Can the spatial component of your Big Data be harnessed and visualized, adding another dimension of power and analytics to your data?
In his session at Big Data Expo®, John Meza, Product Engineer and Performance Engineering Team Lead at Esri, discussed the spatial queries that can be used within the Hadoop ecosystem and their integration with GeoSpatial applications.
The GIS Tools for Hadoop project was also discussed and its implementation to discover location-based patterns and relationships in Big Data to enable better decision support. This was followed by a demonstration of GIS Big Data on a live cluster with expressive web mapping visualization.

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There’s no doubt that the Internet of Things is driving the next wave of innovation. Google has spent billions over the past few months vacuuming up companies that specialize in smart appliances and machine learning. Already, Philips light bulbs, Audi automobiles, and Samsung washers and dryers can communicate with and be controlled from mobile devices. To take advantage of the opportunities the Internet of Things brings to your business, you’ll want to start preparing now.

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Today, IT is not just a cost center. IT is an enabler and driver of business. With the emergence of the hybrid cloud paradigm, IT now has increasingly more capabilities to create new strategic opportunities for a business. Hybrid cloud allows an organization to utilize multi-tenant public clouds, dedicated private clouds, bare metal hosting, and the associated support and services for the right use cases through an on-demand, XaaS model. This model of IT creates tremendous opportunities for businesses to utilize cloud in the most customized way possible to suit its requirements and business goals, and also to enable new business opportunities in a way that was not possible a few years ago. This hybrid cloud computing model brings many more advantages than just cost savings. While a TCO analysis immediately shows the benefit of the hybrid cloud model, it does not fully capture the tremendous value that hybrid cloud brings to a business. The hybrid cloud model can enable and drive strategic opportunities for a business that will have far more impact than just cost savings.

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Plutora, Inc., a global provider of enterprise release management and test environment management SaaS solutions, designed to accelerate the end-to-end software delivery journey through transparency and control, on Tuesday announced a global strategic partnership agreement with UST Global, an information technology solutions and services company for Global 1000 enterprises.
Under the partnership, UST Global will incorporate Plutora’s SaaS Solution into their DevOps service line to provide end-to-end test environment management services. UST Global will train and certify personnel on the Plutora’s SaaS solution.

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Stu Hammer is the leader of the HP Enterprise Services Applications Practice in U.S. Public Sector, where he has specialized in application modernization, transformation strategy and transformation to cloud services. He has been in the IT business for more than 29 years with a strategic focus on IT transformation trends and providing application transformation strategies for government clients.
Public sector IT agencies have many issues, including constrained if not reduced budgets, but meeting mission objectives is vital to ongoing operations. For IT leaders, costs are ever increasing, legacy systems are omnipresent, security risks are growing and new technologies are continually being introduced – including mobility, cloud and Big Data.

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(c)iStock.com/AndreyPopov

The cloud ecosystem has ushered in an exciting era of open access to world-class computing power, resources, storage, development framework and software applications. With this has come an explosion of innovation. While cloud service providers (CSPs) have enabled innovation and cost reduction for their customers, they have likewise been challenged to leverage the power of the cloud to innovate around monetisation and billing. This has resulted in business risks, such as:

• Becoming a commodity provider due to high CSP customer churn resulting from lack of differentiation
• Inability to exceed client satisfaction due to poor usage and billing details
• Missed revenue and maximisation opportunities due to value-added resellers covering this growing need
• Slow time-to-market of new services because there is no dynamic promotion mechanism built into the charging model
• Credit risk exposure, as enterprises with low credit ratings can end up using more than what they can pay

In short, effective monetisation of services remains a challenge to overcome for CSPs to deliver the ultimate cloud offering.

The challenge

Cloud computing monetisation models today remind us of the billing models of the past, with a bias towards flat rate billing. There were few monetisation models that were low latency usage or activity-based, reflecting consumption behaviour. However, with the onset of the mobile data tsunami, bundled packages to enterprise and retail clients and overall market saturation, monetisation models had to be changed to meet customer needs. Providers saw an opportunity to design billing plans to deliver the best offer at the most competitive prices and increase average revenue per user.

Recently, some have positioned subscription billing as the answer to CSPs’ billing challenges. While subscription billing has its place, it is inadequate for the needs of providers who need flexibility with their pricing plans, require hierarchy-based usages and billing break down, and stronger revenue recognition capabilities.

Market realities are rapidly pushing CSPs to become more robust in how they rate, charge and bill for their services.  Following are five essential challenges CSPs monetisation models must meet to be successful:

1. Billing and charging models must be value driven and more reflective of consumption behaviour
2. Transparency and granularity of usage details must be available by accounts and sub-accounts
3. Effective policy control and enforcement must be in place to deliver appropriate quality of service and SLA according to the purchased offer
4. Implementing a low latency credit control policy is necessary so clients don’t experience the “bill shock” effect
5. Delivering reliable and scalable billing and revenue management will be paramount to building trusted client relationships

The market potential                                                                      

Value maximisation potential in the cloud computing era is limitless for all “as a service” models. Effective revenue management and billing can help power the delivery of the ultimate cloud offering by enabling multi-dimensional pricing models.

The flexibility represented in Figure 1 can also be leveraged to deliver benefits, including:

1. Bundle: by bundling different services and packaging them as one
2. Incent: by leveraging metered information of usage and consumption behaviour
3. Reward: by giving limited period bonus services once criterion are met and usage levels have been crossed
4. Inform: by sending near real-time notifications of key account activity or critical usage to a client’s preferred channel
5. Satisfy: by delivering rated unbilled usage information to CSR or enforce credit limit checks to avoid bill shocks

Another benefit of using multi-dimensional revenue management attributes is that billing transaction data records can be used to obtain the end-customer’s usage and consumption behaviour, adding the creativity and innovation needed to achieve differentiation.

Monetising the potential

CSPs have an unprecedented opportunity to be innovative and successful in deploying monetisation models.

Figure 2 illustrates the most time-tested rating and charging keys that have been applied across industries to monetise services. Combining these monetisation strategies can significantly boost the value that IaaS, PaaS and SaaS deliver to CSPs’ clients.

Conclusion

Delivering the ultimate cloud offering calls for ultimate flexibility with on-demand access. The challenge is offering flexible, scalable and reliable monetisation, billing and revenue management for cloud services. The CSPs that can effectively monetise and bill for their services will thrive by meeting the evolving needs of this dynamic market. By learning from the past and understanding the future, CSPs will triumph with higher client satisfaction and a more successful business.

(c)iStock.com/airspeed

IBM has announced the launch of the first SoftLayer cloud data centre in Germany, joining an ever growing list of cloud service providers (CSPs) setting up roots in the European country.

The move, to Frankfurt, had been coming, with Germany and France on Big Blue’s confirmed list of targets after launching a London data centre back in July, Paris already having been opened.

It’s a prevalent trend for cloud providers for a variety of reasons; it helps customers based in Europe attain the stricter security and data privacy regulations on the continent, as well as lowering latency to improve application performance. IBM claims there is only seven milliseconds of latency between the Frankfurt and Amsterdam data centres.

“Data privacy regulations in the European Union are among the most stringent in the world, and Germany has one of the strongest policies,” said SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby in a statement. “While all our cloud data centres have SoftLayer’s same strict standards for security and privacy, the new Frankfurt facility will allow German companies and clients to benefit from in-country data storage, a requirement in many industries to comply with German data protection laws.”

The move makes sense for all parties, with Germany consistently in the top five of IBM Cloud’s best performing EMEA countries in terms of monthly recurring revenue and growth.

Following a ruling in New York whereby Microsoft had to hand over data stored on an overseas server, it has become imperative for organisations – and CSPs – to ensure data is truly kept private.

Back in November Interoute launched a second virtual data centre (VDC) zone in Germany, following their Berlin data centre in 2012, while Amazon Web Services opened a series of data centres in Frankfurt in October. Salesforce also mentioned the possibility of expanding its European operations to Germany, following the launch of its first UK data centre in the same month.

Pricing was not disclosed, although IBM is offering a $500 discount to Frankfurt customers, valid until March 31. You can find out more here.

(c)iStock.com/mattjeacock

As cloud continues to pervade businesses, the primary role of central IT will be to protect sensitive data, maintain centralised software and optimise IT spending, managing chargebacks to line of business.

This is the key takeaway from a study published by IDC and Red Hat. Entitled ‘How IT is planning for its hybrid reality’, the study examines how many of the challenges facing IT with the proliferation of cloud relate back to business rather than technology.

The accompanying survey, which polled over 200 IT professionals in North America, found that 69% of respondents were using at least four public cloud IaaS platforms today, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, VMware vCloud Hybrid Service, Rackspace, and IBM SoftLayer.

IDC notes the fractured landscape of the IaaS market with this data, although related research suggests a clear pecking order and dominant players, with AWS ahead of Microsoft.

This shared ownership demands a new management model, according to the report. Even though organisations are taking a hybrid cloud approach, cloud management tools have yet to catch up, requiring greater degrees of application and data portability, along with a greater number of integration points.

Primary challenges in creating a new management model include developing a public cloud governance strategy, cited by 35% of respondents, as well as unifying the management of public and private cloud resources (25%). Just under a third (32%) of respondents said they were allowing users to manage cloud services on their own, while 36% said they were enabling IT to enforce policy while looking for ways to allow users to manage their own cloud services.

It’s a clear sign for executives to change. 45% of respondents cite deploying a unified cloud management platform as one of their top five initiatives going forward, although problems with deploying it include managing chargebacks and SLA reports for the business, as well as ensuring alignment between business and IT goals.

One of the more interesting facets to come out from this research goes against the commonly held belief that IT is unaware of how IT services are swapping over to cloud providers. “Respondents displayed awareness of the proliferation of public cloud services, and they do recognise the need to increase their level of responsiveness to users, even if IT believes it is already offering a reasonable set of services,” the report notes.

Gordon Haff, a cloud strategist at Red Hat, said of the results: “Augmenting in-house IT with public clouds can help organisations develop the applications and services the business needs faster and deliver them more flexibly. However, a completely ad hoc approach to using public clouds is a recipe for high costs and compliance failures.

“A cloud management strategy lets you take advantage of new and innovative cloud platforms while maintaining control of IT and protecting the business,” he added.

You can take a look at the full report here.

The race to hire is on. By 2029, the U.S. Census Bureau notes that the entire baby boomer generation will be over the age of 65. But even now, boomers are leaving the workforce in considerable numbers, and finding replacements will be stiff competition among organizations looking to attract the more modern-thinking millennial workforce.
But it’s not just ping-pong tables, summer Fridays, and flexible work environments that will bring you top-tier talent. It’s the technology you deploy throughout your organization, and the commitment you have to staying modern in an ever-changing business world.

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