The multi-touch experience allows for object movement, rotation, growing and shrinking, and even multi-hand, multi-person use. Inspired by movies like Minority Report, Maxwell leverages Apple OS X, code developed during Google Summer of Code called Open Touch, and his own code. The table, made from plexiglass and a dissembled Acer monitor, uses infrared light emitting diodes and an IR camera to detect and transmit fingertip motions as inputs.

Maxwell also expects to experience a future where multi-touch technology becomes a standard way to interact with applications, particularly for graphic manipulation and even gaming. Maxwell submitted his code back to the community at code.google.com/p/corkboard/ and has received coverage on Ars Technica and a local NBC news story.

Maxwell also expects to experience a future where multi-touch technology becomes a standard way to interact with applications, particularly for graphic manipulation and even gaming. While Maxwell didn’t get a summer internship on the iPhone team “this” year, has received coverage on Ars Technica and the local NBC news station. Not bad for a high school student.

Tags: Apple, Brad Baldwin, Bridger Maxwell, Google, iPhone, Multi-Touch, RockyMountainVoices, Summer of Code, Surface, Utah

Pandora is one of my favorite Internet services. It lets you build a customized radio station by starting with the names of your favorite bands and songs. It then brings you more music that’s similar to that. Here Pandora’s CTO, Tom Conrad, talks about the service, demos its new mobile service, and discusses new legislation under discussion that is designed to help keep Internet radio alive. For those who don’t know, Tom explains how the music industry is threatening to decimate Internet Radio providers by charging new, much higher, fees than regular radio has to pay to broadcast music. We have an interesting discussion about that while walking around San Francisco on a Saturday afternoon.

Other posts from a year ago:
Editor’s Choice: Pandora’s CTO talks music and politics

Tags: Pandora, Tom Conrad, Internet radio

A virtual desktop is one where all computing happens remotely. It contains a very simple screen that allows you to replace the heavy workstations that are currently being used by the majority of companies. Virtual desktops provide a “virtual” space, in which the user can place all their application software. The most compelling argument that vendors use to convince organizations to buy in to this solution is the fact that all the data and applications are in one secure location. Someone can still manage all of their employee’s desktops, even when the computer is off.

The recent trend has been for companies to move to Windows Vista. This allows an organization to keep the same hardware, which is a viable solution to cut costs. So, why are some people hesitant to invest in this? The answer seems to be that virtual desktops are not a “one size fits all” solution - but there are ways for easy implementation, which is where BearingPoint comes in. We assist with the pain points or doubts that an organizations goes through. It is our goal to assist with the development of a strategic roadmap that brings the client all the way through the deployment. We bring our expertise to the table to ensure the transition is smooth and that our clients are on their way to cost-saving success.

Tags: BearingPoint, Laurent Mandorla, virtual desktops, virtualization

Tags: Kratos, Playstation Portable, God of War: Chains of Olympus, God of War, Playstation 2, Ready at Dawn Studios, The Reboot, Rio Pesino

This small device simply plugs into any Intel or PowerPC based Mac with a USB port (USB 2 is highly recommended). All of the heavy processing normally done by your computer is offloaded onto the Turbo.264 encoder, resulting in much faster encoding and freeing up your Mac for other tasks.

The older and slower your Mac, the more significant the speed increase will be with this device. We found the Turbo.264 encoded video up to 20 times faster on a G4, but even on higher end Intel based Macs, encoding times were drastically improved with the Turbo.264.

The Elgato Turbo.264 goes for about $90 on Amazon.com, making it a very inexpensive way to bring new life to an old Mac as a video encoding workstation.

The new software for the Turbo.264 couldn’t be any easier to use. As with the earlier software, it allows for batch processing, but more importantly, it provides support for custom data rates and other settings. It also includes simple selections for encoding video optimized for the Apple TV, iPhone, iPods, or the recently announced iPod Touch, iPod Classic and iPod Nano (also known as the iPod Nano Fatty.

While the included software is easy to use, the Turbo.264 comes with plug-ins for QuickTime that allow it to work with any application that uses QuickTime for export. This includes Final Cut Express, Final Cut Pro, iMovie (including both HD and ‘08) and third party video apps such as Roxio Popcorn.

For an alternative to the Turbo.264 from Elgato, consider the VideoExpress from Miglia. The Miglia compares very well in terms of hardware and performance, but we find the software for the Turbo.264 to be much better due to the ability to easily customize the settings.

[9/12/2007 - update…]See also:
More Quick and Easy Methods for Video on Your iPhone, Apple TV or New iPod

Tags: Ripping DVD, Turbo.264, video encoder, Elgato Systems, Macintosh, Apple, Intel, PowerPC, USB, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch, iPod Classic, iPod Nano, iPod Nano Fatty, QuickTime, Final Cut Express, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Roxio Popcorn, VideoExpress, Miglia

Golf Launchpad Tour measures user’s swings (clubhead speed, path and angle) and translates it into information that EA Sports Tiger Woods PGA Tour software translates on-screen with breathtaking realism and accuracy. Not only is the Tiger Woods PGA Tour experience enhanced with the Golf Launchpad Tour, but so is the swing analyzer, with its increased accuracy and 3D shot visualization!

Tags: bloghaus, ces, ces 2008, EA Sports, Electric Spin, Gaming, Golf, Tiger Woods

Tags: video game console, gamers, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, holiday season, The Reboot, top ten games, The Romantics, Guitar Hero, Amazon.com, violent video games

A few weeks ago WorldSpace and MSN India a deal that makes five stations from WorldSpace available to its online listeners for a monthly payment of $9.99. Through their online strategy with MSN, Velu wants to tap into the vast global Indian population that lives outside of India.

The Indian radio space is still heavily regulated, and it is only recently that private stations have got permission to operate in various parts of the country. Velu thinks that radio has a great future in India, and he should know. He has over 12 years of experience in the TV and radio space and was part of the core team that founded Channel [V], and he was also part of the team that established the first Indian private radio station.

Tune in to find out what Velu has to say about radio in India, AR Rahman and Lead Belly.

Tags: Velu Shankar, content strategy, WorldSpace Satellite Radio

Austin
Boston
Burbank
ChicagoO’Hare
Chicago Midway
Dallas-Fort Worth
Denver
Miami
Minneapolis/St.Paul
Montreal
New Orleans
New York City La Guardia and JFK
Long Beach
Los Angeles
Oakland
Orange County
Philadelphia
Phoenix
San Antonio
San Diego
San Francisco
San Jose
Seattle
Tampa
Toronto
Vancouver
Washington, D.C. Reagan
Washington, D.C. Dulles

Included are products from:
Griffin Technology
DLO
Incase
SpeckProducts
Case-mate
RadTech
SendStation
Belkin

Shot and edited by Patrick Haynes

Tags: iPhone accessories, iPod accessories, iPhone, Griffin Technology, DLO, Incase, SpeckProducts, Case-mate, RadTech, SendStation, Belkin

FutureBazaar.com recently got infused with a funding of $25 million and is bound to give established etailers in India many sleepless nights.

Led by Kishore Biyani, the group owns and operates huge retail chains including Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Food Bazaar, Central, E-Zone, Fashion Station, Depot and many others.

I caught up with Sankarson, CEO of FutureBazaar.com at the eTailing Conference in Chennai. Shanky, as he prefers to be called, has had impressive experience in the online retailing market having set up shopping sites for Rediff and Shoppers Stop.

In this podcast, Shanky gives his honest opinions about etailing in India and about FutureBazaar in particular.

Tags: India, FutureBazaar.com, Kishore Biyani, Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, E-Zone, Sankarson

Later on, while going through all my SXSW photos, I thought that “All Together Now” would make a good soundtrack for a video featuring all the people I saw at SXSW. I contact the band and they agreed to let me use the song. Enjoy!

Steve Garfield, Videoblogger, Boston

SteveGarfield.com

Tags: SXSW, The Go Station, Steve Garfield

Tags: Ricardo Bazzarella, Hymotion

Related Stories: GoogleApps

(more…)

Tags: SF Bay Pediatrics, Google Apps, GoogleApps

Tags: Phill, Fuelmaker, Civic NGV, Sage Marie

Transcript:

Guest: Win J. Neuger - AIG Global Investment Group

Announcer
It is my honor and privilege to introduce to you Win Neuger of AIG Global Investment Group.

Win J. Neuger - AIG Global Investment Group
Thank you, Bob and Good Morning to all of you. At this conference you’re going to hear from a lot of speakers who know much more about Cleantech than I do. In fact in the two sessions that we’ve already had, you’ve learned more about Cleantech then I know, but what I am going to try to do is put some context around Cleantech in an over all investment portfolio and to talk about social responsible investing as an integral part of any investment decision. I would promise that no investment should be made without taking into consideration, social responsible issues. Why is that? There are really three primary reasons.

The first is risk. Socially irresponsible companies are bad businesses and bad businesses are high risk businesses. Secondly, as we’ve talked about already today, there are huge opportunities in social responsibility in terms of return potential and not only in new technologies but in repackaging. Thirdly and finally, more and more people care and as an Investment Manager, it creates business opportunities for us to pay attention.

So, I’m going to talk about all three of those to try to put some context into this. Now I noticed as I was sitting down there and I saw my cover slide come up, you will notice two things here. First of all the building that has AIG on it, is a brand new building that we built in Hong Kong, it is a clean building, a highly successful clean building and of course we have the Wind Power there in the sale. So, to complete, I didn’t choose this slide, but I would have if I’d thought of it. So, let’s start by talking about risks.

As we all know, when we’re looking at investments, there’re many risks that we consider on a regular basis. We talk about financial risk, what’s the business plan, what are the operating risks of the company. I think all of us as investors have generally considered these risks in everything we’ve done. We do extensive modeling on those risks. We look at various sensitivities. We grow our companies both public and private on their business plan and on the degree of leverage, but most of us historically have ignored the social risks. I mean we start by saying well it’s not our job as main stream investors to look at the social risk.

That’s the job of social responsible investors, as SRI Funds, that’s what they do. They look at those risks. That’s not my job, I’m supposed to pick the best companies and pick the best return from my investors, so I don’t have to worry about those risks. Now, I’m no more of an expert on Global Warming that I’m on clean technology, but at least my risk criteria are rapidly evolving relative to these kinds of environmental risks. Companies that are irresponsible carbon emitters are paying a price for that or will pay a price for that, in fact in most of the world they do pay a price. US I think eventually they will pay a price.

Now, people who emit excess carbon in Europe, pay a true price and people who are — who generate carbon credits get paid for it. So, that’s our true dollars and cents or I guess in this case Euros and cent, transfer of wealth and in fact I believe even in the US that transfer of wealth takes place. I as an investor have to start to look at that potential legislation, that will put that tax on, for me and if I’m going to have that potential risk, I better start to factor that into, to my return equation.

So, in fact I will do that. Just as importantly, industry is pushing towards greater environmental responsibility and accountability. There’s no question in my mind that green buildings receive premium rents and a premium price on sale. This becomes even more so, when that high energy price and high energy consumption is tied in. You get that double whammy of a dirty building and a high priced rent because of energy cost.

Lastly, of course the risk of fines and other sanctions can be significant cost for companies that follow environmentally on some practices. GE, as we all know has paid something around $80 million so far. Many people think that will go to $150 million for dumping glutens into the Hudson River and just this week I received a publication called Executive Council which is on legal issues related to corporation and you see the two headlines here that were two articles in that journal, for those who can’t see it in the back. They’ve talked about criminal charges and criminal prosecutions. So, not only are we running the risk as polluters of civil sanctions, but also criminal sanctions.

So this is a very real risk to us as investors. Okay, so you say — okay maybe environmental issues, we really should take environmental issues into consideration. I’ll accept that as a risk, but that’s kind of the end of the line, I mean don’t talk to me about these other social risks.

Okay, where do you want me to start, I’ll start as I’m doing this slide with child labor. Now, I get two excuses that people use in terms of why they have child labor that produces product for them. The first is the three monkey defenses, hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil. I outsourced this, I didn’t know that my suppliers were using child labor. So that’s not my fault. The other — which I think is equally bad, well it actually is a good thing because it’s bringing up the living standard in XYZ country. If it weren’t for the fact that we had cheap labor and child labor, we wouldn’t produce this good in that country. We will produce it somewhere else, so in fact that country and those kids would be worse-off.

So we’re actually doing a public service by hiring these kids. Now, I think they’re both equally bad, but in reality it doesn’t matter what I think. What matters is what consumers think? When you show up on 60 minutes with child labor, when you get experience and the revulsion of your clients or your customers, it has a real bottom line impact and you just have to ask Nike, who showed up on CBS with labor problems in Indonesia and in Life magazine with this 12-year-old boy in Pakistan sowing a Nike soccer ball. What the impact was on their sales, their margins and their stock price and what the impact was ultimately on the company and the changes and practices that they had to put in place.

GAP is another example, I’m sure all of you’ve read about the report that GAP did on their social responsibility report, where they reveal terrible working conditions in several countries in which they operate. Mexico, China, India and Russia. GAP actually had to cancel contracts with 136 different suppliers around the world in order to become compliant, a very true cost in terms of implementing that. In addition, I really belief that unsafe, unclean, working conditions ultimately have an impact in terms of social unrest and labor unrest in the country and eventually as people’s living standards come up to a certain level, lets say, I’m not going to take this anymore and you end up with labor unrest, you end up with strikes and certainly you have poor quality merchandise from that.

The Limited, which has made a commitment to a high quality working conditions and its suppliers and a commitment and forcing them to make a commitment that they will impose that all the way through the supply chain, is absolutely convinced that the net result of that, even though they pay a little more, the net result of that is high quality merchandise and far fewer returns and far more satisfied customers at the end. So, they make sure that all of their strategic partners have these processes throughout, as I said throughout their supply chain.

The final risk that I’ll discuss briefly is corporate governance. I think we have enough examples in the past couple of years of companies that have met there demise in the US, in Europe and in Japan, just to pick on the developed countries and a lot of that has been driven by poor corporate governance. Companies that have greater transparency have greater stability and predictability of their financial results and that’s not just greater transparency in terms of financial results, but also social, environmental and governance. Organizational stability as I said leads to predictability of corporate profits, which leads to risk reduction on their investments.

So, now I want to turn to the opportunity side of the equation. You will hear a lot about new Cleantech ideas at this conference, but it’s clear to me that between Kyoto and high oil prices, great opportunities are being created not just with new technologies, although I guess — if I look at that earlier slide, I guess it’s still considered new, things like wind and solar, ethanol, roughage to energy and carbon devouring forestry. All these are great new if you will, investment opportunities.

Furthermore, if you ought to respond to whole new trading up market in carbon emission. So, Co2 emissions are now an actively traded commodity. New social responsibility and concerns are also bringing new customers to green products. I presume that there’s a reason that BP and GE are using the themes of beyond petroleum and Ecomagination in their ad campaigns. I don’t think it’s just because they want to show themselves in a good light to the government or to the people that might prosecute them, they do it because their customers care is my belief. Their customers truly care.

So, while GE recognizes its past wrong doings, the company also recognizes the opportunities presented through climate change initiatives. Plans to double its revenues to $20 billion in 2010 from the sale of environmentally friendly products and is committed to double its annual investments in Cleantech to $1.5 billion by 2010. Even Wall-Mart, as the earlier slide shows, has gotten the message that being social responsible matters to their clients or to their customers and that people won’t show up in the store if they don’t take a better stand.

I mentioned earlier that tenants care about their carbon footprint and are willing to pay for green space. Mentioned earlier, customers are paying for premium — are paying a premium rather for hybrid cars. Furthermore, cleaning up the environment is good business. At AIG, we were able to take a — an environmentally contaminated site in Atlanta, Midtown Atlanta which is — if you know Atlanta is prime infield location and turn it from a brown field into a green field and a truly green investment. Green both in terms of the environment and green in terms of the profit to the investors. We talked — if you look at the insert or the cover page in the packet for today’s meeting, it talks about the second industrial revolution.

Well, in the first industrial revolution, great productivity produced by a wonderful steel plant outside of Atlanta which, of course, now is pretty much in the middle of Atlanta — very important to the growth of the region and to the country. By 1999, that old steel plant was an environmentally contaminated, blighted, urban location that no one would touch and today it’s a thriving green development that has in this fabulous location, close to Downtown Atlanta with a multi-use project with office, retail and residential. Atlantic Station received recognition from various organizations including the EPA’s 2004 Phoenix Award for the best national brown field development, the U.S. Green Building Counsel, LEED’s prototype credits, developments within buildings within Atlantic Station and the first high-rise building that we built was the first office building in the US to receive LEED’s Silver Core and Shell Certification, our second high-rise building was pre-certified as LEED Gold and the Sierra Club identified this as America’s best new development project in 2005.

Now, I’ll just run through those not to toot our own horn, but really decide that building a project like this, taking a blighted site, re-mediating it and building a quality project, enables you to not only do good but to do extremely well from an investment point of view. Social responsible investing socially responsible companies have also done well in the market. Nick talked about his new Cleantech index. I mean there are a couple of other industries that we have looked at that show this. For example, the Dow Jones sustainability index has significantly outperformed the general market. Over the past 12 months, the Dow Jones sustainability index outperformed the SNP by over seven-and-a-half percentage points and over the past 3 and 5 years by 16% and 10%, respectively.

So it’s paid again to make these investments. In Japan, the Morningstar Japanese SRI index has outperformed the Nikkei 225 over the past year by almost 2 percentage points and again for 3 and 5 year periods has significantly outperformed as well. So, there clearly is not a social responsible investment penalty, in fact it’s been clear up side. Lastly, I want to talk a little bit about what’s in it for us as an asset manager. The first thing is, as I said, it does matter, it matters to the results, I mean in terms of your investment performance and if you think about it, that‘s our product, that’s what we are outselling to our clients and selling to our affiliated insurance companies. These are investment results.

But, it’s also important in terms of other factors, for example, retention and hiring of people. A lot of studies have been done in terms of employees wanting to work for companies that are socially responsible. It’s interesting, I learned recently that Google as an example will pay any employee who buys a hybrid car, $5000. I’m sure they do that because of their concern and their commitment about the environment, but I’m sure also they do it because it’s a great recruiting tool, because again as I say, people want to work for a company that cares. So, the reputational advantages for SRI are also important. It’s clearly been a success or been an indicator of success as I said for hiring, for retaining, it reduces absenteeism, improves work and productivity and the quality of product. The flip side is also true. People don’t want to work for companies that have poor records in terms of social responsibility. They don’t want to have to go tell their friends, “Oh I work for this dirty company,” it’s just not where people want to work.

As we all know hiring and retaining quality workforce is one of the biggest challenges I think we have in every industry in this country and around the world. Our position on sustainability, which I’ll talk about a little bit more, in fact, was developed by an employee task force. I mean a lot of our position was developed by taking a group about ten people and saying, “Look I think this is important, you all develop what you think our practice strategy should be.”

So couple of years ago we put this team together and they came up with significant recommendations, most of which we have implemented at their recommendation. Some of the things that AIG has done you may have read, AIG has a clear policy now on environment and climate change, we have established an office of environment and climate change which is headed by my colleague Alice LeBlanc who’s here. We have worked to minimize our own green house gas emissions and we have committed to communicating and monitoring the results.

Furthermore, we have developed risk management and derivative products in Co2 trading. Again, there are clear business opportunities in all these areas. We have insured a project’s ability to generate tradable carbon credits and we have provided consulting and technical services for energy in carbon reduction programs. Within AIG Global Investment Group, I’ve already talked about our green building. All of our buildings are green. We’re committed to remediation and recoupment and brown field projects. We use environmentally sustainable construction materials, energy efficient design, etcetera. In our public and equity indebt products, we’re committed first to finding companies that meet the dual objectives, but also committed to evaluating the social issues on every single company in which we invest.

In our private equity side, we make investments in emerging markets that develop those countries, in Asia, in developing Europe and Latin America. We have a social responsible hedge fund that we sell to clients. We have social responsible equity products in the US and Japan and we have committed a significant portfolio to sustainable investments in Europe, which is run by another one of my colleagues who is here, Julia Balandina.

So, all of these things we think are opportunities for us and for other investors. So, let me conclude by saying that I believe that the evidence is increasingly clear. Any investor who fails to consider environmental, social and governance issues in all of it’s investments, is taking out risks, that it’s not paying — that it’s not accounting for and not getting paid for. Furthermore, they’re missing the upside potential of clean technology, green buildings and other product developments and finally, by missing the reputational opportunities that are important to many of their shareholders, they’re failing to satisfy employees, shareholders, and customers. Investors can in fact do well by focusing on social, environmental and governance issues and by doing good, they can do very well, so thank you very much.

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

Tags: Cleantech Venture Forum, AIG, Win Neuger

This podcast is brought to you by Rocky Mountain Voices.

Transcript:

Host: Brad Baldwin – Rocky Mountain Voices
Guest: Kim Anthony Parker – iPort
Guest: Kip Meacham - Card Access
Guest: Gina Lutkus – Somfy
Guest: Key Digital Systems - Speaker
Guest: Thomas Pickral - Home Automation Incorporated
Guest: Dave Froerer – VisionArt
Guest: David Richard – Eaton Home Heartbeat
Guest: Wade Smith – WellSpring Wireless
Guest: Abbas – DSC
Guest: Terry Hoffmann – Johnson Controls
Guest: Nick Finamore – Ember Corporation

Dave Froerer – VisionArt
Hello, my name is Dave Froerer with VisionArt. VisionArt is a system that we manufacture to conceal plasma TVs and flat panel, any flat panel TV that’s mounted either inside the wall like this one is, or can also be mounted - surface mounted on the outside of the wall. We have about 300 pieces of art and about 40 frames. You can also do custom art; you can also do custom frames. So, these are clay prints and it is rolling up and down, so the whole frame doesn’t move. So, you have a beautiful piece of art and instead of watching the TV — and then when you want to watch TV, you hit the ‘TV On’ on your Control4 remote of course and the art rolls up into the top of the frame. We make every single one of them one at a time for every plasma TV and flat panel on the market. So you tell us what TV you have, and we make it for that exact TV dimensions. We also have a cooling system - if you put it inside the wall so that you don’t have to worry about burning up the TV or the LCD. We have about 300 pieces of art; so we have books like this that are available or everything is on our website, it is visionartgalleries.com. There’s also a link on the Control4 site on the vendor partner area back to our website. So you can view all the frames on our site and all the art. You can also click the frame and it will go around the art for you. You can go to another section of our website and you can play with the wall color after you’ve pictured art and your frames.

Kip Meacham - Card Access
Hi my name is Kip Meacham. I’m the Vice President of marketing for Card Access. We are an ecosystems partner with Control4 and have actually produced some of the first products designed specifically for the Control4 Home Automation Platform. For example, this device introduced in November is our in home wireless contact switch. It allows you to interface multiple contacts including an integrated magnetic contact and two external contacts of the installers choosing into a single wireless device. It will also measure temperature internally and externally and when powered by DC power, will act as a ZigBee repeater in the ZigBee mesh. We’re announcing at this show, a wireless contact relay allowing us, as you’ll note on this little functional fountain, our ability to turn that fountain on and off wirelessly, again using the Control4 Home Automation Platform. What Card Access has done, is building a variety of wireless products, our expertise being in developing high performance Wi-Fi and other wireless technology radios; and we are integrating that wisdom into the products that we’re delivering to the marketplace.

Gina Lutkus – Somfy
Hi, how you doing? My name is Gina Lutkus from Somfy Systems. Somfy systems is a manufacturer of tubular motors for window treatments. As you can see here we have teamed up with Control4 and we have a device called RTS 2 R232 and how that works is, whether we are using a battery operated shade, a low voltage or hard wired motor, we are able to tie it into a Control4 system. You can see on the Control4 system, this is the main screen, we type in — we have it on the blind shade, we want to bring the blinds up, we touch the upper end, the blinds go up and the light goes off. That’s one scenario that you can have in your house. You can also bring the shades down as well; the shade comes down, the light goes on. It’s another option or scenario that you could have in your house. Like I said before, if somebody offers a battery operated low voltage and hard wired systems, our radio brand name is called RTS which stands for Radio Technology Somfy. So the device that we would use to connect to the Control4 system is XN2 or R232 to RTS device to be able to control that making you control upto 16 different channels, whether you want individual window treatments or group of window treatments.

Kim Anthony Parker – iPort
Hi, my name is Kim Anthony Parker. I’m the Director of Product Development for iPort and today we’re showing integration of iPod to the Control4 system; and the thing that we love about Control4 is their ability to distribute this content that’s on your iPod throughout your entire house; and the thing about iPort is, we’ve allowed iPod to now make that information available to you over RS232. So, with that being said, now you can, with Control4, take your system remote control or your mini touch screen or your TV GUI or your 10-inch touch panel or all those products that Control4 offers now, and we go to music - we select music, we then select iPort as our source and we’ve set it up. So now you can see - you can browse the music just like you would on the iPod. So we want to go, select an Artist, we select Artist and then we select an artist and then we go and play the song or the album and hit select and now we’re playing the song that we’ve selected. So, now this would be something that would be distributed through the entire house or played just in a local room. The nice thing about it is it also plays your Apple protected iTunes downloaded songs so that you are not having to worry about if a customer says, “Ay, how come my iTune songs aren’t playing?” This does all that because it actually doesn’t analogue audio output. So, simplicity, easy to program, it’s a module that’s already built with your composer software. You just drag that module over into the home - your project file and then make your connections; your RS-232 connection and your audio connection and you’re off and rolling.

Key Digital Systems - Speaker
Brad, thank you for the opportunity to present my product line to you. A brief history of the company before we talk about the line and how it works with Control4. Our company is founded by Mike Tsinberg, with 39 HDTV patents. He is the number one patent holder in the industry and he is the founder of HDTV broadcast technology and DVD encoding technology. Our product line is composed of switchers, distribution amps, Matrix Switchers, video processors as well as video transcoders. One of our most exciting products is the HDMI2×4 Distribution Amp and Switcher, which basically gives you the flexibility of having both audio and video control - meaning, in the marketplace today, a lot of custom installers have problems with video resolutions not sinking up in HDMI as well as audio not sinking up because of the nature of the HDMI handshake. If there is ever a miscommunication that takes place, or the video resolutions aren’t set up properly or the audio resolutions aren’t set up properly, what you have is a miscommunication and an improper HDMI system; Key Digital addresses that - as well as Control4 being a tremendous partner to us, we have all the drivers available and we work with Control4 to have seamless integration with our products in their control system, and we thank them for the opportunity for being at the show with them.

Thomas Pickral - Home Automation Incorporated
We are HAI - Home Automation Incorporated, my name is Thomas Pickral, I am Manager of Business Development and what we’re showing here today is integration between HAI’s family of whole house automation systems and Control4’s Home Theatre Controller. What HAI specializes in is Lighting Control, Temperature Control, security in whole house audio, and what we are doing is, integrating that into control4’s Home Theater Control so you’ve got the ability to manipulate these things through your television or through a Control4 touch screen. So, HAI products like ‘security systems’ or ‘thermostats’ can be controlled through the interface on your television using the Control4 remote. So if you wanted to — while you’re watching TV, control the temperature on the thermostat, would have the ability to come in here for instance, you can down the temperature down to 72 degrees and it will update our current thermostat. You can do the same with ‘Security’ for instance. So if we wanted to go head and arm our security systems, we’d have the ability to do that - again, just right through the television. Now in addition to the interface provided by the Home Theatre Controller from Control4, HAI is also providing the ability to access these things through the telephone or through the web. So you’ve got the ability to log on and control all these devices - the telephone, by simply picking up the phone inside the house or from outside of the house by calling in or through the internet. So, we’ve got a product called Snap-Link which is this whole USB key and what Snap-Link does is, stores all the information for your house and you could plug it into any PC in the world and log on and control all these different devices. We’re also showing it here on this Samsung Ultra Mobile PC just as a demonstration, this is an off-the-shelf item we bought from BestBuy and it’ll allow you to again, come in here and control different devices like thermostats, adjust settings in here if we want to, or lighting control, and it will even let you view IP cameras.

David Richard – Eaton Home Heartbeat
Dave Richards, with Eaton Home Heartbeat Products and we are here in the Control4 booth, showing off our brand new product called Home Heartbeat. The product is very unique in that it is a home awareness type product using this ZigBee technology. We use a simple base station like what you see here, the base station reports to a home key, and then we have any number of various sensors like a water shut off sensor, a front door back door open and close sensor. We have range extenders, power sensors, all types of sensors that can be placed throughout the home and it is truly wireless. So there’s no new wires, and the great thing about the product is that all of these sensors report back to this base station and will give the home owner an alert of the status of that device. So, if a front door is open and it’s not supposed to be, an alarm goes back to this base station, reports to the key fob, where that alarm shows up on the key fob - and not only on the key fob but it also calls your cell phone or gives you an email report of the alarm. What’s also great about this is that — I’m kind of getting lost, but anyway let’s keep going. What’s nice about this is that because we do use the Zigbee technology, we’re allowed to communicate to the Control4 products like what we’re showing here. A simple open and close of a front door can now be reported back through the Control4 system where you can have a light turn on, you can also control ramp rate of how that light comes on based upon the open and close. The same thing can be utilized with a water sensor, if the water sensor detects water, it also can report back to the Control4 system, where then we can choose to turn the water actually off by utilizing our Home Heartbeat automatic shut-off valve or we can choose to do other types of functions through the Control4 system such as bring lights on or give you a blink because there is an alert going on. So the system reports utilizing alerts; you can receive an alert both through the home key while you are at home; it will vibrate or light up and give you an alert through the home key. You can also get alerts through your cell phone, and you can also get an alert through email, and we also introduced a brand new product here at CES, which is our Web portal. So, now you gain full control over the system, so I can see what’s happened in the past week, what’s happened in the past day, and also the alerts report back to the Web portal.

Wade Smith – WellSpring Wireless
I’m Wade Smith, I’m the CEO of WellSpring Wireless, and we make a broad line of sub-metering products that use ZigBee radios, and Control4 is kind enough to bring us in to talk about how we interoperate with their system, and we have here two example products, one is the utility meter - water meter in this case that’s tied to an automatic meter reading system with a two-way radio - ZigBee radio, and shut-off valve that’s battery operated so that the valve can change position in order to sense leaks and to curtail water use if the water bill isn’t paid or if there’s water found down the floor that prevent a catastrophic flood, also to sense small leaks that might lead to mould growth. So, we have another product here which is used in sub-metering of apartments and multi-family condominiums, co-ops, that sort of thing; simply - functionally the same as the utility product but with a smaller meter - 8 gallons per minute, same 2-way radio, in this case a (Inaudible) separate battery; and both of these products essentially function identically, but work at different ends of the marketplace. You can get more information on our Website which is wellspringwireless.com. So, I want to add my special thanks to the folks at Control4 who were kind enough to invite us into their booth to have us be one of the many companies that demonstrates how ZigBee makes our systems able to communicate with each other and operate together.

Abbas - DSC
Hi, my name is Abbas (ph) and here I am representing DSC. DSC is a leading Intrusion security provider that actually designs, manufactures and provides and sells Intrusion security control panels; and what we’re doing here, we are demonstrating the integration between a Control4 system and a DSC power series platform. DSC realizes — recognizes that this is where the market is going to go; it’s going to go into the point where everything is integrated. We are going to have a single point of control, where you control all the different components in the house from your — from the comfort of the home owner’s sofa. So what you see here, you have the DSC system with the new product that we’ve introduced, which is called IT-100. The IT-100, it’s a bridging module between the DSC control panel and the Control4; it’s a serial interface that enables Control4 to basically perform and control the DSC control panels. And some other functionalities — this is a demo screen of what the interface GUI looks like, and basically all you have you to do is, by moving your bunch - you’re armed with code — and by pressing on the remote control itself, you can enter the code, and that code will basically arm the system; and you could do it — just as easily, you can disarm the system by going to “Disarm with Code”, and you can enter the code in here. By entering there okay, you basically disarm the system. So, this system — this demonstration demonstrates the easy integration between the Control4 and the DSC Intrusion Security System via the IT-100.

Terry Hoffmann – Johnson Controls
Hi, I’m Terry Hoffmann and I’m Director of Building Automation Systems, Marketing for Johnson Controls. We are very glad to be here at the Control4 partner pavilion today, and we are demonstrating to people how Johnson Controls takes the Control4 technology and expands it to be used by people in the light commercial marketplace. The Control4 system, as we deliver it, is called Touch4 and it has some attributes that are slightly different than the residential systems that we all know. This slide summarizes those; it gives us low cost automation for residential and commercial systems, but focused eyes (ph) on the commercial; control and scheduling of lighting, audio, comfort, access, shades and blinds, monitoring, alarming of temperature, humidity, occupancy, and interface with the security system - all of those things that you might find in a normal Control4 system. We have added a BACnet interface through this system, so that we can do commercial temperature control, and in general some of the features like password, and scheduling and especially the alarming have significantly been enhanced for that real commercial building network that people are looking to expand the control system into. So, thanks a lot for stopping by.

Nick Finamore – Ember Corporation
Hi, my name is Nick Finamore, I’m with Ember Corporation. We are a proud member of the partner pavilion today here at Contol4’s booth at CES. Quite excited to be here; we’re the only chip vendor, we provide chips and software that actually to Control4’s devices as well as the many of the other members of the partner pavilion that you see here today. We provide chip and software technology that allow these devices to talk to one another, and for Control4’s system to be able to control and use, sense and monitoring information from those devices. What’s really exciting about what Control4 is doing is, they’re integrating multiple systems; people are providing lighting systems, providing security systems, media control and other devices and our chips can go into all of those devices, so that they can be managed and controlled with Control4’s system. What you’ll be seeing in the future is more devices, more manufacturers, who’re going be building devices with our chips and software in them that will allow them to be integrated with Control4’s system. So we are quite excited to be here with Control4, who have got many other customers that are building devices that will be integrated with Control4’s systems in the future. So, you can count a long list of manufacturers down the road that will be on our technology and using Control4’s systems.

Brad Baldwin – Rocky Mountain Voices
This has been a Rocky Mountain Voices Podcast. Visit is on the Internet at www.rockymountainvoices.com

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

Tags: Control4, CES, Rocky Mountain Voices

Related Stories: IntelMooresLaw

Transcript:
Host: Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Guest: Kelin Kuhn - Intel

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah, so who are you. Who are you just talk to me.

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
Okay.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Forget the cameras here.

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
Okay. I am Kelin Kuhn, I am the 45 nanometer Device Group Leader for Intel.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Wow!

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
I am in-charge of the transistor architecture for 45 nanometer.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Wow! And where are we?

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
We’re in the device lab which is…

Robert Scoble- ScobleShow
Come over here, so I can get a little look at what we’re looking out here.

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
So, this is where we test transistor devices for the technology, and here in the background we just — let me start over – I lost it. Here in the background we have a test station with (Inaudible) wafer on it. In fact, we just I’ll ask one of my technicians to move off for a second so we can show you the station.

Robert Scoble- ScobleShow
Okay.

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
You can basically see the wafer probes, the wafer so here, we’ve got the split charts setup and we’re beginning to do actual measurements on the wafer.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Okay.

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
This kind of technology with a very advanced architecture we use, requires very careful measurements and so we supported a lot of hardware in order to make the types and accuracy of measurements we need.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Right and what are the people doing in this lab specifically, what are they trying to look for or what are they doing — what are they tagged with?

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
Well, if you think about what we’ve done in the technology and 45 nanometers what we’ve introduced is basically the world’s first High-K/Metal gate transistor.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah.

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
If you think about High-K/Metal gate, what that does is that buys you some advantages in performance and in leakage over the conventional technology.

Now, High-K/Metal gate is a very unusual gate architecture. What we’ve done here is we’ve introduced a hafnium dielectric instead of the silicone dioxide dielectric and we’ve gotten some significant advantages particularly in leakage. Now, if you think about it, if you’ve spent many years measuring silicone dioxide devices with one kind of leakage and one kind of capacity performance and you start measuring these new devices, it requires some change in how we do business.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah. What is the leakage percentage of different…?

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
Well, it’s a good question. The kinds of number were seen is we’re seeing about a 10X reduction in gate leakage for this technology.

Robert Scoble- ScobleShow
Which means to the person at home lets heat coming off the chip and no power?

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
Well, if you think about it, think about the last time you bought a laptop, right?

Robert Scoble- ScobleShow
Yeah.

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
You probably bought it for some combination of, it will run my favorite software which is performance and our transistors will deliver 20% more performance than the previous technology and you also probably bought it for something like I can fly across United States on a battery. Well, gate leakage is one of the main components of transistor leakage and that means power and that means you’re not sucking your battery and so a 10X reduction in gate leakage has a lot of impact. It might make the difference is to whether you could fly from here to Atlanta or from here to New York.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
And it make the huge difference to somebody like Google or Yahoo! or Microsoft who has a hundreds of thousands of machine with your processor.

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
That’s exactly right and the High-K/Metal gate technology with the significant reduction in gate leakage is especially valuable when the transistors are idle because if you think about gate leakage in a transistor architecture, if the transistor isn’t doing a whole heck of a lot it’s still leaking through the gate, well if you can reduce the gate leakage, you’re that much better off.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Interesting! And so what is this machine behind in here?

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
Well, this is just the Probe Station and what we do and you can actually see it here is we have this very fine needle like probes that go over it and…

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
You just jump over here so I have to say in microphone and audio.

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
So, we have these very fine needle like probes that go over and drop on the wafer. Now, the picture isn’t very exciting because these are just the probe heads when they drop and you can see the little place where the probes have been. But then what we do is then the electrical signals come through these probes and we can setup with the various hardware we have exactly the signal that we want to go in there in order to do voltage or current or capacitance or leakage or whatever we want to do.

This type of station here is typically used for measurements when we want to do something it’s a little non-standard because you can see the folks can sit here and type in on the computer specialized types of measurements to do non-routine things. Some of the other hardware here is more automated. But, this area is the area that we use for the developmental activities.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Right. What is the rest of this lab for? What kinds of things that you’re doing in the rest of the lab that you can tell me about? I am not sure everything is top secret at Intel.

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
Everything is top secret. What we can do on the rest of the lab is, there are several technologies supported here at the same time. This technology 45 nanometers is just entering the phase where we begin to transition the technology off to the high volume manufacturing room. Over one corner of the lab we have the next generation 32 nanometers where people are trying to figure out what the transistor architecture is, and in another corner of the lab we have the last technology which is 65 nanometers where they are doing some high volume work and trying to figure out things like, how many time the probes can sit on the wafer before the probe get damaged and that sort of stuff.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Interesting!

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
So, in this kind of environment typically we have three simultaneous technologies running, the one we’re doing, the one we just did that’s usually making us money and the one we’re about to do that’s in some sort of a research/(Inaudible) probe.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Yeah. Well, thanks for spending a little bit of time. Is there anything else that I should know or viewers at home should know about the lab and the work you and your team does?

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
Well, I think one of the most important messages that I could send is that High-K/Metal gate is probably the most significant transistor architecture change probably in the last 30 years, certainly in my adult life. I can also say that I think Intel is probably the only company that could have done it because many things in this technology have been challenging, trying to make the leakage requirement, the performance requirements, or the role requirements in such a novel system because this is basically a hafnium-based dielectric, has really been something that has been out of the normal for a transistor development side.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
How long have you been here in Intel?

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
I have been here a decade.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
A decade?

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
Yeah.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Is that the craziest thing you’ve seen Intel try to do in a decade or how does this match up to other challenges that Intel has met?

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
Well, we have done some pretty surprising things and each generation at the beginning of the technology cycle I look at the design roles, which is the basic architecture and I go — Uh… we couldn’t possibly do this and then as the technology develops all of a sudden there is one day when all looks pretty easy and then you go to the next one, but I will confess all the High-K/Metal gate technology has been the most challenging technology I have experienced at Intel and there were many days in the developmental cycle when I said, “Oh no, this couldn’t be done” and it’s been really a spectacular experience to be able to do this.

Robert Scoble - ScobleShow
Who on your team would you like to give credit to for helping you out?

Kelin Kuhn - Intel
Oh! I think the credit definitely should go to my two mentors at Intel Mark Bohr who is the senior fellow who is actually introducing this session and then my immediate supervisor who is Carl’s (ph) administrator who is the 1266 program manager and I owe both gentlemen a significant amount of thanks for their help to me during this technology cycle.

Robert Scoble- ScobleShow
Well, thanks for spending a few minutes with me explaining what you do.

Kelin Kuhn – Intel
All right.

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

Tags: Kelin Kuhn, 45 nanometer, Intel, chips, wafer, 45 nanometer, 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 to work together Sun is in a unique position, rather unique position or being the operating system vendor and the supplier of the hardware. That means, we can collaborate to be able to take advantage of a lot of these deep features been in a microprocessors and surrounding architectures. Then the third point is the Intel architecture is expanding.

It’s expanding upwards into the high end of the data centers and downwards into mobile devices, but if you’re independent software developer, thinking about Solaris now, being able to think about Solaris and conjunction with Xeon, which is the volume leader in the marketplace. It’s really important to you as a software developer. You can now take advance of the install base of the Intel hardware that’s out there from Sun and other vendors, but also focus your efforts on Solaris. In terms on Solaris on Xeon in terms of being able to find new markets for your software. In terms of Intel in the enterprise, the driving feature in the enterprise is Moore’s law. It’s been sold for almost 13 years now and Moore’s law gives us more, more transistors.

Up until very recently, the more transistors met simply higher clock speeds. That’s changed it changed in the last year and it’s going to change. I think systemically going forward to where we’ll deliver more performance, but we do it through delivering multiple cores more and more cores of microprocessors on a single chip. That leads to overall lower power requirements, lower cost but gives people more performance. That transistor budget though the Moore’s law gives us, also gives us the ability think but it is the template to put new features on to the chips. You’re seeing Intel developed things like I/O virtualization.

Virtualization of the kernel capabilities to build or run multiple operating system environments on a single microprocessor, which is been true in mainframes for long time and now is coming down to volume-based servers. Intel — from our perspective has done a good job in the last year, meeting all of our commitments in terms of new products coming into the marketplace. We’ve been at or ahead of schedule on every new server chip we’ve developed and we now have industry leading performance on 28th of the top 29 industry benchmarks for servers in terms of performance or energy efficiency of those kinds of metrics. We were the first to market with quad Core. We started shipping quad Core in the third quarter and ramp that volume up in the fourth quarter.

Now you see our quad Core products setting performance metric records out in the industry. We’re stopping Jonathan talked about a deep collaboration. That collaboration goes beyond today’s products and we’re excited about working with Sun or what we can do tomorrow, not just 2007 but beyond. We have a lot of new and exciting products coming out on the next generation Silicon Technology, which is 45 nanometers. This technology is extremely healthy at our conference call last week. We talked about Intel now, microprocessors built on this technology, booting four operating systems and for those members of the press that are interested we’re going to have a deep breathing on 45 nanometers up in Oregon next Monday.

You can talk to our PR people. If you’re interested in attending that that would be one we can actually see what a construct of this technology is like, look the fab look at the products that have been built on it. I think it will be very exciting for you. We have three fabs coming up on this technology in 2008, but I think I talked enough about the technology maybe I think it would be best now to turn a back over to Jonathan and he can tell you about why he was interested in Intel.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
I offered earlier in the day to allow Paul to walk you through this slide. I am, so, thinking about this. This is actually as a very natural collaboration and I want to try to convey to you how we think about our business and how you should look about the some of the strategic moves you’re going to continue to see from Sun as we go drive forward. Every business we built at Sun is independent of the others. They are related to one another, but they cannot be exclusively dependent upon one another. If all we do is built software for our own microprocessors or our own systems. We’ll by definition not be able to go after – majority of the marketplace. The same applies for our storage business.

We cannot simply attach to Sun servers or to the Sun software that obviously misses the majority of the marketplace. By definition, we’re a minority of the marketplace and we’re looking forward to go participate in as broad a market as possible. So, you can dismiss the fact that one looking at our software business, there is a very natural relationship with the volume microprocessor leader in the marketplace. Again if you look at the numbers that are out there, if you look at where people built applications. They’re building them on Intel microprocessors they’re building them on laptops and notebooks, PCs as well as servers.

So, for us, this is an enormous expansion of the market potential, because we can leverage Intel’s brand, Intel’s reach, Intel’s momentum in the marketplace that gives to our consumers to developers as well as the enterprises, more choice and more options that creates more value for Sun. In the fact that we can reach a much, much broader marketplace.

So, frankly along with the technical expertise the fact that when we hurdle together, we end up having engineering interchanges, which create value for both companies. One of the most exciting things here and I think one of the things that is, is really the story underlying all of this. Is the fact that Intel and Sun getting together around the promotion and the endorsement of Solaris changes the game in the marketplace; what was, potentially in question two or three years ago, which is what happens to Solaris. Does it suffer the same fate as some of the other UNIX is in the marketplace that issue is now off the table.

We clearly have volume, we clearly can work together with Intel to amplify that volume and not just – go look at the market as it currently is and sharing a vision of where the market is headed next to what Paul just said? The fact that we can excitedly sit down with Intel and say tell us the features you’d like us to expose through the operating system. We’re already talking about I/O virtualization as well as the next generation of network optimization of application performance. These are the kinds of things we can do working together and again that creates market opportunity for Sun, creates adoption, and momentum behind Solaris, and if there is a better leading indicator for the future of Sun’s fortune, I can’t think of it than the adoption and the proliferation of Solaris.

So, tell us this is a very natural relationship, we’re very appreciative of the work that the Sun and Intel teams have been doing over the past 6 months as we tried to figure out or how is it we worked together. I think we have had a bit of an ebb and flow in our relationship and I think we’ve only been detecting flow in the past 6 months and I think we want to continue seeing that go forwards, so again this is to us, this is a historic moment. This definitively changes the game in the operating system landscape, changes the market opportunity for Sun gives developers that want to use technologies from Sun as well as from Intel new choices, new opportunities, new performance, new economics. The fact that we can give more choice to customers that ISV’s have a higher volume platform now to plan. There is just a tremendous opportunity both for the Intel side as well as for the Sun side.

So, we can do what we do best and in concert with Intel’s obvious strength and volume, and brand out in the marketplace. We can combine forces to really go after a next ways of opportunity. So, again, I don’t think we could be happy with the relationship, more expectant of the benefits. This is going to bring to us and to bring to customers ultimately at the end of the day. It’s all about them any ways. So, with that why not I turn it over to Russ and maybe we’ll field some questions.

Russ
So, we’ve got some folks moving around the room here with some microphones. So, in just a moment, we’ll start, but I’ll do have to ask you or we’re going to be online on the web, so I need to identify yourself and the company you’re with, so that people listening in and can also get that information and with that it also if you like to direct your questions to either of these two, just let us — let me know. So, with that I think we’ll start.

Tom
Hi, Tom Sanders (Inaudible) where will the Intel processor sit next to the AMD line?

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Right next to it; different boards.

Paul Otellini - Intel
Yeah, probably different boards; haven’t got on that level of collaboration yet.

Tom
I mean is it going to be — can I choose between a Intel skew and an AMD skew for the identical system or what is it going to look like?

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
So, I guess two things, one, I’d refer you to John Fallow (ph) and he can talk about specifics of the segments we’re going after. The end of the day, customer will define that. The customer will determine what they want to buy from Sun and what the underlying infrastructure needs to look like? That applies by the way to software as well as hardware because we do an awful lot of business out in the marketplace now, satisfying Window’s demand as much as Linux’s demand.

So, that’s not so much a grand strategic plan about how we carve up the market that’s really a – let’s look at the marketplace let’s go figure out where Intel innovation really creates new opportunity, let’s go after that.

Ian Kinfer - Bloomberg News
Ian Kinfer; Bloomberg News. Jonathan. you mentioned number of facts is one into your decision, but all other the things you said about Intel is pretty much always been true of the Intel in terms of scale, size, power in the marketplace, so why now would be the question place.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Well I think a few things, number one the fact that Solaris was growing as rapidly as that has not always been true. I mean go look at the chart is just been a rocket ride up into the right that changes again. Secondly our server business has been growing double digits and that’s over the past four consecutive quarters on the spot side, triple digits on the x64 side. Frankly I think we’re different company in were obviously coming at this relationship in a very different way.

Thirdly, I think there has been a change in our view of the marketplace and how we want to go after it, maybe leaving some of the rhetoric of the past behind us. Again, one of the first calls I made having gotten my shiny new job was to call Paul and say, “what can we do together?” because clear — of course, we’re going to compete we’re both very large companies. We compete with almost everybody in the marketplace, but where can we go collaborate to create value for both companies, so again this is an either/or relationship for Sun. This is very much in an relationship. I think it is also a reflection on time and place, but maybe I’d also ask Paul to respond to that.

Paul Otellini - Intel
Sure. From our perspective, this is not just a chip deal, that’s certainly is what we’re all about and is important to us from both the credibility standpoint and the commercial aspects of the relationship, but it is not insignificant for us to commit to endorsing Solaris. This means we’ll put deep engineering on it, we’ll put field resources on it and that is from our perspective not just because I like Jonathan, but I think it’s a really good commercial opportunity for us. The install basis Solaris in a lot of places where Intel is not in some cases. Financial services and telecommunication are two markets where Solaris is very strong there being able to offer an optimize environment on Solaris, on Xeon into those marketplaces, make sense for us and it goes beyond the traditional chip sales aspect of the collaboration.

Speaker
The questions (ph) seem to be very quick.

Merv Adrian - Forrester Research
Merv Adrian from Forrester. Can you give us a little color as to when you think you’ll start to ship systems. You said this year, but can you be anymore specific; you think it’s year end, you think it is going to come any quicker on that?

Paul Otellini – Sun
We’re shipping right now; Solaris running on Xeon - go to Sun.com/solaris, get it downloaded, run it. It runs well; it will only run better. And for the specifics of when we start shipping Intel systems, I guess I’d defer to John, late in the first half of 07. Can’t you do better than that John?

Stephen Shankland – CNetNews.com
Stephen Shankland from CNetNews.com. In the past, you guys have been concerned about keeping a cap on your R&D budget; clearly this increases the amount of R&D. You’ll have to do engineering; you’ll to do hardware and software qualifications and certification. I wonder if you can comment on how much of a difference this is going to mean to Sun’s business also in terms of – would just take some supply chain — are you - presumably you think it is going to be justified, but how important is that factor and are you going to be getting any help in those activities from Intel?

Jonathan Schwartz – Sun
Yeah and in fact just to the beginning part; this, is in our view, actually lowers the expense because now we’ve a collaborator who is willing to work with us to court and cultivate and invest in the success of the ecosystem. So, this is a way of making R&D much, much more efficient. We can do what we do best and really now work with Intel to make sure that they can bring all that Intel has to bear against ensuring the success of Solaris. I think the way we look at R&D, we’re not interested in – nor is Paul for that matter in capping R&D. We are interested in the return on R&D.

And so long as we can get a return, we are interested in amplifying that to the extent certainly possible. And I think this is a way of ensuring, we get a better return for the R&D we are doing. Again, Solaris just running on Sun — on SPARC Systems or just running on AMD systems misses the majority of the marketplace. We want to go after the majority of the marketplace. Sun simply delivering SPARC Systems or simply shipping AMD systems misses the Intel opportunity. We want to make sure we can participate in both equally. I think one of the unspoken assets that Intel has is, they got a big software team.

They know an awful lot about software; and the fact that we can get together to optimize Java, we can optimize Net means that we can optimize Solaris; makes their systems look better, makes our operating system look better, makes the overall customer set happier — that’s all goodness as far as I am concerned. And again, I don’t know if you want to add to that.

Michael Singer – InformationWeek
Michael Singer with InformationWeek. Talk about your — you might have alluded to it before, but what were the previous barriers, because both of you had guiders before you took your posts that had a different relationship than you two have today. What was it that broke down those barriers and for you Jonathan and then for Paul? Was it just that you had a new opportunity with Sun that allowed you to take that choice to make this decision today or can you kind of, give us some call on that?

Paul Otellini - Intel
I think it was a bottle of Barolo at Delfina; I think that really - really good bottle.

Jonathan Schwartz – Sun
You know leave history aside, we think — and I think what motivates both of us is, we think there is opportunity – let’s get busy - let’s get after the opportunity. And what do you got, what have we got, how do we put it together in ways that goes off and creates value. So I think, we’re both looking forward and looking at customers — and by the way, just talk to any customer out there; no one could possibly think that this is anything other than a brilliant partnership; all these does is create options and choice for them.

Paul Otellini - Intel
One of the things I think is interesting to observe is that we are coming together at a time when both companies had very positive momentum both in the market and in our products; a momentum behind Solaris, we had a momentum behind the double-digit growth in servers, momentum behind Intel’s new product lines and so forth. And I have always thought that momentum breeds momentum; and the idea that we could get — the two of us working together, could only multiply as what we could have done independently and that was the principal reason for me to really want to do this.

Audience Member
So Jonathan, you’re going to start releasing Dual Processors, Xeon Systems in the first half, which is pretty soon. How long have you actually been developing these systems and also can you comment on when you expect the 4P and uniprocessor systems to come; but basically when did you start working it? How long has this been under cover?

Jonathan Schwartz – Sun
We – and again just so you think about — we don’t take the team that’s working on these systems and have them completely segregated and isolated from every other team at Sun. We have really deep systems engineering expertise; and frankly, the fact that they were only working on SPARC - you know, microprocessors, under-leveraged the talent they had that could enable us to get into new markets. So we have a unified systems team at Sun that builds all the systems we build.

So, in that regard, along with Solaris, which is obviously more than two decades in evolution, we’ve been working an awfully long time in the same space. The question was, when were we really going to commit to build common products. And I think that relationship has been going on for a while, because we’ve seen one another in the marketplace so often.

So I don’t know if I could put a specific date on when did we actually sit down and say okay, what are the aspects and performance and in-outs and how do we go make this — just didn’t work that way. And in terms of the specific ship dates, I am not going to give that to you. You’d give it to the other guy. Yeah, it was a good try still. But again, I’d like to remind you, Solaris runs beautifully on Xeon, is available at Sun.com/Solaris.

Rush
I guess Michael.

Michael Singer - InformationWeek
On the software side, obviously Intel is adopting more the Solaris, but Jonathan talk about Intel software business, and what are the sort of gold nuggets within say TBB or BePro (ph) or what are the things that you’re looking forward to sort of enhancing that you may not already have in Solaris or NetBeans or Java for that matter?

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Are you asking him or me?

Michael Singer - InformationWeek
You.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Let me give you a very simple example. Virtualization in a chip is less interesting if it’s not exposed by the operating system. If the operating system doesn’t know how to deal with it or leverage it or take advantage of it that makes the overall systems package less interesting. If we can synchronize and coordinate our releases around virtualization, whether it’s application virtualization, OS virtualization, or network virtualization, that’s only upside. I was with a customer just last week, who is in a very, very high scale and very high value environment, and one of the points they made, which was I think similar to the point that Paul made, is we’re the only company in the marketplace today that delivers both the operating systems and the underlying system infrastructure, the only one.

Now, a few years ago that was viewed as a deficit that was a bad thing, because that wasn’t the future. Well, now the fact that we can coordinate our releases and work with partners to make sure that we sit down with Paul’s team and say, what’s coming up and how can we help you amplify it in the marketplace, that adds value to them and also adds value to us. That applies across Solaris as well as Java. I mean again, to really understand the Sun model, we want Solaris to absolutely scream on Xeon, to blow everyone else in the marketplace away.

Paul Otellini - Intel
If I could just jump in there. The two other areas I think would be interesting, at least from our perspective. Solaris being able to take advantage of Intel’s I/O acceleration technology for the whole I/O part of the system to run faster. Demand based switching, so we can move task back and forth very quickly, exposing that from the hardware to the operating system would be very interesting to us.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Ultimately, if we do a better job of optimizing Solaris on Xeon, because we can, then that means it’s going to win in the marketplace, but we want to present customer with choice, we want to do what we can to amplify the best of everything we build.

Rush
Steven.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Don, you’re silent back there, what’s going on?

Don
Happy to yield the mike down.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
I read your blog, I can start asking you questions now. So Don, what do you think of the deal?

Don
So, where do you see now SPARC and Itanium competing in the future, how do you divide the x86 line from the SPARC line, and in your case, Paul, the Itanium line?

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
We don’t divide it, we try to go after as much market as we can, but these are loosely coupled than highly aligned business, and so we want to see Solaris succeed on all platforms on which it ships. The fact that we’ve got four consecutive quarters of growth behind us suggests there is more than enough opportunity across all the disparate product lines. We want to go after all the opportunity and not just isolate ourselves to one.

Paul Otellini - Intel
I guess for my perspective, the very positive part of this relationship is the ability to work together to get the Xeon based systems greater than four, up and running, and delivering really good results into the marketplace. Sun is a good company to collaborate with from that perspective. I think it will be the wrong thing to do to reopen the religious war or Itanium. Itanium is a separate product line right now, Solaris does not support Itanium. If they decide to support it, we’d love it, if they don’t, that’s just business decision on their side.

Russ
Steven.

Steven
So, related question, which is big-iron on x86, it’s something a lot of people have tried for a very long time, Sequent, all these companies that have vanished into the midst, and it’s something I guess really, IBM is the only enthusiast for, do you think that Sun is going to be the company that finally gets big-iron x86 to break out, Paul?

Paul Otellini - Intel
Gosh, I hope so, but…

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
He meant to say yes.

Paul Otellini - Intel
The reason I said that is, is that there are other customers working on 8 and above Xeon as well, not necessarily in this country, so you probably don’t have as much visibility to them, but we see that happening elsewhere. I think that in — if you look at, from our perspective, a snapshot or a side view of the Solaris marketplace in terms of some of those very critical mission, mission critical markets and data intensive markets like financial service or Telco, well, the thing is it has to be reliable has heck, that allows us to get Xeon into the space where it isn’t really today.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Maybe then to give you more confidence in that, the single biggest determinant of the success of a high scale x86 system will be the popularity of the operating system that runs on a single socket x86 system. You cannot start by saying I’d like to build a 16 way x86 system, and oh, I would probably need an operating system. No one starts their business on a 16 way system, they all start their businesses and they all start their projects on one way.

So, the fact that we can show up in the marketplace with a one socket system that — I mean again, this is the recipe we know well. What’s led to the success of Sun Systems business is the fact that we’ve had complete binary compatibility up and down the product set. So, the fact that we’re going to be in this space with our own systems, and by the way with an operating system that eats threads for lunch and scales beautifully, should give us a little bit of a boost that maybe some of the other players haven’t had.

Russ
So, I think I’m going to have one more question here. So, if anybody would like to be the last questionnaire, that would be great, if not, we will end early. Michael, give it another go?

Speaker
No question Duncan.

Audience Member
So, the last question is on Service Oriented Architecture, SOA. We’ve heard about writing to the chip, writing to the OS, we write to the SOA stack, so what is it that you now bring to the table, Paul, that wasn’t previously already there with the current processor systems that you have in place Jonathan?

Paul Otellini - Intel
I’m sorry, what is it, that we bring to the…

Audience Member
Yeah, what is that you’re now bringing to SOA that Jonathan couldn’t do already?

Paul Otellini - Intel
Well, on his SPARC side, he’s been doing it for sometime. On the x86 side, I think we’re very comfortable with our first implementation, a visualization. We’ve a second instantiation of that coming down the pipeline that I think is substantially better than the competition. We have other things I talked about earlier in terms of I/O Acceleration, demand-based switching. The terms of the ability for us to use the advance silicon technology we’re about to deploy, to deliver not just performers, but energy efficient performers, leadership, makes the end systems better. SOA isn’t just what it does, its how it does it and how much does it cost, and we think that we help that whole equation in terms of power performance.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Just to amplify what Paul said that, the single biggest issue with SOA in the marketplace — and look SOA is a horrible buzzword, and we can all agree that it represents something, but no can quite identify what it is. The single biggest issue in the data center, just economics, brutal efficiency, environmental capacity, that I think is — that’s become the dominant issue in large scale enterprises, that’s very different than developer productivity, where obviously we’ve been making a lot of progress with NetBeans and the Java platform.

So, I think just ending here, I want to thank Paul specifically and also especially the Intel team. This has been a long time coming and I know there’s been a lot of hard work that’s been put into it. We are thrilled to death with the market opportunities. We’re both going to go evolve and couldn’t be happier with the progress we’ve made to date, and couldn’t be more excited about the progress we’re going to make in the marketplace. So, thank you all very much.

Paul Otellini - Intel
Thank you.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
It is much appreciated.

Paul Otellini - Intel
We iterate that from our side, thank you.

Jonathan Schwartz - Sun
Good.

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

Tags: Sun, Jonathan Schwartz, Intel, Paul Otellini

Transcript:
Host: Paul Lancour - PodTech
Guest: Jean Bozman – IDC

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Sun Microsystems and Intel Corporation announced a major agreement on Monday, between the two companies. The alliance is centered on Intel’s endorsement of Sun Solaris Operating System and Sun’s announcement that it will be delivering Servers and Workstations, based on Intel’s Xeon processors. The announcement was made by Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini, in San Francisco. Jean Bozman is Research Vice President of the Enterprise Computing Group at IDC. I caught up with her shortly after the presentation at St. Regis Hotel.

Jean Bozman - IDC
I have covered Sun since the 80’s. It’s pretty much why I wanted to see this because if you look at it in historical perspective. This is very interesting, this is something that a lot of people thought, would never happen.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Why not?

Jean Bosman - IDC
Because, if you look at the history there were a number of point products that they did work on together if you go back, in the 87 to 90 period, they had a workstation and they had Intel Inside, if you want to say,. And then there was the LX50 more recently, which was an Intel based Server in 2002 and they had sort of Blade Server BX2000 I think, it also had Intel based Blade, but when they made those other ones, is particularly with Microsoft, with AMD, it’s sort of seemed like all the issues they dropped drop in the sense, this is one that I think that people had not anticipated because again, they had these point products, but no big, squashy announcement like this.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
So, they have a history with Intel. This is a much different an announcement that they are making today. What’s going on now in the marketplace for both Intel and for Sun that makes it a good idea for that process?

Jean Bosman - IDC
Couple of things, there are some trends out there. One of the primary, which is virtualization and with this virtualization trend what’s happening is we take something on the x86 server platform, which IDC defines, as an x86 architecture including both, the Intel microprocessor and the AMD microprocessors under that x86 name. If you look at x86, and so many virtualization products out there, in fact that’s last form. Sun talked about its virtualization offerings. What you find is, in old days we had a one server, one OS kind of approach to everything, all across the board.

Today things are a lot more kind of put together almost in the same platform at times and in fact you were able to have Solaris on x86, although you’ve got it from an OEM, who would certify it. For example, whether it was a desktop or server that was available. What this does ,what this alliance does it allows for a deeper kind of engineering and optimization, so that any time you have the operating system in the hardware and worked under the same team, you can speed up the functionality that’s true with any OS hardware combination.

So, but in fact they are working more directly here you can expect some optimization perhaps in some specific areas where Sun really has some speed spots, for example in the networking area, in the Telco infrastructures where Sun is very, very strong. There’s a lot of customized or custom Solaris code within the Telco infrastructure we’ve been looking at that as I can see as a matter of fact. And some of the hardware that is running out it is a little bit on the older side, what this does is, it provides yet another platform for that Solaris code to go to in future.

If you look at it Solaris is a very scalable operating system. Mostly x86 servers that you see today in general I think, I don’t want to name the amount of processors, but they tend not to be very large, is the opportunity for some vendors out there, who might want to make a more scalable servers based on X86 technology so another possibility.

So, there is optimization, there is virtualization, there is new potential partnerships with OEMs and sweet spots within the market, networking, Telco, maybe database, certain areas where Sun can demonstrate an expertise in supporting those workloads. So, we talk about workloads a lot at IDC, we tend to work on it.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Looking at it from Intel’s point of view, there are market areas that they are not strong in that to — Solaris will allow them to penetrate more deeply.

Jean Bosman - IDC
Well, it’s just that you have to understand that we are in the middle of a period of IT transformation and if you work at it, there are lot of areas Telco was just one example there were others, where there has been a lot of Sun’s trends, financial services, Telco. And again, you have Solaris applications written there already. So, the idea is, here will be more places whether it would be more servers, whether it would be more virtual spaces on those servers either way. There would be more places for that combination to be run out in the environment.

The other things for interests is with virtualization such as VMware, what you are able to have is, you are able to have Solaris next to Linux, next to Windows on the same server. And again that’s a real change from that, one server, one OS, world that we had at the height of the behind of the dot com bubble, this is a different world.

And I think what you see now is it Sun and with Solaris and Java is covering all the major types of platforms they had (Inaudible), they have their own CMT chip multithreading, they still have AMD and now they are adding one more. But I think what they are doing there, is realizing whether there’s going to be a wide IT infrastructure and they want to be active in as many places on the infrastructures as possible, because it’s going to be a lot of end to end applications that are going to spin the whole enterprise and want to be able to run Solaris and Java in as many places as possible.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Am I right in saying that the big picture on this that is being driven by the hardware in the fact that…

Jean Bosman - IDC
The hardware is being virtualized.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
The hardware is getting the coverage virtualized; they have the Duo and the Quad and the multicore…

Jean Bozman - IDC
There is a lot of power out there.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
There is a lot of power, there is an opportunity to work across operating systems and so that’s what’s driving a lot of…

Jean Bozman - IDC
well and there is something else, all of this is causing or bringing about a lot of customer choice that wasn’t there it works well, and realize that even with today’s announcement, customer still has a number of choices here with this Sun Technology stack, they can go on several processors, including two or three of Sun’s. And they can then again take their software and run on a variety of processors as well. So, it’s just really increasing the number of options that are out there, for people who already have source application, for people who are thinking of writing, or people who are thinking of moving them from one place to another.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Ultimately the customers are going, is going to shake out ultimately by what the marketplace does. I mean it is not giving as many options to the customers, you can and then…

Jean Bozman - IDC
It’s what so hard for people to understand, if I work at a large enterprise today almost any large enterprise, I can go there and survey those large enterprises and finding a place that doesn’t have multiple operating systems and multiple pieces of hardware, would be the exception, rather than work.

So, there is already a great amount of variety, but before we had the Silos right, so here is this part of the shop, and there is that part of the shop, what’s changing out there again, to this virtualization and then changing the hardware, so that the workloads can move more freely around the network, it kind of place to Sun’s tray this is what we said and the network is the computer. So the more network centric something is, the better Sun could demonstrate this value proposition for. There is they are not going to take over the entire x86 market, this improves their position in it.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Thanks very much for taking the time with us.

Jean Bosman - IDC
Well thank you. I finally got a Podcast, alright.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Jean Bozman, Research Vice President of the Enterprise Computing Group at IDC. I am Paul Lancour with PodTech.net.

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

Tags: Jean Bozman, IDC, Sun, Intel

Related Stories: IntelMooresLaw

Transcript:
Host: Paul Lancour - PodTech
Guest: John Fowler - Sun Microsystems
Guest: Pat Gelsinger - Intel

Paul Lancour - PodTech
I’m Paul Lancour with PodTech.net. Sun Microsystems and Intel Corporation today announced a major agreement between the two companies. The alliance is centered on Intel’s endorsement of Sun’s Solaris Operating System and Sun’s announcement that it will be delivering servers and workstations based on Intel’s Xeon processors.

The announcement was made by Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Intel’s CEO Paul Otellini in San Francisco. Shortly after the announcement I met with Pat Gelsinger, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group, and John Fowler, Executive Vice President of the Network Systems Group at Sun, to discuss the announcement. Sun has featured some Intel processors in their servers in the past. I first asked John Fowler how this announcement is different.

John Fowler - Sun Microsystems
The historians will know that we actually used Intel processors actually going back into the 80’s and so from time to time we had products that include Intel processors, but what we did a few years ago was fundamentally change our strategy. The strategy changed in that we took Solaris and we open sourced it as well as making it widely available on x86.

The second change of strategy was we decided to get very serious about building a comprehensive product line out of x86 processors, which at the time we chose AMD and so, we’ve been doing very well. We’re sort of three years in this journey. We’ve been growing it more than 50% per quarter with that product line and so we reached a point where Intel had also recently done a vast improvement in their technology. So, we saw an opportunity to work together on some things.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
And the result of your efforts is Solaris has seen significant growth of late and Solaris is running on — was it 70% non-Sun?

John Fowler - Sun Microsystems
That’s right. Yeah, so there has been approximately seven million licenses distributed and of those 70% are on x64 platforms; the majority of which are HP, IBM, Dell that is, I mean, our numerical volume today is relatively low in that marketplace. So, those are mostly running on non-Sun which is a pretty interesting statistic. We, actually — when we do licenses, we ask people what are they going to use them on, and that’s how we track it.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
So, essentially what you’re saying is that this is a — the marketplace dictated this to a great degree?

John Fowler - Sun Microsystems
Yeah, so what has happened is, Intel has improved their technology and then interest in Solaris continues to go up and so building out a product line that includes the Intel products, and then — most importantly, I think here is, Intel is collaborating with a great engineering expertise and actually improving Solaris and making it better. So, it’s not just that they are just endorsing it. They are actually going to work on making it better with us. So, before we had to do that independently; now we can do that with Intel and that ought to really move Solaris ahead even faster on Intel.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
The collaboration with your teams of designers?

John Fowler - Sun Microsystems
Absolutely, so the engineers will be able to work on lower level features, on performance, on I/O, on reliability, to be able to work on these features in advance of Intel’s Silicon actually being available, so they’re ready to go when Intel Silicon comes out. These features will work on both systems that come from Sun as well as systems from other manufacturers such as Dell, HP and IBM, which is something that’s very important to us and obviously important to Intel as well.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
You say it is also driven not just by the marketplace, by the dictates of the customers, but also by the advances that Intel is making. Can you give us a little more information about that? What’s happening in the marketplace in terms of the hardware that’s making this happen?

John Fowler - Sun Microsystems
Well, one of the things that Intel has done is they’ve recently introduced revisions to their products, the Intel Core 2 Duo products, as you see under code names like Woodcrest and Cloverton, are very, very compelling microprocessor products to build servers out of. So, at the same time we were improving Solaris, Intel was also improving their technology offerings to build servers out of them. So, the timing is right to actually kind of put some of these efforts together, both in terms of a hardware product line that we bring forth as well as what Intel can do to accelerate our activities around Solaris.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
John, thanks very much for taking the time and now I’ll turn to Pat Gelsinger, with Intel. Pat, how’re you doing?

Pat Gelsinger - Intel
Very well, thank you.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Very exciting day for you today with this announcement and I just want to piggyback on some of the things we were talking to John about, what is going on with Intel? Perhaps you can talk about, more specifically, the — are we seeing a shift in what’s going on in the marketplace that’s different from just a wrapping up or things are going to change drastically in the near future for your business?

Pat Gelsinger - Intel
Well, in data centers new technologies like virtualization, are becoming more important and the result of that is that this ability to take advantage of new capabilities like we’re doing in hardware and combining that with software and system features, like what Sun has a great strength in, is a great technological partnership and marriage. Our objective in this is to uniquely deliver those into the industry. That’s why today’s announcement is very exciting to us. It is a company who has those competencies, working with our engineers and delivering breakthrough capabilities into the industry, as we think no one else really can.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
One of the things that was being talked about today in the presentation is Moore’s Law being not just clock speed but also being able to diversify the way you use the chips. I wonder if you could give us a little more information about that.

Pat Gelsinger - Intel
Certainly, what we’re seeing is, is that very quickly we’re moving up to higher core count systems, higher thread capabilities as well as new technologies like virtualization, I/O technology, demand-based switching. The result of that is, is that the demands on the system to take advantage of that and to fully deliver those capabilities, really required this intimate co-operation of hardware and software.

That’s really what the great opportunity with Intel and Sun coming together today is, is to take advantage of technologies where Sun has shown tremendous capabilities in their Solaris offerings and to combine those with what we’re doing in Silicon and deliver the full capabilities of Moore’s Law into the industry.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
What was this specifically about Sun that was appealing to Intel when making this agreement?

Pat Gelsinger - Intel
Sun has, with the Solaris Operating System, the Java capabilities, what they’ve been doing in their Intel Architecture based systems over the last couple of years has shown a great ability to deliver and grow in this segment of the marketplace, and particularly at the higher end of the marketplace where our traditional share hasn’t been as strong. So, now this is an opportunity for us to extend the reach of Moore’s Law as we never have been able to before.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Let’s talk about the specifics of the deal, so Intel has endorsed Solaris, Sun is going to be building out servers that will be out later this year?

Pat Gelsinger - Intel
Yes, the Sun has announced that they will be offering a full range of Xeon based platforms in the marketplace. The first of those will be out in the latter part of the first half of this year. So, very soon engineers are working like crazy to get those done and a full line from UP’s through MP’s enterprise, Telco workstations, so, a very broad set of product offerings.

In addition to that Intel has announced that we will be putting dedicated engineering and working with Sun at their development efforts in Solaris as well as on Java. We also have a comprehensive marketing strategies as well that go behind the relationship and then maybe the most important element is the deep technical collaborations that go behind those, which mean that it’s a multi-generational, multi-year, multi-generations of technologies and products into the future.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Great! Well, thanks for taking out the time today to talk with us Pat and congratulations.

Pat Gelsinger - Intel
Thank you very much. A great pleasure.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
That’s Pat Gelsinger, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group and John Fowler, Sun’s Executive Vice President of the Network Systems Group. I’m Paul Lancour for PodTech.net.

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

Tags: Sun Microsystems, Intel, Solaris, Xeon, John Fowler, Pat Gelsinger, IntelMooresLaw

Tags: Activision, Guitar Hero II, Xbox 360, CES, Sony Playstation, Rio Pesino, Marcus Henderson

But if the candidate didn’t, then there would be a bus load of journalists covering his campaign from a newly spiffed up lawn in the Lower Ninth Ward.

The Edwards people did get some video from that spiffed-up yard, it’s on YouTube.

An item on DailyKos points out some of the Web spots the Edwards campaign has popped up (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr). For all that Web-savvy, the official line from the campaign is that the announcement — originally planned for tomorrow — was accidentally leaked when the campaign site went live, a day early.

Some might say that’s not a great sign of organization. Others might see it as a lucky break, if not a planned one. New Orleans has already been the backdrop for plenty of politics, and the candidate might want to let tomorrow’s cameras see it for the devastation it still shows instead of the 24 karat ambition of a presidential hopeful. Or maybe that’s just what he wants to convey.

The presidential season has begun, and it’s exactly these kinds of questions that will be keeping our boy on the bus busy, at least for a little while.

Good Luck Robert! The food and lodging’s on PodTech, so dig in.

Tags: Edwards campaign

Open Source has come to Sun Microsystems, following a promise earlier this year from CEO Jonathan Schwartz. The move was made official this week, with endorsements from the open-source community. Catherine Girardeau reports.

IT security in the federal government is a matter of grave concern. Security, compliance and the new technologies that are quickly growing up around increasing demand took center stage at an IT security conference in the nation’s capital, where Clark Boyd continued his survey of cyber security.

Now, almost two weeks after Election Day, Matt Kelly revisits the issue of electronic voting — how the machines performed, and what some experts are still concerned about.

Those stories and a Tech Stat. It’s PodTech News.

E-Voting Photo Credit: Aaron Gustafson via Flickr/Creative Commons

Click here for transcript.

Tags: Playstation 3, Jonathan Schwartz, IT security