ReadWriteCloud

PLM is far from the sexiest acronym floating around the Internet these days. Short for Product Lifecycle Management, PLM is often thought of as an esoteric offshoot of the equally obscure PDM, or Product Design Management - the way engineers track control technical data related to a particular product.

PLM is like PDM on steroids, extending the concept to cover "the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal," as Wikipedia puts it. If you haven't heard of PLM, don't feel bad. The category hasn't exactly set the world on fire. But Autodesk thinks cloud computing can change all that.

Most people think of Autodesk as the maker of AutoCAD, the design software of choice for architects, engineers and other design professionals - typically running on high-powered workstations. So why is Autodesk CEO Carl Bass so hung up on the "democratization" of technology - spreading technology to the cloud computing platforms and mobile devices?

At the company's media summit in San Francisco this morning, Bass told a crowd of journalists, analysts and customers gathered in the company's slick design gallery (see pictures below) that the combination of mobile devices, cloud computing and social collaboration is more profound than the shift to PCs.

Back in the 1990s, U.S. government agencies were officially transitioning their identity systems to smartcards. The Homeland Security Dept. did not exist yet. So the agency expected to lead the way was the Defense Dept., which had a Common Access Card initiative, but not really enough fuel to keep that initiative going.

After Sept. 11, 2001, the new DHS department was ordered to carry out Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12) - an order mandating a smarter card that contains its own biometrics, effectively invalidating the card if someone else happens to be holding it. It's a decade later, and agencies throughout the government are moving to cloud architectures. Now DHS is taking step 2 in the rollout of a defense identity management system (DEFIMNET) forged through trials with DOD. The challenge, as the CEO of the manufacturer of this system tells ReadWriteWeb, will be to live up to HSPD-12 expectations that were written before the cloud as we know it today was even conceived.

As prominent as cloud computing has already become in today's enterprises, it's amazing to realize that the world's reference standards are only now catching up with the concept. On Tuesday, the consortium of industry stakeholders known as The Open Group updated its reference standards for Service-Oriented Architecture. You remember SOA, don't you?

Well, if you've been following along with the SOA story, you know that cloud computing platforms have catapulted the service concept onto a huge and growing platform. Now, the consortium - led by software giants IBM, Oracle, and SAP, along with HP, and business consultancy CapGemini - has produced a formal interpretation of the role services play in the cloud, by offering a new term for the concept. Say it with me (if you can): XaaS.

The one really big problem with file systems designed for compatibility with PCs - and by that, I mean IBM Personal Computers - truly is the "big" problem. They do not scale, and as the size of databases expands far beyond the capacity of any cluster of storage devices, let alone any single device, a new class of "sharding" technologies has had to be deployed to let fragments of huge virtual volumes to be stored in multiple systems. This is, in fact, what much of cloud storage technology is all about.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft acknowledged something it had hinted at during its Technology Preview for Windows 8 last September: It will be integrating a simplified form of storage pooling technology called Storage Spaces into Windows 8. Late yesterday in an MSDN blog post, engineer Surendra Verma, expanded on that theme by revealing new details about a very-high-capacity file system alternative for Windows Server 8, based around a modified resiliency architecture that should be in-place compatible with the existing NTFS.

The urgent push to move the whole of Internet addresses off of a system never intended to replace telephone, television, and computing simultaneously, and onto the IPv6 address system, is now entering its 13th consecutive blockbuster year. Despite high-level government recommendations for action plans, a global DNS poisoning scare that many say could never have happened under IPv6, and a grass-roots effort to build an actual holiday around the transition, it's estimated that the rate at which the Asia/Pacific region is depleting IPv4 addresses is far outpacing the rate that hosts in that region are moving to IPv6.

It's almost as if everyone wants a real Internet, but too few want to lend a hand in building it. Now the Internet Society, its original non-profit guidance organization, is stepping up its push to make IPv6 more marketable, first with the launch of a new Web site called Deploy360, to be followed up next week with meetings with consumer electronics vendors at CES in Las Vegas.

This week we saw lots of new apps and activity around Salesforce, as expected, given its Dreamforce conference. But it reminded us of why it will continue to dominate the CRM space, and why Microsoft's own CRM offerings - despite some solid foundations and active users - still don't measure up by comparison.

(This article is a companion piece to analysis by Scott Fulton, which can be found here.)

Amazon continues to roll out new AWS features at breakneck speed. The latest in a slew of announcements is Amazon's bringing its Virtual Private Cloud out of beta. Amazon Direct Connect lets customers establish a dedicated network connection from the customer site to AWS. Amazon has also added a new feature to AWS Identity and Access Management that gives the ability to perform "identity federation" to grant access to AWS to corporate users without having to create new identities. Companies can now wire up directly to AWS without passing data over the public Internet, and avoid saturating their Internet connection with application data.

This week at the OSCON conference, a group of vendors has banded together to form the Open Cloud Initiative in the attempt to coalesce a collection of open source standards, requirements, products and services. Unlike earlier open cloud efforts, this one is community driven (although with more of a legal tone) rather than coming from vendors.

Add Identity as a Service to cloud-based services, thanks to an announcement this week from Radiant Logic at the Burton/Gartner Catalyst conference. Radiant had previously announced its RadiantOne Cloud Federation Services earlier this year, and CFS is now available, along with a new product called Virtual Directory Server Plus.