Tongues Wag After Open Virtualization Alliance Announcement

Yesterday’s announcement that a group of company’s led by Red Hat, IBM, HP and others have formed the Open Virtualization Alliance had tongues wagging amongst bloggers, analysts and others in the twittersphere. The announcement, which was made at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, as well included founding members Intel, BMC Software, SUSE and Eucalyptus Systems. According to the Alliance the goal is to foster the adoption of virtualization technologies and Kernel-based Virtual Machine in particular. However speculation ran high afterwards the announcement that some member companies may be attempting to break the stranglehold VMWare and Citrix hold on the market during other members may be hedging their bets.

As cloud computing takes center stage, virtualization becomes important and is a key feature in VMWare’s vSphere. Up until recently, KVM has not been considered an enterprise-class solution. Nevertheless according to the OVA, there have been performance, scalability and security improvements that enable it to compete in the enterprise market. The OVA will not define APIs yet will formalize the usage of APIs and provide guidelines for API usage by third-party developers. In the same fashion, the OVA will not produce products or offer solutions.

Mobile banking application for Android

Lars Hesel Christensen shares lessons learned from implementing a mobile banking application for Android, presenting the architecture, the research&tools used, what works and what should be avoided.