Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst Ovum IT

Even today’s most successful organizations will not survive the converged business future by merely doing the same things they currently do only differently. What is needed is a shift to do different things.

Ovum believes that rapid, assured, and sustained business innovation is imperative to an organization’s success. IT leaders therefore need to effectively harness technological advances, cut time to market, and improve quality and performance.

Many organizations are facing significant changes in the application development process, particularly with intelligent computing now in nearly every piece of equipment shipped. This is driving the world toward environments that are becoming so complex that operations needs to be taken into consideration before the first line of code is written.

The need to build and deploy applications quickly is significantly blurring the traditional boundaries between development and operations. Ovum believes that the move to agile …

In some ways, everything about IT is about creating uniformity. Standard configurations. Synchronized patches. 1000 identical laptops shipped to all employees.

We place a high premium on «everything being exactly the same.»  And for good reason – if everything is the same, management and administration becomes far far easier.

And while we enjoy the fantasy of racks and racks of identically-configured servers humming away in the icy cold data centre of the future, anyone who knows what a data centre smells like (mmm, silicon) also knows that we can, at best, approximate that fantasy – but never truly taste it.

Why? Life is a big, hairy exception.

Exceptions for different workloads. Exceptions for supported software packages. Legacy systems where updates are either impossible or cost-prohibitive. New environments needed to support fun new applications and capabilities. Servers bought by enterprising LOB folks and stored under their desk until they were confiscated like gum …

As anyone with a vested interest in cloud computing will know, the perception of the data centre has evolved considerably, from isolated resource centres to more connected pools, helping maximise IT efficiency.

Not surprisingly, with the potential available, the numbers are growing. 60% of server workloads are set to be virtualised by 2014, compared to only 12% in 2008m, with total investment in data centre infrastructure growing 5% on average year on year.

There are, of course, pros and cons to virtualisation, with companies continuing to balance out efficiency and agility against security considerations.

Network solutions provider Ciena, in an infographic, has stated that “the cloud is only as good as the network that supports it,” calling its solution a “data centre without walls”.

Find out the journey from data centre to cloud in the infographic below (click to enlarge):

By Andrew Carr, CEO Bull UK & Ireland @acarr_bull

Businesses today increasingly look at technologies like big data and software-defined networking as being disruptive in the sense that they force organisations to evaluate new business models and new routes to market.

Rather than having negative associations, disruptive in this context means having an impact through a different way of thinking about business issues and challenges, as opposed to the traditional dictionary definition of ‘throwing into confusion or disorder’.

This new interpretation of the word is focused on the development of new ways of working, ultimately leading to new revenue streams and enhanced competitive edge. Indeed, truly disruptive technologies will have a lasting impact on the IT and business landscape and will ultimately be absorbed into the mainstream.

This is what is happening today with one of the most celebrated disruptive technologies of all: cloud computing, which is now widely seen as …

Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, IT – Enterprise Solutions

With the X3 generation of the Oracle Exadata and Exalogic engineered-systems platforms significantly upping the amount of Flash (SSD) and memory (DRAM), Oracle is now cranking up the speed on its applications portfolio. With Flash and DRAM prices plummeting, it is now cost-effective to persist, rather than temporarily cache, data. Oracle claims that much of its existing application portfolio can run up to 16x faster, unmodified, on the X3-2 Oracle Exadata and Exalogic models.

Oracle is now taking the next step in optimizing portions of its application portfolio to take full advantage of the new X3-2 line. Oracle’s Fast Data approach to enterprise applications follows SAP’s release of SAP Business Suite and CRM on the in-memory HANA platform. Ovum believes that Oracle’s approach is a logical first step, and would like to see this eventually yield a new generation of …

Cloud, SaaS, Big Data, Fast Data, NoSQL, PaaS…while this economy cannot produce jobs, it can definitely produce jargon at the speed of light.

As a tech-savvy business person who is not an engineer, I’m always trying to figure out how these new technologies and trends help my customers.

So when I had the opportunity to work on a press release announcing ServiceSource as a MongoDB customer, I wanted to understand the value for my market. Even though MongoDB sounds like something you’d see in the X Games, I knew it must be a differentiator for our business.

I went to the MongoDB website and found “MongoDB in a Nutshell.” When I clicked on it, this is what I saw

"name" : "mongo",
"type" : "db",
"doc_links" : {
        "installation" : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation/",
        "tutorial"     : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/getting-started/",
        "reference"    : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/"
},
versions ...

Cloud, SaaS, Big Data, Fast Data, NoSQL, PaaS…while this economy cannot produce jobs, it can definitely produce jargon at the speed of light.

As a tech-savvy business person who is not an engineer, I’m always trying to figure out how these new technologies and trends help my customers.

So when I had the opportunity to work on a press release announcing ServiceSource as a MongoDB customer, I wanted to understand the value for my market. Even though MongoDB sounds like something you’d see in the X Games, I knew it must be a differentiator for our business.

I went to the MongoDB website and found “MongoDB in a Nutshell.” When I clicked on it, this is what I saw

"name" : "mongo",
"type" : "db",
"doc_links" : {
        "installation" : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/installation/",
        "tutorial"     : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/tutorial/getting-started/",
        "reference"    : "http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/reference/"
},
versions ...

You’ve adopted the cloud, got a high level of storage and moved a lot of apps in – but you’re still not getting as much work done as you thought.

That’s the alarming case with more than half of respondents to an Oracle-conducted survey entitled ‘Cloud for Business Managers: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.

54% of the 1355 executives polled said that they had suffered staff downtime as a result of difficulties with cloud integration. In terms of specific numbers, this amounted to 11 downtime situations per department surveyed in the last six months. Struggling cloud integration also affects departments which don’t even use cloud apps, the research found.

Similarly, 54% of respondents also said that deadlines had been missed during the past six months “due to a lack of cloud data being shared effectively around the organisation”. Whether cloud technology can actually be blamed …

Email management provider Mimecast has experienced a UK-based outage due to a hardware network failure today, with customers being temporarily unable to send or receive emails.

The first reports of irregularity occurred at approximately 1100GMT, with Mimecast acknowledging the problem at 1215.

Around forty minutes later, the company further tweeted that a fix was on the way purportedly on a tower-by-tower basis, with the majority of servers back up and running at the time of printing.

Yet the outage itself does not explain the full story. Mimecast, for better or worse, promises a 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA) – which now is torn to shreds after today’s unfortunate difficulties.

To rub further salt into the wound, a blog post dated May 8 from Orlando Scott-Cowley concerning Postini Services notes: “Any downtime can be expensive and disruptive.

“That is why Mimecast offers a 100% uptime SLA to our customers, because …