Kaiyzen Group

Not from a design perspective, but from an end to end solution perspective.

Lost of noise today around Cisco entering the server market, some here and here.

Just as Apple loves to own the end to end experience by making specific hardware to fit their design needs while powering their software they pride themselves on writing and bundling with their devices.

This approach is a tough one, but very fruitful if you can pull it off.  By entering the server market Cisco moves closer to owning the end to end “experience” of data, services and applications moving around the worlds pipes and datacenters.

Cisco dominates the high end router/switch market.  By optimizing their network gear to run extra efficient with their server gear that is a pretty nice value proposition for groups looking for plug-and-play capabilities.  You basically end up with a bunch of hubs and pipes that move the data and apps around to virtualized containers sitting in the servers/nodes.

My big question is how will all of this fit into their living room strategy?

Mavericks is supposed to kick off tomorrow here on the west coast.  The annual surf event has been waiting for the right conditions and a pacific storm has been pushing a huge swell our way over the past couple days.

Speaking of swells, seems that two of the video streaming startups, Kyte and Ustream are getting ready for a big push with some new announcements and most likely some new years growth.

TechCrunch is posting that Ustream will be releasing a new iPhone application that will allow users to stream any Ustream channel direct to their devices.  Michael gives the good idea of wathcing the inauguration via Ustream if you are out and about and can’t be near a television.  If Ustream can get some serious content partnerships going it will make a nice solution somewhat putting them inline with place shifter Sling minus the hardware and DVR.

Speaking of content partnerships, Kyte has a HUGE one just being announced.  Billboard is announcing that Kyte and UMG are partnering up to stream content over Kyte’s system.  Universal alludes that its artists will be using Kyte to communicate in a more personal way with their fans showing behind the scenes clips they are recording.  If Kyte has similar success to that of SayNow it should mean a chunk of new users to their site.

Maybe Kyte and SayNow can partner up, one providing the video and the latter providing the audio/sms.

(updated)

Seems even Qik has some news tonight.  They are sponsoring an online show at Sundance with streaming various people peroforming tasks over a 24 hr period.  It is being organized by Aston Kutcher.

Amazon steps things up significantly with their continued web services strategy.., I received this from Amazon via email:

Oracle has officially certified Amazon EC2 as a supported platform on which to run
their software.  In addition, AWS has worked with Oracle to enable existing Oracle
Database licenses to be transferred to Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS.  This means that for no additional cost, you can use an existing Oracle license to run your database in AWS, saving yourself the cost and effort of managing your own infrastructure while keeping the same database software you are already running.  Oracle has also enabled Amazon S3 as one of the default backup locations for their RMAN service, making it easy for you to protect your data. Check out more details about running Oracle in Amazon EC2, http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/featured-partners/oracle, along with some easy-to-use tools,
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/cloud/index.html, that can help you get
started.
 

I dont think this will have a huge impact in the short term but what it does say loud and clear is that Amazon wants the enterprise to use AWS for their experimental and initial development of their projects and that they will continue to stay steps ahead of the competition.

Enterprises that do not have super data sensitive projects should love this between the low cost and ability make use of an existing Oracle license.  A perfect example.., although they didnt use Oracle is the New York Times using AWS to process all of their archives into PDF files and make them searchable.

Microsoft is about to swoop on Fast search.

Although a lot of idiots on the web like to blog or comment about this being a play at Google it is really just a play a the enterprise search market.  Google operates in that market with their appliance but as many know.., pretty much ALL of their revenue comes from spam clicks…, uh.., I mean PPC ads through search and adsense.

Microsoft has been serious about their play in the enterprise search space.  Ballmer was pretty vocal in some interviews last year about Microsoft taking control of enterprise search.  He is correct…, enterprise search is Microsofts game to lose.  They have their hands all over the enterprise space already so it makes sense for them to just bundle search with their other products such as Sharepoint, Exchange, Office, etc, and have them all integrated with eachother.

 Fast is a great technology company.  They just failed miserably in the consumer search space and lost out to Google while selling their consumer search biz to Yahoo!.

I dont know how many employees Google has taken from Fast over the years but they seem to have borrowed a lot of their innovation and R&D culture.  A buddy who I did some consulting with was a former Fast employee.  He told me some stories of how in the early days Fast was trying to work with Google to leverage their search technology and that their solution at the time was about 50x more efficient at searching.  He also talked about some projects where someone could whistle or hum a tune into a microphone and they would search songs to find relevant matches, or how guys at Fast were building their own hardware.

Sound familiar to the wowing tales of Google doing “innovative” things inside their walls?

Another player to watch in this space is Autonomy.  They are a public company with a handfull of solutions for the enterprise.  They also control the now public Blinx video search company.