Coty's Weblog

So, if you've got $48...

you can now get nearly immediate access to 20 machines for 24 hours, each with something a like a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth. This is made possible by Amazon's new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The $48 figure is relatively arbitrary. I picked it because you apparently need to get some sort of authorization to fire up more than 20 simultaneous instances. Amazon is charging $0.10 per instance hour. So, 20 instances x $0.10 instance/hour x 24 hours is $48. I'm not accounting for bandwidth charges, but the point is that you can get some serious computing done for not much money—or effort.

A few weeks ago at a dinner that I should have blogged but didn't, Jeff Haynie was talking about how surprised he was at how cheap dedicated hosting was. Jeff was quoting some GoDaddy prices, and they were pretty compelling. This EC2 thing, though, takes it to another level—particularly because of its elasticity. Let's say you want to do some web crawling, for example. All of a sudden, you can have 100 machines go to work for 10 hours for about $100 (plus bandwidth charges). That is pretty cool.

I haven't been able to play with EC2 directly, yet. The beta program was filled by the time I got there. Jesse Andrews did get in in time and has both written an article on Exploring Amazon EC2 and fired up a Rails app on an EC2 instance.

Microsoft and Vocalocity in the news

spkydog beat me to it, but I thought I'd also point to Microsoft's announcement today that Speech Server 2007 will support VoiceXML.

This is exciting news for the VoiceXML community. It is particularly exciting for Vocalocity, as we licensed some of our technology and worked with Microsoft to develop their standards-compliant implementation of VoiceXML for Speech Server 2007.

More information and comments from both Microsoft and our CEO, Mike Dickerson, on the agreement can be found in our press release:

Vocalocity Announces Strategic Licensing Agreement with Microsoft

Oracle, Oblix, Identity, and Integration

So, Oracle bought identity management vendor Oblix recently. I have to admit that I didn't get the significance of the acquisition at first. Then I read Oblix to help Oracle, PeopleSoft tools 'coexist' and realized what should have been obvious to me: it was about integration. Oracle previously acquired PeopleSoft—and JD Edwards along with it. Now, I'm sure there is a grand plan of unification—there always is. However, I'm also sure that it will take some time to deliver—if it ever does.

Given that, Oblix gives Oracle the ability to at least eliminate one of the single most annoying "features" of running multiple disparate application suites from a user perspective: multiple sign-on. Eliminating multiple authentication/authorization systems can also significantly reduce administrative and support costs.

This should have all been evident to me, as my old company acquired more than its fair share of overlapping application suites while I was there—and the integration was not easy. (That is something of an understatement/misstatement, but I'm not going into that now.) At my new company, I'm working to integrate applications from separate vendors using federated identity as a cornerstone. Agreeing on identity goes a long way toward integration, and federated identity offers some good patterns for loose integration.

Chad Dickerson gets mail

When I saw Chad Dickerson's Want a Mac? You’re on your own column, I thought, "Man, is he going to get mail." Since Chad and I use the same IT outsourcer, I knew that he had just gotten a new spam filter in place. Perhaps he wanted to stress test it. (Unfortunately, hate mail isn't necessarily going to be marked as spam.)

Well, Chad's latest Under Mac attack column confirms that he did indeed get mail—mail that he says "would have been kinder if I had just been unmasked as a serial killer." Alas, that is pretty much what I expected he'd get. It was all quite undeserved and counterproductive, though, as anyone who has read Chad with any frequency would know that he is a Mac fan. Not a fanatic, but a fan.

In a longer post on his blog, Chad really goes in depth discussing the challenges of supporting Macs within a corporate setting and well as cataloging the ad hominem attacks he received from fanatics via e-mail and on various web sites. Of course, the best part of that post is that Chad mentions my name for having passed along info. regarding an upcoming port of Connected backup to MacOS. It is something I discovered when my CEO became the second person in the company to use a Mac at work. (After me, of course.) Connected gives me a lot of piece of mind, so its absence on MacOS was a big concern.

I think it should be "Fewer Databases..."

But that is nitpicking at an insightful post by Chris Ceppi at his relatively new blog: Arbitrage.

…

Try to add up the number of databases on the network that contain  a row with your social security number and you get a sense for the distributed and redundant nature of the storage of your digital identity.

The integrity of these identity repositories is a factor of the competence (and trustworthiness) of any number of dba's +/- the level of process and enforcement of access control within each organization that stores my credentials and attributes +/- the quality of the software that runs the systems that house the applications and repositories.

…

With all the automatic password reset systems out there, think too of all the databases with information like your mother’s maiden name, your pet’s name, your city of birth.

Reducing the proliferation of all this “private” data is an aspect of federated identity that doesn’t get much play. It deserves more.

Good is great

Well, I mentioned that I got a Treo 600 in my post a while back on pTunes streaming. I still need to blog on the device itself, but right now I want to mention the thing that really makes my Treo worth it: GoodLink.

GoodLink software from Good Technology, Inc. allows your Treo to wirelessly synchronize with your Exchange server. Your e-mail, your contacts, your calendar, your tasks, your notes—all of it shows up on your Treo. Make a change on your desktop and it shows up on your Treo and vice versa. You may never synch. over a cable again.

The Treo is a great device in and of itself (and eventually I'll get around to blogging about it), but the Good software really takes it to another level. Good reportedly just received another $45M in venture funding. They have raised a lot of money, but I think they have a lot of potential.