IBM and Docker, Inc. have announced a strategic partnership that enables enterprises to more efficiently, quickly and cost effectively build and run the next generation of applications on the IBM Cloud and on prem via the Docker open platform for distributed applications. Enterprises can use the combination of IBM and Docker to create and manage a new generation of portable distributed applications that are rapidly composed of discrete interoperable Docker containers, have a dynamic lifecycle, and can scale to run in concert anywhere from the developer’s laptop to hundreds of hosts in the cloud.

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Joint products enable enterprises to protect their databases with Data Masking and provide controls over their environment with Enforced Version Control

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One of the great things about Logsene, our log management tool, is that you don’t need to care about the back-end – you know, where you store your logs. You just pick a log shipper (here are Top 5 Log Shippers), point it to Logsene (here’s How to Send Logs to Logsene) and you are done. Logsene takes care of everything for you – your logs stop filling up your disk, you don’t have to worry about log compression and rotation, your logs get indexed so when you need to troubleshoot issues you have one place where you get see and search all your logs from all your applications, servers, and environments. This is all nice and dandy, but what if your logs are special and you want them analyzed in a specific way, and not the way Logsene’s predefined index templates and analysis work? To handle such use cases we’ve recently made it possible for Logsene users to define how their logs are analyzed. Let’s look at an example.

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Many people may not realize that API Management solutions can be used for Single Sign-On integration with services like NASDAQ, using technologies such as SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect. But, check out the Storebrand case study to see how this is done. NASDAQ interface: For its private customers in Sweden, Storebrand implemented an SSO integration with NASDAQ, the largest U.S. electronic stock market, which lists 3200 companies and trades some two billion shares per day. The Axway API Gateway solution enables customers who are logged on to the Storebrand site to directly access NASDAQ and carry out trades.

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SYS-CON Media announced that Splunk, a provider of the leading software platform for real-time Operational Intelligence, has launched an ad campaign on Big Data Journal. Splunk software and cloud services enable organizations to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine-generated big data coming from websites, applications, servers, networks, sensors and mobile devices.
The ads focus on delivering ROI – how improved uptime delivered $6M in annual ROI, improving customer operations by mining large volumes of unstructured data, and how data tracking delivers uptime when it matters most.

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Software Defined Storage provides many benefits for customers including agility, flexibility, faster adoption of new technology and cost effectiveness. However, for IT organizations it can be challenging and complex to build your Enterprise Grade Storage from software.
In his session at Cloud Expo, Paul Turner, CMO at Cloudian, looked at the new Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) market and how it is changing the storage world. Now Software Defined Storage companies can build Enterprise grade rack-ready appliances using commodity servers and still provide all the benefits of Software Defined Storage. You too can have Enterprise Grade at 1C per GB per month.

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As enterprises move to all-IP networks and cloud-based applications, communications service providers (CSPs) – facing increased competition from over-the-top providers delivering content via the Internet and independently of CSPs – must be able to offer seamless cloud-based communication and collaboration solutions that can scale for small, midsize, and large enterprises, as well as public sector organizations, in order to keep and grow market share. The latest version of Oracle Communications Unified Communications Suite gives CSPs the capability to do just that. In addition, its integration with Oracle Communications WebRTC Session Controller enables CSPs to quickly and easily add integrated real-time and near real-time capabilities to their menu of secure, enterprise-grade services.

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“The age of the Internet of Things is upon us,” stated Thomas Svensson, senior vice-president and general manager EMEA, ThingWorx, “and working with forward-thinking companies, such as Elisa, enables us to deploy our leading technology so that customers can profit from complete, end-to-end solutions.”
ThingWorx, a PTC® (Nasdaq: PTC) business and Internet of Things (IoT) platform provider, announced on Monday that Elisa, Finnish provider of mobile and fixed broadband subscriptions, will deploy ThingWorx® platform technology to enable a new Elisa IoT service in Finland and Estonia.

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I followed a meetup last night in Austin presented by Michael Cote of 451 Research and CloudCamp co-founder Dave Nielsen. John provided a review of the past five years of cloud computing and Dave talked about some current strategies in using PaaS. The overall program provided a nice and thorough review of where we’ve been and where we are.

The global nature of the cloud reaches to most nations. In the modern era, enterprise IT evolves at a similar pace worldwide, rather than in North America and Western Europe first, as in days past. Depending on what particular aspect you’re examining, it even moves more quickly in some developing nations – “eMoney” services on mobile phones in places such as Kenya and the Philippines are an example of this phenomenon.

Similarly, in the research we’ve been conducting at the Tau Institute since 2011 on the relative dynamics of IT development on a national basis, we’ve found far-flung bright spots in all regions of the world.

Cut Through It
With all this simultaneous development comes confusion. Cloud often continues to be defined in whatever manner a technology vendor wishes. Its perceived benefits become conflated, its power reduced.

In his talk last night, Michael Cote urged some renewed clarity by referring back to the definition of cloud published by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in November 2011:

“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

The definition further deems the following characteristics to be “essential”: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. The NIST definition also lays out the familiar an still-used terms IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, but defines public anad private cloud in ways different from today’s usage: private cloud is for the use of a single organization, and public for the use of many, regardless of whether the actual computing resources are on-site or provided by a third party.

The definition was written by Peter Mell and Timothy Grance, both of whom are still with NIST. Neither has a high profile, though are well-known and respected throughout the technology community. I don’t see either buying an NBA team or doing a GQ spread anytime soon.

I Prefer PaaS
Within this construct, it seems to me that PaaS is the catalyst in forming clouds out of the raw materials of infrastructure and ethereal functionality of software. Thus, Dave Nielsen’s look at PaaS served as a nice book-end to John’s presentation. Dave dives into the particulars of the Cloud Foundry PaaS and how to deploy an app with it.

So given these two talks, where are we going? Cloud computing, for all the good work that so many have done over the past few years, still commands only about 5% of enterprise IT spending.

Cloud revenues are counted in the billions – take IBM’s recently reported $7 billion in cloud revenue as an example – rather than the tens or hundreds of billions. IBM’s total, which includes such ancient technologies as Rational and Notes, accounts for only 7% of its total business. I imagine a similar percentage among its peers.

Amazon’s public cloud revenue appears to be running at a rate of about $4 billion per year. Its reent growth has tapered a bit, but is still running at about 40% annually. Amazon AWS has set the standard and is the clear market leader for public cloud. But even in this outlier case, cloud revenue accounts for only about 5% of the company’s revenue.

A negative person would ask, “what is wrong with the cloud?” A skeptical person would ask, “has the cloud been overhyped?” A more positive-minded person would say “we’ve only just begun.”

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Virtustream has announced its xStream cloud management platform (CMP) software is now certified as Vblock® Ready for VCE® Vblock Systems. Targeting customers running SAP applications, xStream will enable enterprises to easily move existing mission-critical workloads to Vblock System-based Private or Hybrid cloud environments, gaining performance and security improvements without re-engineering software. Virtustream is now also a member of the VCE Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program.

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