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  • Backpacks and Booth Paint: TechEd 2012

    - by The Un-T Guy
    Arriving in the parking lot of the Orange County Convention Center, I immediately knew I was in the right place. As far as the eye could see, the acres of asphalt were awash in backpacks, quirky (to be kind) outfits, and bad haircuts. This was the place. This was Microsoft Mecca v2012 for geeks and nerds, the Central Florida event of the year, a gathering of high tech professionals whose skills I both greatly respect and, frankly, fear a little. I was wholly and completely out of element, a dork in a vast sea of geek jumbo. It like was wearing dockers and a golf shirt walking into a RenFaire, but one with really crappy costumes and no turkey legs...save those attached to some of the attendees. Of course the corporate whores...errrr, vendors were in place, ready to parlay the convention's fre-nerd-ic energy into millions of dollars by convincing the big-brained and under-sexed in the crowd (i.e., virtually all of them...present company excluded, of course) that their product or service was the only thing standing between them and professional success, industry fame, and clear skin. "With KramTech 2012," they seemed to scream, "you will be THE ROCK STAR of your company's IT department!" As car shows and tattoo parlors learned long ago, Tech companies seem to believe that the best way to attract the attention of this crowd is through the hint of the promise of sex. They recruit and deploy an army of "sales reps" whose primary qualifications appear to be long hair, short skirts, high heels, and a vagina. Unlike their distant cousins in the car and body art industries, however, this sub-species of booth paint (semi-gloss decoration that adds nothing to the substance of the product) seems torn between committing to being all-out sex objects and recognition that they are in the presence of intelligent, discerning people. People who are smart enough to know exactly what these vendors are doing. Also unlike their distant car show and tattoo shop cousins, these young women (what…are there no gay tech professionals who could use some eye candy?) seem to realize that while IT remains a male-dominated field, there are ever-increasing numbers of intelligent, capable, strong professional women – women who’ve battled to make it in this field through hard work and work performance rather than a hard body and performing after work. This is not to say that all of the young female sales reps are there only because of their physical attributes. Many are competent, intelligent, and driven -- not to mention attractive. They're working hard on the front lines of delivering the next generation of technology. The distinction is pretty clear, however, between these young professionals and the booth paint. The former enthusiastically deliver credible information about the products they’re hawking. The latter are positioned in the aisles, uncomfortably avoiding eye contact as they struggle to operate the badge readers. Surprisingly, not all of the women in attendance seemed to object to the objectification of their younger sisters. One IT professional woman who came of age in the industry (mostly in IT marketing) said, “I have no problem with it. I was a ‘booth babe’ for years and it doesn’t bother me at all.” Others, however, weren’t quite so gracious. One woman I spoke with, an IT manager from Cheyenne, Wyoming, said it was demeaning and frankly, as more and more women grow into IT management positions, not a great marketing idea. “Using these young women is, to me, no different than vendors giving out t-shirts to attract attention. It’s sad because it’s still hard for a woman to be respected in the IT field and this just perpetuates the outdated notion that IT is a male-dominated field.” She went on to say that decisions by vendors to employ these young women in this “inappropriate way” could impact her purchasing decisions. “I might be swayed toward a vendor who has women on staff who are intelligent and dynamic rather than the vendors who use the ‘decoration’ girls.” So in many ways, the IT industry is no different than most other industries as it struggles to maximize performance by finding and developing talent – all of the talent, not just the 50% with a penis. Women in IT, like their brethren, struggle to find their niche in the field, to grow professionally, and reach for the brass ring, struggling to overcome obstacles as they climb the mountain of professional success in a never-ending cycle of economic uncertainty. But as (generally) well-educated and highly-trained professionals, they are probably better positioned than those in many other industries. Beside, they’ve got one other advantage over their non-IT counterparts as they attempt their ascent to the summit: They’ve already got the backpacks.

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  • ASMLib

    - by wcoekaer
    Oracle ASMlib on Linux has been a topic of discussion a number of times since it was released way back when in 2004. There is a lot of confusion around it and certainly a lot of misinformation out there for no good reason. Let me try to give a bit of history around Oracle ASMLib. Oracle ASMLib was introduced at the time Oracle released Oracle Database 10g R1. 10gR1 introduced a very cool important new features called Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management). A very simplistic description would be that this is a very sophisticated volume manager for Oracle data. Give your devices directly to the ASM instance and we manage the storage for you, clustered, highly available, redundant, performance, etc, etc... We recommend using Oracle ASM for all database deployments, single instance or clustered (RAC). The ASM instance manages the storage and every Oracle server process opens and operates on the storage devices like it would open and operate on regular datafiles or raw devices. So by default since 10gR1 up to today, we do not interact differently with ASM managed block devices than we did before with a datafile being mapped to a raw device. All of this is without ASMLib, so ignore that one for now. Standard Oracle on any platform that we support (Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, ...) does it the exact same way. You start an ASM instance, it handles storage management, all the database instances use and open that storage and read/write from/to it. There are no extra pieces of software needed, including on Linux. ASM is fully functional and selfcontained without any other components. In order for the admin to provide a raw device to ASM or to the database, it has to have persistent device naming. If you booted up a server where a raw disk was named /dev/sdf and you give it to ASM (or even just creating a tablespace without asm on that device with datafile '/dev/sdf') and next time you boot up and that device is now /dev/sdg, you end up with an error. Just like you can't just change datafile names, you can't change device filenames without telling the database, or ASM. persistent device naming on Linux, especially back in those days ways to say it bluntly, a nightmare. In fact there were a number of issues (dating back to 2004) : Linux async IO wasn't pretty persistent device naming including permissions (had to be owned by oracle and the dba group) was very, very difficult to manage system resource usage in terms of open file descriptors So given the above, we tried to find a way to make this easier on the admins, in many ways, similar to why we started working on OCFS a few years earlier - how can we make life easier for the admins on Linux. A feature of Oracle ASM is the ability for third parties to write an extension using what's called ASMLib. It is possible for any third party OS or storage vendor to write a library using a specific Oracle defined interface that gets used by the ASM instance and by the database instance when available. This interface offered 2 components : Define an IO interface - allow any IO to the devices to go through ASMLib Define device discovery - implement an external way of discovering, labeling devices to provide to ASM and the Oracle database instance This is similar to a library that a number of companies have implemented over many years called libODM (Oracle Disk Manager). ODM was specified many years before we introduced ASM and allowed third party vendors to implement their own IO routines so that the database would use this library if installed and make use of the library open/read/write/close,.. routines instead of the standard OS interfaces. PolyServe back in the day used this to optimize their storage solution, Veritas used (and I believe still uses) this for their filesystem. It basically allowed, in particular, filesystem vendors to write libraries that could optimize access to their storage or filesystem.. so ASMLib was not something new, it was basically based on the same model. You have libodm for just database access, you have libasm for asm/database access. Since this library interface existed, we decided to do a reference implementation on Linux. We wrote an ASMLib for Linux that could be used on any Linux platform and other vendors could see how this worked and potentially implement their own solution. As I mentioned earlier, ASMLib and ODMLib are libraries for third party extensions. ASMLib for Linux, since it was a reference implementation implemented both interfaces, the storage discovery part and the IO part. There are 2 components : Oracle ASMLib - the userspace library with config tools (a shared object and some scripts) oracleasm.ko - a kernel module that implements the asm device for /dev/oracleasm/* The userspace library is a binary-only module since it links with and contains Oracle header files but is generic, we only have one asm library for the various Linux platforms. This library is opened by Oracle ASM and by Oracle database processes and this library interacts with the OS through the asm device (/dev/asm). It can install on Oracle Linux, on SuSE SLES, on Red Hat RHEL,.. The library itself doesn't actually care much about the OS version, the kernel module and device cares. The support tools are simple scripts that allow the admin to label devices and scan for disks and devices. This way you can say create an ASM disk label foo on, currently /dev/sdf... So if /dev/sdf disappears and next time is /dev/sdg, we just scan for the label foo and we discover it as /dev/sdg and life goes on without any worry. Also, when the database needs access to the device, we don't have to worry about file permissions or anything it will be taken care of. So it's a convenience thing. The kernel module oracleasm.ko is a Linux kernel module/device driver. It implements a device /dev/oracleasm/* and any and all IO goes through ASMLib - /dev/oracleasm. This kernel module is obviously a very specific Oracle related device driver but it was released under the GPL v2 so anyone could easily build it for their Linux distribution kernels. Advantages for using ASMLib : A good async IO interface for the database, the entire IO interface is based on an optimal ASYNC model for performance A single file descriptor per Oracle process, not one per device or datafile per process reducing # of open filehandles overhead Device scanning and labeling built-in so you do not have to worry about messing with udev or devlabel, permissions or the likes which can be very complex and error prone. Just like with OCFS and OCFS2, each kernel version (major or minor) has to get a new version of the device drivers. We started out building the oracleasm kernel module rpms for many distributions, SLES (in fact in the early days still even for this thing called United Linux) and RHEL. The driver didn't make sense to get pushed into upstream Linux because it's unique and specific to the Oracle database. As it takes a huge effort in terms of build infrastructure and QA and release management to build kernel modules for every architecture, every linux distribution and every major and minor version we worked with the vendors to get them to add this tiny kernel module to their infrastructure. (60k source code file). The folks at SuSE understood this was good for them and their customers and us and added it to SLES. So every build coming from SuSE for SLES contains the oracleasm.ko module. We weren't as successful with other vendors so for quite some time we continued to build it for RHEL and of course as we introduced Oracle Linux end of 2006 also for Oracle Linux. With Oracle Linux it became easy for us because we just added the code to our build system and as we churned out Oracle Linux kernels whether it was for a public release or for customers that needed a one off fix where they also used asmlib, we didn't have to do any extra work it was just all nicely integrated. With the introduction of Oracle Linux's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and our interest in being able to exploit ASMLib more, we started working on a very exciting project called Data Integrity. Oracle (Martin Petersen in particular) worked for many years with the T10 standards committee and storage vendors and implemented Linux kernel support for DIF/DIX, data protection in the Linux kernel, note to those that wonder, yes it's all in mainline Linux and under the GPL. This basically gave us all the features in the Linux kernel to checksum a data block, send it to the storage adapter, which can then validate that block and checksum in firmware before it sends it over the wire to the storage array, which can then do another checksum and to the actual DISK which does a final validation before writing the block to the physical media. So what was missing was the ability for a userspace application (read: Oracle RDBMS) to write a block which then has a checksum and validation all the way down to the disk. application to disk. Because we have ASMLib we had an entry into the Linux kernel and Martin added support in ASMLib (kernel driver + userspace) for this functionality. Now, this is all based on relatively current Linux kernels, the oracleasm kernel module depends on the main kernel to have support for it so we can make use of it. Thanks to UEK and us having the ability to ship a more modern, current version of the Linux kernel we were able to introduce this feature into ASMLib for Linux from Oracle. This combined with the fact that we build the asm kernel module when we build every single UEK kernel allowed us to continue improving ASMLib and provide it to our customers. So today, we (Oracle) provide Oracle ASMLib for Oracle Linux and in particular on the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. We did the build/testing/delivery of ASMLib for RHEL until RHEL5 but since RHEL6 decided that it was too much effort for us to also maintain all the build and test environments for RHEL and we did not have the ability to use the latest kernel features to introduce the Data Integrity features and we didn't want to end up with multiple versions of asmlib as maintained by us. SuSE SLES still builds and comes with the oracleasm module and they do all the work and RHAT it certainly welcome to do the same. They don't have to rebuild the userspace library, it's really about the kernel module. And finally to re-iterate a few important things : Oracle ASM does not in any way require ASMLib to function completely. ASMlib is a small set of extensions, in particular to make device management easier but there are no extra features exposed through Oracle ASM with ASMLib enabled or disabled. Often customers confuse ASMLib with ASM. again, ASM exists on every Oracle supported OS and on every supported Linux OS, SLES, RHEL, OL withoutASMLib Oracle ASMLib userspace is available for OTN and the kernel module is shipped along with OL/UEK for every build and by SuSE for SLES for every of their builds ASMLib kernel module was built by us for RHEL4 and RHEL5 but we do not build it for RHEL6, nor for the OL6 RHCK kernel. Only for UEK ASMLib for Linux is/was a reference implementation for any third party vendor to be able to offer, if they want to, their own version for their own OS or storage ASMLib as provided by Oracle for Linux continues to be enhanced and evolve and for the kernel module we use UEK as the base OS kernel hope this helps.

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  • High Availability Clustering and Virtualization

    - by tmcallaghan
    I'm trying to understand how the various virtualization vendors (specifically Amazon EC2, but also VMware and Xen) enable software vendors to provide a real HA solution in the environment where the servers are virtualized. Specifically, if I'm running any HA application (exchange, databases, etc) I need to ensure that my redundant virtual "servers" aren't located on the same physical server. Using in-house virtualization solutions (VMware, Xen, etc) I can provision accordingly as well as check the virtual - physical arrangement. I could, however, accidentally "vmotion" to the same physical hardware. With EC2, I don't even have the ability at provision time to select different physical servers. Since their Cluster Compute Instances are 1 virtual server per physical server it seems to be the only way to guarantee I don't have a false sense of redundancy. Any ideas or thoughts would be helpful. What are others doing about this problem? If the vendors provided an API where I could get something as simple as a unique physical system identifier I could at least know if I'm going to have an issue. -Tim

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  • Dual Screen will only mirror after 12.04 upgrade

    - by Ne0
    I have been using Ubuntu with a dual screen for years now, after upgrading to 12.04 LTS i cannot get my dual screen working properly Graphics: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV350 AR [Radeon 9600] 01:00.1 Display controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI RV350 AR [Radeon 9600] (Secondary) I noticed i was using open source drivers and attempted to install official binaries using the methods in this thread. Output: liam@liam-desktop:~$ sudo apt-get install fglrx fglrx-amdcccle Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be upgraded: fglrx fglrx-amdcccle 2 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 12 not upgraded. Need to get 45.1 MB of archives. After this operation, 739 kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/restricted fglrx i386 2:8.960-0ubuntu1 [39.2 MB] Get:2 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/restricted fglrx-amdcccle i386 2:8.960-0ubuntu1 [5,883 kB] Fetched 45.1 MB in 1min 33s (484 kB/s) (Reading database ... 328081 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace fglrx 2:8.951-0ubuntu1 (using .../fglrx_2%3a8.960-0ubuntu1_i386.deb) ... Removing all DKMS Modules Error! There are no instances of module: fglrx 8.951 located in the DKMS tree. Done. Unpacking replacement fglrx ... Preparing to replace fglrx-amdcccle 2:8.951-0ubuntu1 (using .../fglrx-amdcccle_2%3a8.960-0ubuntu1_i386.deb) ... Unpacking replacement fglrx-amdcccle ... Processing triggers for ureadahead ... ureadahead will be reprofiled on next reboot Setting up fglrx (2:8.960-0ubuntu1) ... update-alternatives: warning: forcing reinstallation of alternative /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf because link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf is broken. update-alternatives: warning: skip creation of /etc/OpenCL/vendors/amdocl64.icd because associated file /usr/lib/fglrx/etc/OpenCL/vendors/amdocl64.icd (of link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) doesn't exist. update-alternatives: warning: skip creation of /usr/lib32/libaticalcl.so because associated file /usr/lib32/fglrx/libaticalcl.so (of link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) doesn't exist. update-alternatives: warning: skip creation of /usr/lib32/libaticalrt.so because associated file /usr/lib32/fglrx/libaticalrt.so (of link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) doesn't exist. update-alternatives: warning: forcing reinstallation of alternative /usr/lib/fglrx/ld.so.conf because link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf is broken. update-alternatives: warning: skip creation of /etc/OpenCL/vendors/amdocl64.icd because associated file /usr/lib/fglrx/etc/OpenCL/vendors/amdocl64.icd (of link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) doesn't exist. update-alternatives: warning: skip creation of /usr/lib32/libaticalcl.so because associated file /usr/lib32/fglrx/libaticalcl.so (of link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) doesn't exist. update-alternatives: warning: skip creation of /usr/lib32/libaticalrt.so because associated file /usr/lib32/fglrx/libaticalrt.so (of link group i386-linux-gnu_gl_conf) doesn't exist. update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated) update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-25-generic-pae Loading new fglrx-8.960 DKMS files... Building only for 3.2.0-25-generic-pae Building for architecture i686 Building initial module for 3.2.0-25-generic-pae Done. fglrx: Running module version sanity check. - Original module - No original module exists within this kernel - Installation - Installing to /lib/modules/3.2.0-25-generic-pae/updates/dkms/ depmod....... DKMS: install completed. update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated) Processing triggers for bamfdaemon ... Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf.index... Setting up fglrx-amdcccle (2:8.960-0ubuntu1) ... Processing triggers for initramfs-tools ... update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-25-generic-pae Processing triggers for libc-bin ... ldconfig deferred processing now taking place liam@liam-desktop:~$ sudo aticonfig --initial -f aticonfig: No supported adapters detected When i attempt to get my settings back to what they were before upgrading i get this message requested position/size for CRTC 81 is outside the allowed limit: position=(1440, 0), size=(1440, 900), maximum=(1680, 1680) and GDBus.Error:org.gtk.GDBus.UnmappedGError.Quark._gnome_2drr_2derror_2dquark.Code3: requested position/size for CRTC 81 is outside the allowed limit: position=(1440, 0), size=(1440, 900), maximum=(1680, 1680) Any idea's on what i need to do to fix this issue?

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  • What are the functionalities of Distributed File systems and Distributed Storage Systems?

    - by Berkay
    i'm reading cloud vendors solutions for the distributed storage systems such as Amazon Dynamo and Google Big Table. and really confused in two terms : what is Distrubuted file systems for in cloud ? what is Distributed storage systems for? what are differences of these terms and functionalities ? if i understand these terms i will create the general architecture of the cloud vendors, any good tutorial or web page will be appreciated. Thanks

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  • The Oracle Enterprise Linux Software and Hardware Ecosystem

    - by sergio.leunissen
    It's been nearly four years since we launched the Unbreakable Linux support program and with it the free Oracle Enterprise Linux software. Since then, we've built up an extensive ecosystem of hardware and software partners. Oracle works directly with these vendors to ensure joint customers can run Oracle Enterprise Linux. As Oracle Enterprise Linux is fully--both source and binary--compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), there is minimal work involved for software and hardware vendors to test their products with it. We develop our software on Oracle Enterprise Linux and perform full certification testing on Oracle Enterprise Linux as well. Due to the compatibility between Oracle Enterprise Linux and RHEL, Oracle also certifies its software for use on RHEL, without any additional testing. Oracle Enterprise Linux tracks RHEL by publishing freely downloadable installation media on edelivery.oracle.com/linux and updates, bug fixes and security errata on Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). At the same time, Oracle's Linux kernel team is shaping the future of enterprise Linux distributions by developing technologies and features that matter to customers who deploy Linux in the data center, including file systems, memory management, high performance computing, data integrity and virtualization. All this work is contributed to the Linux and Xen communities. The list below is a sample of the partners who have certified their products with Oracle Enterprise Linux. If you're interested in certifying your software or hardware with Oracle Enterprise Linux, please contact us via [email protected] Chip Manufacturers Intel, Intel Enabled Server Acceleration Alliance AMD Server vendors Cisco Unified Computing System Dawning Dell Egenera Fujitsu HP Huawei IBM NEC Sun/Oracle Storage Systems, Volume Management and File Systems 3Par Compellent EMC VPLEX FalconStor Fusion-io Hitachi Data Systems HP Storage Array Systems Lustre Network Appliance OCFS2 PillarData Symantec Veritas Storage Foundation Networking: Switches, Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), Converged Network Adapters (CNAs), InfiniBand Brocade Emulex Mellanox QLogic Voltaire SOA and Middleware ActiveState ActivePerl, ActivePython Tibco Zend Backup, Recovery & Replication Arkeia Network Backup Suite BakBone NetVault CommVault Simpana 8 EMC Networker, Replication Manager FalconStor Continuous Data Protector HP Data Protector NetApp Snapmanager Quest LiteSpeed Engine Steeleye Data Replication, Disaster Recovery Symantec NetBackup, Veritas Volume Replicator, Symantec Backup Exec Zmanda Amanda Enterprise Data Center Automation BMC CA Unicenter HP Server Automation (formerly Opsware), System Management Homepage Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Quest Vizioncore vFoglight Pro TeamQuest Manager Clustering & High Availability FUJITSU x10sure NEC Express Cluster X Steeleye Lifekeeper Symantec Cluster Server Univa UniCluster Virtualization Platforms and Cloud Providers Amazon EC2 Citrix XenServer Rackspace Cloud VirtualBox VMWare ESX Security Management ArcSight: Enterprise Security Manager, Logger CA Access Control Centrify Suite Ecora Auditor FoxT Manager Likewise: Unix Account Management Lumension Endpoint Management and Security Suite QualysGuard Suite Quest Privilege Manager McAfee Application Control, Change ControlIntegrity Monitor, Integrity Control, PCI Pro Solidcore S3 Symantec Enterprise Security Manager (ESM) Tripwire Trusted Computer Solutions

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  • ACORD LOMA 2010: Building Insurance Companies in the Clouds

    - by [email protected]
    Chuck Johnston, vice president of global strategy and alliances for Oracle Insurance, participated in a featured speaking session at ACORD LOMA 2010. He provides an update on his discussions with insurers at the show and after his presentation. Every year I always make a point of walking the show floor at the ACORD LOMA technology conference to visit with colleagues and competitors, and try to get a feel for which way the industry will move over the next 12 months. Insurers are looking for substance in cloud (computing), trying to mix business with pleasure (monetizing social networks), and expect differentiation through commodity (Software as a Service). The disconnect at this show is that most vendors are still struggling with creating a clear path from Facebook to customer intimacy, SaaS to core cost savings and clouds to ubiquitous presence. Vendors need to find new ways to help insurers find the real value in these potentially disruptive technologies by understanding the changes coming to the insurance business and how these new technologies impact the new insurance business. Oracle's approach to understanding the evolving insurance industry comes from a discussion with our customers in our Insurance CIO Council, where one of our customers suggested we buy an insurance company to really understand our customers. We have decided to do the next best thing and build our own model of an insurance company, Alamere Insurance, that uses the latest technologies to transform its own business. Alamere will never issue an actual policy, but it does give us a framework to consider the impacts of changes in the insurance landscape and how Oracle technology meets the challenge or needs to evolve to help our customers be successful. In preparing for my talk at the conference using Alamere as my organizing theme, I found myself reading actuarial memoranda on CSO table changes and articles on underwriting theory that really made me think about my customer's problems first and foremost, and then how Oracle technology can provide answers. As much as I prefer techno-thrillers and sci-fi novels to actuarial papers for plane reading, I got very excited about the idea of putting myself back in the customer shoes I haven't worn in a decade, and really looking at how Oracle can power the Adaptive Insurance Enterprise. Talking to customers and industry people after the session, the idea of Alamere seemed to excite people and I got a lot of suggestions as to what lines of business we should model and where we should focus first on technology uptake. One customer said to a colleague that Oracle's attempt to "share their pain" was unique among vendors. More about Alamere, and the Adaptive Insurance Enterprise next time. Chuck Johnston is vice president of global strategy and alliances for Oracle Insurance.

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  • Launch 2010 Technical Readiness Unofficial Q&amp;A.

    - by mbcrump
    I had an email from one of my readers about the 2010 Technical Readiness Series. Please read below: Hi Michael, I noticed you blogged a while back that you were going to attend MS 2010 Launch event. I’m going to the session in Seattle on May 27, is it worth it to attend? Also, I’m wondering if they give any free software away like VS2010 Pro? Any decent vendors? Looking forward to hearing back from you. I decided this information would probably benefit several instead of just responding back to the reader. In case you are not aware, MS has a 2010 launch event showing VS2010, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008R2.  You can sign up for an event here: https://microsoft.crgevents.com/Register2010/Content/Event_Selection.aspx I’ve answered the questions asked below. Q: Is it worth going? A: It is if you have had little or no exposure to the latest 2010 products. Most people are familiar with VS2010, but have not seen SharePoint 2010 Office 2010 or Windows Phone 7. It is designed to get you up to speed very quickly. If you have watched most of the MIX videos and keep up with .NET in general, you will benefit more by having the ability to ask questions.    Q: Did you get any free software? A: No, only demos including: VS2010/Office 2010 – They give you a link to the url where you can download the trial version. Windows 7 Enterprise – You get a DVD with the trial version loaded. Q: Do they give away any cool swag? A: Just a Microsoft T-Shirt (XL). Q: What about the vendor selection? A: At the event that I went to, most vendors were pushing SharePoint products. There wasn’t a lot of variety in the selection. Most vendors were giving away the typical pens, buttons and stickers and trial software. If you have any other questions, feel free to contact me. I will answer and add to this un-official FAQ.

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  • CRM vs VRM

    - by David Dorf
    In a previous post, I discussed the potential power of combining social, interest, and location graphs in order to personalize marketing and shopping experiences for consumers.  Marketing companies have been trying to collect detailed information for that very purpose, a large majority of which comes from tracking people on the internet.  But their approaches stem from the one-way nature of traditional advertising.  With TV, radio, and magazines there is no opportunity to truly connect to customers, which has trained marketing companies to [covertly] collect data and segment customers into easily identifiable groups.  To a large extent, we think of this as CRM. But what if we turned this viewpoint upside-down to accommodate for the two-way nature of social media?  The notion of marketing as conversations was the basis for the Cluetrain, an early attempt at drawing attention to the fact that customers are actually unique humans.  A more practical implementation is Project VRM, which is a reverse CRM of sorts.  Instead of vendors managing their relationships with customers, customers manage their relationships with vendors. Your shopping experience is not really controlled by you; rather, its controlled by the retailer and advertisers.  And unfortunately, they typically don't give you a say in the matter.  Yes, they might tailor the content for "female age 25-35 interested in shoes" but that's not really the essence of you, is it?  A better approach is to the let consumers volunteer information about themselves.  And why wouldn't they if it means a better, more relevant shopping experience?  I'd gladly list out my likes and dislikes in exchange for getting rid of all those annoying cookies on my harddrive. I really like this diagram from Beyond SocialCRM as it captures the differences between CRM and VRM. The closest thing to VRM I can find is Buyosphere, a start-up that allows consumers to track their shopping history across many vendors, then share it appropriately.  Also, Amazon does a pretty good job allowing its customers to edit their profile, which includes everything you've ever purchased from Amazon.  You can mark items as gifts, or explicitly exclude them from their recommendation engine.  This is a win-win for both the consumer and retailer. So here is my plea to retailers: Instead of trying to infer my interests from snapshots of my day, please just ask me.  We'll both have a better experience in the long-run.

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  • Help assigning Product id for ecommerce site?

    - by Stanford Sequeira
    I am starting an eCommerce marketplace, I am new to eCommerce, but I am taking it up as a challenge. I will have multiple vendors on my site. and they will upload their products through csv.- for bulk upload however there will be certain popular products already listed in the database, they can add those to their listing(like amazon for 3rd party sellers). I have no idea how to assign product codes for every product, can you help me out? im taking about something like amazons asin number. or may be is it possible to let vendors assign their own numbers? how does that work?

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  • What does private cloud Daas or DBaaS really mean ?

    - by llaszews
    Just had meeting with Fortune 1000 company regarding their private DBaaS or DaaS offering. Interesting to see what DBaaS really means to them: 1. Automated Database provisioning - Being able to 'one button' provision databases and database objects. This includings creating the database instance, creating database objects, network configuration and security provisioning. It is estimated that just being able to provision a new DB table in automated fashion will reduce time required to create a new DB table from 60 hours down to 8 hours. 2. Virtualization and blades - DBaaS infrastructure is all based upon VMs and blades. 3. Consolidation of database vendors - Moving from over ten database vendors down to three.

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  • Help assigning product id for e-commerce site? [closed]

    - by Stanford Sequeira
    I am starting an e-commerce marketplace. I am new to e-commerce, but I am taking it up as a challenge. I will have multiple vendors on my site and they will upload their products through CSV files for bulk upload. However there will be certain popular products already listed in the database, they can add those to their listing (like Amazon for 3rd party sellers). I have no idea how to assign product codes for every product, can you help me out? I'm talking about something like Amazon's ASIN number. Or may be is it possible to let vendors assign their own numbers? How does that work?

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