When Yahoo ignored Third Point’s ultimatum to fire CEO Scott Thompson for cause by high noon Monday Third Point read Yahoo Delaware General Corporation Law and demanded that the company open all its records about how it came to hire the man at the center of “ResumeGate.”

It wants them ready for inspection and copying by Friday, another deadline.

Section 220(b) of the Delaware General Corporation Law says any stockholder can inspect certain books and records of a public company on written request. If Third Point doesn’t get what it wants it will doubtless sue in Delaware’s reportedly stockholder-leaning Chancery Court.

Meanwhile, the Yahoo board is supposed to be doing its own investigation of how it came to make a regulatory filing saying Thompson got an undergraduate degree in computer science and accounting from Stonehill College, a Catholic school near Boston, when it was only in accounting.

Yahoo claimed last week that it was just an “inadvertent error,” but it appears that Thompson has been making that “inadvertent error” for years like at eBay where he was president of PayPal.

In a letter to the board Monday Third Point said, “We believe that this internal investigation by this Board must not be conducted behind a veil of secrecy and shareholders deserve total transparency.”

Third Point is Yahoo’s biggest shareholder and is embroiled in a proxy fight with the company aimed at filling four board seats with its own people.

The hedge fund happened upon and immediately advertised the discrepancy in Thompson’s CV last week.

It also discovered that the head of the board’s search committee Patti Hart fudged her resume too and claimed to have a bachelor’s degree in marketing and economics when it’s really in business administration. It wants her gone too.

Third Point wants any records related to her appointment to the Yahoo board as well as any records of how Peter Liguori, John Hayes, Thomas McInerney, Maynard Webb, Jr. and Fred Amoroso happened to get board seats.

If it gets its hands on the documents, Forbes thinks Third Point is going to find that Thompson wasn’t vetted at all; that no head hunter was involved; that there were no other candidates; and that Thompson simply reached out to the board and two weeks later was CEO. If so it will strengthen Third Point’s case of board mismanagement, an easy enough case to prove given Yahoo’s history.

It wants the board to drop its resistance to Third Point’s nominees for the board which include Third Point CEO Daniel Loeb, Maeva Group CEO Harry Wilson, former MTV Networks president Michael Wolf and former NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker. Yahoo claims Loeb isn’t qualified to sit on the board.

Meanwhile, and utterly coincidently, Yahoo is supposedly working on a new deal to sell maybe 15%-25% of its holdings in Alibaba back to the China e-commerce company. A deal, which has previously eluded the two companies, could reportedly be done in weeks.

Thompson has supposedly been leading the latest negotiations.

This deal is supposed to be simpler than the others they tried and would see Yahoo pay heavy taxes on its gains. Of course selling an increasingly valuable asset that’s supposed to represent a large part of Yahoo’s $18.8 billion market cap may not strike everybody as the sensible thing to do right now no matter how much Alibaba complains.

Yahoo owns about 40% of Alibaba and the valuation is unclear. Its valuation last year was $32 billion. Yahoo hasn’t been able to bridge a “valuation gap” with Softbank, the majority owner of Yahoo Japan, so that deal’s going nowhere.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that ComputeNext Inc. will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
What’s the scope of your “single pane of glass”? If you’re a cloud architect wouldn’t you be better suited with a telescope than a magnifying glass? The ComputeNext marketplace and workload manager sprawls across public clouds, eliminating vendor and platform lock-in.
A single point of payment and integration enables choice and flexibility to build, deploy, and manage servers from a vast selection of platform-agnostic infrastructure – empowering businesses to maximize utilization of compute resources.

read more

In this CEO Power Panel at the 10th International Cloud Expo, moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, leading executives in the Cloud Computing and Big Data space will be discussing such topics as:
Is it just wishful thinking to depict the Cloud as more than just a technology solution? If not, then what concrete examples best demonstrate cloud computing as an engine of business value?
Big Data has existed since the early days of computing; why, then, do you think there is such an industry buzz around it right now?
Do you agree that cloud computing is basically to technology what credit is in the financial services industry, i.e., it enables companies to leverage capabilities that they don’t own. Or are there better analogies?

read more

There’s been a cacophony of hyperbole and at times marketing fluff from vendors and analysts with regards to Reference Architectures and Converged Infrastructures. As IBM launched PureSystems, NetApp & Cisco decided it was also a good time to reiterate their strong partnership with FlexPod. In the midst of this, EMC decided to release their new and rather salaciously titled VSPEX. From the remnants and ashes of all these new product names and fancy launch conferences, the resultant war blogs and Twitterati battles ensued. As I poignantly watched on from the trenches in an almost Siegfried Sassoon moment, it was quickly becoming evident that there was now an even more ambiguous understanding of what distinguishes a Converged Infrastructure from a Reference Architecture, what it’s relation was with the Private Cloud and more importantly whether you, the end user should even care.

read more

The elastic resources offered by cloud computing have created an exciting opportunity for applications to handle very large workloads. However, writing applications that span an elastic pool of virtual servers creates huge challenges for developers. How can these virtual servers easily and efficiently share application data while avoiding scaliability bottlenecks? The answer lies in using in-memory data grids (IMDGs) to provide a powerful, easy-to-use, and highly scalable storage layer.
IMDGs unlock the potential for application scaling while eliminating the cost and performance impact of using blob stores and database servers. IMDGs also provide a powerful platform for fast data analysis and enable transparent data migration between on-premise sites and the cloud.

read more

“Airlines can now leapfrog to the cloud to expedite their communications and do so at costs much lower than maintaining existing mainframe systems,” said Ken Stephens, senior vice president of cloud services, Xerox, as Xerox and AvFinity announced and agreement to provide seamless transmission of flight-critical communication.

“There is no room for error in ensuring safety in the skies,” Stephens added.

read more

Community cloud services are services that are shared by multiple members of a community. They centralize the functions and can provide specific mission requirements. The mission requirements can be related to specific policies and compliance. Community clouds leverage the benefits of a public cloud but can satisfy specific requirements. These are perfect for communities with specific focus areas such as performance, auditing or policies that need to be applied across the community.
A major benefit of community clouds is that many organizations can come together and pitch in for the cost of the cloud. This sharing results in significant savings compared to each organization setting up and supporting their own services. Community cloud is a term that is discussed a lot, but I have a new term for the cloud that combines multiple communities together, “Multi community cloud”. Multi Community cloud services span across communities with similar functions and interests. For example, payment cloud services can be used by multiple communities (such as banking, finance, insurance etc) to make payments to individuals and companies, this would fall under multi community cloud services. These services have to be broad enough to encompass the functions of the multiple communities. With the rapid growth of the community cloud, multi community clouds will evolve to a higher level as communities identify and realize the benefits of leveraging many similar capabilities, even though some policies may be different.

read more

The idea behind the Canada Cloud Network has been to identify, review and then utilize a number of Innovation Best Practices to design how (and why) this forum works.

In particular one key goal is to implement a ‘Next Generation Cluster‘, a thought leadership piece from Cisco on how the original cluster model from Michael Porter can be upgraded through new Cloud 2.0 technologies.

read more

With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now five weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference…

We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses…?

read more

I recently read a TechCrunch article titled: The Rise of Big Data Apps and the Fall of SaaS written by Raj De Datta.

I do agree with the prefix. As far as the suffix is concerned, I can only explain why Raj De Datta’s opinion is wrong.

I usually tend not to agree with statements about premature End of Life of technologies or architectures or trends.

In most cases, it easier to kill a concept in writing, than to persuade a large number of users to change their habits.

read more