Blue Marble Media in Atlanta has been using so-called spot-buying capabilities on the Ariba Network and Ariba Discovery to find new sales channels and new clients in the cloud.
Tell us a little bit about your company — your size, what services and products you provide. And why is the cloud not intimidating to you as a smaller firm for selling and finding new customers?
Even though we’re very, very small, less than $2 million in revenue, we have clients like Georgia-Pacific, Verizon, Ariba, and the CDC. We work with a lot of medium-sized companies and even startups, very small ones. So the whole planet is our opportunity, if you will. We develop video, motion graphics, and animation for sales support, marketing, corporate communications, and just about any type of visual presentation that you might need.

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The now almost household name, Kim Dotcom, has been in consistent battle against the U.S government over his Megaupload business – in case you’ve been under a rock for over a year.

Now the case has taken a new turn as his old Dutch hosting provider LeaseWeb has wiped 600 servers containing “petabytes” of his company’s data; including legal evidence.

Kim has expressed his outrage via social networking site Twitter, including suspicions of the U.S government putting pressure on LeaseWeb to wipe the servers. The first notification he had about the deletion was Wednesday morning; yet servers had been wiped without notice on February 1.

In one of his tweets he’s quoted as saying “This is the largest data massacre in the history of the Internet caused by the US government, the Department of Justice & LeaseWeb.”

Whilst directly taking aim at the three mentioned, he compares …

More and more companies around the world are embracing the cloud – and that’s a good thing.

But this massive IT shift also presents a problem: With so many businesses moving to cloud, is there enough quality IT technicians available to help businesses manage the switch?
Don Reisinger from CIO Insight, among many others in the space, has identified the IT skills shortage as a real issue facing the cloud industry. With so much of the technology creating a rift between the old school IT managers of the mainframe to pure virtualization eras and the newer DevOps and Cloud engineer roles, it’s hard to see the simple path towards ample expertise.
But then again, according to Reisinger, perhaps it’s not such a problem as so many fret over. Companies are still purchasing cloud tools and services at incredible volumes, causing projections of the overall revenues of the industry to balloon to many billions of dollars over the next 10 years.

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One of the key aspects of cloud’s value to an organization is the way in which its implementation and processes can impact the bottom line of a business. Automation, in particular, is an issue in the cloud that can have a major effect on cost, and there are two major ways to think about what generates the automation ethos that informs a company’s cloud strategy.
From the engineering perspective, if something needs to be done more than once, it should be automated. This saves times and effort, becomes a repeatable task, and since it was automated, everything comes out uniform. All of these
Business considerations are the other main drivers for automation. Is it cheaper to implement a human solution to a problem, or is it cheaper to install a piece of software? Regardless of the engineering ethos, when a business gets to the level of asking these questions, there are cases where it’s cheaper to utilize human power or where it’s cheaper to rely on a machine powered solution or a combo thereof.

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Fredrik Tunvall, Analyst, Information Managment

The overriding themes of Microsoft’s latest server platform announcements delivered last week at the company’s annual TechEd conference were about design for the cloud. Announcements for Microsoft Windows Server and Systems Center 2012 R2 focused heavily on harmonizing management and deployment tools for cloud and on-premise use.

For the newly announced SQL Server 2014, it was about optimized backup and “always-on” integration with the Windows Azure cloud. With System Center, Microsoft has also taken steps toward managing mobile devices as “first-class citizens”. For the end user, Excel is promoted as a single end-user tool for query, analysis, data exploration, and data-visualization, and it is here that we also find the most BI innovation and integration efforts.

Cloud-first design

With the latest wave of releases, Microsoft has publicly committed to a new “cloud-first” policy for the design of new features for its server platforms …

In enterprises across the globe, CIOs are looking cautiously in one direction: up – to the cloud. Migrating to the cloud changes not only the operations of the data center but also the roles of the CIO and IT staff. As a result, management must carefully weigh the pros and cons of shifting to cloud-based computing so that they can prepare their organizations and themselves for change that cascades across budgets, vendor relations, job descriptions and career paths, as well as infrastructure and processes.
The benefits of moving from an on-premises model to subscription-based, cloud-hosted computing are substantial. With cloud computing, CIOs have the opportunity to capitalize on a variable-cost structure. Until recently, data centers have needed to load up with hardware, software and networking devices to prepare for peak periods, even though these investments may lie underused or dormant for significant periods. Traditionally, IT costs only go up. By employing the cloud, however, IT departments pay for only the infrastructure and applications that they use, as they need them. They can easily scale up when the business grows or during peak selling seasons, then scale back if the economy shrinks. Over time, the cost of Software-as-a-Service subscriptions is far lower than that of licensing fees for software, middleware and databases, along with expenditures on hardware and staff to maintain it all.

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I previously wrote a review of the Microsoft Azure public cloud and included a comparison between Azure and AWS (Amazon Web Services) and will now compare OpenStack and VMware vCloud. For a review of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) see my blog post and video.
This table provides a simple and high level comparison of OpenStack and vCloud.

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MetraTech Corp., a provider of Agreements-Based Billing, Commerce and Compensation solutions, on Tuesday announced that Achilles, a global software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider of supply chain management services, has selected the MetraNet billing and settlement platform to support its global business growth.
Achilles manages the supply chains of 800 of the world’s largest companies to reduce the risk, time and cost associated with procurement activity. The company verifies and keeps up-to-date data of around 80,000 suppliers across 23 countries to ensure they are operating to the highest possible standards. Achilles recently invested GBP 12 million in the development of new global platforms, which will offer a true SaaS solution to customers looking to manage their data anytime, anywhere – with no downtime for maintenance.

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For a while now I have been writing about how to analyze and optimize Hadoop jobs beyond just tweaking MapReduce options. The other day I took a look at some of our Outage Analyzer Hadoop jobs and put words into action.
A simple analysis of the Outage Analyzer jobs with Compuware APM 5.5 identified three hotspots and two potential Hadoop problems in one of our biggest jobs. It took the responsible developer a couple of hours to fix it and the result is a 2x improvement overall and a 6x improvement on the Reduce part of the job. Let’s see how we achieved that.

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