Are you suffering from double vision in your IT? As odd as it sounds, this is a common occurrence. Line-of-business (LOB) stakeholders often use a different set of criteria to measure IT than IT uses to measure itself. This can lead to a kind of “double vision”that can hurt IT prospects. A cloud-centric IT maturity model is a useful tool for evaluating present IT capabilities and planning future growth. It is increasingly being used to establish present and future success criteria for IT in a common language understood by all parties. In this article, we will discuss three essential dimensions of IT maturity and how they can be applied to help IT decision makers achieve their goals.

read more

We’re updating our research at the Tau Institute, something that I launched earlier this year in Asia and the US with sponsorship from Cloud Computing Journal and Computerworld Philippines. We’re aided by an advisory board with members from the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

I started this research late in 2010 with the mission of developing a relative index of national ICT competitiveness that measures things on a “pound-for-pound” scale. Its aim was to go beyond traditional measures that, in the end, simply list rich countries on the top, poor countries on the bottom.

Our method accounts heavily for per-person income levels and local cost-of-living; we’re seeking those countries that do the most with what they currently have. Today, we are integrating several publicly available measures into a series of indices, covering 85 nations. Among the measures integrated into the research are per capita income adjusted for local cost-of-living, Internet access and speed, income disparity, overall development, and corruption levels.

We incorporate a number of exponential and logarithmic iterations that smooth these different measures into curves that reveal which countries are leading the world, which are lagging, and which have the greatest potential.

Global Leaders
We’ve found that the countries who’ve done the best job in developing their ICT infrastructures given their available resources include South Korea, Estonia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Vietnam, the UK, Lithuania, Germany, Taiwan, Canada, and Poland. The USA finishes slightly above the middle of the pack.

Countries that we see having the most potential for continuing rapid development (irrespective of their current development level) include Vietnam, Kenya, Ukraine, Nigeria, Bulgaria, Romania, Morocco, Mongolia, Senegal, Serbia, Egypt, Lithuania, China, the Philippines, and Hungary.

We don’t account for population, so a very small superstar like Estonia (with only 1.5 million people) will not be as attractive in many cases as the USA and other developed powers or lagging giants such as India and Indonesia. We also realize there are well-apparent challenges in each member of the latter group.

Our research is intended simply to start conversations rather than finish tem. In a chaotic world we think we’ve isolated the true superstars, while also developing a list of places we’d recommend for the intrepid, whether you seek markets, sources, subsidiaries, or investments.

We’ve created a “PerfectLand” as a benchmark, which has optimal statistics in all categories. No countries exceed PerfectLand in overall excellence, while, as expected, PerfectLand runs in the middle of the pack when it comes to continuing potential.

Beyond the Basics
In addition to the overall indices, we’ll create rankings by income level, region, and special categories such as “BRICS+” and “ASEAN+”. We also plan to develop detailed country and regional reports for sponsors who require them.

Another big initiative will be to add several dimensions of social media to the research, something that should benefit avidly social countries such as the Philippines, India, and others.

We’ll have full results in time for Cloud Expo November 5-8 in Santa Clara. Meanwhile, contact me through Twitter if you’d like to know more.

read more

Undoubtedly one of the key reasons for so many innovations happening in the information technology space is consumerization. While some feel that consumerization has reached the tipping point, consumers (and businesses as well) are still looking for newer avenues to do things more intuitively and effectively. Video is emerging as the new commodity to enhance the overall experience of how information and knowledge is shared and also how consumers and businesses collaborate. Voice is becoming passé and video has the potential to replace it.
Building solutions that are centered on video has its own challenges and some of these can be well addressed by cloud computing. Before finalizing on the roadmap for any future video-based solutions, it’s important to understand and develop the right perspective on the role of cloud computing for video.

read more

Liaison Technologies has acquired Hubspan figuring that the merger of the two integration companies will create the pure-play leader in the fast-growing cloud-based business integration sector.
Terms were not disclosed.
Hubspan was founded in 2000 and is credited with building the industry’s first cloud-based single-instance multi-tenant integration platform delivered on a subscription basis.

read more

Security, over the years, has evolved from an absolute concept of a binary decision: is it secure or is it not? As we move forward, I believe very strongly that what we’re evolving into is, as we’ve heard people talk about, risk management.
Risk management starts to include things that are beyond the security borders. As I talked to customers out here, I was having an “aha” moment. A little while ago, at one of our converged cloud chats, we were talking about how things fail. Everything fails at some point, and chaos takes over.
So rather than talking about security, which is a set of absolutes or a concrete topic, and boxing ourselves into threats from a security perspective, the evolution of that goes into enterprise resiliency. What that means is that it’s a combination of recoverability, security, performance, and all the other things that bring together a well-oiled business that can let you take a shot to the gut, get back up, and keep going.

read more

Amazon has brought out a new cloud service called Glacier to freeze out the competition.
It wants companies to archive and back up their data, all the stuff they have to hang on to for years and years to comply with all the rules, but don’t have to access very often.
Storing all this pack rat data is expensive. Amazon is offering to do it for a penny a gigabyte a month, a “significant savings” it figures is “disruptive.”
As is typical with Amazon there’s no up-front fee and it’s pay-as-you-go. Archives are apparently saved in “vaults” in Amazon’s data center in Virginia via a Glacier API although the FAQ says the “service redundantly stores data in multiple facilities and on multiple devices within each facility.”

read more

Piston Cloud is about to release Airframe, a cut-down version of its Piston Enterprise OpenStack platform built so business users have a free way to evaluate and get comfortable with OpenStack in a pre-production environment.
It’s supposed to be ideal in pilot deployments, proof of concept and lab environments.
The bare-metal cloud management platform is said to install in less than 10 minutes – which, if true, is probably remarkable – and deliver all the core OpenStack services including compute, storage, networking and cloud management.

read more

A big thank-you to all the R users out there who voted for Revolution R Enterprise in DataWeek Awards. We’re so pleased to be recognized by the voters and the DataWeek judging panel with the Top Innovator Award for Data Science Technology. We’re looking forward to the awards ceremony next week at DataWeek SF (in San Francisco, September 24-27). If you’d like to come along and join us and 1000 of the other most innovative data-centric companies who are attending, speaking, and participating in this first annual event, you can register here with the code DataWeek25 for a 25% discount….

David Smith

read more