Remember textbooks: those heavy, constantly out-of-date, more than slightly frayed tomes of knowledge? They are increasingly becoming a thing of the past, along with the many other innovations thanks in large part to cloud computing.
Taking a step back, the concept of a “cloudy” tech has been part of the education industry for a number of years. Blackboard, for example, was ahead of its time by enabling students to access material and collaboration tools. But as the cloud has matured, so has its value proposition for educational business application.
For many schools, the initial application begins with the mission-critical applications being supported. However, where education is concerned, there are many application possibilities for cloud enablement, with whole businesses starting up to appeal to the wide range of “tech-in-classroom” needs.
Many technical experts believe that cloud computing is capable of reshaping the entire ICT industry in a revolutionary manner. With the introduction and development of cloud computing, the two business entities that emerged include – Cloud Service Providers and Cloud consumers.
Although the consumers of cloud services do not possess much control over the primary computing resources, but it is quite essential for the cloud consumers to obtain necessary guarantees in terms of service delivery standards.
These guarantees are usually provided through SLA (Service Level Agreement) which is negotiated between service provider and cloud service consumer. One of the major requirement of a well defined SLA is its standardization.
It must possess apposite level of granularity, namely the trade offs between complicatedness and expressiveness, so that most of the consumer expectations are covered. An SLA must also be relatively straightforward to be verified, weighted, evaluated.
Oligopoly: A market form in which a market or industry is dominated by a small number of sellers.[1] Its parallel in political science, oligarchy, translates to power effectively resting with a small number of people.[2]
A recent Forbes article entitled – “Cloud Computing Market May Become An Oligopoly of High-Volume Vendors”[3] – quotes Owen Rogers, senior analyst at 451 Research, who argues that with a few large players – namely, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM – offering similar types of services, the market may be in for a “Cloud Oligopoly.”
The interesting thing about markets is that they follow patterns quite similar to geopolitical movements. In politics, major movements are constantly afoot, avoiding the emergence or expansion of oligarchies. For instance, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa have formed the BRICS[4] alliance, a coalition that is aimed to “balance” their world with the ultimate goal of each member not being such an extreme underdog. This alliance could be in direct response to the financial power of traditional western allies, which by many standards forms an oligarchy.
With customer expecting information technology to be delivered with new models, systems integrators have to quickly transform themselves to meet these needs.
Over the past few months, I have interacted with several organizations that are evaluating changes to their business model to adapt to the cloud-enabled IT ecosystem. Management is in a quandary over maintaining their profitable lines of business while growing revenue in new and emerging areas. The problem they face is that some emerging business lines are only possible with completely revamped business models requiring significant change.
“We’ve embraced every version of VMware vCloud Connector released by VMware,” commented Dante Orsini, iland’s SVP of Business Development as Iland announced it’s leveraging VMware vCloud Connector Advanced Edition. Customers will be able to securely connect their VMware environments to iland’s vCloud Powered public cloud and scale up or down according to business requirements.
The recently released vCloud Connector Advanced Edition includes Content Synchronization and Datacenter Extension – two additional features that offer significant improvements for customers leveraging iland to attain their hybrid cloud goals. Orsini observed, “We’re seeing significantly more interest from customers wanting to operate in an enterprise-grade hybrid cloud environment and it’s our job to ensure a smooth transition.”
CIOs are expected to be heroes. They are responsible for innovating and transforming IT using new technologies that will drive business initiatives forward, but that is far from an easy task given the ongoing evolution of the IT world. This article will discuss the case for hybrid cloud in the enterprise, and suggest how CIOs can strategically develop a blueprint for hybrid cloud deployment.
A few years ago, CIOs were hesitant to move any data outside of their own data center due to lack of security and limited guarantees of availability. But as technology matured, education of CIOs improved drastically. Now, they are becoming increasingly aware of how next-gen solutions fit into their overarching goals, which allows them to leverage public and private/hybrid clouds in the most effective manner. In turn, CIOs are warming up to the idea of a hybrid cloud model, as they realize that acceptable cloud solutions are now available.
In the last MetraTech blog, we explored the topic of how you price for cloud and other services. In this blog, we focus on the everything-as-a-service (XaaS) movement and the impact on current pricing and business models. While the cloud industry is heavily impacted by this trend, it is by no means alone. The cloud represents a radical business model change for those vendors that were not born into it. We’ve all seen the mass confusion out there about how to monetize cloud business models and in the process of figuring it out, service commoditization. But like all massive market changes, once the dust settles, a new player takes control. After all, Amazon didn’t exist as a cloud provider until relatively recently. It is important to focus on what it will take to unseat the market leaders and we all know price alone is a race to the bottom where even the winner loses. I can recall a quote from the CEO of one of the largest software companies in the world who famously said at an analyst conference in September 2008 (yes less than five years ago), “the interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. […] The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?” Of course at that same analyst conference, he also admitted that his company would start selling cloud services, too. And therein lies part of the problem, there is a fundamental sea change afoot that requires a new way, a better way. Not the old way.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Incapsula, a cloud-based website security and performance service, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Through an application-aware global CDN platform, Incapsula provides any website and web application with best-of-breed Security, DDoS Protection, Load Balancing & Failover solutions, available as standalone services or as an integrated solution. Incapsula offers any online business with right selection of website security and performance services to meet your needs.
Amazon Web Services has lost a nice piece of glory business to SoftLayer, the public cloud company IBM just paid an estimated $2 billion to buy reportedly for the pleasure of poking AWS in the eye.
Big Blue just got that distinct pleasure, heightened by the fact that it’s making a nice chunk of change off the deal.
Here’s what happened.
Amazon was supposed to host the first cloud-based DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC). The idea was for some of the world’s best engineers to develop their software in a virtual simulation, a challenge in itself, before getting to the actual robot phase of the competition.
Well, after initially using AWS, the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), which runs the annual competition, ran into trouble with the speed of Amazon’s server communication. So it switched to SoftLayer’s bare metal platform, which was reportedly the only one it could find that could shorten communication loops between machines to 1k/second.
SoftLayer offered the power and speed needed, as well as the raw compute, without any extra virtualization.
Unless you live under a rock, you will be aware that Cloudscaling co-founder (and now Acting CEO) Randy Bias wrote an Open Letter to the OpenStack community last week which ignited a Web-wide debate on OpenStack’s direction and strategy. Since OpenStack is now three years old, such a debate on The State of the Stack is only to be expected, and ought rightly to be welcomed. But in the world of IT infrastructure as in all other walks of life, not everyone has the same point of view. In the case of the OpenStack community, the diversity of opinion has been especially broad.