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Is it Time for Facebook to Make Opt-In the Default?

cgseo — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 19:56:40 +0000

Facebook's Open Graph API is getting some negative attention in Washington today. Four democratic U.S. senators, Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich and Al Franken, sent a letter to Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this morning, asking for clarification about the privacy implications of Facebook's latest initiatives. Specifically, these senators complain about the company's new policy to allow third-party developers to store data for more than 24 hours, Facebook's Instant Personalization feature and the social network's new initiatives that make more of its users' personal information public by default. Sponsor Washington and Facebook Privacy The discussion in Washington mostly centers around the fact that Facebook's new Instant Personalization service is opt-out . Facebook's current partners - Microsoft's Docs.com , Pandora and Yelp - automatically get access to a subset of your personal data whenever you visit their sites while you are logged in to Facebook. According to the senators, Facebook now shares "significant and personal data points that should be kept private unless the user chooses to share them." U.S. senators : "Significant and personal data points that should be kept private unless the user chooses to share them." In his response to the senators' concerns, Facebook's VP of global communications Elliot Schrage argues that these new products are "designed to enhance personalization and promote social activity across the Internet while continuing to give users unprecedented control over what information they share, when they want to share it, and with whom." Facebook : We "give users unprecedented control over what information they share, when they want to share it, and with whom." This discussion comes down to Facebook's decision to make many of its latest features opt-out instead of opt-in. Currently, Facebook is only testing Instant Personalization with a small number of hand-selected partners. Facebook's ambition , however, is to turn itself into the hub for personalization on virtually every site on the Internet, so this small group of partners could soon grow exponentially. This - combined with the end of the company's 24-hour limit on storing data by third-party developers - could potentially pose a serious threat to its users' privacy. Opt-In vs. Opt-Out There is a reason why Facebook is currently using opt-out as its default. After all, this guarantees Facebook the largest possible user base for these features and the best possible user experience for those who want to use them. Making new features opt-in exposes Facebook to the (very real) possibility that not enough users sign up and that the reach of its current and future initiatives will be very limited. On the other hand, if its users really wanted to these features, wouldn't they just opt-in if asked? And if these features turn out to be really useful, wouldn't word about them spread across Facebook like a wildfire? Should Facebook Make Opt-Out Its Default? Given the Beacon fiasco from 2007 - and the recent discussion around how Google handled the launch of Buzz - however, we have to wonder if Facebook simply didn't learn its own lessons. Facebook already hosts more private information about its users than any other site on the Internet. Given the company's current trajectory of exposing more and more personal data, it's probably time for the company to establish a consistent policy for how it plans to handle personal data in the future and make it very easy for users to opt out of any new initiatives that will expose more of a user's data to third parties in the future. If you want to make sure that Facebook developers can't access your personal data, here are Sarah Perez's excellent instructions for how to opt-out . Discuss

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Is it Time for Facebook to Make Opt-In the Default?

Giving in to Facebook: A Weekend on the New "Instantly Personalized" Web (Op-Ed)

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:29:52 +0000

At last week's F8 developers' conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled plans to offer "instant personalization" all over the web , a way for websites to become instantly more social. Without even signing in, sites gain access to publicly available Facebook information like your name, profile picture, friend list and more, in order to personalize your experience on the site. At launch, only three partner sites are offering this feature: Microsoft's new Docs.com , Internet radio Pandora and user review site Yelp . You can opt-out of this experience if you like, but by default, you're opted in. Sponsor These changes have raised concerns among privacy advocates and are even now being questioned by government officials like U.S. Senator Charles Schumer who is urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into how social networks handle our private information. And yet... and yet ...after spending the weekend on these "instantly personalized" sites, I have to admit...begrudgingly, mind you...that the experience itself is amazing. Online Music Gets Personal, Too Personal? Pandora's Internet radio is a service I usually partake of via its mobile application on my iPhone, not its regular website. But after the launch of the newly personalized Pandora , I had to take a look. And it was worth it. I immediately discovered which of my friends had the same musical interests as I do. My editor, Richard MacManus, for example, is also a fan of The Killers! Who knew? And apparently, a whole bunch of friends are getting into MGMT now. But finding connections like these aren't the only types of discoveries you can make here. As social media user extraordinaire Robert Scoble found out , you can easily discover your friends' more embarrassing personal tastes too. Kenny G?, Scoble laughingly chides a co-worker after stumbling upon his decidedly unhipster musical interests. These are precisely the types of things we want to stay hidden. Kenny G, for instance. But also our secret obsession with that attractive actor or actress, our fondness for pictures of cute kitties, our forays into celebrity gossip sites when we have a reputation for being intelligent thinkers, our secret Star Wars addiction and so forth and so on. While there aren't " instantly personalized " sites showing you all these types of interests just yet, believe me, there will be. If Facebook has its way (and guess what? It will), your real identity , not just the public parts you've willingly shared in the past, will be revealed to anyone and everyone unless you take action to opt-out. The Real You Can No Longer Be Hidden This is precisely as it should be, Facebook CEO Zuckberberg, more or less said. Earlier this year, he made statements regarding Facebook's new openness, claiming that if he built the social network now, he would make a lot of the data housed there more public by default. This would reflect the current social norms, he said. But that's not exactly true. Facebook isn't reflecting social norms, it's attempting to create them. That said, what an amazing creation it is. On Yelp, I can find the reviews my Facebook friends authored with just a click. I can see who else really digs that local sushi place. And I can do all this without going through the whole "re-friending" process that Web 2.0 sites have put me through in the past again and again. I'm there, my friends are there, and I didn't have to do anything to make that happen. Frankly, it feels right. (Fellow ReadWriteWeb blogger Mike Melanson agrees .) A Minute on the Lips... But it's oh so wrong, isn't it? By giving into to Facebook's vision for the web, we're ceding control of our data, our likes, our interests, our "social graph" (aka who we know, who we friend) - everything - to one company. Historically , one very, very closed company . We're definitely worried about the implications of that. You should be too. But in the meantime, like that calorie-rich dessert we know we shouldn't eat, we're sampling Facebook's web and secretly savoring its deliciousness. Why does everything that's so wrong have to feel so good? Blast you, Facebook. Blast you. Discuss

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Giving in to Facebook: A Weekend on the New "Instantly Personalized" Web (Op-Ed)

Google’s Eric Schmidt Gushes About HTML 5

cgseo — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 07:43:45 +0000

Forrester Research is recommending developers continue developing rich Internet applications and take long pause before embracing HTML 5. For Forrester, HTML 5 is still many years away from becoming a standard in the market and fully functional across multiple platforms. The analyst recommendation reflects on Google's mobile strategy, which CEO Eric Schmidt says is rooted in the company's support for HTML 5. This topic is of real interest now as Apple has dropped support for Adobe Flash. Google is forging ahead with support for HTML 5 but is also playing all sides as Flash remains the incumbent technology for online video. Sponsor So though its commitment is to HTML 5, the company still faces the reality that adoption for platforms such as .NET remain high. Analyst Jeffrey Hammond writes in his report : "These trends underline a key hurdle that HTML 5 technology must overcome to be a ready substitute for today's RIA platform options; users expect it to be as low cost as the other options, but to be of use it must also integrate with Java and .NET server technology. Even if HTML 5 turns out to be a great spec when it reaches Candidate Recommendation state in 2012, it's not clear that this alone will be enough to reverse current RIA adoption trends." In the meantime, Google is debating if it should develop native applications for different platforms. A Google Docs product manager said to us recently that the company has not decided if they should invest in native applications for different mobile platforms. Last week at Google Atmosphere, Schmidt was emphatic about Google's interest in HTML 5. Also at Google Atmosphere, Google Apps President David Girouard moderated a discussion that touched on the HTML 5 issue. In Vint Cerf's view, the "Internet of Things," will evolve to the point where more "things," will go on the smart grid. Speeds will increase at the edges of the network, making downloads to a web page almost simultaneous. What this seems to mean is that we will see the borders between apps and the Web dissolve. There may even be the evolution of new networks that are different than the Web itself. In view of what they say, there is no clear dismissal of different platforms. It's more how mobile apps and the Web blend together. Forrester is critical of the draft HTML 5 spec. Hammond states cites the deep developer use of existing rich Internet application platforms. From his report: "Will HTML 5 make rich Internet application (RIA) technologies such as Adobe Flash/Flex and Microsoft Silverlight obsolete? For at least the next five years, the answer is a definite "no"; inconsistent implementations of the draft HTML 5 specification and immature tooling make building HTML 5 apps that work consistently across browsers and operating systems a real challenge. Furthermore, this "either/ or" scenario is driven only by vendor politics, not by developer realities. Ultimately, HTML 5 and RIA platforms will be complementary technologies, and enterprise development shops will need to invest in both approaches to deliver expressive applications that combine reach and richness." It is a little tiring when we hear the war of words over apps versus the Web. What will win? Probably neither. It will just depend on the demands of the market, the views of the developer and the powers they decide to follow. Discuss

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Google's Eric Schmidt Gushes About HTML 5

One Approach to Growth: Build Your Own Cloud with vCenter in the Middle

cgseo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 07:30:00 +0000

Today, we got the chance to sit down with Aprimo, an on-demand marketing automation company that has built their software business around scaling their own cloud infrastructure with VMware vCenter . Aprimo has optimized its offerings to scale with customer growth and leverage best-in-class hardware to match innovation in the software layers it develops. In this discussion, we found less need for discussing private vs. public cloud. Instead, we found more focus on performance and speed-to-market as key drivers for moving a virtualization strategy into personal cloud infrastructure reality. Sponsor The story of Aprimo starts with virtualization - and has led to the company defining the boundaries of its cloud offering and product architecture around the benefits of scaling resources on demand. Aprimo uses a Microsoft .Net three-tier architecture with MSSQL in the back-end. All of the three tiers (front-end, business logic, database) run in virtual containers that are monitored with vCenter. Performance is the question that Aprimo studied when bringing vendors on board. The company has relationships with 3Com, Cisco, and HP for the three key parts of the technology stack. vCenter joins these offerings together and offers the company quick response to new customer requests. Like many business, marketing can come in waves and this architecture is designed to scale around the unknown and to be agile enough to support the marketing calendar. Here is a diagram showing the core services VMware vCenter is focused on: We had the chance to explore the customer experience of build-your-own-cloud with John Gilmartin, Director of Product Marketing at VMware. We asked him if VMware sells clouds, or if instead its tool build clouds. What we found is that it is a bit of both. Like a data center itself, or a complex application, building your own cloud can be a multi-faceted event. Customers are using vCenter as a building block to manage the resources and enabling automation around business processes. By thinking of automation as the line in the sand between virtualization and cloud, we can easily see how connecting business processes focuses on the best place in harnessing on-demand resources for business benefit. Some of the areas of focus we the Aprimo team took on as the company to optimize its virtual resources into its cloud. Design and optimization of resource pools Database tier optimization and support new dynamic customer scaling Designing for performance with vendor evaluations Leveraging best practices from VMware on tuning and finding bottlenecks Processes for spinning up new users automatically across all resources Out of these focus areas, we found database scaling the most interesting to consider. It seems clear that as build-your-own-clouds grow, database performance, concurrency, and process integration are ripe for further optimization. What we learned from Aprimo and VMware vCenter is that launching a cloud infrastructure is a combination of virtualizing computing resources and designing the automation of the right business and technical processes. Reaching the stage of an effective cloud depends on how the team thinks about connecting software, sales, and infrastructure together as a process. Making a commitment to your own cloud can bring a company together - from sales manager to developer. This join can position an organization to win customers and grow the business due to an increase in the end to end agility of the organization. Is your business ready to cook up a cloud recipe of your own? Discuss

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One Approach to Growth: Build Your Own Cloud with vCenter in the Middle

Fujitsu Making $537 Million Investment in Cloud Computing

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 23:13:00 +0000

The Nikkei Daily in Japan is reporting that Fujitsu will invest $537 million in cloud computing for 2011. That seems like a staggering investment to us but perhaps it's not at all surprising considering the metamorphosis in the IT sector. According to The Nikkei and Reuters , the investments will be for more servers and external memory storage at data centers in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, Australia and Singapore. Sponsor Fujitsu is not a name that is often thought of in terms of cloud computing. But it is one of the largest IT management services companies in the world, competing with the likes of companies such as CA and Microsoft, two providers with deep investments of their own in cloud computing. A little more insight into the investment came at the Symantec conference last week during an interview with Fujitsu CTO Dr. Joseph Reger. According to TechPulse 360, Reger said that relationships are developing, so to speak. "The IT industry and the cloud thing are in the dating stage... Dating is when you see only the bright side, the opportunities and you don't sit down and worry about what could be the issues." And like a lot of enterprise technology companies, Fujitsu is pushing for is own cloud stack for he enterprise: "It is a step away from current IT but it needs to be connected to the current IT: so private-public cloud. We're thinking about trusted boundaries, the security perimeters and so on. And we are seriously hoping that the cloud will be just another incarnation of IT, not a total different thing. Meaning that there will be a cloud stack where everybody can contribute... Because if the cloud is like an end to end proprietary big heater proposition, that's not good for us, for you [Symantec] and for our customers either." Open standards, anyone? Discuss

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Fujitsu Making $537 Million Investment in Cloud Computing

Docs.com: Facebook and Microsoft Go After Google Docs

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:24:06 +0000

During today's F8 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg announced a number of new products and features for Facebook, including a new collaboration with Microsoft. With Docs.com , Microsoft's FUSE labs just launched an online document editor and viewer that connects directly to Facebook and uses all of the new social features for third-party sites that Facebook announced today. Docs, for example, allows users to share documents with their Facebook friends, edit them collaboratively and discover documents that their friends have uploaded to their profiles. Sponsor Creating Documents in the Cloud and Sharing them With Your Facebook Friends With Docs, you can create new documents right in the web application or upload them from your desktop. Docs gives you the option to share documents privately or you can allow a select group of your Facebook friends to edit the document with you. A button next to every document allows you to add additional editors at any point. In our tests, the editor wasn't working properly yet (though the document viewer works just fine). We will take a closer look at Docs editing features once it is fully up and running. In addition to being able to create and view documents, Docs.com's Facebook integration will also allow your friends to discover these documents (if you choose to share them). You can also add a new tab to your profile page that shows all the documents you have shared with your friends. This also means that you can use Facebook to discuss these documents in public, just like you would discuss any other status update on the site. Attacking Google There can be little doubt that this is a direct attack against Google Docs . Even though Google Docs only offers relatively basic editing features, the service's collaboration tools allow it to stand out from Microsoft's products. Until now, collaborating on Microsoft Office documents was always a rather difficult task for Office users and generally involved using third-party software. It remains to be seen how many people in an office environment will really want to connect their documents to Facebook. For students and other Facebook users who aren't using this tool in a corporate environment and just want to share documents with each other, however, this looks like a great solution. Discuss

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Docs.com: Facebook and Microsoft Go After Google Docs

Live Blog: Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 Keynote

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:50:19 +0000

Facebook is hosting its annual f8 developer conference in San Francisco today. We expect quite a few announcements around new features and products today, including more information about the availability of a firehose of user data , geotagging, payments and the rumored off-site "like" button that publishers will soon be able to embed in their pages. Read on to find our live blog of Mark Zuckerberg's keynote. The keynote is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. PST (GMT -7:00). Sponsor Watch it Live You can also find live video of the keynote here . We will refresh this page regularly during the keynote. Please reload this page to see these updates. 9:45: Audience is getting seated. 10:01: Looks like there is a little delay. Keynote is now scheduled to start at 10:10 a.m. PST. 10:07: Rumor : Facebook and Microsoft will announce a new application partnership. Image credit: Devin Reams . 10:11: Zuckerberg on stage. 10:12: "What we have to show you today will be one of the most transformative things for the Web we've ever done." Open Graph: Puts people at the center of the Web. "The Web can become a semantically meaningful set of connections." 10:14: Recap of Facebook stats: 400 million users on Facebook, 100 million people use Facebook Connect. "A lot of startups are requiring that their users use Facebook Connect. We want to make it simple to create these personalized experiences." Policy updates: All permissions are now managed in one permissions dialog. Cache: Developers can now store information for longer than 24 hours. 10:18: Facebook credits: More than 100 developers working with Facebook already. 10:18: Back to Open Graph: "Facebook only maps out the part of the social graph that relates to people." Others, like Yelp and Pandora map out the social graph around other topics. 10:21: There is no way to bring these different graphs together yet. Right now, developers use the stream metaphor, but the services don't understand these connections. 10:22: By connecting these graphs, Facebook will be able to show you restaurants your friends like, music your friends like, etc. "By doing this, the Web will get a whole lot better." 10:23: New Graph API: Makes it simple to read connections on FB. Based on a new standard. New plugins for sites: Make your sites instantly social and personalized. 10:24: Example: See what your friends already liked on CNN. CNN won't know who you are or who your friends are. On CNN homepage: See all your friends' activity. 10:25: Bret Taylor (formerly of Friendfeed) on stage. 10:27: How do you get people to feel comfortable with importing their Facebook friends? Experience from Friendfeed: The only signup button that mattered was Facebook Connect, because that was the best way for people to find their friends. 10:28: New products: Social plugins: add social features with just one line of HTML. Universal like button: A like button for the Web that will instantly share your like back to FB. Based on an iframe. 10:31: Activity streams plugin: Transport the FB news feed to your site. 10:31: Recommendations plugin: Show users articles on your site that they are most likely to like. Highly personalized. Login plugin: See which of your friends already signed up for a given service. Social bar: The "kitchen sink" of Facebook's new plugins. One bar at the bottom of the site will show all of these features. 10:33: Talking about the news feed: Open Graph will make the stream more useful. Allows you to markup your pages to tell Facebook what kind of real-world object your page represents. You can say, for example, that a page is about a band and where this band is from. New section on your profile can now show which movies, songs, etc. you liked. 10:36: Launching with 30 partners today. You can also subscribe by topics. These likes and updates will point to sites outside of Facebook. "My identity is not just defined by Facebook but also by all of the things I do around the Web." 10:38: Graph API: Our attempt to re-architect the Facebook platform with simplicity and the Graph API in mind. 10:40: You can download all of the connections of a given user from the Graph API. 10:41: Search: You can search through all of the public updates on Facebook. Real-time will be built-in. Facebook will ping developers when a user posts an update. 10:42: Facebook will use oAuth 2.0. "It's so much more awesome than our current system. Available for the Graph API and all of Facebook's existing APIs. 10:44: Zuckerberg back on stage. Facebook expects to service a total of 1 billion like buttons today. 10:45: "The Web is at an important turning point today." Startups require their users to bring their real identity. "The default is now social." 10:46: What kind of products would be possible if Facebook partners already knew everything about their users? Microsoft Docs.com: Online version of Microsoft's office suite. Collaborate with friends on documents. All of the power of Microsoft Office - but with a built-in social experience. Second example: Pandora. See what bands your friends like on Pandora. 10:50: Zuckerberg finishes the keynote with an anecdote about his girlfriend. Discuss

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Live Blog: Mark Zuckerberg's F8 Keynote

Google’s Vint Cerf on Private Clouds v. Public Clouds

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 02:01:10 +0000

The debate about private clouds continue as the traditional heavyweight enterprise software providers make their big and glossy pitches for their vision of a private cloud. So, it may come from Google, but still, it is refreshing to hear the intellectual tone that a scholar like Vint Cerf provides. Cerf is Google's chief technology evangelist but his reflections give a sound bearing on how private and public clouds do interact. Sponsor He spoke last week at the Google Atmosphere Conference. We came across one of the discussions he had with fellow Google innovators. He repeats what we hear him say a lot. It comes down to interoperability. Private clouds are tools. Google develops tools that are distributed on the Internet. The question is how do clouds interact? It's a contrast to what we see with Microsoft or Oracle in its quest to sell cloud computing environments into the enterprise. In the meantime Amazon continues its own quest to dispel private cloud computing as a myth, not a reality. In an interview with eWeek , Adam Selipsky, vice president of AWS outlined their views: "....Moreover, Selipsky said what people are calling private clouds come with the following drawbacks, where the customer will: · Still own the capex...and they're very expensive (big fixed investments) · Not pay for what you use · Not have true elasticity...when groups relinquish their servers, the company still owns the datacenter space and servers...and will also find that managing this supply chain will present a dilemma...will either have to significantly overprovision which is wasteful or become really expert at managing just-in-time supply-chain so there are no long waits for servers...managing a supply chain like this is really hard and takes a lot of effort and refining and keeping the status quo of long time to market is not so appealing either · Still own the headache of managing the undifferentiated heavy lifting" And so, the debate continues. Discuss

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Google's Vint Cerf on Private Clouds v. Public Clouds

Microsoft: Everything Moves Faster in the Cloud

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 19:38:51 +0000

Microsoft revealed a bit more about its container system for data centers, giving us some pause about it as a symbol of the cloud itself. These boxes represent the future of cloud-based infrastructures for both shared and dedicated networks. Microsoft, Amazon, HP and a number of other vendors use these containers to operate cloud networks. They are becoming fully automated systems that physically represent how we are seeing a fundamental shift in how IT services are managed and deployed. Sponsor In his keynote at the Microsoft Management Summit, Executive Bob Muglia featured the company's container system used at its Chicago data center, illustrating the company's new datacenter and cloud management capabilities for mass deployment of virtualized technologies. Muglia said the new container system is 10x less expensive than traditional data center infrastructures and 10x faster, too. "Everything moves faster in the cloud,"Muglia said. The container is an independent, high-speed network optimized with virtualization technology. Muglia said every piece of the data center is tightly fit, almost bound to make one network that stores data and provides raw processing power. The news serves to represent Microsoft's ability to model and deploy applications across platforms. Microsoft owns the management tools, the developer tools, the applications, OS and the cloud platform. That's Microsoft's value statement to data center operators and the new generation of IT professionals and developers who will become wizards of sorts in these new environments. It also shows the move to automate IT. Bing, for instance, has a few hundred thousand servers that are manned by a handful of people. Bing servers do not get patched. Instead, IT will deploys an updated OS image with the apps pre-installed. It also highlights some key trends in cloud computing and data center environments. As Mike Kirkwood wrote in his post today about Hitachi , server management is moving from three steps (OS, network and storage) to one system to orchestrate them all. Microsoft is providing both shard and dedicated services. It's the container model, though, that makes this interesting for us. By offering an automated data network, it opens up in some respects the data center market. It's an OEM environment that can be plugged in to a data center for offering virtualized and cloud-based services. Companies like Hitachi, Microsoft and Eucalyptus are defining a new container model that binds "compute, storage, network" with templates that can allow resources to move quickly. These types of systems will become predominant as virtualization gains mass acceptance. Discuss

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Microsoft: Everything Moves Faster in the Cloud

Hitachi’s Unified Compute Platform Goes for the Endzone

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:26:00 +0000

Yesterday, Hitachi took the wraps off their Unified Computing Platform by introducing its open data center platform. It is aimed at consolidating the enterprise functions of networking, storage, and compute into an orchestration layer. Virtualization is still guiding the evolution of the data center, in this case all the way to the physical form. If you like consolidating your systems into big iron with lots blinking lights, Hitachi has you covered. And if you like open systems that connect to your existing infrastructure, Hitachi believes that playing nice with others is in the domain of unified computing. Sponsor If you're interested in this idea, check out the video summary of the platform . The company shares us a deeper view of this product line and the problems it is intending to solve. Many of the opportunities targeted address budgets, for example, how to remove operating expense through the orchestration of resources. Orchestration is the Huddle on Third Down Orchestration merges network, system, and storage resources as a single unit to be managed and reported in. An analogy might be found in football. In the huddle, the quarterback might call "the slant 6" and all eleven members of the team interpret that play and perform their respective jobs. Orchestration, as Hitachi describes it behaves in a similar way. It will respond to plays like "scale up for product launch". All the members of the team (disk, server, and network) go to their respective places and do the jobs needed. And, if needed, adjust appropriately to the conditions on the field. Hitachi leverages a partnership with Microsoft's System Management tools to closely align the plan and reality to bring more intelligence into the equation. The Computing Stack is the Team This product is also about abstracting systems through software. The company is betting that the coordination of the tasks of operating systems, storage and networking within a single framework provides a lot of value to the business. Hitachi takes the point of view that it is best to harmonize existing assets though open standards and looks at computing as a utility to be shared in the organization. Some of the features the product contains make it easier for organizations to achieve scale across functions and environments. It is designed to support this modern data center principles: Multi-tenancy Charge back for resources Distributed physical data centers Public cloud resources through open APIs Hitachi Unified Compute Platform looks like an impressive physical device. It brings together resources normally held in separate racks and hosts them in a single location and reduces a lot of the work of wiring up data centers. As we unfold another chapter in computing, Hitachi is leveraging its strength in consolidation to meet the trend of massive growth of data. At a glance, there are a lot of reasons why IT managers might choose unified computing products: cost, ease, agility. Looking out a few years, it is easy to imagine growth in this category overall. Is Hitachi well positioned for aggregation of data center resources with its Unified Computing products? How will EMC, Cisco, IBM, and HP fare in the movement towards unified computing? Photo credit: idovermani Discuss