SYS-CON Events announced today that Verizon has been named «Gold Sponsor» of SYS-CON’s 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Verizon Enterprise Solutions creates global connections that generate growth, drive business innovation and move society forward. With industry-specific solutions and a full range of global wholesale offerings provided over the company’s secure mobility, cloud, strategic networking and advanced communications platforms, Verizon Enterprise Solutions helps open new opportunities around the world for innovation, investment and business transformation. Visit verizonenterprise.com to learn more.

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SoftLayer, an IBM Company, provides cloud infrastructure as a service from a growing number of data centers and network points of presence around the world. SoftLayer’s customers range from Web startups to global enterprises. Products and services include bare metal and virtual servers, networking, turnkey big data solutions, private cloud solutions, and more. SoftLayer’s unique advantages include the industry’s first Network-Within-a-Network topology for true out-of-band access, and an easy-to-use customer portal and robust API for full remote-access of all product and service management options. SoftLayer was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. SoftLayer was acquired by IBM in July, 2013.

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Microsoft suffered a blow yesterday when its Azure cloud and virtual machines suffered a series of outages before later being restored.

According to Reuters, the downtime was due to interruptions in multiple centres, with a representative from the company explaining that a small section of its customer base was affected.

A cursory glance at Azure’s status history page gives a glimpse as to the various outages suffered, with downtime logged on both August 18 and 19.

“Starting at 18 Aug 2014, 17:49 UTC, we are experiencing an interruption to Azure Services, may include Cloud Services, Virtual Machines Websites, Automation, Service Bus, Backup, Site Recovery, HDInsight, Mobile Services and possible other Azure Services in multiple regions,” the update wrote. “Customers began to experience service restoration as updates were deployed across the affected environment.”

The downtime was Microsoft’s most severe outage since February 2013. But what does this outage mean for the firm?

It’s no secret that the cloud is a major area of potential growth for Microsoft. No coincidence either that CEO Satya Nadella’s experience was in cloud and enterprise, and his first memo to employees – Microsoft’s unique marketing means that periodic rallying calls from the CEO dressed as company-wide emails are used as PR – heavily cited cloud as “the largest opportunity” for change.

Yet it wasn’t all good news in the memo last month, with job cuts inferred through the phrase “engineering and organisation changes”, and promptly delivered. Microsoft isn’t the first, and won’t be the last company to see moving resources to the cloud as a reason to let a few employees go, but it was particularly galling to see the human effects of this particular round of layoffs, as explained by software dev Jerry Berg on his Barnacules YouTube account.

Microsoft has long since been competing with Google and Amazon Web Services among others in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, with a series of price cuts on storage and compute in March and April this year. Microsoft followed Amazon, who followed Google in slashing its prices, with Google SVP Urs Hölzle joking that “you need a PhD” to work out the best options.

Then earlier this month Box moved the goalposts completely and removed its storage limits altogether for business customers, keeping the hypervendors on their toes.

Recent research, from Synergy’s John Dinsdale in particular, indicates that Microsoft, along with IBM, is catching up with AWS in the IaaS race while Google is trailing behind. This latest outage won’t be catastrophic for Microsoft by any means, but it’s not as if there’s a scarcity of other candidates should customers get itchy feet.

Seagate has a strong track record of collaborating with others to develop better cloud solutions. The Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance program, for example, leverages the company’s knowledge of storage and cloud-optimized solutions to give cloud service providers the customized, flexible and scalable server and storage solutions to meet the high levels of service their customers demand. Seagate also is a member of the OpenStack Foundation and Open Compute Project to help define and promote open-source standards for cloud computing.

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Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Bitium was founded by Kriz and Erik Gustavson. The 1,500 cloud-based application using Bitium’s analytics, app management, and single sign-on services include bug trackers, customer service dashboards, Google Apps, and social networks. The firm states website administrators can do multiple tasks online without revealing passwords. Bitium’s advisors include Microsoft’s former CMO and the former senior vice president of strategy, the founder and CEO of Like.com, a product strategist at IBM and Oracle, Hootsuite’s CEO, and the founder and CEO of KISSMetric, among others. More about Bitium can be found on its website at www.bitium.com.

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Martin Heisig, Senior Vice President of Cloud and Infrastructure Delivery at SAP SE, is responsible for SAP’s global IT infrastructure including the operation of SAP’s external cloud offerings.
The mega trends real-time platforms – Big Data, cloud, enterprise mobility as well as social media – continue to enable completely new business scenarios. In a tectonic shift, we witness how our most innovative customers reinvent their business models and processes by using in-memory technology, like SAP HANA. The world goes real-time across entire industries and in the private space.

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Earlier, I wrote a bit about traffic and the IoT. It’s a big topic. The traffic problems of the developed and developing worlds seem so large, complex, and intractable to significant change in any reasonable timeframe.

Consider Mexico City. There are more than 20 million people in the metro area, of whom about 4 million ride the subway systtem every day. There are also about 4 million cars, all of which seem to be on the road at most given moments. The traffic there has been legendary for a long time.

Mexico City, like so many other metro areas in the developing world, does not have a highly advanced multi-lane highway system. (Crawl along Manila’s EDSA or any number of main thoroughfares in the developing world and you have roughly the same experience.)

Yet, ask people in Los Angeles, or New York, London, or any other big place in the developed world, and you’ll learn that a highly advanced highway system just seems to make things worse. Who doesn’t thrill to the idea of banging one’s way from the airport into mid-town Manhattan or North Michigan Ave. in Chicago early on a Tuesday morning?

Blink your eyes and experience the year 2040. The IoT has had 25 years of solid development, and all traffic problems have been solved. Driverless cars, flexible tolling, real-time speed control and re-routing, and tens of thousands of sensors kicking out gigabytes of telemetry and flow data in real-time have fixed all that. Gut-wrenching commutes are gone, road rage is as common as dueling, and we’re all living together in a spirit of peace and harmony.

But go back to Mexico City or Manila. Or perhaps to Lima, Peru. Look at the mass of cars mingling with buses, trucks, and pedestrians in a widespread, continuous morass of humanity that seems impervious to technologically utopian dreams.

Then realize the car ownership is still a dream for most people there, one that they do not realy want to give up. Back in Manila, it seems the last thing the area needs is more cars—yet that is the dream of the millions of people striving to break out of a difficult life into middle-class comforts.

Unlike telco in the developing world, in which a lack of 20th century landlines allows many nations to skip over this step and move straight to mobile, it’s hard to imagine societies skipping over the deam of automobile ownership in exchange for IoT-driven traffic.

Run the Numbers
Meanwhile, the overall picture of a comfortable life centers around electricity, not cars. This seems to be the truly big challenge.

World electrical consumption in the developing world runs at 3% to 5% of the developed world. Do the arithmetic and you quickly see that bringing all of the anticipated 9-10 billion people we’ll have by 2040 into a comfortable existence is simply impossible unless we achieve vast new energy efficiencies.

My numbers show that it would tak about 500,000 megawatts of new capacity to bring the 3.5 billion people who live below the world’s average income up to the average. It’s important to note that this average is not that of the developed world; it lies somewhere around the average of Mexico and Brazil.

Putting 500,000 new megawatts of power online will require the equivalent of roughly 500 power plants at a cost of at least $1 billion apiece. The total investment of $500 billion may not seem so terrifying until we realize that, off of the spreadsheet and in the real world, there needs to be more than $10 trillion in new economic development in these countries to get these plants built.

How do we go about doing that? Looking at basic economics principles, what comparative advantage can exist in these places to create this new wealth? Alternatively, what massive new energy efficiencies can we wring with the IoT to address this challenge?

(This is the first in a series of articles on this topic.)

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By John Dixon, Consulting Architect

Last week, Chris Ward and I hosted a breakout session at Cloudscape 2014, GreenPages’ annual customer Summit. We spoke about cloud service models today (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), as well as tomorrow’s models — loosely defined as XaaS, or Anything-as-a-Service. In this post, I’ll discuss XaaS: what it is and why you might want to consider using it.

First, what is XaaS? Is this just more marketing fluff? Why do we need to define yet another model to fully describe cloud services? I contest that XaaS is a legitimate term, and that it is useful to describe a new type of cloud services — those that make use of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS all neatly delivered in one package. Such packages are intended to fully displace the delivery of a commodity IT service. My favorite example of XaaS is desktop as a service, or DaaS. In a DaaS product, a service provider might assemble it with the following:

• Servers to run Virtual Desktop Infrastructure from a provider such as Terremark (IaaS)
• An office suite such as Microsoft Office365 (SaaS)
• Patching and maintenance services
• A physical endpoint such as a Chromebook or thin client device

The organization providing DaaS would design, assemble, and manage the product out of best-of-breed offerings in this case. The customer would pay one fee for the use of the product and have the all-important “one throat to choke” for the delivery of the product.

At GreenPages, we see the emergence of XaaS (such as DaaS) as a natural evolution of the market for cloud services. This sort of market behaviour is nothing new for other industries in a competitive market. Take a look at the auto industry (another one of my favorite examples). When you purchase a car, you are buying a single product from one manufacturer. That product is assembled from pieces provided by many other companies — from the paint, to the brake system, to the interior, to the tires, to the navigation system, to name a few. GM or Ford, for example, doesn’t manufacture any of those items themselves (they did in days past). They source those parts to specialist providers. The brakes come from Brembo. The interior is provided by Lear Corp. The Tires are from Goodyear. The navigation system is produced by Harman.

The auto manufacturer specializes in the design, marketing, assembly, and maintenance of the end product, just as a service provider does in the case of XaaS. When you buy an XaaS product from a provider, you are purchasing a single product, with guaranteed performance, and one price. You have one bill to pay. And you often purchase XaaS on a subscription basis, sometimes with $0 of capital investment.

So, secondly, why would you want to use XaaS? Let’s go back to our DaaS example.

At GreenPages, we think of XaaS as one of those products that can completely displace a commodity service that is delivered by corporate IT today. What are commodity services? I like to think of them as the set of services that every IT department delivers to its internal customers. In my mind, commodity IT services deliver little or no value to the top line (revenue) or bottom line (profit) of the business. Desktops and email are my favorite commodity services.

Increased investment in email or the desktop environment does not translate into increases in top-line revenue or bottom-line profit for the business. Consider that investment includes financial and time investments. So, why have an employee spend time maintaining an email system if it doesn’t provide any value to the business? Two key questions:

1. Does investment in the service return measurable value to the business?
2. In the market for cloud services, can your IT department compete with a specialist in delivering the service?

When looking at a particular service, if you answer is “No” to both questions, then you are likely dealing with a commodity service. Email and desktops are two of my favorite examples. Coming back to the original question… you may want to source commodity services to specialist providers in order to increase investment (time and money) on services that do return value to the business.

We’ll expand this discussion into the role of corporate IT in a future post. For now though, what do you think of XaaS? Would you use it to replace one of your commodity services? Maybe you already do. I’m interested to hear from you about which services you have chosen to source to specialist providers.

You can download John’s “The Evolution of Your Corporate IT Department” eBook here

Cloud Expo has announced its first annual «Iron Cloud IoT Shootout» to be held on November 6, 2014, at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley at Santa Clara Convention Center in California. The «Iron Cloud IoT Shootout» will be a live competition among all the key Cloud Computing platforms, and will be held on Day 3 of the show, Thursday, November 6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. So far five platforms – Amazon AWS, Google GCE, Microsoft Azure, IBM SoftLayer, and Rackspace – have been named as part of the live competition. The «Iron Cloud IoT Shootout» will feature teams representing each platform. Team members may or may not be employees of the companies that represent the competing platforms. Each team will create an IoT app or service and be judged by everyone in attendance.

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