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Heroku Chief Forsakes Tech for Olive Gardening
Former Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian, who became Salesforce.com’s EVP of platforms when the SaaS pioneer acquired the Platform-as-a-Service for $212 million in December of 2010, left Salesforce last month.
According to his LinkedIn page, he’s off farming olives somewhere in the San Francisco area. How utterly sensible.
GigaOm, which discovered his departure and is looking to intrude on his pastoral reverie, says he was “key to Heroku’s fast growth.” It says the now-polyglot Heroku hit a “1.5 million apps-hosted plateau” in May.
Sebastian came out of SourceLabs and BEA.
Effectively Leveraging the Cloud for Better User Experience
The cloud has many benefits, but when it comes to application development, how does the cloud help enterprises and development teams create custom software and applications that end users actually care about? In his General Session at Cloud Expo New York, EffectiveUI President Anthony Franco highlights the advantages cloud computing provides for quickly developing custom software and applications with compelling user experiences using real world examples from Adobe, Herff Jones and Navy Federal Credit Union.
He also explores:
Using the flexible nature of cloud computing to rapidly design and deploy integrated enterprise applications
Leveraging the cloud for a highly visible and transparent development process
Using a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to create a hybrid cloud
Enterprise Talent Wars and IBM’s Acquisition of Kenexa
Different factors are driving changes for businesses who need to continuously adapt to them. Not having the right talent available is a challenge in being able to adapt to those changes. Efficiently managing the talent pool is an important to businesses that is leading to numerous acquisitions in this space.
That observation leads me to IBM’s recently announced acquisition of Kenexa. With this purchase, IBM is getting into the HCM application space in direct competition with Oracle who acquired Taleo, Salesforce who acquired Rypple and SAP who acquired SuccessFactors for similar reasons. Demand for solutions in this space is also increasing due to the entry of millennial candidates into the workplace who are likely to look for job satisfaction in addition to typical benefits, likely to re-locate if they find the right position and also are very social. All these characteristics bring different expectations of HCM solutions by enterprises to cater to a different expectation of the workplace. In other words, in Kenexa, IBM picked solution focused on an area with a significant projected worldwide demand growth, as candidates are growing pickier in choosing an employer.
Rackspace UK Achieves ISO 14001 Environmental Management Certification
Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, has achieved certification to the ISO 14001:2004 Environmental Management standard. The certification is based upon an external validation of the company’s environmental performance with regard to the design, implementation and support of hosting solutions in its UK data centre and office operations.
ISO 14001 certification among cloud data centre providers is still comparatively rare and Rackspace continues to be environmentally proactive in improving its operations. Adherence to the voluntary 14000 or 14001 standards is evidence of Rackspace’s efforts to both improve and formally systematise the company’s environmental management efforts.
Vietnam, Ghana, Senegal Among Developing ICT Leaders
I recently reported on overall and regional leaders in our latest research at the Tau Institute (which has offices in Illinois and Manila, Philippines). Now here’s a look at leaders by income tier – this is a way to compare similarly developed nations with one another, regardless of location.
We’ve been able to include 91 countries into the mix. The mission is to produce a sophisticated ranking that takes into account relative progress of the nations of the world when it comes to ICT. We integrate several publicly available factors into our own algorithm. There is thus transparency in the data we input combined with a specialized weighting system that we believe reveals new insight into the statistics.
We’ve integrated the following factors into a single, weighted formula:
* Per capita income (from the World Bank)
* Local cost of living (ditto)
* Gini coefficient (income disparity as measured by the United Nations and CIA)
* Perception of corruption (from Transparency International)
* Human development (according to the United Nations)
* Data servers per capita (adjusted for local income, as measured by the World Bank)
* Average bandwidth speed (from Ookla, Inc.)
* % of population with access to the Internet (from the International Telecommunications Union)
* % population with broadband connections (ditto)
In the end, we’ve created a «pound-for-pound» analysis that reveals the countries that are doing the most with what they have. Our method goes far beyond the normal rankings one sees that simply show wealthy countries on top, developing nations on the bottom.
We can view the datas in several ways. For today, I’ll list the countries that have been most successful on a relative basis so far.
Tomorrow, I’ll list the countries with the most raw potential. The «raw» ranking hits a middle ground of opportunity and development. Countries that have lagged regardless of income level (such as Norway and Libya) do not fare as well in this index as countries that have shown good relative ICT commitments (such as Jordan), even if they’re still impoverished (such as Ethiopia).
As a reality check and benchmark, we’ve created a «Perfect Land» which has optimal statistics in all categories. The idea is that no country should beat Perfect Land in the overall index, although many countries will beat it in the raw index, which is weighted toward potential.
Here are the Overall leaders, sorted by income tier.
Tier 1 (>$30K in per capita income)
New Zealand (#3 in the world overall)
Netherlands (#4 in the world overall)
Finland (#5 in the world overall)
Denmark
Sweden
Tier 2 ($13K-$29K)
South Korea (#1 in the world overall)
Estonia (#2 in the world overall)
Lithuania
Taiwan
Poland
Tier 3 ($6K-$13K)
Bulgaria
Romania
Latvia
Turkey
Serbia
Tier 4 ($2K-$6K)
Jordan
Jamaica
Ukraine
Mongolia
Morocco
Tunisia
Philippines
China
Armenia
Thailand
Tier 5 (<$2K) Vietnam Ghana Senegal Kenya India Each of these countries has a story to tell, as do all countries covered in our research. We are currently engaging with local resources in some of the places that emerge as leaders. We are also very interested in making new connections within any country – the Tau Index serves merely to start conversations about ICT and its role in increasing economic development and improving the lives of people. Follow me on Twitter
Managing the Explosive Growth and Consolidation of Big Data in the Cloud
IT departments are experiencing storage capacity needs doubling every 12-18 months, 50x the amount of information and 75x the number of files. IT managers are dealing with growing constraints on space, power and costs to manage their data center infrastructure. Intel is helping businesses and users realize the benefits of cloud computing technology by working to develop open standards that operate across disparate IT infrastructures and by delivering cloud-based architectures that enable federated, automated and client-aware cloud services. In his General Session at Cloud Expo New York, Tony Hamilton, Enterprise Marketing Manager at Intel, discusses how the foundation for this vision will be defined by an open approach that delivers best of breed technologies + flexibility + choice from data center infrastructure to client devices. and how Intel is bringing together a broad network of leading hardware and solution providers to build and enhance cloud solutions that are interoperable, multi-vendor and embrace open standards.
Big Data – Business Value
With every passing day, Big Data assumes new strength as a significant force in our industry. Someone even said that Big Data is transforming business same way IT did few decades ago.
The overall revenue (includes hardware, software, service) for Big Data is said to be around $5.1B in 2011 and includes players such as IBM, Intel, HP, Fujitsu, etc. This is hard to fathom! But pure-play revenue coming from players such as Vertica, Aster, Cloudera, Greenplum, 1010Data, etc. is valued at $468M in 2011. Then someone said the projected revenue from Big Data will reach an astounding $53B by 2017 (source- Wikibon), growing to $10B in 2013, $32 in 2015 and $48B in 2016. We can argue on these numbers, but let us agree that this will be quite big. Why is that?
Cloud Computing: Virtustream Gets Plum Cloud Job
Virtustream has snared a handsome contract to move Veyance Technologies’ complex global SAP environment to its xStream cloud platform where it will run in production.
Veyance, in case you don’t know, is the exclusive manufacturer and marketer of Goodyear engineered products worldwide and its SAP environment serves over 3,000 users.
Its legacy SAP R/3, SAP XI, TREX, Netweaver, ITS and WAS systems were previously deployed on physical hardware in a traditional outsourcing arrangement. It decided to move to the cloud to enable an extensive global data center and server consolidation initiative, which will cut its IT costs, and to let it scale dynamically as future expansion needs.
Veyance will still manage the multi-tenant environment with a single panel of glass.
Its requirements reportedly included true consumption-based pricing, guaranteed compute resources, data protection and industry-leading SLAs. The xStream platform will also provide comprehensive disaster recovery and data protection.
Software as a Service (SaaS), Security and Risk Management: Part 1
As cloud computing technologies and offerings mature and evolve in its services to customers, one common consumer use will be that of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model.
My earlier articles have touched on the various models, risks, security and forensics at several levels. There is also a plethora of resources available now that end users can educate themselves with that are freely available online.
This article will focus on aspects of security that impact the SaaS environment as developed, presented or augmented by me for several Cloud Computing projects.
Before we proceed in the subject matter, a brief clarification of what I refer to as the cloud follows. Keep in mind that this term «cloud computing» is now being used to describe a broad range of services to include product descriptors that sits outside the common definition of the cloud.