Information Technology Market

Intel has chosen virtual conference technology to power its high profile corporate event – Global Sales Conference that links thousands of sales and marketing executives from 15 time zones. This is the first time the semiconductor market leader has launched international training event on this scale through this new medium using new technology.

Intel used the WebEx system to organize 5000 participants into nearly 276 virtual sessions. Virtual event logistics has been managed by Boyer Communications Group. A recent market forecast Virtual Conference & Trade Show Market Forecast 2010-2015 explosive growth in all segments of this emerging virtual event market. Intel’s event is a classic case study of the current virtual conference market state:

• it’s corporate event
• it’s powered by tested web conferencing software provided under SaaS (Software as a Service) model
• Boyer Communications Group, a consulting company, bridges the gap between new technology and end user

Actually Intel is not a novice in using virtual event technology. Linden Lab’s blog describes the following case study:

When Intel’s bi-annual Embedded Channel Conference (ECC) was canceled, the conference organizers sought a less expensive means to deliver the same content and level of interaction to 150 employees and business partners. Encouraged by the work other groups at Intel were already conducting in Second Life, ECC organizers unanimously decided to execute their conference in the virtual world. The virtual ECC conference (vECC) saved Intel $265,000 of the $300,000 budget for the real world event that they cancelled–not including saved travel expenses. The vECC was executed the pilot event using The Immersive Workspaces™ solution by Rivers Run Red, a virtual world meeting and collaboration product developed exclusively for Linden Lab – for both Second Life and private networks that hosted numerous keynote presentations, live product demos, and social networking.

Virtual event market, driven now by mostly corporate events, is slowly moving to main stream – traditional conference and trade show market.

The 2nd annual Cloud Computing World Forum will be held 29th and 30th June 2010 in Olympia, London. This is the perfect event to learn and discuss the development, integration, adoption and future of cloud computing and SaaS.

Building on the success of the 2009 show, this two day conference and free-to-attend exhibition will provide a focused platform for the global cloud and SaaS industry.

Virtual conferences and virtual trade shows are on rise for a very sound reason – virtual tradeshows typically cost much less than traditional trade shows. Since virtual trade shows can be conducted from a person’s desk, the cost of travel, lodging, and trade show displays is virtually eliminated.

A virtual trade show, often called a virtual trade fair, or a virtual event, or a virtual conference is an online 3D environment, that goes live and stays live online for a limited period of time, often with the expectation that several like-minded participants will be available online for brief spells of time, allowing them to connect with one another without travel, via the Internet, no matter where they are located geographically, to exchange valuable information.

The worldwide virtual conference market is forecasted to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 56% between the period of 2010 and 2015. This prediction has been made by Market Research Media Ltd, a leading market and technology research company, in its recent research report “Virtual Conference & Trade Show Market Forecast 2010-2015“. In the estimates made by the report the worldwide virtual conference and trade show market is predicted to reach $18.6 Billion over the period 2010 – 2015.

The structure of a typical virtual expo often includes a virtual exhibit hall which users enter with specific permissions and capabilities, to either attend and view virtual displays in the exhibit hall or build virtual booths to exhibit information related to products or services on offer, just as they would at a trade fair in a convention center. The virtual event may have other components such as a virtual web conference, or a web seminar or a webinar, or other educational presentations. The virtual trade fair thus results in live interaction between all the users on many levels (one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many) and simultaneously. Detailed tracking mechanisms allow organizers to determine the flow of traffic in the virtual tradeshow. Although virtual tradeshows are usually conducted in specialized web environments, many have been organized and conducted in tightly controlled text based environments.

Visitors to a virtual trade fair or a virtual expo fill out an online registration form to create an online badge or avatar, and then enter a virtual exhibit hall to visit various virtual booths. The virtual booths often reflect the imagery of a real-world exhibit hall. The visuals also sometimes reflect those seen in real-world convention centers so that users can relate to them easily. A virtual booth typically has several icons which can trigger different responses upon the click of the mouse. There are icons on which a visitor would click for instant communication with the exhibitor, such as by sending an instant message, or an instant email, or making an instant voice-call. There are icons on which a visitor will be able to click for instantly playing multimedia such as videos and audio messages or other slide-show presentations. Users within the environment often create avatars as a visual representation of their person.

Virtual exhibitors use online tools to upload relevant and tailored content to appeal to the audiences. Virtual exhibits may be made to look like an exhibitor’s real-world booth in any in-person trade fair where they may be exhibiting. Virtual events could be run in conjunction with real-world or in-person trade shows. Sometimes they are stand-alone online only web events. Businesses that use virtual conferences, sometimes use them as part of their overall marketing mix.

Virtual events are used for a variety of purposes such as international trade shows, business match-makers, procurement fairs, product launches. The experience also translates well for other applications such as virtual job fairs, virtual benefits fairs, online employee networks, distributor fairs, and venture capital fairs.

The U.S. Air Force has landed IBM a contract for secure cloud computing infrastructure capable of supporting defense and intelligence networks. The ten-month project will introduce advanced cyber security and analytics technologies developed by IBM Research into the cloud architecture.

The project will push the technology boundaries of federal cloud computing market with an infrastructure design that not only supports large-scale networks, but meets rigorous security standards and the government’s Information Assurance guidelines for all networks, not only those of defense market. The Air Force’s network manages the operations of nine major commands, nearly 100 bases, and 700,000 active military personnel around the world.

IBM researchers, software architects, analytics specialists and cyber security experts will work with military personnel and other federal agencies to demonstrate an unprecedented level of security and network resiliency into the Air Force cloud design. Advanced “stream computing” analytics will be a key design component. This technology, coupled with sensors, monitors and other detection devices, would enable the Air Force to perpetually analyze the massive amounts of data flowing through its network and get fast, accurate, and actionable insights about possible threats, such as cyber attacks and network, system or application failures, while automatically preventing disruptions.

In the design, customized executive-level dashboards will be used to deliver up-to-the-second information on the health and status of the network and facilitate decision-making. This instant access to information, for example, would enable Air Force officials to automatically shift the prevention environment based on rules-based protocols in the event of a cyber attack or network anomalies.

Autonomic computing will be another important feature of the cloud model. This automated functionality will enable virtual cloud services to be managed remotely and provide capability for the cloud infrastructure to constantly retune itself for optimal performance – without human intervention.

The Obama Administration has called for more extensive adoption of cloud computing in the federal government to improve information technology (IT) efficiency, reduce costs, and provide a standard platform for delivering government services. In a cloud computing environment, IT resources – services, applications, storage devices and servers, for example – are pooled and managed centrally. These resources can be provisioned and made available on demand via the Internet. The cloud model strengthens the resiliency of mission-critical applications by removing dependency on underlying hardware. Applications can be easily moved from one system to another in the event of system failures or cyber attacks.

The world’s first 25-nanometer (nm) NAND technology, which provides a more cost-effective path for increasing storage capacity in such popular consumer gadgets as smartphones, personal music and media players (PMPs), as well as the new high-performance class of solid-state drives (SSDs), has been announced by Intel Corporation and Micron Technology. Intel and Micron have doubled NAND density roughly every 18 months, which leads to smaller, more cost-efficient and higher capacity products.

NAND flash memory stores data and other media contained in consumer electronics products, retaining information even when the power is turned off. The drive toward smaller NAND processes enables the continued development and introduction of new uses for the technology. Not only is the 25nm process the smallest NAND technology, it is also the smallest semiconductor technology in the world – a technological accomplishment that continues the advancement of more music, video, and other data in today’s consumer electronics and computing applications.

Manufactured by IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), Intel and Micron’s NAND flash joint venture, the 25nm process produces 8 gigabytes (GB) of storage in a single NAND device, creating a high-capacity storage solution for today’s tiny consumer gadgets. It measures just 167mm2 — small enough to fit through the hole in the middle of a compact disc (CD), yet packs more than 10 times the data capacity of that CD (a standard CD holds 700 megabytes of data).

The 25nm, 8GB device is sampling now and is expected to enter mass production in the second quarter of 2010. For consumer electronics manufacturers, the device provides the highest-density in a single 2 bits-per-cell multi-level cell (MLC) die that will fit an industry-standard, thin small-outline package (TSOP). Multiple 8GB devices can be stacked in a package to increase storage capacity. The new 25nm 8GB device reduces chip count by 50 percent compared to previous process generations, allowing for smaller, yet higher density designs and greater cost efficiencies. For example, a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD) can now be enabled with just 32 of these devices (versus 64 previously), a 32GB smartphone needs just four, and a 16GB flash card requires only two.

Voltaire, a leading provider of scale-out computing fabrics for data centers, high performance computing and cloud environments, is hosting a live webinar event with NYSE Technologies on Wednesday, January 27, 2010, at 11:00 am ET (4:00 pm GMT) detailing how the solution slashes end-to-end trading latency for financial services institutions. To register for the event click here.

Voltaire Ltd. announced the industry’s first 40 Gb/s InfiniBand switch with a built-in low latency Ethernet gateway for seamlessly bridging traffic to and from Ethernet-based networks. The Grid Director 4036E features thirty-four, fully non-blocking 40 Gb/s InfiniBand ports (delivering 2.72 Tb/s), less than 100 nanoseconds of port-to-port latency, and two 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports bridging traffic in less than two microseconds. The switch is designed as a self-contained complete solution in a compact 1U device. It includes an InfiniBand switch, an embedded subnet manager, and a built-in hardware-based low latency Ethernet gateway, ensuring that I/O bottlenecks are removed and applications operate at maximum efficiency.

The Grid Director 4036E delivers improved performance and lowers costs for a variety of enterprise applications:

Financial Services
Market data feeds typically run multicast traffic over 1 or 10 Gigabit Ethernet which the Grid Director 4036E significantly accelerates by seamlessly mapping it to hardware-based InfiniBand multicast. When used with Voltaire’s Messaging Acceleration (VMA) software, even greater latency reduction can be achieved. Designed in a space-saving, energy-efficient, 1U form factor, the switch is ideal for co-located low-latency trading environments.

High Performance Storage
10 Gigabit Ethernet storage is used in many industries ranging from energy, to manufacturing and life sciences. The Grid Director 4036E’s built-in gateway seamlessly bridges the InfiniBand cluster to 10 Gigabit Ethernet storage providing maximum bandwidth for each node accessing the storage. It also reduces the overall solution cost by eliminating the need for a dedicated storage network.

Databases
Clustered or scale-out databases often rely on InfiniBand for the interconnect fabric and 10 Gigabit Ethernet NAS for storage. The Grid Director 4036E combines the InfiniBand clustering and storage access in one device, simplifying configurations, while boosting performance and reducing costs.

According to analysts of Market Research Media Ltd the governmental High Performance Computing markets shift from Vector to Cluster, from Custom Supercomputer to COTS (see COTS Is the Name of the Game for Defense HPC Market), with parallel designs based on “off the shelf” server-class microprocessors, such as the PowerPC, Opteron, or Xeon, and most modern supercomputers built on computer clusters using commodity processors combined with custom interconnects. It seems that Cray fall victim to this technology shift. In a recent release of preliminary 2009 results Cray announced about DARPA cuttuing back on Cray super project:

“During the fourth quarter, a contract modification was not finalized and consequently a milestone was delayed in the agreement covering Phase III of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (”DARPA”) High Productivity Computing Systems program. This contract delay will have an approximately $7 million negative impact to net research and development expenses in the fourth quarter of 2009. Substantive talks regarding this contract are ongoing and the company expects to complete a contract modification and milestone in the first quarter of 2010. As with the previous contract, the balance of the modified contract is expected to be received through achievement of a series of pre-defined milestones culminating in the delivery of a prototype system in 2012. Consistent with this change, certain deliverables will be eliminated from the contract, reducing the overall scope and cost of the project. After the anticipated contract modification, the remaining amount of the contract is expected to be reduced by $60 million, to $92.5 million. As a result of the reduction in overall scope, we expect future research and development expenses related to this program, net of reimbursement, to be lower than previously anticipated. “

While Cray is rather vague on the nature of the DARPA requirements and specifics of the DARPA contract, it seems that DARPA preference of competitors’ HPC systems relying mostly on COTS played its role. According to a recent market report, Worldwide Defense High Performance Computing (HPC) Market Forecast 2010-2015, HPC systems built on COTS is the only way to meet exponentially growing military computing requirements and lagging behind budgets.

As U.S. government agencies and departments evaluate the potential cost savings, service level improvements and greater resource utilization offered by various cloud computing models, there is a recognized need for a technology-agnostic platform that can support and integrate legacy, heterogeneous HPC environments while also managing a wide-range of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines. In order to maximize prior technology investments, government agencies must invest in technologies that prevent vendor lock-in and that work with multiple types of operating systems.

Platform Computing, the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management software, today announced a strategic partnership with Instrumental Inc., a leading provider of architecture, design and integration services for high performance computing (HPC) and data storage in the government and commercial sectors. The partnership enhances Platform’s global service capabilities and gives users an end-to-end, full service solution that maximizes the value of Platform’s private cloud management and HPC cloud-enabling software solutions, Platform ISF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster.

IBM has signed a definitive agreement to acquire National Interest Security Company, LLC (NISC), a provider of information technology, information management and management technology consulting services. The agreement includes the acquisition of Technology and Management Services, Inc., an NISC affiliate. Following the completion of the transaction, NISC will be integrated with IBM’s global business services consulting unit. The transaction is expected to complete in the first quarter of 2010.