“Times are hard” was a phrase often used in my house as a child usually when begging my mother for the latest pair of Nike trainers.  

Fast forward 20 years and not much has changed as we continue to struggle through the worst economic crisis we have ever seen. The downturn has had a huge impact upon the public sector with many departments being forced to cut budgets to help reduce the government deficit.

One way departments are seeking to cut costs is by reassessing their technology needs, which has in more cases than not, resulted in the implementation of cloud computing solutions. The government’s ‘G-Cloud’ framework hopes to eliminate waste by more efficient IT procurement helping departments innovate, creating a better public service. The framework includes a list of approved suppliers and provides quick and easy access to cloud services. The cost benefits of cloud adoption in the …

I’m looking forward to Cloud Expo in Santa Clara next week.

Last year I flew from Manila, Philippines to be in attendance and announce the initial results of the Tau Index research that I’d been conducting with partners in Asia. This year, my flight will be only from Chicago, even as my Asian partners continue to expand the research.

We now cover 102 countries. The world’s top five are South Korea, Estonia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Finland. The bottom five are Libya, Cameroon, Cote D’Ivoire, Iran, and Algeria. The countries with the most untapped potential seem to be Vietnam, Ukraine, and most of Eastern Africa.

I’ve written extensively on the topic, so won’t repeat anything more here. One of our next steps is to bring some serious computing power to bear on the numbers, to bring them to life through data visualization. We can slice and dice the information through dozens of parameters, regions, income groupings, and combinations thereof. Our goal is to make them dance; we may be able to do this with the support of a university here in the Midwest with which we’ve been speaking.

Our research shines a light on many of the undiscovered gems in the world of global IT, and also reinforces the perceptions of many other countries with strong reputations. Given that IT innovation reaches most corners of the globe very quickly these days, we view our efforts as a way to further the growth of all global economies through the analysis and application of great technology.

If you’re looking for new markets, sources, or investments, try to speak to me next week at the show. I’d love to share what we’re doing with you.

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“I’m not expecting consolidation in the infrastructure space, except for acquisitions that have to hire strong engineering teams,” noted Renat Khasanshyn, CEO of Altoros Systems and Venture Partner at Runa Capital, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan.
Cloud Computing: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?
Renat Khasanshyn: I agree that extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless.

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In the initial presentations at the 4G World Conference in Chicago’s McCormick Place this week, several executive insights from Verizon, Nokia, Telstra, IBM, and others focus on the need to expand speeds and network capacities. One talked about the need to expand networks in order to handle 1000X the current traffic
The 4G World Conference is one of the best conferences to go to if you are concerned with the future of wireless because there are many corporate perspectives represented there. Besides hearing some of the strategic directions industry leaders are taking, you can also see a lot of the latest technology offerings in the exposition hall.
Everyone was talking about the need to move more data through the wireless networks. 4G Networks can really facilitate addressing that need.

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IT Asset Management, or ITAM if you prefer, is the lost link to the cloud. There, now we’ve said it, do you feel better?
Before we can decide whether this is true, we need to understand what ITAM really is of course.
Sometimes called EAM (Enterprise Asset Management), the practice of asset management is quite a broad term used to describe the process of auditing and subsequently overseeing the total number of IT assets inside a company.
Encompassing hardware, but predominantly focused (these days) on software, asset management allows IT managers to improve cost control, perform maintenance scheduling, manage upgrades and look downstream towards decommissioning and replacement.

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“There are back-office batch processes written in COBOL that work fine. And, there are apps written for client/server that will continue running great in a virtualized environment,” stated Troy Angrignon, Vice President, Sales & Partnering at Cloudscaling, in this exclusive Q&A with cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. Angrignon concluded, “Re-engineering them for cloud won’t happen for the foreseeable future.”
Cloud Computing Journal: Just having the enterprise data is good. Extracting meaningful information out of this data is priceless. Agree or disagree?
Troy Angrignon: Sure. But, it’s harder than you might realize. Making money from Big Data starts with data, but you need a business model, developers who get devops, and a cloud infrastructure built for agility and economy.

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Another perfect storm is brewing in cloud computing fueled by the explosive growth of Internet-based mobile apps, network virtualization, and APIs for programmatic control of infrastructure. In addition, community-driven open source projects such as OpenStack make it possible for anyone to deploy and directly contribute to what promises to be a widely deployed, open cloud platform. Many companies and individual developers are contributing ideas and code for new cloud services, which bring capabilities of the underlying infrastructure into the world of cloud applications.

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As a result of many years of experience, innovation and acquisitions, HP has firmly established itself as the leading Big Data solutions and services provider – and a thought leader, helping enterprises solve the trickiest of Big Data challenges by building an end to end analytics framework.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Sanjai Marimadaiah leads Strategic Business Development, Big Data at Hewlett-Packard, will discuss how HP is empowering CEOs, CIOs and CMOs alike to extract actionable business insights from both structured and unstructured data through workload-optimized solutions built for performance and scale. Listen to success stories of customers, who have tamed the Big Data beast with HP solutions for Big Data, delivered as on-premised and cloud offerings.

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