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After nearly 5 years with the company, Engineering Director Mark Lucovsky has left Google for a role with VMware, TechCrunch has learned. Before Google, Lucovsky worked at DEC and then Microsoft for 16 years, eventually gaining the title of “Distinguished Engineer.” He had been the principle architect on Windows NT, which would eventually evolve into Windows XP. Lucovsky was also the architect of Microsoft’s Hailstorm project to port older Microsoft products into .NET. A famous anecdote recounted on TechCrunch:

But Lucovsky may be best known for the role he played in a complete and utter meltdown that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once had. As the NT architect, Lucovsky was clearly pretty vital to Microsoft, so when he went in for a meeting with Ballmer in 2004 to let him know he was leaving, you can be sure the CEO was a bit on edge. “Just tell me it’s not Google,” Ballmer reportedly said according to court documents (for a case surrounding another Google ex-Microsoft hire). When Lucovsky said it was Google, Ballmer allegedly picked up a chair and threw it across the room.

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Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), provider of virtualization software for mobile phones and broadband internet devices, today introduced OK:Android, an off-the-shelf paravirtualized version of the Android smartphone platform. Using Secure HyperCell Technology, OK:Android enables Android to be used as a guest operating system running in a secure hypercell on top of the OKL4 microvisor, the OK Labs mobile phone virtualization platform. OK:Android gives handset manufacturers (OEMs) a short path to developing and delivering new designs with Android. The combination of OK:Android and OKL4 also extends new levels of security and robustness to the increasingly popular smartphone OS from Google and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA). To date, Android-based handsets have been delivered by Taiwan-based HTC, with additional designs announced by Motorola, Samsung and other handset OEMs. Although Google and the OHA have been successful in engaging device suppliers and building a developer community, semiconductor suppliers, mobile OEMs and mobile network operators (MNOs) still face the significant challenges involved in porting and hosting Android on current chipsets and on new mobile hardware. By providing a flexible framework for Android integration with specific handset hardware and a straightforward way to reuse legacy software in new Android devices, OK:Android helps reduce time to market for a new wave of Android devices. Since its introduction in 2008, Android has enjoyed a rapidly-growing market presence and bullish prospects for new deployments. One million Android-based handsets have shipped in 2008 as indicated by HTC; and research and consulting firm Strategy Analytics projects nine times that number in 2009. “Virtualization technology is being evaluated by many handset OEMs today, primarily for its significant time-to-market benefits for new phone designs,” noted Andreas Constantinou, lead analyst at VisionMobile. OK Labs virtualization technology already ships in over 300 million mobile handsets, including Android-based devices where OKL4 runs on the baseband processor. With OK:Android and the OKL4 microvisor, OK Labs can further accelerate Android adoption for new designs. The impact of OK:Android starts by helping OEMs bring designs to market faster, and further extends its impact by incorporating a range of benefits across the emerging Android ecosystem. In particular, OK:Android enables OEMs, MNOs and ISVs to:

• Offer new options for creating and prototyping Android-based devices and applications with embedded virtualization.
• Create more secure and robust mobile devices, applications and services with Android and OKL4.
• Run Android together with other mobile OSes and/or deploy multiple instances of Android on a single device.
• Consolidate hardware (e.g., base band and application CPU cores) for more aggressive price-points for Android-based handsets.
• Create new Android-based devices enabled for mobile-to-enterprise virtualization (M2E). M2E is a set of joint solutions developed by Citrix Systems, Inc. and OK Labs for delivering enterprise applications to mobile devices.

OK:Android and OKL4 are available immediately from OK Labs and its global channel partners.

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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), a provider of systems software and virtualization technology for mobile devices and other embedded systems, announced today that the company’s OKL4 embedded hypervisor is employed on the Qualcomm chipset inside the market’s first-ever commercial Android-powered handset. Manufactured by HTC, the G1 introduced by T-Mobile in September 2008 is the first handset powered by the Android software platform developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. At the heart of the G1 is the Qualcomm MSM7201A, a dual-core ARM family device with hardware-accelerated multimedia, 3D graphics and integrated multi-mode 3G baseband processing. Android is likely to attract significant attention from third-party developers as a competing platform for reaching a large number of mobile phone users. The combination of open source software, third-party applications, and internet connectivity represented by Android is indicative of next-generation mobile phone deployment environments in which the reliability and security benefits provided by microkernel-based OKL4 are essential. OK Labs’ OKL4 open source embedded hypervisor helps developers deliver increasingly complex software for mobile devices—in less time and with less effort—without compromising the reliability and security of those devices. Focusing on the specific requirements of mobile phones, using proven high-performance microkernel technology, and building on an open source code base uniquely position OKL4 as the optimal software architecture for next generation mobile devices. OKL4 is available from OK Labs under open source and commercial licenses.

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We've covered Hyperic before, most recently when they added monitoring for Citrix XenServer environments to their Hyperic HQ service. The company just announced that their CloudStatus service now also supports Google App Engine, after launching with advanced monitoring for Amazon EC2 services. Support for additional cloud providers is planned for the coming months. Update: check out the excellent analysis on GigaOM as well. The addition of App Engine monitoring is designed to provide customers with the ability to obtain up-to-the-second perspectives on performance and network connectivity from both inside and outside the App Engine platform. The initial release will allow for continuous monitoring of the health and performance of major App Engine infrastructure, including the DataStore, Memcache, and global network connectivity. CloudStatus uses App Engine-specific management plug-ins to collect measurements that provide administrators and developers with unprecedented insight into the health of the App Engine platform. As part of this development, Hyperic is also announcing the availability of the first cloud-specific management plug-in for its flagship product, Hyperic HQ. The new plug-in extends the full monitoring and management capabilities of Hyperic HQ to App Engine users, enabling them to examine the performance of their own custom applications running in the cloud. This plug-in is free for download on HyperForge.

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Lots has been written already about Google's new initiative called App Engine, a preview-release developer platform for Python applications, and now Microsoft seems to be throwing itself in the ring - where Amazon and Salesforce are also to be found - in order to get at least a piece of the cloud computing buzz momentum. LiveSide spotted a job posting with clear mentions of the Microsoft Utility Computing Platform, code-named Red Dog, and it sounds very much like a platform for building a Google App Engine type service. LiveSide's take: "The posting itself is a little dense, written to appeal to seasoned developers looking for new challenges. But to paraphrase a bit, here's what the (CIS) team is building with Red Dog:

• an "efficient, virtualized" environment
• a "fully automated service management system" (like the Google App Engine, you won't have to worry about managing the system)
• on "highly scalable" storage services (you only use the storage you need)
• the service will "scale to millions of machines" across Microsoft's data centers (geo-located, easy to maintain data centers, remember?)
• "will lead the marketplace as the best platform for rapid development, deployment, and maintenance of internet services and applications"
• SDK and tools will be included for external and internal customers
• V1 for external customers in the coming year

Meanwhile, Gartner analysts Daryl Plummer and Thomas Bittman reportedly stated at the Gartner Emerging Technologies conference in Las Vegas that it will be another year – 2009 – before companies will start using cloud computing services extensively. "In the meantime, folks will have to define and sort out a lot of mumbo jumbo about the cloud." Interesting times!

Interesting interview up on GigaOM today, featuring Microsoft's Chief Software Architect and industry luminary Ray Ozzie talking about MS's strategy, the economics of cloud computing and the relevance of desktop and infrastructure challenges.

The most interesting bits:

OM: The costs of computing, hardware and bandwidth are dropping quickly. Do you believe that the cost will come down fast enough to make cloud computing actually a profitable business? RAY OZZIE: Well, it’s unlikely that we would get into it if we didn’t think it was going to be a profitable business. So we’ll just manage it to be profitable. It’s going to have different margins than classic software, or the ad (-supported) business. But, we have every reason to believe that it will be a profitable business. It’s an inevitable business. The higher levels in the app stack require that this infrastructure exists, and the margins are probably going to be higher in the stack than they are down at the bottom.

...

OM: When do you think utility computing can be a profitable business; are we’re looking at like maybe two years, four years out before it actually starts to become a profitable entity? RAY OZZIE: (Let’s) take (one company) who is in the market today: Amazon. They chose a price point. There are either customers at that price point or not. They may have priced themselves at expected costs as opposed to actual today costs, but it doesn’t really matter. They could have brought it out at twice the existing price and there still would have been a customer base, and they’d be making money at birth. I think all of these utility-computing services, as they’re born will either be breaking even or profitable. At the scale that we’re talking about, nobody can afford, (even Microsoft) can’t afford to do it at a loss. We could subsidize it, I suppose. Google could subsidize it by profits in other parts of their business, we could subsidize it, but I don’t think there’s any reason that any of us in this world would bring out that infrastructure like this without charging for what we’re paying, and then trying to make some profit over it. The cost base is so high in terms of building these data centers you do want to kind of make it up.

Read the rest of the (edited) interview here.