New Services and Updates Will Be Revealed By SAP at the Tech Ed Conference

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The following article was written by Chris Kanaracus/IDG News Service

SAP is unveiling a series of enhancements, services and deployment options for its HANA in-memory computing platform in hopes of enticing more partners and customers to begin building software products with the technology.

Some 1,000 startups are already using HANA to create applications, according to SAP executive board member Vishal Sikka, who heads all development, in an interview prior to this week's Tech Ed conference in Las Vegas.

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That uptake was no doubt helped by a venture fund and heavy-duty marketing campaign SAP has used to court developers for HANA. But SAP is also increasing the number of tools and services for HANA-based programming efforts.

A seventh service pack for HANA, which will be announced at Tech Ed, includes a series of developer-friendly updates, including the ability of HANA to write to external data stores such as Oracle databases; Hadoop integration; and customizable text-analysis dictionaries.

On the systems administration front, the service pack includes improvements for high availability and disaster recovery as well as better patching and monitoring tools, according to SAP.

Customers and partners will also soon have more ways to deploy HANA, which has been sold in appliance form on hardware from a number of vendors.

An IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offering based on HANA is now in private beta, with general availability expected early next year, SAP said. Customers would port their HANA licenses to SAP's cloud and purchase instances ranging in size from 128GB to 1TB of RAM.

SAP is also increasing the maximum size of HANA One, which is available through Amazon Web Services, from 256GB to 1.2TB. Many SAP customers and partners asked for the increase, Sikka said.

He demurred when asked whether customers would have any specific advantages by choosing SAP's HANA IaaS versus HANA One. "The main point is the choice," Sikka said. "Obviously there are lots of customers that have their own clouds, but a lot of them want a freedom to do things on our cloud, and other public clouds."

There are now more than 2,200 HANA customers, according to Sikka. The database became generally available in 2011. SAP executives have called HANA the fastest-growing product in company history, with total revenue expected to top €1 billion ($1.4 billion) soon.

SAP is hoping its customers that are now using rival databases such as Oracle's to run SAP applications will port their implementations to HANA. Tech Ed will give it an opportunity to sell the benefits of HANA to a developer-heavy audience that is already invested skills-wise in other technologies.

Meanwhile, during his keynote on Tuesday Sikka is also expected to discuss a new set of SAP design services, wherein designers will work alongside customers to create more compelling user interfaces and applications.

In addition, attendees will get an update on Fiori, a set of bite-sized mobile applications that tie into SAP flagship Business Suite ERP applications, which was announced in May. Another 150 Fiori applications will be released this year, according to Sikka.

Tech Ed continues through Thursday in Las Vegas.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology

http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/sap-set-preach-the-hana-gospel-developers-22925

David Linthicum Has Tips for the Next CEO of Microsoft on How to Handle Windows Azure.

By now, you've surely heard: Steve Ballmer is stepping down, after serving at Microsoft for 33 years overall, including 13 years as CEO. The move is due, at least in part, to the company's poor performance.

We're told the time frame for his departure is 12 months. However, he could be gone much sooner, given the current feeling among Microsoft investors. Indeed, the stock surged 8 percent at one point Friday morning on the news that Ballmer was leaving.

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Microsoft shops need to keep a close eye on this transition. This could be the beginning of Microsoft's rejuvenation -- or the beginning of the end.

The new CEO will likely focus on Azure and the movement to the cloud. To be honest, Microsoft has done better than I expected here; Azure is in second or third place behind Amazon Web Services, depending on which analyst reports you read. However, given the company's leadership position, the investors expected more from Azure and Microsoft as a whole.

The new CEO will have to renew focus on the cloud and figure out how to drive Microsoft into the forefront or at least into a solid second place. I have a few suggestions for the would-be CEO prior to getting the keys to the big office.

First, focus more on your existing .Net developer base. Many Microsoft developers don't feel as loved as they should be by Microsoft. While Microsoft does a good job of managing developer networks, I've seen many jump to Amazon Web Services in the last year. Developers are key to the success of cloud computing, and Microsoft has a ton of them.

Second, hire new cloud talent that will think out of the Microsoft box. Microsoft has undergone a brain drain in the last few years, and the ones who've stuck around haven't shown much innovation with Azure. Microsoft's strategy has been largely reactionary, such as the recent realignment to IaaS -- that's following, not leading.

Finally, look at interoperability. Microsoft loves having closed technology. Instead of arguing for interoperability, Microsoft prefers you stick to its stuff because it's supposedly made to work together. The world is not that simple, and Microsoft needs to take steps to make sure Azure works and plays well with others.

Good luck to the new CEO. He or she will need it.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/3-tips-microsofts-next-ceo-how-handle-windows-azure-225558

Cloudwords Announces Easier Integrations Capabilities in the Developer Center

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 15, 2013) - Cloudwords, the market-leading cloud-based translation management application, today announced the launch of the CloudwordsDeveloper Center, a new developer-centric destination designed to enable easy integration between content management systems (CMS) and the Cloudwords platform. To meet the ever-increasing demand for localized content, Cloudwords is providing new integration capabilities to accelerate the process of multilingual content management by enabling developers to integrate with all major CMS platforms, including Drupal, Adobe CQ, Microsoft Sharepoint, Oracle UCM, and SiteCore, among others.

The Cloudwords Translation Management Automation solution helps companies expand their global presence faster, more easily and with enterprise-class quality. With today's announcement, Cloudwords becomes the most developer-friendly cloud-based translation management solution geared specifically for the enterprise.

"Cloudwords continues to deliver innovations that enable our customers to stay one step ahead when it comes to going to market globally. The Cloudwords Developer Center underscores our commitment to making it even easier and faster for enterprises to manage large amounts of content that need to be translated. By simplifying the integration process behind the scenes, customers can get up and running in the Cloudwords platform even faster, and take advantage of the simplicity of moving content in and out of critical content systems, ultimately delivering increased ROI," said Scott Yancey, CEO and Co-founder of Cloudwords.

The Cloudwords Developer Center features the Cloudwords Sandbox, a unique environment that provides developers a fully automated integration experience. The Cloudwords Sandbox allows developers to quickly build and test Cloudwords integrations with any content system their business users rely on. A simulated end-to-end translation management experience, automated by a translation vendor "robot," means developers can experience the power of Cloudwords in a low-risk environment. Having the ability to test an integration within an environment that mirrors the actual Cloudwords production account allows developers to completely prepare for enterprise roll-out.

The Cloudwords Development Center also includes pre-built integrations for Drupal, Adobe CQ, and others, as well as complete documentation for the company's acclaimed REST-based API, and Software Development Kits (SDKs) for Java, .net, and PHP.

"The ability for companies to easily and efficiently localize their marketing content is mission critical in today's global economy. But this critical enterprise content is locked away inside ungainly content management systems. By leveraging CMS integration capabilities with their translation management application, organizations can finally achieve optimal localization efficiency. If companies aren't streamlining their localization process, they will fall behind their competition when it comes to reaching international markets," said Robinson Kelly, CEO and Co-founder of Clay Tablet Technologies.

"Cloudwords allows ADInstruments to easily integrate our Drupal website with their localization management platform so we can streamline the ongoing process of translating our website content. By integrating with Cloudwords, our content is uploaded, translated and approved within a significantly shorter time frame than the traditional 'cut and paste' approach. Now, we rely on Cloudwords to centralize all our multilingual assets and work with multiple translation vendors to localize content in 13 languages," said Ina Kinski, Hardware and Tools Coordinator at ADInstruments, responsible for website implementation.

Cloudwords' complete cloud-based translation management solution helps companies go global faster by enabling companies to manage the complexity of translation projects from creation to vendor selection to project and billing management. The Cloudwords platform offers easy-to-use, cloud-based project management capabilities so users spend less time manually managing localization projects and complete projects faster.

To learn more about Cloudwords' integration capabilities and the Cloudwords Developer Center, please visit http://developer.cloudwords.com/.

About Cloudwords
Cloudwords revolutionizes the way global companies think about their multilingual content strategy and execution. Through an intuitive customer-centric interface and a secure cloud infrastructure, Cloudwords delivers an application for business users to accelerate their translation process, manage vendors, and leverage data. Created by veterans of the translation industry and high-tech leaders from Salesforce.com, the company is backed by Storm Ventures and Cloud visionaries such as Marc Benioff. For more information on Cloudwords, please visit Cloudwords.com or join the global conversation on Twitter@cloudwordsinc.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/cloudwords-announces-faster-easier-integration-capabilities-with-new-cloudwords-developer-1821247.htm