Green Channel: Features

New York City's Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers is saving power and money by replacing its desktop computers with thin clients running virtualized operating systems.

Even tech companies need an IT overhaul from time to time. Case in point: Last year, a Canadian software developer (who preferred to remain nameless for the purposes of this story) called my team at Microtek to give its server room a badly needed upgrade.

Faced with the continued commoditization of servers, IT vendors this year will try to differentiate their offerings by moving toward more highly integrated, unified compute platforms.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to moderate an HP-sponsored meeting on the subject of virtualization. Predictably, most of the discussion (attended by press and vendors including Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware) focused on cloud computing. It was a pretty lively session, but what I want to address here is an HP product portfolio called "IT Financial Management" that was discussed, along with its implications for cloud computing. As you might guess, the product focuses on financial analysis of IT operations, which is extremely relevant to the adoption of cloud computing.

In last week's post, I discussed why dev/test can be a good first use of cloud computing. Without rehashing the entire post, it's clear that dev/test is often hampered in its activities by the difficulty of getting enough computing resources to its job.

At Storage Networking World a couple of weeks ago, the focus was on solid-state drives and cloud technologies.

Highlights and lowlights from this year's show: Cloud talk eclipsed by real-life rain, too many #oow09 tweets, not enough specifics about Fusion or Java plans, and an action-packed visit by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

When Microsoft's storage service for Sidekick users broke down, cloud computing questions sprang up -- both fair and unfair.

Did you think all those legacy apps would just float up into someone else's cloud infrastructure? Management, licensing and migration concerns highlight the list of troubles that vendors are now trying to address.

Both tech vendors are aiming to change the rules of game for enterprise software. And while they're going about it with two different business models, the companies share some things in common.