Windows 7 will become the leading operating system worldwide in the PC installed base, running on 42 percent of PCs in use by the end of 2011. Gartner's latest PC OS forecast shows 94 percent of new PCs will be shipped with Windows 7 in 2011.

"Steady improvements in IT budgets in 2010 and 2011 are helping to accelerate the deployment of Windows 7 in enterprise markets in the U.S. and Asia/Pacific, where Windows 7 migrations started in large volume from 4Q10," said Annette Jump, research director at Gartner. "However, the economic uncertainties in Western Europe, political instability in selected Middle East and Africa (MEA) countries and the economic slowdown in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 will likely lead to slightly late and slow deployment for Windows 7 across those regions."

The forecast assumes that Windows 7 is likely to be the last version of Microsoft OS that gets deployed to everybody through big corporate wide migration. In the future, many organizations will also use alternative client computing architectures for standard PCs with Windows OS, and move toward virtualization and cloud computing in the next five years.

"By the end of 2011, nearly 635 million new PCs worldwide are expected to be shipped with Windows 7. Many enterprises have been planning their deployment of Windows 7 for the last 12 to 18 months, and are now moving rapidly to Windows 7," Jump said.

Shipments of Apple iMacs and Mac OS share on new PCs have seen increases in the last 12 months. The Mac OS was shipped with 4 percent of new PCs worldwide in 2010 versus 3.3 percent in 2008. Mac OS is forecast to be on 4.5 percent of PCs in 2011, and grow to 5.2 percent of new PCs in 2015. Shipments will grow stronger in mature markets where consumers are buying into the Apple product ecosystem.

"The adoption of Mac PCs and Mac OS is a result of Apple's ability to grow well above the market average in the last 12 to 24 months, thanks to its ease of use from the user interface (UI) point of view and ease of integration with other Apple devices, such as the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch," Jump said.

The Mac OS share still varies greatly by region, as Apple has much stronger presence in North America and Western Europe. The fastest growth is expected to happen in selected emerging countries, where Apple and Mac OS are growing from a small base.

Gartner does not expect Chrome OS, Android or webOS to get any significant market share on PCs in the next few years. Analysts believe that to get any consideration as an alternative for a traditional PC, lighter OSs will first need to get strong positions on emerging client devices such as Web books and media tablets. Even then, it is unlikely that they will have any impact on Microsoft and Windows OS's hold on positions on traditional professional PCs in the time frame of the current forecast. This is because of application compatibility issues and the high proportion of Windows-specific applications within many enterprises.

Gartner estimates that only in 2012 will the market reach the point of crossover between Windows-specific and OS-agnostic applications for enterprises, as 50 percent of the applications will be OS-agnostic. In the consumer space, the company believes that the proportion of OS-agnostic applications is already above the Windows-specific applications. This could help Chrome OS and Android make inroads into the consumer space in the next three to five years.

"Cloud computing represents a new generation of technology in this new era of science, one of data-driven exploration.  It creates precedent-setting opportunities for discovery," said Farnam Jahanian, assistant director of the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. "We are especially proud of these excellent projects, led by top researchers at universities throughout the country that we think will best capitalize on the NSF/Microsoft partnership. They will use the resources Microsoft will provide to explore and experiment with cloud computing in order to address some of society's greatest challenges."

Projects selected include “Building Scalable Trust in Cloud Computing,” headed by Kenneth Birman (Cornell University), “Enhancing Stork Data Scheduler for Azure,” headed by Tevfik Kosar (State University of New York at Buffalo), “Storing Data with Minimal Trust,” headed by Michael Walfish (University of Texas at Austin), and “Enabling Mobile Cloud Computing,” headed by Richard Han (University of Colorado Boulder).

"Increasingly, the important scientific questions lie at the intersections of traditional disciplines, so I'm pleased to see such technical diversity and interdisciplinarity among this list of award recipients,” said Daniel Reed, Microsoft's corporate vice president for the eXtreme Computing Group and Technology Strategy and Policy. “They illustrate the range of scientific fields that can take advantage of the cloud for rich data analytics on large data sets via powerful, easy to use tools. This lets scientists be scientists, enabling them to focus on discovery rather than computing infrastructure. I look forward to seeing the results of this potentially groundbreaking work."

The NFS awards nearly $4.5 million to support these projects.

Cloud computing enables faster, less expensive processing across geographically distributed data centers and provides on-demand computing power and storage to hosts. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

According to research from the Cloud Security Alliance and Novell, managing and enforcing security in the cloud is a top concern among IT executives considering cloud-based solutions. Novell hopes that the combination of Novell Cloud Security Service on Windows Azure will reduce security concerns by leveraging seamless cross-platform authentication, single sign-on and audit for users.

"Microsoft is excited to have Novell participate in the Windows Azure Technology Adoption Program. The Windows Azure platform enables Novell to deliver cloud-based services that extend the value of on-premise software without the need to manage technology infrastructure," said Robert Duffner, Director of Product Management for Windows Azure, Microsoft Corp. "Integrating Novell Cloud Security Service into Windows Azure ensures an identity, security and compliance management framework is in place to give our customers peace of mind without sacrificing investments in existing applications."

With Novell Cloud Security Service, developers using Windows Azure will be able to extend any business identity and access management infrastructure to Windows Azure. Changes made to user access permissions within an organization's application infrastructure using Novell Cloud Security Service will be immediately replicated in the cloud. The result will help customers using Windows Azure to deliver a consistent identity and security framework to address compliance needs in heterogeneous cloud environments, while keeping critical identity data secure behind customers' firewalls.

As cloud models mature and businesses look at cloud solutions to reduce costs and increase agility, security questions such as protecting data in the cloud and ensuring regulatory compliance are becoming increasingly important. Part of Novell's WorkloadIQ vision, Novell Cloud Security Service offers a multi-tenant environment with built-in metering, and auditing so cloud services providers, like Windows Azure, can offer a secure, compliant computing environment to their customers.

Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale and manage services on the Internet through Microsoft data centers. "Running applications and storing data in the cloud can have clear benefits," said Josh Dorfman, director of Global Alliance Marketing at Novell. "Today's enterprises are embracing cloud services, but security is top of mind when it comes to the cloud. We are pleased to be working with Microsoft to offer an interoperable set of identity, security and compliance management products for Windows Azure. Our goal is to give service providers the ability to enable cloud computing while mitigating risk and maintaining compliance".

Internet-based cloud computing is here to stay. In summary, it describes a scalable delivery model for IT services based on the Internet. Photo: www.imagine-your-world.com

"We believe that the combination of consumer opt-in, an open platform for publishing of Tracking Protection Lists (TPLs), and the underlying technology mechanism for Tracking Protection offer new options and a good balance between empowering consumers and online industry needs," says Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Internet Explorer, on Microsoft’s IE Blog site. Users do not always realize that information about products they research or buy online is often shared with third parties, Microsoft says. When switched on, the Tracking Protection Lists that will be introduced in IE9 will work like the "Do Not Call" list.

"When the browser calls any other website to request anything (an image, a cookie, HTML, a script that can execute), the browser explicitly provides information in order to get information," Hachamovitch says. "By limiting data requests to these sites, it is possible to limit the data available to these sites for collection and tracking."

Internet Explorer 9 will allow users to write lists and share them with friends and coworkers so they can get the same protection. Microsoft plans to release the standards used to compile TPLs under an open license to enable other browser manufacturers to incorporate the functionality into their own products. However, the tracking protection system will be turned off by default in IE9, and users have to opt in to utilize it.

Microsoft plans to release the new browser in early 2011. The current Beta has been downloaded more than 15 million times since it became available in September 2010.

"Blasphemy might be the first word that comes to mind when you hear Microsoft, PHP, and open source mentioned in the same breath," said Mike Gualtieri and Jeffrey S. Hammond in a paper published in May 2009. "But no more: The new Microsoft Web Platform will offer simplified install of certain popular PHP Web applications such as Acquia Drupal, Gallery, and SilverStripe CMS. PHP runs on other platforms now, but Microsoft’s contribution to the open source software (OSS) community is to support PHP apps and make them easy to install - on Windows servers. The result: Open source software has another direct channel into the enterprise, which means that it’s now easier for enterprises to find and install an OSS alternative to expensive commercial application platforms that run on Windows and Internet Information Services (IIS).”

The content management system (CMS) provides enables users to build websites, intranets, and web applications. SilverStripe is written in PHP and takes full advantage of its object oriented design capabilities. Saphire, a custom PHP framework, is embedded. The CMS allows designers to incorporate security models, workflow, caching, multiple language, and sub-site support into their websites. Themes, widgets and modules can be used to extend the functionality o the platform and allow greater customization.

It took developers three years to port the CMS to Microsoft operating systems, web and SQL servers. The developers did package SilverStripe into a Microsoft installer to make the install as easy as possible for Windows users. Using Microsoft Best Practices, the CMS was fine-tuned to run as fast as possible on Windows.

SilverStripe made international headlines when the package was used in 2008 to design a new website for the Democratic National Convention. "DemConvention.com received more than 3.2 million visits totaling more than 2.6 billion hits during Convention week. More than 350,000 hours of video were watched by DemConvention.com visitors as the DNC site offered live gavel-to-gavel coverage in High-Definition (HD) in both English and Spanish for the first time in Convention history," said the Democratic National Committee in a press release at the time. The CMS also received the award "Best NZ [New Zealand] Open Source Project" in 2010. SilverStripe CMS is available as a free download on the community website here.