“I think there is opportunity for this market to go far beyond analytics,” observed Margaret Dawson, Symform’s Vice President of Marketing, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Again,” Dawson continued, “this goes back to how we can integrate these solutions with other related products/solutions to get a broader picture of what is happening across our business. I think an interesting intersection is Big Data and distributed compute processing.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Agree or disagree? – «While the IT savings aspect is compelling, the strongest benefit of cloud computing is how it enhances business agility.»
Margaret Dawson: I don’t think it’s one or the other or so black and white. For some companies, it is absolutely a budgetary impact issue; for others, it’s about being able to move to a new technology or increasing productivity quickly regardless of money saved or not. For others it’s about minimizing impact on the network. Depending on which cloud computing platform and solution the business is pursuing, the benefits can be wide ranging. That being said, I absolutely agree that business agility is a key benefit of cloud.
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SoftLayer Delivers Rapid Scalability to Game Developers
Interruptions from outages, network lag and scalability issues caused by unpredictable usage patterns can mean “game over” in the competitive world of online game development. With a wide array of Internet-scale cloud infrastructure options – including dedicated, virtualized and managed servers – SoftLayer Technologies has become the go-to provider to some of today’s top game developers. Online gaming companies such as Broken Bulb Game Studios, East Side Games, KIXEYE, Hothead Games and Storm8 rely on SoftLayer to provide a platform where they can develop, test, launch and run their latest games.
“Working with SoftLayer gave us the right mix of dedicated and pure cloud-based resources,” said Robert Nelson, CEO of Broken Bulb Studios. “We have a robust platform that can support our massive bursts in user adoption when rolling out new games. This is because we’re able to easily provision any and all IT resources while overcoming network latency issues, giving our users a great online experience.”
Cloud Computing: TwinStrata CEO to Discuss Cloud SANs at Cloud Expo NY
TwinStrata, Inc., the leading innovator of cloud-based data storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions, on Tuesday announced that company CEO Nicos Vekiarides is a featured speaker at Cloud Expo. Specifically, he’ll discuss how Cloud SANs are rapidly becoming the new approach to building and enhancing storage area networks. In addition, the company will be exhibiting its CloudArray Storage Gateway at the Expo in Booth No. 339 of the Javits Center in New York, June 11-14.
«Despite numerous benefits over their direct-attached predecessors, SANs still present a number of challenges,» said Vekiarides. «In this session, Cloud Expo delegates will learn how Cloud SANs are rapidly becoming the new approach to building and enhancing storage area networks. Attendees will learn how using cloud storage, in combination with enterprise-class cloud storage gateways, overcomes the limitations of traditional SANs through a pay-as-you-go cost model while offering unlimited capacity, multi-site scalability, and even cloud-based disaster recovery without dedicated infrastructure and resources.»
Cloud Computing: Compuware to Speak on Cloud Performance at Cloud Expo NY
Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company, on Tuesday announced that Michael Kopp, a Technology Strategist for Compuware’s application performance management (APM) business, will present a session titled: «How to Do Application Performance Monitoring in the Clouds: Lessons Learned» at Cloud Expo 2012 New York in New York City.
Organizations face the challenge of monitoring and managing performance in clouds every other day. Not only is APM different in a cloud, but all clouds are not equal either.
During this session, attendees will learn how to do APM in different types of clouds (Azure, EC2, VMware private clouds) and how clouds differ from more traditional environments. The session will also cover performance monitoring, troubleshooting and tuning in environments where resources are virtually infinite but application performance is not.
SoftLayer Delivering Cloud to Gamers
“Gamers require a high-performance, always on, graphically attractive and quick-responding experience,” writes SoftLayer Chief Strategy Officer George Karidis in a recent blog post. “If they don’t get that experience, they move on.”
Thus go the thought processes at the Dallas based company, which claims to be “the go-to provider” for top game developers such as Broken Bulg Game Studios, East Side Games, Kixeye, Hothead Games, and Storm8.
Delivered as IaaS, SoftLayer strives to give game developers the ability to roll out cloud-computing instances in minutes, or turn up dedicated servers in just two hours. It provides dedicated, virtualized, and managed servers in a “consumptive billing” (ie, pay as you go) model, with a focus on precluding the outage interruptions, network lag, and scalability problems caused by unpredictable, spiky usage patters that can cause gamers to go elsewhere.
As Karidis also notes, “Game developers do not have the time, operational expertise or resources to manage their own complex data centers because they need to focus on…developing new games, launching before the competition and keeping players engaged.”
SoftLayer’s dozen-plus datacenters are found throughout the world, including Dallas, Seattle, San Jose, Washington DC, Amsterdam, and Singapore, connected via private, 10Gb Ethernet point-to-point connections.
Piston Cloud CTO to Present at Cloud Expo New York
Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., the enterprise OpenStack company, today announced its co-founder and CTO, Christopher MacGown, will lead a session titled, «CloudAudit: Cloud Security for Regulated Industries» on Wednesday, June 13 at Cloud Expo 2012 East in New York City.
What:
Regulation of consumer and corporate data is increasing in response to the growing movement into cloud service offerings. Coupled with high-profile intrusions by groups such as Anonymous and Lulzsec, the necessity for a standard way to assess the security of cloud service providers becomes apparent.
CloudAudit is an open standard developed by a Cloud Security Alliance working group that provides an open, common, extensible namespace and interface to enable cloud providers and authorized customers to automate audits, assertions, assessments and assurance for their cloud infrastructure, platform or application environments. This session will look at the CloudAudit API and implementations.
Cloud Expo NY: "It’s Now Official, Everyone On the Planet is Going To Be There"
«I finally registered for #CloudExpo,» tweeted Michael Baylor (@CloudVisions) Monday. «It’s now official,» he added, «everyone on the planet is going to be there.»
Baylor was just one of thousands of IT professionals who are using Twitter right now to connect with other like-minded Cloud & Big Data experts and compare notes as they prepare to attend The Largest Cloud Computing Event in the World…10th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York.
Thinking Beyond “The Cloud”
As the conversations from FIRE sink in, I start to see IT evolve away from the conventional (and highly standardized) data center design to more advanced and highly-tuned architectures customized for particular operating missions. For all of the buzz about commoditized infrastructure there has been very little discussion about the need for customization. Yet, much […]
Salesforce to Buy Buddy Media for Social CRM
As rumored last week, Salesforce.com Monday said it’s going to buy Buddy Media for roughly $689 million in cash and stock.
Buddy Media lets marketers manage their presence on social sites like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. They can publish content, place social advertising, measure the effectiveness of their social media marketing programs, determine which content is driving the most engagements, test different strategies and isolate the campaigns delivering the best ROI.
Salesforce already owns Radian6, a so-called social media listening platform, and will merge the two platforms together in its Marketing Cloud so it can offer the entire social marketing lifecycle.
Salesforce said it got interested in Buddy Media after Gartner predicted that CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017 – and 15% of whatever they plunk down will be for CRM.
That may also explain why Oracle bought Buddy Media rival Vitrue a couple of weeks ago for what TechCrunch said was $300 million.
Buddy’s nearly 1,000 clients include Ford, HP, L’Oreal, Mattel, eight of top 10 global advertisers and ad agencies like Interpublic and WPP, an investor. Salesforce said it was attracted by the size of its major customers.
All Things Digital said last week that Buddy Media spurned an offer from Google to go with Salesforce.
Salesforce said it will pay approximately $467 million in cash and $184 million in common stock and $38 million in vested options and restricted stock units.
It calculates that the acquisition, expected to close by the end of October, should add $20 million-$25 million in revenue to its current fiscal year but cut earnings by 14 cents or 15 cents a share. As a result it tweaked guidance for the year to $1.45 to $1.49 on approximately $2.99 billion-$3 billion, less than the $1.63 on ~$3 billion Wall Street was already expecting.
Buddy Media raised $90 million in financing since getting started in 2007 from Softbank, Greycroft, Bay Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, GGV Capital, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and VCs Ron Conway and Peter Thiel.
The Financial Times made the observation that Facebook, which Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff called the “new corporate homepage,” lets companies market on its platforms for free, leaving Buddy Media, Vitrue and others like them make money on its free tools. Facebook, by the way, closed at an all-time low Monday: $26.90
GridIron and Brocade Set IOPS Standard for Cloud-Based App Performance
GridIron Systems, a pioneer in Big Data acceleration, has announced record performance and substantial energy savings for a new reference architecture that combines its OneAppliance FlashCube ultra-high bandwidth solid state storage appliances with Brocade 16 Gigabits per second (Gbps) Fibre Channel storage area networking (SAN) technologies in validated tests running a cloud-enabled MySQL clustered database application.
The new reference architecture overcomes the challenges many organizations face in scaling and enabling concurrent access to databases, while also reducing costs and data center hardware requirements. The architecture, which was validated by Demartek, an independent analyst firm, is an important development for enterprises that depend on MySQL clusters for mission-critical business applications.