Last week, I met with a number of our top clients near the GreenPages HQ in Portsmouth, NH at our annual Summit event to talk about successful adoption of cloud technologies. In this post, I’ll give a summary of my cloud adoption advice, and cover some of the feedback that I heard from customers during my discussions. Here we go…

The Market for IT Services

I see compute infrastructure looking more and more like a commodity, and that there is intense competition in the market for IT services, particularly Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

1. “Every day, Amazon installs as much computing capacity in AWS as it used to run all of Amazon in 2002, when it was a $3.9 billion company.” – CIO Journal, May 2013
2. “[Amazon] has dropped the price of renting dedicated virtual server instances on its EC2 compute cloud by up to 80 percent […]  from $10 to $2 per …

The biggest problem with software is that it doesn’t do us any good at all unless our wetware is working properly – and unfortunately, the wetware which resides between our ears is limited, fallible, and insists on a good Chianti every now and then.

Improving our information technology, alas, only exacerbates this problem. Case in point: Big Data. As we’re able to collect, store, and analyze data sets of ever increasing size, our ability to understand and process the results of such analysis putters along, occasionally falling into hidden traps that we never even see coming.

I’m talking about fallacies: widely held beliefs that are nevertheless quite false. While we like to think of ourselves as creatures of logic and reason, we all fall victim to misperceptions, misjudgments, and miscalculations far more often than we care to admit, often without even realizing we’ve lost touch with reality …

You can’t move at the moment for surveys advocating the importance of hybrid cloud strategy – and this latest one, from Rackspace Hosting and conducted by Vanson Bourne, is no different.

60% of IT top brass see the hybrid cloud as the bright, shiny future for IT operations, with a third of that number (19%) completely integrated, compared to only 41% who are partially hybrid-oriented.

The primary reason for hybrid adoption over pure public cloud systems was more control, according to 59% of those polled. This was followed by greater security (54%), reliability (48%) and cost (46%). Overall, it’s safe to say that a majority of respondents saw multiple benefits.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the US is more advanced than the UK in hybrid developments; 80% cited the hybrid cloud as a game changing strategy, compared to just 64% of UK-based respondents.

But according to Nigel Beighton, VP of technology …

IDG Enterprise recently published Cloud Computing: Key Trends and Future Effects Report, showing how enterprises continue to struggle with security, integration and governance while finding immediate value in collaboration and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

IDG’s methodology is based on interviews with 1,358 respondents, stratified across CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, ITworld, and Network World websites, in addition to respondents contacted via email, and LinkedIn forums. 

58% of respondents are from executive IT roles; 17% from Mid-level IT; 14% from IT professionals; 8% from middle-level business management and 3% non-manager roles were represented in the study.  High tech industries are the dominant industry represented with 18% of respondents, followed by financial services, government and manufacturing (each accounting for 10% of respondents).  Education (9%) and telecommunications & utilities (6%) are the other industries represented.

Key take-aways from the survey include the following:

• 49% of executive-level management see cloud computing as transformational …

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Information Management, Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Solutions

Intel recently shared its long-term strategic vision of how corporate data centers will evolve. Big Data processing plays a central role, driven by a future of escalating data volumes from mobile, cloud, and “Internet of Things” sources. Intel is starting to pull together a portfolio of offerings as a foundational infrastructure for analyzing Big Data.

Not surprisingly, this is a hardware-centric strategy, allowing Intel to sell more server engines to effectively run Big Data software applications. Intel believes it has the right chips (x86) to manage and analyze this data. But the chipmaker is taking a proactive role thinking further up the stack and fishing for Hadoop-related software opportunities.

Big Data is one of several demand-side drivers shaping the data center of the future

Intel laid out a detailed blueprint of key infrastructure for building the data centers …

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Information Management

Oracle recently unveiled a faster version of its Exalytics in-memory analytics database. The company claims the X3-4 version delivers up to 25× performance improvements over its predecessor, thanks largely to pure and simple hardware upgrades – i.e. more memory.

Ovum does not doubt the sheer speed of Exalytics, particularly for data analysis where ASAP is simply not quick enough. We see the most immediate applicability for such an ultra-responsive analytics infrastructure in driving more agile business planning and budgeting processes, but there are also a raft of other emerging use cases. Certainly benefits are to be gained from the raw power of Exalytics, but companies must consider carefully their strategies for realizing the benefits in business-critical applications.

Exalytics X3-4 reflects the accelerating pace of doing business today

Nowadays, data analysis is a deft mix of data scale and processing speed: whether it is about …

By Andy Flint, FICO

Analytics depends on data — the more, the merrier. If we’re trying to model, say, the behaviour of customers responding to marketing offers or clicking through a website, we can build a far stronger model with 10,000 samples than with 100.

You would think, then, that the rise of Big Data and its seemingly inexhaustible supply of data would be every analyst’s dream. But Big Data poses its own challenges for modelling. Much of Big Data isn’t what we have historically thought of as “data” at all. In fact, 80% of Big Data is raw, unstructured information, such as text, and doesn’t neatly fit into the columns and rows that feed most modelling programs.

Here’s how data scientists seeking to harness Big Data for predictive modelling have addressed the challenges presented by a mass of messy data.

Turning words into numbers …

In today’s cloud-filled world, the conversation around operations management is – as it should be – all about service assurance.

Can IT deliver the server, storage, networking, and application resources necessary to meet business needs?

The focus on service assurance isn’t really a new concept – it’s been talked about since the transition from mainframe to client server architectures. But how it is talked about has significantly changed over time, reflecting the reality of datacenter evolution. Because of the emergence of virtualization, cloud, and converged infrastructure, how your organization talks about delivering operational excellence demands a new conversation.

But what shape should that conversation take?  Well, let’s start by looking at a few things that have been said in the past.

Enterprise nirvana

At the beginning of the 1990s, monolithic systems management frameworks from IBM, HP, and CA were the loudest voices in the room when it came to …

Research from Quocirca in conjunction with CA Technologies has revealed that opinion on cloud services in Europe is still fiercely divided.

The Quocirca report divides respondents into three potential categories; ‘enthusiasts’, ‘avoiders’ and ‘blockers’, and found that overall 57% of those polled were ‘cloud positive’.

In Europe, 22% were considered enthusiasts, for whom “cloud is the future for much of [their] IT requirement”, whilst a further 35% said they evaluate options to supplement in-house IT resources.

23%, interestingly, avoid cloud based services whilst a further 3% say they block their use altogether.

The UK figures reveal more overall who were cloud-positive – 60.3% compared to 57% – although only 17.5% were enthusiasts.

It was interesting to note the differences between job sector. Europe-wide results show that the telco sector is the most comfortable with cloud services – nearly 80% were positive. Compare and contrast with the government sector, where 30% polled …

The Cabinet Office has announced that the fourth iteration of the UK government cloud, G-Cloud 4, is open for business and is accepting submissions from suppliers for its Invitation to Tender (ITT).

Various improvements have been made to the ITT, according to Cabinet Office spokesman Peter Middleton. These include clearer application instructions, for suppliers both new to G-Cloud and for those previously on the ii and iii iterations.

The launch and timetable were posted on the UK government blog, with the clarification period closing on September 4, and the tender submission deadline arriving on September 23. Applicants will be informed on the success of their application on October 16, with the expected commencement date for the framework agreement later that month on October 29.

Suppliers who are on G-Cloud iii are safe until May 2014, whilst vendors still running on the second iteration have only until October 27 before the …