Cloud Computing, Microsoft's Midori, and the End of Windows??

With the Internet increasingly taking on the role of the PC operating system and the growing prevalence of virtualization technologies, there will be a day when the Microsoft Windows client OS as it's been developed for the past 20-odd years becomes obsolete. Microsoft seems to be preparing for that day with an incubation project code-named Midori, which seeks to create a componentized, non-Windows OS that will take advantage of technologies not available when Windows first was conceived, according to published reports.

Although Microsoft won't comment publicly on what Midori is, the company has confirmed that it exists. That report paints Midori as an Internet-centric OS, based on the idea of connected systems, that largely eliminates the dependencies between local applications and the hardware they run on that exist with a typical OS today.

Today, users move across multiple devices, consume and share resources remotely, and the applications that they use are a composite of local and remote components and services. To that end, Midori will focus on concurrency, both for distributed applications and local ones.

Cloud computing, which offloads applications from local PC installations to the Internet or company networks, stands poised to free business from many uncomfortable tethers. For one thing, those local PC installations, and the operating systems they require, can be a royal pain to manage and update. Not to mention the potential for data loss with local storage - sure, you can create good backup policies and train users to store files on network drives, but you're still going to run into situations where a drive blows and someone loses a critical document.

According to the documentation, Midori will be built with an asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources.

The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.

In order to efficiently distribute applications across nodes, Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors. The model will be consistent for both the distributed and local concurrency layers, and it is internally known as Asynchronous Promise Architecture.

If Midori is close to what people think it is, it will represent a "major paradigm shift" for Windows users and be no easy task for Microsoft to pull off.

Source [PCWorld, SDTimes, Wikipedia]

Tata Offers TelePresence Rooms for Rental

Indian telecommunications service provider Tata Communications plans to offer TelePresence services worldwide based on technology from Cisco Systems. In addition to private TelePresence rooms, set up and managed at customers' premises, the company is also planning to offer public rooms in select locations which companies can rent.

This cybercafé model is expected to attract companies that do not want to incur the cost of setting up a private, dedicated TelePresence room in their own office. Cisco TelePresence technology enables high-definition conferencing over a network, and tries to recreate the feeling of an in-person meeting among colleagues anywhere in the world.

Tata Communications' initial strategy is to set up these public rooms in hotels run around the world by Indian Hotels Company, the hospitality business of the Tata Group which runs the Taj Hotels, a spokeswoman for the company said on Thursday. It has also tied up with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) to house public TelePresence rooms at their offices in some locations in India.

Tata Communications has already set up public rooms in Chennai, Bangalore and Bombay in India. It plans to add similar rooms in two other locations in India, and in Boston and London by September, and later in New York, the spokeswoman said. The service in India is priced at 20,000 Indian rupees (around US$500) an hour, which will also be the tariff for public rooms in other locations outside India, the spokeswoman said.

The TelePresence managed service includes a concierge service that takes care of reservations, scheduling, customer support, monitoring, management, reporting and billing capabilities, making it easy for customers to deploy and manage the TelePresence collaboration tool, Tata Communications said.

Source [PC World]

India's 3G Spectrum Policy Allows Foreign Bids

The Indian government on Friday announced its guidelines for auction of 3G (third generation) spectrum in the country, allowing foreign bidders with experience in offering 3G mobile services to participate. The government is allotting spectrum in the 2.1GHz band for 3G services, India's Minister for Communications, A. Raja, told reporters in Delhi on Friday.

The announcement of the policy was delayed because of disagreement within the government on whether to allow foreign investors to participate in the bid. The government was in favor of a global bid so that it could raise more money from auctioning the spectrum, and also to introduce competition in the market. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) argued that existing players already had the infrastructure in place to be able to offer 3G services faster and at an incremental cost to customers.

The opening of the auction to foreign bidders will make the 3G market very competitive in India, which will help mobile users, said Madhusudan Gupta, senior research analyst at Gartner. Operators are now expected to start offering commercial 3G services in the first half of next year, Gupta said. They will introduce applications like gaming, music, and navigation from the start, he added.

The government has thrown open the bid to current mobile service providers holding an Unified Access Service License (UASL), and to any bidder who qualifies for an UASL in India and has experience in 3G services, according to guidelines issued by India's Ministry of Communications on Friday. Foreign bidders fall under the second category, and will have to comply with current UASL rules limiting foreign investment in mobile services companies to 74 percent of total equity.

State owned telecommunications service providers Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd.(MTNL) have been allotted 3G slots in the service areas they operate in, without participating in the bid, though they will have to pay license fee for the spectrum at the highest bid in each service area. The allotment of spectrum to these two service providers, without their participating in the auction, will at best give them a faster time to market, but they have to pay the same license fees as the highest bidder, and they will have to compete with private operators with strong brands, Gupta said.

Spectrum will be auctioned in blocks of 2x5 MHz, and the number of blocks to be auctioned will range from 5 to 10 depending on the availability of spectrum in each service area, the ministry said. Each bidder will be allocated only one block in each service area, and spectrum allotment will be for period of 20 years, it added.

As Indian mobile service providers try to expand their reach to rural markets, they are seeing ARPU (average revenue per user) declining. Value added services using 3G will help these companies boost their ARPU by addressing a new premium market segment, Gupta said.

Source [PC World]