Cloud Expo New York: The Next-Generation IT Department – Must Have Cloud

Compelling consumer applications are created every day. Are you ready for the IT implications both internally and externally? As your datacenter needs more capacity, the cloud will be critical to success. What are the key considerations to help plan for the needed capacity over time? And how can the cloud best work with your existing applications?
In his General Session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Brian Jawalka, Enterprise Solutions Architect at Rackspace Hosting, will open conversation to talk about the SaaS consumer apps that are forcing IT to evolve. Learn how a hybrid approach can add agility, flexibility and speed-to-market for your organization.

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Amazon Web Services leading cloud IaaS app development

Evangelising development on any cloud computing or enterprise platform is challenging, costly and takes a unique skill set that can educate, persuade, sell and serve developers at the same time.

The companies who excel at this exude technical prowess and as a result earn and keep trust.  For cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) platform providers, getting developers, both at partner companies and at enterprise customers to build applications, is a critical catalyst for future growth.

Assessing Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Providers with Inquiry Analytics  

Using the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, 2012 published October 18, 2012 as the baseline and shown above from Rueven Cohen’s excellent post last year, the five leaders were compared using the Inquiry Analytics Statistics: Topic and Vendor Mind Share for Software, 4Q12 published March 13th of this year. 

Analysing the five leaders in the Magic Quadrant using Inquiry Analytics …

Intrinsic-ID to Exhibit at Cloud Expo New York

SYS-CON Events announced today that Intrinsic-ID, a provider of top-level security solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Intrinsic-ID’s software application Saturnus® offers users total data security in the cloud. With the application users can securely access, share and store their data in the cloud. They can use it anytime, anywhere and on any device. With Saturnus® users regain control again of their digital life and their data in the cloud.

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Cloud Expo New York: Building Capacity Control into Internal Clouds

How your organization approaches capacity management will make or break your private cloud initiative. No longer a periodic sizing exercise, capacity management is now an essential element of daily infrastructure operations that impacts costs, performance risks, and the ability to respond to new workload requests.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Andrew Hillier, Co-Founder & CTO of CiRBA, will show how to integrate next-generation capacity control with cloud stacks, including OpenStack, in order to proactively reduce risk and maximize cloud efficiency.

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Taking a Cloud-of-Clouds Approach

We’ll learn why a cloud-of-clouds approach is providing new types of IT services to Thomas Duryea’s many Asia-Pacific region customers.
We’ve been talking about cloud computing for years now, and I think it’s pretty well established that we can do cloud computing quite well technically. The question that many organizations keep coming back with is whether they should do cloud computing. If there are certain risks, how do they know what risks are important? How do they get through that? What are you in learning so far at TD about risk and how your customers face that?

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Cloud Encryption Deployment for VMware-Based Application Services

As the infrastructure cloud market (IaaS and PaaS) continues to grow rapidly, we are seeing quite a few customers who are delivering an application – whether it is a mission-critical or SaaS application – and basing their solution on VMware.
VMware Security Cloud Encryption cloud keyboard Cloud Encryption deployment for VMware based application servicesSome of these are deploying VMware in their private data center, while others are leveraging the cloud model and “renting” capacity from a public VMware-based cloud provider. In a way, both of these scenarios are public: in many of the cases the “private cloud” scenario serves users who belong to different organizations, so from the user point of view the scenario is “public”. As a result, these customers have many of the same security concerns (see here for a deeper discussion of that point).

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GigaSpaces Launches Cloudify Player Service on HP OpenStack

GigaSpaces Technologies announced today the launch of the Cloudify Player, a new patent-based service that makes testing and deploying  complex, multi-tier big data applications like playing a video on YouTube. The new service currently supports OpenStack-based clouds and is available as a free online service from HP Cloud Services and GigaSpaces’ Cloudify. The source code for the service is also available as an open source project on Github. The Player was developed in collaboration with HP Cloud Services, GigaSpaces’ cloud partner and leading provider of OpenStack-based public cloud services.

Unlike many of the current online deployment tools, the Cloudify Player was designed as a lightweight widget that can be easily embedded in any external website using JavaScript embed code, similar to the way one would embed a YouTube video.

The lightweight design makes the Cloudify Player a classic tool for open source projects and ISV’s such as NoSQL database providers, (e.g. Couchbase, ElasticSearch, MongoDB and Cassandra), as well as web framework owners such as the Play Framework, NodeJS, or even complete web platforms like Redmine or Drupal. These providers can use the Player as a tool for launching their product on the cloud from within their own website, personalizing the Player with their own logo and brand. The Player allows vendors to offer a single-click, hassle-free deployment experience for users who want to test drive their product. As the widget is based on Cloudify and Chef, users will have a streamlined experience from a simple trial to a full production environment on a public or private cloud of their choice, all using the same tool.

“With the Cloudify player, Couchbase users can instantly launch a full-blown Couchbase instance on the cloud and give it a test drive, without going through the usual download-configure-install cycle”, said Dipti Borkar, Couchbase Director of Product Management. “This can lower the barrier for new users as they evaluate our technology, and can help existing users to evaluate new Couchbase releases without needing to upgrade their already existing installation”.

Prior to the joint development of the Player, GigaSpaces worked with HP using Cloudify to enable on-boarding of enterprise applications to HPCS.

Cloudify users can also use the new Player to easily experiment with and test new tools online without downloading or installing Cloudify.

“One of the biggest challenges in managing applications in the cloud is keeping the right balance between control and convenience,” said Uri Cohen, VP Product Management at GigaSpaces.  “We have focused on making Cloudify the most open framework for deploying any application on any cloud, while also keeping the user in control over the environment, the stack and the cloud of choice. With the new Cloudify Player we provide both full control and convenience at a level that was previously unattainable, through a streamlined experience from a simple trial to full production deployment.”

5 triggers for closing cloud computing deals

One of the most frequent questions we get on cloud computing is “When should a company move to the cloud?”  While there are numerous reasons to make the move, there are also certain events that minimize obstacles and objections. These are ” triggers” which greatly reduce the sales cycle for prospects considering cloud offerings. In no particular order:

1. Change in business size

As an elastic, utility-based service, cloud computing is ideal not just for growing companies, but ones that may be downsizing as well.   The on-demand nature of cloud services ensures that one can scale quickly and without additional investment. 

Companies in uncertain economic times are reluctant to make capital purchases or commit to large projects or financial obligations.  Through cloud computing, you can help these prospects leverage every advantage of newer technology without the downside of purchasing hardware and software that may sit idle in a business downturn. 

As …

2013 ERP market share update: SAP solidifies market leadership

SAP Headquarters, Building 1 Source: Wikipedia

During 2012 the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market experienced sluggish growth of just 2.2%, yet Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), financial management and Human Capital Management (HCM) applications showed potential for breakout growth.

Through the challenging times of the previous year however, SAP still retained worldwide market share leadership.  These and other insights were recently published in the recent report, Market Share Analysis: ERP Software Worldwide, 2012 authored by Chris Pang, Yanna Dharmasthira, Chad Eschinger, Koji Motoyoshi and Kenneth F. Brant.

Key Take-Aways

  • Overall market growth of just 2.2% and the top ten vendors owning 64% of the worldwide ERP market is leading Gartner to predict further consolidation of the industry.
  • SAP had just over $6B in total ERP software revenue in 2012, leading the worldwide market with 24.6% market share.  Oracle had $3.12B and Sage, $1.5B in software revenues for 2012 …

Step-by-Step: Extend Your Network to the Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Networks

Windows Azure Virtual Networks offers the power to open up several cross-premises use case scenarios, including Active Directory Disaster Recovery, SQL Database Replication, Windows Server 2012 DFS-R File Replication, Accelerated Cloud File Services with BranchCache, Hybrid Web Applications and MORE! But … we need to configure the Virtual Network FIRST … which is what this Step-by-Step article is all about!
This month, my fellow IT Pro Technical Evangelists and I are authoring a new articles series on 20 Key Scenarios with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. You can catch the full series at http://aka.ms/CloudTop20. In today’s article in this series, we’ll discuss extending our On-premises Datacenter into a Hybrid Network Infrastructure with Windows Server 2012, Windows Azure Virtual Networks and Site-to-Site VPN Tunnels.
Windows Azure Virtual Networks allow us to securely extend our Private Cloud with a hybrid network infrastructure that leverages the best of two worlds: the low-latency and high-bandwidth available with our on-premise datacenter networks with the elastic, pay-as-you-go cloud model of Windows Azure Virtual Networks and Virtual Machines.

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