If you use photo sharing sites you might not be aware of some of the kinds of stories you can create with your photography. Here, Simple Star’s CEO, Chad Richard, shows me how to use his company’s service, PhotoShow, to create really great photo stories.

Other posts from a year ago:
Talking with Simple Star CEO about photo shows

Tags: Simple Star, Chad Richard

Despite the soup’s tragic disposition, the episode may be worth a check-out, if nothing more than as a cautionary tale. “What not to do with grapefruits.” The music, by our friend Justin Winokur , is great, and there is a healthy dose of nervous laughs to accompany.

If we’re still friends after you watch this, consider tuning in next week. Among other things we’ll be showing you how to make our variation of green lemonade, as well as blogging up a storm.

Here’s the recipe, so you know what to avoid…

Sundried Tomato-Chipotle Swirl:
1/3C olive oil
1/4C sundried tomatoes
1 small dried chipotle pepper
1t mustard
Sea salt and pepper to taste

Grapefruit Avocado Soup:
2 large grapefruit, peel and pith removed
1 large avocado

Tags: grapefruit, raw food, soup

After a while we started to notice counter messages advertising PG&E’s environmental record. Posters and stickers saying “Let’s Greenwash This City” with statistics citing PG&E’s purchase of renewables at less than 4% started showing up on the green posters. This counter message was initiated not by a competing billion dollar utility corporation, but by a group of citizens called “Green Guerillas Against Greenwash“. Their purpose was to counter PG&E’s million dollar ad campaign with the simple truth that no matter how many bikes Californian’s ride, companies like PG&E could make a massive systemic difference by just making cleaner energy purchases.

So far the Green Guerillas have helped successfully pass The Community Choice Energy initiative through the city legislature and over to Mayor Newsom’s office (where it was not vetoed!). This plan would give the residents of San Francisco a choice of where they can buy their power instead of having to settle for dirty PG&E energy. In the near future, they hope this will force PG&E to look at the greater picture and take their own advice to really help “green this city”.

Tags: PG&E, Let’s Green This City, Green Guerillas Against Greenwash, Mayor Newsom

Sam was known in the blogosphere for the good coverage he did at TechCrunch UK. After a public split with Mike Arrington , he began Vecosys, and now BlogNation.

Sam has worked in the IT industry for over 18 years for companies like Microsoft, Netscape, Gateway Computers and CMGi, in a variety of senior technical and marketing roles. Sam has also experienced the joy and pain of running his own start-ups. Recently, Sam has been working as a freelance consultant with companies such as MSN (UK) and BT, helping develop their Web 2.0 strategies.

When not blogging, consulting or presenting, Sam loves nothing better than spending time with his wife & young family, running, drinking fine wine with his friends or watching his beloved Liverpool FC.

Oh, just a quick note to let you know that the audio quality isn’t the best. To make it easy, I have transcribed the conversation below and it will be a good supplement to the podcast.

Photo courtesy: Library House

Transcript:

Kiruba : Sam, welcome to the show.

Sam Sethi: Thank you for having me. Nice to be here.

Kiruba: Congratulations on the launch of BlogNation. That’s a very ambitious project you have started.

Sam Sethi: Yeah. It has started on a post I wrote on my own blog “Go Big or Go Home” which really was related to the fact that most Europeans were told by Americans that we don’t have enough ambition. Alright. OK. Let’s see how ambitious we can get and if we can cover most of the world’s Web 2.0 news and that’s what BlogNation will do.

Kiruba: Alright. If a person in the US were to listen to this and one of the obvious questions that would be asking is, “Are there enough innovation happening outside of the US?”. What would be your answer?

Sam Sethi: The answer would be Yes and No. Let me explain. Yes, there is a lot of innovation happening outside of the USA, outside of the Silicon Valley. Companies like Jaiku,Vimeo, get on the American radar very early. The answer, ‘I don’t know’ is because of the language barrier. Up until now, I’m trying to understand what’s happening in Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Brazil, Japan, China. Its just impossible for us if we don’t know the language. BlogNation will be moving into 22 countries…there is a lot of activity in the Web 2.0 space and we’ll get to understand them better.

Kiruba: In countries like India and UK, obviously there is no problem because English is the main language but like you just said, in China, Bulgaria, Germany, a lot of blogging and coverage of technology happens in the local language. How are you going to overcome this barrier?

Sam Sethi: OK. What we have done is that BlogNation will be written in English only. We will rope in 22 very good bloggers from around the globe who live in their country, who are native speaking and who can write very good English. The idea is that they will write about what is going on in their country in English and hopefully we can use one common language on the Internet to appreciate what is going on in each country and learn quicker about the new startups rather than wait four to five months to learn about them.

Kiruba: OK. Let’s go back in history. Now, Sam Sethi as a person came into prominence for a lot of bloggers because you were with TechCrunch UK and you did some real good work. So what happened after that and how did BlogNation came into being?

Sam Sethi: OK. TechCrunch UK was really a project with myself and several friends in London who organize events to try and realize how we can make the UK start up scene much more available around the world. We started on a project called unplugged London and we realized that it would be much simpler teaming up with Mike Arrington. Post Mike Arrington and Post TechCrunch, we started a blog called Vecosys which really was a knee jerk reaction to me leaving TechCrunch.

In the three months that we wrote Vecosys we realized that its not sustainable unless you build it big. Really, we were covering too small a market and not getting any revenues in.

BlogNation was born as a project that would be built from the ground up having an advertising network. The company Index is an important feature of the site. The company Index is really a lesson learnt in blogging. If you write ten posts they would appear on the homepage but once it drops off the homepage, its gone. The Company Index of BlogNation is a link between the post and the company. Every time there is an article written, it would be added to the company Index. Basically if you look at a particular company in the Index, you can access all articles relating to the company. If there’s one or more articles about the company, you will be able to see the history of the posts. So a great way to track a particular company, read news about the past and the current. BlogNation is a professional version of what we were doing at Vecosys.

Kiruba: Alright. Now, the scale of BlogNation is quite ambitious with 20 plus countries in the plans. So how are you funding the entire project.

Sam Sethi: The project is currently self funded and angel funded. We hope that we encourage startups who haven’t advertised before. So a lot of startups I know say they haven’t advertised on Google or Yahoo or other social networking sites because the advertising is very expensive. We are looking at providing a simple targeted advertising for entrepreneurs for a very reasonable CPM rate to encourage them. The other revenues will come from larger companies who fund BlogNation. More revenues will come from other activities that we be doing which I will be talking about later.

Kiruba: Alright. When you say other activities, would events also be in your business model just like how Rafat Ali is doing.

Sam Sethi: Events is certainly in the business model. When you have got 22 editors covering news around the world covering news, you have a very strong view of whats happening around the world and what technology we feel we will be able to attract people. Today, its just in the plans.

Kiruba: BlogNation typifies a startup company. And for a lot of startup companies the biggest hurdle they face is ‘How do I make myself known to a lot of people?” which is marketing basically. So, how are you planning to take care of that?

Sam Sethi: Like any startup we need other bloggers around the world to connect to us. We need people to talk about us. We need to provide quality relevant content which makes people want to come back to us and make BlogNation their destination site throughout the day or once a week or whatever is their frequency. I don’t think there is a quick way. I think we will take six months to build a good traffic or maybe longer.

We have very good people in our team who are well connected. The combination of writing well and sponsoring and reporting events around the world, linking to people, talking about interested things. Overtime, if we are the right thing, people will come to us.

Kiruba: Awesome. Your plans for the next year. One year down the line where do you anticipate BlogNation will be?

Sam Sethi: I would hope it is the river of news homepage which is all the world stories, will become the destination choice. Our page views, we have some figures in mind, which will make us one of the top blogs in the world hopefully. Outside of that we have a couple of other plans in mind. One is to create a TechMeme for the rest of the world. Again I feel, TechMeme is a US centric blog and cover mostly the valley and when they don’t have enough to cover, they occasionally look outside. I’d like to cover everything outside of the US . And we would be supporting a community of entrepreneurs.

Kiruba: Awesome. We were talking about Sam Sethi, the business guy. Let’s talk about Sam Sethi, the person. Tell us about your personal interests other than business. I know that now BlogNation would take more of your time but in your spare time what would you like doing.

Sam Sethi: I’m a family man with two children. So, that takes care of more of the free time. I like sports, running, rugby, football . I like socializing with friends..the thing that most family people tend to do. I don’t think I’m any different.

My interest before blogging was to learn all about learning, about what new and exciting things in technology is all about. I have a technical background. So, my natural extension is get into writing about exciting companies.

Kiruba: Alright. Fantastic. Sam, here’s wishing the very best for BlogNation.

Sam Sethi: Thank you.

Kiruba: Thank you, very much.

Tags: Sam Sethi, entrepreneur, BlogNation, Web 2.0, TechCrunch UK, Mike Arrington, Vecosys

One of the reasons ‘going green’ is brought to the forefront is a first-time study done in 2006, that showed how much electricity data centers in the U.S. are consuming. This study has prompted lots of companies to examine their data center operations and see if they can make them green by making them more energy efficient, including the disposal of old servers.

Tags: BearingPoint, Daryouche Behboudi, data centers

Years later I’m working the issues out and rekindling the love, this time with healthy raw coconut fat (and here) and sweet, sweet agave syrup. And what better vehicle than some of the delicious white peaches which are so very in season right now? Aromatic arugula and fennel make a simple salad that stands out!

Arugula & White Peach Salad With Creamy Poppy Seed Dressing
Serves 2-4

Creamy Poppy Seed Dressing
1C young coconut meat, or soaked cashews if coconut is not available
1/2C coconut water, or filtered water
1/4C agave syrup
1/4C apple-cider vinegar
2T white onion
1T stoneground mustard
1T poppy seeds
Dash of sea salt

Blend all ingredients except the poppy seeds until smooth and emulsified. Add poppy seeds, blend very briefly to mix.

Pour dressing liberally over 4C arugula, 1 large sliced white peach, 1/2C thinly sliced fennel, and garnish with pecans or pine nuts.

Reserve the extra dressing for another beautiful summer day!

Tags: Simple Star, Chad Richard

Tags: Chad Richard, Simple Star

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Tags: NETGEAR, Digital Entertainer HD, Jamison Ching

Ed Ryan and Scott Moulton at Control4 talk about how little, everyday tasks can become conveniences with Smart Lighting. With Control4 “scenes,” you can wake up to lights that come up gradually, have shades open to let in the sun, and have favorite wake-up music grow in volume. Keep kid’s from turning on lights in the middle of the day. High-tech switches easily integrate into your walls and support more commands. Plus the same remote you use to turn on your TV can also control your lights. Finally, you can even turn lights on or off with a Web browser from a remote location.

Have you ever jumped in bed and then realized that an outside light is on but the switch is all the way downstairs? Or have you ever wanted to wow your friends in your home theater by having the lights dim gradually over a 10-second period? Find out how.

Transcript:
Host: Brad Baldwin – RockyMountainVoices
Guest: Scott Moulton
Guest: Ed Ryan

Announcer
This is RockyMountainVoices powered by PodTech.

Ed Ryan
“So in the morning, instead of waking upto an alarm clock, personally I wake up better to the sun rising regardless of time of the day, you can have the lights gradually dim up and have your music come on, have the blinds raised 20 minutes before you wake up, the temperatures come up. So, you can have control of your whole environment.”

Brad Baldwin – RockyMountainVoices
This is Brad with RockyMountainVoices and I’m here today with Scott Moulton and Ed Ryan from Control4, welcome to the Podcast.

Ed Ryan
Thanks.

Brad Baldwin – RockyMountainVoices
I’m excited to learn a little bit more about what smart lighting would mean? I know you guys talk about the smart home and we’ve talked a little bit about automation in the past and even some of the digital home but tell me a little bit more about lighting Ed, and what is smart lighting?

Ed Ryan
Well, lighting is one of those technologies that everybody takes for granted and doesn’t really understand the benefit of what smart lighting or automated lighting can do for you. The first obvious benefit is that you can control lights from wherever you are without having to go to the specific light switch that controls that lighting. So, it gives you remote access and remote control to all your lighting. The other thing that over lays on top of that is that you can control your lighting in an automated way.

So, you can have events in your home automation system that trigger lighting coming on. So, for example, at a certain time of day, half an hour before sunset, you can have your outside lights come on or at certain times of the day, you can have them shut off or based on events, if a motion sensor goes off because you are getting up at night, you can have the pathway to the kitchen, turned on. So, there is all this automation that you can get built into the lighting deck, most people don’t think about until you really use it and have access to it

Brad Baldwin – RockyMountainVoices
You really need smart lighting, I mean isn’t it easy just to turn on a switch in your house?

Ed Ryan
Well sure, and what does it need right? You need food, you need air, right? Because if we get down at that level, do you need — so what one of my favorite keypad buttons in my house is at the top of my stairs looking down into the basement, I have programmed a button that shuts all the lights off in the basement. There is nothing more annoying than having a light being put on and having to walk down to where it is. Last night for example, a perfect example, one of my children turns on the fan in the bathroom all the time and leaves the lights on and not just the lights but the fan.

So, at 11:30 at night, I’m going to bed and this bathroom is right underneath our bedroom and that fan, the ball bearings aren’t quite working exactly right and so it’s a very noisy, rattly fan and so I can’t go to sleep if that fan is on. So, without smart lighting, I’d have to get up out of bed, go downstairs, turn the fan off, come back up. Where last night, it’s one of those moments where you say, “Boy, I’m so glad I have this system” I reached over to my nightstand and I have a basement off button, so I didn’t have to search for which light it was, which fan it was because there are a couple of bathrooms down there. I just pressed that ‘off’ button, the fan goes off and I roll over back in bed saying, “Ah, isn’t this great?”

Brad Baldwin – RockyMountainVoices
So, one of those moments where you’re happy you made that investment?

Ed Ryan
Yeah, it’s little things like that, but once you live with this, you just really appreciate the value of it. I have another keypad button when I leave the house, its house off. So, when everyone is out of the house, I don’t have to run around the house and make sure I didn’t leave the light on. I just pressed that button and the whole house, the lights will shut off and I’m good to go, no need to worry about it.

Brad Baldwin – RockyMountainVoices
Scott, I know one of things that I’ve read in some of your brochures even on the Websites. If you’re in an emergency situation, you get a fire in your home or something, you can program your system, your lights would be flashing or other things in the outside. Tell me a little bit more about that and maybe some of the benefits that’s around security and really kind of helping in your home.

Scott Moulton
Sure, yeah as Ed mentioned, one of the benefits is that the lights — multiple lights can interact with each other but because you’re tied into a whole home automation system, really the lights can interact with other systems in the home as well. And so, whether that’s a security alarm that goes off, or a smoke detector, or a motion detector, those lights can respond accordingly.

So, that could be a case like you mentioned, a fire alarm that goes off and so emergency vehicles are on their way, so to notify those vehicles where the home is at, the front porch lights could flash on and off but it could also be something more convenient oriented in the way that for example, coming home from work. You never have to arrive home to a dark house. I open the garage door and that triggers lights in the home to come on, right? So, it gives me a pathway from the garage into the — through the mud room into the kitchen, things like that. So, I don’t have to walk into a dark home, carrying groceries and fumbling for lights or anything like that.

Ed Ryan
Yeah, just safety and security; one of the basic things about it is having the lights on, so you can see where you’re going, right? So, you get up at night; our house we have the lights programmed, so if it’s after 11 o’ clock at night, so lights come on, they only come on 50%. So, in the middle of the night, when I’m up, I turn the light on I don’t have to do the one eye dance, I can’t open both eyes because it’s too much of a shock to my eyes, its painful. So, you have the lights come up just a little bit, so it’s comforting to your eyes. The other thing, if you need to get up and walk downstairs, go into the kitchen, or answer a door, or something, you can have the entire lighting path, the place where you’re coming from to where we’re going to and back, be lit just with the touch of a button.

So, you don’t have to keep going forward into the dark, then hit that switch, go to next one, hit that switch. So, it’s little things like that that. You know a lot of people fall, accidents happen based on that, or like Scott said you’re carrying something and you don’t have the ability to turn the light switch on, how often you come into the house with the groceries and you’re fumbling around, trying to hit a light switch, where as you don’t have to do that.

So, it’s just little conveniences like not having to go downstairs to turn the fan off or not having to turn all the lights off as you’re walking some place or have things happen automatically be a motion sensor or a time of day, or some other event happened. A cool thing that I do in my theater at home, is I tie the lights dimming to starting a movie.

So, when I play on my DVD player or my VCR, the lights dim down over 15 seconds and when I press ‘pause’ or ‘stop’, they dim back up. It’s a simple thing, but when you’re done with the movie and you shut the screen off, well, its dark, or you have to get up and turn the lights off after you’ve started the movie or where you just have the convenience of doing that. The other convenience is wherever you are in the home from any user interface, not just a light switch or a keypad, but from the remote control from a touch panel, from across the Internet using our four side product, you can control your lighting from wherever you are. So those little conveniences add up to just having a lifestyle impact, once you live with it, you really don’t want to be without it.

Scott Moulton
My experience is a lot like, you know when I first experienced DVR TiVo right, it’s a question do you really — how big of a deal was it to be able to skip commercials really? But you live with that for a little while and then you go to a hotel for example and then you’re frustrated by the fact that you have to sit through commercials, you can’t skip ahead or anything like that and lighting is very much the same way. You get used to just those real simple conveniences of being able to turn all the lights off with a single button press, or I had the scenario in my home of, if I return home past 11 o’clock, I press the ‘Welcome Home’ button and it would give me a pathway of light, but if it was after 11 o’clock, it would only go to 50% and that’s usually because I created it that way because I was usually carrying my daughter and I hated the fact that I would come in, the lights will come on full bright and she would wake up and she was usually asleep.

So, I just created that simple programming that if during the day, the lights would come on full bright but if it was after a certain hour, they would only come on to 50% but it would turn on all the lights to her bedroom, so I could take her, put her in a crib and then it’ll be done and so real simple little scenarios like that, but they’re just, they’re addictive.

Ed Ryan
The other thing is the whole save your money concept or being energy conservative. I grew up in a house where if we had the lights left on for five minutes, where they weren’t being used, boy, my mom was all over me, like “shut the lights off.” And my kids aren’t — haven’t been raised that way, we just leave the lights on all the time and it just bugs me. So, simple things like a pantry light, where I open the door to our pantry, I have it programmed, so five minutes after the light was turned on, it shuts off.

So, you hit the pantry light on, you get what you need, you forget to shut it off, you shut the door well without the Control4 system, automated lighting, that light may stay on for four hours the next time somebody goes in the pantry, now it just shuts off five minutes later. I can set the lights to shut off after so many minutes after use or I have a sweep in my base — 9:30 in the morning after they’re all off to school, every light in the basement shuts off.

I just know that well for the most part, the lights are off in the basement they’re not going to be left on all the time. In my case, whether it’s conserving energy or not, it’s just peace of mind because I feel better when I know the lights aren’t left on around the house, I’m not wasting energy. So, that’s another aspect of it, it gives you more control over your environment in your home.

Scott Moulton
You know, even while you are not at home, the home can give this ‘lived in’ appearance right? So, that if anyone would be happening by or be scoping the house at all, they would get the appearance that people are living in the house because not just a single light, you can buy timers, and just turn on a single lamp, rooms can turn on and off in different parts of the house and kind of cascade through so that it gives a more intelligent kind of safety and security type scenario.

Ed Ryan
So, one of the big benefits of having not just lighting control, but having it as part of a whole home control package, is you get to all the interaction between the different systems in your home, so it’s not just lighting. So, for example, we have what we call an agent or something you can set up in your system, it’s called the wake up agent.

So, in the morning instead of waking up to an alarm clock personally, I wake up better to the light or the sun rising, regardless of what time of the day. But you can do things like set your wake up scene, so if you like to sleep cold and you have the temperature down, you can have 20 minutes before you wake up to temperatures come up. You can have the lights gradually dim up and have your music come on, have the blinds raised.

So, you can have control over your whole environment and have it all be integrated into a Control4 system and not just be lighting control. Its really upto your imagination, like I talked about the theater example, there’s a lot of things where you can integrate lighting into other things that you’re doing to set moods, to add convenience, to add safety to whatever you’re doing which really adds the benefit of the whole is greater than some of the parts.

Brad Baldwin – RockyMountainVoices
That really answers my question. Earlier on I talked about just flipping a switch, it’s more than flipping a switch. If you have an integrated system, because you’re flipping lots of switches all simultaneously with dimming and I think that’s in a sense, answering my own question, it is a lot easier when you look at all of those systems working together as a one whole.

Ed Ryan
Right because you interact with your whole environment, you don’t interact with just your music, or just your lights or just your heating or climate control. It’s the entire environment with what you’re doing, with what your lifestyle is and because the system is automated and it’s intelligent, you can set it up to completely fit like a glove with your lifestyle and how you want your environment to behave and lighting is a key part of that.

Brad Baldwin – RockyMountainVoices
The thing I keep hearing Ed is that it’s just everyday available and it’s easy and it’s just always there. I think you have one example, I remember back before my car didn’t shut the lights off automatically, after so many seconds and I would come out to a parking lot to a dead battery. I mean this is the same kind of thing I imagine it’s that feeling that you lock your car doors, lights on, as a matter it’s going to be off in 30 seconds and it’s that same comfort that you get of walking away and knowing that everything is under control.

Ed Ryan
Yeah the whole point of having a control system in your house is to enhance your lifestyle, add more convenience, more comfort, more peace of mind and the little things that you point out, the little annoyances in life, a dead battery from a light being left on or you just think there is any number of things having this system give you full control over your environment from wherever you are and have it be intelligent enough to interact with you and behave without you having to remember, “Oh I got to remember to shut that light off”, it just knows and it will do that for you.

It’s kind of like the TiVo example, where if you haven’t had it, you really don’t know what the big deal it is, but once you start living with it, you say wow, what I — how would I be if I moved houses will I spend the money to move this over and if you haven’t lived with it, you’d have a question but once you have experienced, you say “Boy I don’t want to live without this anymore”, it’s added that much value to my lifestyle.

Brad Baldwin – RockyMountainVoices
Scott, where can we tell listeners to get more information about Control4 and lighting?

Scott Moulton
Yeah, anybody can log on to the Control4.com Website and there it’s the site is divided into the different sections and different systems, different pieces of the Control4 solution. So they can go into lighting and look at all the different products that are available as well as some easy scenarios that can be accomplished with the Control4 system.

Ed Ryan
And then we have a dealer locator up there. You can put in your zip code and you can see all the dealers that are in your area, contact a couple of them and see what their capabilities are? We have a large number of dealers that are certified and trained to do this all the time and can come out and do a walk through with you and find out exactly what your needs are and get your set up.

Brad Baldwin – RockyMountainVoices
I think you kind of answered some of my earlier questions. I think lighting and integrated into the home automation system, the whole thing is, obviously, you get a lot of benefit. Thanks for joining us today on the Podcast Ed and Scott.

Ed Ryan
Thanks for having us, thank you.

Announcer
This has been a RockyMountainVoices Podcast, visit us on the Internet at www. rockymountainvoices.com.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Ed Ryan, Scott Moulton, Control4, Smart Lighting

The podcast was made possible by Intel.

Related Stories: IntelWorldAhead

More info from Intel’s World Ahead

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Tags: United Nations, Craig Barret, Intel, Global Alliance for ICT and Development, Sarbuland Khan, IntelWorldAhead

This podcast is brought to you by Rocky Mountain Voices.

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Tags: Control4, Ed Ryan, Jeff Thomas, Brad Baldwin

Transcript:
Host: Bryan House - EMC Software
Guest: Naomi Miller - EMC Software

Bryan House - EMC Software
Hello and welcome to the EMC Podcast, When Content Matters. My name is Bryan House. Today’s discussion is on transactional content management and we’ll cover our solutions and strategies that you consider to address your paper management challenges. I am joined today by my colleague, Naomi Miller. Hey! Naomi.

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Hello.

Bryan House - EMC Software
So, Naomi we can start as you take a minute to introduce yourself to our audience.

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. My name is Naomi Miller as Bryan mentioned. I am the Director of Product Marketing for our Transactional Content Management focus. I have been at EMC Documentum for just about six years now. Actually I have a background as a customer, where I worked at Hewlett-Packard and helped, manage and implement some of our content management strategies using Documentum. So, I have some good hands-on experience, as well as a lot of experience of Documentum.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Well, great. So, to start the discussion today, can you provide us maybe with an overview of transactional content management?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. It’s a bit of a new terminology for those of you who followed the content management space. You could think of Transactional Content Management as kind of focused on your back office processes, those processes, which are transactional in nature and result in some sort of transaction happening in your company. These processes are often very paper heavy and are very traditionally, very manual in terms of their processes, cumbersome processes and time consuming processes. The Transactional Content Management approach that EMC Documentum takes, helps to streamline that whole process, helps to eliminate as much of the paper as possible to digitize that content, and to make that content available at the right time, in the right place, as part of that transactional process.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great. So, you talk on a couple of the challenges there, maybe we should dig in a little bit more, we talk about manual processes and paper. Can we — you maybe go a little bit deeper on what some of the challenges companies face in dealing with paper in their organizations?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. Most people could probably resonate with this in terms of those processes being quite cumbersome, very inefficient and obviously they not lead to a more and more expense. The one of the challenges is that, it isn’t just paper, although that is a large part of the process, there are also electronic documents you need to deal with, sometime EDI or XML files, and the papers. So, you need a much more holistic way of how you managing that information.

Accessing the information is probably one of the biggest business challenges. So, if you are a person, as part of that process, for instance one of the processes we look at is invoice processing, very manual, cumbersome process, where accessing the right information to — and properly execute that process can be quite difficult. It causes the requirement for very a leaner process, right only one person can be working on the file at any one time that obviously elongate that process unnecessarily.

As you can imagine this can also be quite a compliance nightmare not everybody knows where the right paperwork is. You don’t always know for sure that you are looking at the right version of the supporting documentation. Perhaps one of the biggest business challenges customers face, is the ability to really respond quickly to a customer inquiry. Every company, whether you are in financial services, or in manufacturing you are looking to always improve your customer service. And when a customer calls and/or a partner, or even a supplier calls to inquire about the state of their transaction with you, to the degree and you can’t answer pretty efficiently and pretty rapidly, you are then at a disadvantage over your competition.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great. So, you started such a little bit on applications or business processes where this can be applied. Can you talk a little bit more about areas within businesses that are more visible or tangible in the Transactional Content Management market?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. At a horizontal level most companies could probably recognize as I mentioned I kind of talked about these as back office processes. Your accounts payable and even your accounts receivable processes are usually very cumbersome and manual today. You could look at your legal and HR processes as well at a horizontal level. And then if you were to look into individual vertical areas, financial services probably has some of the biggest challenges in the space, you think about it essentially what financial services companies create is paper, is information, and so their processes often can be quite paper heavy, quite manual. Any individual who purchased a home could resonate with the very paper based, somewhat complex back and forth process of taking out a loan.

So, Mortgage origination, loan origination is just a prime example of where we can make that a lot of efficient. Insurance companies, we all have filed claims. Medical claims, auto-insurance claims, and so forth, the claim processing is another great target for this. Processing applications, we have examples and in government, and in education where the whole approving of an application, or the enrollment of a new student, or a new citizen in a program is also another good example.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great, great. Certainly, I think we all experienced refinancing our mortgages so we all understand the paper involved in that on the end user side. So, we talked a lot about applications and some of the challenges, can you talk little about how companies can put solutions in place and what that means on the nuts and bolts side?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. It’s important to note it may already be obvious to you that in a Transactional Content Management environment it isn’t just about the documents and the papers, it’s also about the transaction. So, one — I think really important element is the right understanding of what your transactional system is? What its requirements are? Who accesses that information? And what additional information do they need? So, there are certainly line of business, ERP, back office applications that need to be taken into consideration. There needs to be the right level of integration, so that to the degree we are managing, supporting documents as part of the transaction, when we have the right level of integration and seamlessness between those systems.

Certainly, scanning and imaging and digitizing content is not necessarily new, but typically what would happen is that would often get done at the back end of a process. So, you go through the full refinance process for instance, in a very paper rich process and then at the end when that loan is funded, organizations certainly would scan and digitize that content for archiving sake. Now, what we see is much more of a trend of moving that digitization and automation process upfront, so that you can truly see an ROI, you can really shorten the total amount of time that process takes to complete, as well as, in archive and retaining that information.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Excellent. So, can you talk about the — you just started to touch on the benefits company start to see from thinking holistically about Transactional Content Management? Can you go a little bit further into what those expected benefits might be?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. The nice thing about this area is that very often organizations can see a very tangible return on their investment. Certainly there are costs, tangible costs associated with handling paper, filing papers, storing paper, copying paper, forwarding paper and you can often add those up and there are a good deal of those costs and you can’t actually eliminate. We have got examples for instance, financial services companies with distributed locations, who can simple eliminate their FedEx cost. Often times in branch locations, you would collect the day’s paper work, put it into big red envelopes and ship it across the country or wherever you need to ship it and so definitely a cost associated with that.

The other true benefit, tangible, but maybe not as — well it is ROI associated, but can’t necessarily add up that exact cost, and that is the compliance aspect. So, you collect all the paper work, you put it into envelop, you ship it across the country, who knows what is going to happen to it, that’s a compliance risk.

So, being able to automate that information, digitize that information, retain it really starts lower your compliance rest and as we mentioned perhaps again not as added up in terms of dollar and cents, but clearly giving you competitive advantage in terms of customer responsiveness is really a very big benefit. Being able to shorten the amount of time, it takes you to make any one decision. The amount of time, you can say, in responding to your customer inquires can be priceless in terms of your competitive position on the marketplace.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great. I know one of the customer case studies that really resonates with me, I think about the spaces Cincinnati Insurance and one of the things that I really like about that story is that, is all of the things that you describing here are really behind the scenes and integrated into their SAP Claims Management System. So for the end users, utilizing this as part of their SAP environment, can you talk a little more about that case study?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. It’s a really terrific one, people can find that on our website for more detail, but essentially we put a solution in place for Cincinnati Insurances. Our claim adjustors out in this field investigating large personal and casualty insurance claim. And that’s an environment, which is very content rich, adjustors have to go out and inspect damage. They take notes, they take picture, and they have supporting documentation. In the old days they would fill out by hand long forms. They would collect their notes. They would process their pictures. They would put them into FedEx packages, and to read it four weeks later, they would get a claim put into the system.

Today that’s all done very electronically. So, they have personal scanners where they are able to digitize their content via the Web. They are able to fill out their forms online, and a claim can essentially be put into the system in a matter of days, maybe even some times hours as opposed to weeks. So, not only do they have that immediate information now available to themselves, to the home office, and to the customer, they have also eliminated a lot of those shipping charges, and a lot of the paper cost.

So, it’s really been a traffic solution and then when the information comes in electronically, as you mentioned it’s automatically connected to their SAP Claims Processing Systems and once the claim is paid out that information is all archived on EMC storage devices as well. In a Archiving environment it’s got a much lower cost than high end storage. So, they really there got a very end-to-end, all the way from capture through the business process phase and through the archiving phase.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Yeah. It’s a great story you really get to see too when you think about a transactional process how many different types of content make up a claim in this case, or any sort of business process?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Exactly. As I mentioned it’s not just paper, it’s really about I am including paper in with your electronic content, digital photos and everything else, so that you have everything you need to complete that transaction as quickly as possible, with the most accuracy as possible, and at the least amount of cost.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Yeah, that’s great. Well, Naomi, I want to thank you for joining us today. This is a great discussion.

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
You are welcome. Thanks Bryan.

Bryan House - EMC Software
You are welcome and I also want to thank all our listeners for tuning into the, When Content Matters podcast series from EMC. I encourage you all to learn more about Transactional Content Management Solutions, as well as our other content management products at software.emc.com, where you can also download additional podcasts and subscribe to a number of EMC RSS podcast feed. So, I want to thank you everyone for joining us today and call better up.

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Tags: content management

Host: Michael Johnson – PodTech
Guest: Paul Brady - Mazu Networks
Guest: Dimitri Vlachos – Mazu Networks

Michael Johnson – PodTech
This is Michael Johnson and we are here on the floor of RSA 2007 in the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and we are here at one of the interesting booths. It is Mazu and we are here with the CEO of Mazu, Paul Brady and also the Senior Product Manager Dimitri Vlachos. Welcome both of you to the podcast.

Paul Brady - Mazu Networks
Thank you Michael, thanks for having us.

Dimitri Vlachos – Mazu Networks
Thanks Michael.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay. Well, Paul, let’s start, tell me a little bit about what Mazu is?

Paul Brady - Mazu Networks
Well, simply stated Mazu provides continuous global visibility into our users application hosting devices are behaving on your network. Simply stated, it gives you a window into what users and applications do. How they are behaving? And it helps both security and network professionals, secure and optimize their network.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay, now we’ve seen a lot of boxes here, a lot of things, lot of the interesting sort of the applications. They all pretend to have the answers. Tell me what Mazu’s approach is and why you selected visibility as a way of looking at the network and the problems with that?

Paul Brady - Mazu Networks
Sure, well, what we have seen is there is lots of devices like firewalls, IPS, parameter-based tools that if you can program signatures or rules into them, you can stop people from getting in. The reality is the network parameters become more porous. it’s open, it’d be partnerships and business relationships and things like Voice over IP, the network end-points are expanding and people just did not know what’s happening on the network and is usage of the network and the mission critical nature of the network becomes more important.

They really need to understand what’s happening on the network? Who is doing what, where and how? And we do that in a unique way. We are able to without agents or inline devices through the use of NetFlow which is pervasive on almost all networks and transparent meaning very little to know overhead. We can very quickly tell users, how people are behaving on the network? What threats exist? And help them optimize it for business purposes.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay. Now, as the value of this that maybe a lot of people are finally getting into the security, getting to realize that they really need to get up to speed on security and this is kind of an easy interface way for them.

Paul Brady - Mazu Networks
Well, I think the key drivers are — applications are more tightly bound than ever to the network and there is pressure on network and security operations teams to understand and resolve issues more quickly. Five years ago, if you had an outage, people were a little bit frustrated because email was not there and you couldn’t surf the Web. Now, the cost of having any sort of network downtime is huge for most companies and the exposure of any sort of breach of critical data is also very expensive in terms of brand and so having that visibility on your network, we think is more critical than ever and is evidence by the growth we have had as a business in 2006.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Dimitri, what are you hearing from folks out there about what they are expressing as far as a need for security? Because one of the things that I have gathered at the conference is that, lot of people are thinking that the thinking about security, the mindset about security has to change. What are you hearing about?

Dimitri Vlachos – Mazu Networks
Well, so, what I hear about security is, the policy based all these detecting of known problems or most associations today are based on the fact that you can figure logs to send data to a central entity and the problem with that is on most of those solutions you have to know what you are looking for and they fail to realize that they are host-centric a lot of times and they fail to realize that the network is what’s connecting everything. So, the network no longer is kind of network issues and security issues isolated. If a worm breaks out in your network it not only affects your host it can clog your network and affect other pieces of your infrastructure.

So, I think there’s this commonality that is missing from a lot of products and solutions is that the network how it interacts is key to security just as it is key to network professionals as well. So, that’s an area I think, we are starting to see a lot of demand for — I don’t understand my network before I can do anything. I need to really understand what’s going on.

Paul Brady - Mazu Networks
Yeah, and now I would simply add to that. I think what users are demanding is security tools help move them from reactive to proactive to predictive and we think technology like Mazu Networks that gives you a behavioral based view of what’s actually happening on your network, real time, historically and can alert you to problems both with out of the box heuristics and by point clip policy to tell you about things like suspicious connections or users are using Peer-to-Peer or Instant Messenger and the firm has made a policy against it. We can out of the box, swat things like that and just help people understand and secure and optimize your network.

One of the exciting things we did in our most recent release which was last September, was we all — prior to that release we had a very IP-centric view of the world. Now, we are able to integrate with things like Active Directory, so instead of IP addresses user and we also are able to finger print over 500 applications. So, instead of IP address, it’s SAP Server, Oracle Server.

So, when you get into the Mazu appliance you are looking with a very solid contact which user Paul is talking to that server SAP and he is doing something unusual that he has never done before. Let’s zoom into and see exactly what he is doing? How is that vary from what he has typically done historically, and is it a problem and if to an extent there is a problem we can look into any device from the network user or application and say, who else is he connecting to? Who else is connected right now?

Last week we had a call from one of our customers in the East Coast, a large financial services firm and they had, like many financial services firm, they have a policy against using IM. They want to control, they have gateway products, they want to control communication in and out. Well, any guy with a little bit of technical capability knows how to tunnel IM over port 80 pretty easily.

So, the policy was in, we helped them establish a policy, simple policy within Mazu and they called us up to tell us say, they had caught a user transferring 10 Gig over IM which obviously — they didn’t tell us what was contained and I do not know if it is anything bad but they were quite excited that they were able to identify it quickly and stop it and I think that will get out there and it will be a way for them to enforce the rational policies that they’re setting pretty easily.

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay, so the folks who want to find out about Mazu, where can they go? Is there a Website?

Paul Brady - Mazu Networks
www.mazunetworks.com

Michael Johnson – PodTech
Okay. I have been speaking today with the CEO of Mazu Networks and that is Paul Brady and also the Senior Product Manager Dimitri Vlachos. It’s been great talking with both of you. It sounds like a fascinating product and we’ll have a link up on PodTech and thanks for talking both of you.

Paul Brady - Mazu Networks
Thank you, Michael. Nice to meet you.

Dimitri Vlachos – Mazu Networks
Thank you, Michael. Very nice to meet you.

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Tags: RSA 2007, Paul Brady, Dimitri Vlachos, MAZU Networks

Transcript:

Host: Paul Lancour – PodTech
Guest: Frank Buytendijk – Hyperion
Guest: Martin Vonk - ING Direct
Guest: Rennae Rupert (ph) - University Of Lausanne
Guest: Ulrich Coenen – E-Plus

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Frank Buytendijk of Hyperion has developed his series of articles and podcasts. CIO Dilemmas, examining the role of the CIO and distilling it down to four common Dilemmas that must be addressed in order to formulate working solutions.

In this final Podcast in this series, Frank tackles the comments of several thought Leaders in the area of Business Intelligence in the context of his work. We started with Martin Vonk, COO and CIO of the ING Direct. He began by assessing the IT landscape today.

Martin Vonk – ING Direct
The main dilemma is the way and I perceive them nowadays is a lack of alignment between business and IT, IT and Aux (ph) together, I must say, which presumably from my perception relates to governance issues and the way the organization is basically put together, so it’s strongly related in my opinion to governance. So, I would like to ask him what would be his idea about bridging that gap because still when you see that operations, IT and all these areas of expertise are really treated to these cost centers by senior management and CEOs instead of (Inaudible) for a profit center and so, that is the main challenge I’m facing. So, I would like to ask now, “How will you would basically address this challenge?”

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Frank, go ahead

Frank Buytendijk – Hyperion
That’s indeed a very important question that Martin is putting on the table here and I must say I’m really honored by Martin Vonk’s question because I have to say I know ING Direct just a little bit and Martin is actually too modest to ask this question. ING Direct — their business model itself shows that there’s not really an IT and business device necessary and in their case they’ve made the business and IT alignment actually a comparative advantage. At ING Direct, IT is at the core of the business model itself, it shows how you can defeat the either-or choices of strategy.

Many people know that three key strategies that there are, those would be Operational Excellence versus Product Innovation versus Customer Intimacy, at least that’s what we’ve learned, you have to make a choice for your Core Strategy but ING Direct chose which that you don’t have to choose. What they have done, they have innovated their Operational Excellence model to create Customer Intimacy in their interactions through the Web and through the call centers that they have.

Now, there’s also something else that is quite interesting about ING Direct in the very visionary work that Martin Vonk has done there. ING Direct also defeats the central — decentral discussion and that is typically how the pendulum swings in most companies. We decentralize, come across the negative consequences of that, then we centralize, come across the negative consequences of that, we decentralize and that’s how it goes. What ING Direct has done that I think is brilliant in its simplicity is that they have a very centralized business model but all kinds of innovations that come from a certain country are immediately implemented in a decentral way first, but after it has shown to be a success for instance as a pilot or it comes through specific implementation, those innovations as new best practices are immediately picked up and become the standard for other countries. There’s no such thing as a top-down or bottom-up business model. Innovations come from all over the business.

There’s not one country that is in the lead or there’s also not corporate that is in the lead. I think and that is my opinion that this all comes from understanding that the statement, “IT follows the business” or vice versa for that matter is nonsense. In many cases, IT equals the business and I think in IT, we shouldn’t think in terms of users or internal customers, we should be colleagues with the same objectives and the moment we go back to actually a logical way of thinking, many of the dilemmas in business and IT alignments will not even appear.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Great! We’ll next return to Rennae Rupert (ph), Rennae is Lecturer at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. We asked him “What question he would like to direct to Frank?”

Rennae Rupert (ph) – University of Lausanne
Well, I think Frank’s approach does not excludes the emotional aspect of a dilemma. He only and simply presents a dilemma as most people tends to discover them. Obviously, it’s very embarrassing because a dilemma is a problem which two or more monolithic solutions, and monolithic means that it can’t be broken down into something simple that could be discussed individually, it’s monolithic, so it’s that or nothing and usually they’re not acceptable. So, it’s a tough situation, but what I am saying is as soon as you look into the emotional aspect you discover ways out and ways to treat and address this problem.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Frank.

Frank Buytendijk – Hyperion
What Renay Rupert is bringing up is quite interesting, that’s the emotional side of dilemmas, being embarrassed about them and not really knowing what to do with them and how would emotional approach would help in solving a dilemma. In fact, there’s a technique in counseling that has been used a lot for this when two parties are quarreling and one of the way that you can solve the dilemma that two parties in business or in the private sense are dealing with, would be to ask each of the two parties to defend the other party’s position to totally lift the situation of the other side, and the moment you crawl into the skin of the other person, you defend their position, you’re one step closer to the solution of the dilemma as well and that is a very simple, let’s say, a smaller way of solving a dilemma.

I think there’s a misconception that dilemmas and dealing with dilemmas has to be big, that if it is about heroic decisions, that’s or nothing, Rennae (ph) already said. It is about drastic measures or brilliant insights to defeat a certain dilemma, but in most cases it is actually rather simple. What I would like to suggest as well is to look at dilemmas in the — well, let me say, not that monolithic, try to break down the dilemma, the two opposite opinions or the two opposite situations, try to break them down in smaller components and you’ll see that of every small component the advantage that you would gain by implementing that small component would be small, but also the disadvantage would be small, and if you wisely choose components of one side of the dilemma and to the other side of the dilemma and you create a portfolio of small, incremental, straight forward solutions.

Again you’ll see that most probably the negative side effects of choosing between the two bad things of the dilemma won’t even appear, you have synthesized it.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Great and finally we turn to Ulrich Coenen, he is the director of business intelligence at E-Plus which is a large mobile phone company in Germany, we asked him what he would like to talk to Frank about?

Ulrich Coenen – E-Plus
The speed of development, what we face in telecom industry is still a very high speed of change that I have never encountered in any other industry before and to cope with those issues from business intelligence or business performance management side, still it’s an unsolved issue and I know that Frank is very busy at this technical question, I think it’s the most important question, it’s not about how to outsource operations, how to streamline the IT with respect to standardization and things like that. It’s about how can you keep pace with the changes that still happen, especially in fast moving industries like the telecom business.

The idea of a competence center is key for answering this question so that actually what I took away from his thoughts about, how to structure everything around business performance management.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
So, Frank the speed of business today is Ulrich Coenen’s concern.

Frank Buytendijk – Hyperion
Yes, how can you keep pace with all the change in the telecom market that’s what Ulrich is talking about, which is interesting. In fact, it is — the one of the dilemmas that I did described in one of the papers on the CIO Dilemmas and it can be solved with an infrastructural approach. It’s the infrastructure versus business agility dilemma, and infrastructural approach means that you try to create a generic way to solve many different problems at the same time. It’s a highly-standardized way of working, so the moment you have implemented such an infrastructure, every change only has to be completed once throughout the systems and not in multiple places and it has an effect in the complete organization as you can imagine there’s a huge advantage in creating such a way of working.

Unfortunately, implementing such an infrastructure takes a lot of time and given the speeds of change in the Telco Industry and mainly other industries for that matter, you don’t have that time, you don’t have, let’s say, a year or one-and-a-half year to build a complete generic data warehouse infrastructure. So, how we describe this in one of the CIO dilemma pieces if you need to do both at the same time, you need to have your short-term solutions and you need to be working on this infrastructural approach at the same time.

Now, when I mentioned infrastructural approach, I don’t want to necessarily restrict myself to technology infrastructure. If you listened to what (Inaudible) what I’m trying to say, he did mention a business intelligence competency center and I know that E-Plus is a very successful competency center. In essence you could call this competency center an organizational infrastructure, it is a generic group of people that know how to tackle difficult business intelligence problems and apply those solutions throughout the organization in a standardized way.

So, the results can be leveraged throughout the complete business and the different people in the business intelligence competency center can work for the various kinds of business as there’s also not only a standardized technology set but also a standardized way of working, and in that sense, this is how you would solve the dilemma between the speed of making changes versus taking a long time to think and doing things right.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Well, Frank, thank you very much for taking the time to take some of the ideas we’ve discussed in earlier podcasts and directing them towards some real life situations with some thought leaders in the area of Business Intelligence and thank you for sharing your insights throughout the entire series on CIO Dilemmas.

Frank Buytendijk – Hyperion
Thank you very much, it was a pleasure.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Get in on the conversation by going to Frank’s Blog at blogs.hyperion.com/frankb. And of course, for more information go to Hyperion.com.

Thanks for listening.

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Tags: Frank Buytendijk, corporate strategy, Hyperion, CIO, business intelligence

Intel announced that it will begin making 45 nanometer chips, code-named Penryn, in the second half of the year. The new microprocessors are the culmination of years of R&D using new materials to improve the efficiency and performance of silicon-based semiconductors.

The company says the new chip technology maintains Moore’s Law, the observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in the late 1960s that the number of transistors doubles on chips every two years. Intel scientists say that transistors are now so small that more than 300 can fit on a human red blood cell.

In a recent earnings announcement, Intel officials said they expect to rebuild a lead in the computer chip market through innovation and manufacturing efficiency. Intel’s current line of microprocessors includes the Core2Duo, Core2Extreme, and Core2Quad.

In this video podcast, PodTech’s Jason Lopez visits Intel’s Hillsboro, Oregon research facility and fab.

Related Stories: IntelMooresLaw

Transcript:
Host: Jason Lopez – PodTech
Guests: Intel Spokesperson
Guest: Kelin Kuhn - Intel

Jason Lopez – PodTech
Transistors are the miniature machines of the heart of computers. The first transistors built on silicon in the 1960’s were relatively large compared to those of today. But in the last few years, scientists have sensed The End of Moore’s Law as the quest to double a number of transistors on a chip every two years has pushed the limits of physics.

This test wafer is used to measure the reliability of billions of H transistor and interconnect features, the blue prints for making microprocessors. For nearly 40 years, transistors have been made from a polysilicon gate and silicon gate oxide, the materials used to create the switch inside that turns it on and off. But with 65 nanometer technology currently in production, those materials have been pushed to their physical limits. To go smaller at 45 nanometers scientists said Intel chose new materials a Metal gate and High-K gate oxide based on the element hafnium. These materials have enabled yet again the doubling of the density of transistors within a two-year timeframe.

Intel code names its new family of 45 nanometer chips ‘Penryn’ which deliver a significant improvement in power efficiency and performance.

Speaker
This is a really tremendous accomplishment to get all the way down to 45 nanometer dimensions. When I joined Intel five micron dimensions were common. 45 nanometers is more than a 100 times smaller than that. So, quite remarkable.

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
If you think about it, if you look at the Intel 45 nanometer device technology, we can fit 400 transistors on something about the size of the human blood cell.

Speaker
So, it allows us to continue scaling and maintain this Moore’s Law type of evolutionary built up we’ve seen.

Speaker
Well, developing smaller transistors or technologies with smaller feature size is very key, because it allows you to pack more transistors on a chip which means you can do more things with that chip, that also means that these transistors when they’re smaller can use less energy when you switch them on and off. So, you have better power efficiency, you can get certain computational functions done using less energy, less power.

Jason Lopez - PodTech
Intel’s drive to adhere to Moore’s Law is as much an economic decision as it is a scientific one. It’s one thing to make the Metal gate and High-K gate oxide technologies work. It’s another to make 45 nanometer chips enlarged volumes to satisfy the market. Intel’s lead in the chip industry is based on its ability to deliver cheaper and faster microprocessors.

Speaker
Well, one of the key things that Intel does very well is what’s called Design for Manufacturability and the key there is to make sure that the product design and the process manufacturing technology are able to work together and produce high yielding, high quality products and because we’re an integrated device manufacturer, we do the design in-house, we do the process development in-house, we’re able to do a really good job at Design for Manufacturability up front and produce these chips in high volume.

Jason Lopez - PodTech
Metal gate and High-K gate oxide only atoms thick are more electrically efficient helping to reduce heat and power lost from leakage and improving transistor performance by 20%. The idea to use new materials has been around for more than a decade, but the technologies to deploy them were developed by hundreds of engineers over the past few years.

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
Okay so, if you think about how we build gate oxides, historically, we’ve used very simple silicon dioxide materials basically glass, and as we’ve developed our technology expertise over the years we started doing very elegant things to this glass to make ever better oxides basically the gate of the transistor.

When we introduced the Intel 45 nanometer process we moved a hafnium-based material as a radically different way of resolving our gate leakage issues and so it’s a very novel material system that’s intrinsic to the type of leakage improvements we see. Chip design was simple once and we don’t do that anymore. It’s complicated now because we already did the simple stuff that’s my humorous answer, but I think in today’s world if you look at a modern microprocessor. We’re talking hundreds of millions of transistors and it’s incomprehensible that humans can build this to be honest.

Every time we have a success in the fab. I sit back and look at this and we’re looking at devices that are one-tenth the wavelength of light. Little tinnie winnie devices and humans can build these very complicated things and if you think about it, a yielding dye in our process technology means every single transistor worked. Every single one of those 100 million transistors worked and that’s when we sell them. Can you believe it? Humans can actually make something where every single one of a hundred million plus devices worked, it’s remarkable, and we don’t do it as individuals, we do it as an international team.

Speaker
We had the fly of the wafers to Arizona, get them assembled and then fly them back to Folsom, California in order to actually test them.

Jason Lopez - PodTech
So, what was the feeling of the team when you booted up that first OS?

Speaker
I would say one word it was ‘Euphoria’. The team was just tremendously excited. When you considered a number of people involved in the two–and-a-half years that culminated in this boolean of major Operating System with Penryn, it was an awesome feeling.

Jason Lopez - PodTech
Is that simply because it worked or is it because a number of things work?

Speaker
Yeah, it really represents the fact that a number of things worked. Coming out of reset is not so monumentous as say (Inaudible) up to boot Windows XP, or Windows Vista or Linux because there is a lot of functionality that has to be working to reach that level of capability. So, the team was obviously excited for that. All this happened around. I believe we booted around 3:30 in the morning and there was just a lot of adrenalin in the lab at that time and this is a lot of excitement.

Jason Lopez - PodTech
It’s like a moon shot only you didn’t have the big screen looking.

Speaker
Yeah, you could say that. Maybe on a smaller scale, but yeah, that’s equivalent to us on the engineering team as our moon shot.

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Tags: Intel, 45 nanometer, Penryn, microprocessors, semiconductors, Moore’s Law, Gordon Moore, Intel, Core2Duo, Core2Extreme, Core2Quad, Jason Lopez, IntelMooresLaw

Transcript:
Guest: Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Guest: Paul Otellini - Intel

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Well, good morning everybody. I think we’ve got a pretty interesting day ahead of us. What I’d like to do is, first of all, welcome Paul and the Intel team. As somebody earlier remarked, it was interesting to see those two logos side by side up there, with no spontaneous creation of energy around them. We think today really changes the marketplace for Sun, it certainly opens up a new era in our future. We are really looking forward to talking through what it is that we’re all about.

So, what I’d like to do, and maybe give Paul an opportunity to take a little rest here, is actually talk back to a meeting, and I don’t know if you remember this Paul, but when I was announced as the CEO of Sun, that was back in April of last year, I made a series of phone calls, and probably first on the list was a call to Paul to say, surely, there’s more that we could do together. I mean we are really fundamentally engineering companies, we’re both really focused on innovation and opportunity. We then had dinner in a San Francisco restaurant, which Paul enjoyed a great deal, he came to my neighborhood, which I was happy about. We really got to talking about the marketplace, and it really struck me at that point, the more we talked, the more similarly we viewed the market, the more similarly we viewed the market opportunity.

A slide that can give you a little picture of that is really quite simple. The more folks come online, the more services they want to get access to. You want to get access to your Gmail account, you want to get access to your work, you want to get access to the new entertainment services. The more folks we could bring online, the more opportunity on the network, the more opportunity that would drive in the world’s data centers and network operation centers to fuel that demand. This is a very simple idea, but really the volume on the front end of this is what defines our markets. The accessibility, the affordability, and the innovation that really captivates consumers brings people online and creates economic opportunity, and certainly for Sun and Intel back in the world’s data centers.

So, what I thought I could do is just give you a little bit of a perspective on, not only our business model and the way we see the marketplace, but put our relationship today in the context of the business that we’re ultimately building, and then I will turn it over to Paul to talk about some of the things that we’re going to be doing together.

So, if you spend anytime around Sun, you’ll hear us talk about the four S’s. We’re basically in four businesses, and those businesses are Software, Server, Services and Storage. Now, for us those businesses are a Venn diagram, because there is a considerable amount of overlap between them. Customers really don’t want to have to make four entirely distinct and separate and disparate decisions, and similarly as an R&D company, we don’t want to have to do completely independent R&D to go pursue these marketplaces.

So, we want to leverage to the extent that we can the core innovations we have at Sun, the core systems engineering expertise, software expertise, and market expertise. To the extent that we can, that creates a very efficient model for R&D as well as a very efficient mechanism to go pursue the marketplace, but importantly for Sun, we cannot be just about our own intellectual property. We cannot simply attempt to lock piece A to piece B and piece C, that’s not how customers buy as we see in the marketplace, that’s not what ultimately we believe the market actually wants.

So, if you look at how we go pursue the marketplace, we tend to meet customers where they are today. Our servers at this point run both the SPARC as well as AMD, and going forward, the Intel servers we build are not just about running Solaris, they’re about running Windows, they’re about running Linux, they’re about running Red Hat.

The software we ship, and I’ll give you a graphic to really make this point in a moment, dominantly runs off of Sun hardware. The majority of the software that Sun builds is running on Nokia hardware or on Intel hardware or on — certainly non-Sun hardware, HP, Dell laptops and notebooks along with those systems and servers up in the network.

Our storage business tends to be very, very cross platform. A very significant portion of the storage we build in the marketplace, whether it’s archive systems or enterprise storage, attaches to an IBM mainframe or to an HP server, or to a Windows server.

Then finally our services business, customers don’t want to just go to a company they can support only its own products, they need those products in deployment attached to a world of other innovations and opportunities. So, really this is our view of the marketplace. We meet customers at the edges of this Venn diagram and then we do our best to bring them toward the centre, knowing full well, there’s only one customer in the world who only buys from Sun and that’s our Chief Information Officer and we don’t expect to clone him anytime soon.

So, fundamentally behind this is a very simple concept that I know — also, Paul and I spoke about, which is a belief that volume drives value. So, what you see up in front of you here is a chart showing since we announced the open sourcing of Solaris, announcing that Solaris would be cross platform, would run on anybody’s hardware, what happened when we left those downloads free onto the networks? So, you’ll see back in March of 2005, when we began this program, we have come close to, if not, I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me right now, around 7 million licenses total distributed out into the marketplaces, 7 million licenses. What’s truly interesting about those download figures is how significant a proportion of those downloads are actually running on Intel and x86 hardware out in the marketplace, nearly 70%.

So, 7/10 downloads, 7/10 of those licenses of Solaris into the marketplace were not running on Sun hardware, they were running on Intel innovation. They were running on systems built by HP and DELL and IBM, and clearly if there is going to be an indication of opportunity for us to work together, it looked an awful lot like, here is a great motivation. It’s evident that customers wanted us to work together, and so clearly we wanted to do exactly that.

So, I think you’ve seen some of the news come out this morning, but as we were discussing with the media this morning, you’ve seen one out of three elements of this relationship. To just walk you through what in fact is going on. We are announcing today a relationship in which Intel will endorse Solaris, will support it across a broad range of Xeon platforms, will agree to OEM Solaris out into the marketplace, and to ensure that the market gets the support it needs in running and optimizing Solaris on Xeon platforms. This is a market changing event. This totally changes the perspective that a customer has on how they can do business with Sun, and similarly how they can do business with Intel.

So, Intel has agreed to really promote Solaris, to help us collectively go off and build the marketplace and the ecosystem around that, and reciprocally Sun is announcing today that we are going to be building a complete line of Xeon servers as well as workstations, complementing and augmenting a very rapidly growing server business that we have at Sun. You’ve probably seen the double digit growth we’ve posted now for consecutive quarters. This just opens yet more opportunity creates more choice for consumers, and again, not just running Solaris, but running Windows as well as Linux that’s out there.

Lastly, and I think what’s most interesting to me is — in fact our teams had a dinner back in December to help prep them for working together on getting this agreement struck, and it was evident, we had all of the heads of our product businesses there, and similarly Paul had some of his leading products folks there as well. We’re both engineering companies, we’re both companies focused on technology, focused on the advancement of our own technologies, using process, using wisdom about the marketplace to create new innovations that really capture and captivate consumers.

So, we’re also announcing today that we’re going to be collaborating on the next generation of our software leveraging Intel software expertise, the next generation of systems leveraging Intel microprocessors as well as Sun Systems engineering capabilities. What does that hold for the future? Time will tell, we’re pretty certain you all will be paying attention to that, and certainly we think there is just a world of opportunity out in front of us. So, this is really a comprehensive relationship. This is not simply a buy-sell arrangement. This is a mechanism that brings the two of us together and creates new market opportunities and new options as well as new value for both of us.

So, the substance of our collaboration, why don’t I just quickly walk you through this, I think you can read this on your own. Again, from the Intel side, Solaris will now be a Tier 1 operating system in the Intel definition, which again confers upon Sun and the ecosystem built up around Solaris in the OpenSolaris Community, a great opportunity to go drive after the volume leading microprocessors in the marketplace. This really brings Intel’s involvement in not just the product evolution, but also the community evolution around the Open Source Java platform, NetBeans, as well as Solaris. Then importantly, Intel is going to help make sure that we know how to optimize Solaris well for Intel microprocessors, so we end up with a better total solution for customers.

On the Sun side, we’re certainly looking forward to building out uniprocessor Dual and Quad Core processor systems. I think we’ve also suggested that we’re not just going to end there, this is — again, we see the marketplace is growing, both in requirements as well as the need for scale. We’re going to be building out things that are greater than four way, and I don’t think it takes a lot of creativity to figure out what’s greater than four way, but it sounds an awful lot like an eight way. As we go — yeah, six way, probably not. Again, this is a mechanism for both of us to get together to do the engineering, to do the hard work, to invent things that really capture and captivate consumers.

So, with that I’d like to pass the pickle to — actually you have your own pickle. Paul Otellini, Chief Executive Officer in Intel. Thank you very much.

Paul Otellini - Intel
Thank you, gentleman. As Jonathan said at one level the very highest level, this is about Intel endorsing and embracing Solaris and this about Sun endorsing and embracing Xeon, but I think there is a lot more behind that story and to give you some of our perspective on that. I thought it has been just a couple of seconds talking about how we at Intel view the enterprise environment today. At the highest level, the biggest single thing that’s happening is it all data centers regardless of their size are now focusing on evolving to a service oriented architecture and what that means we’ve think about the data center providing the critical services for a company, large or small. It means you start worrying about the cost of that echoes of that environment. They overall ecosystem built out in a particular how you use your equipment.

Thinks like utilization rights of servers are becoming very, very critical particularly in the era of rising energy cause. So, you want to able to use them more, but also have them costless in terms of the overall construct at the data center. As this happens, we look at things that are important to CIO’s and data center managers today. One of the things that’s popped up to us is that Solaris is evolving as a mainstream operating system, as you saw some other rate on the downloads, but it also it’s mainstream and enough itself and just to the equipment the Sun ships.

Now we’ve the opportunity to have Intel Inside many of those boxes, but it is becoming as the slide as the Mission-critical UNIX for Xeon. What is that mean? It means that we can collaborate together to make sure that the feature sets that people are — who buyers are focused on that is availability, reliability, Demand Base Switching, virtualization those kinds of features can be unleashed from the microprocessor through the operating system into the hardware the people buy, this lowers are in customers cost and increases the utilization rights. It’s all very, very good.

All the customers are demanding more, more flexibility, interoperability that also a strong argument for us