SYS-CON Events announced today Sematext Group, Inc., a Brooklyn-based Performance Monitoring and Log Management solution provider, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s DevOps Summit 2015 New York, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Sematext is a globally distributed organization that builds innovative Cloud and On Premise solutions for performance monitoring, alerting and anomaly detection (SPM), log management and analytics (Logsene), search analytics (SSA), and search enhancement. We also provide exceptional Search and Big Data consulting services and offer 24/7 production support for Solr and Elasticsearch to clients worldwide.

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Is there a point where business can safely assume they have hit the limit of what traditional IT organizations have to offer? In an Internet and data driven world, does IT simply lack the agility and depth needed to fulfill business requirements and need for innovation?
Parts of cloud computing have chimed a loud and painful wake up call for many IT managers. Even at the most simple level, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), it might be fair to say this is simply a utility to accelerate data center imagedecommissioning, and the process of physically decoupling underlying compute, storage, and network infrastructure from the business.

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There has been a lot of discussion recently in the DevOps space over whether there is a unique form of DevOps for large enterprises or is it just vendors looking to sell services and tools.
In his session at DevOps Summit, Chris Riley, a technologist, discussed whether Enterprise DevOps is a unique species or not. What makes DevOps adoption in the enterprise unique or what doesn’t? Unique or not, what does this mean for adopting DevOps in enterprise size organizations? He also explored different vendor approaches and success/failure examples with the idea of preparing you to help instill DevOps in your business

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SYS-CON Media announced today the IBM, which offers the world’s deepest portfolio of technologies and expertise that are transforming the future of work, has launched ad campaigns on SYS-CON’s numerous online magazines such as Cloud Computing Journal, DevOps Journal, Virtualization Journal, and IoT Journal.
IBM’s campaigns focus on application testing, improving application development processes, common challenges in testing composite applications, continuous testing as part of the DevOps lifecycle, and deploying higher quality software faster through continuous integration testing.

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Software-driven innovation is becoming a primary approach to how businesses create and deliver new value to customers. A survey of 400 business and IT executives by the IBM Institute for Business Value showed businesses that are more effective at software delivery are also more profitable than their peers nearly 70 percent of the time (1). DevOps provides a way for businesses to remain competitive, applying lean and agile principles to software development to speed the delivery of software that meets new market requirements.
IBM’s new DevOps Innovation Services help address the challenge of scaling DevOps, enabling enterprises to transform their software delivery lifecycle. The hybrid cloud services combine IBM’s industry expertise from hundreds of organizational change and application development projects with the industry’s leading application development portfolio, including Bluemix, IBM’s open cloud platform-as-a-service. They also apply the flexibility of IBM’s enterprise-grade, hybrid cloud portfolio, which was recently ranked by Synergy Research Group as the leading hybrid and private cloud for the enterprise (2). These services are based upon SoftLayer, IBM’s premier cloud infrastructure platform.

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(c)iStock.com/LindaJoHeilman

Over the weekend, Verizon’s cloud service, Verizon Cloud, was offline as it looked to add ‘seamless upgrade functionality as well as other customer-facing updates.’

The maintenance period was put in to improve the service and to ensure further updates went ahead without any hitches to customers. The telco giant warned the fixes could take up to 48 hours, but was completed after 40, with Verizon taking the bizarre step of issuing a press release to announce the work had been done.

“The seamless upgrade functionality allows Verizon to conduct major system upgrades without interrupting service or limiting infrastructure capacity,” the release states. “Traditionally, updates have been made via rolling maintenance and other methods.

“Many cloud vendors require customers to set up virtual machines in multiple zones or upgrade domains, which can increase the cost and complexity. Additionally, those customers must reboot their virtual machines after maintenance has occurred.

“Verizon eliminates these requirements, since virtually all maintenance and upgrades to Verizon Cloud will now happen in the background with no impact to customers,” it adds.

Verizon customer Kenn White tweeted his way through the outage, some with a rather scathing undertone:

Know which clouds are up & have status pages? AWS GCP Azure Fatcow Know who’s been down worldwide 13 hrs, no updates? pic.twitter.com/6ibM1PNPcU

— Kenn White (@kennwhite) January 10, 2015

Until all was finally resolved:

Yay. (logged in as full admin, btw) pic.twitter.com/0eTMRxkmyQ

— Kenn White (@kennwhite) January 11, 2015

Verizon, like various other telecoms providers, has made a concerted push towards cloud services in recent years, having bought Terremark in 2011 for $1.4bn. The company launched its software store Verizon Cloud Marketplace back in November.

While one particular customer was less than happy, two days of pain in a planned outage seems like a far better idea than aiming for 100% uptime before the inevitable happens, as happened with Mimecast. So long as Verizon keeps up its end of the bargain, that is.

Picture credit: JD Lasica/Flickr

Cloud storage provider Box is set to finally go public nine months after its aborted first attempt, according to an updated regulatory filing.

The updated S-1 filing, viewable here, outlines plans to sell 12.5 million shares at between $11 and $13 a share, with CEO Aaron Levie tweeting a thinly veiled comment on the delay:

Well that certainly took a while.

— Aaron Levie (@levie) January 9, 2015

There was plenty of furore back in March when reports surfaced that Box had filed for IPO, with this publication noting at the time Levie’s comment over how neither he nor CFO Dylan Smith had “storied” careers at IBM or Oracle, and the general disruption between cloudy upstarts and legacy tech vendors.

Yet the ending wasn’t a happy one; after shares of various public cloud companies tanked – no, not that sort of public cloud – the Los Altos-based firm decided to withdraw and keep its powder dry.

In the updated document, many of the figures haven’t changed. Profitability is at -137%, while sales and marketing spend remains at 137% of the firm’s revenue. These are figures which don’t seem to concern Tomasz Tunguz, venture capitalist at Redpoint, who wrote in his blog: “Compared to other publicly traded SaaS companies, Box is among the least in efficient customer acquisition.

“But in this market, which values revenue growth and seemingly ignores profitability, the bottom line doesn’t seem to matter as much as the top line. In that regard, Box is close to the top of the heap.”

Events since then have improved Box’s standing, not least the acquisition of General Electric as a new customer in May. In July, Levie announced the removal of cloud storage limits for Box’s business customers, calling it “the end of the storage wars.” Given Microsoft responded in kind, first by offering 1TB and then unlimited cloud storage for Office 365 subscribers, then it’s clear the next phase for Box and its nearest competitors is not just the storage of data, but its location and protection as well.

Not every pundit is in agreement, however. Vineet Jain, CEO of competitor Egnyte, previously spoke of the need for “basic financial sense” in IPO valuations. Yet Alex Gorbansky, CEO of Box partner Docurated, told this publication back in September of the difference between the media’s comment and what customers are actually thinking. “If you talk to customers and leading CIOs, they’re all enthusiastically investing in Box,” he said.

Box is usually portrayed as a bitter rival of Dropbox, although both companies play this down. Yet Dropbox’s recent business decisions – partnering with Microsoft for Office 365, for instance – marks a change in their strategy over recent months. Where Box goes from here, particularly given Microsoft and Google’s aggressive push on cloud storage, among others, remains to be seen.

Enterprise cloud adoption rates have climbed in leaps and bounds over the past several years and 72 percent of companies are expected to pursue a hybrid cloud implementation strategy by 2015.[1] But cloud technology’s value proposition has transformed as business needs have evolved. Whereas cloud was once seen as being a way to reduce costs, cloud users are finding it’s now much more than a matter of saving money. As business processes and applications have become more complex and simultaneously more automated, more companies have moved away from virtualized environments in favor of the flexibility, reduced capex, rapid service delivery and other business benefits experienced by their peers who have made the leap to the cloud.

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In today’s application economy, enterprise organizations realize that it’s their applications that are the heart and soul of their business. If their application users have a bad experience, their revenue and reputation are at stake.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Application Performance Management at CA Technologies, discussed how a user-centric Application Performance Management solution can help inspire your users with every application transaction.

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