The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Miles Davis's mind-blowing Tribute to Jack Johnson. Music biz rumor is that Davis wanted Jimi Hendrix as guitarist for these 1970 sessions, but it's hard to imagine he could've done much better than John McLaughlin did. The producer grabbed Herbie Hancock, who just happened to be walking through the building on other business that day, to play keyboards, and the first track that appears on the album is the one where Davis himself showed up at the studio after the other musicians had started playing:

Cherwell Software, a vendor of ITIL and Pink Elephant Verified IT Service Management software, has announced what company officials are calling a "unique and innovative guarantee and licensing structure."

 

And there you thought you'd seen all the guarantee and licensing structures there were.

The vendor's offering both the SaaS on-demand and the on-premise options, both allow multiple users to access the licenses. In addition, the software has the ability to reserve licenses for specific individuals for continual access.

"We've found our customers have a hard time determining the number of concurrent licenses they may need because the industry has long had a restrictive and costly 'named license' approach," says Vance Brown, Cherwell CEO, adding that his company's approach of "concurrent licensing combined with our 60-day guarantee, allows an organization to find the optimal ROI balance of needed licenses in the first 60-days of deployment." 

Headquartered in Colorado Springs, Cherwell Software was founded and is run by the former CEO of FrontRange Solutions, the former Chief Architect of FrontRange's HEAT and ITSM product lines, and the original founder and past CEO of the Help Desk Institute.

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Good news or bad news, depending on your point of view: A study recently released by the Partnership for Public Service finds there will soon be "a considerable increase" in new government jobs.

 

The study attributes the coming increase to a variety of factors including stimulus spending, turnover and "increased demand in expanding areas such as homeland security."

 

The study thinks there'll be 273,000 new hires in positions deemed "mission critical" by the fall of 2012.

Evidently government "medical jobs" are going to lead the way, as the study's calling for 54,000 over the next three years. Overall, however, there will be taxpayer-funded sinecures for paralegals and biological science experts, border patrol agents and engineers, IT experts and accountants.

Taxpayers are also going to be on the hook for loan repayment of up to $10,000 per year (totaling $60,000 in exchange for a minimum of three years of service) for the expansion of the government payroll, recruitment bonuses, and relocation incentives. 

The Partnership for Public Service is a Washington, D.C.- based -- surprised? -- group founded in 2001 by Samuel J. Heyman "in an effort to restore prestige to government service."

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Telecom New Zealand has recently gone live with a product from Opengear letting them access and manage network and telecom equipment in their Network Integration Lab in the national capital, Wellington.

 

It includes a couple console management appliances, Opengear KCS6000 and IM4200, deployed as two distributed clusters, supporting access from up to 1000 external specialist engineers and administrators.

Telecom officials say Prophecy Networks and Opengear worked with them to "fine-tune" the product, "something that was not forthcoming from the vendor" of the previous management product."

"Although the Opengear did not initially fulfill our needs out-of-the-box, their engineers were dedicated to modifying the operational software" for Telecom's requirements," said Dave Shaw from the Network Integration Lab, "at a reduced cost when compared to the existing vendor."

Telecom's Network Integration Lab in Wellington is used for the creation and testing of new products such as routers, switches, DSL concentrators or VoIP gateways, as well as voice, data, and video services prior to release onto live networks. It's also used by its vendors to undertake proof of concept testing against models of Telecom's networks.

The Telecom NIL is used by our vendors to undertake proof of concept testing against the model of the network, allowing for rigorous testing of concepts before releasing them live on a network. The sales teams can also use The NIL as a demonstration and sales support center.

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NewBay has announced LifeCache Smart Address Book 2.0, what company officials are billing as a "converged social address book offering for carriers."

 

It's basically a white-label address book that syncs, merges and updates contacts and dynamic content from multiple sources, storing it in the cloud. It "creates a single unified view of everyone you know -- including all phone contacts, e-mail addresses, instant messaging buddies and social networking friends," according to New Bay officials.

 

"Interacting with contacts becomes an engaging experience for the user, resulting in increased voice and messaging traffic for carriers," said Nagappan Arunachalam, CMO at NewBay Software.

 

First Coffee isn't sure how it normally is for others, but would classify interaction with contacts as engaging enough with the current technology. Ah, maybe we just don't know what we're missing.

 

"We believe carriers are positioned to provide the social address book service... and a range of communication options and ensure that users on any connected device are only a click away from their digital lifestyle cloud services," New Bay officials say. The product imports contacts from multiple sources including Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, and consolidate contacts into a single view.

LifeCache SAB 2.0 also has a Web-interface and "handset client experience."

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G2iX has unveiled the Morph CloudServer, described by company officials as an appliance using open standards to create custom Platform as a Service environments -- for "developing and deploying software on a massive scale."

The idea, company officials say, was to give businesses a way to "pilot new ideas, facilitate global expansion, and decrease time to market." The market opportunity they see here is the one Gartner Research VP Phil Dawson talked about when he said "for now, private cloud computing will not just be a viable term, it will be a significant strategic investment for most large organizations" recently.

 

"Cloud computing for the enterprise is about efficiency," says Winston Damarillo, founder and CEO of G2iX.

 

According to Dawson, through 2012, "more than 75 percent of organizations' use of cloud computing will be devoted to very large data queries, short-term massively parallel workloads, or IT use by startups with little to no IT infrastructure."

The Morph CloudServer is a customizable private PaaS that can be tailored to match and support different development languages and frameworks. Company officials say it's designed with "a philosophy of fault tolerance, not fault avoidance."

 

"Cloud computing technology, such as the Filipino co-developed Morph CloudServer, provides emerging countries with affordable access to world-class ICT infrastructure," said Secretary Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua, secretary of the Philippines' Commission on Information and Communications Technology.

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OpSource is crediting the "enterprise demand for cloud efficiency" for "accelerating momentum for OpSource Cloud." The product was in private Beta until early October.

 

Emphasizing security, company officials say OpSource Cloud provides every user with a Virtual Private Cloud within the public Cloud, "allowing them to determine their own degree of Internet connectivity." 

 

"Virtual private clouds for the first time allow enterprises to put computing in the cloud and expose as little or as much of their virtual cloud domain as is appropriate to their needs," said Phil Wainewright, CEO, Procullux Ventures.

"The opportunity that exists for elastic cloud computing offerings to redefine the manner that users purchase and consume IT resources is huge," said Ted Chamberlin, research director, Gartner. "Enterprises have long realized that paying full price for an underused asset does not make financial sense and does not match the scale needs of many applications."

 

The idea behind infrastructure utility and cloud based offerings, Chamberlin explained, is to provide user control and flexibility to "change the enterprise mindset away from deploying capital to buying infrastructure services."

OpSource Cloud is designed to "allow IT departments to manage their security as they would within their internal IT infrastructure," company officials say, explaining that upon sign-up, each customer receives a Virtual Private Network and sets the degree of public Internet connectivity they wish to grant, from totally private to fully available.

 

Addressing security, Antonio Piraino, Research Director, Tier1 Research claims "there has been little evidence to date of cloud providers that are able to show that they can offer adequate levels of control and performance while at the same time offering the same or better levels of security than their current operating environment."

"Unlike the alternatives, OpSource Cloud enables enterprises to not only have cloud computing on their own terms, but have it in the cloud too."