Goodness there is a lot of talk about cloud computing. This ‘talk and chatter’ is part of the problem, i.e., we look at it, we prod it and we might even test it out – but do we get down to practical implementation, deployment and (if you happen to be a fan of the term) actual cloud ‘rollout’ today?
Cloud offers the promise of a new era they say – and a new style of IT at that.
But this again is the problem and we know that cloud can only deliver on the promises it makes if it is part of a well-coordinated effort that brings together both existing IT infrastructure and these new service-based technologies.
Monthly Archives: September 2014
Why @DevOpsSummit at @CloudExpo Is a Giant #DevOps Event
DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley announced today a limited time free “Expo Plus” registration option through September. On site registration price of $1,95 will be set to ‘free’ for delegates who register during special offer. To take advantage of this opportunity, attendees can use the coupon code, and secure their registration to attend all keynotes, DevOps Summit sessions at Cloud Expo, expo floor, and SYS-CON.tv power panels. Registration page is located at the DevOps Summit site. Your DevOps Summit registration will also allow access to @ThingsExpo sessions and exhibits. Register For DevOps Summit “FREE” (limited time) ▸ Here
Oracle chief Larry Ellison steps aside to become CTO, results miss target
Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison has stepped down from the chief exec role, with co-CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd appointed to steer the ship.
Ellison isn’t leaving Oracle full stop however, assuming the role of CTO and executive chairman at the software giant. In an earnings call, Ellison admitted that not much would change under the bonnet.
“I’m going to continue doing what I have been doing over the last several years, [Catz and Hurd are] going to continue what they’ve been doing over the last several years,” he said, according to Seeking Alpha.
It would seem this is a case of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’, then.
The news came alongside Oracle’s first quarter results, which were again on the spotty side. New software license revenues were down 2%, net income stood still at $2.184bn – noting a very slight decrease in constant currency – while total revenues were up only 3%, considerably lower than Wall Street predicted.
In the call, new CEO Catz immediately got the excuses in early. “Those of you who have followed us for a while know that Q1 is a seasonally smaller quarter which can mean more volatility in our results, and that’s what we saw this quarter,” she said.
Not surprisingly, the new chief execs focused significantly on cloud as the way forward. “As the movement to the cloud grows, we expect this transition will affect our revenue to the positive,” said Catz. “These customers will essentially replace their software support payments with a cloud subscription which will mean substantially more revenues to Oracle.”
Yes, this may sound a bit like ‘welcome to cloud’. SAP and IBM, other legacy hardware and software businesses, got there a little earlier with their aggressive transformations. IBM shoots out new iterations at a rate of knots, and remember SAP’s bigging-it-up quote that they were going to become ‘THE cloud company’ (their emphasis, not ours)?
When Ellison grabbed the reins for the earnings call, he discussed Oracle’s new multi-tenant database as a service offering, to be unveiled next week at Oracle Open World. “With the push of a button, your data is automatically compressed 10 to one and encrypted for secure and efficient transfer to the cloud,” he said. “With the push of a button, your existing application automatically becomes a multi-tenant application and it’s moved to the Oracle Cloud.”
To be fair, this does seem like an improvement, especially with the NoSQL brigade of MongoDB, Couchbase et al breathing down Oracle’s collective necks. Yet the analysts, naturally, were more interested in the boardroom shuffle.
On the promotion of Catz and Hurd, Ellison said: “They deserve the recognition. They deserve the CEO title and I’m happy that our management team continues forward as a team.”
When one analyst enquired about whether there would be a change on the sales leadership side, Hurd curtly replied: “No.”
There was a little back and forth between the analysts over whether Ellison was staying on these executive calls. “You’re going to have to wait a little while longer before you get me off the call,” he joked. “I apologise to everyone for that.”
This may reveal more than is let on. Even though Catz and Hurd are the new faces at the top of Oracle, Ellison will still be doing his fair share of backseat driving.
This isn’t to say there aren’t good precedents for this change, however. Catz joins HP’s Meg Whitman, IBM’s Ginny Rometty and Good Technology’s Christy Wyatt in the influential female tech CEO camp, while the concept of two co-CEOs is not new: SAP has been doing it for years.
Ellison, if you recall, was initially dismissive about cloud computing. Oracle has since then been playing one long game of catch up – and if the latest results are anything to go by, then they could be playing this game for a while longer yet.
Updating Your Network Infrastructure for Modern Devices
Today the world of IT infrastructures is changing. This is due to the way companies communicate and the way they send and receive data within their networks, and the development of cloud computing and virtualised servers has re-shaped the way we share information with one another.
Cloud computing is a scalable and reliable cloud based environment which utilises remote servers to host and store all of our information. Just some of the benefits of cloud computing include improved accessibility, reduced spending on maintaining localised servers, a streamlining of processes and much more flexibility for businesses and organisations. (To find out more about how cloud computing works and how it can benefit your business, visit PC Mag online.)
Networking and Secure Infrastructures
With the increased accessibility of using servers in the cloud, it’s never been more important for network security. A greater number of people and an increasing number of new devices, including mobile devices will request access to modern day business networks. From laptops and contemporary tablet devices, Blackberries and smart phones, to desktop computers and other digital devices, one single business will have a lot of different data handlers to consider.
With new devices, are increased levels of complexity when it comes to traffic patterns, and as expected there are more security threats when more devices request to access your network. With this in mind, today’s IT infrastructure needs to be updated in order to cope with the increasing amount of data flowing over the IT network. (For more information on networking, visit Logicalis, an international IT solutions provider.)
The Importance of Accessibility
What’s most important to understand is the importance of welcoming such changes to your IT network. Virtualisation can improve the way businesses send and receive information, both internally and externally, and can also help organisations of all sizes cut down on costs in the long-run. Cloud servers can also provided added security with data backup and the development of virtualised computing can reduce planned downtime by up to 90%.
With the growth and development of modern devices it’s now more important than ever to ensure that you have increased accessibility for all business devices. Finding the right IT solutions provider for your business can help you support next-generation technology whilst encouraging better communication between key people in your company.
Read more on how virtualisation and cloud servers could be redefining the roles of IT within a business on the Logicalis blog.
@CloudExpo | @Cisco to Acquire Metacloud [#Cloud]
Cisco on Wedesday announced its intent to acquire privately held Metacloud. Based in Pasadena, Calif., Metacloud deploys and operates private clouds for global organizations with a unique OpenStack-as-a-Service model that delivers and remotely operates production-ready private clouds in a customer’s data center.
Metacloud’s OpenStack-based cloud platform will accelerate Cisco’s strategy to build the world’s largest global Intercloud, a network of clouds, together with key partners to address customer requirements for a globally distributed, highly secure cloud platform capable of meeting the robust demands of the Internet of Everything. Since announcing its Intercloud strategy in March, Cisco has made rapid progress, enlisting key technology partners, service and cloud providers, all of whom are standardizing upon the Cisco Cloud Services architecture, which is based on OpenStack open source software for building private and public clouds.
@CloudExpo | What Is Important for #Cloud Services?
Amazon is indisputably the biggest name in cloud service providers. They have built up a strong market presence primarily on the argument that access to cheap compute and storage resources is attractive to companies looking to shed IT costs as they move from on-premises solutions to the cloud. But after the initial push for cheap resources, how will this market develop?
Amazon has cut prices to their cloud offering more than 40 times since introducing the service in 2006. The way this gets translated in press circles is that cloud services pricing is approaching some floor. But is that true?
@DevOpsSummit | #DevOps Inspires Software Quality Assurance
High performing enterprise Software Quality Assurance (SQA) teams validate systems are ready for use – getting most actively involved as components integrate and form complete systems. These teams catch and report on defects, making sure the customer gets the best software possible. SQA teams have leveraged automation and virtualization to execute more thorough testing in less time – bringing Dev and Ops together, ensuring production readiness. Does the emergence of DevOps mean the end of Enterprise SQA? Does the SQA function become redundant?
How to overcome the cloud-savvy IT talent shortage
Senior executives at large multinational enterprises are already demanding that their CIO has a plan in place to ensure that they can effectively procure public and private cloud services for their organization. In smaller companies, some IT managers are now expected to acquire the knowledge and skills to perform a similar role.
Are they prepared? To find out, let’s review a current IT resource assessment.
According to the findings from a recent market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), European IT departments still need to make significant improvements before they have fully embraced cloud architectures and transformed themselves into hybrid cloud service providers.
When asked to evaluate their current readiness to execute on their cloud service brokering strategy — where they become a trusted internal advisers to their Line of Business leaders — European respondents admitted to unexpectedly low levels of confidence that they’re ready.
As an example, 56 percent of European IT departments cannot find qualified staff to effectively support cloud projects. Moreover, 61 percent are struggling to up-skill their employees to effectively evaluate cloud service providers. And, 70 percent still need to learn how to make effective use of automation, self-service, and basic orchestration tools.
Why finding talent is still a major roadblock
If you assumed that — based on this insight — the skills shortfall is merely a European problem, you’d be mistaken. IDC interviewed IT and non-IT staff at director level or above in 1,109 organizations globally — including 304 in Europe (100 in the U.K. and 102 in both France and Germany).
The IDC survey confirmed the depth and breadth of challenge — like many of their counterparts, the vast majority of European IT departments still require a great deal of transformation and need to invest further in people, process, and technology.
“The use of cloud computing as an increasingly business-critical technology is quickly changing how companies and institutions evaluate, procure, and deploy IT assets,” said Carla Arend, program director at IDC.
She believes that the effective use of cloud-related tools remains the biggest challenge for IT organizations, while accurately defining costs and implementing charge-back models is a struggle in the business and IT relationship.
According to IDC’s assessment, spending on cloud services and the building blocks for cloud infrastructure has reached 25 percent growth in Europe over the past 12 months. But beyond the early-adopter segment, IDC says that deployments in the coming years could stall if IT buyers are not prepared to systematically tackle the known hurdles to a successful adoption.
Additional findings from the IDC study include:
- IT organizations see themselves as Service Providers focused on business priorities. Almost half of the respondents have achieved this change in mindset, where IT departments have embraced the IT-as-a-service approach and are ready to negotiate service levels and serve their business users like an outside service provider. Only 5 percent of respondents do not have this major transformation as an area of focus.
- Return on investment remains difficult to prove. Only around a third of European organizations are able to build a comprehensive business case for their cloud projects. Understanding all the implications, costs, and benefits of a transformational process like implementing cloud computing is tough, but without creating solid business cases it is hard to demonstrate the ultimate success of cloud projects.
- Ability to use cloud to drive business innovation and competitive advantage. Just 41 percent use cloud to gain a business advantage, leaving 59 percent of European organizations not able to take cloud projects beyond the level of IT infrastructure projects. The real benefits of cloud projects will only be realized if they are used to drive business innovation and competitive advantage.
So, given that backdrop, how can companies solve the apparent cloud infrastructure and business innovation skills gap? One approach is to reach out to consulting and training organizations that have a proven track record of helping other legacy IT organizations evolve towards these 21st Century demands.
Clearly, there are likely a few highly-qualified candidates in every region of the world. In the European marketplace, Paris-based eNovance is an example of the high-caliber consulting talent that’s available to create and deploy cloud infrastructures quickly and cost effectively — plus manage a multitude of web applications on the largest public clouds.
@DevOpsSummit | Continuous Delivery and #DevOps by @ElasticBox
Achieve continuous delivery of applications by leveraging ElasticBox and Jenkins. In his session at DevOps Summit, Monish Sharma, VP of Customer Success at ElasticBox, will demonstrate how you can achieve the following using ElasticBox and the ElasticBox Jenkins Plugin: Create consistency across dev, staging, and production environments Continuous delivery across multiple clouds to handle high loads Ensure consistent policy management across environments: tagging, admin boxes, traceability Spin up machines and environments quickly Deploy applications to any cloud Enable real-time collaboration between developers and operations
@ThingsExpo | ‘Internet of Things’ (#IoT) Is Still a Vague Buzzword For Many
IoT is still a vague buzzword for many people. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Mike Kavis, Vice President & Principal Cloud Architect at Cloud Technology Partners, will discuss the business value of IoT that goes far beyond the general public’s perception that IoT is all about wearables and home consumer services. The presentation will also discuss how IoT is perceived by investors and how venture capitalist access this space. Other topics to discuss are barriers to success, what is new, what is old, and what the future may hold.