The best manufacturers I’ve visited this year all share a common attribute: they are obsessed with making themselves as easy as possible to work with from a supply chain, distribution and services standpoint.  Many are evaluating cloud-based manufacturing applications including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and several have adopted cloud-based applications across their companies.

With so much interest, there is much confusion as well.  I recently spoke with Cindy Jutras, founder and CEO of MintJutras.  Her firm has recently completed a survey of SaaS adoption in manufacturing, distribution and other industries.  She found the following:

• 49% of respondents in the manufacturing & distribution industries do not understand the difference between single- and multi-tenant SaaS architectures.  Overall 66% of respondents to the survey did not know.

• SaaS-based applications are 22% of all manufacturing and distribution software installed today, and will grow to 45% within ten years according to MintJutras.

• The three most …

This year will see the turning point for the public cloud, as a result of repeated security infractions and regulatory issues.

Companies are beginning to realise that they need a secure and stable infrastructure, which is both fast and flexible. They need to think about systems that allow them to ramp up resources, as well as scaling them down depending on business needs.

For many service providers, 99% uptime is seen as good, however as the role of service providers becomes even more critical, that one per cent of downtime isn’t good enough anymore.

This is what is starting to be seen with the public cloud. The fundamental question is, what infrastructure would you run your important business system on and how risky are you willing to be with business data? 

The public cloud emerged as a quick and scalable utility that could revolutionise enterprise IT, however, due to …

Another day, another cloud survey, and for 69% of the near 250 IT professionals quizzed by business process automation firm PMG, the hybrid cloud is the “wave of the future within their organisations”.

The combination of public and private cloud is really starting to gain traction in 2013. But why?

The most important reason for adopting hybrid clouds, according to 38% of respondents, was that cloud apps were deployed faster. Delivering better value (21%), and being able to meet requirements more easily (10%) were the next most popular suggestions.

Elsewhere, the survey touched on more general cloud trends. Only 18% of respondents said they weren’t going to procure more cloud services in the next 18-24 months, whilst more than three in five (64%) agreed that BYOD equalled corporate cloud usage.

A good cloud survey is rarely without a question on cloudy security threats, and this report is no different …

NetSuite, the cloud-based ERM house majority-owned by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, has agreed to buy OrderMotion, a cloud-based Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) order management company.
Financial terms were not disclosed. OrderMotion, which has been around for a long time, has gotten over $10 million in fairly recent backing.
NetSuite said it will use OrderMotion to strengthen its own order management system.
OrderMotion caters to B2B, B2C, retail, wholesale distribution and manufacturing, and its solution is used by e-commerce and omni-channel retailers in conjunction with front-end tools such as Demandware and the eBay-owned Magento.

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The OpenNebula project has just announced the immediate availability of OpenNebula 4.0 Eagle. The project has come a long way since the first «technology preview» of OpenNebula five years ago. During these years it has witnessed the rise and hype of the Cloud, the birth and decline of several virtualization technologies, but specially the encouraging and exciting growth of OpenNebula; both as a technology and as an active and engaged community.
OpenNebula 4.0 is the result of the terrific feedback of the day-to-day operation of virtualized infrastructures by many of its users, result of all their contributions, bug reports, patches, and translations, but one and foremost, OpenNebula 4.0 is the realization of a vision of simplicity, openness, code-correctness and a sysadmin-centric approach. This defines its personality as a community, it defines the OpenNebula Way.
OpenNebula 4.0 includes new features in most of its subsystems. It is showing for the first time a completely redesigned Sunstone, with a fresh and modern look and an updated workflow for most of the dialogs. The also new Sunstone Views functionality allows to customize the GUI for each type of user or group, so the interface implements a different provisioning model for each role. A whole new set of operations for VMs like system and disk snapshoting, capacity re-sizing, programmable VM actions and IPv6 among others. There are some new drivers also, like Ceph; as well as improvements for VMware, KVM and Xen. The scheduler has received some attention from the OpenNebula team to easily define more placement policies… and much more.

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It’s a standard refrain heard in enterprise IT departments around the world – “I want to move to the cloud, but what about data security, uptime and user response time across a nearly infinite number of devices to support?” Because of this, fear gets in the way and enterprises reap only a small percentage of the potential benefits that can be gained through cloud adoption.
In his General Session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Gary Ballabio, Product Line Director at Akamai Technologies, will examine a variety of strategies you can employ to make your cloud architecture better performing, more secure and available. Learn best practices for achieving the optimal reliability for applications running in the cloud as well as maintaining or increasing the velocity of real-time data transfers happening in support of Big Data initiatives.

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Fusion-io’s two co-founders, CEO David Flynn and chief marketing officer Rick White, up and quit Wednesday sending the company’s stock into a nosedive, down better than 26% to $13.29 at noon, a record low.
They are off to turn early-stage investors.
Fusion board member, Shane Robinson, 59, the former chief strategy and technology officer of Hewlett-Packard, blamed, among others, for its disastrous acquisition of UK search company Autonomy, has been named CEO, president and chairman, effective immediately.

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Clustrix, the start-up with the NewSQL database that’s supposed to have no size limits, has raised a $16.5 million C round to build out distribution for the scale-out cloud database and push it into real-time analytics, e-commerce and web-scale applications.
Counting the new money the venture has gotten a total of $46.5 million in financing so far and will probably be back for more.
The company’s existing investors Sequoia Capital, US Venture Partners, ATA Ventures and former Cisco exec Don Listwin, CEO of Openwave Systems, kicked in.

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Learn about the complex regulations surrounding HIPAA compliance and other considerations for running sensitive data in the Cloud.
In their session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Ken Ziegler, CEO of Logicworks, and Frank Nydam, Director of Healthcare Solutions at VMware, will discuss the best practices for leveraging virtualization and cloud technologies without sacrificing security or compliance. Care providers, State and Federal entities, integrators and SaaS providers large and small will benefit from understanding the basics of protecting sensitive healthcare data, including PHI and EMR, in today’s fast-paced environment. The HIPAA Omnibus Rule and Business Associates Agreements (BAA) will also be covered in this important session for compliance-sensitive organizations.

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