I read a story the other day about “the 10 poorest countries” in the world. The writer examined poverty statistics to determine this list. Some of the countries are known for terrible governments (eg, Zimbabwe), some had high per-person income levels – usually due to abundant mining — but abysmal income disparities (eg, Burundi), while others (eg, Madagascar) were just poor through and through.

But there’s always hope. Madagascar, for example, has landed on our radar screen in the Top 10 “raw” ranking among 22 African nations we’ve surveyed.

What does that mean?

We started our research at the Tau Institute with the struggles of developing countries – “the world’s poorest” – in mind. How could we develop a truly relative ranking, one that shows which countries are doing the best with what they have? We’ve integrated several publicly available sources of information and adjusted them for local cost-of-living levels and income disparity to produce our ranking, known as the Tau Index.

Its purpose is to find the countries that are the most dynamic, ie, which have the most potential for continuous upward economic progress, regardless of where they stand today. It provides a unique view of technology-driven progress, whether you’re looking at developed countries or developing nations across the entire spectrum of relative wealth. (I’ve written extensively on this topic – you can find my most recent articles at http://rogerstrukhoff.sys-con.com )

99 Countries Surveyed
We have an overall ranking of 99 countries at this point, and have broken the overall result into regional and income-tier groupings. We also have a “raw” ranking. The overall ranking integrates income levels, local cost of living, bandwidth measurements, and other publicly available socioeconomic measurements. The raw ranking focuses on the income and technology integration, leaving the socioeconomic factors aside.

Most “developmental” and “competitiveness” rankings and the like simply tell us what we already know, ie, rich countries are at the top, developing countries at the bottom. It’s easy enough to draw a nice, smooth curve as incomes rise from less than $1,000 to more than $50,000 throughout the nations of the world. Measurements of health, infrastructure, technology development, etc. follow this curve faithfully.

But economic progress in this era of globalization and the Worldwide Web is a very odd thing. Ethiopia, for example, has the lowest income (at $374). It does not score well overall, or in our regional or tiered rankings.

Yet the country’s national airline, Ethiopian Airlines, is Africa’s second largest, is the first outside of Japan to buy the new Boeing 787, and is working to establish the nation’s capital, Addis Abbaba, as a major regional hub. Looking at our numbers, we find that Ethiopia does score relatively well in the raw rankings, placing 4th among 22 African countries we’ve surveyed.

Back to Madagascar: it ranks 7th on that particular list, three notches behind Ethiopia but two notches ahead of Egypt. In our overall rankings, Madagascar is a more modest 13th among the 22 African nations, and 82nd overall out of 99 countries surveyed. Compare this to Egypt’s 8th place in Africa and 65th overall.

As I’ve stated, our research is intended to start conversations, not finish them, so please contact me to learn more about what we’re doing.

read more

Every emerging market goes through a time of confusion where both vendors and analysts try to “define” the solution to a pervasive problem. Meanwhile, companies actually experiencing the problem are left to sort through a cacophony of mixed messages and terminology, all the while struggling to understand how this “category” of products solves their problem. As cloud storage moves closer to the IT mainstream, we see this same story arc playing out, with analysts and vendors coining a new category of products – “Cloud Integrated Storage” (CiS) – that is subtly different from the “cloud storage gateway” term that previously captured the entire category.
According to an ESG report, CiS entails “primary and/or most active data staying onsite (as a tier or cache).” It operates “for less active data … as an easily scalable archive” and offers “powerful remote data protection and business continuity capabilities.” While this description is quite elaborate, in layman’s terms, CiS simply delivers cloud storage in addition to traditional storage to on-premise environments. In fact, it may all sound very familiar to those already using advanced cloud storage gateways and appliances.

read more

This is a follow-up to a recent post about modernizing data protection and doing more than simply swapping out media or mediums like flat tires on a car as well as part of the Quantum protecting data with certainty event series.
While I was traveling saw this advertisement sign from Datalink (who is a Quantum partner that participated in some of the events) in a few different airports which is a variation of the Datadomain tape sucks attention getter. For those not familiar, that creature on the right is an oversized mosquito with the company logos on the lower left being Datalink, NetApp, Cisco and VMware.

read more

SYS-CON Events announced today that the Telx, a leading provider of global interconnectivity, cloud enablement services and data center solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Telx is a leading provider of interconnection and data center services in strategic, high-demand North American markets. With 17 premier C3 Cloud Connection Centers by TelxTM, Telx increases speed to market and reduces connectivity costs by providing direct connections to a community of the industry’s highest performance networks and access to 1,000+ customers, including leading telecommunications carriers, ISPs, cloud providers, content providers and enterprises.

read more

Much has been written here, and in many blogs, about Cloud Adoption. However, most of this has focused on the tangible and critical pieces like technical architecture and operational considerations. This can’t be minimized in the least. However, in my work with both vendors and end customers, I’ve identified what is another critical success factor across all organizations, and that is adopting a Cloud Mindset. And while mindset may seem “softer” than the other issues, if we don’t shift our mindset, we will continue to cling to ideas and assumptions that served us well in the past, but can get in the way of our future success.

read more

It’s become increasingly clear that Big Data, and the tools for manipulating, visualizing and analyzing it, are transforming the business landscape. McKinsey released a report in 2011 that projects 40 percent growth in global data generated per year. This is all well and good, but more and more companies are finding that their toolbox for dealing with all of this data is antiquated and confusing.
Indeed, 58 percent of enterprise decision makers surveyed in March 2012 by DataXu felt they lacked the skills and technology required for marketing analytics. Marketers should be chomping at the bit to fruitfully employ the data they have. Successful marketing requires proper segmentation of the customer base to create more targeted campaigns. Real-time insight into the performance of existing campaigns and a clear grasp of where to redirect efforts can also turn a campaign that would have failed into a success. These are the promises made by the drivers of the current “data movement.” The unfortunate reality, however, is that the accumulation of data just adds to the costs of an organization as it struggles to merely store the incoming torrent of data, let alone harness it and allow non-technical individuals to explore and understand it.

read more

Oracle is buying SelectMinds, a New York maker of cloud-based social talent sourcing and corporate alumni management apps that are supposed to empower recruiters, hiring managers and employees to leverage social connections for higher-quality referrals.
Referrals are the #1 source of external hires according to a CareerXroads study last year.
SelectMinds products are already integrated with Oracle Cloud recruiting, performance management and human capital management solutions and will extend its social and mobile initiatives into talent management.
Terms were not disclosed. SelectMinds was started in 2000 and got $5.5 million from Bessemer Venture Partners in 2007.
SelectMinds claims JP Morgan, ADP, IBM, eBay, Rackspace and Schlumberger as customers.

read more

Abiquo, the UK-based cloud platform company, has named Jim Darragh CEO, replacing Peter Malcolm who quietly disappeared in April.
Darragh is supposed to grow the business aggressively and deliver shareholder value.
He comes over from Riverbed Technology where he was running its Stingray business unit, a job he got in July of last year after selling Zeus Technology to Riverbed for a $110 million plus a possible $30 million incentive that was due to be paid out this summer.
He was CEO of the web server company that had branched out into the load balancing and traffic management for virtual and cloud environments that Riverbed wanted.

read more

For the past several years as virtualization and cloud computing adoption has expanded, we have seen endless proof points in regards to 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 the application teams.
In their General Session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Richa Dhanda, Senior Product Marketing Manager at VMware, and Murthy Mathiprakasam, Senior Product Marketing Manager at VMware, will provide concepts and solutions to allow leveraging the investment in the cloud technologies while offering up capabilities to the application teams that allow them to take advantage of the constructs of the cloud, hence empowering them to deliver more business value on top of IaaS. They will examine the different type of cloud applications, and new approaches to deploy applications, embed policies, monitor the applications and leverage the cloud elasticity.

read more

Information Builders on Tuesday announced a new partnership with 1010data, Inc.. This partnership links Information Builders’ popular WebFOCUS BI and analytics platform to 1010data’s Big Data platform environment, improving customer analytics performance and reducing costs.
Many organizations are struggling to manage large sets of structured and unstructured data and to access this information in near real time regardless of its size or form. To help minimize these complexities and accelerate time to value of big data analytics, Information Builders and 1010data have joined forces to deliver a 1010data-exploitive version of WebFOCUS that takes advantage of 1010data’s unique analytic capabilities. Using WebFOCUS, customers are able to write queries, build analytical dashboards, and produce reports that perform at near native speeds and bypass the need for intermediate table setup or summarization, as required by other SQL-based business analytics tools.

read more