Wyse Technology, a provider of cloud client computing, on Wednesday announced that Tarkan Maner, President and CEO of Wyse, will be a featured speaker at the World Economic Forum (WEF) on the Middle East, North Africa and Eurasia 2012. The event theme «Bridging Regions in Transformations» takes place in Istanbul, Turkey from June 4-6, 2012.

This historic summit returns to Istanbul and is backed by Turkey Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This is the first time the WEF will hold a summit to handle both Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions in the 42 years of its history. The summit will bring together more than 1,000 people from the political, business, civil society and media sectors and participants will discuss economic growth and humanitarian development.

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2012. This is the year of the cloud. This is the year that business is realising it needs the cloud. But why?

Efficiencies is the answer.

If surviving the GFC taught us one thing, it’s how to be lean. If business, and especially small business is to survive and even thrive post-GFC, it must learn to operate on a strict diet.

To be lean and mean. This means not just micro-managing your managers and staff to greater productivity, but looking at your business systems and how they can serve you, not the other way around.

By choosing wisely with public cloud services, businesses can selectively tailor a cloud-based system to their needs (and budget) without the expensive implementation and overheads previously seen with proprietary systems.

For example, a small business (in a remote country location) we are currently co-consulting with was looking to decentralise their accounting work. They wanted …

In a previous post, I touched on the need to have APIs for managing storage in cloud environments.  In this post, I’ll talk about how the way in which storage is deployed in cloud environments has to change.

For the last 10 years, the advent of Storage Area Networks (SANs) has created a storage-centric view.

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Wyse, a provider of cloud client computing, on Wednesday announced its participation in the eLearning Africa conference and exhibition. As the event’s platinum sponsor for the second year running, Wyse will discuss how advanced cloud client computing can help African educators meet their goals for widening access to technology-enhanced education, development and training. eLearning Africa runs from 23rd – 25th May 2012 in Cotonou, Benin, under the patronage of the Government of Benin.

Working across the continent with its local technology partners, Wyse has developed and deployed a range of solutions that are ideally suited to widening access to IT-enhanced education and training in Africa. The technologies involved are tailored to the continent’s requirements for classroom ICT that is exceptionally reliable, affordable and energy efficient while not compromising on access to the latest applications and data for teaching and learning.

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The consolidation fairy has struck again.

SAP said late Tuesday that SAP America will be buying Ariba for about $4.3 billion, paying $45 a share, a 20% premium, for a company that had revenues of $443.9 million last year, up 38.5%.

Ariba also reportedly has $196 million in the bank.

Ariba’s purchase price falls in between two big recent SAP purchases: the $5.8 billion it paid for the Sybase database in 2010 and the $3.4 billion it paid for SuccessFactors and its talent management widgetry late last year. Spending like it was Oracle, SAP paid $6.8 billion for French BI house Business Objects in 2007.

SAP is going to use cash on hand and debt to pay for its new prize. The acquisition should be accretive in 2013.

SAP is positioning Ariba’s global B2B trading network as “collaboration-as-a-service” or “procurement in the cloud.”

SAP’s co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann said in a statement that “Cloud-based collaboration is redefining business network innovation, and we are catching this wave in the early stage of its evolution.”

SAP figures Ariba’s widgetry will ultimately benefit from its own real-time in-memory Hana platform.

Ariba currently connects 730,000 companies, whose transactions are worth $319 billion. It expects Ariba to hit a million companies this year. It sees opportunities in China, South America and the Mid-East.

Ariba will remain a free-standing subsidiary after the acquisition closes in Q3 with its network open to companies using Oracle and Microsoft software to connect.

But SAP also said that together SAP and Ariba can deliver an end-to-end solution that enables companies to achieve a closed-loop from source-to-pay, regardless of whether they deploy in the cloud, on-premise or through a combination of both.

The California concern, called the second-largest cloud vendor by revenue, has some 2,600 employees. Ariba CEO Bob Calderoni will be joining SAP’s global managing board. He will run all of SAP’s cloud-related supplier assets.

SAP itself is expecting double-digit revenue growth this quarter and this year despite weakness in the mature markets.

Oracle last month picked up SuccessFactors rival Taleo for $1.9 billion.

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The consolidation fairy has struck again.

SAP said late Tuesday that SAP America will be buying Ariba for about
$4.3 billion, paying $45 a share, a 20% premium, for a company that had
revenues of $443.9 million last year, up 38.5%.

Ariba also reportedly has $196 million in the bank.

Ariba’s purchase price falls in between two big recent SAP purchases: the
$5.8 billion it paid for the Sybase database in 2010 and the $3.4 billion it
paid for SuccessFactors and its talent management widgetry late last year.
Spending like it was Oracle, SAP paid $6.8 billion for French BI house
Business Objects in 2007.

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In Part 1 of this series, we highlighted Enterprise Strategy Group’s 2012 Spending Intentions Survey, showing that organizations plan to spend 60-72% of IT budget maintaining existing infrastructure in 2012. This second installment takes a deeper look at the maintenance cost of data storage infrastructure and how cloud technologies can help.
Consider the IT burden of maintaining data storage. Regardless of industry, data storage capacities are constantly growing and on-premise storage arrays require upgrade and replacement on a regular basis. This results in a constant stream of maintenance tasks.
Let’s take an example: Assume an organization stores data across 6 separate storage arrays. A typical 3-year life cycle per storage array would mandate at least two migrations/retirements of storage arrays per year in addition to two new storage array purchases. And remember, each time a storage array purchase is required, there’s a qualification process that precedes the purchase. Also, if each storage array requires three software upgrades per year, 18 total upgrades would need to be orchestrated annually in a way that minimizes business risk. Let’s not forget that hardware and network failures, which may not cause outages thanks to RAID-protection and redundancy, also require manual intervention and repair.

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As a Silver Sponsor of Cloud Expo New York, CloudPassage is offering special passes to 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.
CloudPassage is the leading cloud server security provider, and creator of Halo, the industry’s first and only security and compliance platform, purpose-built for elastic cloud environments. Halo supports cloud server bursting, cloning, and migration and operates across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. Industry leading companies like Foursquare, StrongMail and Exois trust Halo to seamlessly manage their server security configuration, host-based firewalls, intrusion detection, and server account auditing from one system. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., CloudPassage is backed by Benchmark Capital. Gartner, Inc. named CloudPassage one of four «Cool Vendors in Cloud Security Services, 2011.»

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