By working with IT across the software development lifecycle via cloud-based DevOps, development teams can decrease software bottlenecks, increase code output and be seen as drivers of the business.
I have a confession. I am Shadow IT. I am the guilty party operations and security love to hate because I expense tens of thousands of dollars in cloud services…every month. Truth be told, my team and I couldn’t afford to wait in line for IT to provision the resources we needed to begin work. We had goals to meet and objectives to achieve – all of which didn’t include waiting in line for IT to give us virtual machines, development platforms or set up sandboxes so we could begin work.

With a lengthy approval process and cost justifications, there was no way I would have been able to secure either the physical infrastructure or cloud vendor approvals I needed to achieve the business unit’s goals. And, honestly, the risk of choosing a vendor that would leak our data, or otherwise put the business at risk, seemed a lot lower than the risk of not getting my job done.

So, even though my monthly cloud bill continued to rise, it didn’t surprise me too much that I was never questioned about the expense because my team was delivering. And, that is exactly what everyone from the business side of things cares about – is development creating new applications and/or services that can be brought to market before the competition? Can we secure ‘first-mover’ status or market leadership because development is firing on all cylinders? These are the questions marketing, business development, and other teams ask. Not, did central IT get you those VMs you needed?

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n the cloud doesn’t matter whether you are running on an Open Source platform or not – it is NOT free because you pay for the service. And for long Open Source project have been funded through the services premiums that you pay. I would argue that Open Source vendors have mastered the way they can take profit from Open Source services and are far ahead than the proprietary vendors. The whole catch here is that you pay nothing for the software and incur no capital expenditures (CapEx) but you pay for the services (i.e. Operational Expenditures or OpEx) – remember, this is also the cloud model. Bottom line is that you may be better off with a propriatery vendor than an open source one, because the former need to yet master that business model.

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n the cloud doesn’t matter whether you are running on an Open Source platform or not – it is NOT free because you pay for the service. And for long Open Source project have been funded through the services premiums that you pay. I would argue that Open Source vendors have mastered the way they can take profit from Open Source services and are far ahead than the proprietary vendors. The whole catch here is that you pay nothing for the software and incur no capital expenditures (CapEx) but you pay for the services (i.e. Operational Expenditures or OpEx) – remember, this is also the cloud model. Bottom line is that you may be better off with a propriatery vendor than an open source one, because the former need to yet master that business model.

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Three HP executives discuss the implications and business value from the Converged Cloud, the major focus of discussion at HP Discover 2013.
What’s happening in the market today, is that on one end, you have startups that are rushing to the cloud very quickly, that use cloud and don’t use anything else, because they don’t want to spend a penny on building up an IT department.
On the other extreme, you have very large corporations that look at all the things that are unknown around cloud and are sticking their toe in the water.
And you have everything possible and every possible scenario in the middle. That’s where things are getting interesting. You have forward-looking CIOs who are embracing clouds, and understand how cloud can help them add value to the business and, as such, are an important part of the business.
You have other CIOs who are very reluctant and that prefer to stay managing the traditional boat, if I can put it that way, in keeping and providing that support to our customers. It’s a interesting market right now.

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Over the weekend Barron’s put out a piece touting AMD’s chances of taking share in the mainstream server market that belongs to Intel with its SeaMicro microserver acquisition, a development that would tickle its tiny stock price, if it ever happened. But even the thought of it, although the possibility is a ways off, tickled the shares Monday.
“SeaMicro’s technology looks good; its management team, astute; and the market opportunities, promising,” the story said.
It was the opening salvo for myriad articles sketching out AMD’s already tipped plans to make its first ARM chip, a 64-bit processor that it expects to have sampling in the first quarter of 2014 with production following sometime in the second half.

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MetraTech Corp., a provider of Agreements-Based Billing, Commerce and Compensation solutions, on Tuesday announced that Achilles, a global software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider of supply chain management services, has selected the MetraNet billing and settlement platform to support its global business growth.
Achilles manages the supply chains of 800 of the world’s largest companies to reduce the risk, time and cost associated with procurement activity. The company verifies and keeps up-to-date data of around 80,000 suppliers across 23 countries to ensure they are operating to the highest possible standards. Achilles recently invested GBP 12 million in the development of new global platforms, which will offer a true SaaS solution to customers looking to manage their data anytime, anywhere – with no downtime for maintenance.

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Red Hat made its power play Wednesday. One it’s been itching to make for a couple of years. One that it hopes will ultimately jam a stick through the spokes of VMware’s front wheel. And to make sure that happens it’ll be telling everybody who’ll listen that its widgetry is a third the price of VMware’s vCloud.
This is where Red Hat gets to play a card that only Microsoft can match – its operating system, commonly known as RHEL – and create a tightly integrated cloud platform by fusing RHEL with OpenStack, the open source cloud computing software.
The move came as a one-two punch consisting of a kit called the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and another called Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure that deliver the company’s essential vision of an Open Hybrid Cloud.

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The personal cloud will be the main catalyst in bringing services otherwise unavailable to developing nations.
While businesses have been deploying cloud technology for some time, it’s only recently that personal cloud services have emerged. The rise of the personal cloud means content, applications and computing power can move off the device.
While iPhones and iPads are unlikely to fade in popularity, the personal cloud will create opportunity, according to an article on NetworkWorld.com. Opportunity for users who have not been able to afford services historically tethered to an expensive device; opportunity for manufacturers to design lower-cost hardware to reach a new demographic in developing countries; and huge opportunity for businesses to bring a new wave of services to this previously untapped audience.

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The notion that PaaS exists solely «in the cloud» as a discrete environment of developer services is hampering the maturation of enterprise PaaS.
The three most common answers to «give me an example of PaaS» are: Force.com, Azure, Google. I didn’t even need to do an unscientific Internet survey to nail that one down.
These are certainly fine examples of PaaS, but they are not necessarily examples of enterprise PaaS solutions. While off-premise PaaS offerings do address many of the same challenges being faced by enterprise operations today, they do so in a way that makes integration and control – not to mention the measurement and monitoring required by developers – nearly impossible.

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For more than half a century, cloud computing has changed names more often than a Hollywood starlet.
Utility computing. Time share. Thin client. SaaS. PaaS. IaaS. While concepts have been added and capabilities grown, cloud computing was no more invented by Amazon or other modern vendors in the last seven years reality invented by reality shows. It’s simply been advance, repackaged and repurposed for as long as computer connectivity has existed.
In honor of Father’s Day, NJVC looks up the family tree of cloud computing to say thank you to six of the fathers of cloud computing. (And if you’re wondering about a gift, a single tie will suffice. Certainly, these guys understand how to share.)

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