REDWOOD CITY, USA: Informatica Corporation, an independent provider of data integration software, announced Informatica 9, touted to be the first data integration platform designed to enable the data-driven enterprise.
Informatica 9 is an unified and open data integration platform. It delivers a comprehensive platform by combining products in six categories: enterprise data integration, data quality, B2B data exchange, application information lifecycle management, complex event processing and cloud computing data integration. Informatica 9 is uniquely designed to be deployed on-premise or in the Internet cloud.
Sohaib Abbasi, chairman and CEO, Informatica, said: "Informatica 9 is a comprehensive infrastructure platform with products across six different technology categories that are unified to reduce IT costs and open to leverage data on-premise and in the Internet cloud. With Informatica 9, customers can gain competitive advantage with the most relevant, trustworthy and timely data as mandated by their top business imperatives.
Google Lifts the Curtains on Its New Music Service
Music lovers, start your searches.
With a panel discussion and concert in West Hollywood this afternoon, Google is formally rolling out its new music search tool, Music Onebox. I first wrote about the new service last week.
Google users who put the name of a song into the search engine will get, as the top result, information about the musician and an opportunity to stream the song from one of two services, Lala and MySpace Music. People who click on that link will, in most cases, get a pop-up window that allows them to play the full song once, for free, along with a link to buy the song.
Entering an album name or band name into Google yields similar free listening opportunities.
The service could significantly change how people look for music online. Music searches on Google, heretofore, have typically generated links to Wikipedia, random ad-filled lyrics sites and, in some cases, YouTube videos. But it usually took a few hops across the Web to actually sample a song. Not anymore. (It will be interesting to see, in this new environment, whether the music labels are truly comfortable with allowing all these free streams on Google.)
There are also some new dimensions to the Google music announcement we did not cover last week. Through a relationship with Gracenote, now owned by Sony, Google is making it easier to plug lyrics into the search engine and instantly find and play a song. If you mistype or mishear a lyric, a feature called “Google Suggest” will list similar queries in an effort to steeryou to the right song.
Finally, Google has also forged relationships with three other music services Pandora, ImeemRhapsody. When users enter a song or album title into the search engine, Google will present links to those sites as well, where users can also play the song and find similar music.and No money is changing hands in any of these deals, and Google is not trying to create a free music buffet on its site. While there will be text ads in the right-hand column against the search results as there is with any Google search, there are no ads in the OneBox.
The goal, said R.J. Pittman, Google’s director of product management, is to better answer music queries, which routinely account for two of Google’s top ten searches in the United States. “The intention is not to turn the partners on Google into a free streaming music service. This is about providing a richer experience for users looking for a particular song,” he said.
In its latest effort to embrace open source, Microsoft has created an open-source foundation of its own.
Microsoft today launched the CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit foundation focused on the exchange of code and knowledge among software companies and open-source communities. It is an extension of Microsoft’s Codeplex.com open-source project hosting site, but Microsoft said the two are independent from one another.
Sam Ramji, who will be serving as the CodePlex Foundation interim president, called the foundation a “culmination” of what Microsoft has been working toward as an open-source strategy. He noted that Microsoft has increased its open-source participation, pointing out the company’s funding and code donations to the Apache Software Foundation, as well as Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center’s (OSTC) cooperation with the PHP community.
“The increasing participation in open source at Microsoft led to internal discussions about initiating a new open-source foundation that would be sensitive to the needs of software developers who don’t always participate in open-source community projects,” Ramji said.
“Existing open-source foundations are mostly targeted at particular projects, such as the Mozilla Foundation. The CodePlex Foundation will complement the activities of other open-source foundations by addressing a full spectrum of software projects.”
When asked how an open-source foundation could have so much Microsoft involvement, Ramji said Microsoft and open source are no longer “antithetical, but work closely together.” The foundation hopes to increase its independence with funding from sources outside of Microsoft, he said.
The CodePlex Foundation will be different from other open-source foundations because it will focus on the contributions of copyrights along with code from individuals who work for software companies, Ramji said. The focus is to make sure it’s easy to grant software use rights on behalf of a company to a community.
“It’s a different dimension from what other foundations are focused on, where when we think about an open-source license, we really think about the specific copyright license,” Ramji said. “That’s just a copyright on the code itself, but some of the challenges in the practices between software companies and community projects have been how to clearly treat what’s contributed and who can use it. We hope to bring some clarity and coherence to that.”
Ramji added that one benefit of the foundation is that developers can work through the legalities to contribute to active open-source projects.
Ramji will also be leaving Microsoft effective Sept. 25 for what he said are personal reasons. However, he said that the OSTC, which he oversaw, will continue on under the leadership of Tom Hanrahan, who was formerly the director of engineering at the Linux Foundation and currently the OSTC's director.
The CodePlex Foundation is license, platform and technology agnostic. Microsoft gave initial funding for the CodePlex Foundation of US$1 million.
After the first hundred days of the foundation’s existence, a new executive director will be hired and new board members will be brought in. Microsoft and open-source community members will create a charter to help guide how the foundation will be run.
