NJVC, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in northern Virginia, is pleased to announce the winner of the George Mason University (GMU) Student PaaS Developer Contest. For the contest, students used the Cloudcuity AppDeployer platform as a service (PaaS) to develop business software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in the cloud. The winning team entry, “Nimbus Solution Scheduler,” is a workforce scheduling application.
The Nimbus Solution Scheduler team members—James Hays (team leader), Christopher Le, Anthony Nester and Ed Rubins—each received a monetary award and certificate for their innovative application. The students were honored at a special ceremony on February 22 during National Engineering Week at the Volgeneau School of Engineering Nguyen Engineering Building, Fairfax, Va. Donald Gantz, Ph.D., chair of the GMU Applied Information Technology Department attended the ceremony.
The GMU contest is serving as a pilot for a regional contest for university students to design SaaS applications for a scholarship award and additional rewards. This contest will launch during the first quarter of 2013.
Following a series of posts about the new OpenNebula 4.0 features, the OpenNebula project has published a preview of the the brand new Sunstone. OpenNebula 4.0 Sunstone has some beautiful new looks, but it’s not only about the external appearance there has also been a major boost for the user experience by redefining the users workflow.
In this post we will show a few snapshots of some new Sunstone key features. The new wizard screen eases the task of creating and updating Virtual Machines. There’s also new functionality to update very easily existing resources using the extended info panel.
CipherCloud, the cloud information protection start-up, has moved its encryption platform to Box.com to make it safer for any organization that uses Box’ ostensibly secure file-sharing widgetry and by default encourage cloud adoption by those spooked at the mere thought of putting data in the cloud despite the cloud’s obvious collaborative and cost advantages.
CipherCloud’s open platform provides encryption, tokenization, malware detection and user activity auditing that forestalls downloads of confidential content based on security policies.
There’s still a need for a more focused and refined understanding of what Cloud service level agreements should be and ultimately a more concerted approach towards the applications. So while neologisms such as speed, agility and flexibility remain synonymous with Cloud Computing, its success and maturity ultimately depend upon a new focal point, namely velocity.
Velocity bears a distinction from speed in that it’s not just a measure of how fast an object travels but also in what direction that object moves. For example in a Public Cloud whether that be Amazon, Azure or Google no one can dispute the speed. Through only the clicks of a button you have a ready-made server that can immediately be used for testing and development purposes. But while it may be quick to deploy, how optimised is it for your particular environment, business or application requirements? With only generic forms the specific customization to a particular workload or business requirement fails to be achieved as optimization is sacrificed for the sake of speed. Service levels based on uptime and availability are not an adequate measure or guarantee for the successful deployment of an application. For example it would be considered ludicrous to purchase a laptop from a service provider that merely stipulates a guarantee that it will remain powered on even though it performs atrociously.
Signing up and signing on are major threats to any cloud application business. What approaches can an application provider take, and what are the implications on the business?
Did you know that:
Half of paid SaaS customers do not use the application at all
Nine out of 10 has left an application when they forgot a password, instead of restoring it
Eighty-six percent may leave a web site when asked to sign up
Two out of five would rather scrub the toilet than come up with a new password
These figures, based on research from Totango and Janrain in 2012, clearly show that sign-up and sign-on are major issues for any cloud application provider.
The cloud is often touted as the answer to all our problems. The cloud broker model can give service providers the chance to avoid commoditization by repackaging their own offerings together with cloud services and selling these to customers. But cloud brokers beware. There’s a risk of being a jack of all trades and master of none. It’s crucial to ensure that a cloud offering is designed to meet the needs of a specific market.
But cloud brokers beware. There’s a risk of being a jack of all trades and master of none. It’s crucial to ensure that a cloud offering is designed to meet the needs of a specific market. For example, enterprises and small/medium sized businesses (SMBs) will hardly subscribe to all cloud services from a single provider. So which approach is best for which target market?
Centrify has signed its biggest contract ever.
Samsung has OEM’d Centrify’s Active Directory-based security and cloud identity technology intending to put the widgetry on millions of its notoriously insecure Android-based smartphones and tablets to out BlackBerry.
BlackBerry is generally acknowledged to have the most secure mobile devices and, having made its bones in the consumer space, where it’s now far and away the leader, Samsung is out to woo the enterprise customer helped along by the problems besetting BlackBerry and spooking its users.
With Cloud Expo New York | 12th Cloud Expo [June 10-13, 2013] hurtling towards us, let’s start to take a look at the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference coming up June 10-13 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City.
We have technical and strategy sessions for you all four days dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses…?
Pity IBM won’t say what it spent on mobile last year sans acquisitions, but whatever it was it’s going to double it this year under a big new “ second wave” initiative decreed by its new CEO Ginni Rometty, who has apparently sensed an inflection point that will grow Blue by a few billion dollars.
It’s Ginni’s first big initiative, and Mike Riegel, IBM’s VP in charge of mobile solutions, has been heard to say that the rise of mobile connectivity and e-commerce is “bigger than the web.”
That makes the new initiative the equal of IBM’s famous push into analytics and the cloud.
So, the company is mustering its troops and its 270 mobile patents and its R&D people behind the effort and has carved a new MobileFirst platform out of the products and services bought in by its 10 acquisitions in mobile that it will hawk.
