Monthly Archives: January 2013

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Hybrid Cloud and Its Future Role in Market Leadership

Hybrid cloud is early, yet promises to accelerate the enterprise adoption of cloud computing. The question is: who will lead and what impact will they have on how enterprises buy technology solutions?
There are a handful of publicly-traded companies vying for leadership in cloud computing, among them Amazon, VMware, Microsoft, and Rackspace. There is even a cloud ETF (SKYY). That is why the current debate regarding the future of public, private and hybrid cloud operating models is significant to the futures of these companies, as well as many others in hardware, software and even data center co-location.

If the public cloud becomes the cloud of choice for enterprise IT pros, Amazon will have a commanding position in the evolution of the multi-trillion enterprise IT market. Likewise, if private cloud establishes market leadership then VMware could transform its leadership in server virtualization into cloud leadership and have even greater access to IT budgets. On the other hand, hybrid cloud promises the opportunity for VMware and others (including Microsoft and Rackspace) to establish leadership by delivering even greater levels of IT power and efficiency by integrating public and private cloud functionality into more powerful hybrid clouds.

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Business Processes, Credit Cards, Go Daddy, Partnerships, Payment

Go Daddy Getting Into Web Payments

First Data Corporation and web host Go Daddy today announced Go Daddy Payment Solutions. The application is designed to serve the electronic payment needs of the small business community.

Go Daddy customers will be able to leverage Go Daddy Payment Solutions to process eCommerce transactions online. Go Daddy gives customers the ability to go from an idea to a full-blown Web presence – including a website, shopping cart and online payment acceptance – in a few simple steps.

“Go Daddy’s main focus is to help small businesses get bigger without investing a lot of time, money or energy,” said Neil Proctor, senior director of Development, Go Daddy. “First Data’s payment processing gives Go Daddy customers the chance to quickly enable credit card payments online, expanding their revenue growth opportunities exponentially. The best part is, if customers have any questions, they can reach out to Go Daddy’s world-class customer service to get them answered quickly.”

To find out more about Go Daddy Payment Solutions, please visit http://www.godaddy.com/ecommerce/merchant-services.aspx.

Analytics, Artificial intelligence, Cloud & IT Management, Machine learning, Partnerships, Prelert, Splunk

Anomaly Detective Adds Predictive Analytics to Splunk

Prelert today announced Anomaly Detective, an advanced machine intelligence solution for Splunk Enterprise environments. The introduction of Anomaly Detective expands Prelert’s line of diagnostic predictive analytics products that integrate with a customer’s existing IT management tools and quickly provide value by finding problematic behavior changes hidden in huge volumes of operations data.

Anomaly Detective’s self-learning predictive analytics with machine intelligence assistance recognize both normal and abnormal machine behavior. Using highly advanced pattern recognition algorithms, Anomaly Detective identifies developing issues and provides detailed diagnostic data, enabling IT experts to avoid problems or diagnose them as much as 90 percent faster than previously possible. IT personnel who utilize Splunk Enterprise software in infrastructure, applications performance and security can now additionally benefit from machine learning to automatically spot anomalies and isolate their root causes in minutes, saving time and resolving problems before the business is impacted.

Anomaly Detective is  downloadable software that installs as a tightly integrated application for Splunk Enterprise. Because it leverages recent advances in machine intelligence, Anomaly Detective is 100 percent self-learning and requires minimal configuration. Anomaly Detective augments existing IT expertise, empowering IT staff to spend less time mining data, reduce troubleshooting costs and improve compliance with service-level agreements — all of which contribute to a rapid return on investment.

“Prelert Anomaly Detective is like a machine intelligence assistant, using advanced machine learning analytics to analyze the massive amounts of IT operations management data produced by today’s online applications and services,” said Mark Jaffe, CEO of Prelert. “We’ve packaged the power of big data analytics, normally focused on solving business problems, in easy-to-use machine intelligence solutions that are greatly needed in the real world of IT operations.”

Prelert Anomaly Detective is now available and easily downloadable from the Prelert website and from Prelert resellers. Pricing is based on the amount of data analyzed per day, starting at $1,200 for environments indexing more than 500MB of data per day. For information on pricing for Splunk Enterprise, go to http://www.splunk.com/view/how-to-get-splunk/SP-CAAADFV.

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Building a ‘Mainstream’ Private Cloud: What You Need to Know

Private clouds are a great way to provide real-time service delivery of IT resources with a single-tenant, customized, secure environment. However, the challenge of scaling and managing physical resources still exists. The solution may be to leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider to build an off-premise Private Cloud to add scalability to your current private cloud.
In his General Session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer, discusses:
How to achieve scalability at Internet speed
Why it makes technical and business sense to host the cloud off-premises
What hosting options are available

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Android, Cloud & IT Management, MDM, Mobile, Mobile device management, Tools

ManageEngine Adds Android Mobile Device Management

ManageEngine today announced it now manages Android devices in the latest version of its desktop and mobile device management (MDM) software, Desktop Central. The move extends the mobile device management support in Desktop Central to include smartphones and tablets running Google’s popular mobile OS as well as devices running Apple iOS.

“The mobile usage trends will eventually drive sharp increases in demand for enterprise MDM solutions that embrace BYOD while ensuring enterprise data security,” said Mathivanan Venkatachalam, director of product management at ManageEngine. “The growing Android market and increasing demand for Android support among our customer base encouraged us to add Android support to Desktop Central as quickly as possible.”

Android MDM in Desktop Central provides data wipe, mobile application management, configuring profile/policy and default option to run mandatory background applications

Desktop Central 8 is available immediately. Prices start at $10 per computer annually for the Professional Edition. The MDM add-on module support is available on all the editions, and prices start at $15 per device annually. The Free Edition of Desktop Central manages up to 25 computers and two mobile devices. A free, fully-functional trial version is available at http://www.manageengine.com/products/desktop-central/download.html.

Covert Affairs, FlixMaster, Golden Seeds, HBO, Venture Funding, Video

FlixMaster Gets $1.125 Million for Enterprise Video

FlixMaster, the platform for Enterprise Online Video, today announced it has secured $1.125 million in additional funding from a syndicate of investors led by New York-based investment firm Golden Seeds.

The company said the investment would be used principally to expand sales and marketing efforts, particularly in the corporate enterprise markets. The company also announced it was launching new industry modules for its video editing and deployment platform designed for online retailing, corporate customer service and media markets.

FlixMaster is addressing the growing need for more creative uses of video by corporations and media properties alike. To date, Enterprise Video technology has been primarily focused on video distribution and content management, but as those technology challenges fade, creative professionals are looking for platforms that improve content quality and increase viewer engagement.

“The promise of Enterprise Video has been high engagement that converts interaction into action,” said Erika Trautman, co-founder and CEO of FlixMaster, a Boulder, CO-based graduate of the prestigious TechStars program. “The problem is, most videos simply transfer a conventional TV-like experience to the web, and even though most viewers go to the video first, they’re gone in a matter of seconds.”

“Brands need to produce interactive video experiences that draw viewers in and keep them there. And companies need to be able to produce those experiences at scale and at a reasonable cost. That’s what FlixMaster offers,” she continued.

The company was recently engaged by HBO to develop an interactive online experience for the newly launched Cinemax series, “Banshee”, that incorporates FlixMaster video technology and makes heavy use of the Player API. The online destination, Banshee Origins, provides audiences with an enhanced viewing experience, driven through interaction with the video player itself, and gives them an opportunity to explore the show and interact with its characters and themes. Last summer, FlixMaster’s technology powered an acclaimed web experience for the USA Network show, “Covert Affairs.”

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SingleHop Debuts Hosted Cloud Apps Built on Standing Cloud’s Platform

SingleHop on Wednesday announced the launch of Hosted Cloud Apps, a new hosted application solution that gives SingleHop customers a simplified way to discover, deploy and manage applications on virtual machines in the cloud.
According to SingleHop CEO Zak Boca the company was able “to integrate the marketplace seamlessly into our console and infrastructure, and customize it with our own look-and-feel to provide a user experience that is point-click simple.”
Built on technology from Standing Cloud, a provider of cloud marketplace and management solutions for IaaS, cloud and hosting providers, Hosted Cloud Apps is an easy-to-use marketplace of 100+ applications, software, development tools and deployment options,fully pre-configured to run instantly and reliably on the SingleHop infrastructure. Once an application is deployed, automated application lifecycle management features give SingleHop customers an easy way to manage their servers and applications on a continuing basis, including monitoring, scaling, back-ups, upgrades, auto-restore and more.

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Big data: What’s hot, what’s not according to the Twitter stream

By Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Ovum IT Enterprise Solutions

Because (or in spite) of the hype, sentiment about Big Data vendors was generally bullish in 2012. The attention spilled over from IT to the business media. These were among the findings reported by DataSift, which conducted a retrospective analysis of vendor mentions on Twitter during 2012 for Ovum.

To some extent, the results were surprising: while Hadoop garners much of the spotlight as a Big Data platform, the vendor 10gen, which develops MongoDB, came in second in mentions to Apache, which hosts the Hadoop project. Although only peripherally a Big Data story, HP and Autonomy was the biggest negative story of the year.

The data provided by DataSift provides a good example of how social media mining provides a useful snapshot of popular thinking that supplements – or replaces – the traditional role of marketing focus groups.

Mining Twitter for insights

Traditionally …

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EESC questions EU cloud computing initiative figures

The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has published an opinion piece detailing opposition to the well documented European Union (EU) computing initiative.

The EU’s cloud strategy, ‘Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe’, announced in September featured two main takeaways; a yearly 160bn Euro (£127.6bn) boost to the European GDP by 2010, and a net gain of 2.5m jobs.

Sounds good on first glance, but the EESC’s opinion – carried by 158 votes to two in a plenary held on January 16 and 17 – disagrees.

It’s not that the EESC is opposed to cloud computing in general – the committee agrees that it is “an opportunity for European growth and competitiveness” – more it suggests an alternative complementary vision to the European Commission’s original plan.

Nor is it that EESC is at odds with everything EU digital agenda VP Neelie Kroes lined out. The committee …