Mike Sapien, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Telecoms, Ovum
In October 2012 AT&T and IBM announced a new strategic relationship that uses the telco’s secure private network to access the tech company’s back-end infrastructure. The goal is to give Fortune 1000 customers access to IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise+ (SCE+) services with AT&T’s VPN network services. IBM and AT&T plan to launch the new service in early 2013. Either company could take the lead, but it seems likely that IBM will drive these opportunities among its Fortune 1000 customers.
This new relationship should take advantage of the earlier AT&T–IBM partnership, known as “Blue Sky”, and leverage the experience of that relationship. In fact, this latest move should ideally be positioned as an extension of the previous partnership.
With the addition of IBM’s SCE+ services, both players could position the new relationship as a unique …
Did you know 72% of data breaches worldwide the previous year occurred at companies with 100 or fewer employees — a 63 percent increase. However, with unified security solutions, small businesses can gain enterprise-class safeguards at an affordable price.
I just got off the phone with a friend of mine. His name is AJ and he was particularly grouchy. He had just spent the last 12 work hours scouring month-old machine logs so that he could compile a quarter-end audit that met his company’s compliance requirement. AJ is the Director of IT for what would be considered an SMB. It’s a modest home warranty related company that deals with homeowner end users, finance and loan offices, mortgage companies and manufacturers. It does roughly 15-20 million in business each year and employs about 60 direct employees and maybe 100 contracted agents. AJ has a staff of 3 other IT professionals, but given the workload, could easily double that headcount.
AJ is very proud of his jack-of-all-IT-trades status. He is proficient at writing code as he is virtually installing access on contractor home devices or planning strategic IT footprint expansion. And it’s this proficiency that has been making him grumpy. Because he can work some sort of magic with just about any application, the bosses have him wear many different hats. In fact, one of his online IT forum handles is “The Maddest Hatter.” But it is this reliance on his tribal knowledge and multidisciplinary acumen that keep the C-Levels saying “that sounds like it’s right up AJ’s alley.” AJ’s biggest problem is that there are only 24 hours in a day and he can only prioritize so many projects that are interspersed with hair-on-fire emergencies.
Companies are continuing to move along with adopting cloud computing even though they haven’t completed their formal strategies for using it, according to ZDNet.com.
Analyst IDC found that nearly three-quarters (69 percent) had already started using private cloud technologies, with nearly half (40 percent) saying they were using public and hybrid cloud.
But while some companies are already taking the plunge, 64 percent of UK organizations said they are still «considering» what to do with the cloud (compared to 60 percent in France and 52 percent in Germany).
Most enterprises’ cloud strategies aren’t particularly sophisticated, however, and focus on the technology-related drivers for cloud adoption, such as cutting the cost of IT, rather than business-related drivers, such as creating new revenue streams, according to IDC.
Big Data is everywhere. Predictive analytics and real time in-memory computing isn’t everywhere.
This truth (if we can accept it to be so) represents something of an imbalance.
As a subset of data mining, predictive analytics driven by in-memory computing efficiencies now has an opportunity to bring real-time analysis and insight to fast-moving live transactional data flows. Or to put it another (rather shorter) way, we can now start to manage and understand Big Data better than ever.
If we combine contemporary approaches to predictive analytics with the newly arrived Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor that produces what is claimed to be over one teraflop per second in terms of workload computational power for highly-parallel workloads, then CIOs can start to think about what “50-processor core computing” will mean for us in the very near future.
A new survey about cloud computing explores the business growth opportunities for buyers and consumers of cloud services alike, with surprising findings about confidence and a high degree of ongoing experimentation.
The multi-year annual survey on the cloud market provides a springboard for examining some of the implications for where the growth opportunities are and where the inhibitors for the growth may be.
To learn more about where the cloud business has been and where it’s going, BriefingsDirect sat down with Michael Skok, Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
When I talk to CIOs, they usually complain that the trend of Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD, is undermining their ability to keep their organization’s infrastructures and data secure. Every employee who comes to work with his or her smartphone or tablet and pulls up sales reports, help tickets and other corporate data creates a small hole in the IT armor companies have spent billions to build. Over time, the argument goes, the holes become a dangerous sieve.
My response to those worries: BYOD is a force of nature, so you better not get in its way. And it’s just raising the curtain on another, even bigger trend that follows right behind it. Let’s call it BYOS, short for “bring your own services.”
It’s rather difficult to get a good read on public opinion, especially about things that half of them don’t know about. Cloud computing is one of those things.
How does one get a really good view on the overall public perception of particular things? Sure, you’ve got your own personal opinions, but they may be years ahead or behind the bulk of the public, depending on what exactly the subject is. We’re speaking very generally right now and philosophically at that, but this is a general topic that is extremely relevant. How can we really gauge things, and not just model them and pretend as if we’re doing something real.
Political polls claim to be judges of public opinion. They are somewhat accurate, but you’re taking thousands of people and claiming that they are representative of millions. Something seems fundamentally wrong. Thus, to claim that we know anything except very limited knowledge based on polling would be a lie.
A cornerstone study into cloud computing in the UK has revealed the key difference in opinion between cloud users and non-cloud users.
The study, from Raconteur Media and written by Mike O’Driscoll entitled ‘Navigating the Cloud’, had a relatively small survey base – just under 250 completed at least part of the survey – but of that number, there was a lot of clout – 84% saw themselves as the key IT decision maker.
Again, software as a service (SaaS) proved itself to be the most mature cloud market. 81% of respondents currently use SaaS, compared to 45% for information as a service (IaaS) and 38% for platform as a service (38%). Crucially, only 5% of respondents had no plans to use SaaS in their company.
This correlates with research from Symform which showed that SaaS “continued to be the entryway” for cloud platforms.
Anyone who ever monitored or analyzed an application uses or has used averages. They are simple to understand and calculate. We tend to ignore just how wrong the picture is that averages paint of the world. To emphasis the point let me give you a real-world example outside of the performance space that I read recently in a newspaper.
The article was explaining that the average salary in a certain region in Europe was 1900 Euro’s (to be clear this would be quite good in that region!). However when looking closer they found out that the majority, namely 9 out of 10 people, only earned around 1000 Euros and one would earn 10.000 (I over simplified this of course, but you get the idea). If you do the math you will see that the average of this is indeed 1900, but we can all agree that this does not represent the “average” salary as we would use the word in day to day live. So now let’s apply this thinking to application performance.
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