Flourishing ARM Server Market Creates Opportunity – for Software

ARM-based Servers are poised to shake up the traditional Server market. This will also shake up the software market – creating opportunity for new vendors who choose to specialize in delivering solutions for this emerging computing platform.
«There’s a new class of technologies poised to shake up the Server market – the Microserver, sometimes called the ARM Server. But the Microserver will do more than shake up the X86 server market. It is going to shake up the software market as well.» That’s the message software and technology executive Chris Piedmonte, CEO and founder of Austin, TX-based Suvola Corporation delivered as we discussed the topic over coffee earlier this week.

read more

OMB’s Evidence Memo: A Call for Cloud Services Brokerage

n a late July memo the Office of Management and Budget requested cloud services brokerage.

Well, not in so many words.
Rather, OMB requested increased use of evidence in 2015 budget proposals and in evaluation of existing programs to, in the words of agency leadership, “continually improve program performance by applying existing evidence about what works generating new knowledge and using experimentation and innovation to test new approaches to program delivery.”
The memo is part of the administration’s ongoing evidenced-based initiative to better use analytics to evaluate outcomes of dollars spent.
All of which makes sense. With the ebb tide of sequestration causing federal IT budgets to continue to recede, Uncle Sam’s wallet is more cobwebs than cash. This means every dollar spent must be carefully indexed for performance.

read more

SugarCRM Reports Continued Rapid Growth; New Social, Mobile, Cloud Offerings

“Unlike conventional CRM systems, Sugar is designed for the individual user first, and what they need to engage successfully one-to-one with their customers,» said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, as he today announced that the company has achieved 15 consecutive quarters of growth and increased annual recurring revenue by more than 30 % year-over-year in the second quarter of 2013.

read more

SugarCRM Reports Continued Rapid Growth; New Social, Mobile, Cloud Offerings

“Unlike conventional CRM systems, Sugar is designed for the individual user first, and what they need to engage successfully one-to-one with their customers,» said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, as he today announced that the company has achieved 15 consecutive quarters of growth and increased annual recurring revenue by more than 30 % year-over-year in the second quarter of 2013.

read more

IBM vs AWS federal cloud war steps up a notch with Amazon lawsuit

It’s been one of the biggest stories of the summer. The battle for a lucrative CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) cloud computing contract between IBM and Amazon has featured attack, counter-attack, and all manner of legalistic name-calling as the two giants battle out for federal cloud supremacy.

While most of the talk has been in the sanctity of legal offices, a lawsuit from Amazon against the Federal Government, made public this week, reveals the true extent of the imbroglio.

The story so far: the CIA initially awarded its $600m private cloud contract to AWS back in Febuary. IBM, not surprisingly, protested against this, as reported by FCW in May.

In June, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report examining both sides of the argument and, whilst admitting that Amazon’s offer was at the time “the best value” and a “superior technical solution”, made the can-of-worm-opening recommendation that the …

Rackspace gets back into bed with VMware for hybrid offering

Rackspace Hosting has announced a new offering for its Managed Virtualisation Service hosting a VMware environment, entitled ‘Dedicated VMware vCenter Server’.

This is an interesting change, given how Rackspace’s most recent focus has been on OpenStack technologies instead of VMware.

Currently, the Managed Virtualisation service offers partial accessibility to vCenter’s features, but not full management capabilities. The theory, according to Rackspace, is that the dedicated environment will be an extension of the customer’s data centre.

What does this all mean? Essentially, it’s pushing more into Rackspace’s hybrid cloud policy.

“This new service has been designed to enable customers to migrate workloads out of their data centre and into a Rackspace data centre,” said John Engates, Rackspace CTO in a statement.

“Utilising Rackspace’s hybrid cloud portfolio gives customers the choice to find the best fit for their applications and workloads, all while offloading data centre …

Hard Dollar ROI of Gamification

Join us and guests Kim Celestre, Forrester Research Senior Analyst, and Bill Hussey, Manager of Developing Platforms at Bell Media, for this compelling educational webinar on Wednesday, August 21, 2013, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. Kim will share Forrester’s Total Economic Impact report to show you the specific, hard-dollar results businesses have driven by engaging customer communities with gamification.
Forrester will provide real life data on how companies leveraging gamification have:
Dramatically increased customer retention revenue
Significantly lowered product support costs
Sourced innovative ideas through the community
From Bell Media, you will learn how they drove up registrations and fan engagement, ultimately driving greater value for advertisers and their brand.

read more

Another New Logo on the OpenStack Corporate Sponsors Page: HDS

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is now a Corporate Sponsor of OpenStack – as can be seen today at the ever-impressive (and constantly expanding) list of sponsoring companies at the OpenStack Foundation web site. The OpenStack Foundation was the Diamond (top) Sponsor of 11th Cloud Expo / Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, held just under a year ago at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, California.

read more

Cloud Monitoring Essentials | Part 2: Security

Part 2 of Cloud Monitoring Essentials presents 3 key actions to ensure that cloud users maintain a strong security posture.
The cloud offers users agility and flexibility at, potentially, a far lower cost than a traditional data center model. However, with these benefits come risks from cost sprawl, security holes, and availability management. Part 1 of Cloud Monitoring Essentials focused on cost concerns. This second part looks at security.
The dynamic nature of the cloud, with ever-changing security groups and rules, makes security difficult. New instances, auto scaling groups, and buckets are created and terminated daily. Resources that were ‘secure’ yesterday may be altered today and your security posture may be compromised.
The distributed and centralized nature of the cloud creates security headaches. Not only is the deployment regularly changing, but the people changing it are across groups and departments.

read more