A highlight of the upcoming Cloud Expo and co-located @thingsexpo will surely be a lunchtime keynote by Dr. Kristof Kloeckner, General Manager of Rational Software, IBM.

Kristof (pictured below) will be one of five speakers from IBM during the three days of the event, being held June 10-12 at the Javits Center in New York City. His topic will be “Cloud as a Growth Engine for Business: Unleashing Software-Driven Innovation,” and will be delivered at 12:15pm on Tuesday, June 10.

“In a world of ever accelerating business cycles and fast changing client expectations, the cloud increasingly serves as a growth engine and a path to new business models,” he notes. “Dynamic clouds enable businesses to continuously reinvent themselves, adapting their business processes, their service and software delivery and their operations to achieve speed to market and quick response to customer feedback.”

“The cloud opens up new possibilities for businesses to continuously deliver software driven innovation and enables new ways of collaboration between an extended group of stakeholders, including business leaders, developers, operations as well customers and partners,” he adds.

Kristof plans to illustrate To illustrate these possibilities by discussing BlueMix, IBM’s Cloud Platform, with integrated DevOps Services. “With BlueMix, developers can compose applications in a tight feedback loop, using a wealth of IBM, third-party and open-source services and APIs, deploy and scale with infrastructure services from SoftLayer and code with the confidence based on a foundation of open standards, “ he says.

Kristof joined IBM in 1984 as a development engineer in the Boeblingen Development Laboratory in Germany, working on porting UNIX to the mainframe. is responsible for application lifecycle management and system engineering tools within IBM’s software business.

He has held executive leadership positions in strategy, architecture and development in Germany, the UK and the USA, and has delivered many industry leading software products. He was CTO of the first Cloud Computing initiative in IBM’s Corporate Strategy team and created the Beta for IBM’s first public cloud.

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RackSpace has become an important player in the cloud market. Although the company is a publically traded stock, it seems as if RackSpace just doesn’t have the brand name recognition or the capital to keep up with movers and shakers in the cloud industry. RackSpace has invested $1 billion in infrastructure since 2005. Recently, it was reported that RackSpace had been bleeding clients due to the slashing of cloud prices from vendors such as AWS, Google and Microsoft. While RackSpace’s commitment to cloud and their total investment within the industry is nothing to scoff at, it seems as if …

At his earnings call last week, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff noted how he could run his business from his mobile device.

Well, with a few tweaks now you can too: Salesforce has launched the new Salesforce1 mobile app at the World Tour event in London, with the product being available in the summer roll-out.

The app, which the promotional material perhaps optimistically compares with an enterprise-eseque Facebook, promises more than 30 features, including easier access for salespeople to reports and dashboards, an ecosystem of more than 65 partner apps including FInancialForce and Kenandy, as well as the ability to deploy custom business apps.

“Cloud-first is the new mantra in today’s world,” said George Hu, Salesforce COO in the keynote speech.

The Salesforce1 app is built for practically all browsers and devices, including BlackBerry, Windows 8 and Good Access Secure, and zeroes in on the ecosystem; partners, employees, admins …

It’s a logical suggestion after all, i.e., that the mission-critical enterprise is getting wider.
In truth, the mission-critical enterprise is getting wider, deeper, longer, broader and altogether bigger. But what does that mean?
In practical terms we are stating that the “granular depth” of the mission-critical enterprise has increased in both overall external size and internal granular richness.
Once again we need to ask, what does that really mean?

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“A strategy that will work for the new cloud providers is to focus on a vertical industry / application and provide a deeper and more complete solution than the big guys currently provide,” noted Jeff Tabor, Senior Director of Product Management at Avere Systems, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. “After succeeding in one vertical, move on to the next vertical to grow the business.”
Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers?
Jeff Tabor: Standards always help users since with standards the users don’t have to treat all the vendors as separate entities. Standards can eliminate vendor lock-in and give users bargaining power since multiple vendors can sell them technically equivalent solutions. Standards create an ecosystem of users and vendors that allow new business models to get started. Without this ecosystem, there is too much risk that users will head down the wrong vendor-proprietary path and new businesses can’t get off the ground.

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Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions in the cloud are spawning a wide spectrum of services that are revolutionizing the workplace for employers and employees. Instead of HR being just a cost center, cloud computing is affording HR the opportunity to add significant value to the bottom line in the form of reduced expenditures on software and computer systems that are now managed in the cloud, as well as increased efficiencies. With easier access to vital business processes via Wi-Fi networks and mobile devices, cloud tools are driving higher productivity and delivering strategic business results.
In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Tarik Taman, General Manager, HCM & Cloud ERP at Infor, will examine how HCM in the Cloud is empowering organizations to achieve new levels of success.

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Distrix, ein führender Entwickler von softwaredefinierten WAN-Produkten, die einfache, sichere und belastbare Netzwerke ermöglichen, gab heute die Änderung seines Namens von Spark Integration Technologies zu Distrix bekannt. Der neue Name spiegelt den Erfolg des Unternehmens beim Einsatz seines Vorzeigeproduktes – Distrix®, der sichere Gateway-Router – in vielen verschiedenen Branchen weltweit wider.

„Für unsere breit gefächerte Kundenbasis vom Transport- zum Bankwesen, sowie von Telekommunikation bis zur industriellen Steuerung ist der Name Distrix mittlerweile gleichbedeutend mit Netzwerken, die einfach, sicher und skalierbar gestaltet sind, und so die Kosten für die Netzwerkverwaltung senken“, so Jay Friedman, Präsident von Distrix. „Dass wir uns enger mit dem Namen Distrix identifizieren, zeigt die Einfachheit und zunehmende Bedeutung unserer Lösung in öffentlichen sowie privaten Netzwerken, und dem Internet der Dinge.

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“An agile approach to data is really a requirement of just about any application, but even more so with Big Data,” stated Cory Isaacson, CEO/CTO of CodeFutures Corporation, in this exclusive Q&A with @ThingsExpo conference chair Roger Strukhoff. “What the enterprise needs is a data platform that can adapt to changing requirements in a flexible and rapid manner. This has not been the case with existing databases.”
Cloud Computing Journal: With the MapDB announcement, it sounds like to some degree you’re bringing the Java Programming Language into the 21st century modern enterprise. To what degree do you agree with that statement?
Cory Isaacson: This is a very good assessment, while Java has always been a capable language there have been many barriers when it comes to delivering full-featured database technology. For example, APIs like JDBC have worked for many years, but fast performance, convenience and tight integration in Java applications with the database were not there. With MapDB Java developers now have the convenience and agility of the native Java Collections API, with the power of a very fast database engine.

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Four in five (83%) of civil servants have said their experience of cloud computing in the public sector was ‘negative’ or ‘poor’, according to the latest research from not-for-profit CSP Eduserv.

The research, the latest monthly update produced by the government cloud provider, found that nearly half (40%) of those who’d suffered bad experiences were hindered by not being able to access the right data or applications, with one in 10 adding their ability to do their job was disrupted by new cloud services.

The results were collated in a paper entitled ‘Delivering Cloud First’ and polled over 800 civil servants to find out the state of the UK government’s cloud first policy – and found that efficiency trumps innovation.

Most cloud adoption (60%) has focused on entry level infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solutions, while the primary driver for adopting cloud remains improving operational efficiency, according to 57 …

The challenge for many businesses is building an integrated eCommerce solution that delivers on all fronts – design, usability, customer experience, segmentation, and execution.
In her session at 14th Cloud Expo, Marie-Pascale Authie, a Solution Consultant at Infor, will explain how apply new approaches that deliver a deeper and richer personalized online experience – with tailored content, marketing messages, and offers based on an individual user’s activity and buying behavior. Discuss customer engagement platforms that enable companies to enrich their customer interactions, and scale their market impact by taking advantage of omni-channel sales and distribution opportunities that will power their top and bottom lines.

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