Larry Ellison, who spent $50 billion more or less on acquisitions in the last 10 years, is swearing off making any big acquisitions to add to Oracle for a couple of years to focus instead on growing the company organically in an attempt to dominate the cloud, a technology he used to call “complete gibberish” and a “fad.”
Of course Larry can resist anything but temptation and didn’t rule out a big deal “down the road,” when he spoke to CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo in his first interview in years. But he’s especially not going to buy NetApp, the storage concern rumored to be a target. It would cost a lot of money and doesn’t fit Oracle’s current strategy.
“We have all the assets in-house to grow very rapidly on an organic basis,” he said.
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How Government Early-Adopters Use Cloud Services
What are the best practices for deploying managed cloud services? Case studies have now confirmed that cloud services can be a better, faster, less expensive and less risky way to source Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions, according to the latest market study by Ovum.
Results from recent research conducted by Ovum details the experiences of five public sector organizations that have successfully deployed cloud services — either with Infrastructure-as-Service (IaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
Highlighting the known benefits and the catalysts that empower organizations to embrace the cloud service delivery model, Ovum says they have developed a framework to assist government agencies in understanding the organizational factors associated with early adoption of managed cloud services.
It is All About Repeatability and Consistency
Not that I need to tell you, but there are several things in your network that you could have better control of. Whether it is consistent application of security policy or consistent configuration of servers, or even the setup of network devices, they’re in there, being non-standard.
And they’re costing you resources in the long run. Sure, the staff today knows exactly how to tweak settings on each box to make things perform better, and knows how to improve security on this given device for this given use, but eventually, it won’t be your current staff responsible for these things, and that new staff will have one heck of a learning curve unless you’re far better at documentation of exceptions than most organizations.
Sometimes, exceptions are inevitable. This device has a specific use that requires specific settings you would not want to apply across the data center. That’s one of the reasons IT exists, is to figure that stuff out so the business runs smoothly, no?
A Cloud That Cares? Or About Eating Your Cloud and Having It Too
Although self-service -together with elasticity, pooling/sharing, etc. – is a defining attribute of cloud computing, many of the companies expressing an interest in cloud computing do not seem to be aware of that.
In fact, when asked: who do you expect to provision your services to the cloud?; who will monitor your services’ performance and availability? and; who do you expect to take action if something goes wrong?, a majority of the companies asked look to be somewhat surprised by the question, as they simply assumed that their service provider would do so.
This is a bit like going to a supermarket (a typical self-service facility), pointing to the ingredients you like and expecting the cashier to clean, cook and serve them for you. The name we generally use for such a service however is «restaurant» and it comes with significant different expectations and pricing, as demonstrated by the price of a bottle of the wine in a restaurant versus that same bottle at a supermarket (which is one reason restaurants prefer to buy from exclusive wine merchants and not to put bottles or their wine list that are available in retail).
Government SaaS Entrepreneur
As the name suggests our Government SaaS Entrepreneur program tailors their venture accelerator for apps for the public sector.
Examples of apps that have already gone through this process include Huddle IL3, referring to it being suitable for the UK’s information security classification IL3. This has resulted in the Huddle app grabbing the lions share of the G-Cloud market.
[Dave Nicholl] In this interview with Dave Nicholl, CIO for Ontario Province, talks about how they would consider this type of service for key requirements like their Drivers Licence applications, with a critical point about security.
Intelligent Infrastructure: Clouds for Commercial Real Estate
If they plan to remain viable in today’s markets, now is the time for real estate firms to make some dramatic changes by offering intelligent amenities in their commercial properties.
How do we prop up our dying shopping center?
How do we develop and maintain more business for our stadium?
How do we raise our commercial properties’ occupancy from 45% to 85%?
These questions are being asked more and more in the commercial real estate industry as the economy remains in a slump in many locations. Many executives are baffled because their usual management techniques are not working. In addition, assessments and property appraisals that overlook or discount technology within the property’s infrastructure are inadequate at best, and totally erroneous at worse.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Truth and Lies about Cloud in Europe
Are you aware of the new reality that cloud computing is bringing to bear? Cloud is not as global as you might think.
The global acceptance of cloud computing has caused a spike in demand for multi-national cloud capability. As a result, cloud companies are facing an intimidating next step – expanding to new international markets. The Netherlands is the leading cloud hub in Europe that can address this process specific to transatlantic cloud expansion and how to intelligently establish the highest performing Cloud environment between North America and Europe.
Creating a Self-Defending Network Using Open Source Software
A coworker and I put a couple pieces of open source software (OSSEC and Snort) together to respond to certain types of automated attacks we were seeing in our IDS (we use Snort in this case). Prior to this, an engineer would manually respond to alerts by logging into our firewall and blocking the IP address causing the alert. This process was tedious, repetitive, and time consuming. By the time the firewall change would be pushed, generally the scan (it was usually a scan) was over and the attacker had moved on. So we took advantage of a feature in OSSEC called “active response”, which is used to react to events on the network. OSSEC was configured to watch for Snort alerts, and would run a script on our Internet routers (running Vyatta core 6.3) to block the IP for 10 minutes. This response runs almost immediately. We hand selected alerts that we had associated with simple scans, such as FTP Brute Force attacks, and set them up to block the addresses. But this wasn’t enough for us.
IBM Arms ‘Sparta’ for Big Data & the Cloud
IBM will be adding another one of its Oracle Exa-like converged PureSystems in a webcast from Boston on October 9.
AllThingsD broke the news in a piece that has mysteriously disappeared from the Wall Street Journal’s site.
It said the thing – which IBM is advertising as an integrated solution for Big Data and the cloud – was developed under the codename Project Sparta, which makes some sense since the first PureSystems – PureFlex and PureApplications – announced in April, were reportedly codenamed Project Troy.
Cloud Computing: Rackspace Cloud Institute Launched
Rackspace has unveiled a new global open cloud initiative, dubbed the Rackspace Cloud Institute, to train and certify an “army of thousands of technicians, engineers and developers” on the fundamentals of OpenStack, the open source cloud platform it put in play.
Rackspace, the first company to commercialize OpenStack, has been beta testing a training course for the last year and has educated 300-350 people from about 50 mostly end-user companies in Australia, China, South Africa and the US so far, with Israel and Hong Kong scheduled soon.