In this Women in Technology Power Panel at 15th Cloud Expo, moderated by Anne Plese, Senior Consultant, Cloud Product Marketing at Verizon Enterprise, Esmeralda Swartz, CMO at MetraTech; Evelyn de Souza, Data Privacy and Compliance Strategy Leader at Cisco Systems; Seema Jethani, Director of Product Management at Basho Technologies; Victoria Livschitz, CEO of Qubell Inc.; Anne Hungate, Senior Director of Software Quality at DIRECTV, discussed what path they took to find their spot within the technology industry and how do they see opportunities for other women in their area of expertise.

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«We are the top stocking distributor for HP renew products in North America. We can only sell to U.S. authorized partners and resellers for HP,» explained Miguel Diazdelcastillo Jr., Sales Executive at Creative Business Solutions, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at Cloud Expo, held Nov 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

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The move in recent years to cloud computing services and architectures has added significant pace to the application development and deployment environment. When enterprise IT can spin up large computing instances in just minutes, developers can also design and deploy in small time frames that were unimaginable a few years ago. The consequent move toward lean, agile, and fast development leads to the need for the development and operations sides to work very closely together. Thus, DevOps becomes essential for any ambitious enterprise today.
This Lunchtime Power Panel at DevOps Summit (http://DevOpsSummit.SYS-CON.com), was moderated by Andi Mann, VP of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies. Monish Sharma, VP of Customer Success at ElasticBox; Myles Steinhauser, Software Development Engineer at Blue Box; Victoria Livschitz, CEO of Qubell Inc.; and Mark Levy, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Serena Software go beyond the basics in a discussion of why DevOps is not only important for transformation, but is mission-critical for enterprises that want to stay in business.

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The follow up article to Welcome to the Age of the Consumer: No Opinion Matters More

Now we go into how to take advantage of those essential first few days or even minutes that you have your potential customer’s attention in order to follow through on heightened expectations of stellar customer service.

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Information Technology (IT) service providers have historically struggled between the huge capital expenditure and long development cycles of building their own cloud versus the thin margins and limited flexibility of using public retailers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). The emergence of wholesale cloud, and the technologies that make it possible, is revolutionizing how and by whom enterprise IT is delivered. Wholesale cloud is the game-changing third option between building your own (BYO) cloud and public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), providing the advantages of each minus any of the drawbacks. We are entering a new realm of cloud computing as the next wave of technical innovations from emerging startups brings the dawn of Cloud 2.0, and with it, a new era of IT transformation and agility. The global market for cloud services is expected to grow from $131 billion in 2013 to $244 billion by 2017 (source: PwC), and wholesale cloud presents tremendous opportunities for a growing segment of service providers (MSPs, SIs, and VARs) to gain a competitive advantage and effectively compete against larger players.

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This BriefingsDirect innovator case study interview explores how a Texas healthcare provider has adopted cloud computing, and in doing so has both saved money and improved the quality of its many services.
Creative Solutions in HealthCare is the largest independent owner and operator of skilled nursing facilities (SNFs), which are nursing homes, in the State of Texas. We also operate assisted-living facilities and we provide long-term care solutions, primarily in Texas.

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Amazon and Google have built software-defined data centers (SDDCs) that deliver massively scalable services with great efficiency. Yet, building SDDCs has proven to be a near impossibility for companies without hyper-scale resources.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, David Cauthron, CTO and Founder of NIMBOXX, highlighted how a mid-sized manufacturer of global industrial equipment bridged the gap from virtualization to software-defined services, streamlining operations and costs while connecting the infrastructure between its corporate data center and remote partner sites. He also discussed performance expectations and detail implementation scenarios.

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Already, in the few short years that cloud has been in the mainstream IT conversation, we’ve seen the rise of «bare metal» cloud (thus ending the illusion of cloud’s infinite capacity to users), the substitution of virtualized machines by Docker containers, and most recently, the potential disruption of containers through the recent CoreOS Rocket announcement and Docker’s alleged movement toward full-fledged PaaS.

Meanwhile, PaaS was supposed to be subsumed into IaaS this year. Oh, and companies who were routinely accused of «cloudwashing» a few years ago are now considered to be mainstream cloud technology providers.

Which brings us to this week’s formal establishment of the Coud Foundry Foundation. Initial reaction seems to be that his organization will be detrimental to non-members Red Hat and Oracle, although it’s clear that Oracle will buy almost anything it seems it needs, and Red Hat is large enough (with $1.5 billion annual revenue) to shore up its weaknesses (say, in containers) as well.

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Now that cloud services have become part of IT’s “new normal,” commonly referred to as “hybrid,” it seems obvious that the approaches and tools we use to manage IT would also evolve and mature, though the pace of evolution varies amongst companies, of course. According to a Website Magazine article quoting a Gartner survey, more than 55% of CIOs indicate they would host all critical apps in the cloud by 2020. Cloud services use cases can vary greatly, but often hold common themes around converting traditional applications to SaaS, or adding disaster recovery to your existing datacenter with RaaS.

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PaaS has been such a great innovation for developers. They can develop and deploy applications from their desktop to the cloud, all in a consistent environment. They can deploy to production themselves, bypassing the IT middleman and speeding up the application delivery process. And they can develop in any language they want, without limitations. Developers have it made! But what about IT?
Does PaaS help them in any way or is it just another system for them to manage? Is this an unnecessary complication or does it help them? Why do they need PaaS?

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