

The API can best be described as low level storage focused API (An API for other API's). In a sense it's a way to create other higher level programmatic API interfaces such as REST or SOAP using an easy, yet portable PHP programming environment. The Simple API allows you to easily interact with a variety of cloud interfaces including support for File Storage, Document Storage, and Simple Queue services. The Simple Cloud API is not a web service; it is an API that exposes common operations in application services offered by different vendors, making it easier for PHP developers to build ‘cloud native’ applications.

According to the website http://www.simplecloud.org/, "The Simple Cloud API is here to bring cloud technologies to PHP and the PHP philosophy to the cloud. With it, developers can start writing scalable and highly available applications that are still *portable*. If you're looking for code to start playing around with immediately, you'll find the first file storage, document storage, and simple queue interfaces."

Interestingly the goal of API is not be a standard, but instead to foster an open source community that makes it easier for developers to use cloud application services by abstracting insignificant API differences. Another goal of this initiative is to define interfaces to be implemented as a new Zend Framework http://framework.zend.com/ component called ‘Zend_Cloud’. The Zend Framework will provide a repository of php appplication to host code for the Zend_Cloud.

Check out the project at http://www.simplecloud.org

The Underground PHP and Oracle Manual

This free PDF book is for PHP programmers developing applications for Oracle Database. It bridges the gap between the many PHP and Oracle books available and shows how to use the PHP scripting language with Oracle Database. You may be starting out with PHP for your Oracle Database. You may be a PHP programmer wanting to learn Oracle. You may be unsure how to install PHP or Oracle. Or you may just want to know the latest best practices. This book gives you the fundamental building blocks needed to create high-performance PHP Oracle Web applications.

About the Authors

Christopher Jones works for Oracle on dynamic scripting languages with a strong focus on PHP. He is a lead maintainer of PHP's open source OCI8 extension and works closely with the PHP community. He also helps ensure that future versions of Oracle Database are compatible with PHP. He is the author of various technical articles on PHP and Oracle technology, and has presented at conferences including PHP|Tek, the International PHP Conference, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and ZendCon. He also helps present Oracle PHP tutorials and PHPFests worldwide.

Alison Holloway is a senior product manager at Oracle with a number of years experience in advanced technology. She has presented at various PHP conferences. Most recently she has been working with Oracle VM.

Click Here to download this PDF book (6.2MB)

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Shareflow: It's Google Wave, And Available Now

From readwriteweb.com :

It was inevitable really. Ever since Google Wave burst on to the scene as the next hot thing, someone, somewhere was going to beat Google to the punch and release something comparable. That something is Shareflow, a new SaaS play by New York City-based startup Zenbe.

Whether or not Shareflow is simply an imitator is really beside the point. What matters is that it's available here and now, and it works.

Shareflow is a granular version of a flow-based collaboration; you can either view all flows or just single projects. In terms of content, it handles threaded comments, files of most types can be uploaded and previewed through Scribd's iPaper interface, there's Google Maps integration, images, and video. Like other Zenbe products, email integration is also a big component of Shareflow.

Part of the reason this doesn't look like an imitator is that the two major features that Shareflow doesn't really do very well are real-time document collaboration and chat, both of which are key parts of Wave.

Not A Wave-killer

It's doubtful Shareflow will be the game-changing tool that everyone has predicted Google Wave will be, and that's only natural, considering Zenbe isn't Google. Even if it was, the fact that Shareflow is proprietary means it will never get near the crazy level of adoption and interest that Wave will.

But open source or not, if you're desperate to start working in a manner that is similar to Wave, Shareflow might just scratch your itch until the big day arrives, just about two months from now.

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"Living Large: Small Companies Yield Big Results with Web Collaboration"

SMBs': Discover how to cut costs and stay competitive in a global economy through Web-based Collaboration.

For SMBs' doing more with less is a must in today's business climate. Virtual collaboration and online meeting technologies are advancing SMBs' reach without huge investments, thus allowing them to not only save costs and land more sales but to better educate consumers and business partners and serve a greater number of people lost by former logistical barriers. This report discusses how this knowledge transfer is allowing smaller companies to gain greater mindshare and reach new markets more efficiently and at Web-based speed.

Written by: Larstan Business Reports

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Business Colloaboration Opportunities around Google Wave

Business collaboration is where people assist and co-operate with colleagues and other contacts to further a particular aspect of the business that they share.

What if you could keep track of all the changes to a document (any kind of document, not just word processor files), without mandating that everyone use the same package (especially important if you collaborate with other businesses or even just people out side your business).

You would be able collaborate with anyone, at anytime with all changes and versions kept up to date automatically. Furthermore, all changes could be traced back to whom made them and when. All old versions of documents would be available for you to check information.

With the global economy tightening as never before, collaboration between businesses is absolutely vital to business growth as well as profitability.

Brought ever closer by technological breakthroughs and increased communications around the globe, today’s world is smaller than ever. The need to constantly grow, change and innovate in today’s business landscape requires a new approach to connect, communicate and collaborate, inside and outside the enterprise, to accelerate revenues and reduce costs.

Companies everywhere rely on positive and consistent interactions with customers, partners and suppliers.

Collaboration has been described as the next phase of the Internet, and a $34 billion market opportunity.

Collaboration Is a Key Driver of Business Performance

Collaboration is a key driver of overall performance of companies around the world. Its impact is twice as significant as a company’s aggressiveness in pursuing new market opportunities (strategic orientation) and five times as significant as the external market environment (market turbulence).

A global culture of collaboration exists, but that there are regional differences in how people in various countries prefer to communicate with one another.

American professionals were more likely to enjoy working alone, and prefer to send e-mail rather than calling a person or leaving a voice mail message. They are also more comfortable with audio, video and Web conferencing technologies than people of other regions and tend to multitask the most when on conference calls.

Europeans thrive on teamwork more than their counterparts elsewhere and prefer to interact in real time with other people. They are more likely to feel it is irresponsible not to answer the phone and want people to call them back rather than leave a voice mail message.

Professionals in the Asia-Pacific region, more so than anywhere else, want to be in touch constantly during the workday. As a result, they find the phone to be an indispensable tool and prefer instant messaging to e-mail.

These differences highlight an opportunity for greater cultural understanding to improve collaborative efforts around the world.

Collaboration can positively impact each of the gold standards of performance — profitability, profit growth and sales growth — to determine a company’s overall performance in the marketplace. “As a general rule, global companies that collaborate better, perform better. Those that collaborate less, do not perform as well. It’s just that simple.” said Jaclyn Kostner, Ph.D., best-selling author and expert on high-performance virtual collaboration.

Measuring the quality and capability of collaboration in a given organization presents an opportunity for management to prioritize technology investments, encourage adoption of new tools and open up communications lines for improved collaboration.

Google Wave is an incredibly smart tool that can turn any Web browser (even a mobile one) into an über-communication hub, essentially rolling e-mail, IM, social media and document sharing into one easy-to-navigate platform, er “wave,” that can be shared among different users on a single hosted server.

In Google’s own words, a wave is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more. Unlike e-mail, waves start out as a conversation with a set of users picked to participate in the dialogue.

Waves can have many uses in a business setting. For one, they’re highly collaborative. Wave participants can share and edit documents at the same time and use waves to track and complete projects without ever having to set foot in the same office. And since waves are live transmissions, employees can have faster conversations than they can by waiting for e-mailed replies. Waves also make managing multiple media easier. Within a single wave you can manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts, e-mail alerts, and more. As long as a gadget is open source, it can sit within a wave. Waves even come with a handy robot called Rosy, which can translate your typing as you type it into 40 different languages, allowing you to communicate with customers in real time around the world.

Collaboration Opportunities around Google Wave

What business opportunities exist around Google Wave? What can startups, software vendors, and consulting companies offer that could be profitable? Here are a couple of ideas...

1. Migration Tools and Services
   Companies today use Outlook and Exchange. If Wave is good enough, some of today's users of Outlook, Exchange, Notes, or even SharePoint could be convinced to switch, either in whole or just for a part of their workflow. Third parties could offer migration tools and services that allow companies to get started and port their existing data - Terabytes of emails and documents - into Google Wave.
   
   
2. Enterprise Wave
   The key to making organizations switch to Google Wave is to make it sufficiently full featured for enterprise use. In particular, it's hard to see anyone switching from Outlook without tightly integrated group calendaring, task lists, and mobile sync. Since Wave is open source, you could add those in and sell an "enterprise version" of Wave under your own brand.
   
   
3. Extensions
   There is no shortage of plugins, extensions, and add-ins to Microsoft Outlook: Think Xobni, Gwabbit, ClearContext, and many little helpers that can you extract attachments, schedule emails, or remove duplicate contacts. Some of these tools are highly profitable paid extensions, and it's conceivable that you could build and charge for extensions that add useful features to Google Wave.
   
   
4. Hosting
   Since Google Wave is open source, you can host the server on your own hardware. There's no shortage of hosted Exchange providers - a quick search will give you many offerings that will give you an exchange account for $9.95 a month. Similarly, you could host Google Wave accounts for a fee.
   
   
5. Wave as a Feature
   I imagine that this will be the most common type of use for Google Wave. Once it's released, websites will replace systems for commenting and user-generated content with Google Wave.
   
   

Doing more with less

As the economic crisis continues, technology leaders are faced with the challenge of considering how best to trim the fat out of their budgets. While some steps are obvious and necessary, others could be like a diet you've been cheating on; you know what you ought to be doing, but you don't always follow through.

Here are 10 ways to do more with less in tough economic times from CIO.com:

1. Architecture - Do it right. Yes, organizations are achieving savings, quicker time to market, scalability and redundancy with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). No, it does not have to be a huge and costly initiative. The SOA approach has achieved savings done piecemeal, via small reusable components. Prioritize new core business components, services for under performing applications and for systems with costly maintenance. Some organizations are finding SOA pays for itself over time.
   
   
2. Open Source. Much of it is prime time: Operating systems; Web servers; application development tools; DNS; Desktop Productivity Tools; Database and Management; Infrastructure Management Tools - the list is almost endless. Do your research, talk to people and companies employing the open source you are interested in, and move forward with these viable alternatives.
   
   
3. Collaboration. Share, share, share, just like your mother taught you. Share desktop support personnel with the unit across the hall, on another floor, the building across the street and even your competition. Share a network, a server room or a geothermal system. Share a Bloomberg terminal, a printer, or share a relationship with a vendor for better pricing on volume.
   
   
4. Consolidation of Systems. The consolidation of systems is a greater area of investment right now due to mergers and acquisitions. Even before the pressure of the current economy, many organizations were addressing the sprawl of systems developed over time by consolidation. More consolidation is being considered across lines of business, as similarities between products become the focus instead of differentiation. These initiatives can be costly and it's important to be aware that end-users and the technology team can become emotionally attached to their particular system, which can create a closed mindedness that may prevent the success of the initiatives. However, there is also the anticipation of future savings from these efforts.
   
   
5. Smartsourcing. Stop doing business that is not your business. What is your core business? Define it, stick to it and invest in it. Where are you spending time, money and resources outside of your core? Find an organization whose core business is one you could partner with, one that will reach economies of scale you may not be able to reach. Done right, organizations can save a great deal with this approach.
   
   
6. Renegotiate with Vendors. Everyone is trying to stay in the game, so it may be prudent to renegotiate and create a win-win scenario for all involved. If you have vendors you are happy with, don't try to wean down the number of vendors to save money. You are working with the different vendors for the skills or services they bring to your organization. Vendors are not necessarily substitutes for each other, so before cutting the number of vendors, try cutting with each individually. It may work best for both of you.
   
   
7. Improve IT governance. When asked to cut, don't ask how low, ask what? We all know best practice is for IT to be in sync with the business. Yet, business strategy is changing due to macroeconomic challenges. In order to prioritize for core business initiatives, CXOs are working together to rigorously scrutinize projects and priorities. This effort is resulting in monetary savings, better utilization of resources, and a better understanding of the strategic direction of the organization.
   
   
8. Increase IT expenditures. Done right, spending your money in the right place today can save you elsewhere now and in the future. Spending money on tools that will ultimately allow management to immediately cut certain expenses, such as travel, can result in a quick payoff. Investing in high-quality conferencing tools will facilitate workers to do more with less and collaborate efficiently. As business travel declines and use of external resources rises, conferencing can help bring in identifiable cost savings to companies who deploy it.
   
   
9. Stop buying storage. It appears there is an abundance of storage everywhere. In historical comparison, storage has become so cheap we keep buying more and don't trash anything. Disks will continue to perform at greater than 50% capacity. New approach: clean up your files, clean out your e-mail, let's stop hoarding and clean house. And while we're at it, let's take a look at server capacity. Does every application really need its own server? The answer is no.
   
   
10. Rightsizing. We're experiencing it in our offices and reading about it in the news. It's painful, we don't like it, it affects our ability to meet service agreements - and it is not always the best choice. Less systems support can continue to hurt the business. Although some think this would be a great time to "upgrade" resources, hiring managers are finding it difficult to find such resources. Those who can are staying put as they are fearful of moving in this economy. So although cutting human resources may achieve quick cost savings, C-level management believes access to and retention of key talent is the single most important issue for sustaining long-term growth.
    

So no more cheating on your diet. Managing technology in this environment means strict adherence to strong leadership, solid business partnerships, prioritizing for core business objectives, sharing and leveraging resources, and continuing to develop and deliver technical solutions in the most cost effective way.

SMBs': Discover how to cut costs and stay competitive in a global economy through Web-based Collaboration.

For SMBs' doing more with less is a must in today's business climate. Virtual collaboration and online meeting technologies are advancing SMBs' reach without huge investments, thus allowing them to not only save costs and land more sales but to better educate consumers and business partners and serve a greater number of people lost by former logistical barriers. This report discusses how this knowledge transfer is allowing smaller companies to gain greater mindshare and reach new markets more efficiently and at Web-based speed.

Written by: Larstan Business Reports

Offered Free by: WebEx Communications, Inc.

To get your free report click here.

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Google Wave: Redefiniing Communication

In May, at the Google I/O developer's conference, Google announced its new project: Wave.

Created by many of the same team members that developed the highly successful Google Maps, the preview of the service itself on Thursday was quite compelling, resulting in a rare standing ovation at a tech conference.

Its egalitarian and federation-friendly design is intended to create an entire open ecosystem for communication and collaboration that Google is not-so-modestly touting as the reinvention of digital interaction circa 2009.

Basically the idea is rather than using electronic tools to emulate analog communication methods, we should use the strengths we already have and do things you simply can't do in the analog world. Create a "wave," add people to it, and edit and collaborate. View all the collaboration in close to real time, and then view the history and evolution in "playback" mode.

Google has launched many communication services since its inception including Gmail, Gtalk, Google Docs to name just three, yet none of these have had such obvious business utility or attempted to reinvent the collaborative process from the ground-up.

"A Wave is a single shared space where two or more users can exchange real time dialogue, photos, videos, maps and documents in what we call a Wave. Everyone can reply to a Wave, people can come and go and you can drag and drop information from all over the web."

In Google's own words, Wave will "try out some new ideas" such as concurrent rich text editing – you'll be able to see on your screen almost instantly, letter-by-letter, what your fellow collaborators are typing into a message or document in a wave, unlike in instant messaging where you need to wait to see what someone is typing. (If you don't like this, there is a draft mode.)

Google is planning to open source Google Wave in the coming months while any developer can build extensions to Google Wave using open APIs.

"The way we think about Wave is that it's a communication system, a productivity tool as well where you can produce content but there's a very rich set of APIs that come with the tool and that of course is why we're releasing it to developers first," explains Lars Rasmussen, Software Engineering Manager.








Google Wave is rather confusingly a product, a platform, and a protocol. Meaning that you can use Google Wave by itself or write your own application that incorporates or extends Google Wave, and make tools that use Google Wave interoperable. The project is only open to developers right now, but you can sign up to be notified when they open the project to users.

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Trends in Enterprise Software

What trends will emerge around the enterprise software space as we head into what looks to be shaping up as a daunting 2009?

Here's a look at three trends I thinks have been playing out, and will continue to do so even more noticeably in 2010 against the backdrop of the troubled economy.

1. Increased software consolidation among big vendors opens opportunities for smaller providers.
   
   
   Consolidation has been the trend in the BI space, with Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion and Sun Microsystems being acquired respectively by SAP, IBM, and Oracle.
   
   When mergers occur in any part of the software sector, customers may take a breath to see what is going to happen to the products they use as they are brought into the acquirers fold. In the BI (Business Intelligence) world, the mergers of the last 18 months have created just that kind of "pause" effect, and it's opening up a real window of opportunity for open source companies and other more nimble start-ups that represent more modern alternatives.
   
   Large software companies have business models that require them to keep pushing the largest enterprise software deals, the largest sales, which means building bigger suites of software, so there's greater complexity and bigger price points which fuels additional opportunities for open source companies where the model is simple, integrated architectures. The cost, long deployment windows and complexity of existing BI technology means that it hasn't worked its way deep into the enterprise. Only 15 percent of users in the enterprise typically engage with BI software.
   
   Now when you have to get BI to those 85 percent of individuals not touched by it, you can get to them with lighter-weight, less complex solutions that solve the needs of the average worker in general.
   
   
2. Enterprises will be more interested in SOA and Web services-driven architectures that define newer software offerings.
   
   Large vendors of proprietary architectures will have a hard time adjusting and taking advantage of Web based 2.0 architectures and such. Smaller, lighter weight and open-source vendors will move more agilely.
   
   While larger software companies tout those architectures as well,what they are doing primarily is extending their architectures and exposing Web services to others for integration with other large enterprise systems. From that standpoint, Web services provide that connective mechanism so different enterprise software can interact. It actually can occur, and that's a good thing. But, that's fundamentally different from designing products from the ground up that take advantage of being built in a compartmentalized way to be far more flexible.
   
   
3. Consumerization of information.
   
   This is the least obvious and by far the most important and compelling over the long term.
   
   This will have a deep impact not just on IT and the way it implements and deploys and manages systems, but also on vendors who seek to provide solutions for that environment.
   
   Individuals in the workplace will want their enterprise systems to better reflect the way they are able to access and use information in their consumer lives. For vendors, that means rolling out software in a different way, and building experiences in the Web 2.0 vein using rich media software layers and the like. If you don't have the elegance of the best desktop applications built into a pure Web design, you will disappoint many of these workers who expect better experiences in online or Web applications.