Enterprise revenue recognition specialist SOFTRAX and MetraTech Corp. have announced a partnership to collaborate on billing and revenue management solutions for both traditional transactional and recurring revenue models. These solutions draw on both companies’ long-standing experience in these fields and automate customer acquisition, provide flexibility to handle a variety of pricing models, and improve renewals with easy access to a comprehensive 360-degree view of the business.

Together, MetraTech and SOFTRAX will automate quoting and contracts, billing and revenue recognition processes to support the increasingly complex needs of recurring revenue businesses, including established companies that are transitioning to a recurring revenue model but are still maintaining existing legacy clients. Joint customers will be able to minimize the cost of customer acquisition, identify opportunities for cross- and up-selling, and drive customer satisfaction with differentiated offers to increase renewals.

read more

Perhaps you may have read that Brazil recently abandoned their controversial proposal that would have forced global internet companies to store data on Brazilian users inside the country. While many of us can surmise a number of reasons the viability of such a measure might have been unlikely, the list is quite long and includes:
the challenge of enforcement
the difficult logistics facing global organizations serving Brazilian users
the potential loss from the region of high-value services that do not comply

read more

As businesses increasingly embrace private, public, and hybrid clouds to cost-effectively and quickly deliver business applications and services, Cisco on Monday announced plans to build the world’s largest global Intercloud — a network of clouds — together with a set of partners. The Cisco global Intercloud is being architected for the Internet of Everything, with a distributed network and security architecture designed for high-value application workloads, real-time analytics, “near infinite” scalability and full compliance with local data sovereignty laws. The first-of-its-kind open Intercloud, which will feature APIs for rapid application development, will deliver a new enterprise-class portfolio of cloud IT services for businesses, service providers and resellers.

read more

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Software – Information Management

It hardly rains in Palm Springs, California. But there was a great deal of talk about clouds at Oracle’s recent CloudWorld analyst conference.

Oracle presented an update on the aggressive cloud strategy it unfolded at last September’s Oracle OpenWorld conference, where it made a score of announcements around its PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS offerings. Oracle has made significant incremental advances across both its public and private cloud portfolio offerings and clearly communicated its direction for the cloud – though many of the specifics around roadmaps were under non-disclosure agreement.

The company is committed to delivering a comprehensive suite of private and public cloud services integrated across SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS. A key question, however, is how flexible those products and services are beyond the Oracle technology stack (the so-called red stack).

Oracle is firmly committed to the cloud

Oracle was initially dismissive …

You can’t say it wasn’t coming. Cloud storage provider Box has announced its public offering after a huge amount of rumour and conjecture, with the overall amount raised expected to hit around $250m.

The company is looking to trade under the NYSE symbol ‘BOX’ and confirms reports in January that the cloud storage bods had confidentially filed.

The number of shares and their price wasn’t disclosed in the official S-1 form on the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) site, however the company’s numbers were – and it doesn’t make for pretty reading on first glance.

As the company’s revenues have gone up, so have its losses – $124.2m in revenue for the year ended January 31, combined with a loss of $169m. This compares with $58.8m revenue and $112.8m loss for the previous year, and $21.1m and $50.4m for 2011 …

Cobbling together point solutions provides tools, but doesn’t promote the key collaborative intelligence integrated cloud-based unified security offers.
Of all the strategies and tactics available to prevent breaches, deter data leakage and theft, control access and secure beyond the so-called network perimeter, the one that is emerging as an achievable and affordable best practice is that of unified security from the cloud.

But if you look across the web, you will no doubt come across various versions of what constitutes “unified,” what is “protected,” and, what is “security from the cloud?” Luckily this means that the concept of unified security from the cloud is becoming more and more of a best practice. In general, the practice of unified security is the centralization of all security functions under one umbrella across the enterprise. This means more than ensuring data encryption. It means more than access policies. It means more than intrusion detection, malware blocking, data review. It’s more than ensuring compliance to the various regulatory bodies that provide general guidelines. It is the sum of all these things…and more.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that Gigamon®, a leader in traffic visibility solutions with the innovative Unified Visibility Fabric™, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Gigamon provides an intelligent Visibility Fabric™ architecture for enterprises, data centers and service providers around the globe. Our technology empowers infrastructure architects, managers and operators with pervasive and dynamic intelligent visibility of traffic across both physical and virtual environments without affecting the performance or stability of the production network. Through patented technologies and centralized management, the Gigamon GigaVUE portfolio of high availability and high density products intelligently delivers the appropriate network traffic to management, analysis, compliance and security tools. With over eight years’ experience designing and building traffic visibility products in the US, Gigamon solutions are deployed globally across vertical markets including over half of the Fortune 100 and many government and federal agencies.

read more

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is like an F-16 Fighting Falcon.  In the right hands it can be nimble, graceful, and extremely powerful.  Not to mention that it often destroys other cloud platforms in a dogfight…  However, an important part of the analogy is the understanding that the AWS fighter plane comes in a thousand pieces with “some assembly required.”

Managed AWS services attempt to take care of some of this assembly for you.  Most AWS management partners and platforms will cover the basic features and customize them for your architecture.  For example, if you’re moving from an in-house datacenter to the cloud, an AWS management service will take the configuration of your infrastructure and translate that into AWS features and services. 

Hardware like CPU and RAM become services like Elastic Compute (EC2).  Switch and router configurations become networking services like Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).  Load-balancers become elastic (ELB).  Storage …

What do you look for when you choose a Web hosting provider? These days, it seems difficult to compare the differences between each service, whether you’re talking about supported languages, databases or bandwidth. You might be tempted to pick the cheapest provider and plan in hopes of saving a few dollars. However, you should not overlook the importance of speed and reliability.
Take a small business for example – if its website is down or under-performing, the host is actually hurting the business. Even if the hosting were $1 per month, losing $100 in revenue because of unreliable performance means the customer loses $101. At that price, they could afford to grow their business to a dedicated server.

read more