If you’re like me, you’ve already grown tired of the word “pivot” when used to describe a shift in a company’s strategy, a politician’s lies, or an industry’s focus. Yet indeed it appears as if the cloud computing industry’s focus has suddenly shifted, er, pivoted, from processing and storage to networks.

VMware’s $1-billion+ Nicira acquisition, followed quickly by Oracle’s sort-of-related Xsigo acquisition has turned our heads. Suddenly, the network is the most important thing, and SDN is the new star peaking through the clouds. Never mind that is a LAN technology, not really SDN. A network by any other name…

Fortunately, the letters “SDN” don’t have nearly as snappy an appearance or sound as “cloud,” so we miserable scribes, analysts, and marketeers are in no danger of having to pivot anytime soon.

There’s more good news here in that it’s high time we started talking more about the network, specifically the Internet, aka the “cloud” in “cloud computing.” Network failovers have been the culprit behind the recent AWS blackouts – and this has not been the fault of the Internet, but rather the way we’re managing it.

The new focus on networking virtualization software is no doubt making people at Cisco nervous. It seems to me this shouldn’t be the case except for those in the organization who have to plan long-term market growth – SDN in theory should make Internet plumbing vastly more efficient, thereby reducing future demand for it. But we’re so far from optimizing network traffic, and the anticipated growth in traffic fueled by small devices and video should maintain a strong demand for Internet tubes, pipes, valves, and fittings for a long time.

The real challenge to the big vendors and to enterprise buyers is to future-proof plans that may look like they’ll become obsolete before they’re deployed. This is a great time for analysis paralysis within the world of cloud computing.

So the question to me is, does SDN pivot mean that potential bottlenecks which impeded plans are now removed, or has it added a layer of complexity that will further impede plans?

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Yahoo’s short-lived interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, who was replaced by the board two weeks ago by a bright shiny blonde from Google, said Monday that he’s leaving the company.

He didn’t say if he had a destination.

He wasn’t expected to stay after Marissa Mayer got there.

As CEO Levinsohn succeeded in defusing the ill-considered infringement suit his fired predecessor Scott Thompson lodged against Facebook and calmed the water roiled by Thompson’s sudden departure caused by phony academic credentials.

The board, led by proxy fight victor Dan Loeb, who discovered Thompson’s fib, traded the media and advertising executive for a technologist it’s expecting to make Yahoo’s web sites more relevant.

Levinsohn, who worked at Fox Interactive Media where he bought MySpace and cut a huge ad deal with Google as well as HBO and AltaVista, joined Yahoo in late 2010 to run its media sites and Americas ad sales.

Yahoo and Mayer acknowledged his contributions. Marissa wished him well and said in an e-mail that wended its way to All Things Digital that he “helped keep the company moving, closed important deals, and assembled a very talented team.”

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In the first quarter of 2012, FEMA reported 12 natural disasters throughout the country, including tornadoes, flooding, mudslides and severe storms from Florida to Alaska. The threats to your data are limitless – natural disasters, fires, water damage, equipment theft and hardware failure to name just a few. In the event of a disaster, if you don’t have access to an offsite copy of your data, or if you are unable to replicate it, the chances are it will be gone forever.
Deciding on the Right Provider Should Be No Different Than Buying a Car
Many businesses are opting to move their data to the cloud, citing benefits in time savings/automation, cost, security and access; however, some SMBs still maintain reservations about keeping their valuable data offsite and beyond their control. A recent Information Week Report indicated that only 23 percent of business technology professionals use cloud services as part of their application and data recovery strategies. Many others are confused by the number of online cloud backup companies and “free storage” offerings that are flooding the market; while others are concerned about those data storage companies who have proven to be “fly-by-night” entities that are here today, gone tomorrow.

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«We are Europe’s leading operator of carrier-neutral data centers, and it’s a demand-driven dynamic that we are seeing,» stated James Tyler, Director of Marketing & Communications at TelecityGroup, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Progress Software Corporation on Monday introduced the new Progress DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET 4.0, the latest version of its suite of ADO.NET (ActiveX Data Objects for .NET) data providers that completely eliminates the need for database client libraries with a 100 percent managed, wire protocol architecture. This new release includes Microsoft Entity Framework support, Visual Studio LightSwitch support and expanded enterprise capabilities that enable developers to rapidly create, deploy and manage high-performance, mission-critical desktop and Cloud applications with ease.
As more .NET applications move to the Cloud, high performance and efficiency become even more important. The Progress DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET 4.0 data providers are a critical component to delivering on that goal, while significantly lowering operating costs for Cloud applications by using less memory and CPU cycles. The DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET 4.0 data providers deliver top performance, as well as significantly higher levels of security and authentication, reliability and failover, connection pool management and multi-database consistency not found in other drivers. This enables developers to create higher performing applications with greater uptime and better security.

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«We’re helping store all the wonderful identity and personal data about you for cloud providers,» said Andy Land, VP of Marketing at UnboundID, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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“UShareSoft has been progressing significantly since last year. We are providing a multi-cloud app store platform,” said Alban Richard, CEO of UShareSoft, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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“We’ve always been focused on Software as a Service. And Dimension Data, which was recently bought by NTT, has always been focused on on-premise cloud,” explained Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, a Dimension Data company, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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A week ago VMware said it was buying Nicira for $1.26 billion for its cloudy software-defined network virtualization.
Monday morning Oracle said it’s buying Xsigo Systems for its cloudy software-defined network virtualization.
Oracle’s not saying what it’s paying and it’s unclear how much funding the eight-year-old company took in from VCs like Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Greylock Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.
Like the Nicira acquisition, Xsigo in Oracle’s hands threatens Cisco and Juniper.
Xsigo, which has worked with Oracle in the past, is more established than the fledging Nicira. Xsigo’s stuff is supposed to simplify cloud infrastructure and operations by letting customers connect any server to any network and storage dynamically and flexibly, resulting in increased asset utilization and application performance while reducing cost.

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“Distributed computing (cloud) services are proving to be more universal, more scalable, and more economical as a pay-per-use model,” observed Jerry Miller, Vice President of Technology at CDNetworks, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. Miller continued, “Many of the functions previously confined to private networks, such as WAN acceleration and high-security transactions, can be increasingly performed in the cloud.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?
Jerry Miller: Definitely agree. Even with cloud services, there is often a wealth of data available. Yet enterprises often don’t possess the resources or experience to analyze and take proper action when needed, often resulting in underserved regions or markets, underperforming sites or services, and/or lost revenue. As a service provider, CDNetworks helps ensure that this information is presented in an understandable, actionable manner and works with its customers to consult on improvements, so the content provider can get the analysis needed to find patterns and problem areas to better focus scarce resources. In addition we accelerate cloud applications and websites that contain the data, so companies can use resources in emerging technology hubs like India, China, and Russia to help extract meaningful information.

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