Valley View TV: Watch Our Live Videocast Aug. 20Valley View TV: Watch Our Live Videocast Aug. 20

Because Silicon Valley is still THE hotbed of innovation, it's high time we created a talk-show platform to get inside the companies, demonstrate the new technology and rip apart the most compelling topics in the valley. So we've created "Valley View," a live Web TV experience from TechWeb and information. In the pilot show this Thursday at 4 p.m. PST we'll feature live demonstrations of SAP's fledgling software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and Sybase's enterprise mobile solutions; we'll talk with both VMWare and its latest pending acquisition, SpringSource; and we'll get some analysis and insights from our senior editors on the latest news.SAP has come under some fire recently as it tries to find its way in a world that still largely uses on-premise software (ever imagine having to use "on premise" as a modifier for software?), but talks aggressively about cloud-based offerings. SAP announced Business ByDesign, its SaaS for small and medium sized companies two years ago and has taken its lumps for its stealthy (read: invisible) execution. SAP has been riddled with questions about the company's seriousness in bringing on-demand offerings to market. However, SAP is ready to show the world that Business ByDesign is real, so we're looking forward to a live demonstration.

Sybase has been working diligently on its mobile platform. Once known as the major database provider, competing with Oracle and Microsoft, it has focused its attention in the past few years on the exploding mobile industry, where it makes the tools to build mobile software, deploy it, and manage it. And it's done this where it may eventually count the most: for the enterprise mobile customer. Sybase plans to demonstrate its offerings, showing us all how well it has been able to work with partners and integrate enterprise-class business processes onto platforms that heretofore have been seen mostly as consumer luxuries (read: texting, photos of your drunk friends).

VMWare has been in the news much of the year as it works to transition from being the company that can help you virtualize your desktops and servers, to a company that is creating the next infrastructure for the cloud. Its vSphere 4 roll-out was well orchestrated, but for those who suspected the company was applying more hype than reality, we've seen a variety of serious follow ups, including a partnership with SpringSource, and investment in Terremark, and a partnership with Terracotta, all followed by last week's announcement of the SpringSource acquisition. It's no big secret now, given the heft of all of this, that VMWare is serious about powering the cloud -- that is, providing the virtual infrastructure to enable private and public "platform as a service" offerings. At a time when cloud architectures are starting to transform, VMWare is offering something different and compelling. We'll hear from executives at both companies, including VMWare Senior VP of Product Marketing, Bogamil Balkansky and the CEO of SpringSource, Rod Johnson.

There's more . . . we'll be looking at a few new mobile devices that information editor Marin Perez has been testing, and we'll talk to Charles Babcock about VMWare and SpringSource, Tom Claburn about one of the biggest credit card thefts in history, and Michael Singer about efforts in college football to shut down social networking at its games (hey,we've got to have a little fun). We'll also visit with Jennifer Pahlka, TechWeb's General Manager for Web 2.0, co-produced with O'Reilly Media -- the theme of the show this year is Web Squared, and we'll talk with Jennifer about exactly what that means and who some of the key players are.

Please join us here (note: this is a working URL but will not have content until we start the show) starting at 4 p.m. PST on August 20.

Fritz Nelson is an Executive Editor at information and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

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