So the acquisition rumors some months ago were half true. Atlanta based JBoss is being acquired by Raleigh based RedHat for $350M with a $70M earnout. It makes a ton of sense for RedHat to own JBoss in my opinion. They’re both based in the South and both are fundamentally open-source initiatives, but more importantly they target a very similar enterprise customer.

In my opinion, it makes more sense for a vendor like JBoss, that primarily is known for their application server, to be owned by an OS infrastrastructure vendor like RedHat than by Oracle.  RedHat’s stock price today indicates that the analysts are bullish on the acquisition news as well.  The investors should be happy with the exit terms, considering they only invested $20M.

The most recent $8M from Sequoia puts them at $11.5M total.  YouTube recently announced that they were limiting the running minutes on videos uploaded to the site in order to reduce the amount of copywritten content.

If I was an IP attorney, I would be incredibly concerned with the legal ramifications of making money on the backs of copywritten content.

I can usually rely on SandHill.com for thought provoking business, technology, and venture capital articles, but a recent article by Guy Smith falls short of the usual.

While I admire his ability to be creative in regards to what might constitute an enterprise mashup, the reality is that the engineering costs alone might far exceed what a customer would pay for a finished product.

I have obsessed endlessly about enterprise mashups.  Customers love what can be done, but the fully burdened cost of amalgamating disparate interfaces is expensive.  And you can’t just expect to create an application that becomes the “new interface” or console.  That’s an even harder battle to fight.  Dashboards by themselves are not interesting enough to rush out and develop mashups.

That brings up the old question of value.  What value can your core application add that’s not being supplied through another vendor’s API?  If you’re application is doing little more than tying a couple of APIs together, then neither is it that interesting nor is the barrier to entry in whatever you’re doing all that great.

For enterprise mashups to work, they have to be multi-dimensional in my opinion.  In other words, you create middle-tiers that exposes new functionality from what’s gained in mashing multiple APIs together, create your own interface on the other end and then add value to other applications that normally wouldn’t have any knowledge whatsoever about the mashed entities.  (More on this later…maybe.)

Object-oriented programmaging is full of boring examples. Not this one.

Link: OOP Concept explained: Polymorphism

Vast has been getting a decent amount of buzz today, especially given the TechCrunch story .

It’s Naval Ravikant’s new deal. I like the idea of content aggregators and I like Vast, but my very first search using the product demonstrates some of the inherent challenges with their approach.

They make structure out of unstructured data by assessing what they find during crawls of web sites for things such as auto listings from a dealership website. They essentially create a normalized view of things for sale.

Try searching in the Cars section for BMW as the make and 2002 as the model. The intended result would show me BMW 2002’s (the model) from the 60’s and 70’s. Instead, I get BMW cars and motorcycles that were built in the year 2002.

These types of problems are not insurmountable and don’t indicate a completely flawed methodology, but exposes some basic challenges with any product that attempts to make uniform presentation out of data that’s inherently unique.

Amazon announced a storage offering for third-party developers to use. They will offer no client UI of their own, so it will essentially be “black box storage” for developers who would rather not invest in the expensive infrastructure involved in buying equipment and software.

Personally, I like it. They’ve reduced one of the larger barriers to entry for developers that need highly-available storage. Developers are no longer remanded to purchasing expensive storage systems while in startup mode without sacrificing the need for high availability.

There’s a ton of new services that can come out of it. It really does change the game considerably.

I wrote some quick thoughts in September about applications like Onfolio. I didn’t quite get it and still don’t, but apparently Microsoft does. Parts of the new version of Onfolio will be a part of Windows Live.

I have written about the enterprise search space in the past as it relates to various topics here, here, and here.

Oracle is getting into the enterprise search market as was announced recently by Larry Ellison in Tokyo at Oracle World. Oracle understands the needs of enterprise customers in way that Google might not ever.

Here’s what I said a few months ago:

Google has been making steady strides into the enterprise market recently. But it’s a rather crowded field. Everyone and their mamma thinks they can offer a search product for business users just because they have some relative experience doing similar things for the internet at large. I’m bearish on these types of offerings that “integrate” end-user search capabilities with disparate repositories from a multitude of vendors. The IBM and Google link-up is slightly different, but generally speaking I don’t think that the Google Enterprise appliance will see wide adoption. Their’s one big reason: ACLs.

My guess would be that Oracle is doing more than simply indexing data on file systems and discrete elements in a database. Based upon nothing short of conjecture, I would guess that Oracle is actually adhering to the nuances of the individual applications that created the data.

A brief look at some of the datasheets for Oracle 10g Search appears to indicate that they offer a toolkit to create adapters for various applications, thus adhering to the target application’s ACLs and the nuances.

The concept of “federated search” in the enterprise reminds me of my recent post regarding mashups. In essence, enterprise search is a mashup using search as the value add. Mashups can be more than just restaurant or classified ad listings mashed with Google maps. The APIs don’t have to be dramatically disparate have well coordinated effect. Federated search mashups show us that the mashed APIs are more alike than they are different. Personally, I think that’s where real value exists in the enterprise: creating a normalized view of similar, yet intrinsically different APIs enhances user experience.

Oracle getting into the game surely adds more legitimacy to the cause, but it could serve to make enterprise search a commodity depending on what they do with it. This could spell trouble for the spat of companies that have cropped up in the storage market trying to attack the problem from within the datacenter.

The problem with that approach is that most datacenter guys don’t get what goes on outside of the walls of the raised floor. They typically don’t understand the real business challenges from a process perspective.

Oracle is lucky in that they understand both. If they capitalize on this, the Oracle Search product could be game changing.

Bill Burnham has an interesting assessment of Google’s new payment services and their inevitable quest to compete with eBay and PayPal.

My first guess: Google wants to use the Dell model of sitting on a pile of cash and earn interest on it for a while. It’s smart.

Link: Google Base Is The Merchant Of Record

Removable media such as tape and CD media disintermediates the data from the application that created it and thus the ability to quickly identify physical losses such as the one that occured with Deloitte and Touche recently.

A Deloitte employee lost an unencrypted CD that contained personal information regarding McAfee employees and their company stock option plans. What’s worse is that it was left on an airplane — not destroyed in a server failure that would otherwise go unreported.

This is a huge problem for companies. Deloitte is just the most recent in the spat of firms that have suffered PR nightmares by losing removable media. Time Warner, Iron Mountain, UPS, and Citibank have suffered similar losses involving removable storage media and personal information.

Portability of media is indeed useful, but introduce the human element and big problems arise. Actually, it’s not just removable media that exhibits this problem — it’s backup in general.

Backup applications create “backup sets” that usually contain media of some type — usually tape media since it’s relatively cheap. More recently, companies are using disk based backup since the price/performance ratio is pretty good these days. But whether it’s actually removable media contained in the backup set or SAN attached disk makes very little difference after the backup process itself has occured.

Backup applications themselves usually know very little pertinent information about the data being managed. They only know about physical storage descriptions like a file system and possibly a database such as Oracle or SQL Server. Backup applications know nothing about the value of the data itself like the name, SSN, and other meta data that may relate to that data.

The backup set, once created and populated with data, no longer has any meaningful connection to the process-based application that created the data. It’s managed independently and thus creates a huge problem on many levels in all industries.

The examples of this are fluid and the problem is obvious, but the most appropriate solution is far from easy and likely impossible. Why is it impossible? That’s a subject for a couple of beers and a late night. Wait — I did that recently….

The root of this problem is 30 years old. The file system, in it’s modern form, is not capable of dealing with the requirements of today’s datacenter and the compliance challenges exerted on every industry and market. It has long been used as a cheap and loose integration point between process based applications used by business people and infrastructure apps in the datacenter. Ineffectual database architecture by the likes of Oracle and Microsoft just exacerbate the condition. (Pssst Microsoft: adding relational database features to the NTFS file system won’t solve this problem either unless developers take advantage of it.)

Separating data from the business logic in the process of management is a bad thing. The problem will only get worse.

At what point do I need to stop adding web services to my blog or any other application? I’m not pimpin’ my blog with all the latest bits of code that one could drop into the sidebar, but I’m noticing a performance hit when attempting to load the first page.

Others have noticed too. I need to spend some time and start removing the bits of code that have been added to the sidebar and gauge which service is the root cause.

I don’t want to jump to any conclusions on which service it is, but I have a hunch. I just need to spend some time eliminating the possibilities.

Quick video on India’s prestigious IIT.

Update:  It appears that Google removed the video.  Sorry.

Read a great post by Peter Rip on mashups and whether they represent features or “standalone economic activity.” (I’ll be using “standalone economic activity” in a sentence as soon as possible by the way.)

The discussion really surrounds the question of value when you build on top of one or more APIs without having significant standalone functionality of your own. How dependent is your application on an API from a different company? If you remove one or more APIs are you left with anything of value?

Peter’s post actually reminds me of one of my own posts recently regarding a cliche amongst enterprise folks that suggests that companies divert customer attention to professsional services engagements and APIs when trying to cover up for product shortcomings.

Peter’s examples of enterprise application mashups are certainly interesting, but the problem with enterprise mashups relate to development and testing. Someone will come along and develop a framework that is aware of a ton of APIs that will allow “Great Plains and Salesforce and Fedex into a customer RMA/package tracking solution.”

But the problem is that Great Plains will make changes in their code that changes the behavior of the application and potentially the API. This means that someone would need to constantly test the framework and the interfaces with the mashup to make sure that nothing is broken.

This creates for a huge spaghetti strapped environment that has too much potential for failure. Centralizing the management, development, and testing of enterprise mashups is the only way to get this done. One throat to choke.

One solution is the push the responsibility of developing and testing the interfaces to the vendor themselves. This could work, but software companies won’t join a party unless they sense that they are being left out. So you have to get everyone in at once.

That’s a political fight if there is one. Does Microsoft really want to level the playing field with a smaller vendor simply to make life easier for a customer? Not really. No big company wants to relinquish their competitive advantages just to make things pretty.

Office Live went into beta recently. They’re making a noble attempt by trying to offer a substantial platform to small businesses. Some aspects of Office Live will suit the SME market just fine. It has low to no IT administrative requirement because it’s a hosted offering. Someone will still need to be a super-user who’s knowledgeable enough about broad aspects of the business to make Office Live work though.

But it won’t be really valuable to a small business unless it offers out-of-the-box integration with their own line-of-business applications. In other words, it needs to mashup with a credit union’s member services application and a small clinic’s patient administration application. Or else it’s just another repository that has neat places to put documents.

Developers of small business applications will need to actively determine whether or not an Office Live mashup with their own application is worthwhile. I think the small business market is under served and someone could capitalize by making vertical specific applications on top of Office Live.

Seamless integration is key especially in this market.

My iPod died today while thrusting about in the frenzied Atlanta traffic. I’m lucky I didn’t get into an accident trying to reset the state of the device while holding down the menu and play options.

No luck. It’s completely dead. It was doing really weird things since the last firmware update dated 2006-01-10. If I actively initiated what appears to be a suspend operation by holding the play option down, it would not power back up without being connected to my PC.

But this time it’s done. The PC nor any other source of power revives my fallen friend. We’ve been through a lot together. Farewell.

My only challenge now is deciding on another device. (How quickly we move on?) Do I get another iPod or do I venture out and get something else?