Amazon’s stock this last week crossed $300 (from $2 in 1997 when it went public, after splits) and the valuation reached $140B, twice that of Facebook, but lower than Google and Apple. This is indeed amazing.
Amazon started out as a web-based book selling company. Now it has three businesses:
Selling new books as well as users can sell their old books.
Using its fulfillment engine to sell every other consumer goods.
The Amazon Web Services platform for offering cloud based services.
The last item is growing to become its number one business soon. It started monetizing its huge computing infrastructure few years back, first with renting storage (S3). Then came the Elastic Computing Cloud followed by myriad other cloud services. The AWS platform is the dominant cloud infrastructure, both IaaS and PaaS. It has been innovating new technologies such as REST, Dynamo, etc.
McKesson Corp. accomplished a multi-year, pan-IT management transformation that has enabled it to better leverage an agile, hybrid cloud model.
Gardner: It’s hard to believe it’s been a full year since we last spoke. What’s changed in the last year in how McKesson had been progressing and maturing its applications delivery capabilities?
Smith: Probably one of the things that have changed in the last year is that our performance metrics have continued to improve. We’re continuing to see a drop in the number of outages from the standardization and automation. The reliability of the systems has increased, the utilization of the systems has increased, and our system admin ratios have increased. So everything, all the key performance indicators (KPIs) are going in the right direction.
What’s an e-commerce tycoon to do after funding everything from nuclear fusion startups to commercial spaceflight ventures? Why, help develop a museum exhibit to inspire young folks and teach them about innovation, of course.
After more than two years of development and $10 million from Jeff Bezos’ own pockets, the Museum of History and Industry will open the doors to the Bezos Center for Innovation on October 12th. Not only does the center aim to help visitors learn about “the importance of innovation” through interactive exhibits, but it will toot Seattle’s horn for being “the birthplace of so many trailblazing companies.”
We’ve certainly come a long way. Over the last couple of years, we’ve witnessed the trials and tribulations of the early-adopters of managed cloud services, and we’ve observed how the offerings have matured to attain broad-based market acceptance.
Cloud computing has become pervasive within today’s forward thinking companies. It’s already a transformative force throughout the global networked economy. Every enterprise that uses Business Technology is either considering or implementing cloud solutions — to create a strategic advantage over their late-adopter industry peer group in the marketplace.
According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), about 77 percent of North American companies were already using at least one public cloud service in 2012. IDC believes the companies that are spending on cloud-based capability have reached a deployment pace that’s unmatched by any previous business technology transformation.
The key responsibility of the CIO is to ensure an organisation has the technology it needs to function cost effectively, while at the same time remain a competitive force.
Nowhere is this more relevant than in the contact centre industry. If a contact centre does not have technologies, such as interactive voice recognition (IVR), multimedia queuing or real-time speech analytics, then it risks not being able to meet customer expectations of service.
However, buying-in all of these solutions can be an large capital outlay for an organisation. This can be a major drawback to a company that prefers the agility and flexibility of OpEx over CapEx. The alternative is to look at moving some or all operations to the cloud.
It’s not all or nothing
The first consideration for the CIO is: how much IT infrastructure should be transferred to the cloud?
Cloud computing continues to gain momentum as enterprises of all sizes and across all industries seek to harness the business agility promised by this computing model. Despite its long-accepted benefits, the cloud has also fallen victim to performance and reliability challenges, combined with a perceived lack of security. As a result this has led to slower predicted growth and adoption of this still promising infrastructure methodology.
In his Lunchtime Focus Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo, Neil Cohen, Akamai’s Vice President of Global Product Marketing, explains how to these challenges, and the role application delivery solutions play in optimizing public and hybrid cloud architectures without sacrificing performance, security or control.
“Intrinsic-ID is a spin-off of the security experts team of Philips Research, and we bring here Saturnus, a secure cloud application that protects data in the cloud,” stated Tony Picard, VP of Business Development at Intrinsic-ID, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, 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.
If you are like most businesses you struggle with the age-old problem of trying to define the perfect price for your service. You also struggle with what can and is offered as a service. While this is true for all industries, in cloud it is a particularly acute problem. It is important to remember that the cloud market has plenty of opportunity for providers to differentiate offerings or for completely new providers to enter the market and compete. However, unseating the market leaders will not come from selling commodity services. While providers like the old recurring, predictable contracted revenue model, customers are becoming more educated, have more visibility and are demanding that their bill be better aligned with their actual consumption. In addition, service differentiation does not mean simply bundling multiple features to justify a single flat price regardless of a customer’s interest. Customers are reacting to the “tyranny of packages” as they realize they are being forced into a commodity model. There is no question that the value-add bar needs to move higher and service providers need to build tailored, high-margin, sticky relationships with customers. Using financial commitments, you can achieve predictable revenue while providing customers with elasticity to utilize reserved instances, on-demand instances, bandwidth, etc.
Cloud computing is the #1 topic for most CIOs this year. In her Lunchtime Focus Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo, Krishna Subramanian, VP of Marketing & Business Development at Citrix Systems, walks you through how customers have transformed the way they do business using Citrix Cloud Solutions. Learn best practices and architecture from companies who have embraced the cloud in their datacenter environment.
You can design a great enterprise cloud network, but it will be very restricted if you are in a building that does not support broadband connectivity or mission-critical applications.
What good is a multi-gigabit design if your connection to the central office is not fiber? Or redundant? Can you even have a mission-critical network if you only have one connection to one central office?
Here are five ways to tell if your building is obsolete.
How receptive is your building to all the new connectivity technology exploding onto the market? Have your smartphone with you? Does it work well in your building?