Ariba’s product and services roadmap is rapidly evolving, including gaining more analytics capabilities. BriefingsDirect had an opportunity to learn first-hand how at the recent 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.
To learn more about the recent news at Ariba LIVE — and also what to expect from both Ariba and SAP Cloud in the coming months — we sat down with Chris Haydon, Senior Vice President of Solutions Management for Procurement, Finance and Network at Ariba, an SAP company. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Monthly Archives: April 2014
Simplicity Is What Differentiates the New OpenNebula 4.6
Code-named “Carina”, the twenty-first release of OpenNebula is available today with a new innovative provisioning model based on virtual Data Centers that offers a simple but comprehensive framework for resource allocation to different groups of users in federated data centers and hybrid cloud deployments. Carina brings the ability to easily federate multiple OpenNebula clouds for high availability, scalability, isolation or multiple-site support, and the seamless sharing of golden images across these zones through a new revamped AppMarket. Users can also browse and provision services on-demand using a new simple, intuitive cloud provisioning portal.
Simplicity Is What Differentiates the New OpenNebula 4.6
Code-named “Carina”, the twenty-first release of OpenNebula is available today with a new innovative provisioning model based on virtual Data Centers that offers a simple but comprehensive framework for resource allocation to different groups of users in federated data centers and hybrid cloud deployments. Carina brings the ability to easily federate multiple OpenNebula clouds for high availability, scalability, isolation or multiple-site support, and the seamless sharing of golden images across these zones through a new revamped AppMarket. Users can also browse and provision services on-demand using a new simple, intuitive cloud provisioning portal.
Modernizing IT by Killing the Transactional Treadmill
By Geoff Smith, Senior Manager, Managed Services, GreenPages-LogicsOne
Many IT departments today are unable to get off the transactional treadmill. You may have some serious talent in your IT department, but valuable, strategic IT assets are becoming bogged down with tactical actions. When this happens, IT cannot fulfill its true purpose: applying technology to enable business success. As an IT decision maker, you need to be providing IT with an effective, efficient, and modern way of addressing every day responsibilities so that internal focus can shift back to supporting crucial business objectives. I consistently see this issue when I’m out in the field speaking with customers. For this reason, I’m hosting a webinar on May 8th to go over some strategies your IT department can implement.
In this webinar you will learn ways to modernize IT operations and combine advanced management tools, mature operating procedures, and a skilled workforce to:
- Build an Enterprise Command Center to effectively address and monitor the health and status of critical infrastructure systems
- Leverage run books and Standard Operating Procedures to complete required actions and create consistency in approach
- Establish a transparent co-sourced operational structure that promotes a culture of collaboration and joint responsibility for success
- Create visibility and analytics that maximize availability and functionality of technology investments
If you’re interested in learning more, register here & bring your questions May 8th at 11 am EST.
Inktank Living in a Multi-Petabyte World
Blink your eyes and five years have gone by. That’s my feeling as I posed questions to Ross Turk (pictured below), VP of Community at Inktank.
I first interviewed him almost five years ago, at an event in San Jose, when he was with SourceForge. Since that time, the entire cloud computing revolution went into full-launch mode, with Inktank’s focus on massive distributed storage along with it.
Inktank and Ross were at the recent Red Had Summit, which seemed like a great opportunity to re-visit his thoughts. Here’s what I asked him and what he had to say.
Roger: What sort of scale do your customers face?
Ross: Deployments in the 3-5PB range are common, and larger ones are slowly coming online. In 2014, we plan to see regular deployments in the 10PB range.
Through Inktank Ceph Enterprise, we aim to deliver massively scalable storage that runs on commodity hardware, radically improving storage economics and easing the costs of managing exponential enterprise data growth.
Because Ceph contains no single point of failure and is built using only scale-out components, there is no theoretical limit to the deployment size. And because our solution is based on open source, it frees enterprises from vendor lock-in, providing the flexibility and scalability necessary to keep up with evolving storage needs.
Roger: What problems are InkTank and Ceph designed to solve?
Ross: Traditional storage solutions typically are built using costly and restrictive proprietary hardware, requiring enterprises with vast amounts of data to invest heavily. But they are also restrictive, often tying enterprises to a single vendor and reducing their ability to adapt to changing storage demands.
Roger: What are the keys to your relationship with Red Hat? What do each of the companies contribute to one another?
Ross: Our relationship with Red Hat is critical to us; as we work to bring the power of Ceph into the enterprise, more and more of our customers are demanding tight interoperability with technologies in the Red Hat ecosystem, and their customers are increasingly requesting Ceph-based solutions.
Inktank Ceph Enterprise is certified to provide storage for RHEL-OSP, Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution, and RHEV, Red Hat’s enterprise virtualization product. Our relationship is necessary to deliver and support the fully-integrated solutions our customers are asking for!
Why there is more to IaaS than price cuts
Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum Software
At the end of March 2014, and in short succession, Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft announced significant price cuts to their public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud offerings. Widely reported in the press, the market rejoiced at the news, which combined price cuts with other announcements.
IaaS price cuts are not a new trend, but the most important aspect of this latest round of cuts is that it reflects Google’s unambiguous ambition to position itself as a major IaaS player. However, the company has much more to do to catch up with AWS, because price cuts are not the main weapon in an IaaS vendor’s arsenal.
For more information, see the upcoming Ovum report IaaS: Beyond Price Cuts.
IaaS is also one of the key topics that will be covered at the Ovum Industry Congress, May 13/14, 2014, at the Victoria …
Red Hat to Acquire Inktank
Red Hat, Inc., on Wednesday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Inktank, a provider of scale-out, open source storage systems. Inktank’s flagship technology, Inktank Ceph Enterprise, delivers object and block storage software to enterprises deploying public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack clouds. Combined with Red Hat’s existing GlusterFS-based storage offering, the addition of Inktank positions Red Hat as the leading provider of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage.
Infor Acquires GRASP Systems International
Infor on Tuesday announced the completed acquisition of substantially all of the assets of Colorado-based GRASP Systems International, Inc. (“GRASP”), a leading provider of automated patient acuity, workload management, patient assignment systems and consulting services to healthcare organizations in the U.S. and Canada. GRASP’s strong analytics and reporting capabilities will help Infor address the current cost-crisis occurring in healthcare, and deepen the Infor Healthcare suite by providing another leading solution to the market.
“This acquisition will add value to our existing development efforts for Infor Workforce Management for Healthcare by leveraging information from Infor Cloverleaf and real-time analytics from Infor Care Path Optimization,” said Duncan Angove, president, Infor. “Adding this functionality will enable health systems to go deeper than ever in understanding how staff resources are used in patient care and the costs associated at the patient procedure level to predict not only patient staffing needs based upon patient diagnoses, but also cost while benchmarking against their peers.”
Huawei Selects SOASTA to Provide Cloud Performance Testing
SOASTA® Inc., on Tuesday announced that Huawei has selected SOASTA to provide continuous integration and robust functional test automation for its business and consumer offerings. Huawei will utilize SOASTA TouchTest and CloudTest for internal testing of Huawei’s apps, ensuring peak performance and user experiences for its PaaS (Platform as a Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) ecosystem.
“We chose to work with SOASTA because of its unrivaled leadership in cloud and mobile testing,” said Guoqiang Rong, President of Device Cloud, Huawei. “SOASTA continues to outperform the competition by ensuring top application performance and quality user experiences, allowing our developer base to bring their apps to market quickly. Huawei would have needed three companies to accomplish what SOASTA can achieve. We look forward to continuing our work together to enhance our business and consumer cloud offerings in China and beyond.”
IBM’s Doug Clark on the company’s move towards ‘IBM as a service’
Earlier this week, IBM announced another series of cloudy launches, chief of which being the IBM Cloud Marketplace, a ‘one stop shop’ for IBM’s IaaS, PaaS and SaaS portfolio. CloudTech caught up with Doug Clark, cloud leader at IBM UK&I, to find out more.
“Everybody is moving to as-a-service,” Doug Clark, cloud leader at IBM UK&I says. “It’s almost the entire landscape is moving there.”
With the release of the IBM Cloud Marketplace, as CloudTech reported earlier this week, almost everything in IBM’s portfolio is available under one roof – it’s an enterprise app store with a little edge. More interestingly, the branding move towards ‘IBM-as-a-service’ is gathering pace.
“It was Ginny [Rometty, IBM chief exec] who I first heard talk about IBM-as-a-service,” Clark explains. “But what’s been exciting for me is when I’ve been talking to clients, I’ve been using the …