Plexxi is gearing up for the 13th Cloud Expo on November 4-7 in Santa Clara, CA. We’re looking forward to discussing the two major IT trends that will be the conference focus: cloud computing and big data. Plexxi’s Mike Bushong recently wrote a post for InfoWorld about the inevitable intersection of Big Data and SDN, and how Plexxi SDN is already being deployed to the cloud. We can’t wait to explore these topics and more at the Cloud Expo and look forward to seeing you all there. In the meantime, watch Plexxi’s Dan Backman and Nils Swart describe the relationship between Plexxi control and OpenDaylight. Here is the video of the week and a few of my reads in the Plexxi Pulse – enjoy!

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According to IDC, we spent over $34 billion on business analytics in 2012. To put that in perspective, that’s more than the GDP of 100 of the world’s countries. And Gartner’s 2013 survey of over 2000 CIOs worldwide puts business intelligence at the top of their technology priorities. Given this spend and focus, it’s shocking to realize that according to the BI Scorecard only 24% of today’s information workers actually have access to BI tools, and that number has stagnated even with the advent of new technologies like data visualization. What gives? The reality is that most information workers don’t spend their day working with a BI tool, nor do they want to. They already have their preferred applications. So, what can be done?
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Karl Van den Bergh, VP, Product and Alliances at Jaspersoft, will discuss how cloud application developers hold the key to making analytics more pervasive within the enterprise. He’ll analyze emerging business models and technologies that are enabling developers to easily and affordably inject intelligence inside the applications they build, bringing information TO knowledge workers rather than expecting them to go find it. He will also look at how some of the world’s leading companies are already doing this and the benefits they’re seeing from this approach.

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You want to move your enterprise applications to the cloud, but fear (security, uptime, responsiveness) and loathing (exaggerated claims, undisclosed complexity, etc.) seem to keep getting in the way. It feels like this fear & loathing in the enterprise cloud is resulting in organizations realizing only a small percentage of the potential benefits that can be gained through cloud adoption.
In his general session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Gary Ballabio, Product Line Director at Akamai Technologies, will examine a variety of strategies you can employ to make your cloud architecture better performing, more secure and available. Through a variety of best practices learn how to escape fear & loathing and achieve the optimal reliability for applications running in the cloud.

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It was supposed to be about flexibility, wasn’t it? Cloud computing lets you alter your capacity as your demand fluctuates, something on-premise solutions could never do the same way. But, is the cloud as flexible as it could be? With cookie-cutter VM sizes, scalability that removes an entire former dimension, and reserved instance pricing that requires prediction we went to the cloud to avoid in the first place, the first generation of public cloud providers don’t go as far as they could.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Pete Johnson, Chief Evangelist for ProfitBricks, will explain how Cloud 1.0 falls short and how Cloud 2.0 offers the flexibility you’re looking for.

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Ever since SoftBank Corp in July completed its $21.6BN purchase of Sprint Corp, Japan’s biggest overseas acquisition to date, it seems that Japanese firms are ramping up their efforts to improve overseas networks through acquisitions. Today, according to Reuters, Japan’s NTT Communications Corp has acquired two US Cloud companies.

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Ever since SoftBank Corp in July completed its $21.6BN purchase of Sprint Corp, Japan’s biggest overseas acquisition to date, it seems that Japanese firms are ramping up their efforts to improve overseas networks through acquisitions. Today, according to Reuters, Japan’s NTT Communications Corp has acquired two US Cloud companies.

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This infographic highlights some interesting findings from Parasoft’s research on API Integrity…
With the advent of the API economy, the integrity of the APIs you produce and consume is now more important than ever. As applications grow increasingly interdependent, the security, functionality, and performance of the composite «mashup» is only as strong as its weakest link. The success of an end-to-end transaction depends upon all the parts working flawlessly – all the time.
To better understand the scope and impact of API issues, Parasoft, leading provider of API Testing solutions, recently conducted study on API Integrity. The following infographic highlights some interesting findings…

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The data center industry is heading toward an inflection point that has significant impact on enterprises. It seems many aren’t looking far enough ahead, but the timeline appears to be 12-18 months, which is not that far out! The issue is a typical supply chain issue of supply, demand and timelines.
First, let’s start with a bit of background… The advent of Cloud Computing and newer technologies, are driving an increase in the number of enterprises looking to ‘get out of the data center business. I, along with others, have presented many times about ‘Death of the Data Center.’ The data center, which used to serve as a strategic weapon in an enterprise IT org’s arsenal, is still very much critical, but fundamentally becoming a commodity. That’s not to say that the overall data center services are becoming a commodity, but the facility is. Other factors, such as the geographic footprint, network and ecosystem are becoming the real differentiators. And enterprises ‘in the know’ realize they can’t compete at the same level as today’s commercial data center facility providers.

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Keith Mayer and myself kick off our new multi-part series today on how you can build your hybrid cloud environment with Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 and Windows Azure by laying down a quick overview of what we can expect for the series as well as diving into the new features found in Windows Server 2012 R2 Storage Foundation.
Build Your Lab! Download Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012 and Hyper-V Server 2012 and get the best virtualization platform and private cloud management solution on the market.

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Over the past decade, social media has disrupted the traditional methods of providing customer support. In the new era, digital tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest are transforming organizations into social enterprises.
For companies of any size, a strong social media strategy is a growing necessity in the world of branding. What savvy businesses are doing is taking advantage of collaborative online platforms to shorten the distance between support specialists and consumers. The bottom line is that social media is a strategic tool that can be used to manage a company’s online reputation, control the spread of misinformation and enhance the overall customer experience.
In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, Robert Collazo, Manager of Social Media and Senior Systems Engineer at Rackspace, will explain how you can leverage social and mobile technologies to drive real business outcomes. Attendees will learn how to optimize their company’s online presence in order to build customer engagement and extract value from social networks like Facebook, micro-blogs like Twitter and multimedia platforms like YouTube.

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