This phrase “Internet of Things” is making big rounds these days, specially this week at CES (Consumer Electronic Show), Las Vegas. Not sure who came up with this, maybe Cisco in one of their self-serving predictions of the enormous growth of devices connected to the Internet (from about 10 billion today to 50 billion by 2020) and hence the need for their networking gear. John Chambers will elaborate this opportunity at CES in a keynote speech tomorrow. Gartner puts the number of connected devices at fewer than 30 billion, but sees $309 billion in additional revenue for products and service suppliers by 2020.

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In recent years two technologies have combined synergistically, the cloud and mobile. Without the cloud many of the mobile apps we have today would not exist. They rely on the existence of powerful cloud-based syncing and storage technology to provide a compelling cross-platform user experience. Cloud-based notifications are an essential part of the mobile ecosystem. Without cloud compute, devices wouldn’t be capable of tasks that require advanced processing like speech recognition and image manipulation.

Mobile devices are growing ever more powerful, but they still lag behind desktop and server hardware in processing power and storage, so in order to provide the experience that users expect, a symbiosis has developed between mobile devices and the cloud.

But mobile is just the beginning. As processors become ever smaller, cheaper, and more powerful, they are finding their way into objects that were not traditionally “intelligent.” The smart toaster is something of a …

Over the course of the past decade, there’s been a lot of hype pertaining to the_ Internet of Things (IoT)_ and how China leads the U.S. in this technology — yet many who are active on the Internet are still unaware of its existence.
In its simplest form, IoT is an evolving wireless network of objects and devices that will eventually all be connected with each other. Using RFID, Bluetooth, GPS and other emerging semantic technology, and working in tandem with cloud computing, Web portals and back-end systems, in essence our “things” will be be able to “talk” with each other.

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When we talk about the impact of BYOD and BYOA and the Internet of Things, we often focus on the impact on data center architectures. That’s because there will be an increasing need for authentication, for access control, for security, for application delivery as the number of potential endpoints (clients, devices, things) increases. That means scale in the data center.
What we gloss over, what we skip, is that before any of these “things” ever makes a request to access an application it had to execute a DNS query. Every. Single. Thing.

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Microsoft has announced that Windows Server 2003 will hit End of Support (EOS) on July 14, 2015. Over the course of 2013, AppZero undertook the first “State of Readiness for Windows Server 2003 End of Support” Survey in an effort to assess how serious this event is to enterprise IT pros.
AppZero surveyed Fortune 1000 IT professionals at a series of industry events to assess their readiness for the impending end of support of Windows Server 2003. Results show that IT pros are evaluating their options which range from accepting the risks of running on an unsupported operating system to upgrading all of their servers to moving to the Cloud, and lots of other choices in between.

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Cloud computing is great, right? As a way to get something up and running quickly, affordably, and with a minimum of fuss, it can rarely be beaten. But some of the most compelling attributes of the public cloud are best suited to ephemeral or (relatively!) short-term use cases. You can spin up a cloud server in minutes. You can scale a cloud-based application to cope with the peaks and troughs of demand. You can control all of this through a web console, with no more than a credit card and a laptop. Silicon Valley, SoMa, Silicon Alley, Silicon Roundabout, Silicon Allee, Silicon Wadi, Silicon Forest, Silicon Welly, and the Silicon Bog (only one of those was made up, I think) are full to bursting with bright young things building exciting new products (and silly photo sharing sites) powered only by the cloud and expensive coffee. And then you have government, private, and commercial Archives, with an over-riding imperative to keep stuff for a very, very long time. These Archives clearly can (and do) use cloud computing in the same ways as everyone else. They use clouds to cost-effectively transform data from one format to another, they use clouds to stream […]

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Enterprise IT organizations today often are bypassed as employees and LoBs use cloud services; in fact cloud computing is considered the revenge of the business unit. 2014 will be year that the Enterprise IT organizations move from role of helpless bystander to role of strategic partner to the business unit. It will be the year that the CIO carves out a new role of strategic importance, namely the enabler of cloud apps that drive agility, productivity and competitive advantage for their business units. In 2014, CIOs and IT departments will use rapidly emerging cloud security solutions to accelerate the adoption of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) within the enterprise and will embark on security transformation.

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RevChain Solutions, LLC (RCS), part of Windstream and a provider of enterprise carrier grade billing, account management and customer care solutions, announced on Tuesday that it has executed a three-year, $5 million extension for professional services and support with Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Bogotá (ETB). ETB is primarily focused on serving Bogotá, but also maintains a presence in eight other regions of Colombia.
RCS provides billing, customer care and account management solutions to worldwide service providers across various industries through its RevChain platform. Throughout these industries, RevChain is recognized as offering the most sophisticated rating and pricing engine, allowing it to address any discounting or contract T&C pricing requirements. RevChain is also known for its ability to process very high volumes of data, transactions and invoices through its distributed processing system architecture, Internet Integration Architecture.

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As promised, newly minted VMware execs Bob Schultz and Sumit Dhawan responded to my inquiries about their new jobs. Both came over from Citrix, signalling a clear escalation in the battle for desktop virtualization supremacy between the two companies.

Schultz has been named to a new position as chief strategy lead for Vmware’s End-User Computing (EUC) Unit, while Dhawan, who was with Citrix for almost 16 years, “will lead our desktop business and organization and be responsible for the overall business including overseeing the strategy, product portfolio and engineering,” according to EUC unit head Sanjay Poonen.

According to Bob and Sumit…
When asked what key, compelling reasons prompted his move, Schultz told Cloud Computing Journal, “My decision to make a career change came down to two related reasons. The first was VMware’s momentum in the market and the company’s commitment to investing in growth areas.” (He gave Desktone as an example here, as did Poonen in a formal company announcement.)(example: acquisition of Desktone).

“The second reason,” Schultz said, “was the competitive advantage I saw with the company’s vision of integration between their three major focus areas, the Software Defined Data Center, Hybrid Cloud and End-User Computing.”

Dhawan told us he “enjoyed every minute” of his time at Citrix, but decided to leave Citrix last summer “so I can get an experience of growing and building a business somewhere else. I found that VMware was the best place for me to come and join – best positioned with a great strategy for enabling IT as a service via a portfolio of products across (the three areas also mentioned by Schultz).”

“Everyone can see that the desktop and the way people work through technology is changing,” Schultz said. “So IT needs to think broadly about the desktop, mobile devices, applications and data.” He cited a new report from Gartner that estimates that by 2017, more than 60% of organizations will have to support Windows applications across multiple devices.

Dhawan noted that “there is a lot of research available from various sources regarding growth opportunities of virtual desktops and apps. However, my move was based on my personal belief that virtual desktops from both private and public cloud is still largely an untapped market.”

What Will They Be Up To?
Schultz said he plans “to help the business continue the momentum that is already in place, win customers over by clearly differentiating the many benefits of our integrated solutions, and continue to lead in desktop-as-a-service (DaaS). In addition, cost and complexity are two challenges that VMware End-User Computing is well positioned to solve thru integration with vSphere, vSAN for storage and unified management with vCOPS.”

For his part, Dhawan said “our goal is to target two major barriers that customer have experienced with virtual desktops – cost and complexity. Customers and partners have always put VMware View as the simplest VDI product in the market, and VMware has the leading DaaS platform with Desktone.

For a glimpse into the future, he told us, “look for us to leverage our assets across VMware, and key partnerships, to radically simplify customer experience in leveraging private and public cloud for delivering virtual desktops at low costs.”

Citrix Seems Satisfied
As I reported earlier, top management at Citrix is remaining outwardly calm. “We have a strong leadership team in place, including the new executive for our app and desktop virtualization business, which was announced this morning,” a company spokesperson told me in an email.

The newly named Citrix exec is Rakesh Narasimhan (pictured), a 25-year industry veteran “with 15 years in leadership positions at Microsoft, and whose expertise fits squarely in the Citrix market space,” according to Citrix’s note to me.

Narasimhan has served as a General Manager in Microsoft’s Server and Tools division during his career. He was most recently President and CEO at InstallFree. He also has experience at Oracle.

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People care a lot about technology augmentation, refinement and fine-tuning. We talk about performance acceleration, pushing processing power and the required levels of storage we need to underpin modern IT needs. It’s a never-ending cycle of regenerating work all focused on producing the optimal performance out of our technology stack at any one moment in time.
The ‘optimal’ word is important; it has produced a technology term that falls into a sub-classification all its own.
Arguably more than any other single word exposed to the transatlantic incongruence which sees the use of the letter S replaced with a Z, the term optimisation (or indeed, optimization) is one we fight over with a passion. This passion is a result of the close feeling of ownership we attribute to optimisation. We care about it and it’s a sensitive thing. But what does it mean?

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