«Building a media solution that encodes and streams video to various devices and clients is a complex task,» blogged Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie this week. «It requires hardware and software that has to be connected, configured, and maintained. Windows Azure Media Services makes this problem much easier by eliminating the need to provision and manage your own custom infrastructure,» he added.
Used last year by several broadcasters to stream the London 2012 Olympics, Windows Azure Media Services is now live in production, and Guthrie’s blog introduced it in great depth.
Symform, the distributed cloud backup service, has a new CEO.
The recent incumbent, Matthew Schiltz, is, as they say, “pursuing new opportunities,” replaced by the company’s original backer Mark Ashida, former managing director of OVP Venture Partners and a Symform board member.
The announcement says the Symform board executive team “agreed to leadership adjustments to execute on its aggressive 2013 plan and support the company’s long-term vision.” Its mission is to build the world’s largest virtual data center and cloud storage network. Ashida is supposed to strengthen the company’s management team and drive continued momentum of its Cloud Storage Network focusing on small business and prosumers.
As the cloud market matures, the desire to get the agility and cost savings for new and legacy applications that run your business grows stronger. Quickly migrating to the cloud or across clouds is where AppZero specializes.
At AppZero, we’ve had many discussions with IT leaders who plan to empower business unit mangers to choose whatever cloud they want to run their applications. This represents a marked departure from the developer who chooses a cloud for building an application for test and development purposes. Now business leaders want to choose a cloud vendor that can scale and meet their business objectives and it may not be the cloud where the application lives and breathes forever.
Here is a question that in the IT world is equivalent to asking about gun control: Who should decide which cloud is best for which business application, the application developer or the business manager? (You can now see how controversial the question can be.)
In the last several years as virtualization and cloud computing adoption has expanded, we have seen endless proof points in support of the value these technologies and solutions bring to Opex and Capex savings. However, cloud has yet to bring to life the agility and efficiency promised to application teams.
In his General Session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley Shahar Erez, Director at VMware, provides concepts and solutions that can enable customers to leverage their investment in the cloud technologies while surfacing-up capabilities to the application teams to enable them to take advantage of the constructs of the cloud and empowering them to deliver more business value on top of IaaS. He examines types of cloud applications, new approaches to deploy applications, embed policies, monitor the applications and leverage the cloud elasticity.
As Senior Director/IT Leader of Information Technology at Dole Fresh Fruit North America, I am responsible for providing consistent and reliable distribution services for our division. Dole’s mission is to provide our customers with safe, healthy, high-quality products and services. To succeed, our business critical systems must be highly available and we need to quickly identify and resolve problems as they arise.
When I assumed this role in March 2008, IT credibility was at an all-time low. Our internal IT user community was very frustrated with the poor stability of the applications supporting our logistics functions including transportation, product tracking and traceability from Dole farms to our distribution centers. System stability was so poor it disrupted our ability to ship products effectively.
AppDynamics is a four-year-old start-up that can tick off all the current buzzwords that make a VC get out a pen and write a check – to wit, it manages and accelerates federated web apps in the cloud, tries to make sure they stay up and spots problems with their web sites.
So it’s gotten a juicy $50 million D round led by Institutional Venture Partners after the VC discovered that a lot of its portfolio companies were using the stuff.
Other enterprise customers include Cornell University, Orbitz, Expedia, Tivo, Overstock.com, Fox News, Staples, Time Warner Cable, Intuit, Priceline and Netflix. It reportedly has 500 clients.
Spend less time running the network and more time enabling your business. Learn how Cisco is leading the way to a new fully unified wired-wireless network solution in this live webcast on January 29, 2013, 16:30 p.m. GMT / 08:30 a.m. PST.
Cisco and NetApp on Thursday announced an expanded partnership to deliver new converged infrastructure innovation to unify branch office, data center and public cloud infrastructures under the FlexPod architecture. The partnership expansion includes efforts in technology integration, solution development, and continued go-to-market collaboration — all designed to make it easier for customers to deploy and access next-generation cloud infrastructure solutions.
Current IT architectures comprise a fragmented combination of infrastructure along with public, private and hybrid clouds offered by different organizations and addressing distinct customer needs. Through a shared vision of a unified data center, Cisco and NetApp offer the ability to simplify deployment, management and orchestration — connecting enterprise clouds to service providers, enterprises to branch offices, consumers to enterprises, and clouds to clouds.
Is now the time to make the move to cloud services with all the current IT security concerns? Security and the cloud seems to be the topic of conversation for many businesses and IT groups today. As you prepare for that decision making process around your IT infrastructure security, remember to take a risk based approach to help ensure a sound decision from an information security perspective.
Rather than spend months learning, digesting, and attempting to implement a structured formal risk management framework, regard your strategic security planning with these four pillars of risk management.
As soon as Apple’s fiscal first-quarter numbers hit Wall Street Wednesday,
its stock dropped.
Thirty minutes into the after-hours conference call it was down 8% to
under $475 after losing 30% of its value since it hit a $705 all-time high in
September and was roundly cheered as the most valuable company on earth.
Fifteen minutes later it was down 10% to $462 and change. By the end of
the call it was grazing the other side of $460, down 11%.