Today, we’re at a crossroads. Some companies are choosing to dive into the application economy, while others stand back afraid of the change. It should come as no surprise then that companies that are embracing the application economy are emerging as victorious.
That’s because customers today are far more likely to experience brands through software than in-person interactions. Everything is connected through the application-based world, and customers are demanding superior user experiences.
What can you learn from the leaders in the application economy, and what will it take for you to join their ranks?

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Desjardins Group in Montréal is improving their IT operations through an advanced IT services management (ITSM) approach.
Tell us why ITSM has become important to you. What were some of the challenges, some of the requirements? What was the environment you were in that required you to adopt better ITSM principles?

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New local cloud services for co-location customers in 17 markets has been announced by 365 Data Centers. The new service supports customers’ NAS and SAN storage architectures, and is aimed at everything from clustered databases and Big Data analytics to archiving and disaster recovery.

We asked company executive Keao Caindec a few questions, and this is what he told us:

Cloud Computing Journal: Who are the target customers for the new service?

Keao Caindec: We are targeting businesses that are using the storage for databases, clustering, file storage with large volumes, local back, remote disaster recovery and mirroring, storage migration and temporary workloads. Data-intensive industries will also be targeted such as hardware and software, SaaS, manufacturing, retail, advertising, education, finance, and healthcare.

CCJ: How important is the hourly pricing plan? What sort of demand have you seen for it?

Keao: Hourly pricing is critical to realizing the benefits of cloud-based services. Hourly pricing allows our customers to pay only for the amount of storage they need, when they need it.

CCJ: Could you explain a bit how you can work with customers’ SANs and NAS storage?

Keao: Using our our web-based console, users create a Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) made up of dedicated drives that have been selected by the customer. You can easily add those drives into a RAID-protected pool drives. Based on that storage, you can create volumes of block (SAN) or file (NAS) storage. All of this functionality to manage and control storage is built into the console.

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In a recent webinar, Porticor’s AWS cloud security experts took on the security challenges companies face when migrating to AWS (and other IaaS clouds) and offered alternatives that enable IT Directors to take advantage of the cloud, while maintaining control of their data and its security. Security Issues in Cloud Computing: Are you a TARGET? […]

The post Security Issues in Cloud Computing: Porticor’s AWS Experts Discuss appeared first on Porticor Cloud Security.

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The proliferation of SaaS and Cloud applications has a dark side – the disconnect between IT and the application owners. IT is aware of only about 1 in 7 of the Cloud applications in their organization, raising issues ranging from compliance to security to backup and recovery.

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Picture credit: Salesforce

Cloudy giant Salesforce has announced Wave, the Salesforce Analytics Cloud, as its Dreamforce event in San Francisco. The platform is designed to make it easier than ever before to explore data, and take action from any device.

You can’t say it wasn’t coming. Last month Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted out a “top secret” version of the Dreamforce schedule, and it soon came to people’s attention that the first keynote on October was entitled “analytics cloud.”

An updated one later that month – again “top secret”, with “do not share or tweet” written underneath it – was tweeted out by Benioff, this time with “Project Wave keynote” replacing analytics cloud. It certainly must be an exciting development at Salesforce HQ, as the chief exec was tweeting out updates over the weekend, breaking his own company’s embargo.

“Today, Salesforce is disrupting the analytics market, just as we disrupted the CRM industry 15 years ago,” Benioff said. “We’re not only connecting companies with customers in a whole new way with our Customer Success Platform, we’re empowering companies to know their customers like never before with the groundbreaking Wave Analytics Cloud.”

Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio, a Salesforce Analytics Cloud partner, said: “Salesforce’s entrance into the business intelligence market with its Analytics Cloud offering is well-timed. Most of the BI tools on the market today are built on last-generation technology that is not focused on the new user-led analysis needs, and they have not been born to take full advantage of the cloud or mobile platforms.

“The benefit of Wave for customers is that it democratises business intelligence; it embraces the new user-led data discovery and puts the power in the hands of everyday users,” he added.

This represents a very interesting area for Salesforce, for whom various observers – Ben Kepes of Forbes being one of them – saw analytics as one of the missing pieces of the jigsaw.

Last month Bluewolf released its yearly report showing the state of Salesforce adoption. The report found that the Salesforce Sales Cloud was used by 89% of respondents, Service Cloud by 46%, Community Cloud by 22%, and Marketing Cloud by 18%.

The latter two were said to be growing at a rate which is ‘on fire’. It’ll be interesting to see how Wave performs here.

Picture credit: ykanazawa1999/Flickr

Software giant Oracle has reportedly hired former SAP exec Shawn Price in another push towards cloud computing, days after hiring Google App Engine founder Peter Magnusson.

Price was fired by SAP five months after he took on the role of global cloud president, having taken over from Robert Calderoni in January. As CloudTech reported at the time, the surprising move was taken as part of a wider effort to shift the business towards cloud computing.

According to Re/code, Price’s new job title will be senior VP for product strategy and marketing, reporting to CEO Mark Hurd.

Unlike Magnusson, whose LinkedIn profile confirmed he was at Oracle with the vague job description of ‘public cloud’, Price’s LinkedIn offers no clues. This may not be unexpected however, as it still lists him as an employee of SAP.

Oracle’s aggressive move towards cloud services was exemplified by Larry Ellison’s keynote speech at this year’s OpenWorld, where he told delegates: “Our cloud is bigger than people think, and it’s going to get a lot bigger.”

It’s been a particularly busy time for Oracle’s HR department of late, with a litany of new hires as well as the boardroom shuffle which saw founder Ellison move to chief technical officer, with Safra Catz and Mark Hurd taking over as CEOs.

During a recent analyst call, Ellison joked: “You’re going to have to wait a little while longer before you get me off the call”, indicating that while Ellison was no longer the boss on the face of it, he’d still be doing his fair share of backseat driving.

SAP and Oracle have plenty in common. Both companies are moving their business models to cloud from on-premise software sales, both companies have used the co-CEO model, and now the former SAP cloud chief is taking an executive role at Oracle.

Oracle’s last set of financial results saw new software license revenues down 2%, total revenues up 3%, and net income pretty much standing still at $2.184bn.

For all but the most curmudgeonly luddites among us, it’s become totally clear: “The cloud” is here to stay. The power and ubiquity of distributed compute and storage is all around us – at home, at work, and in our social lives.
Recent advances in virtualization have brought us compute efficiency, storage consolidation, and system redundancy that were nearly unimaginable just 10 years ago. As a former IT guy, those benefits were always the promise of virtualization, but they seemed like a futuristic fantasy.
A decade ago, my corporate file store consisted of primary storage with three disk shelves of expensive, fast spinning disks to store backed-up data for 30 days. Then I had a filer to track what data was “fresh” and what was “stale.” Stale data was moved to secondary storage, which consisted of many more shelves of much slower disks. Then, after 90 days, all data was copied via a (totally awesome and very expensive) tape robot that whipped and whizzed tapes around inside a big ol’ refrigerator-sized enclosure in my datacenter.

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Performance is the intersection of power, agility, control, and choice. If you value performance, and more specifically consistent performance, you need to look beyond simple virtualized compute. Many factors need to be considered to create a truly performant environment.
In their General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate at SoftLayer, and Harold Hannon, Sr. Software Architect at SoftLayer, to discuss how to take advantage of a multitude of compute options and platform features to make cloud the cornerstone of your online presence.

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