Web Host Industry Review “Media Sponsor” of Cloud Expo NY & Silicon Valley

SYS-CON Events announced today that the Web Host Industry Review has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Since 2000, The Web Host Industry Review has made a name for itself as the foremost authority of the Web hosting industry providing reliable, insightful and comprehensive news, reviews and resources to the hosting community. TheWHIR Blogs provides a community of expert industry perspectives. The Web Host Industry Review Magazine also offers a business-minded, issue-driven perspective of interest to executives and decision-makers. WHIR TV offers on demand web hosting video interviews and web hosting video features of the key persons and events of the web hosting industry. WHIR Events brings together like-minded hosting industry professionals and decision-makers in local communities. TheWHIR is an iNET Interactive property.

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Solinea Joins the OpenStack Foundation

Solinea, the OpenStack™ software and services company, has joined the OpenStack Foundation. The OpenStack Foundation promotes the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud operating system.
“Joining the OpenStack foundation gives Solinea the ideal platform to deliver innovative service offerings in enabling Enterprises, SaaS providers and Service providers to accelerate the adoption of cloud.” says Solinea CTO, Ken Pepple. “As part of the Foundation, Solinea will continue to contribute software and its proven delivery expertise to the OpenStack cloud ecosystem.”

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World’s Top Expert Named “DevOps Summit 2014” Tech Chair

Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Andi Mann has been named Tech Chair of DevOps Summit 2014.
2nd International “DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo” will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, and the 3rd International DevOps Summit will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“We are excited that Andi Mann is joining us as DevOps Summit Tech Chair. Our upcoming event in June, the largest DevOps conference in the world, will offer the best sessions and faculty,” said Carmen Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO of Cloud Expo, Inc. “DevOps Summit 2014 in June will feature 75 world-class sessions over three days, presented by more than 50 rock star faculty members who join the conference by invitation only!”

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Migrate Oracle Database from HP-UX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Mission-critical functions at the heart of your business – such as order entry, finance, human resources, customer relationship management, and enterprise resource planning – frequently depend on “always-on” and scalable Oracle Database functionality. In the past, many businesses have selected HP-UX/Itanium systems as the backbone of an Oracle Database infrastructure because they could supply the throughput and availability needed for key database workloads.
The life cycle of an HP-UX/Itanium infrastructure for Oracle Database, however, is rapidly coming to an end. On July 1, 2013, Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Database 12c. Because cloud deployments are the projected direction for IT services, Oracle Database 12c follows a multi-tenant architecture that facilitates cloud delivery of database services. It seeks to simplify database management tasks by managing multiple co-located databases as one, while simultaneously enabling data isolation and database resource prioritization. Changes to existing Oracle database tables and applications are not required. However, Oracle supports this new release only on Solaris, Windows, and Linux® operating systems – and not on HP-UX. This means that current HP-UX customers must migrate to a different platform to take advantage of Oracle Database 12c and its ability to ease the transition to a database service cloud.

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OK 2014, Now What

So I’ve been staring at this blinking cursor for the last 5 minutes wondering what story to tell. ‘Once upon a time, there was a….‘ No that won’t work. ‘It was a dark and dreary night as our protagonist grudgingly dragged his feet toward the impending…‘ No, not that either. How about, ‘The waves were big, mean and fast that day…the kind of day where Eddie would go.’ Nah, too local boy.
After a few weeks break and with so much going on within information technology, I sometimes find it difficult to zero in on something interesting with so many choices. So I decided to do a mini blog buffet….the best in town, I say!

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3rd Annual World Congress of Cloud Computing 2014

Today I am proud and honored to announce that I will be participating in this year’s 3rd Annual World Congress of Cloud Computing 2014! Highlighting the theme of “Chinese Dream in Cloud” the event will be held in Dalian, China from June 19 to 21, 2014.
CloudCon-2014 aims to strengthen the technical and business ties in cloud computing area, to bring
together experts and industry leaders to share technological advancements and business
experiences, and to jointly explore opportunities in emerging technologies. This congress provides an ideal platform for industrial practitioners and academia to keep up to date with current technology trends, interact with industry experts and network with peers. CloudCon-2014 is presenting an ambitious and unique program based around major themes “Chinese Dream In Cloud”, and will feature an exciting line-up of keynote speakers and intense breakout sessions, where lively and interactive debates will take place among the delegates. The newly launched sectors are Parallel Thematic Forums, Frontier Technological Program, and IT/ICT Business Matchmaking and Career Fairs.

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The Intelligence Inside: Cloud Developers Change the World of Analytics

We live in a world that requires us to compete on our differential use of time and information, yet only a fraction of information workers today have access to the analytical capabilities they need to make better decisions. Now, with the advent of a new generation of embedded business intelligence (BI) platforms, cloud developers are disrupting the world of analytics. They are using these new BI platforms to inject more intelligence into the applications business people use every day. As a result, data-driven decision-making is finally on track to become the rule, not the exception.

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Secure File Delivery API Aimed at Medical Records Sharing

My Docs Online yesterday released its “Secure File Delivery API” which allows web and mobile apps to easily incorporate HIPAA-compliant file delivery. Although My Docs Online supports a wide variety of professionals and small businesses needing secure file sharing, a significant part of their customer base uses the product for files containing “Protected Health Information” (PHI). This core competency should make My Docs Online an attractive partner for adding ad hoc file delivery to a variety of EMR, EHR and other medical applications.

My Docs Online Secure File Delivery includes the following features and options:

  • Branded web page listing the files being delivered
  • Optional PIN or password
  • HIPAA compliant
  • SSL standard for all connections
  • Files encrypted at rest using AES256
  • Default file delivery expiration in days with override
  • Control panel enabling checking of delivery results, link reuse, and delivery cancellation
  • Delivery results query via API
  • Delivery cancellation via API

Details and documentation.

(disclosures)

SOASTA Reveals Five Technology Predictions for 2014

It’s been a great 2013. Out of the global $1.2 trillion dollars’ worth of business conducted online in 2013 across the globe, SOASTA is trusted with protecting 10% of that figure – or $150 billion. Based on the hundreds of brands SOASTA worked with this year and listened to the challenges they face, there are five predictions that are pretty clear as we look ahead to 2014. Hint: Simplify, the User Experience, and M-commerce will be buzz words for successful enterprises and e-commerce vendors. The Top 5 Predictions for 2014 are:
Acquisitions vs Innovation Drive Legacy Tech Companies into New Frontiers
We’ll see the larger legacy vendors take a proactive approach to buying into social, mobile, cloud, and Big Data environments. They’ll begin to buy into the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) space. “With the changing face of application development, I suspect we’ll see increased M&A activity and increased consolidation in the market for cloud -based and social-based tools.”

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DaaS Re-Boot: Citrix Execs Move to VMware

VMware execs Bob Schultz and Sumit Dhawan were in leadership training in Boston during their first day at their new company. They promised to respond to my inquiries regarding their new positions as soon as possible. When they do, I’ll report what they said.

The news of their move came as a seeming lightning strike on the first real work day of 2014. Officially, they give Wmware “even deeper end-user computing and industry expertise going into 2014 and position us very well to continue to provide customers with industry leading solutions,” according to a blog entry by Sanjay Poonen, EVP & General Manager of the company’s End-User Computing (EUC) Unit.

Schultz fills a new positions as chief strategy lead for the EUC, “and will be responsible for driving our business, technology and alliance strategies,” according to Poonen. He’s a 30-year veteran (writer’s note: I personally like this age group) and was Group VP and General Manager of Desktop and Applications at Citrix.

Sumit 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,”

Not to be lost in this announcement was the promotion of long-time VMware exec Kit Colbert to the position of CTO of the EUC.

DaaS Re-Boot
So let’s call this “DaaS Re-Boot,” with apologies to the creators and fans of the 1981 film with a similar name. That film centered around a submarine crew in a crisis situation, and perhaps serves as a close analogy to the virtualization business.

It’s hard for me to pin a dollar figure on the size of DaaS (and desktop virtualization by other names). But it’s clear that VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft are now competing hard in a tight, claustrophobic environment for access to every desktop in the world.

Poonen specifically mentions Vmware’s acquisition of Desktone (the folks who were trying to patent DaaS) in October as part of the dynamism of the desktop virtualization market. He also mentioned “enterprise mobility and enterprise social collaboration” as growth areas in this space.

Citrix Announces New Exec
For its part, 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, 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.

Narisimhan served as a General Manager in Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, covering Microsoft Azure, SQLServer, Windows Server, Windows Client, virtualization, storage, data protection and security products,” according to Citrix.

He was most recently President and CEO at InstallFree, a developer of application portability, virtualization and access soluions that delivered Microsoft Office as a subscription-based cloud service to any device. He also has experience at Oracle.

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