Silicon Valley Watcher - at the intersection of technology and media

Tuesday morning Intel (an SVW sponsor) hosted a media conference introducing a new Atom microprocessor code named Pine Trail and released Moblin Version 2 Beta into the community of open source developers.

There was little performance data on Pine Trail, it's primarily a shrink from a 3 chip to 2 chip-set, which will probably result in about a 30 per cent performance boost and extended battery life in new netbooks that come out in the fourth quarter of this year.

The more interesting announcement was the release of Moblin and its user interface, into the open source community. This mobile Linux is optimized for the Atom architecture but will run most Linux applications and Linux middleware. But to get optimal performance software developers will need to optimize their applications for Moblin. Intel says that the port will be very easy.

The user interface to Moblin is smart, it gives easy access to user's Internet activities, especially social networks. Users can see friend updates without having to log in.

More importantly, Moblin will make netbooks a lot less expensive if the manufacturers don't have to pay a license fee for a Microsoft OS. Until MSFT optimizes its OS for netbooks, Moblin should offer a faster user experience.

Intel down played any competition with MSFT, saying its OEM manufacturers wanted an option. Intel has been a long time contributor to Linux to ensure there is always a broad OS choice for its chips. And clearly, Mobil will compete with MSFT to some extent. It might even spur MSFT to produce a Moblin-like experience on netbooks, otherwise it might lose out if netbooks become more like notebooks.

Intel is trying to not make netbooks into a potential PC or notebook replacement because it's margins on notebook chips are so much greater than for netbooks. For example, it repeated that Atom is not designed for high-end games and that future versions such as Pine Trail won't play more than basic games.

But, Atom netbooks aren't that great at streaming video, at least not the ones I've played with. If Intel gives Atom good streaming video capabilities then netbooks might become a potential notebook replacement for more people. Streaming video capability might then become be the trojan horse for cannibalizing notebook sales. And if Intel doesn't do it, Nvidia could do it with its graphics chips for netbooks.

Will Atom-based netbooks become notebook competitors? Can Intel keep Atom down? History shows that low-end technologies will always become ever more powerful.

- - -

You can see a video of Moblin here.

Moblin Zone

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/reference/Pineview_Moblin_disclosure.pdf

Intel (an SVW sponsor) on Monday morning (May 11) is launching its largest marketing campaign in 3 years and its first promoting the company and not a product.

The "Sponsors of Tomorrow" campaign is focused on the people of Intel and will be initially launched in the US, Germany, and UK, then rolled out to more than two dozen countries, reaching Brazil and Japan in the third quarter. It is expected to run 3 to 5 years.

The campaign is being launched at NASDAQ in New York's Times Square.

In honor of the occasion, Heather Dixon, Consumer Marketing Manager of Intel Corporation [INTC], and Intel engineers featured in some of the advertising will ring the Opening Bell to launch "Sponsors of Tomorrow," the new global campaign emphasizing Intel’s future-focused brand. This is the first time that NASDAQ’s traditional bell has been replaced by another sound, the familiar Intel bong.

Vivek Ranadive, CEO of Tibco Software (Tibco is a sponsor of SVW) has been in Silicon Valley for more than 25 years and is one of its top entrepreneurs and very well connected. Here are some notes from our conversation:

- I'm a little saddened to see Sun go. Scott McNealy (Sun co-founder) helped me when I was starting my business by giving me a Sun workstation.

- Sun should have kept innovating. It was when it stopped that its problems began and top people such as Eric Schmidt started leaving.

- Larry Ellison seems to be putting all his energies into building an ever larger dinosaur. He just seems to be interested in the maintenance revenues that a business can bring in. Oracle doesn't invest in innovation.

- The new entrants such as Cisco Systems benefit from this deal because customers will be looking for alternative suppliers, they won't want to give Oracle all of their business. The same is true for Tibco, this deal is fantastic for us, we will benefit because customers don't want all their eggs in one basket.

- Java is a big a loser. SAP put a lot of work behind Java, this will hurt them.

- Oracle may have to sell MySQL because of anti-trust concerns.

- Open source is a big loser. 'Oracle and open source' has always been an oxymoron.

- Larry Ellison needs to show that he can reinvent Oracle for this new era of virtualization, and cloud computing. It's not clear that he can, he seems just to be interested in the maintenance revenues. He's said before that he doesn't believe in cloud computing.

- Larry Ellison has transformed Oracle into a private equity firm, and he's doing better than any of the private equity firms.

- Oracle might buy Accenture next, it needs a strong services company if it is going to go up against IBM. But there is just one IBM.

- - -

Please see: Mastermind Strategist Larry Ellison: Oracle Snaps Up Sun And Throws Down Gauntlet To IBM

Intel has been a long time supporter of SVW for many years. Intel has also been a pioneer in social media among large companies thanks to Ken Kaplan, Bill Kircos, Bryan Rhoads, Bill Calder, and many others at Intel.

In "Intel's Social Media Story - just the beginning," Bryan Rhoads looks back to when Intel first started and forward to what's ahead. This article is from blogs.intel.com.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By Bryan Rhoads

We introduced Intel's blog program 2 years ago this month. I'd like to use this Intel anniversary as an opportunity to reflect and look back at some of our social media efforts over the past decade.

Its not possible to go into every project and program in one blog post. Nor can I properly speak to all of the hard work from our various social media teams. So, I look to others to help fill in those gaps, but here's a high-level overview of just some of the activities to date at Intel.

We created Blogs@Intel as a new business tool for our customers and employees to directly communicate and collaborate from keyboard to keyboard. We launched the blogs on April 10th 2007.

Yet in fact, our social media story started much earlier. 8 months prior, we launched our IT@Intel pilot blog. It was a big success, so we launched more blogs, including this one. Moreover, the Intel Software Network started our popular developer blogs and wikis for software collaboration back in May of 2006.

Internally, grassroots employee blogging started as early as 2003 consisting mainly of self-maintained servers under desks. These internal employee blogs gained a tremendous following. Intel CEO Paul Otellini launched his employee blog in 2004. Other top execs and leaders followed throughout 2005 culminating in a fully IT-supported platform that same year.

Team-based wiki collaboration started in 2004, culminating in our enterprise-wide "Intelpedia" created by Josh Bancroft in November of 2005. Today, Intelpedia contains over 15K 30K articles from Intel employees defining, collaborating and documenting their part of the vast Intel workplace. Intelpedia was founded in the spirit of open information sharing and community moderation of content, much like the very popular Wikipedia.

We created all of these social spaces to foster dialogue and make important contributions to a widening range of issues relevant to our customers, to our employees and to the future of technology.

Since then, we were the first to offer a corporate blog in the People's Republic of China with Blogs@Intel China (ok, Dell may have beaten us by a few days in May ‘07, but I'll need to exchange notes with Lionel about that). We soon followed with Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and English blogs on topics ranging from corporate social responsibility and research to jobs and customer support. Intel's on-domain social media offering now totals over 35 blogs and vibrant communities.

[Intel is a sponsor of SVW]

Intel today revealed impressive benchmarks for its new Nehalem Xeon 5500 server microprocessor, calling it "transformational" in terms of it's expected effect on customer's applications.

The new chip represents a large jump in performance when used in data center applications due to integrated support for IT technologies such as virtualization and from Intel's ability to pack more transistors onto the chip using its latest 45nm manufacturing technology. It also reduces power consumption.

"This is the big one," said Pat Geslinger, senior VP at Intel. He demonstrated one Xeon 5500 based server out performing nine servers. Intel expects that the large cost savings data centers can achieve through consolidating servers and also from lower administration costs, lower power bills, represents a compelling reason for data centers to retire their old gear.

The performance and total cost of ownership numbers certainly do point towards a massive reboot by data centers installing Xeon 5500 servers, especially since current economic conditions are creating enormous pressure to aggressively reduce business costs. However, IT managers are very conservative and it can take many months for them to qualify a system and make sure it works with all applications. To help speed this process, IT vendors have already seeded Nehalem based systems with large customers months ahead of today's official launch.

Dell, HP, IBM, Cisco Systems, and many other IT vendors today announced Xeon 5500 based servers.

The high performance provided by the Nehalem microprocessor architecture makes the chip more competitive with RISC based microprocessors such as Sun Microsystems SPARC and IBM's POWER microprocessors. Nearly half of the server market is RISC based. This represents a massive market opportunity.

It is this threat to the RISC server market that could be behind reports that Sun has been actively seeking a buyer for the past few months. It is very expensive to maintain a roadmap for SPARC that keeps pace with Intel's performance improvements in its server family.

- - -

Please see:

Nattering nabobs of negativity nixed by Nehalem

- Upcoming Intel Chip Launch Could Spark Massive Wave Of IT System Disruption

- Dell Makes Big Bet On Enterprise IT In Bid To Boost Profits

Intel promises faster, greener, cheaper computing with Xeon 5500 | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

Intel highlighted some performance benchmarks, looked at specific servers, compared the performance against the previous generation chip, and found performance benchmarks that increased by more than 150 percent in some cases.

The company also pointed to enhancements in the memory subsystem, as well as the I/O subsystems. And it made note of the improvements that will enhance virtualization benchmarks.

IBM revamps server lineup based on Intel's Nehalem | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

(Tibco is a founding sponsor of SVW)

Tibco Software has launched its first hardware product -- a messaging appliance that can do the work of ten servers for one-tenth the cost. Its an interesting move for Tibco and it will be interesting to see how data centers react to it.

In terms of performance and cost, it is lucky timing since the market is predisposed to such things. Capital efficiency in data centers is more valuable now than it ever was.

The Tibco Messaging Appliance P-7500 encapsulates the Tibco messaging software within chips. That means the hardware doesn't need to deal with latency from operating system tasks -- it runs at the speed of Moore's Law.

Software running on general purpose microprocessors, as in servers, suffers from a lot of system latency. By incorporating the software into silicon, the messaging software can execute 10 times faster.

Also, the Tibco hardware appliance is perfectly tuned to the task. Normally, data centers have to provision servers and fine-tune them for running each software application -- that takes time and is far less efficient than doing it with hardware.

Tibco can update the software in the hardware through simple online connections thanks to reprogrammable silicon. Any improvements in software performance can be automatically transmitted and updated on customer installations.

Tibco's labs have tested the P-7500 handling 10 million messages per second -- software apps on a server top out at 1 million messages per second.

Tibco says that the hardware appliance replaces up to ten servers, and at a fraction of their cost, power consumption, licensing costs, plus no administration, and lower maintenance costs.

The hardware was developed as a response to customer behavior. Tibco noticed that its customers in financial services were moving IT equipment from New Jersey to Manhattan--some of the most expensive real-estate in the country. They were doing it to try to remove some of the latency in their messaging applications.

Vivek Ranadive, CEO of Tibco, says that for many of his customers, "the speed of light was not fast enough." The short distance between Manhattan and New Jersey was too long for some of Tibco's customers.

That's what led to discussions with those customers and the genesis of the the P-7500 -- Tibco's first hardware product.

Financial services companies are a target market for Tibco and they have been battered by financial events, which should make them a prime market for the P-7500. And there are other sectors that have similar needs. Ram Menon, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Marketing says Tibco's customer base has common requirements.

"It's not only financial companies but also large manufacturers who have high speed messaging needs. They are running large logistic chains and that generates a large number of messages."

It'll be interesting to see how Tibco's novel approach will be accepted by enterprise IT. These are tough times to sell infrastructure IT, but so far, Tibco has been doing very well. It recently had a stellar financial quarter with record profits.

Tibco is one of those companies that has been thriving despite the gloom.

Here is the Tibco news release:

Tibco Software is a founding sponsor of SVW and one of the top supporters of SVW--keeping it free to all readers. Its user conference TUCON 08 is on this week in San Francisco April 29 to May 2.

TIBCO ActiveMatrix to Provide Predictive Service Level Agreement Management for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

TUCON®, San Francisco, April 30, 2008 – TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) today announced it has added new functionality to its ActiveMatrix™ Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform to automatically predict and fix IT service problems before they slow down access to mission critical business information. The new TIBCO ActiveMatrix™ Service Performance Manager capabilities mark the next wave of SOA infrastructure software technology from TIBCO by moving into the realm of predicatively taking action to solve technology problems before they occur.

TIBCO Expands Leadership in Ultra-Low Latency Messaging with its First Integrated Messaging Appliance

TUCON®, San Francisco, April 30, 2008 – TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) today announced a significant addition to the company's market-leading messaging technology, unveiling a hardware messaging appliance specifically designed to accelerate the capabilities and performance of TIBCO Rendezvous® software. Building on TIBCO Rendezvous' breakthrough reliability, predictability and manageability, this tightly integrated hardware/software combination will offer improved application-to-application, ultra-low latency messaging throughput for mission critical data.

TIBCO SOA Management Platform Adopted by Business Service Management Market Leader

TUCON®, San Francisco, April 30, 2008 – TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) today announced that BMC Software will embed TIBCO ActiveMatrix™ in its Business Service Management (BSM) platform. BMC selected TIBCO ActiveMatrix because of its ease of use and ability to provide service enablement and management on a single platform.

TIBCO Expands Strategic Alliance with Infosys

TUCON®, San Francisco, April 30, 2008 – TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) today announced that it has expanded its existing eight-year relationship with Infosys Technologies (NASDAQ: INFY), the global IT consulting company. Infosys CEO, Kris Gopalakrishnan, will use his keynote speech at TUCON to outline how the strategic alliance has enabled TIBCO and Infosys to win new customers by delivering a unique value proposition based on the two companies' combined experience and market knowledge.

TIBCO Advances Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) with Closer Microsoft Integration

TIBCO Selects Silverlight for Rich Internet Application Development

TUCON®, San Francisco, April 30, 2008 – TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) today announced that the company is working closely with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to make it easier for customers to use their respective technologies together – giving them more power and flexibility over their service-oriented architectures.

TIBCO Spotfire Introduces Actionable, Real-Time Business Intelligence

TUCON®, San Francisco, April 29, 2008 – Spotfire, a division of TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX), today announced TIBCO Spotfire® Operations Analytics, which allows customers to deploy real-time process-specific analytics applications and streamline business process control across the organization. The new software embeds event processing into Spotfire's next generation business intelligence platform. With this announcement, TIBCO offers the only event-driven, closed-loop analytics software on the market for achieving actionable, real-time business intelligence (BI).

The Future of Software Infrastructure is set at TUCON® 08

Conference Gathers Leading Architects to Explore Best Practices and New Technology Across SOA, BPM and Business Optimization

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 24, 2008 – TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) today announced TUCON® 08, the company's annual user conference, is being held April 29-May 2, 2008 at the San Francisco Marriott Hotel.

TUCON 08 will feature keynotes from global business leaders at Allstate Corp. (NYSE: ALL), BMC Software (NYSE: BMC), The Carphone Warehouse (LON: CPW), Citigroup (NYSE: C) and Infosys Technologies (NASDAQ: INFY) . They will discuss how they are leveraging TIBCO's software infrastructure to achieve business innovation and agility to stay ahead of the competition.

TUCON 08 features:

• A choice of over 60 in-depth educational sessions across TIBCO Products and Technology including:
• TIBCO's Product and Technology Direction
• Service Oriented Architecture: From Principles to Best Practices
• Development: From Ajax to low latency messaging to standards like SCA
• Optimization: Event processing based solutions to Next Generation Analytics
• Process Improvement: Success Stories, Best Practices, and Implementation Methodologies
• A Solutions Showcase that offers a place to engage in one-on-one discussions with TIBCO product managers, professional services consultants, engineers and other experts
• More than 60 partners from 24 countries form TIBCO's partner ecosystem

Intel is challenging modders (hobbyists who alter the standard PC) to show off their creative skills in building Intel processor-based mods for an online competition. Intel delivers the unrivaled performance and energy efficient processors that modders can then build just about anything from, including an 18-wheeler Mac truck. Get a glimpse at these creations and vote on your favorite one by visiting the Intel Modding Competition Group on Channel Intel. Check out the contest

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/chipshots/chipshots.htm?cid=rss-90004-c1-192263

Now that you can stick a high performance PC in just about anything, I wonder what there is out there that you can't stick a high performance PC into? It would be interesting to see a category of modds that would be unbelievable. Such as a plate of Jello?! You'd certainly need a low-power chip for that one...

Or take advantage of the power dissipation and create a PC that also toasts Pop-Tarts...!

Technorati Tags: puppy

This comes from Intel's publicist Burson-Marsteller, I haven't had a chance to check it out yet... (Intel is a sponsor of Silicon Valley Watcher.)

Cool Software.com (http://coolsw.intel.com) is a forum where people -- from software developers, ISVs and end-users -- can submit and vote for their favorite software company or product. The site taps into the collective intelligence of the community and, much like the popular site Digg.com, utilizes user ratings to assign levels of importance or relevance to each company or product.

These votes and conversations provide everyone with the latest and greatest on software companies and possible engagement with Intel, and supports Intel’s efforts to encourage emerging technologies and companies. Additionally, the CoolSW site provides a forum where ISVs can raise awareness for their product and/or services.

Over on the Intel blog (http://blogs.intel.com/views/ ):

Kirk Skaugen, Intel vice president and Co-General Manager of the Server Products Group at Intel announced information about Intel’s new MP server platform Codenamed ‘Caneland’.

* Caneland is Intel’s new Xeon MP platform. It is composed of the ‘Clarksboro’ chipset and the ‘Tigerton’ processor.

* The earnings call last week saw double-digit growth in servers, both units and revenue. Both year-year and quarter on quarter.

* Quad-core has already ramped with over 1 Million shipped in volume servers

* The Caneland platform is tracking extremely well towards launch his quarter.

The main points of new information that Kirk disclosed in the 6 min video:

[Intel is a sponsor of SVW}

On Wednesday I went to Intel's launch of its latest Centrino chipset for notebooks. Everything, of course, is a lot faster, but what caught my eye was a new technology embedded in the chips which, although aimed squarely at business users, would be a god-send for consumers.

Take a look:

Intel® vPro™ processor technology. IT departments will be able to reliably manage both desktops and notebooks and deal with what plagues them most – security threats, cost of ownership, resource allocation, and asset management – and do so wirelessly.

One of the key innovations designed in Intel Centrino Pro – Intel® Active Management Technology – provides business-class notebook PCs with wireless PC management, protection and remote repair work thereby increasing productivity, IT savings and uptime.

For example, if a virus or other type of malware gets into the notebook, the Intel technology will shut it off from the network, and the IT department is notified, downloads software to get rid of the problem and repair any damaged files. It's all done in a minute or two.

This technique can be used for other things too, installing software across hundreds of clients etc, etc.

At first glance it sounds like many other remote management software applications/utilities that provide similar capabilities, what's new here?

It turns out there is a microcontroller (a separate chip) that creates a wireless back channel to a central location. This back-channel remains unaffected and is used to deliver new software and repairs--even if the notebook is disconnected from its main network and has been completely taken over by hordes of malware!

This Active Management Technology is inside every one of the new Centrino chipsets, but it is only used in business-class notebooks. It allows the notebook vendors to charge corporations a premium. However, it is there in the consumer notebooks too, it is just not turned on.

But it could be turned on with the right software and it could become a platform to deliver repair and maintenance services to millions of consumers! It's potentially a massive business for some future companies. Who will be the first to do this?

Best Buy and its fleet of Geek Squads running out to people's homes to fix their machines might soon become a thing of the past...

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Multitude Of Innovations Boost New Intel–Based Laptops›
NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO, May 9, 2007 – Faster processors and chipsets. Great-looking video and graphics. Stronger and faster wireless signals. Better security and manageability. Designed for energy efficiency to enable great battery life.

I really should spend more time with my sponsors. I spent most of Tuesday at Tibco's user conference, catching up with the the company's business strategy team and having some great conversations, and thinking I really should spend more time with my sponsors.

Tibco, Infineon Systems, Intel, Edelman and Cohn & Wolfe are part of a small, courageous band of of SVW sponsors. Tibco in particular, has been vital to this venture. 

Vivek Ranadive, the CEO and founder of Tibco is one of Silicon Valley's key players and one of its quintessential figures. He "got" what I was trying to do with Silicon Valley Watcher earlier than anybody else, when it was just a gleam in my eye.

Conversely, I feel that I "get" what Tibco is trying to do, as it forges ahead into new territory. And it is a complex new territory that goes beyond information technology as we've known it.

Tibco's focus is on enabling large corporations to move into the next phase of business automation, into the automation of the deployment of business processes.

This is not about enterprise applications, ERP, CRM, etc. and the dozens of acronyms and terms that became common in the lexicon of enterprise IT for the past 2 decades.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com talks all the time about "the end of software" and he is dead right. Except that he doesn't really mean it. What Salesforce is trying to say is "the end of software-on-your-server."

Tibco really is about "the end of software." The leading edge in the enterprise IT space is not about applications--server-based or delivered as a service--it is about the meta level above that layer. It is in the "wrapper" above where application companies such as Salesforce operate.

Tibco's focus is on automating and managing business processes, and building the service oriented architecture (SOA) that businesses need to quickly respond to a changing world. It's a changing world of competition, and also literally a changing world--rising temperatures, sea levels, and energy costs.

SOA is about reprogramming an entire business on-the-fly, it is about predictive intelligence, it is how large businesses will differentiate themselves from each other.

SOA makes IT strategic again because in a world where everyone has the same enterprise applications, the competitive differentiator becomes the automated business process and how quickly it can be deployed and combined.

The SOA world is a complex one because to get to that level means that a company's IT systems have to be integrated, real-time, and built on an incredibly flexible infrastructure. In the context of SOA, IT really does matter.

- - -

Some recent Tibco news:

[I should write about my loyal and very patient sponsors more often, my apologies! They make it possible for me to do what I do, which I enjoy tremendously. They are my co-pioneers in this emerging new media world.]

Intel says that more than 5,000 people turned up to its recent Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in Beijing.

It was the largest so far for Intel, and will probably get larger because of the size of the domestic market and the growing number of developers in Asia.

I'd love to go to Beijing, one of these days. If you missed IDF in Beijing...here's a foot tapping 5 minute video from Podtech.net (an SVW content partner):

Keynotes and webcasts from IDF Beijing:

• http://www.intel.com/idf/webcasts.htm

See all the coverage from PodTech.net:

• http://www.podtech.net/home/category/intel

Next Intel Developer Forum is in San Francisco September 18 to 20.

. . .

Tibco User Conference This Week...

Tibco has its user conference in San Francisco this week. It works with some very large companies and what it does is not easy. Integrating IT systems and automating business processes is "heavy lifting" and hugely important for any company--if you do it right.

The World's Largest Gathering of TIBCO Users

Some of the speakers:

. . .

Cohn & Wolfe's  Boomerang Blog

The Cohn & Wolfe office in San Francisco recently began blogging, which is a good thing, because it takes a little while to find your voice. It's a very nice looking blog but posts are not yet very regular, that will come in time.

Tony Obregon wrote the most recent post, dated April 13th:  Boomerang » Blog Archive » For Your Listening Pleasure, about the agency's new green practice.

It's OK to start cautiously, the important thing is to start :-)

When people ask me to recommend PR companies that have expertise in social media I have a few favorites but I tell them to look to see if an agency has a blog and bloggers because that is the single most important marker.

And check on the blog's Technorati/Alexa rank too. The rank doesn't have to be high but it will show if it is consistently relevant within its community, and if its community has noticed.

Basically, if a PR company isn't using social media to represent itself then how can it do the same for its clients? It can't.

Yet there are lots of PR companies out there that claim such expertise but seem to have invisible bloggers.

It's not easy to blog, it takes guts--but that's good because it becomes a competitive barrier to entry.

Actually, you need guts and cojones, especially in the snippy world of PR companies, where there are many that love to leave snarky comments, but few willing to use their real names, which is very cowardly imho.

[Cohn & Wolfe is a sponsor of SVW sister site New Rules Communications - - the new rules in media and pr.]

Technorati Tags: Intel - Tibco - tucon - Cohn&Wolfe - boomerang blog

Intel's PR agency, Burson-Marsteller says that there are some misconceptions in the mainstream media about Intel's new Quad-Core microprocessor. (Intel is a sponsor of SVW).

Samantha Saephan from Burson-Marsteller writes:

Since the launch of the Intel® Quad-Core Xeon® processor and the Intel Core™ 2 Extreme quad-core in November 2006, and the more recent Intel Core 2 Quad processor; research has suggested that there remain some misguided perceptions about performance, price and compatibility. So, in the spirit of the Final Four, and in honor of the 4^th of April, we’re hoping to address what are the four biggest misperceptions about Intel Quad-Core processors.

Misperception #1:

Why pay more for Quad-Core when I don’t yet need that level of performance?

At Intel, you’re getting better performance and better energy efficiency for the same price – Quad-Core offers up to 80%* more performance for the same price as Intel’s dual-core chips. These products deliver immense speed and responsiveness for general purpose servers and workstations and for digital media creation, high-end gaming and other market segments that crave absolute performance. Software developers are also increasingly moving toward per socket licenses which will lower software costs making now the ideal time to skip Dual-Core and upgrade straight to Quad-Core. (* - For detailed system information and performance claim, please visit http://www.intel.com/performance/desktop/extreme/3d_ray_tracing.htm).

Misperception #2:

My systems are already equipped with Dual-Core – now I have to take the time and effort to install Quad-Core?

Advanced technology adoption is not a problem. Quad-Core is easy to install, with drop-in compatibility with Intel’s previous Dual-Core platform. This also makes it easier on data center managers by streamlining the path to server consolidation. In fact, business data centers can achieve significant cost savings/server thanks to the optimal utilization, lower power consumption, and lower software costs of Quad-Core systems.

Misperception #3:

Before using Quad-Core I’d rather wait until software applications can actually take advantage of the performance. Besides, when it comes to some applications, Quad-Core isn’t much better than Dual-Core.

Server software has been threaded for years. But whether it's encoding, rendering, editing, or streaming - or running a variety of applications at once, an innovative Intel processor with four processing cores will deliver more performance and responsiveness. Check out what the press have to say about Quad-Core gaming on Intel processors: Click here http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTMwNiwxMCwsaGVudGh1c2lhc3Q=  and here http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2107337,00.asp

Also check out Quad-Core gaming at the 2007 Game Developers Conference and World Series of Video Games:

http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/2505/gaming-with-intel-quad-core-processors

http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1924/intel-gives-gamers-max-power-at-ces

http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1863/ces-2007-intels-world-series-of-gaming

Misperception #4:

Intel’s Quad-Core is ugly, and far from elegant  

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When performance is as great as it is today, customers don’t care about the intricacies of how the cores are connected inside the CPU package. Intel’s solution allowed a much faster time to market and Intel will have shipped more than a million of them before any other x86 competitor has shipped a sizeable volume. Using Intel’s industry-leading 65nm manufacturing technology also allows for smaller die size, better yields and lower cost. This also means better supply. So, it is a careful choice of performance, schedule and cost. Intel is already demonstrating 45nm processors which will further its lead in processor performance, innovation and nanotechnology.

For more information, visit: http://www.intel.com/quad-core/ and http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1139/idf-preview-quad-core-microprocessors.

Intel's new processor families are on track to deliver faster processors without consuming more power. The Penryn family will be released this year and the Nehalam family is due next year, The New York Times reports.

The chips will have wires as thin as 45 nanometers, a scale at which 2,000 transistors will fit in the width of a human hair. The resulting chips will have as many as 820 million transistors, making it possible for Intel’s designers to add parallel computing, energy management and graphics to the computing engines that are the mainstay of its business.

This news puts Intel - which has been playing catch-up on energy efficiency and parallel computing - ahead of release schedules for AMD and IBM, which have said they'll release 45-nanometer chips in mid-2008.

AMD's Barcelona is due out in late 2007, based on 65-nanometer technology with four cores. On Wednesday, AMD said Intel won't catch up with them until Nehama comes out in '08.

Pat Gelsinger described Intel’s approach as a “tick-tock” strategy in which it would make incremental changes with the Penryn processors and then more sweeping design changes with the Nehalam chips. The Nehalam chips will have as many as eight or more processing cores, as well as the potential for built-in graphics and memory control processing and networking.

Intel is a SVW sponsor.

Intel (an SVW sponsor) has encouraged PC makers to go beyond the beige box for many years. Here is Intel's latest challenge to PC makers, and this time Intel is seeking help from PC users to vote and comment on a variety of PC designs.

You can win $100 in a random drawing by taking part in Intel® Core™ Processor Challenge PC Design People's Choice Awards.

Intel will open a $2.5 billion wafer fabrication plant in China, the first major production facility there, according to the New York Times.

Labeled Fab 68, the new plant will join just seven other plants in the world capable of producing Intel 300mm wafers when it opens in 2010. But Fab 68 will produce only chipsets. Microprocessors themselves will not be produced in China. That's a distinction that won US government approval for the plant.

The move is a huge win for China, which is trying to become a high-tech center.

“The Intel plant is very symbolic,” said Li Ke, a senior analyst at the Semiconductor Industry Research Center in Beijing, a government body. “It is inspiring and will help to expand the production scale of the industry.”

Private industry has been relucant to move to China because of weak protection for intellectual property and the federal government is very concerned about China getting a hold of private sector technology that it can use for military operations. But by the time Intel opens its facility in the northeastern city of Dalian, the company will have opened production lines of at least two generations of more advanced equipment, Intel officials said.

While other companies have assembly facilities in China, Intel stands alone in the size of the investment and the nature of the operation. It's just Intel's third 300mm wafer facility outside the US. The others are in Ireland and Israel.

The judge in the Intel-AMD lawsuit ordered both sides to work with a mediator to figure out how serious Intel's loss of email is, InfoWeek reports.

Intel admitted recently that it had deleted some of the emails AMD had requested in discovery in the case.

The judge gave Intel 30 days to determine whether any of the lost email was relevant to AMD's suit and how important they are. After that, AMD will have two weeks to respond and Intel will have 10 days to answer AMD's response. All of this to be done under the eye of a mediator, who will report to the judge. Intel could face sanctions for the destruction of the email.

Intel in court filings on Monday acknowledged that for three and a half months after AMD filed its suit on June 27, 2005, a small number of employees whose e-mails were considered potential evidence failed to move all messages to their hard drives, which means they would have been purged automatically from Intel's system. In addition, "a few" employees believed erroneously that Intel's IT group was automatically saving their e-mails.

The judge considers the deletion unintentional but AMD is fuming.

"Given the obvious implications to the administration of justice, it is exactly right that Intel must now prepare a full accounting, fashion an effective remedy, and be accountable for the loss of evidence," Thomas M. McCoy, chief administrative officer and executive VP of legal affairs for AMD, said in an e-mailed statement.

If the judge rules against Intel on this discovery issue, Intel could be fined millions of dollars, or the jury could be told to presume the emails were damaging to Intel.

Intel's already delivered 17 million pages of potential evidence and will deliver 30 million more before the trial resumes in May.

We are pleased to announce Cohn & Wolfe as a sponsor of our new sister site: New Rules Communications - reporting on the new rules in media and pr.

It also marks the launch of Cohn & Wolfe's blog: Boomerang - What goes around, comes around.

I think it is important for PR firms to show how they are using new media in their business in order for them to be able to show clients that they understand the new media and how it works. This type of understanding can only be had by doing and not by saying or reading about it.

Tony Obregon at Cohn & Wolfe has been spearheading new media practices,  along with Chris Knight and Annie Longsworth. I'm impressed with the team at the San Francisco office and the mix of clients they have been working with. And it is a much different culture than the valley PR firms.

I'm always keen to be associated with companies and organizations that are trying out new things and there are many new things to try out these days. And I've turned down sponsorship opportunities with companies that I felt were not trying out anything new but just wanted to be seen as if they were.

Media and PR are changing rapidly because of all the new media technologies pouring out of Silicon Valley and beyond, and the new rules that are emerging will set the format for the next decade. I want to help discover and establish the new rules, the best practices and work with others that share these goals. That is why it is great to have sponsors such as Cohn & Wolfe, Edelman, Intel, and Tibco Software. All of them, in different ways are trying new ways of communicating and conversing with their peers, customers, and consumers.

New Rules Communications will be a place to showcase thought leadership through submitted columns and posts.

We will be announcing some additional sponsors for New Rules Comunications very shortly. If you are interested in discussing a sponsorship slot let me know: tom at SiliconValleyWatcher.com

The New York Times reports that on Monday Intel will demonstrate a computer chip with 80 separate cores.

While the chip is not compatible with Intel’s current chips, the company said it had already begun design work on a commercial version that would essentially have dozens or even hundreds of Intel-compatible microprocessors laid out in a tiled pattern on a single chip.

The chip’s design is meant to exploit a new generation of manufacturing technology the company introduced last month. Intel said that it had changed the basic design of transistors in such a way that it would be able to continue to shrink them to smaller sizes — offering lower power and higher speeds — for at least a half-decade or more.

During a briefing on Thursday in a hotel room here, Nitin Borkar, one of the chip’s designers, showed an air-cooled computer based on the chip running a simple scientific calculation at speeds above one trillion mathematical calculations a second.

During the demonstration, Justin R. Rattner, the company’s chief technology officer, showed several futuristic computing applications that he said the new chip design would help make possible. One of the applications was an automated video editing tool that would, for example, allow a computer to create a digital sports highlights video featuring a user’s favorite players.

A second demonstration showed motion capture technology — a technique widely used by the videogame industry to reproduce human forms in action — relying only on digital video cameras and computers. Conventional motion capture technology requires a complex array of sensors pinned to an actor’s body and face to record a digital video that can be used interactively.

The shift toward systems with hundreds or even thousands of computing cores is both an opportunity and a potential crisis, computer scientists said, because no one has proved how to program such chips for many applications.

“If we can figure out how to program thousands of cores on a chip, the future looks rosy,” said David A. Patterson, a University of California, Berkeley computer scientist who is a co-author of one of the standard textbooks on microprocessor design. “If we can’t figure it out, then things look dark.”

During the briefing last week Mr. Rattner essentially endorsed the Berkeley view, saying that the company believed that its Teraflop chip was the best way to solve a set of computing problems he described as “recognition, mining and synthesis,” computing techniques that use artificial intelligence.

In addition to new kinds of computing applications, Mr. Rattner said that the so-called network-on-chip Teraflop processor would be ideal for the kind of heterogeneous computing that is increasingly common in the corporate world.

One of the most impressive technical achievements made by the Intel researchers was the speed with which they are able to move data among the separate processors on the chip, Mr. Patterson said.

The Teraflop chip, which consumes just 62 watts at teraflop speeds and which is air-cooled, contains an internal data packet router in each processor tile. It is able to move data among tiles in as little as 1.25 nanoseconds, making it possible to transfer 80 billion bytes a second among the internal cores.

[Intel is an SVW sponsor.]

[UPDATE: Please also see: IBM says Intel not alone in solving 45nm chip roadblock]

People mistake Intel for being a microprocessor manufacturer. That's just an application of what it does best: it knows how to make the world's most advanced chips in massive quantities.

Late last week Intel briefed reporters and analysts on what is likely the most significant breakthrough in chip making since the late 1960s.

Intel said it had discovered materials that would enable it to make the world's tiniest chips in high volumes--and place it years ahead of competitors seeking to do the same.

With the its new materials, Intel is able to make chips with geometries of 45 nanometers, half the size of most leading edge chips at 90nm.

Intel shares a lot of its chip research but it said it will keep these materials secret. If the information leaked out, it would enable competitors to shave years off their R&D efforts and enter lucrative chip markets years earlier.

Quite rightly, Intel is racing to take advantage of this lead. It is building three giant chip fabs which will use its secret process on silicon wafers the size of large dinner plates, 300mm (12 inch) across.

By the end of this year two fabs will be completed and ramping into high volume production, closely followed by a third in Israel, in early 2008--all using this advanced chip making process. This means servers, desktops, and notebooks  will run faster and cooler and will be less expensive.

With more smaller chips being able to be squeezed onto giant silicon wafers Intel will be able to do a combination of several things:

• Existing chip designs will run faster because of shorter distances between transistors.
• Power consumption is reduced because of the smaller size of the chip.
• More transistors can be crammed into the same sized space which means larger memory caches-a performance bottleneck.
• Manufacturing costs are dramatically reduced. It costs about the same to process a silicon wafer in any process. More chips per wafer means more product for the same cost. Intel can choose to lower prices or pocket the productivity increase. (It always lowers prices but it can decide the rate.)

Intel makes microprocessors because they are the most profitable high volume application of its core ability: to make chips cheaper, faster, smaller, and in vast quantities.

All of the above means that rival Advanced Micro Devices is in for a tough time. It won market shares against Intel in server markets because it spotted a trend in low power consuming microprocessors. That was great because it brought Intel into that market and now server buyers have a choice of two very good server chip families.

Mind the Gap

But the gap between the two server product families is set to widen into a chasm. Quite simply, AMD cannot fight it out with Intel on the basis of design.

The chip business is always talking about making chips in smaller sizes because:

• the laws of physics automatically provide faster performance by shrinking the size of chips.
• the laws of economics provide greater profit margins by shrinking the size of chips.

AMD's manufacturing prowess is good but not great. Manufacturing prowess has historically been a highly volatile characteristic at AMD.

Yes, clever designs can boost performance incrementally, but fundamentally, it is the laws of physics that govern every performance characteristic of a chip. And the laws of physics can only be exploited by knowing how to manipulate the material world.

It is through chemistry that we manipulate the material world. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore is a chemist. Andy Grove has a degree in chemical engineering. (BTW, I  have a chemistry degree :-)

Moore was born in San Francisco, California. He received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry and Physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1954. (Source: Wikipedia.)

 

Chemistry is something that Intel knows very well. And like an alchemist of yore--it has succeeded in transforming baser materials into gold, lots of it, it is a highly profitable company with margins that sometimes approach those of a software company. 

I think it is safe to say that the chip industry uses more of the periodic table of elements in its production process than any other industry in the world. Because it has to, it has to develop new types of materials in order to make ever smaller chips.

Elements are the fundamental building blocks of the physical world. Elements combine to form material compounds, and each compound has specific physical characteristics.

The chip industry needs materials that can guide electrons at high speeds through an incredibly complex maze of wires just a few atoms wide.

But as everything shrinks in size, materials behave differently. For the chip industry to move to a smaller chip size, 45nm, it needed to find new materials that behave in the correct way.

Finding these materials for 45nm had stumped the industry. It threatened to slow Moore's Law.

Top chip experts had been predicting that 2010 would be the earliest date for a solution to be found. Which means Intel could very well be more than two years ahead...a huge achievement.

That's why Intel's discovery of these materials constitutes what must be the most valuable secret in the world today. Because it dramatically improves the fundamental performance of all silicon chips--the bedrock and building blocks of our current and future worlds.

A two or more year lead into the future is an incredible competitive advantage, imho.

----

Additional info from Intel:

(Intel is a sponsor of SVW) Monday's news that Sun will make Intel Xeon servers and Intel will promote Solaris shocked some observers.

Sun's former CEO Scott McNealy used to say nasty things about Intel's Itanium 64-bit microprocessor, a competitor to Sun's SPARC chip. But that was then, when Sun still thought it had to own the stack.

These days, it is less about the microprocessor and more about the system. Sun realizes that it is in the business of selling data center systems to data centers. And customers are asking for Xeon servers along with AMD, and SPARC servers, that Sun sells. And selling is a good thing.

And the fact that Intel will promote Solaris along with Linux and other operating systems is good for Intel because it encourages sales of servers.

What this alliance shows is that Intel has made a lot of progress in catching up to AMD's lead in low-power consuming servers. Otherwise Sun would not be getting requests from customers for Intel hardware.

What this alliance needs is the addition of Hewlett-Packard, that would worry IBM. Then we'd see a West Coast/East Coast rivalry that could become very interesting to watch.

I caused quite a stir earlier this year with my Die! Press Release Die! Die! Die! post. It came about from my frustration with the usefulness of the conventional press release. I offered some characteristics of what a new media press release might have, such as more links, labels/tags to quickly find information, and have links to related news stories, etc.

Many in the PR community have been working to create a more useful press release, which is wonderful. I applaud all efforts to make my job easier.

Edelman [an SVW sponsor] just released a tool/template it calls StoryCrafter that helps produce what has come to be known as a "social media news release." Shift PR has produced one too, and so has PRX Builder.

I'm not a big fan of the term "social media" I think "new media" would have been sufficient--and a more neutral term. But as long as everyone agrees on one meaning that is fine.

PR companies are extremely competitive and so the vying over whose social media release tool/template is better than the rest is only just beginning. Will there be one standard for social media releases? Maybe, but not yet. Let's try out these and other formats. I'm sure that a set of best practices will develop and everyone will benefit.

What interests me is if the PRnewswire and Businesswire services will carry social media releases. My understanding is that they charge extra for every link carried in a news release. Since links reduce the need for long press releases, their business model is threatened.

It is clear that the newswires are facing more than one challenge to their business model and are becoming increasingly irrelevant as news distribution platforms.  The Internet is so much better at distributing information, it is vastly cheaper, and has far greater reach.

PRNewswire and Businesswire charge a lot of money,  money that could be better used in communicating company news through formats such as the social media news release, and technologies such as RSS.

All that is needed is a ruling by the SEC that a company's RSS enabled newsroom and its web sites, satisfy requirements for broad and immediate dissemination of material information. I don't think that we are far from such a ruling, IMHO.

Link to :: Edelman :: EDELMAN INTRODUCES WEB-BASED TOOL FOR PUBLISHING SOCIAL MEDIA NEWS RELEASES

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher

Intel (an SVW sponsor) is a strong supporter of WiMAX, the wireless broadband technology that works over a distance of several miles compared with the hundred foot or so range of WiFi. WiMAX offers the possibility of bridging the digital divide by bringing down the cost of providing Internet access.

More importantly, WiMAX could be a way of opening up the "last mile" into consumers' homes, currently guarded by the cable and telco companies. These companies have been bundling Internet access with other services, which raises the costs for many customers interested in just Internet access.

The Intel WiMAX Connection 2300 chipset design was demonstrated during Executive Vice President and Chief Sales and Marketing Officer Sean Maloney's keynote at the 3G World Congress and Mobility Marketplace in Hong Kong.

Maloney showed an Intel® Centrino® Duo mobile technology-based laptop with mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e-2005), Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11n), and high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) 3G capabilities successfully accessing the Internet at broadband speeds over a mobile WiMAX network.

Link to Intel Demonstrates Its First Mobile WiMAX Baseband Chip

This WiMAX chipset could also help boost Intel's revenues. The company's Centrino WiFi chipset for notebook computers was hugely successful and helped support record profit margins for many quarters.

Integrating radio capabilities into chips is not an easy task because analog and digital circuits respond in different ways to the CMOS production process.

This is interesting:

For the first time, Intel incorporated multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) functionality into the baseband chip to enhance the signal quality and throughput of wireless bandwidth. The baseband chip also employs the same software for Intel's WiMAX and Wi-Fi solutions to help ensure unified management for connectivity. Over-the-air provisioning supports easy configuration and enables consumer activation of services, shifting the traditional hands on service provider business model to a direct activation one based purely on consumer purchases of mobile devices.

Making things easier for consumers is key, it appears that they will be able to choose services without needing to know how to configure their notebooks, or be tied to any one service provider. I wonder how the cable and telco companies will respond, especially since WiMAX would enable inexpensive cell phone capabilities.

WiMAX would offer far faster Internet connection speeds, which would encourage new types of applications and services, which would require more Intel based infrastructure equipment investments. WiMAX on consumer notebooks would pull through a potential revenue bonanza for Intel.

Opening up the "last mile" would also help to establish Internet neutrality--vital in creating a fair competitive arena for startups with innovative services and technologies. Clearly, there is quite a lot riding on this Intel product.

But, there is a wait:

Intel plans to focus on validating and testing the product, with plans to sample both card and module forms beginning in late 2007.

[This is an account of my first trip to India,  traveling as a guest of Tibco Software, an SVW sponsor. Part 1 is here.  Part 2 is here.]

We leave for Delhi airport to travel by small chartered jet to Mumbai, formerly known by its Portuguese name Bombay, India's largest city with 19m residents. The security at the Delhi airport is multi-stage and every few yards police or military personnel are rechecking our papers and screening our baggage.

India has suffered far more terrorist attacks than the US and it seems they can't be too careful. Even though we have moved through multiple checkpoints--all in view of each other--our documents and baggage get checked again and again.

Vivek Ranadive, Tibco's CEO, notes that in the US, private jet travelers go through no security or screening at all. I'm amazed.

We drive out to the other side of the airport and board the aircraft. We're soon up in the air for the 90-minute flight to Mumbai.

I've become a big fan of the newspapers and business magazines in India and pass the time by reading. It's interesting to see things from within India  (more on this in a later post.)

As we glide into the approach for the landing I can already see that this is a much different place than stately Delhi, with its broad boulevards and grand government buildings. Right next to the airport is a large brown-grey area of boxes and rectangles all jumbled up. I can't make out what it is but as we get lower I can see it is a sprawling shanty shack city.

As we drive from the airport we're embedded within a mass of humanity and traffic. Tiny two-stroke cars and taxis mix with Bentleys and Mercedes. Some are cutting at right angles across the traffic lanes and people are crossing against the traffic. And everywhere is a cacophony of car horns. Every time we stop, young children tap on the car windows selling roses or newspapers, or begging for one rupee (about two cents) for food.

Bombay is crowded because it is spread across seven islands, so everything along the road is packed in tight: the kiosk-like shops, the people, the shanty shacks, the lone cows. It's all a mashup of colorful clothes and smells. I'm completely fascinated whichever direction I look.

Mumbai seems to be decaying with rundown Portuguese colonial-era buildings and bad housing projects, yet simultaneously rising young and new with striking office buildings and apartment buildings. All mashed up together, next to each other.

We head for the evening reception and dinner at a large hotel in the western part of Bombay. Vivek Ranadive and CIO magazine are hosting an event to launch his book, "The Predictive Enterprise," and about 50 CIOs of India's largest companies will be there.

Sanjay Gupta, vice president for global alliances at Tibco, is already decked out in a sharp suit and sun glasses. Vivek jokes that he looks like a Bollywood movie star. I get changed into a suit in the hotel and then head off to the reception on the lower level.

The restaurant in the hotel is sharp and very urban - it could be a trendy night spot in New York or London. I chat with some of the CIOs, many have spent time in San Francisco and the Bay Area in years past, some have worked at startups.

I ask about the startup culture in India. There doesn't seem to be much going on. I can't get much of an answer from the people I'm speaking with.

One of them says, "We've skipped that step." I smile but say that you can't skip the startup stage, innovation happens much faster when you are not encumbered by a large organization.

After a while the room is hushed and Mr Ranadive gives an introductory welcome. He says he grew up in Mumbai, his mother and sister still live there, but he left when he was 17. He introduces his concept about the predictive enterprise and then the CIOs line up to have him autograph copies of his book.

Before dinner begins, I head back to the hotel room to get some stomach medicine. I feel like I am coming down with a local malady, despite only drinking bottled water.  

I lay down on the bed for one moment and then am startled to wake up four hours later, having completely missed the dinner. And everybody has left for another hotel on the other side of Mumbai. Holly Burkhart, Tibco's very able and super-efficient corporate communications director and events organizer calls. I apologize for missing the dinner, she tells me not to worry and says I should stay there and make my way over to the other hotel the next morning.

My stomach is still churning so I'm thankful to rest and nurse my stomach cramps. I notice that the vitreous porcelain bathroom receptacle is marked "HindWare." How apt I think, but then again it could it also refer to "Hindi.

Part 1 is here

Part 2 is here.

in New Delhi.

[This is an account of my first trip to India,  traveling as a guest of Tibco Software, an SVW sponsor. Vivek Ranadive, CEO of Tibco, is launching his business IT strategy book, "The Power to Predict," in India and he invited me to come along as he meets with politicians and some of India's top business and technology leaders. Part 1 is here.]

New Delhi is a government city, at least for now. Broad boulevards and grand government buildings seem to be everywhere. And civil servants sit outside in circles having lunch on the expansive lawns. It is a city of 14mn people but I have no idea where they live, clearly not in the British colonial palaces in the part of the city where I am staying.

I take a guided tour of the city's sights during the day. The weather is warm and humid but not oppressively hot. I'm told by my guide that this is a good time of the year to visit India.

Delhi and Rome share the distinction of being the only two cities that have been inhabited for more than 2,000 years.

Delhi is moving away from its dominance by government agencies and is building a large IT business park in its suburbs. Already, there are many US IT companies represented in India's capital city and more are expected. Bangalore, the well known Indian high-tech center is about a two-hour flight south of Delhi, closer to Mumbai (Bombay).

In the evening we head out to the Sheraton hotel, about 15 minutes away, where Vivek Ranadive, the CEO of Tibco, is due to give a keynote speech at the Dataquest India IT awards reception and dinner.

The Sheraton is teaming with men in suits as we walk along the corridor and into a cavernous, dark room and sit and watch the stage. Various awards are given for achievements in IT.

Mr Ranadive gets up and gives his speech. He talks about how he started life as a hardware engineer but got fed up with software continually lagging hardware. He spoke about how he started his first software company, making a presentation to Goldman Sachs and winning his first customer.

He explains how IT has been database-driven for many years and how this led to an "architecture of extortion" because it requires expensive consultants and processes to manage. And now the future of IT needs to be services-driven, through a services oriented architecture (SOA) as a way to escape the "extortion" of the old IT order.

With SOA, corporations can move beyond real-time processing of business data and tap into historical analysis to predict strains on their IT systems, to predict which customers need services that will keep them customers. The historical data can trigger business processes in real-time. It's all part of his predictive enterprise concept that is explained in his book, "The Power to Predict."

There is lots of applause and then the rest of the awards ceremony continues. It is soon over and we skip the dinner and head back to our hotel.

Next: Part 3: Private jet to teeming Mumbai as Vivek Ranadive returns to his home town, and a CIO magazine dinner with CIOs from India's largest corporations - India Inc. Part 1 is here.

in New Delhi.

[This is an account of my first trip to India,  traveling as a guest of Tibco Software, an SVW sponsor. Vivek Ranadive, the CEO of Tibco is launching his business IT strategy book "The Power to Predict" in India, and he invited me to come along as he meets with politicians and some of India's top business and technology leaders.]

We're about to land in New Delhi when suddenly the engines of the huge American Airlines 777 rise to a roar and I'm pushed back into my seat as we gain speed and altitude.

The captain's voice is calm, "We decided to abort the landing to get out of a bad situation. We'll be taking the approach again and we'll be landing in about ten minutes."

This time the landing proceeds smoothly and I walk out of the high-tech transport and into a dowdy, provincial looking airport with threadbare carpets and walls covered with a patina of neglect. It reminds me of Warsaw airport circa 1977, before the economic changes that transformed Poland into a modern country.

Even the roads leading from the airport are similar to pre-capitalist Warsaw, with small, ancient looking cars, traveling over narrow roads with broken paving.

The analogy with Poland is an apt one but clearly on a much different scale. Poland's programmers routinely win top international competitions and India's programmers are helping to win big outsourcing contracts for the domestic IT companies--all part of a transformation of a country from a planned economy to the wild, wild west of a capitalist economy.

And while India's infrastructure is lagging its tech prowess, its IT companies are not laggards in terms of their ambitions to make their mark on a global scale. Infosys and Wipro are India's largest and best known IT companies but these are just a tip of an iceberg that I hope to find out more about on this trip.

As our driver patiently negotiates through traffic that considers lane markings as a suggestion--rather than a rule--I can see the night-time air is filled with a smoke-like haze. I'm told it is from all the two-stroke engines that are popular in many parts of Asia. I think to myself that the smog is probably good for slowing global warming by reflecting sunlight back into space but at what cost to human lungs?

It takes about 30 minutes to reach The Oberoi Hotel, a luxury resort with its own golf course close to the center of New Delhi. We pass through a security checkpoint that inspects the underside of the car, and there are security guards stationed all along the driveway that leads to the lobby entrance.

Check-in is quick and the receptionist and a porter and a butler, form an entourage that escorts me to my room. I take a quick shower and head back down to the lobby to meet with my Tibco hosts at an Italian restaurant inside the hotel.

It's interesting that we are eating Italian rather than Indian food but I'm not complaining about the quality, which is excellent. I hear a bit more about the schedule for the week-long trip. This includes a big IT awards dinner organized by Dataquest India, a flight to Bombay, a visit to the massive Infosys campus with 15,000 staff, and a visit to Tibco's India HQ in Pune, plus interviews with TV, radio, and newspapers.

Ram Menon, executive Vice President, Worldwide Marketing for Tibco meets us for dinner while Vivek skips the food so that he can work out in the gym. Ram lives in Silicon Valley with his American wife and five year old son and is very American.

Ram was raised in India in a British colonial tradition. His family owns a plantation and he was  sent to boarding school when he was just 5 1/2 years old, and educated in India's top private schools. He knows many of India's business leaders because of his old school tie connections.

He tells me about all the changes he's seen in India, and the booming real estate and business markets of the past few years. He says that more recently, Indian companies have been teaming up with large private equity firms, which has fueled an M&A boom enabling them to acquire large foreign companies.

He says it all reminds him of the 1999 era dotcom boom days, and that the newspapers and the rest of India's media, are covering the trend with an uncritical eye--similar to our dotcom boom period.

It was interesting hearing about the private equity funds. On the flight over I had read the excellent BusinessWeek cover story on the corporate "gluttony" of US private equity firms and the potential problems they are causing.  

The BusinessWeek article noted that it used to take five or more years for private equity firms to turn around companies and then IPO them. Now, some of them are flipping companies in less than a year. Plus, they make the companies take on massive debt so that they can award themselves huge dividends--and large consulting/management fees.

BusinessWeek said the companies are leaner and meaner, but are saddled with large debt loads that will make it more difficult for some of them to survive periods of market weakness--with shareholders and employees the ones that ultimately suffer.

When I awoke the next morning, the lead story in India's top financial newspaper, The Economic Times, announced that US private equity funds were behind plans to IPO Genpact, a large Indian BPO (business process outsourcing) company. 

The deal could raise more than $1bn which would become "India's biggest listing in the US." The newspaper said that the private equity firms are likely to earn five times their initial investment made just two years ago.

It made me wonder if the booming Indian IT/BPO sector could be harmed in the future, if private equity firms were to engage in the types of excesses described in the BusinessWeek article. A slowdown in US and European outsourcing could be disastrous for some Indian companies carrying large debts because of their M&A and IPO financing.

Indian companies tend to be large conglomerates, active in several very different industries, not just tech. While this can be seen as offering a protective effect by spreading risk, it could also lead to a knock-on effect that could impact India's non-tech sectors in the event of a tech melt-down. 

The Indian media would do well to take notice of our dotcom dotbomb experience and offer a critical analysis of big deals, especially those involving large private equity firms.  

Quad Core is key to Intel's bid to revive profits and growth. PodTech's Jason Lopez interviewed Stephen Smith, head of Intel's desktop and platform operations:

http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1139/idf-preview-quad-core-microprocessors