I don’t listen to music before I buy it anymore. I don’t need to – as long as I’m purchasing it from Amazon. Based on algorithms that crawl my purchasing history, the online retailer knows what I like as well as I do and, dare I say, better than my wife.
A company develops this intimate knowledge by using Big Data to improve the customer experience in an economical and adaptable way. Amazon has integrated this agility into every aspect of its business, from running its warehouses to its revolutionary ability to publish on demand.
Game-changing innovation happens when you simplify everyday processes. But managing a large, traditional application portfolio – however crucial it is to your business – disrupts innovation.
The cloud virtualizes your software, protecting you from the inefficiencies associated with IT. As a result, you spend less time and money introducing and maintaining applications and more resources innovating and advancing your business. Whether you implement a software-designed data center, a hybrid cloud approach or and end-user computing strategy, you’re taking the burden off of your own team and into the virtual world.

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Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst, Ovum Software

IBM has announced that it will invest more than $1bn in the new IBM Watson Group, as well as $1.2bn to expand its global cloud computing footprint to 40 data centers worldwide in 15 countries across five continents. On January 23, 2014, IBM also announced that it has reached a definitive agreement with Lenovo to sell the Chinese company the majority of its x86 server business in a $2.3bn deal that includes System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, x86-based Flex integrated systems, NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and associated software, blade networking, and maintenance operations.

This represents the biggest ever technology acquisition by a Chinese company, and sees IBM exit server manufacturing in all but the System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, and PureApplication and PureData appliances markets.

Is Lenovo IBM’s strategic partner for …

For most organizations, developing a cloud strategy is no longer a matter of “if,” but a matter of how. The right cloud strategy can significantly reduce costs, offer instant scalability, and improve business agility. But to get the most from the cloud and position their businesses for the future, IT leaders must understand the trends that are shaping the rapidly changing landscape. Here are five considerations that should be top of mind for any IT decision-maker in the coming year.
1. Providing the best possible user experience. When it comes to cloud, there’s only one thing that matters and that’s the user experience. It’s easy to forget about the end user while getting caught up in the “arms race” of building and brokering cloud services. When consulting about cloud strategy for a healthcare R&D firm, my colleagues and I were asked the question: “Amazon offers these services, so why don’t we?”

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Innodisk, a designer and manufacturer of solid state drives (SSD) for commercial and industrial applications, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Innodisk is a service-driven designer and manufacturer of industrial Flash and DRAM storage products and technologies. Innodisk focuses on the cloud, embedded, military, aerospace, transportation, medical, networking, and gaming industries. Since newly announced FlexiArray™ Cloud Storage Appliance, Innodisk has been making the leap to become a major player in the cloud industry, with devices and technologies that boost IOPS through specially designed system. Innodisk is a global company, with a headquarters in Taiwan, and engineering and sales support in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan. Innodisk provides customizable firmware, multiple form factor solutions, and local engineering support to meet customers’ specific needs.

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In my last blog, I discussed the debate surrounding the true definition of open and unfettered Internet, and the different interpretations various groups and individuals have on the matter. In this posting, we continue the discussion.
The U.S. government has not enacted legislation to actually define and require Internet openness or to specify what level of non-openness is acceptable, if any. So openness is a concept without legal definition or backing, which means that individual opinions vary on what constitutes fettering and what doesn’t. And attempts by the FCC to fill this gap with the Open Internet Order triggered this court action.

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AT&T* and Equinix are working to speed up the adoption of cloud services. The companies today agreed to embed AT&T NetBond into select Equinix data centers.
AT&T NetBond enables customers to connect to their cloud services using their private AT&T VPN networks, which deliver highly secure connections with high reliability and performance capabilities, rather than relying on access via the public Internet. The alliance will create the opportunity for cloud providers to allow access to their services via AT&T NetBond from Equinix data centers around the world.

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The Big Data and Cloud market have been growing at a staggering pace. Data is becoming unmanageable and too big to be handled by relational database systems alone and there is a need to effectively provision, manage elastic scalable systems. Information technology is undergoing a major shift due to new paradigms and a variety of delivery channels. The drivers for these technologies are social networks, proliferation of devices such as tablets and phones. Social business and collaboration are continuing to develop further to enhance productivity and interaction. There has been a big void in the Big data area and a need to come up with solutions that can manage Big Data. Part of the problem has been that there was so much focus on the user interfaces that not many organizations were thinking further about the core – Data. So now with the proliferation of large and unstructured data, it is important to extract and process large data sets from different systems expeditiously. To deliver strategic business value, there should be the capability to process Big data and have the analytics for enhanced decision making. In addition, Big Data can rely on the Cloud to rapidly provision and deploy elastic and scalable systems.

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The fallout of the Edward Snowden scandal that broke over the summer is being felt globally, with concerns around governments’ ability to access data prompting many organisations to rethink their investment in ICT and the cloud. It is this information that has contributed to analysts estimating that the US cloud computing industry could lose up to $180 million by 2016. This has opened up a debate – has the PRISM project spawned a culture of paranoia?

Why are organisations so worried about data monitoring and is it a justifiable concern?

Following what the business community has learnt about online surveillance, organisations are now asking their cloud provider how they can improve data security. Equally, data sovereignty, the physical location where data is stored and the data centre partner are now wider organisational concerns, not simply just the remit of the CIO. Keeping data in data centres in a country where the …

Configuration tools are starting to get more sophisticated on these virtualized systems doing things like automated os hardening, switch configuration, vlan and port mapping, and high order overlay orchestration. Products like Chef and Puppet both have introduced primitives supporting platforms like Arista, Juniper and Cumulus Networks. Please join me to help me start the discussion of what DevOps in the Network really means.

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