Advocates on both sides of the net neutrality debate descended on Harvard Law School Monday for a U.S. FCC hearing that multiple speakers suggested was crucial to the Internet's future.

Members of the FCC, along with industry representatives, legal scholars, and pro-neutrality advocates spoke at the hearing, which drew an overflow crowd.

"The Internet is as much mine and yours as it is AT&T's and Comcast's," said Rep. Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts.

Markey has filed a bill along with Rep.Charles Pickering, a Republican from Mississippi, in support of net neutrality, the idea that network providers shouldn't discriminate against Web sites or various types of traffic. The FCC is investigating complaints that Comcast has interfered with p-to-p (peer-to-peer) traffic associated with file-sharing sites.

"Network operators are making choices right now that will determine how Americans communicate, now and in the future," said FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps. "I am not saying that any or all of these practices are unlawful. I am saying that choices like these, when you add them all together, are going to determine what kind of Internet we have in the future."

Other FCC members echoed Copps.

"Respect for the free flow of information was bred into our country from its founding," said Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein. "We must preserve the open and neutral character of the Internet, which has been its hallmark from the very beginning. It is clear consumers don't want the Internet to be a another version of old media dominated by a number of giants."

Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Vuze, a video service that uses P-to-P technology, said that while his company competes with Comcast in the delivery of content, the latter company holds an unfair advantage. "What we have here is a horse race, and Comcast owns the racetrack. I agree the market should decide which services win ... but there is no market without basic ground rules and transparency. ... We believe corporate assurances of good faith are not enough."

Marvin Ammori, chief counsel for Free Press, an advocacy group backing the net neutrality effort, also described Monday's discussion in sweeping terms.

"This hearing is not about technical details of managing networks, it's about the future of online TV and the Internet," Ammori said. "By targeting p-to-p, Comcast is disrupting investment and innovation in its online competition."

But David Cohen, executive vice president of Comcast, was as vigorous in defending his company's practices as its critics were in lambasting it.

"Comcast does not block any Web site, application, or protocol, including p-to-p. Period," he said.

The company only "manages" protocols such as p-to-p during limited periods of heavy traffic; does so in limited geographic areas; only manages uploads, not downloads; and merely delays, not totally blocks requests for uploads, he said.

"It's true that to maximize our customer's Internet experience, we do manage our network. But don't let the rhetoric scare you. There's nothing wrong with it," he said. "Every network must be managed. Our customers want us to manage network congestion, so they can do what they want, when they want, at reasonable speeds."

Tom Tauke, executive vice president for public affairs policy and communications at Verizon, noted that his company's investment in fiber-optic networks has resulted in exponential growth in the size of data pipes to residential homes, but network management is still necessary. "As capacity grows, so do the applications and services. This is a good thing, but you still have to have reasonable network practices," he said.

Later Monday, the hearing continued with a second panel, this one stocked with an array of technologists from the academic and commercial sectors.

"Some kind of network management is critical. ... the question is how to do that in an open manner," said Daniel Weitzner, director of the MIT's Decentralized Information Group.

At the same time, the Web's days as a primarily client-server environment are over, he suggested: "The profile of the way people use the Internet today is peer-to-peer, and we have to deal with it. But I think it poses a challenge way beyond whether we all get our BitTorrent or not. What's really at stake is everyone's ability to speak with everyone else."

David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT, predicted the debate could ultimately be settled by moving away from current pricing plans -- which see ISPs charge varying rates for a broadband line's speed, but not for the amount of content downloaded -- to a cost schedule based more on data volume.

Eric Klinker, CTO of BitTorrent, said it is wrong for the industry to view his company as a force "endlessly consuming bandwidth."

In fact, he argued, BitTorrent has actually solved a problem: "How do we effectively move large files on the Internet?" He listed off a series of public and private-sector organizations, ranging from film studios to NASA, that employ p-to-p file sharing to deliver large files.

Efforts to thwart p-to-p traffic "would stamp out in its infancy the most promising technology we have to deliver a world of near-infinite content," he said, adding that the United States falls far behind other nations in terms of its Internet infrastructure: "Geopolitically, we might think of ourselves as a superpower, but when measured against network power we're a third-world country at best."

This article was updated on Feb. 25, 2008.

Most computer industry companies would feel satisfied with ruling the highly lucrative and technically complex search engine advertising market -- but not Google.

As the search giant celebrates its 10th anniversary of incorporation this month, riding a years-long bonanza from its search business, it is also a scrappy underdog with lofty aspirations in the world of software for workplaces.

As such, Google, the unmatched consumer search engine champion, must compete against seasoned and formidable IT providers like Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM. This is no small undertaking, requiring a long-term commitment and heavy investments, while facing real risks.

The jury is still out on whether it's wise for Google to invest significant resources in providing software for enterprise search, office productivity, mapping, collaboration and communication.

It's estimated that about 98 percent of the company's revenue comes from consumer search advertising, making the company's Enterprise unit a small side business currently, at least from a dollar perspective.

Industry observers recommend that IT and business managers keep this in mind as a risk factor when considering buying enterprise products from Google.

Although Google maintains it is committed long term to its enterprise products, it isn't unheard of for large companies to change course and pull out of non-core businesses with little advanced notice.

The warning should be heeded particularly by CIOs in large companies contemplating a major investment in products such as the Google Apps Premier hosted communication and collaboration suite.

"I would absolutely ask that question," said Forrester analyst Rob Koplowitz. "As long as 98 percent of Google's revenue comes from other sources, this question of whether they're in [enterprise software] for the long term will always come up. This isn't their core business."

Burton Group analyst Guy Creese concurs. "In its heart of hearts, Google wants to succeed as a provider of software to large enterprises, but they haven't yet signaled that it's a do-or-die kind of thing," Creese said.

The highest-profile product in Google's Enterprise unit is Apps, whose free versions have proven very popular with individuals, small and medium-size businesses and educational institutions.

Google could have opted to just target universities and SMBs with the Standard and Education editions of Apps, generating revenue from advertising. It could also have been content to lure SMBs to the Premier version, which is a very affordable option at $50 per user per year, when compared to Microsoft Office and Exchange.

"The things preventing Google from being attractive to enterprises aren't necessarily big issues for SMBs," Creese said.

Google could rake in robust revenue from SMBs, which are often underserved by major vendors and hold off on purchasing IT products that they need but aren't priced right for them, Koplowitz said. "There's a lot of money to be made there," he said.

This accounts for much of the success Google has had with its Search Appliance and Google Mini, which have disrupted the enterprise search market, where systems have traditionally been pricey and complicated to install, manage, and use. Priced aggressively and built with a low-maintenance, plug-and-play design, those products have hit a sweet spot with SMBs and schools.

The University of Florida in Gainsville has been using the Search Appliance since 2002 and currently has two of them to index its entire public Web presence -- from its main site to individual college and department sites and Web servers from specific research teams.

"The appliance has always been easy to set up and maintain. The administrative interface gives a very clear overview of how the appliance sees your Web sites, and makes it easy to update the index," said Daniel Westermann-Clark, Web developer at the university.

According to Google, more than 500,000 organizations have signed up for Google Apps, totaling more than 10 million end users, of which "hundreds of thousands" are using Premier.

However, Google has made it clear it has its sights set on large companies as well, recently releasing a newly architected version of the Search Appliance that can index more than three times as many documents as the current model and improves the product's IT management functions.

But it's the Apps Premier expectations that are riding particularly high. As CIOs warm up to the SaaS (software-as-a-service) approach of application delivery as an option to the traditional on-premise model, Google sees a big opportunity to take business away from Microsoft's Office/Exchange and from IBM's Notes/Domino and rake in big bucks.

In fact, a big motivation behind Google's development of Chrome, a major two-year project involving significant investment, was to create a browser optimized for next-generation Web applications like the ones in Apps Premier.

Google is far from alone, as Yahoo's Zimbra, Cisco's WebEx, Zoho, and others beef up their own hosted collaboration and communication suites, while Microsoft and IBM are taking steps to protect their turf.

In its enterprise aspirations, Google has other disadvantages. Unlike Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce.com, Google doesn't have a large list of enterprise clients, nor does it have as much experience courting CIOs and catering to their requirements, including prompt, individual attention throughout a product's lifecycle.

While Google has strengthened Apps Premier's IT control features, particularly with its purchase of e-mail security and management expert Postini, the suite still lacks features that large enterprises often require. For example, Google only offers an uptime guarantee for Gmail, not for the other components, and the company admits that the feature set of its applications lags behind Office's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, while Apps' calendaring and contact management features are often cited as weak. Apps has only partial support for offline access to its applications, a popular request.

"Google hasn't been able to put together a set of features that are important enough to enterprises to make them shift," Creese says.

Thus, CIOs aren't rushing to adopt Apps Premier, and those who decide to deploy it are opting to do so for a limited set of users and for operations that aren't critical to the business. This is true even among CIOs who have embraced SaaS applications as viable alternatives to on-premise software.

Health-care company The Schumacher Group has used hosted applications successfully for well over two years from vendors such as Salesforce.com and Oracle's PeopleSoft, and is now about to deploy Apps Premier, but not as a replacement to its Exchange/Office environment, which its about 750 full-time employees use.

Instead, The Schumacher Group, which provides management services for hospital emergency rooms, plans to buy Apps Premier licenses for the about 2,400 physicians and nurses that it works with as independent contractors.

"We'll use Apps Premier to create an environment that doesn't exist now, but as far as replacing Exchange and Office, we're not at that level yet," said The Schumacher Group CIO Douglas Menefee.

Part of the problem is that Apps Premier can't meet the company's regulatory compliance requirements for handling patient data, Menefee said. However, it looks like a good option to provide e-mail, calendar and office collaboration software at a low cost and in a convenient hosted manner to these doctors and nurses, he said.

The decision to go with Apps Premier, as opposed to another hosted option, is 99 percent certain, barring any architectural problems that might prevent the users from accessing the software through the hospitals' networks. A pilot phase with portion of the doctors may start in about a month, he said.

And so as Google celebrates its 10th birthday and its unquestionable dominance of the search engine ad market, which has propelled it to stratospheric financial success, it looks at a major challenge and unanswered questions in enterprise software.

"It's hard to break into the enterprise business," Koplowitz said. "Will Google sign those big customers that represent big revenue and continued investment in this area? Google certainly can afford it, but that doesn't mean they won't decide to refocus their resources in their core business. That's definitely a fair question to ask of Google. I don't think Google is having cold feet yet but time will tell if they're in this for the long term."

Adobe Systems in October plans to launch a private pilot program for its "Genesis" mashup technology, which provides a desktop client uniting multiple tasks in a single workspace.

The pilot project will provide Genesis to selected customers and partners, with 100 to 200 people set to test it, said Matthias Zeller, group product manager for corporate development at Adobe, in an interview at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Friday. A more widespread beta program is eyed for some point in the future.

With Genesis, Adobe is aiming to save users from having to open up multiple windows to access various applications; Genesis, which is just a code name, provides a unified user experience for each specific project. Serving as an alternative to portals, Genesis offers business users links to enterprise applications, business intelligence, documents, and Web applications. Content can be shared with other users. Instant messaging, VoIP, and video collaboration are supported as well.

"It's a mashup on the client," Zeller said. Users can make a "mini-portals on the desktop," he said.

Genesis is built with Adobe's Flex technology and deployed on the desktop via Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). Supported on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, the client is developed with Flex and compiles into Adobe's Flash software.

Users, for example, could bring together a Salesforce.com application with PowerPoint materials and Google searches. "Today, you do all that separately," requiring many windows, said Zeller.

"The idea in Genesis is bring all these windows into a workspace, which is persistent on your desktop," he said. The desktop leverages drag-and-drop capabilities. The Genesis user experience takes cues from products such as Adobe Photoshop Express for assembling content.

Also featured in Genesis is the notion of content catalogs, to be provided by enterprise users themselves or Adobe partners. The company plans to work with other vendors to develop these catalogs. Adobe already is working with Business Objects regarding development of BI dashboards.

"The whole concept of Genesis relies on an ecosystem of partners and end-users to provide content for it," Zeller said.

Adobe has not set precise product release plans for Genesis. But plans call for users to access the client for free and subscribe to Adobe's Acrobat.com hosted service to handle collaboration.

The disk storage industry defied economic gloom in the second quarter with strong increases in both capacity sold and revenue, according to two research companies.

Worldwide revenue from external disk storage systems grew 16.7 percent in the quarter, the fastest year-over-year increase that market has seen in two years, IDC said on Friday. Meanwhile, total disk storage systems revenue grew 10.9 percent, according to IDC. Vendors shipped 1,777 petabytes of capacity in total, up 43.7 percent from a year earlier.

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Sales growth was remarkable especially because it occurred across several market segments, IDC said in a news release.

Despite economic slowdowns in some parts of the world, storage demand has been growing rapidly, driven in part by increased use of video and by regulations that force enterprises to preserve more data. IDC has estimated overall demand for storage capacity is growing by about 60 percent per year.

IDC defines a disk storage system as a set of storage elements associated with three or more disks. Some are located inside server cabinets and some are external. While the total disk storage system market hit $6.9 billion in revenue in the second quarter, the external market grew to $5.08 billion.

EMC kept its lead in external disk storage systems with 21.7 percent of the market, followed by IBM and Hewlett-Packard in a statistical tie with 13.1 percent and 12.9 percent, respectively. EMC's revenue grew fastest among the major vendors, up 19.7 percent to $1.101 billion from $920 billion a year earlier. HP's growth rate was lowest, at 8.2 percent, and the company lost a full percentage point in market share.

In the total disk storage systems market, HP fared even worse with a 1.2 percent drop in revenue, while all other major vendors gained. Though HP remained in the lead, it fell to an 18.1 percent market share, nearly tied with IBM at 17.7 percent. EMC was in third place and Dell in fourth. Sun Microsystems had the strongest rise in revenue, at 29.2 percent. Its revenue grew to $494 million and its market share to 7.1 percent.

According to figures from research company Gartner, the external controller-based disk storage market grew 18.8 percent in the second quarter, reaching $4.46 billion in revenue. EMC lost half a percentage point of market share but maintained a commanding lead at 24.3 percent, experiencing 16 percent revenue growth in the quarter. Next was IBM with 14.1 percent of the market, followed by HP, Dell, and Hitachi Data Systems. NetApp came in sixth but had a strong 22.9 percent revenue gain, Gartner said.

Sun's revenue shot up 34.7 percent in the quarter, according to Gartner, which attributed the gain to its StorageTek 2000-, 6000-, and 9000-series products. The relative newcomer to storage, which entered the market through StorageTek and other acquisitions, had 6.6 percent of the market.

Gartner found the Japanese market leading in growth, with revenue up 38.7 percent from a year earlier, followed by Latin America with 25.2 percent. Europe, the Middle East and Africa had growth of 22.3 percent, and the Asia-Pacific region grew 16.6 percent. North America trailed all other regions with 12.7 percent growth, according to Gartner.

Microsoft Friday renamed the next major release of BizTalk server and committed to releasing major updates to the business process management server line ever two years or less.

Burley Kawasaki, director of product management in Microsoft's connected systems division, said the company changed the name of the name of the next version from BizTalk Server 2006 R3 to BizTalk Server 2009 to indicate that its a major release. The new version is slated to ship during the first half of next year, he added.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

BizTalk Server 2006 R2 was made generally available last September.

"[Users] want more transparency," Kawasaki said. "As they're doing more and more with our technology, they want to be able to plan for future releases. We're trying to provide much more transparency about where we're going with BizTalk."

Kawasaki went on to outline the major new features planned for the 2009 release and for the follow-on major release, now referred to as BizTalk Server 7.

The 2009 release, he said, will add support for Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, SQL Server 2008, and the .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 as well as bolstered connectivity and better developer productivity tools.

On the connectivity front, the server will include a new Web services registry, new business adapters, better host systems integration, and enhanced business activity monitoring, Microsoft said. It will also include improved support for EDI and AS2 protocols for business-to-business connectivity, Kawasaki added.

For developers, BizTalk 2009 adds support for Microsoft's Team Foundation Server and provides development teams with integrated source control, bug tracking, Project Server integration, and support for team development.

Microsoft plans to focus on developer productivity and visibility in BizTalk Server 7, Kawasaki added. For example, Microsoft hopes to provide an easier way to do automated mapping between systems and protocols to speed connectivity. Release 7 will also focus on asset management to support remote devices beyond RFID readers, he added.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Google garnered headlines all week with its new Chrome browser. Rival Microsoft announced it will release just four patches next Tuesday, but that may not be cause to think the day will be an easy one for those responsible for keeping systems patched. On the virtualization front, HP launched a product-and-services blitz this week, while VMware picked up a Microsoft certification. Otherwise, a warning was issued about new trickery from spammers, and in case we all weren't aware of it by now, social-networking sites could be ripe for malware.

1. Continuing coverage: Google's Chrome browser: Google offered up a Labor Day holiday surprise when it inadvertently posted a look at its new Chrome browser at an unofficial company blog. Google then made the news official later in the day and released the browser, which shifts the landscape of that market, in beta on Tuesday. Reviewers found the Chrome browser fast, functional, and, following the Google home-page pattern, with a stripped-down look. By week's end, though, the first security problems had surfaced.

2. Upcoming Microsoft patch lineup could be 'massive,' says researcher: A word of warning for next week -- don't assume that because Microsoft is releasing only four patches this month that it will be a snap to deal with them. "It's not going to be an easy month, what with all these different applications and different operating systems affected. Patching will be a lot more involved than you'd think with just four bulletins," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security. The job of applying the patches could be "potentially massive," he said.

3. Researchers build malicious Facebook application: A research team built a malicious Facebook program to show the perils of social-networking applications. Their experiment shows how easy it could be for a miscreant to trick a big group of users into downloading an application that seems harmless, but that contains malicious code.

4. Should IT form a union?: Demands on IT workers keep piling up, and they have to labor under the constant threat of having their jobs outsourced. Is it time for IT workers to unionize in order to demand better working conditions? Perhaps, but the idea could also be a tough sell in the "lone gunman" ethos of IT work.

5. Sony recalls 73,000 Vaio laptops due to burn hazard: Sony recalled 73,000 Vaio TZ laptops because a manufacturing defect could cause them to overheat in some circumstances. Wiring near the hinge of the computer models could short circuit, Sony said. One person has suffered a minor burn and Sony has gotten 15 additional reports about computers overheating.

6. Spammers use free Web services to shield links: Spammers are using free Web services to try to make the spam links they send out look more legitimate, according to MessageLabs. Photo-hosting sites and the like are being used by spammers who are taking advantages of various features offered as part of free services, the e-mail security vendor has found.

7. HP launches product blitz for virtualization: Responding to survey findings that show most businesses aren't making the most of what virtualization has to offer, HP introduced several new products aimed at both desktop and server virtualization. Besides the hardware, including a new ProLiant server and desktop thin clients, HP is alos offering virtualization consulting services.

8. VMware's ESX certified for Microsoft support, deployment: Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program has issued its first certification with VMware's ESX hypervisor receiving the honors. The certification means that VMware's product will work with Microsoft's Windows Server and other software. It also means that ESX users will be able to receive tech support from both companies.

9. Internet traffic growth slowing, research firm shows: Remember the alarming reports that the Internet is going to collapse under the weight of its own data, especially as more video goes online? Well ... for the second year in a row, international Internet capacity grew at a quicker pace than Internet traffic, according to TeleGeography. International Internet traffic grew 53 percent from the middle of last year to the middle of this year, compared to 61 percent in the prior year. Between 2007 and 2008, average traffic utilization levels on the Internet dropped to 29 percent from 31 percent, with peak utilization decreasing from 44 percent to 43 percent, the market-tracking firm found.

10. Cheaters: Inside the hidden world of IT certification fraud: A group of IT hardware and software vendors have joined with independent certifying agencies, test centers and some others to create the IT Certification Council in an effort to share information to keep certification fraud from occurring. Certification cheating is apparently a dirty little IT secret that the council seeks to bring into the open.