Red Hat is already intimately involved with Amazon's Electronic Computing Cloud (EC2) service, having offered Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as a supported option for EC2 instances since November of last year. Now the company is extending the offering by including the Jboss Enterprise Application Platform on the service (beta, of course... no one ever just releases ready to run software anymore).

The combination of RHEL and Jboss is already popular in the enterprise in non-virtual contexts, and this move has the possibility of accelerating service outsourcing into the cloud for those applications already running internally in that environment.

That's an over-simplification of the argument, of course, as all title lines are, but when you get right down to it, that's the implication of Jonathan Zittrain's concept of "generative systems," the open and unobstructed tools on which he lays the credit for the creation cool and useful technologies.

The theory is that the open, uncontrolled nature of the PC platform has allowed many applications which did not have any obvious value at their conception to gain traction in corporate environments sufficient to come to fruition and eventually mature into useful technologies to the enterprise; things like the Web, VoIP, and Wikis. This sort of bottom-up adoption can drive those responsible for developing strategic plans and maintaining consistency batty, but Zittrain argues that it has resulted in better technology than a tightly controlled, planned system might have.

Zittrain can do his argument better justice than I can, and you can get a good sense of it from this CIO Insight Q&A. He also has recently published a book on the subject, which I haven't had a chance to pick up yet: "The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It." The Q&A article is specifically about the iPhone, a closed system that Zittrain disapproves of because, even with the new availability of third party applications, Apple can haul in the rug at any time. But, as I argue after the jump, this is hardly a new issue... and certainly not one that has shut down innovation so far.

Microsoft last week released their Hyper-V virtualization server for Windows 2008, finally showing all their cards in the latest round of betting against dominant virtualization platform provider VMware.

Microsoft's virtualization products have long lagged behind competitors in flexibility and features, and in some cases performance, which may be the most important factor considering the purpose of the technology: to cram more running systems onto a single hardware platform than ever before.

The performance benchmarks on Hyper-V (cited here by ZDNet's Jason Perlow) are impressive. I/O blocking, a traditional pitfall for virtualized systems, has been reduced such that virtual servers are able to achieve nearly the performance of the base hardware. Further tuning has reportedly optimized Hyper-V for popular Microsoft enterprise products such as SQL and Exchange Server.

This combination of vendor supported virtualization and optimized performance, taken together with a dramatically simplified licensing structure, may open the market up for Microsoft with more conservative IT establishments taking the plunge into virtualization. The sweetener is the licensing, which effectively allows four for one pricing on Windows Server... if it's not free as in Linux, it's a lot closer than it was, and Microsoft shops are sure to take advantage of it.

The product still falls down on a number of important features for the production datacenter, however, including live instance migration and dynamic resource allocation. The support for non-Microsoft products is, as expected, generally weak. Nonetheless, this appears to be a strong product, and VMware will be pressed by the cost-dynamics of the Microsoft licensing model in ways which may not be pleasant in the long run.

That seems to be the implication in Senior VP Bill Veghte's letter to Microsoft customers announcing the ship date for Windows 7 (around about January 2010... all those 2009 rumors needed to be gunned down, apparently) excerpted here in Network World. Of course, he doesn't say "failed" and he didn't send me a copy of the letter (my money not green enough for you, Bill?) so I may be taking things out of context.

But when he says things like ""You've also let us know you don't want to face the kinds of incompatibility challenges with the next version of Windows you might have experienced early with Windows Vista" then it certainly sounds as if much of the trouble was to do with compatibility. While there were some significant programs which had compatibility issues, in my mind they were never at the forefront of the debate over Vista adoption. The question, rather, was more about where the value was and whether it sufficiently exceeded that offered by XP to make up the cost of purchase and migration.

I'm curious now if compatibility and a shipping delay (the other reasons cited for the announcement) are really the big takeaways that Microsoft has from the whole Vista debacle? If so, they're a lot less plugged in over there than I was thinking.

I first wrote about eXpresso, the online collaboration solution for Excel, last year and left off with a question about such focused, non-integrated collaboration solutions: do you solve the problems that the adoption of these quick packaged collaborative efforts frequently reveal in your organization's data environment the "right" way by altering your basic internal systems to address the imbalance (often a costly approach) or do you encourage or allow users to go off the reservation and use third party solutions over which you can exercise little control?

I spoke last week with eXpresso CEO George Langan and put the question to him.

"The last thing I want is to step on some CIO's toes," said Langan, who sees a route into the corporation via numerous industry partnerships (Microsoft, WebEx, and Salesforce, to name a few) and not from stealth adoption by frustrated users outside the IT department. Also busy developing similar solutions for Word, PDF, and PowerPoint, as well as working on a commercially deployable version of the database system that currently serves as the intelligent backend allowing secured a la carte Excel file sharing, Langan sees eXpresso as the glue which can tie together disparate in-house and SaaS document stores seamlessly, and he doesn't want to poison the well for future corporate customers.

When last I looked at it, eXpresso seemed very much a one-trick pony; spreadsheet collaboration, where can't you do that? But Langan doesn't see Zoho, Google Apps, or Microsoft Live as competition... instead, they are just more disparate standards which eXpresso can translate between. With the coming expansion into other document types, eXpresso may indeed become an ally to the IT department, if only to help retrieve users from other data silos they may have locked their data within.

It's a significant insight of Langan's that most business gets done in Excel; I myself have known accountants so enamored of the program that they type their memos up in it, spurning Word. So although they don't have a huge user base yet, it was astute of eXpresso to start with Excel. Once the accounting department get their teeth into a solution, they don't let go... and the IT department frequently falls under the CFO's purview. It's not hard to see what the accounting crew will find attractive in eXpresso. The combination of the spreadsheet paradigm with their backend database's security and access controls results in a flexibility which I don't believe any other online office vendors have: cell and cell region specific access control. Adapting this to other document types is sure to add a competitive edge in the collaboration market.

Of course, all this presumes that Microsoft Office already has you by the nose (or some other anatomical feature of your choosing) and that you will be continuing to use it, and documents stored in that proprietary format, for years to come. Although that's undoubtedly the case for most users simply by default, it strikes me that the open document format wars may catch eXpresso in the cross-fire. Although the company makes much of its ability to translate formats, by slaving its primary utility to a single, disputed document type, it may find itself bypassed entirely by companies trying to get out from under the scourge of a closed and shifting format.

But there are some formats you stick with whether they are closed or not, just because there aren't any viable alternatives. If I had to guess, I would say that the potential killer app in eXpresso's line up is the PowerPoint collaboration. If they are able to do with that complex and bloated program what they have done for Excel, allowing smooth, real-time, remote collaboration, then as long as corporate America's fascination with slideshow presentations lasts I would say CIOs should keep eXpresso's site bookmarked... your users are going to be calling you for it.

Even Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs), at least according to vendor Managed Objects. With their unveiling of "myCMDB" at Gartner's IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit, they've become the latest in a series of companies with traditional, conservative roles in IT infrastructure jumping on the jazzy New Age MySpace/Facebook inspired social networking bandwagon.

I'm still on the fence as to the efficacy of adopting this sort of interface strategy for every application under the sun (and I am starting to loathe the inclusion of "My" in front of business applications almost as much as the ridiculous "i"everything you are seeing in the consumer market). On the one hand, as Managed Objects claims, I can see the potential to take a rather hum drum set of tasks (which are nonetheless important) and spice them up by turning them into stuff you do while you're hanging out online with all your cool business friends, potentially getting better conformity in the bargain. But I also see a lot of vendors which are attempting to apply the wrong lessons to their products, like trying to slap design characteristics from a Ferrari onto a Ford truck (although El Caminos are pretty cool).

I haven't actually seen the myCMDB interface in action yet, so I'll reserve judgement on the effectiveness it has in encouraging the updating and utilization of CMDB data. But for crying out loud, someone change the name so it won't embarrass the datacenter staff to use it.