A new SoftLayer facility in London with a capacity for more than 15,000 physical servers is the most recent of IBM’s ongoing campaign to invest $1.2 million in 15 new datacenters worldwide. The new facility will complement an existing SoftLayer datacenter in Amsterdam and London network Point of Presence (PoP), according to IBM.
“We’re excited to give our large customer base in London a full SoftLayer data center right in their backyard, with all the privacy, security, and control the SoftLayer platform offers,” said Lance Crosby, SoftLayer CEO.
He also said that “organizations of all sizes are using SoftLayer services to disrupt their industries or even their own operations, creating new business models and applications.”
SofttLayer cites MobFox as an example, a company it says is the largest and fastest growing mobile advertising platform in Europe. “MobFox has been working with SoftLayer for a couple of years. We currently deliver more than 150 billion impressions per month for clients including Nike, Heineken, EA, eBay, BMW, Netflix, Expedia, and McDonalds,” said Julian Zehetmayr, MobFox CEO.

Separately, IBM announced a five-year services agreement with Boursorama, a subsidiary of the Société Générale group, in which Boursorama will move its web-based IT to SoftLayer cloud infrastructure “to implement a solution that will ensure continuous business operations and rapid growth,” according to IBM.

Boursorama is an online bank that “considers quality and availability of the website to be one of the pillars of the development of our company,” according to company CEO Marie Cheval. “The agreement with IBM will help us implement a proven technology infrastructure that will let us continue to grow while also giving us the opportunity to improve our website’s resilience, our website being our main means of communication with our clients.”

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A new SoftLayer facility in London with a capacity for more than 15,000 physical servers is the most recent of IBM’s ongoing campaign to invest $1.2 million in 15 new datacenters worldwide. The new facility will complement an existing SoftLayer datacenter in Amsterdam and London network Point of Presence (PoP), according to IBM.
“We’re excited to give our large customer base in London a full SoftLayer data center right in their backyard, with all the privacy, security, and control the SoftLayer platform offers,” said Lance Crosby, SoftLayer CEO.
He also said that “organizations of all sizes are using SoftLayer services to disrupt their industries or even their own operations, creating new business models and applications.”
SofttLayer cites MobFox as an example, a company it says is the largest and fastest growing mobile advertising platform in Europe. “MobFox has been working with SoftLayer for a couple of years. We currently deliver more than 150 billion impressions per month for clients including Nike, Heineken, EA, eBay, BMW, Netflix, Expedia, and McDonalds,” said Julian Zehetmayr, MobFox CEO.

Separately, IBM announced a five-year services agreement with Boursorama, a subsidiary of the Société Générale group, in which Boursorama will move its web-based IT to SoftLayer cloud infrastructure “to implement a solution that will ensure continuous business operations and rapid growth,” according to IBM.

Boursorama is an online bank that “considers quality and availability of the website to be one of the pillars of the development of our company,” according to company CEO Marie Cheval. “The agreement with IBM will help us implement a proven technology infrastructure that will let us continue to grow while also giving us the opportunity to improve our website’s resilience, our website being our main means of communication with our clients.”

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“We introduced our product called AgilData. It’s basically the first Agile view, a streaming view of looking at a database and data as a streaming real-time dynamic capability,» explained Cory Isaacson, CEO/CTO of CodeFutures Corporation, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 14th International Cloud Expo®, held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4–6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Cloud has been on a lot of boardroom agendas for quite a while, but typically those discussions have focused on using cloud around edge applications – expenses management, human capital management or perhaps customer relationship management. However, as the cloud cover extends to business-critical processes and core activities, five new considerations for enterprise cloud deployment have arisen.
There should be no difference whatsoever to end users when they are faced with an application via the cloud or on-premise. This begins with the user interface, which needs to be intuitive and critically consistent across desktops, tablets and mobile devices. Much of the success of the likes of Facebook is due to the fact that the social experience is not interrupted or disrupted by the cloud behind it and that the interface is so consistent. This invisibility also applies to performance – applications delivered via the cloud must be just a quick, if not faster, than on-premise alternatives.

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IBM on Monday announced that SoftLayer, an IBM Company, will open a data center in London this month. It will be the latest of 15 new data centers that IBM plans to open as part of a $1.2 billion dollar global investment to strengthen and extend its cloud services in Europe and around the world.
The new facility will provide customers and their end users with SoftLayer services that meet in-country data residency requirements. It will also complement the existing SoftLayer Amsterdam data center and London network Point of Presence (PoP), both launched in 2012, to provide European customers redundancy options within the region.

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Red Hat on Monday announced a new cloud management certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform as part of the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, a commercial ecosystem for OpenStack. Red Hat will enable cloud management solutions from partners to interoperate with and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. The certification offers customers confidence that their OpenStack-based clouds and management solutions have been fully tested together and are supported jointly by Red Hat and the participating companies.

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“As the move to the cloud started, we stayed ahead of that by providing security solutions to our enterprise customers, financial customers, and now a whole new range of customers, which are application developers,» explained John Gunn, VP of Corporate Communications for VASCO Data Security, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 14th International Cloud Expo®, held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo® 2014 Silicon Valley, November 4–6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Disruptive innovation is all very fine and good, but legacy technology and disruption don’t mix. That old gear is just too brittle and important to mess with, right? That’s when it hits you: it’s time to go rogue.
Adjectives like «swashbuckling» and «romantic» rarely if ever apply to enterprise technology, so the fact that «rogue» IT is now a Thing should give one pause. Errol Flynn swooping down from a yardarm, disarming smile on his too-handsome face? Hardly the image you’d expect bringing your iPhone to work would elicit.

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The Mass Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) recently hosted the The Value of Things (VoT): MassTLC IoT Conference in Waltham, Massachusetts. There was surprisingly little disagreement between the various panelists on the future of the Internet of Things (IoT), but probably not in the way you might expect. Sure everyone was in agreement about the billions of devices and trillions of dollars in market growth; however, something else was afoot. Nearly all the panelists were in agreement that the free-for-all model of the consumer Internet and mobile markets would not repeat itself. With IoT, the sheer number of devices and their pervasiveness has already put governments and regulators around the world on notice. Here’s the consensus: design your system to support an opt-in model with high security and concerns for privacy otherwise, within the next 5 years, you will be shut-out.

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I recently led a panel discussion for SYS-CON.TV on the topic of “Cloud Computing 2.0,” a term I decided to employ just a few minutes before we started recording.

A few years ago, any right-minded person would wince at the use of “2.0” to describe anything, as it had long become a meaningless cliché.

So I don’t know if I was being ironic, too clever by half, or just tedious when I told the panelists that we’d go with the topic of Cloud Computing 2.0.

The Debate Evolves
My point was, and is, that the discussion about cloud computing has notably changed this year.

Three years ago, the debate was how to define cloud, whether virtualization alone was enough to fit the definision, whether an on-site datacenter could even fit the definition of cloud, and to what degree the big-vendor latecomers were engaged in cloud washing.

A couple of years ago, the chief debate was over public vs. private cloud. Last year and into the start of 2014, I heard and read endless discussion of PaaS vs. IaaS, whether the former had simply become part of the latter, and so forth.

All of those debates seem a little quaint to me now. Not that these specific issues can, and must, come up within any enterprise of any size when considering, defining, designing, and deploying its cloud strategies. The world is a hybrid, and XaaS is what you make of it. To me, the big issue today is the integration of cloud, Big Data, and the IoT.

If you’re not talking about Big Data and the Internet of Things today, you’re not talking about cloud computing. Also, you’ve fallen down and you may not be able to get up.

Ulcer Time
Just creating a catalog of all the data within an organization (of any size), trying to predict dataflows for the next few years, and (gasp) trying to conduct any sort of rational capacity planning is an ulcer-inducing task that I wish on no one but realize is being experienced by everyone in this industry.

Ergo, Cloud Computing 2.0. Somebody asked the question at the recent Cloud Expo in New York when we would start hearing the term “legacy cloud.” The comment was meant in jest.

But it’s no joke. Yesterday’s cloud discussions are not today’s cloud discussions. With all of the major technology vendors pushing hard on their IoT strategies, with numerous start-ups focusing on Big Data and its accompanying analytics, and with longstanding debates about Open Source vs. proprietary continuing, I fear an analysis paralysis by many organizations in this new cloud era.

You Will Submit!
I’m in the midst of working with a very sophisticated team of people to put together the upcoming Cloud Expo in Santa Clara November 4-6—with co-located events focused on Big Data, the IoT, SDDX, DevOps, and WebRTC. We are addressing the very thorny and serious issues that face enterprise IT today.

Submissions to the conference remain open, as does my Twitter account for any comment and perspective. I welcome not only technical opinions and harangues, but also specific use cases that highlight how things have been done, either well or badly, in this age of Cloud Computing 2.0.

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