France Télévisions and Eurosport have tapped Microsoft technologies in order to enable users of their respective websites to watch high-definition content from the 2010 French Open tennis championships. As of May 26th, 2010, and until June 6th Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming will enable visitors to FranceTV and Eurosport websites to watch games featuring superstars like Rafael Nadal in the Roland-Garros French Open Tennis. The Spaniard has already won the French Open no less than four times, and, despite the loss last year, he is most probably THE player to watch in 2010.

The (video) player is the right one, the (tennis) player not: Long live King Roger!

Ryan O'Hara, Microsoft's senior director for System Center, talks to V3.co.uk about bringing cloud resources under the control of existing management tools

Microsoft's cloud computing strategy has so far delivered infrastructure and developer tools, but the company is now looking to add cloud support into its management platform to enable businesses to control workloads both on-premise and in the cloud from a single console.

Microsoft's System Center portfolio has focused on catching up with virtualisation leader VMware on delivering tools that can manage both virtual and physical machines on-premise, according to Ryan O'Hara, senior director of System Center product management at Microsoft.

"Heretofore we've been investing in physical-to-virtual conversion integrated into a single admin experience, and moving from infrastructure to applications and service-level management," he said.

Microsoft is now looking at a third dimension, that of enabling customers to extend workloads from their own on-premise infrastructure out to a public cloud, while keeping the same level of management oversight.

"We think that on-premise architecture will be private cloud-based architecture, and this is one we're investing deeply in with Virtual Machine Manager and Operations Manager to enable these private clouds," said O'Hara.

Meanwhile, the public cloud element might turn out to be a hosted cloud, an infrastructure-as-a-service, a platform-as-a-service or a Microsoft cloud like Azure.

The challenge is to extend the System Center experience to cover both of these with consistency, according to O'Hara. He believes this is where Microsoft has the chance to create some real differentiation in cloud services, at least from an enterprise viewpoint.

"I think, as we extend cross these three boundaries, it puts System Center and Microsoft into not just an industry leading position, but a position of singularity. I don't think there is another vendor who will be able to accomplish that kind of experience across all three dimensions," he said.

This is territory that VMware is also exploring with vSphere and vCloud, and the company signalled last year that it planned to give customers the ability to move application workloads seamlessly between internal and external clouds.

However, O'Hara said that Microsoft intends to go further than VMware and provide consistent management control across cloud boundaries at every level of the stack. All of Microsoft's future management products will have cloud extensions, he said.

"VMware is investing heavily in infrastructure-level symmetry, creating mobility at the virtual machine level from the on-premise stack to the off-premise stack," he said.

"That's interesting, but there's no uniformity of platform, no uniformity of managing service levels between the on- and off-premise capability, and there's really not a lot of insight on applications being delivered across the infrastructure."

In other words, VMware's focus is on moving virtual machines around, rather than managing the applications running inside them.

"One of the things we're highlighting is that we're extending across the public boundary using Systems Center and familiar assets like Operations Manager 2007 to manage an Azure application in conjunction with your on-premise application workloads. Having established two discrete management stacks, we're now looking at bringing them together," said O'Hara.

Microsoft announced in April that a forthcoming Management Pack for Azure, coming in the second half of 2010, will give customers the ability to control Azure components within the Operations Manager 2007 R2 console.

This is a necessary path to take, O'Hara explained, otherwise cloud computing will turn into yet another separate application stack with its own management tools and expertise.

"Frankly, we're going down a path where, if we don't do this, we're going to end up with a third silo in the organisation, with cloud engineers as well as infrastructure engineers and virtualisation engineers. That's a cost model that I don't think is viable," he said.

Microsoft is also spinning back the expertise it has gained from Azure and its compute fabric management capabilities into Windows Server and its on-premise infrastructure, according to O'Hara. Announcements around this are expected in the next couple of months.

The next generation of Virtual Machine Manager and Operations Manager, which Microsoft has dubbed its 'VNext' releases, are due in 2011 and will have "even more robust investments incorporating cloud scenarios", O'Hara said.

Some big news today for customers who are interested in easy to use, robust content protection for HTTP streaming scenarios using IIS Media Services…

Today we’re announcing that IIS Media Services will support a version of PlayReady DRM to enable protected HTTP streaming. The PlayReady DRM IIS Media Services solution will deploy on a single box to secure your media assets for online streaming using the IIS Smooth Streaming and PlayReady DRM technology, directly within IIS Media Services - no additional license fees or royalties required.

File-based encryption is the most robust way to secure high value content – much more so than stream encryption, which only secures the communication stream. The PlayReady DRM IIS Media Services solution will bring full file-based encryption into IIS Media Services with the ease of use of traditional stream encryption.  And the solution of course will use Microsoft PlayReady technology, which is widely supported in the industry and draws on the experience gained from more than a decade of investment that Microsoft has made in the development of DRM technology.

For customers needing to apply PlayReady DRM protection to content for offline scenarios, or apply customized business rules to the use of protected content in purchase/rental/subscription scenarios, of course that functionality will remain available, as it is today, via the use of a PlayReady Server.

We are at booth 125 at Streaming Media East this week (May 11-12) at the Hilton New York in New York City, where we are showing a preview of IIS Media Services with PlayReady DRM. We are also showing features of IIS Media Services 4, including Transform Manager, a server-side transformation engine that streamlines production workflow by enabling scenarios like encode once and simultaneously deliver multiple formats. For example with Transform Manager, you could simultaneously deliver the IIS Smooth Streaming format for Silverlight clients, and Apple’s HTTP streaming format for iPhones and iPads. Please read our NAB post to see what else is new in IIS Media Services 4.

If you have not already registered for Streaming Media East, we’re pleased to offer discounted registration for the conference or a free exhibits pass by registering using the VIPMICRO priority code at the registration link.

This is a good opportunity to let you know about some exciting new Silverlight offerings from our customers. Swedish sports channel C Sports and MediaCorp, the Singaporean television and radio broadcaster, join the ever-increasing roster of companies using Silverlight and IIS Smooth Streaming to deliver high quality engaging content.

Awesome! (Smooth) Streaming has never been so powerful and cheap!

Mobile phone and smartphone sales are on a roll, according to figures released Wednesday by market researcher Gartner.

In the first quarter, customers worldwide bought 314.7 million mobile phones, a 17 percent increase year over year. Smartphones sales specifically jumped 48.7 percent from the year-ago quarter, as 54.3 million units flew off the shelves.

Demand within mature markets and lower prices are part of the reason for the double-digit gains, Gartner said.

For the quarter, the usual mobile phone makers topped the ranks, with Nokia in first place with a 35 percent market share, followed by Samsung, LG, Research In Motion, and Sony Ericsson. But smaller players have also started to inch their way up the ladder. Hong Kong-based G-Five climbed into the list of top 10 mobile manufacturers worldwide, winning 1.4 percent of the market.

An array of other manufacturers across Asia also made a big dent in market share, collectively accounting for 19 percent. This surge had some impact on the top five companies, Gartner said, as their collective market share dropped to 70.7 percent in the first quarter from 73.3 percent a year ago.

Among the top five, Nokia continues to face strong competitive challenges. Although its midmarket phones sold well in the quarter, the company doesn't yet have any high-end products driving sales. Its MeeGo-based devices and other higher-tier phones won't have an impact until the end of the third quarter at the earliest, Gartner predicts. Nokia's impending reorganization, announced last week, is a sign that the company is also trying to improve its standing among investors.

As for the rest of the pack, Samsung and RIM saw sales and market share grow during the quarter, while LG and Sony Ericsson watched their results drop.

In the smartphone arena, the industry enjoyed its strongest year-over-year sales growth since 2006, according to Gartner. Ranked by smartphone operating system, Nokia's Symbian led the pack with a 44.3 percent slice of the market. But that was down from the 48.8 percent share a year ago.

Among the top five smartphone operating systems, the iPhone and Android were the only ones to enjoy growth in market share from a year ago. The first quarter proved to be Apple's strongest yet, helped in part by overseas sales from mature regions such as the U.K, but also new markets such as China and South Korea. Demands for Android phones continued to grow in the first quarter, especially in North America, where sales jumped 707 percent from a year ago.

What does Gartner expect for the near term? Mobile e-mail, text-messaging, and social networking will continue to spark demand for smartphones and enhanced phones with hardware keyboards. But in Gartner's view, the most successful companies will be the ones that control an integrated product in terms of operating system, hardware, and services. To stay competitive, manufacturers must integrate hardware, the user interface, the cloud, and social networks to continued to attract consumers, Gartner said.

[…] Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates suggested during a television interview that rumors of the company's death in the tablet PC space were, at best, premature. His comments followed a week in which Microsoft announced the death of its long-rumored Courier project, which centered on a dual-touch-screen device in a folding book-like format, and in which further scuttlebutt had it that Hewlett-Packard had decided to eliminate a Windows 7-powered "Slate" tablet PC from its upcoming lineup. "Microsoft has a lot of different tablet projects that we're pursuing," Gates said, according to a Fox Business Network transcript quoted by TechFlash. "We think that work with the pen that Microsoft pioneered will become a mainstream for students. It can give you a device that you can not only read, but also [use to] create documents at the same time." […]

More here.