Category: Network

On Monday, The Next Web covered Research In Motion’s possible attempt to best Google in bidding for the numerous patents held by Nortel. The patents are seen as a huge asset to mobile industry players as a key in coming out on top in the mobile realm. Google’s bid seemingly came out of nowhere — and was noticed across the mobile technology space immediately.

“What’s fascinating about it is that Google put out this bid on this huge portfolio almost sight unseen,” says David E. Mixon a partner and patent attorney with Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP in Huntsville, Alabama. “Because it’s got this huge number of patents in the portfolio and there’s not enough time or money to analyze all of that.”

While Research In Motion has yet to comment on why it might bid on the properties, Mixon has some ideas.

“There are two basic reasons,” Mixon explains. “First, is to establish a very large patent portfolio that is technology-based. The other reason is probably to keep it out of the hands of Google. (RIM) can also use it to go after or potentially intimidate smaller competitors or competitors that don’t have as large of a patent portfolio — just by the size of it alone.”

It’s those patent portfolios that are used as defensive mechanisms against each other. The more patents a company has, the more it prevents other companies from going after it in litigation. Google, who has quickly risen to the upper ranks in mobile technology, is already seeing lawsuits come its way. Acquiring the Nortel properties would help them combat such litigation.

But what if Google is outbid for the patents, either by RIM or by another mobile giant such as Apple?

“It’s hard to say. I don’t think it would stop them in their acquisition,” says Mixon. “This situation is kind of unique because you had this huge portfolio on the market because of the situation with Nortel. I don’t think that if Google failed to acquire this portfolio that it would stop them in their efforts. They would (just) most likely acquire smaller portfolios many times over — so to speak — through acquisition or outright purchase or licensing.”

Mixon also notes that such a strategy wouldn’t be as visible as the current bid for Nortel is, but thinks that would be the way Google would go about handling it.

In such a large portfolio, Mixon believes that there will be some patents that will be very valuable and some that aren’t commercially viable at all. But he doubts that they will be split up and sold separately prior to being sold by Nortel’s stakeholders.

“I’m presuming it’s an all or nothing deal,” Mixon suggests. “First, for efficiency. Also, for the long-term prospects of the bankruptcy settlement. They (Nortel’s creditors) will probably make more money this way than if they try to pick and choose which patents to sell.”

The longer any sort of bidding war for the Nortel patent continues, the worse it may be for Nortel’s stakeholders. Mixon believes that over the long-term that the stakeholders will lose out.

“(These patents) were like the ‘crown jewel’ of Nortel. It’s not something that companies like to give up readily,” Mixon explains. “Intellectual properties — especially for tech companies…of all sizes — is very important to them. Nortel’s spent a lot of time and a lot of money building up this portfolio and to have it basically auctioned off in a bankruptcy proceeding has got to hurt them, especially in the long term.”

The Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) has run out of all but a handful of IPv4 addresses that it is holding in reserve for start-up network operators.

APNIC is the first of the Internet’s five regional Internet registries to deplete its free pool of IPv4 address space.

APNIC’s news is another sign that CIOs and other IT executives need to begin migrating to IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol known as IPv4.

“For anybody who hasn’t figured out that it’s time to do IPv6, this is another wake-up call for them,” says Owen DeLong, an IPv6 evangelist at Hurricane Electric and a member of the board of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), the North American counterpart to APNIC.

Any CIO who isn’t planning for IPv6 is “driving toward a brick wall and closing your eyes and hoping that it’s going to disappear before you get there,” DeLong says. Ignoring IPv6 “is not the best strategy.”

Most IPv4 address space is expected to be handed out by the regional Internet registries by the end of 2011.

IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses and can support 4.3 billion devices connected directly to the Internet. IPv6, on the other hand, uses 128-bit addresses and supports a virtually unlimited number of devices — 2 to the 128th power.

The Asia Pacific region has been gobbling up the most IPv4 address space in recent years. Geoff Huston, Chief Scientist at APNIC, said APNIC allocated more than 58 million IPv4 addresses in the last two months alone: 41.2 million in March and 16.8 million in April. Among the largest allocations since February 1 were 8.3 million to NTT Communications of Japan, 4.1 million addresses to China Mobile, 4.1 million addresses to KDDI of Japan. and 3.1 million to North Star Information of China. Three other carriers — India’s Bharti Airtel Ltd., Pakistan Telecommunications and Chinanet Hunan Province Network — all received 2 million IPv4 addresses.

APNIC has depleted its IPv4 address space “dramatically faster than people expected,” DeLong says. “My guess is that a lot of operators in the Asia Pacific region realized the time of IPv4 depletion was drawing near and they rushed to get their applications in.”

DETAILS: The 6 biggest misconceptions about IPv6

APNIC is holding 16.7 million IPv4 addresses — dubbed a /8 in network engineering terms — in reserve to distribute in tiny allotments of around 1,000 addresses each to new and emerging IPv6-based networks so they can continue to communicate with the largely IPv4-based Internet infrastructure.

ARIN, which doles out IPv4 and IPv6 address space to companies operating in North America, predicts that it will run out of IPv4 addresses this fall.

“RIPE [the European Internet registry] is going to be the next one to run out. I wouldn’t count on them making it until July,” DeLong says. “I think ARIN will make it to the end of this year; maybe we’ll run out in October or November.”

Just four weeks after the final version of its Web IE9 browser, Microsoft has posted a preview of IE10 development. Company executives showed a wide range of new Internet features, and demonstrated again the power of hardware acceleration introduced in the current browser.

The demonstration scenario in Microsoft’s MIX11 conference in Las Vegas this week, faced a preview of Google Chrome against IE10. In most cases, IE10 was noticeably faster and smoother than the chrome with a range of HTML5 and CSS3 properties.

During the presentation, Microsoft corporate vice president for Windows Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch said HTML5 and emerging web standards like they were making Web applications behave more like native applications. Microsoft’s goal in the recently published IE9 IE10 and the next is to expand and improve that “native” quality for the Web. “The only native to the Web experience today and HTML5 is Windows 7 with IE9” he said.

Not everyone is excited, as comments to the transcript of the speech blogpost Hachamovitch make clear.

The preview IE10, which, as presented to developers today, showed a series of new web standards, including:

Design CSS3 Multi-column – the content can flow from one column to another, while the columns can vary in number depending on the size of the viewport. And pulling the marking of boxes of documents: documents can be more easily presented in different form factors.

CSS3 Network design – networks are a way to create a wide range of different designs, dividing the space for regions of an application, or by defining the relationship between the parts of an HTML-based control.

Gradients CSS3 – are a type of image shows a soft cast different colors used to create shadows on the background images, buttons or other objects on a Web page.

Also on tap is the flexible design support for CSS3 Box, an additional format to display related tables in a Web page, and other emerging web services specifications that was added in the preview after IE10. Microsoft says that the iterative versions come every eight to 12 weeks.

According to Microsoft, what is Web developers who want to Web standards that are native to a particular operating system for optimal performance and consistency. “Native implementations are better for developers, consumers and businesses,” said Hachamovitch. “While the use of cross-platform compatibility layers nonnative makes development easier browser that does not necessarily make a better browser. Browsers that use modern operating systems more directly provide a better experience.”

IE9 does not run on Windows XP, for example. “[B] uilding a new browser version ten years of Windows that comes with Internet Explorer 6 does not make sense to us because of the limitations of its graphics and security architectures,” Hachamovitch said. [See: “Firefox 4 IE9 tops, if you just ignore all Windows XP users.]

“Our focus has been on how to turn the same mark for the delivery of native HTML5 Windows with full hardware acceleration and working closely with standards bodies and the community,” said Hachamovitch.

Google on Monday denied an allegation by rival Microsoft that it lied about an important government certification.

But an analyst with experience in dealing with the federal government, and its contract and bid practices, said Microsoft got it right.

“Microsoft’s argument is certainly valid,” said Donald Retallack, an analyst and research vice president at Directions on Microsoft , a Kirkland, Wash. research firm that focuses on Microsoft.

Yesterday, Microsoft cited recently-unsealed court documents , including a brief from the Department of Justice (DOJ) that said, “Notwithstanding Google’s representations to the public at large, its counsel, the GAO and this Court, it appears that Google’s Google Apps for Government does not have FISMA certification.”

FISMA, or the Federal Information Security Management Act, is a set of security standards that some federal agencies require vendors to comply with.

“We did not mislead the court or our customers,” David Mihalchik, who leads the strategy and business development for Google’s Enterprise team, said in a statement.

“Google Apps received a FISMA security authorization from the General Services Administration [GAO] in July 2010. Google Apps for Government is the same system with enhanced security controls that go beyond FISMA requirements,” said Mihalchik. “As planned, we’re working with GSA [U.S. General Services Administration] to continuously update our documentation with these and other additional enhancements.”

But that’s not how things work in Washington D.C.

“Just because you’re certified with one system doesn’t mean you’re certified with others,” said Retallack, who before joining Directions worked for Boeing. While with the aerospace company, Retallack frequently dealt with the federal government on contracts that Boeing sought.

The issue comes down to Google’s contention that because its Google Apps was FISMA certified, the superset Google Apps for Government suite was also certified. On its Web site, Google touts the latter as FISMA-certified .

“That’s not the way that the government works,” said Retallack. “That would be like saying that because an electrician had met code on one house, he was certified for all the houses he built. Based on my experience with the government, each system certification is an individual process.”

Even if many of the components of Google Apps for Government were previously FISMA certified by the GAO, it doesn’t mean the entire system — which is what the government certifies — meets the requirements, Retallack added.

The dustup over FISMA is fall-out from a lawsuit that Google filed last November against the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI). In that suit, Google charged that the agency restricted competition by requiring bidders on a $59.3 million contract for cloud-based email and messaging services to use Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite-Federal (BPOS) system.

Google claimed that DOI officials told it and one of its resellers that its Google Apps for Government did not meet the agency’s security requirements.

Google’s confusion over what is certified and what isn’t shows the company’s inexperience in dealing with the federal government, said Retallack.

“Microsoft, like a lot of other federal contractors, has many, many years of experience with the federal government and contracts, and has a very large contingent dedicated to that,” Retallack said. “What strikes me about Google is that their capabilities here may not be as complete as Microsoft’s, and that got them into a little bit of trouble. They may have things to learn.”

It’s not uncommon for major contracts to be disputed, something Retallack knows from his time at Boeing.

“This is a tough business to be in,” he said. “It’s not unusual for IT projects to be protested, or at least discussed. And when there’s lots of money involved, people are going to do all they can.”

VMware made an open offer as a service platform, on Tuesday that supports multiple programming frameworks in the spring to Java, Ruby on Rails for Ruby and Sinatra.

The offer, called Cloud Foundry, is open in other ways too. Developers can use it in combination with any environment, public or private tag, even those not using VMware technology. They can also choose from a variety of application infrastructure services.

So far, PaaS providers have tended to tie users to their platform of choice and sometimes a specific cloud service. “But we knew that evolve because people want the portability of applications,” said George Hamilton, an analyst at Yankee Group. “Companies want the flexibility to develop applications and being able to port to different environments. It’s how they are used to develop software when they buy on the premises. ”

Because Cloud Foundry is open, you can make it easier for companies to change the internal environment applications to a cloud of groups, for example, or between different public clouds. “Now we can evaluate a cloud of public companies not based in its infrastructure but what are your other attributes of service,” he said.

VMware is offering access to Cloud Foundry in several ways.

VMware developers Operated Service, available now in beta, is designed for developers to test new services and operational optimization.

At some point this quarter, VMware plans to launch the Micro Cloud Cloud Foundry, an example Foundry Cloud downloadable content within a virtual machine. Developers can use at their desks Cloud Micro to develop and test their applications.

VMware also plans to offer a commercial version of Foundry Cloud for companies that want to offer PaaS capabilities within private clouds.

VMware has released the code behind Cloud Foundry as an open source project under the Apache 2 license. That means that developers can modify the software for their own needs, VMware said.

In addition to the Spring for Java, Ruby and Ruby on Rails for Sinatra, Cloud Foundry is also compatible with other JVM-based frameworks, including Grails. VMware has announced plans to allow additional programming frameworks as well.

For application services, Cloud Foundry initially support the MongoDB, MySQL and databases Redis, with planned support for VMware vFabric services.

Cloud Foundry opening may be attractive to some users, but not necessarily pose a fatal threat to PaaS providers such as Microsoft, said Hamilton. Microsoft Azure supports the environment. Network programming.

“The simple services like Azure PaaS to take charge a little more out of the developer,” he said. “But you lose a little flexibility to not have to worry about system administration.” Some developers may decide to give some flexibility to get the additional support provided by Azure or PaaS other offers.

While developers may gravitate toward Cloud Spring Foundry, as it now owns SpringSource Spring maker VMware, VMware may face challenges trying to build a relationship with other developers. “When it comes to Ruby, JavaScript and other platforms for the future, there is plenty of street cred VMware has to win,” said Michael Cote, an analyst at RedMonk.

Its success gaining the credibility of those will come down to marketing and community development, said. For example, Amazon Web Services, which is relatively open, and Google have good relations with developers, he said. However, Microsoft has had to work very hard to convince developers that it is “sort of” evil empire “when it comes to blocking Azure developers,” said Costa.

Because VMware has not set pricing details, however, Costa sounded a bit skeptical about whether Cloud Foundry will be truly free. PaaS providers usually lock users to a component so that the seller can earn revenue from each facility. Apparently, VMware is trying to build a large environment with the hope of earning only certain types of applications.

“I hope that’s what they’re doing, at least: It would be bad business people worry about monetizing every example of casting Cloud” he said.