Here are the Tau Index Omega leaders as of late 2011. I’m looking forward to see how things change in the results I’ll present at Cloud Expo.

Tau Index Omega – Global Top 25
1. South Korea
2. Bulgaria
3. Ukraine
4. Lithuania
5. Romania
6. Hungary
7. Vietnam
8. Estonia
9. Czech Republic
10. Sweden
11. Hong Kong
12. Poland
13. Latvia
14. Bangladesh
15. Slovakia
16. Malaysia
17. United Kingdom
18. Singapore
19. Netherlands
20. Morocco
21. Egypt
22. Canada
23. Russia
24. China
25. Slovenia

Notes
I don’t have sufficient information to include Taiwan in my research. I think this nation would finish near the top of the rankings.
The United States finishes 33rd in the ranking, among 82 countries researched

Regional Leaders
Africa
1. Senegal
2. South Africa
3. Kenya
4. Cameroon
5. Nigeria

Americas
1. Canada
2. Honduras
3. United States
4. Mexico
5. Chile

Asia
1. South Korea
2. Vietnam
3. Hong Kong
4. Bangladesh
5. Malaysia

Central/Eastern Europe
1. Bulgaria
2. Ukraine
3. Lithuania
4. Romania
5. Hungary

Western Europe
1. Sweden
2. United Kingdom
3. Netherlands
4. Germany
5. Finland

Middle East/North Africa
1. Morocco
2. Eqypt
3. Israel
4. Saudi Arabia
5. Turkey

By Income
Developed Tier A – Per Capita Income US$29K+
(22 countries in group)
1. Sweden
2. United Kingdom
3. Singapore
4. Netherlands
5. Canada
6. Germany
7. Japan
8. Finland
9. Denmark
10. United States

Developed Tier B – PCI $17K-29K
(7 countries in group)
1. South Korea
2. Czech Republic
3. Hong Kong
4. Slovenia
5. Portugal

Developing Tier A – PCI $7K-17K
(18 countries in group)
1. Lithuania
2. Romania
3. Hungary
4. Estonia
5. Poland
6. Latvia
7. Slovakia
8. Russia
9. Saudi Arabia
10. Turkey

Developing Tier B – PCI $3K-7K
(18 countries in group)
1. Bulgaria
2. Malaysia
3. Egypt
4. China
5. Thailand
6. Tunisia
7. Costa Rica
8. South Africa
9. Jordan
10. Panama

Developing Tier C – PCI <$3K (17 countries in group) 1. Ukraine 2. Vietnam 3. Bangladesh 4. Morocco 5. Honduras 6. Senegal 7. Pakistan 8. India 9. Kenya 10. Philippines

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As Cloud Expo in New York approaches, I’m working to update my Tau Index country rankings. The index integrates economic data with national ICT expenditures, Internet access and speeds, and societal factors.

I’ve created a “raw” index that simply measures the amount of ICT purchased on a relative, “pound-for-pound” basis that accounts for the local cost-of-living in the 82 countries I was able to research. In addition to an overall Top 25 list, I’ve created smaller lists of regional leaders and leaders by income category.

Then I’ve created a more nuanced, “Omega” list that incorporates the technology and societal factors. All of the underlying information is publicly available – from organizations such as the World Bank, United Nations, and the International Telecommunications Union – but the weighting is done with a proprietary algorithm intended to smooth out the raw data’s rough edges and to reflect the “street-level” reality of these countries.

The purpose of this research is to derive a ranking system that provides a more level view of the nations of the world. So many rankings I see are absolute, and simply show rich nations on top, poor countries on the bottom, and a bunch of developing nations in the middle. This is not a criticism, as I use a lot of this information as the foundation of my relative calculations. My purpose is to derive something that’s unique and refreshing.

What Does It Mean?
A high listing in the Omega index most likely indicates that the nation is progressing quickly and relatively smoothly toward strong economic growth, fueld by ICT productivity. A high listing in some of the regional and income-tier groups may also indicate some societal turbulenc, given the often-disruptive power of information technology.

The Tau Index is certainly not meant to find the “best” nations when it comes to their ICT expenditures. It does have an implication that all of the leading nations are on a trajectory for rapid economic advancement, for good and bad.

The laggards on the list have a few of today’s popular countries – Brazil and Indonesia, for example. My take is that the blooms will soon be off of these roses if they don’t turn more toward the sunshine and energy of ICT.

Many of the other laggards are also economic laggards, and should be considered countries of opportunity, in my opinion. Some of the very lowest rankings I’ve discovered belong to intriguing countries that could quickly turn things around with whatever change is necessary to make them more aggressive ICT deployers – Venezuela, Paraguay, Libya, Serbia, to list a few examples.

Coming to Cloud Expo
I’ve conducted all of this research with the assistance of Cloud Computing Journal and Computerworld Philippines.

I don’t expect wholesale changes to the results that I’ll present at Cloud Expo, although I do expect some nations to move up and down. The Tau Index measures societal torque, and by extension, volatility. The Index’s leaders, particularly among developing nations, are very dynamic, even combustile places. They are the ideal places for individuals and companies who like to roll the dice a bit and are seeking (or validating) sources, locations, partnerships, and investments.

The Index’s leaders among developed nations would appear to be the most dynamic, yet stable, nations within a sometimes unstable developed world.

I wrote about the leaders of the raw Tau Index in October. Here are those results.

Then here are the Tau Index Omega leaders as of late 2011. I’m looking forward to see how things change in the results I’ll present at Cloud Expo.

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Grid Dynamics, an eCommerce technology solutions company, and GridGain Systems, makers of an open source in-memory platform for Big Data processing, on Wednesday announced the expansion of their partnership which began in 2008.
Grid Dynamics provides personalization and big data solutions for large-scale eCommerce companies, GridGain’s Java based open source middleware platform allows organizations to perform real time processing and analytics on live big data.

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ServerCentral, Chicago’s leading provider of colocation, cloud, network connectivity, and managed services, announced on Tuesday that its high performance cloud will debut on June 11 at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14 at the Javits Center in New York City.
“ServerCentral customers have voiced their frustrations with cloud offerings which may require thousands of VMs to run large workloads,” explained Jordan Lowe, ServerCentral President and CEO. “Our cloud services support real-world enterprise and content workloads, offering the CPU, network, and disk throughput of high-performance physical servers.”
ServerCentral built their cloud with virtual machines as powerful as physical servers, enabling it to run enterprise workloads with ease. Each VM has dedicated CPU, a generous allocation of memory, and redundant 10-Gigabit connections to ensure data and applications are accessible, protected, and lightning-fast 100% of the time. Additionally, cloud users are able to configure, launch, monitor, and manage their entire cloud infrastructure in a powerful provisioning portal built by ServerCentral’s own Chicago-based software development team.

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ITpreneurs, the leading provider of competence development solutions for IT best practices, will be delivering its Cloud Essentials course at the upcoming Cloud Expo New York, taking place June 11-14, 2012 at the Javits Center in New York City. The two-day course covers core concepts and prepares individuals to become internationally certified by CompTIA.
«We are very pleased that ITpreneurs is providing this course offering for attendees,» said Jeremy Geelan, President & COO, Cloud Expo. «The Cloud Essentials course provides professionals not only with the content to succeed, but the confidence to excel.»
Individuals can register for the course here. Those registered for the course will be able to attend two daily technical sessions, and have access to the Expo floor and all keynote and general information sessions.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that PerspecSys Inc., the leader in cloud data protection solutions for the enterprise, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
PerspecSys Inc. is a leading provider of cloud data protection solutions that enable mission-critical cloud applications to be adopted throughout the enterprise. With PerspecSys, any information that leaves an enterprise’s environment and enters the cloud can be tokenized or encrypted (using strong FIPS 140-2 encryption modules), ensuring that data remains undecipherable when it is being processed or stored in the cloud. PerspecSys accomplishes this for many large, heavily regulated companies across the world, giving them full control over their sensitive data while ensuring that end-user functionality of SaaS cloud applications is maintained. Based in Toronto, PerspecSys Inc. is a privately held company backed by investors that include Intel Capital and GrowthWorks.

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Before embarking on using open source cloud technology for your web property, a basic understanding of cloud, as it’s used in the industry, is essential. While there might be exceptions, here are the definitions.
A software application delivered on the web instead of installing standalone software on a particular OS requiring some environment qualifies as Software as a Service. This makes applications available anywhere on a browser in any OS, device, and also makes latest updates available asynchronously, e.g., email on the web, banking on the web.
PaaS
A web application requires software in turn to be built like the environment, application server, and web server and the configuration of these should be adequate for the applications deployed on this platform. For a Java-based application, one may require a JBoss server to deploy code. With Platform as a Service, instead of trying to manage the JBoss server deployment and configuration, it can be made available as a service and integrated right within your IDE, e.g., openshift.redhat.com, cloudfoundry.org.

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Eucalyptus Systems provides IT organizations and technology businesses with the most widely deployed cloud software platform for on-premise Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Eucalyptus is built as an open source cloud product and is uniquely suited for enterprise-class private cloud or hybrid cloud computing.
Eucalyptus is the world’s most widely deployed private cloud software platform. Our software enables companies to turn their own hardware into so called private clouds. With Eucalyptus installed on your servers and your storage system, you have a cloud of your own with the benefits that you are used to from the public cloud such as Amazon Web Services.
Some examples: Puma runs all their consumer-facing websites on Eucalyptus. This allows them to move workloads around and provide compute power to the website or campaign that needs it most. The US Department of Agriculture built a modern mobile application for farmers. The application runs on a Eucalyptus cloud installed on USDA’s existing servers. Plinga runs massive social games on both the public cloud and on Eucalyptus. They can move the games back and forth without change.

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Like a moving company for the cloud, Racemi provides the ability to easily migrate Windows server images to public clouds. The company is a sponsor at the upcoming Cloud Expo where visitors can see Racemi demonstrate server migrations.
Racemi announced on Wednesday its DynaCenter software can now quickly and easily migrate Windows server images to public cloud providers including Amazon EC2, GoGrid, Rackspace and Terremark. It also provides flexibility to move workloads from one cloud computing provider to another, as well as to a physical or virtual server – in any combination or direction.

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