I'm in Las Vegas this week as a guest of Tibco Software's user conference, TUCON13  - an annual event. I've been to plenty of them and they are often full of marketing razzle with a dash of dazzle but this year things were different.

They were different because the company has reorganized significantly over the past year as it missed some of Wall Street's numbers.

Founder and CEO Vivek Ranadivé (above) made many executive changes and has refocused the company on its strong engineering roots. His keynote, and also presentations by Matthew Quinn, CTO, and for the first time on stage Murray Rode, COO, (bottom) exhibited a fresh new energy at Tibco and very importantly, a tightened vision and strategy.

Its acquisition of Streambase early this year, is a good example of its sharper strategic focus, and it fills an important piece in Tibco's IT infrastructure story. It enables it to make a serious grab for a very strategic piece of the IT infrastructure market: events processing in real-time - what Tibco calls "The Events-Enabled Enterprise."

Matthew Quinn (below) says,"When the industry thinks about events we want them to think of Tibco."

It's hard to argue with Tibco's vision of what every corporation needs: a real-time messaging bus. I agree, and I think of it in terms of a "media bus" as a core IT infrastructure of every company that's a media company, which is every company.

When Tibco talks about streams of messages triggering events inside an enterprise I think of a media news feed triggering political, cultural, and business "events." All companies have "news" events -- the transactional business data of their everyday working day. They trigger apps to take action and publish new data into the live enterprise data stream.

Vivek Ranadivé talks about the importance of integration of "all data" rather than just Big Data, a subset of an ever bigger data world.

I see all types of corporations, no matter what they make, as media companies because they constantly publish to the outside world, customers, staff, to neighbors, to partners, and to themselves. Now the world publishes back, into the enterprise, in the form of transactional data, cookies, metrics, blogs, tweets, and all sorts of machine data.

Every company needs a real time media bus into which their enterprise apps plug into. It's a unifying platform integrating the silos of internal enterprise activities; and it's the intersection of where the internal meets the external. It's where the data of the external world is sifted and shifted into the right business streams, the right data at the right time, at the right place. Context is very important because it renders Big Data useful data.

Businesses that have the capabilities for extreme agility, that are able to respond with the right decisions faster than their competitors will win, there is no argument there. How corporations achieve those capabilities is Tibco's opportunity. Its competitive advantage is that it has seen the future sooner than other IT companies and has built, or acquired the technologies corporations need.

For example, it knew the cloud would be important and it has tools that allow enterprises to manage their cloud-based apps, and use the cloud as a messaging bus. Also, it recently acquired Maporama, a French startup with key geolocation events technologies.

Inside the enterprise Tibco offers Tibbr, a social media tool that now has 6.5 million users, a quintupling since last year, reports Senior VP Ram Menon, Head of Social at Tibco. He said that Tibbr is adding task management and will add more features over the coming years, burrowing deeper into the enterprise infrastructure.

Tibco has alwys had interesting customers, one of these is Nielsen. A keynote by Mitchell Habib, COO at Nielsen, was very impressive. Nielsen used Tibco's technology as the foundation of a huge new business that essentially saved the company at a time it was losing it's largest customers.

What Tibco does has always been difficult to explain because it is heavy-duty IT engineering. Now, there's a better understanding by businesses about what they need to be an agile enterprise. It's potentially the start of the biggest ever IT infrastructure shift ever seen and Tibco will have to compete against some very large players, but it is more agile. We'll see how that agility profits Tibco.

If it manages to execute on its plans it looks very well positioned for the coming boom in the re-engineering of the IT enterprise.

Murray Rode, COO, Tibco.

(Tibco has been a founding sponsor of SVW since 2005.)

(The spectacular Oracle Arena.)

It was a dark and stormy evening but it was also Bollywood Night at the Oracle Arena in Oakland and I had two tickets to see the Golden State Warriors play the Dallas Mavericks -- thanks to Tibco Software.

[Vivek Ranadivé, CEO of Tibco, is one of the owners of the Warriors, and the first Indian-American NBA team owner. The scrappy kid from Mumbai has done very well, arriving as a teenager in Silicon Valley many years before the recent waves of Indian engineers.

Vivek Ranadivé is also one of the most interesting personalities in Silicon Valley. I knew him when I worked at the Financial Times and he became one of my most important contacts because of his long history and extensive contacts within the valley. When I left the Financial Times he took a keen interest in my publishing venture. Tibco became a founding sponsor of Silicon Valley Watcher in 2005, and has remained our most loyal supporter. I hope my readers appreciate Tibco's important contribution to SVW.]

I'd never been to an NBA game and was looking forward to it immensely. I set off with my son Matt, and we braved the nasty cats and dogs weather, driving across the bridge to Oakland. And I'm glad we did because we had a brilliant time. Here's a taste of the event:

The Warrior Girls, the Golden State Warriors' cheerleaders got into the Bollywood spirit with colorful costumes.

Sport is theater...

The first person we ran into was Cory (Scoop) Johnson (above with Tim Draper) CNBC's original Silicon Valley reporter. He now works for Bloomberg TV.

Tim Draper, founder of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is as well known for his eccentric personality as he is for his VC prowess.

Al Seracevic, sports editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, quickly took Matt and I under his wing and gave us for a whirlwind tour of the benches and the media balcony. It great catching up with Al, I hadn't seen him since a very late and very liquid North Beach adventure about a year ago.

It was also good to bump into

Zach Nelson, CEO of Netsuite, who had a great seat down on the court.

Vivek Ranadivé's daughter Anjali (on screen above) sang the national anthem.

The Dallas bench...

Here's where the sports hacks perch.

Elevator to the Grandview Suites.

A very spirited crowd.

The always hardworking Tibco Comms team.

A rainy treck home.

Pearltrees, a French-based curation platform, today released an iPad app that lets users easily explore the curated collections of websites created by more than 200,000 people, via a unique visual and touch interface that serves a discovery engine based on interests.

The company has the world's largest community of online curators on its platform. Many work in teams to create a Pearltree, which consists of "pearls" -- each is a visual metaphor for a web page. Users can share and collect each other's Pearltrees, creating an ever expanding web topology generated by humans and their interests, rather than algorithms.

The free application takes full advantage of the iPad's touch interface to enable users to quickly discover collections of websites with simple swipes of their finger.

"This is the first time that you can see an interest graph in action," said Patrice Lamothe, CEO and co-founder of Pearltrees. "Users can discover the curation work of more than 200,000 Pearltrees users. There is no other application that does this."

Pearltrees is betting that many people are suffering from social network fatigue and the many chores of online relationship management. [Please see: The Tamagotchi Nature Of Social Networks]

"On Pearltrees there are no friends to collect or people to follow, it is solely based on your interests," said François Rocaboy, Chief Marketing Officer, co-founder of Pearltrees, and inventor of its "pearls" visual interface. "It's a way for people to curate their special places on the web, cultivating their own garden of interests, and taking their time to make a collection, a similar process to a curator in an art gallery. The iPad app is a great way to discover these curations."

The iPad app can be downloaded here.

And here is a screen cast, you really have to see it because it's a very visual app.

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Here is an example of a documentary I put together using Pearltrees and found video footage from the recent Outside Lands music festival. I chose the best videos from sites such as Youtube, to try to recapture some of the excitement and the fun of being in a crowd of people happy to be among so much great music.

You are in the middle of the action. At times the camera swings in the air along with everyone's arms; sometimes you can't hear the music because everyone around you is singing; while an other clip shows happy fans singing on the bus that's taking them home -- all wonderful vignettes inexpertly captured.

Pearltrees allows me to quickly organize the video clips and it has a media viewer that makes it easy to show to anyone, without them needing a user account. And it looks really good on the iPad.

Even better, my curation of Outside Lands can be easily shared and collected by other Pearltrees users. If I make changes to my Outside Lands documentary, those changes are automatically published to everyone that has that Pearltree in their collection -- it's a powerful and unique media publishing platform. Which is precisely why I chose to work with Pearltrees in late 2009.

Please take a look at my Outside Lands found-footage documentary. (And please let me know if you'd like to team up with me, I've still got a lot of curating to do, and many hundreds of videos to review. But it's a fun project.)

Outside Lands 2011 - Found Fan Video Documentary in Outside Lands 2011
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About Pearltrees:

Launched in December 2009, Pearltrees has gathered more than 200.000 collectors and more than 10 million pearls. The company has been growing at average rate of 15% month over month, with over half a million visits in September.

Since being founded, the company has been recognized by OSEO in Europe as a "leap forward" and was selected as one of only five companies for the Launch Pad at Web2.0 Expo in 2010.

Pearltrees has raised 3.8 million Euros from a group of international entrepreneurs and angel investors.

---

Useful Links:

Direct Link to Pearltrees for iPad in the App Store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pearltrees-for-ipad/id463462134?mt=8&ls=1

Demo Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zDkwN-_ySg

Short screen-cast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXU-IKS7KdA

Screen Shots: http://bitly.com/opOsVz

I'm a big fan of Pearltrees because it is a fascinating media technology. It allows anyone to curate their own section of the web by using a visual metaphor that looks very much like mind maps: users create a Pearltree and attach pearls to it; each pearl represents a web page or site, a video, image, or even a Tweet.

With so much content on the Internet it is becoming very important to identify trusted sources of information and to have people curate sections of the Internet. Google tries to do it by looking at trusted sites and who links to who but it is constantly fighting spammers trying to game the sysem -- the Pearltrees approach is spam-proof.

Pearltrees are also very social, they are extremely easy to create and share. They can be Tweeted, emailed, or embedded in any web page or web document, creating a live window (see below).

One of my goals is to build a Pearltree about Silicon Valley so that people can quickly find the best information about this region. As part of that project I have put together a Pearltree that acts as a directory of Silicon Valley PR firms.

People looking for a PR firm can browse my Pearltree and hopefully find a compatible business partner. In the short space of time since I created the Silicon Valley PR firms Pearltree it has had nearly 2300 views.

But I'd like to improve it. I'd like each PR firm that does business in the Silicon Valley/Bay Area to create a Pearltree about their business and send it to me.

If you are in PR here are some reasons why you should make a Pearltree about your company:

- It puts you, rather than me, in control of the information about your firm.

- You are the one that receives notifications on who has shared it or picked it for their collection of Pearltrees.

- You can see and respond to comments on your Pearltree.

- You can be creative about how you build your Pearltree.

- By creating your own Pearltree it shows you as the author rather than me.

- You can use your Pearltree for communications with clients. Again, being in control of the information in your Pearltree is key.

- This is the important part: each Pearltree is dynamic. Any changes are updated in real-time everywhere that Pearltree is used. You won't have to wait for me, or rely on me, to update a Pearltree about your company.

Here are two examples:

I created a Pearltree for the Horn Group:

Horn Group
It shows clients, newsroom, blog, contact info etc.

Because each Pearltree is controlled by the author, each firm can be creative about how it organizes their Pearltree. For example, in this Pearltree about The Hoffman Agency, there are links to client web sites that Hoffman might like to highlight, rather than just a simple client list.

The Hoffman Agency (Demo)
So please send me your Pearltree. It's the simplest way to get into my Silicon Valley PR directory. And also, send me the categories that you would like to be included in. Email foremski at Gmail or send it to me through Pearltrees.

And if you are an independent PR professional/consultant, send me your Pearltree too.

You can show who you work with, your past and current clients, and whatever else you'd like to include, such as your LinkedIn profile, portfolio, etc.

- - -

It's a very flexible technology and I can think of a variety of ways of using it.

For example, using Pearltrees as a media kit. Here is a Pearltree about an Intel press event, containing links to media assets such as video, and also the resulting press coverage.

Example Press Kit
And Pearltrees has lots of great new features coming very soon, including a private version that controls who can view it; and a community version that enables teams to collaborate on a Pearltree.

It's also great as an organizational/research tool. I've used it for a book project, and I'm exploring other uses, including an online store.

I use it for business and for recreation, such as this Pearltree about the upcoming Outside Lands music festival in Golden Gate Park so I can get to know some of the acts before the event.

 PEARLTREES.embed.initTree('pt-pearl-1_1081162-751',1,9745,1,1081162,1); 
The beauty of a flexible media technology such as Pearltrees is that you can be the first person to use it for a particular task. It's like making the first footprints in fresh snow :)

So please send me your Pearltrees so I can include them in my PR firms Pearltree directory. And send me examples of any new uses you come up with.

Just click here to start: http://www.pearltrees.com/

Tibco's technologies allow large corporations to bring together all their computing assets into an integration layer, which enables them to build business processes as services, that run across their entire computing platforms.

This integration layer is more important today than ever before because this is where you can create lightning fast responses to the billions of business events happening within organizations every day.

Vivek Ranadivé, Tibco's founder and CEO, likes to speak about the "2 second advantage" this is the brief amount of time a business has to respond to an event, such as a customer having problems with a dropped cell phone call. One response is to send a text message apologizing and crediting the customer account with 50 minutes of free time (a pleasant fantasy, AT&T would be providing millennia of free minutes).

Mr Ranadivé is working on a book on this subject with Kevin Maney, the former journalist with Portfolio and USA Today.

I spoke with some of Tibco's customers. Syed Kashif Qasim Ali, a project manager from the Adu Dhabi Commercial Bank, said that Tibco technology is being used to rapidly create new services. Those services can be reused among different business groups and across different channels.

The bank has to maintain two banking systems, one that is Muslim based and that adheres to Muslim principles, and a commercial banking system. The goal is to be able to provide customers with a 360 view of all their accounts and products within 5 seconds.

I also spoke with José Salinas, Vice President of Technology and Logistics at Banco do Brasil. This bank is one of the world leaders in banking IT, it has more computing power than Argentina. The bank is integrating its computer systems so that it can quickly respond to clients.

Dr Salinas says that the goal is to bring the branch to the customer. For example, if a customer is at an auto dealership, the bank wants the capability to make a loan offer within a few seconds. I'll have more on this project coming up in a future post.

Here is a Pearltree on Tibco's latest announcements.

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

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.

The goal of the Intel campaign is to promote Intel as a "move-society-forward-by-quantum-leaps company" rather than just a microprocessor company. However, the campaign does celebrate the role of silicon chips in creating the future, and that much of that silicon has come from Intel.

OMD created the campaign. An example of a print ad:

"Your rock stars aren't like our rock stars." The two-picture visual is, at left, a grunge rock 'n roll band looking cool in sunglasses and jeans behind bright stage lights; and, in the photo at right, two bespectacled computer engineers are sporting white lab coats in their techy environment. But these aren't just any engineers. As the ad copy explains, they are the designers of the very first microprocessor. "Back in 1969," the ad says, "their Intel 4004 blew people's minds wide open -- a tradition that's still very much alive" at Intel.

And:

Another video, titled "Oops," is set at a technology convention, where Intel is about to reveal a new microprocessor to a packed auditorium. As the dramatic unveiling is about to happen onstage, Intel employees and reporters struggle to find the tiny chip on the floor, and have the impossible task of finding it. The tagline: "Our big ideas aren't like your big ideas."

Foremski's Take:

It's interesting that Intel is promoting Intel rather than any of its chip products. In many ways, it makes because Intel no longer has any competitors to worry about. Advanced Micro Devices is its closest competitor but it is beset by problems. Intel has won the the "war" and that makes it less interesting than before, when it was still fighting competitive battles.

Intel's culture is very competitive, so it must seem strange not to have anyone significant to compete against. That's usually not a very interesting situation for people inside Intel, or out, or at any large company (GOOG, MSFT, ORCL ....)

Today, Intel chips are in almost every computer large and small, and because the competitive battles are done, there are fewer opportunities to write about Intel. Except in terms of having investors still interested in Intel, which is why the campaign kicks off at NASDAQ.

Intel's marketing is very important to its customers, the various digital device manufacturers that receive marketing money from Intel. This is a very large pot of money that helps sell their products.

Intel is searching for a way to market itself and its customers in this new online world. It has pulled back from most of its print, radio, and TV advertising.

Maybe Intel should become the ad agency for its customers. Instead of doling out money for the marketing budgets of customers, Intel can orchestrate things on a global level with common ads, videos, and other promotional items. That would allow Intel to provide high quality marketing materials to its customers, which would help them sell their gizmos . . . and sell more Intel silicon.

I'm one of the "Intel Insiders" a group that Intel uses to consult on its marketing programs. Here is a quick video from about a year ago, from our first Intel Insiders meeting, where Sean Maloney, Intel's #2, and head of marketing, talks about the "fog" -- the challenges of online marketing.

- 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

From Wikipedia:

"Vivek Ranadive (b. 1957, Mumbai, India) is the Chairman, CEO and Founder of TIBCO Software, the computer software technology company he founded in 1985. The Palo Alto company employs 1,600 and has annual revenue of more than $500 million. Ranadive's New York Times business bestseller, "The Power of Now: How Winning Companies Sense and Respond to Change Using Real-time Technology" has been widely used in academia.

Ranadive grew up in Juhu area of Mumbai and was the youngest of three children. One of Ranadive's earliest dreams was to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he learned of through a documentary film on the institution. Described as "a true visionary in a valley full of seers," by the August 10, 2004 issue of Information Age, left Bombay at age 17 with enough money to last two months. In 1975 Ranadive entered MIT and in four years, he completed a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's in mechanical engineering. He received an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1983."

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.

Our social media guidelines are public in over 25 languages. And our strategy is simple:

Build community

Engage others

Empower employees

Expand the conversation

Strengthen relationships through active listening

Be social media leaders

Amplify Intel and our brand

Today, we're scaling our participation even further. Since last December, Intel launched a global initiative and training program (Digital IQ) that is open to all employees to become active participants in all forms of social media. We built this framework to ensure employees are successful, to protect their own privacy online and to engage in ways that are consistent with ourethical and corporate standards.

We want employees to get involved online - engage, comment and participate in the areas where they're most passionate. We encourage them to engage in conversations on competitive topics but in those cases where the topic is part of pending or existing legal or litigation matters, we ask that employees contact our legal department before proceeding, as there could be risk to the employee and to the company.

Within 12-weeks, over 700 Intel employees have "raised their hands" and volunteered to tell their story, lend their experience and share their knowledge directly on places like Twitter, Facebook, technology websites, BBSs in China and support forums throughout the planet. We're reaching out by engaging in technology conversations in existing communities where our knowledge is welcome and when participation is appropriate.

And, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

As a part of the Intel Social Media Center of Excellence and on behalf of my colleagues, we appreciate your continued feedback and participation. My hope is that this participation empowers us all and that we continue to discuss technology that defines tomorrow.

In follow-up posts, I'll be talking more specifically around some of our challenges, successes, and disappointments. What we've learned and the common struggles we share.

Until then, follow me on Twitter @bryanrhoads

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 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’s First Hardware Delivers Quantum Leap Performance - Changing the Game for Enterprise IT

TIBCO Messaging Appliance™ P-7500 Shatters Messaging Speed Barrier Through Hardware-Only As Software Reaches Its Limits

PALO ALTO, Calif., February 4, 2009 – TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) delivered the first hardware offering in the company’s history, TIBCO Messaging Appliance™ P-7500. This radical new offering from a recognized messaging industry leader shatters a previously insurmountable messaging latency problem by taking an approach that lowers latency, improves predictability, and provides increased throughput by implementing TIBCO messaging in hardware.

"Messaging is the backbone of communications between IT systems. Whether used as a way to integrate applications or to disseminate data across systems in real time, message volumes are exploding," according to Maureen Fleming, program director, business process management and middleware at IDC. "Messaging appliances promise to improve both the cost-performance ratio and manageability of messaging and are an important next step in the evolution of this mission critical technology."

Extending TIBCO’s 25-year history of continuous innovation, TIBCO Messaging Appliance™ P-7500 delivers a number of key metrics that will change the game for customers:

· 10X increase in messaging volume of current software-only solutions

· 50% reduction in base latency

· 10X increase in the predictability of data flows and performance

“Even in a period of turmoil in financial markets, the one constant is a steady increase in trading volume,” said Tom Laffey, executive vice president, products and technology at TIBCO. “As a result, data-intensive industries—financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, government and major online commerce companies—need lower latency and increased throughput at lower costs.”

Messaging is Growing Fast and Furious

Mainstream messaging volumes in enterprise IT today routinely reach the level of 1 million events per second, supporting tens to hundreds of services. This volume is expected to experience a quantum leap soon. Leading-edge companies are already witnessing volumes of 5 million events per second, and this level is expected to rise to 10 million-plus very soon, often supporting thousands of services.

“The messaging infrastructure backbone is at its breaking point,” continued Laffey. “Software has reached its limit in ultra-low latency messaging, focusing increasing importance on the hardware “plumbing” to deliver future performance increases.”

In addition to high performance, ultra-low latency messaging requirements, TIBCO Messaging Appliance also helps TIBCO Rendezvous® customers reduce costs and gain efficiency in the servers required to support a Rendezvous® network. Through the use of TIBCO Messaging Appliance, customers can achieve a 10-to-1 reduction in the number of servers required by their messaging infrastructure, reinforcing TIBCO’s commitment to Green IT.

“The P-7500 is the result of our work with literally hundreds of customers worldwide in all major geographies and markets. It addresses an area in critical need of a breakthrough idea. This is just the first in a series of hardware products that TIBCO plans to offer to its customers,” Laffey concluded.

TIBCO Messaging Appliance employs a pure hardware approach, utilizing field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technologies. TIBCO Messaging Appliance is offered in three different network configurations: 4-1Gb Ethernet connections, 8-1Gb Ethernet connections, and 2 - 10Gb Ethernet connections. Its 375W power consumption delivers new power-use efficiencies, and is the same size as a standard 4U server unit.

TIBCO Messaging Appliance preserves the investment customers have made in their Rendezvous applications by providing drop-in compatibility with existing versions of Rendezvous client libraries. TIBCO Messaging Appliance includes redundant power supplies, fans, and other mechanical components to protect against failure within each appliance, Additionally, it adds built-in hardware fault tolerance for increased reliability and active-active failover between two appliances.

ABOUT TIBCO

TIBCO technology digitized Wall Street in the '80s with the event-driven "Information Bus" software, which helped make real-time business a strategic differentiator in the '90s. Today, TIBCO's infrastructure software gives customers the ability to constantly innovate by connecting applications and data in a service-oriented architecture, streamlining activities through business process management, and giving people the information and intelligence tools they need to make faster and smarter decisions, what we call The Power of Now®. TIBCO serves more than 3,000 customers around the world with offices in more than 20 countries and an ecosystem of over 200 partners. Learn more at www.tibco.com.

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

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

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.

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:

- The Tigerton CPU family’s brand name is the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 7300 series. Clarksboro is the Intel® 7300 chipset.

- The product itself is looking great – we’re seeing the benefits of the Intel Core® microarchitecture and Quad-Core showing up in our initial performance tests:

- Up to 2X the performance over our current generation (Dual-Core Intel Xeon 7100 processor series)

- Over 2X the performance per watt vs. Intel Xeon 7100 series – with 50W low voltage version available - we expect to see new MP blade and high-density servers

- The fastest version of the CPU will be available in volume production running at 2.93GHz

- We are looking forward to an exciting launch and expecting many announcements from our partners on OEM system availability and solutions announcements around virtualization and scalable performance very soon.

- We are already in production and began shipping volumes of the Intel® Xeon® processor 7300 series (Tigerton) and Intel® 7300 Chipset (Clarksboro) to our OEM customers in June.

- We also began shipping seed systems into end-users to begin their pre-qualifications in June

- This platform is the fastest design to production execution of an MP server platform in Intel’s history.

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...

---

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.

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:

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

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.

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.]]> Thu, 29 Mar 2007 03:19:18 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/intel-challenge-competition-thinking-outside-of-the-beige-box/ https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/intel-challenge-competition-thinking-outside-of-the-beige-box/242358

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.

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.]]> Mon, 26 Mar 2007 04:00:34 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/3807-judge-intel-amd-must-determine-if-lost-email-relevant-important/ https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/3807-judge-intel-amd-must-determine-if-lost-email-relevant-important/242383The 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 ]]> Thu, 08 Mar 2007 04:51:47 -0800 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/sponsorwatch-cohn--wolfe-leader-sponsor-of-new-rules-communications/ https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/sponsorwatch-cohn--wolfe-leader-sponsor-of-new-rules-communications/242234 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

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.

[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's Transistor Technology Breakthrough Represents Biggest Change to Computer Chips In 40 Years ›

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 27, 2007 – In one of the biggest advancements in fundamental transistor design, Intel Corporation today revealed that it is using two dramatically new materials to build the insulating walls and switching gates of its 45 nanometer (nm) transistors.

Silicon

For over 30 years, Intel has been a leader in silicon technology, steadily doubling transistor counts to the beat of Moore's Law, consistently advancing logic processes for higher processor speeds and performance, and researching new materials and transistor architectures. Our history of innovation continues today, with new breakthroughs that are enabling new usage models and new business opportunities.

Logic processes ›

Find out how Intel's advanced logic processes improve performance while reducing power.

• 65-nanometer technology
• 45-nanometer technology
• Lithography
• Lead-free solutions

Moore's Law ›

Learn how the realization of Moore's Law delivers affordable computing to the world.

• Our vision
• Read how Intel's high-k gate dielectric drives Moore's Law into the future (PDF 102KB)

Energy-efficient performance ›

Discover how we're making performance energy-efficient while expanding capabilities.

• Silicon innovation

Silicon research ›

As silicon technology approaches the physical limits of today's materials and processes, we're developing future technologies to ensure the continuation of Moore's Law.

• High-k/metal gate
• 3-D and III-V transistors
• Fully silicided (FUSI) metal gates
• Staying ahead of the power curve (PDF 270KB)

(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 online 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

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.

[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.

[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.  

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

Thursday was a very important day for Intel (a sponsor of SVW) as it introduced its Core 2 Duo family of microprocessors, representing the most important product launch since its Pentium launch 13 years ago.

"The empire strikes back," was how Nathan Brookwood, microprocessor analyst at Insight64 termed it. And that's an excellent comment on what this launch means to Intel, the world's largest chipmaker.

The Core 2 Duo launch is more than just a new microprocessor family; it represents Intel's determination to return to its core capabilities after embarrassing missed product deadlines, less than successful forays into other businesses, and an obsessive need to regain market share lost to rival Advanced Micro Devices.

It is also a return to a culture formed from a rigorous engineering discipline that doesn't tolerate missed deadlines, or *any* loss of market share--no matter how small.

To further underline the importance of this event, just days before the launch Intel appointed its most effective and aggressive senior executive, Sean Maloney to lead its global sales and marketing.

. . .

As Intel chairman Craig Barrett looked on from the front row, CEO Paul Otellini strode the stage and reported that over the past couple of years Intel's engineering teams have consistently met all their deadlines on time, and sometimes ahead of schedule. This includes the new Core family, which will form the foundation of Intel's business for the rest of the decade and beyond.

But getting to this point was not easy, it required a complete overhaul of its microprocessor designs in order to make low electric power consuming chips operating at higher performance levels. These two goals are extremely difficult to achieve with traditional microprocessor designs. Intel had to develop innovative technologies, making the chips smarter about power conservation, while providing higher performance through the use of multiple processor cores.

During this time, it was not easy watching rival AMD make significant inroads into its markets, with its Opteron family and other microprocessors.

The significance of Thursday's launch was further underlined by its location at Intel's HQ in the heart of Silicon Valley, in huge tent filled with nearly 300 journalists and analysts.

Sean Maloney, the freshly appointed senior VP of global sales and marketing, demonstrated the capabilities of the chip family, and promised further advances in lower power consumption, increased performance, and new types of applications for the digital living room.

. . .

Over the past 24 years Mr Maloney has earned a reputation as Intel's top troubleshooter. He is the one that Intel relies upon to tackle some of its most challenging business problems.

Mr Maloney used to head Intel's UK operations and then became technical assistant to CEO and chairman Andrew Grove. From 1992 to 1995 he worked side-by-side with Intel's legendary top executive, learning all aspects of the business. This is how Intel grooms executives destined for its senior ranks.

Through a series of senior positions Mr Maloney quickly became known as one of Intel's most effective and aggressive managers, tackling some of the company's most difficult jobs such as rebuilding its troubled communications chip group.

Again, Mr Maloney has been handed one of the company's most challenging jobs: reigniting sales and growth for what insiders call "Intel 3.0," the next big phase of Intel's business strategy. Intel 3.0 represents the third reinvention of the company.

Very few people remember that Intel started off as "the memory chip company," then it became "the microprocessor company," and now it is set on a new course to become "the platform company."

But Intel is like a supertanker in that it takes a while for it to set up a new course; when it does, it becomes an extremely aggressive competitor.

AMD, located just a stones throw away from Intel's HQ, has done well to exploit changes in microprocessor markets at Intel's expense. Now it faces the full might of a refocused and reenergized Intel determined to win back any lost market share--and then some.

Yet AMD's response is puzzling. Earlier this week it announced plans to acquire Canadian graphics chip maker ATI Technologies in a $5.4bn deal. This is not the time to be distracted by a huge merger--unless AMD's management is looking to ATI as a life raft.



In fact, a life raft might be the best way to view this deal if you consider that AMD has to develop its own multi-core chip family, develop global sales channels, *and* invest billions of dollars in building new chip fabs, which, by the way, includes mastering a new manufacturing process at 65nm. Each one of these are extremely challenging and risky endeavors.

I cannot see how AMD can continue to gain market share and profit at Intel's expense. It is up against a competitor that just announced a record number of 550 PC/notebook design wins; and 200 server design wins for its new microprocessors. Intel has already successfully made the transition to 65nm production; plus it has one of the industry's most capable managers, Sean Maloney, leading its global sales push. This is the Empire Strikes Back--with a vengeance.

- - -

Coming up: Sean Maloney talks to SVW on net neutrality. (I grabbed a few minutes with him for a chat before his presentation.)

It's part of a series of aggressive, strategic moves by Richard Edelman, the CEO of Edelman. Mr Edelman has also been acquiring the PR industry's top bloggers, such as Steve Rubel, who writes Micro Persuasion, and Phil Gomes. Plus a recent deal with Technorati will extend Edelman's ability to monitor the blogosphere internationally.

The acquisition of A&R comes at a time when the demand for PR services is rising rapidly as Silicon Valley VC firms fund a new generation of what some call "Web 2.0" companies. The large number of such companies is increasing the noise level which makes it difficult for them to attract attention without professional help.

Large Silicon Valley tech companies are also increasing their PR spend as traditional forms of advertising are slipping in their effectiveness because of the turmoil in the media sector. Traditional and trade media publications are transitioning to online business models but the change is disruptive and there are fewer publications.

Public relations is potentially more cost effective than some forms of advertising. Intel recently boosted its PR spending with several deals spanning its global markets.

Pam Pollace, who used to head Intel's communications team is now at Edelman as director of the US Technology Practice.

Here are some of the details from the press release:

Edelman Acquires A&R Partners, Emerges As a National Leader in Tech Public Relations

Friday May 26, 10:00 am ET

Deal combines largest independent global PR firm with leading independent technology agency in San Francisco Bay Area

NEW YORK, May 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Edelman, the world's largest independent public relations firm, announced today that it has acquired A&R Partners, Silicon Valley's largest independent technology PR firm. The move significantly expands Edelman's global tech practice and makes it the leading agency in the San Francisco Bay Area and one of the largest technology practices in the state.

Edelman's Mountain View office will merge into A&R's San Mateo headquarters, creating a nexus of technology PR expertise to serve clients throughout the world. The combined Silicon Valley operations will be called A&R Edelman.

The acquisition of 115-person A&R includes its offices in San Mateo, San Diego, Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., Denver, Portland and Louisville.

"Edelman has excellent technology clients; we have done strong work in technology for decades. Our goal is to play a global leadership role in this market. With this acquisition, technology will become our third largest practice after consumer and healthcare. A&R Edelman catalyzes our global technology team, creating instant global technology communications leadership," said Richard Edelman, Edelman's CEO.

The integration of A&R will push Edelman's annual revenues to more than $300 million globally and $200 million in the U.S. The combination of the two agencies will create one of California's largest technology practices. Edelman currently has California offices in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco and Mountain View.

Bob Angus and Zelda Rudin founded A&R Partners in 1986. The agency has ranked #1 in revenue in Silicon Valley for the past four years and has received several prominent industry awards, including PR Week's Mid-sized Agency of the Year and the Holmes Report Tech Agency of the Year, both in 2004. The company also has consistently ranked among the top PR agencies to work for in the U.S. by The Holmes Report.

Bob Angus, A&R's president, said, "Our decision to join with Edelman is all about extending our global reach, adding new services and practices for our clients and giving our people more opportunities for growth. At the same time we will help move Edelman's tech practice into a leadership position in the U.S. Edelman is an outstanding fit for us, both strategically and culturally. We share the same vision, interest in our people and passion for results."

"They think like we think. We have known A&R and Bob Angus for years; we share a common approach to our business," said Pam Talbot, Edelman's U.S. CEO.

Talbot will oversee A&R's acquisition by Edelman, and A&R's president Angus will report to her as president, A&R Edelman. He will also become director of Edelman's U.S. technology practice, working closely with Pam Pollace, president of Edelman's global technology practice.

Pollace said, "This acquisition will expand our strong tech practice, strengthen our global credentials and extend our experience across the board -- in mobile computing, digital entertainment, social networks, enterprise software, semiconductors, security and beyond. This will create new growth opportunities for Edelman in a revitalized technology PR sector."

Edelman is the world's largest independent public relations firm, with 2,000 employees in 45 offices worldwide. AdvertisingAge recently named Edelman as the best PR firm in its 2005 "Best Agencies" issue while PR Week awarded the firm its "Editor's Choice" distinction at the start of 2006 and named it best large agency of the year. Edelman's network includes four specialty firms -- Blue (advertising), First&42nd (management consulting), StrategyOne (research) and BioScience Communications (medical education and publishing) -- making it possible to provide clients with a comprehensive spectrum of communications services. Visit www.edelman.com for more information.

Key Facts:

A&R Partners Edelman

Revenue 2005 $14.1 million $261 million

% Revenue

growth over

2004 17.6% 13.6%

Founded 1986 1952

Management President and Managing Founder and Chairman -

Partner - Bob Angus Daniel J. Edelman

Sr. Partner - Zelda Rudin Global CEO - Richard Edelman

Sr. Partner - Maria Amundson US CEO - Pam Talbot

Partner - Lisa Auslen Vice Chairman - Leslie Dach

Partner - John Derryberry President, Global

Partner - Todd Irwin Technology Practice -

Partner - Mark Rawlins Pam Pollace

Staff 115 2000 (21 Silicon Valley)

Offices San Mateo(HQ), New Co-headquartered in the

York, Washington D.C., U.S. in New York and

Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, with offices in

Denver, Portland and other major U.S. cities

Louisville -- 45 offices Globally

[This stomach bug has taken the wind out of my sails for a few days, my apologies about the backed up emails I hope to get to them in the next few days...]

Edelman's deal with Technorati is interesting. For an undisclosed sum of cash Edelman, the world's largest private PR firm is financing Technorati's expansion into the rest-of-the-world blogosphere. It's a savvy move, not one without risks, but Richard Edelman has been out in the forefront in trying to understand the blogosphere and the need for tools to measure influence and reach within the entire (global) mediasphere (of which the blogosphere is a subset).

There are lots of comments on the deal out in the ether, but none seem to get it. We won't know unless we know the terms of the deal, either way its a bold move.

So far, Edelman has hired the top PR industry bloggers and it is moving ahead on a course that I do not see other PR firms following. And I think it is because they don't understand the nature of the game.

Edelman's moves are very interesting because they are potentially game changing, they are risky, and bold. Let's see if the other the-game-is-still-the-same PR firms figure things out. Can they be fast followers? I don't think so . . . but I'd love to be proved wrong.

Technorati has had problems scaling its infrastructure but that's probably because it has done a masterful job on branding. It really understands the psychology of the blogosphere and it has managed to keep that balance of being a good community citizen along with its right to monetize what it is doing.

Technorati has managed to almost privatize the trackback--a key element of the blogosphere. Trackbacks seem to have stopped working but if I look at my Technorati links there are many links that don't register as trackbacks. I've no idea why that is the case but Technorati offers a solution.

Usually I rarely get to go to user conferences but I wanted to see Tibco in its environment. Tibco has been one of my earliest supporters in this brave new world of online publishing/blogging at Silicon Valley Watcher, and this was good chance to learn more about the company, and the IT industry.

Tibco is a well established IT enterprise software company but what it does is complex IT. The company has technology that helps enterprises connect up multiple layers of legacy IT systems into a single, real-time business system.

And now, with the advent of the age of the services oriented architecture (SOA), as opposed to the database centric IT architecture--Tibco is addressing the upper-most layers of the enterprise stack--the business process management. This goes beyond applications and into the realm of where IBM, the world's largest services company, has strong ambitions.

Tibco might be David to IBM's Goliath but the battle doesn't require either one to lose  because there is a huge potential market that can support many vendors as it expands over the next few years.

CEO Vivek Ranadive's keynote on Wednesday morning stated the case for business process automation  in reasonable and rational terms. And Mr Ranadive wasn't shy about hitting out at the enterprise software application vendors.  He said that IT departments had been "extorted" by enterprise applications vendors for many years.

Enterprise software application vendors have earned a reputation for being expensive to license, operate, and integrate. Not to mention the failure of software enterprise applications in markets such as supply chain management. That is something which has made cash-strapped IT departments very unhappy.

Mr Ranadive believes that corporations should leap to the next stage of IT design by adopting a services oriented architecture rather than focusing on applications. This approach takes away the need for a central database, it democratizes data, and it is an event-driven system rather than relying on constant polling for data.

That means anything that inputs data into the system is at a peer-to-peer level. This makes communications of data far easier compared with having to deal with hierarchies of IT systems, and also IT silos around each departmental group.

And by focusing on services, corporations can focus on the business process rather than trying to adapt to fit the business process construct of an application. Mr Ranadive made the point that when everyone has access to the same applications and IT systems, the differentiation between competitors is in their business processes. And that is why business processes should not be commoditized but kept unique.

A business process is like a story narrative that describes a series of steps that result in an action; and the goal is to automate the business process. But that content is unique and that's what makes a business unique.

Another advantage of this approach is that if you could automate all the business processes of a corporation, you would be able to use your modules to quickly construct additional business processes and deploy them in a matter of days.

Partnerships with other companies become much easier because SOA enables the sharing of real-time data.  That means you could bring several corporations together for short-term ventures.

And it would make M&A deals easier to integrate and therefore speed up sector consolidations; resulting in a more rapid return of value to shareholders, and possibly, customers.

SOA however, is still very far from making an impact in most corporations simply because their IT departments are mired in projects and only have resources to pursue small steps towards an SOA goal.

Charles Feld, executive VP at EDS , the IT services giant, gave a very good presentation following Mr Ranadive. Mr Feld is one of the most experienced global CIOs. He has worked as CIO for massive organizations such as Frito-Lay, Delta Airlines and First Data.

Mr Feld warned large corporations that they might not have much time to dally because their legacy systems will hurt them. That's why upstarts such as Jet Blue can gain a significant competitive advantage over older, established competitors--they are not weighed down by the burdens of legacy IT systems.

Mr Feld also made a pleas for the CIO to strongly push for the changes within corporations that are needed to be made in the trek towards SEO. Otherwise many of the global 2000 corporations will not be here by the end of the decade.

I later ran into Madeline Bayliss, vp of sales at Solstice Software, which has an SOA testing suite. With SOA, there can be many modules and business processes across many different platforms--which quickly makes for a very complex system. How do you know a new services project will work without defects? And trying to find defects manually can be a gruesome and tedious ordeal.

Ms Bayliss, who has had a long career in financial services IT, says that it can take a long time to find problems unless you can automate the testing.  And that is very much where the future of IT is heading--it is all a mashup of IT services organized into business processes but potentially touching dozens and maybe hundreds of other business processes. Solstice is in a good position to help deal with such a world.

It was a smart, cultured crowd in a smart, cultured venue. And I met several outstanding people--a perfect evening.

The Power to Predict is surprisingly good for a book about IT strategy. My former colleague at the Financial Times Louise Kehoe contributed her formidable editorial skills to the project. The book explains how enterprises can take the next step beyond real-time IT systems and take advantage of predictive patterns.

The problem with the Predictive Enterprise concept is that the message--once you get it--is very powerful. And so Tibco is finding it difficult to get its customers to talk abut how they are using its real-time predictive technologies.

I'm not surprised that they are reluctant to talk because this is something I have seen happening time and again. If IT strategy is strategic to my business, why would I tip off my competitors and have them copy my process? There is nothing in it for me.

Tibco is also, very much an old school Silicon Valley company, the culture of the software engineer has an important standing within Tibco, along with its close ties to Stanford University. It is a conservative organization--but one that is trying to break out of its mold.

Tibco is willing to take a chance on the new media technologies, the podcasts, the vidcasts, books--whatever it takes to establish its thought leadership. And the new rules of the new communications reward the less-scripted interview or presentation. The more real, off-the-cuff, less-controlled--the more effective the communication.

And that was clear at the book launch. When Tibco senior executives didn't stick to their scripts that's when their stage presence became more noticeable and more interesting.

That is why I recommend to people: don't over prepare for presentations--and ditch the PowerPoints. You know the subject by now, tell a narrative--and if there is no PowerPoint the audience will look you straight in the eye. Why distract your listeners from you?

- - -

It's Tuesday morning and another glorious sunny day in Palo Alto and I'm about to sit down at Il Fornio with Richard Edelman CEO of highly regarded and highly successful Edelman agency. And Mr Edelman is one of the legendary figures, and leading thinkers, of the US PR sector.

Mr Edelman is just finishing a conversation with Paul Saffo, the renowned futurist thinker at the Institute of the Future (I want a job like Mr Saffo's!). "We used to crew together at Harvard," explains Mr Edelman. "Aha, the old boy network rears its head again," I say with a smile.

I see Mr Saffo has the latest edition of the Edelman Trust Barometer report grasped in his hand. This is an interesting international study of "trust" and what types of individuals and organizations people trust.

"You'd better watch out," I tease Mr Saffo. "Third-party independent experts such as yourself are slipping in people's trust."

"That's what I spotted, I'm going to have to study this document carefully," Mr Saffo says as he prepares his farewells and then leaves Mr Edelman and I to our first meeting.

The two of us are probably the least "trustworthy" table in the restaurant. That's because the media and PR ranked extremely low in the recent Trust survey. And for the first time, respondents said they trusted their peer group the most--even more than experts such as doctors etc.

People trust their colleagues, friends and family--it is what Mr Edelman calls the Me2Revolution it is peer-to-peer trust networks. Please take a look at Mr Edelman's essay on the survey results, which are published in PR Week's February 13th edition. You can read the Me2Revolution essay here on his Richard Edelman 6 A. M. blog.

I really respect that Mr Edelman is a blogger. He is rare among the senior leadership in the PR/communications sector. Most of his peer group worries about blogs and tries to understand blogging and the proper response etc. Mr Edelman found out by becoming a blogger--(and his Google Page Rank of 7 is very good!)

Our conversation runs through a tremendous amount of media and communications subjects. We compare notes and experiences and it is clear that we talk the "same language."

The same language is the language that you acquire when you become involved in blogging and in the online conversation with the world, with your peer group, and with yourself. You always know if someone speaks the language or not.

Reading about blogging will not teach you the language--it comes from doing and being involved. And that takes a lot of guts for someone of Mr Edelman's stature in the industry, because blogging means you have to walk the walk otherwise the Emperor's lack of clothes is very visible (mashup metaphor #15!).

I like to say that blogging and bloggers have a lot in common with roosters--both need cojones. And I say that in a balls reference not as a reference to gender because many women have bigger balls than many men :-)

Bloggers need to have cojones because they put themselves on the line every time they publish a blog post. Because others can and will challenge you--and you have to respond in a very public way.

Also, there are the obligatory snipers, and complainers and habitual cynics that clog the blogosphere and leave nasty comments. Most usually, those types never use their real names because they don't have the balls.

And because Mr Edelman blogs, he speaks the language of the new communications and knows the power of this communications medium. However, it doesn't necessarily mean you can teach others in your organization the same language. Mr Edelman mentions that convincing others is often difficult.

For example, he understands that trying to keep control of a corporate message is futile. It is much better to engage and to "build credibility through dialogue." Control is a huge issue in the PR world--so Mr Edelman is dealing with deeply seated core beliefs.

This is why I think that the new communications/new media that emerges will come from what I call "new rules" enterprises/ventures. You start off new, with the people that understand and speak the same language so you don't waste time in fighting the culture wars within organizations.

For example, I often like to work with people who are young or are new to a topic or job because they haven't been taught what they cannot do.

That means they can bring a freshness and originality to an endeavor. And with the new communications/new media--it is still all very new. And there are many new ways that we will use these powerful, two-way communications technologies, and in many new ways that we cannot yet predict.

So that's why we should jump in--just like Mr Edelman did with blogging--and try them out and see what can be done and compare notes, then do it all again, and again.

Because then we get a chance to create something new and potentially help design what the new communications/new media world will look like for the next decade and beyond.

And that would be a nice place to be.

I popped over to Vivek Ranadive's holiday event at the weekend. It seems as though the holiday festivities officially start with Vivek's early December bash at the very regal, black-tie optional party at the Canter Arts Center at Stanford University.

Vivek is CEO of Tibco, one of the first and most loyal sponsors of SVW. The least I can do is pop over once a year and eat Vivek's food and sample his wines (I offer such services to all of my sponsors and I encourage them to use them often. Sign up now...)

Vivek's book, "The Power to Predict," is due early in the new year It is the sequel to "The Power of Now" which laid out the competitive advantages of being a real-time corporation--having your IT systems run at the speed of your business--rather than in batch mode.

The Power to Predict discusses a concept that Vivek has been talking about for several years. It is the next stage: how corporations can respond in real-time to likely outcomes based on past data.

For example, the technology is being used by Harrah's Casinos to figure out how to improve customer satisfaction in real-time, such as offering free dinner show tickets to customers reaching their spending/losing limits.

Predictive technology is also becoming integral to IT architectures, especially in the brave new world of utility computing. Allocating computer and network resources in real-time is a big challenge.

However, if you can make use of predictive technologies, you can potentially be better prepared to respond to changing demands for IT within your organization..

- - -

BTW, you should visit the Canter Arts Center, it has stunning art galleries and it is free.

The Canter Arts Center at Stanford University presents art in 24 galleries plus sculpture gardens, terraces, and courtyard. The Center's diverse collections span 4000 years and the world's cultures and number some 25,000 objects, including the largest collection of Rodin bronzes outside Paris. Nearly 100 contemporary sculptures sited outdoors throughout campus await your discovery. Presenting a wide range of important changing exhibitions, docent tours, lectures, gallery talks, symposia, and classes, the Canter Arts Center is a cultural hub for the community and a teaching resource for Stanford University. Learn what the Center offers and visit often. ADMISSION IS FREE.

http://ccva.stanford.edu/

During my recent lengthy apartment/office move, I took a break and went to the Infineon Technologies media/analyst conference in Sonoma. Infineon, a founding sponsor of this site, attracts a decent-sized crowd to this annual event.

It is held at Infineon Raceway, one of the premier automotive racetracks in the US and just 40 minutes north of San Francisco.

The media and analysts are invited to listen to a few hours of presentations, updates from Bob LeFort, president of Infineon USA, and panel discussions on current issues from Infineon and third-party experts.

It's a quick and effective way to catch up with what the largest European chipmaker is doing, and the issues and trends that affect its business strategies.

Hot Laps

And then after lunch, Infineon invites everyone to play on the racetrack in a variety of motor sports events, including the opportunity to do "hot laps" with Mario Andretti.

This means sitting next to the seven times world champion race car driver as he barrels at incredible speeds into impossible turns in a racing Porsche GT3 Cup car. Seeing this racing legend work his craft at such close range is very very impressive.

[Last year, Nathan Brookwood, Insight 64 microprocessor analyst, had an interesting experience with Mr Andretti. As they came into a turn, one of the wheels fell off, and rolled right ahead of them(!) Mr Andretti maintained complete control of the car and within a few minutes he was back on the track with all four wheels, and plenty of eager passengers waiting in line.]

Automotive chips--Silicon drivers

My regular contacts at Infineon USA are Christoph Liedke, and his boss Gerhard Zimmermann of the comms team, aided by Mansi Agarwal. I met Christoph and Gerhard several years before Infineon became a sponsor of this site, when I was covering the chip sector for the Financial Times.

To Wall Street and many others, Infineon is viewed somewhat plainly, as Europe's largest chipmaker, spun out of Siemens, the German industrial and engineering conglomerate.

It is one of the world's largest memory chip manufacturers, but this is not always a welcome accolade. That's because memory chip markets have notoriously low margins and follow a brutal business cycle marked by long bust periods and very brief boom periods.

And that is why Infineon is pushing into higher margin chip markets such as automotive chips, a market in which it dominates in Europe but lags in the US. Which is why it bought the the ten year naming rights to Infineon Raceway, formerly known as Sears Point Raceway.

Now in its third year, it has been a very good move for Infineon. The popularity of motor sports in the US has grown tremendously over the past few years. And the venue has hosted NASCAR and many other national and international racing events, helping to associate the Infineon brand with high performance automotive technologies.

Infineon's controversial CEO

Infineon came alive for me when I first interviewed its CEO, Dr Ulrich Schumacher. He was one of Germany's most prominent business leaders and on a meteoric career path -- a business wunderkind.

He was the youngest ever director at Siemens, one of Germany's largest and most respected companies; and when Siemens decided to spin-off Infineon Technologies in April 1999, Dr Schumacher presided over a very successful IPO at the height of Germany's dotcom mania.

Infineon, within Germany, represented the crown jewel of the country's tech boom and it became one of the most widely held tech stocks in Germany.

Dr Schumacher was very much in the public eye and he used that position to push for reforms in German laws that burdened German companies in global markets. And he gladly tackled the hard cultural battles within a society that doesn't tolerate mavericks very well.

What began to fascinate me about Infineon was that it was a new company emerging from a large and well established parent. And it was trying very hard to shed the old business culture and old ways of thinking prominent in the German business community.

Escaping Munich

Dr Schumacher recognized that Infineon must become a global chipmaker, not a German or European chipmaker. He would sometimes hold board meetings in different locations around the world to encourage a global perspective within the company.

I remember asking him what brought him to San Francisco one particular time. He said he had just had a company board meeting in Napa. "I have to have an excuse to get these guys out of Munich some of the time."

He also wanted to separate as much as possible from Siemens, and worked hard to reduce Siemens' stake in the company and its majority control, which he felt sometimes restrained Infineon's abilities to manage its business within very tough chip markets.

Alliances not acquisitions

Dr Schumacher pursued a very savvy business strategy, establishing numerous manufacturing partnerships with other leading chipmakers, such as IBM. This spread the capital investment risk, and it enabled Infineon to co-develop leading manufacturing processes and technologies.

And Infineon was very conservative in its acquisitions, avoiding large deals but happy to help bid up the price of acquisitions targeted by rivals.

The low margins in the memory chip business also forced Infineon to become highly disciplined and cost-efficient in its manufacturing, which it then applied to its other chip products, improving the profit margins on those lines.

Outspoken payback

Mr Schumacher trod on many toes during his tenure at Infineon. And his outspoken opinions and attempts to limit Infineon's exposure to European labor earned him the enmity of German trade unions and many others. He resigned from Infineon in March 2004 during a board meeting.

Dr Schumacher's strategy and culture still continues at Infineon. And the company maintains a strong presence in Silicon Valley with several thousand workers in San Jose and other locations in the US.

It's not just the talent pool in Silicon Valley that Infineon benefits from, but also from the the region's culture of entrepreneurship, risk taking, and innovation. I've seen such associations with Silicon Valley transform companies and they are very important, more important than we sometimes realize.

Where were you?

Infineon's sponsorship of SiliconValleyWatcher shows it is a stalwart supporter of innovative approaches, and keen to explore the opportunities emerging from the use of innovative/disruptive media technologies such as blogging. And it has been willing to experiment with the medium directly, establishing InfineonWatch.com.

But it has not been easy sailing for Christoph Liedke and Gerhard Zimmermann, who have had to step out on a limb with their support of SiliconValleyWatcher. The chip industry has slipped into yet another downturn, and they have smaller budgets and have had to face questions about their support for "blogging" type media publishers.

Obviously, I think Infineon's money is well spent and the association with SiliconValleyWatcher is helping both parties build our brands in mutually positive ways.

Plus, what excites me the most, is that we all get to be part of an amazing phenomenon that is changing the global media sector; and it will lead to some very profound and historic changes in our global society, some of which we cannot yet predict. And we will be able to say to our grandchildren: "I was there." imho.

- - - - - - - -

[Infineon is listed on the DAX 30 index of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: IFX).]