If you attended VMworld 2007 in SFO, you will understand my confusion. The theme last year seemed to be, “We totally rock. Look at our cool stuff. No other vendor compares. No one else even understands virtualization. If you have not already virtualized your entire data center, you are losing money right this minute, you poor fools.” Even fledgling GCG staff were aghast at the hubris of it all. Only the pompoms were missing.

And this year? To paraphrase: Our focus is on providing business value to customers (yes, yes, yes!) by moving in three main directions: Virtual DataCenter O/S, the vCloud Initiative, and the vClient Initiative. Our roots are in desktops, and we are going after that untapped market. End users want seamless mobile computing, and we intend to deliver it to them. We aspire to be a platform player. Our partners are a key part of our success…

“JAVA” is, of course, the ticker symbol for Sun Microsystems. The news is that Southeastern Asset Management, along with the subsidiary Longleaf Partners, has become the largest Sun stockholder in recent weeks by accumulating a stake totaling 14% (107,719,299 shares) of the company. There isn’t a lot of information out there on Southeastern; their public persona is as the parent company of Longleaf Partners Funds, a mutual fund company that “Invests primarily in mid- to large-cap U.S. companies believed to be significantly undervalued.”

A recent SEC filing on June 6th disclosed that Southeastern passed the 5% ownership threshold and thus was compelled to report their total holdings. This makes them the largest single investor in the company by a factor of almost 2x. The next largest institutional holder, Lord Abbet LLC and their Affiliated Fund, has slimmed down their JAVA holdings by about 25% in the last reporting period. Other institutions are also cutting back on Sun stock in recent months, according to the WSJ institutional investor tracking service. Insider holdings (McNealy, Jonathan, etc.) have negligible holdings relative to the public float and their shares.

Taking a cursory look at Longleaf didn’t reveal a whole lot. They are value investors, looking to buy solid companies on the cheap and then reap the rewards when the rest of the investment world catches up. They have large positions in a number of companies, but don’t seem to take an activist role. They also aren’t technology-centric; their holdings are widely diversified in a number of different industry sectors. So why take this big position now? And what are their plans for the future, if any?

A speaker (Kris Kaspersky – who I don’t think is affiliated with Kaspersky Labs) at the upcoming “Hack in the Box” Security Conference in Malaysia is garnering headlines with his presentation, “Remote Code Execution through Intel CPU Bugs.” Kaspersky is saying that bugs in Intel Core 2 and Itanium processors allow hackers to remotely control or crash any systems using the chips. In his session, he will outline methods that bad guys can use to convert systems running these procs into robots or, best case I guess, just crash the systems outright. He will also discuss his new CPU malware detection research, which was funded by Endeavor Security.

  Kaspersky’s most outlandish claim is that these bugs can be exploited locally or remotely regardless of any operating system safeguards or security software. He also states that there aren’t any existing workarounds or SW solutions to close the security holes. Hmm…this sounds pretty nasty and is, from a computing standpoint at least, end-of-world type stuff. But, before we give in to panic and start the looting and burning, let’s consider this for a moment…..

Don’t just download our papers and scroll through our disjointed rants… listen to Dan Olds, GCG Principal Analyst, talk data center hardware and strategy with host Ashlee Vance of The Register.  From the The Register: Episode 17 of Semi-Coherent Computing…

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/The_New_Science_of_Visual_Analytics.html

Anything with “Analytics” in the title is going to make us sit up and pay attention. We at GCG are keeping watch on the growth of decision-making based on statistical analysis of huge data sets of information, and its sweeping effect on pretty much everything, from the course of treatment your doctor prescribes to the way a movie studio chooses to end the film you’re watching.

So what’s visual analytics? According to Jim Thomas, Director of the National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC), “Visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.” Uhhh… ok. Anyone else need an example? HPCwire’s John E. West illustrates:

Consider the news stream at CNN.com and imagine that you are an analyst employed by Amalgamated Office Buildings to monitor what your competition, ACME Builders, is up to. You might be interested in news about big real estate deals, large purchases of steel, new metropolitan construction projects, and so on. But ACME is smart, and they know not to let news of their future projects into the press before they have the contract. There are clues, and any of these news stories individually might give a hint about what your competition is doing. The whole story, however, won’t be clear until you put all the pieces together.

Just think about how great it would seem to be a smart-guy type – a “Distinguished Engineer” – who possesses a sweeping, all-encompassing vision of the future of IT.

Now imagine how great it would seem to be that smart guy, possess that vision, and be able to explain it in a comprehensible way to a bunch of dopey industry analysts who are all jacked up on coffee, Coke, and snickerdoodles.

If you also have the patience to talk details with small groups of the aforementioned dopes and answer their tedious questions, you’d be Anders Vinberg of Microsoft.

Our particular questions for Mr. Vinberg related to his ideas about desktop computing: Where will we be five years from now?

Microsoft’s commitment to virtualized systems has come along at just the right time for The Scooter Store of New Braunfels, TX. This leading supplier of power mobility devices, a Microsoft shop from the outset, was able to make its long-planned move to a virtualized, centralized environment and remain a Microsoft customer.

VP Gary Vogel told GCG that Microsoft made it “easy to evolve” to a configuration that has reduced their number of servers by 59%, saved approximately $500 per month, and provided enough headroom to add on 50% more applications in the future.

See if you can name the major software vendor from whom analysts heard the following this week: “Virtualization is our top priority.” “Virtualization needs to be ubiquitous.” “We will deliver cross-platform support that is standards-based and community extensible, with a…

A Real Sun Fan

 Jeff Whitehead, CEO of Real Time Matrix Corporation (RTM), told analysts on today’s “Customer Coffee Chat” call, “I’m obviously a real Sun fan.”

 And why not?  His Oakland-based startup – 11 employees strong – has overcome its scalability, availability, and cost challenges, and is signing up new customers by the boatload.

 RTM uses a patent-pending matching engine to provide streams of real-time information to its customers over the Web. They “unclutter the Web” and make it easy for customers to obtain the news, video, blogs, social media, and entertainment relevant to them.  RTM process 500,000 – 2 million articles a day and must be able to deal with “fast periods” of 100,000 hits at once.

Consolidation in Russia and the Commonwealth States? Da! Concerned about Green IT? Nyet.

Today’s IBM analyst call provided some good figures on what’s happening in their East Europe/ Asia territory and even better insight on how a behemoth corporation enters, and understands, an emerging economy.

Tan Lu, System z Growth Leader, explained that the need for growth, control, and security is leading to an IT renaissance in Russia and, in particular, to a renaissance of mainframe use. Siegfried Langer, System z Growth Manager, provided some compelling examples: The Central Bank of the Russian Federation consolidated 78 data centers full of homemade apps down to three, decreasing the cost per transaction by 10X. Russian Railways pared 50+ data centers down to three, which are now strategically placed along major transport lines.

The peek into the business and cultural aspects of accomplishing these projects was really thought-provoking. For example, while the “green” story makes sense to clients in Moscow According to Mr. Langer, everything is still quite political, and certain industries deemed “key” reap the lucrative rewards of that designation. and the surrounding regions, it’s not part of the business justification at this point. Their primary energy concern is making sure that they won’t be subject to brownouts in the summer. For the most part, Russian and CIS companies aren’t even breaking down power costs in their accounting. And some of them have very – VERY – favorable energy deals with the government.