Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s keynote speech at the Oracle OpenWorld event this year had heavy billing.

And rightly so; the software giant was going to announce its in-memory database, and we were going to be told just how far ahead of the competition it was.

Oracle announced two primary products; the in-memory Oracle 12c database, and a new server, the M6-32 Big Memory Machine, which includes 32 TB of memory. Ellison said that, with the new database, data will fly around at “ungodly speeds”.

Ellison’s keynotes, of course, are always newsworthy events, from the product launches and big claims to the trash talk of competitors.

Yet the expected barbs didn’t come, apart from one slide where Ellison noted Oracle’s new server, the M6-32 Big Memory Machine, had twice the bandwidth and memory of IBM whilst being three times cheaper.

IBM has complained about the veracity of …

SYS-CON Events announced today that Rackspace® Hosting, the open cloud company, has been named “Platinum Plus Sponsor” of 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.
Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX) is the open cloud company and founder of OpenStack®, the standard open-source operating system for cloud computing. Headquartered in San Antonio, Rackspace delivers its renowned Fanatical Support® to more than 200,000 business customers, from data centers on four continents. Rackspace is a leading provider of hybrid clouds, which enable businesses to operate their workloads where they run most effectively – whether on the public cloud, a private cloud, dedicated servers, or a combination of these platforms. Rackspace has been recognized by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company, and is featured on Fortune’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For.

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Asserting control of the IT environment through collaborative and integrated identity and user access strategies create the necessary visibility.
Security is not an all-or-nothing proposition. And that’s part of the problem. It creates blind spots; gaps in vulnerability. Partly because of the inherent complacency that after a company institutes a new security initiative that hackers will be held at bay, or the employees won’t be tempted to make off with a database or a hundred other internal or external threats.
I have long promoted that security is as much about planning and process as it is about the various solutions that are deployed to protect networks, data, and other assets.
Security is no longer a wall. Stick up a firewall and your customer/user data won’t get leaked. Actually it’s more like a sandwich. And good security initiatives are like a good Dagwood sandwich – layered and integrated. But even the best sandwiches have holes (if they didn’t, you’d be eating a brick).

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Running a successful business, regardless of the type of business, requires a handful of tenets that should always be embraced: enjoy what you do, hire the right people and provide the correct tools.
These days, one of those tools businesses now rely on to succeed is cloud computing. Many businesses are turning toward cloud computing, according to an article on Cloudtweaks.com. Here are a few reasons why.
With an increase in business comes more data. That data has to be stored somewhere. Instead of regularly buying new hard drives and external hard drives, many businesses have turned to cloud services. Cloud services are constantly expanding, and some offer a large amount of space at a premium price.
You can set your computers to remotely back up data to the cloud at certain intervals. If the worst case scenario happens and your computers are down, you’ll retain all of your data, since it’ll be stored remotely. You don’t have to worry about getting the computer repaired, either – since the data is remotely stored, you’ll be able to access everything from any computer.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Nippon Software Knowledge Corp 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.
“SOFIT super REALISM” is the world’s fastest all-in-one data processing appliance based on “in memory” technology. You can operate it easily and benefit from its amazing speed, which has never been experienced before.
Cloud Expo® 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4-7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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The call for help began as a rumble.
Twenty miles beneath the ocean’s surface, a rupture in a massive tectonic plate ripped a 310 mile-long break in the sea floor, sending an army of seismic waves to the coast of Japan, a geologic event as unavoidable and uncontrollable as it was unpredictable. By the time the earth again stood still and the subsequent tsunami receded from Japanese shores, the enormity of the tragedy was left to see, even as so much of the landscape was wiped clean by the waves.

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Rik Turner, Senior Analyst, Financial Services Technology

NYSE Technologies, the technology products and services arm of the New York Stock Exchange, is teaming with UK software developer First Derivatives to launch “Tick As A Service,” an offering that will enable firms carrying out backtesting on algorithms and compliance checking to access large volumes of historical tick data directly from its facilities.

Payment is currently by monthly subscription rather than on a pay-per-use basis, and the data is presently stored separately for each customer, but the plan is to move to a central store, which suggests on-demand payment will become possible.

Ovum sees the launch as a further sign of the advance of cloud in the financial markets and recommends that companies with large-scale backtesting or compliance workloads consider the new service.

Data-as-a-service helps reduce capex on hardware and management

The partnership with First Derivatives is designed to enable companies that …

Unless you have been sleeping under a rock, you are probably aware that in May 2011 Google open-sourced the key audio/video components for web browsers, paving the way for the development of rich, high quality, RTC applications in the browser via simple Javascript APIs and HTML5. This in turn gave rise to the WebRTC project, a cross-industry project to bring Real-Time Communication to the Open Web platform. WebRTC – Web-based Real-Time Communication – is being heralded as one of most disruptive web/telecoms innovations for years, which is why SYS-CON Events, true to its 13-year tradition of producing events on the technologies of tomorrow, is holding its 1st WebRTC Summit in California’s Silicon Valley in November.

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One of my colleagues and advisors is from France, and currently working in the Sophia Antipolis tech enclave in the southeast of the country. He wonders why I never mention France in my stories about the global leaders in our rankings.

This is a valid question, and one that I know people also ask in many other highly developed nations, including the US. After all, aren’t the highly developed places the ones with the best quality of life, the best access to modern technology, the greatest places to live?

Perhaps they are. After three years in developing Southeast Asia, I can say that in many ways life is better for me back in the US. It is certainly physically less taxing.

What We Seek
But at the Tau Institute, we are not seeking to find the places with the most development or the most comfortable standards of living. Many other organizations already do that, and do that quite well.

Rather, we seek to identify those countries that are doing the most with what they have, ie, the relative leaders when it comes to their ICT environments, and by extension, the most potential for improving their economies and the lives of their people in the future.

And in fact, a number of highly developed nations have cracked into the Top 20 of the 102 nations we currently survey. New Zealand finishes #3 in the world (behind only South Korea and Estonia), and the Top 20 also includes the Netherlands, Finland, all of Scandinavia excepting Norway, the UK, Germany, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Belgium, and Australia.

But no France, no United States, and what happened to Norway, anyway?

We measure Internet and broadband access levels, average bandwidth speed, and other factors against the local cost of living – the idea is that technology is relatively more expensive in countries with an overall lower cost of living, so a lower-cost country will rank higher if it achieves the same development level as a higher-cost country. So a high cost of living in France and Norway work against these countries in our rankings.

To drill down into just one small example, Norway has the highest level of Internet access in the world, at 94%, according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). France ranks 13th, at almost 80%. It slightly trails Germany and the UK.

But then there is Slovakia at 74%, achieved with a per capita income level less than half of that of Norway or France, and a cost of living that’s discounted 38% from the benchmark US dollar. We thus score Slovakia significantly higher in this category than we do France. Extend this approach across a variety of technology and socio-economic factors, and the countries doing the relative best, ie, doing the most with what they have, emerge.

US Lagging
The United States does not score well in our rankings, either. It can be contrasted to Canada, which does. But isn’t the US the world’s technology innovation crucible? Why does it not rank highly?

We do not seek to measure technology development, but rather, its deployment and use. In our key areas, the US barely makes the world’s top 20 in Internet access, its average speed is similar to Canada (which achieves this at an income level lower than the US), and its socio-economic factors (eg income disparity) trail Canada (and many Western European countries). Add it all up, and the US does not rank among the world’s top-tier leaders; Canada does.

It’s All Relative
All of this could lead to a question of whether we are thus penalizing wealthy countries for being successful. We are not.

Rather, we realize it is common knowledge that Norway and France are wealthy, provide a great quality of life generally, and provide great Internet access specifically. I’d happily live in either of these countries if the opportunity presented itself.

What we seek instead is to unearth uncommon knowledge about those countries that are doing the most with what they have.

If you want to identify the world’s wealthiest countries, simply look to Wikipedia. If you want to know who has the highest Internet and broadband access, simply look to ITU statistics. Look to other easily available resources for other simple statistics. But if you want to know who is doing the best with technology deployment and use on a relative basis, look to us.

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