GoodData and its Cloud BI Platform, which got started in the Czech Republic, have closed a $25 million C round from Tenaya Capital, along with Next World Capital and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners. Tenaya, the old Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, gets a board seat.
The Big Data analytics start-up has raised $53.5 million to date.
It claims more than 6,000 customers, including Capgemini and Software AG, have adopted its widgetry to monetize their data and says it posted 600% bookings growth last year, more than doubling employees and customers.
Archivo mensual: julio 2012
Cloud Computing: Capacity Control Systems in the Cloud
“Version 7 has an advanced control console – it’s an interactive visualization of a data center, it could be virtual or cloud-based, and it tells you if you have any inefficiencies or risks,” stated Andrew Hillier, CTO of CiRBA, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Automation & Orchestration Part 1: What’s In A Name? That Which We Call a “Service”…
The phrases “service,” “abstraction,” & “automation & orchestration” are used a lot these days. Over the course of the next few blogs, I am going to describe what I think each phrase means and in the final blog I will describe how they all tie in together.
Let’s look at “service.” To me, when you trim off all the fat that word means, “Something (from whom) that provides a benefit to something (to whom).” The first thing that comes to mind when I think of who provides me a service is a bartender. I like wine. They have wine behind the bar. I will pay them the price of a glass + 20% for them to fill that glass & move it from behind the bar to in front of me. It’s all about services these days. Software-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and Platform-as-a-Service. Professional services. Service level agreement. No shirts, no shoes, no service.
Within a company, there are many people working together to deliver a service. Some to external people & some to internal people. I want to examine an internal service because those tend to be much more loosely defined & documented. If a company sells an external service to a customer, chances are that service is very well defined b/c that company needs to describe in very clear terms to the customer exactly what they are getting when the customer shells out money. If that service changes, careful consideration needs to be paid to what ways that service can add more benefit (i.e., make the company more money) and in what ways parts of that service will change or be removed. Think about how many “Terms of Service & Conditions” pamphlets you get from a credit card company and how many pages each one is.
It can take many, many hours as a consultant in order to understand a service as it exists in a company today. Typically, the “something” that provides a benefit are the many people who work together to deliver that service. In order to define the service and its scope, you need to break it down into manageable pieces…let’s call them “tasks.” And those tasks can be complex so you can break those down into “steps.” You will find that each task, with its one or more steps, which is part of a service, is usually performed by the same person over and over again. Or, if the task is performed a lot (many times per day) then that task can usually be executed by a member of a team and not just a single person. Having the capability internally for more than one person to perform a task also protects the company from when Bob in accounting takes a sick day or when Bob in accounting takes home a pink slip. I’ll throw in a teaser for when I cover automation and orchestration…it would be ideal that not only can Bob do a task, but a computer as well (automation). That also may play into Bob getting a pink slip…but, again, more on that later. For now Bob doesn’t need to update his resume.
A lot of companies have not documented many, if any, of the internal services they deliver. I’m sure there is someone who knows the service from soup to nuts, but it’s likely they don’t know how (can’t) to do every task—or—may not have the authority/permission (shouldn’t) to do the task. Determining who in a company performs what task(s) can be a big undertaking in and of itself. And then, once you find Bob (sorry to pick on you Bob), it takes a lot of time for him to describe all the steps he does to complete a task. And once you put it on paper & show Bob, he remembers that he missed a step. And once you’ve pieced it all together and Bob says, “Yup, that about covers it,” you ask Bob what happens when something goes wrong and he looks at you and says, “Oh man, where do I begin?”
That last part is key. When things go well I call it the “Happy Day Scenario.” But things don’t always go well (ask the Yankees after the 2004 season) and just as, if not more, important in understanding a service is to know what to do when the Bob hits the fan. This part is almost never documented. Documentation is boring to lots of people and it’s hard enough for people to capture what the service *should* do let alone what it *could* do if something goes awry. So it’s a challenge to get people to recall and also predict what could go wrong. Documenting and regurgitating the steps of a business service “back” to the company is a big undertaking and very valuable to that company. Without knowing what Bob does today, it’s extremely hard to tell him how he can do it better.
LinkedIn Leaked Password Statistics (Infographic)
VMTurbo Joins the OpenStack Push
VMTurbo and its workload management software are going to support OpenStack.
Although philosophically it tends to lean more to the data center, VMTurbo already integrates with the alternative open source CloudStack platform and the proprietary VMware vCloud Director.
It figures that the service providers currently outfitting private and public cloud infrastructures are going to go with one or two of those three so it wants to have all the bases covered, which is why it’s joining the OpenStack community.
Why cloud should be part of your business mobilisation
A survey of mobile enterprise app developers has found that a significant percentage plan to integrate some kind of cloud service into their apps in the near future.
Mobile platform company Appcelerator’s quarterly survey of its developers, carried out by IDC, found that 83% of devs will utilise cloud services and also intend to use a cloud solution for the back end of their apps.
The numbers are roughly in line with a similar study from Appcelerator conducted during the same quarter last year. Analysts suggested a number of factors encouraging cloud utilisation for enterprise app developers, including the increasingly compelling nature of some of the services available, like push notification.
Also, difficulty in developing back-end-server-side capabilities in-house, particularly for developers focused on client side activities, was a factor, combined with the increasingly complex job of managing the myriad connections that modern mobile apps require.
Push notification was the …
Cloud Computing: Self-Service Cloud Deployments
«We secure virtual servers running in public and private clouds. We are building all the security technologies that people need for their public cloud servers which they don’t have access to since they moved outside their own private data center,» explained Rand Wacker, Vice President of Product Management for CloudPassage, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud Computing: The Transformational Cloud
“Cloud solutions are great for lots of workloads but the cloud is not perfect for everything,” noted Robert Miggins, senior vice president of business development for PEER 1 Hosting, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. And Miggins continued, “We have many examples of highly skilled clients that are staying with traditional hosting or pursuing hybrid solutions for various reasons.
Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?
Robert Miggins: I strongly agree. What good is data without putting it to use to make good decisions?
Cloud Computing: Compliance and Security in the Cloud
“We have about 30 major cloud assessments going on. The problems we’re solving is that security and compliance are a continual challenge to cloud providers and we’re there to help organizations understand what to do,” stated Tom McAndrew, EVP of Professional Services at Coalfire, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud Computing: From Private Data Centers to the Cloud
“The Internet is exploding. The Internet is at an inflection point and cloud computing is one of the drivers,,” stated Neil Cohen, VP of Product Marketing at Akamai, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.