One of the hottest areas in cloud right now is DRaaS and related offerings.
In his session at 16th Cloud Expo, Dale Levesque, Disaster Recovery Product Manager with Windstream’s Cloud and Data Center Marketing team, will discuss the benefits of the cloud model, which far outweigh the traditional approach, and how enterprises need to ensure that their needs are properly being met.
Monthly Archives: March 2015
IBM’s Internet of Things + Partnership With The Weather Channel
Last fall, IBM announced their Internet of Things (IoT) Foundation service on its BlueMix cloud-based platform. This news was overshadowed by the announcement this week that they plan to invest over $3 billion to build a dedicated IoT unit consisting of over 2,000 consultants, researchers and developers over the course of the next four years.
Along with this news, IBM announced that they are building a cloud-based platform to assist clients and partners to enhance real-time data and insights from various sources directly to business operations. In a separate announcement they said they would be partnering with The Weather Channel for an IoT service, as The Weather Channel is adding IBM as its cloud services provider.
The IoT foundation already has offered developers a set of APIs to simplify data access from Internet-connected devices. The new service includes IoT Cloud Open Platform for Industries (new analytics services offered directed at developing and delivering vertical industry IoT apps for cloud customers), BlueMix IoT Zone (new IoT services to support integration of IoT data into cloud-based apps) and the IoT Ecosystem (expanding partnerships with existing chip, device and industry partners to confirm the secure and easy integration of data solutions and services to their cloud platform).
The Weather Company, parent company of The Weather Channel, runs its weather-data-services-platform on Amazon only. They capture more than 20TB of data per day in order to drive their predictions accurately. The use of IBM’s cloud platform shows how the cloud market is heating up. The CIO/CTO of The Weather Company says they believe in multi-cloud stories, so cloud-based businesses or applications need to be built in an agnostic manner. This is the reason why they have been on a three-year journey to integrate IBM’s SoftLayer to power opportunities beyond what AWS could do alone.
The data from the Weather Channel’s WSI (B2B) will be made available to IBM IoT ecosystem customers so that they can make decisions about supply chains and customer buying patterns with accurate up to minute forecasts. IBM creating a dedicated business unit means that they can bring more focus and scale IoT opportunities. IBM feels that it is the right time for IoT to become the mainstream source of innovation across various industries.
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The Future of Data Analysis By @Emcien | @CloudExpo [#Cloud #BigData]
With the arrival of the Big Data revolution, a data professional is expected to master a broad spectrum of complex domains including data processing, mathematics, programming languages, machine learning techniques, and business knowledge. While this mastery is undoubtedly important, this narrow focus on tool usage has divorced many from the imagination required to solve real-world problems. As the demand for analysis increases, the data science community must transform from tool experts to “data chefs,” capable of crafting creative solutions with tangible benefits.
Announcing @Emcien to Exhibit at @CloudExpo New York [#Cloud #BigData]
SYS-CON Events announced today that Emcien will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 16th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Emcien’s vision is to let anyone use data to know the future. Emcien has built an automated, predictive analysis product that improves the lives of real people. Emcien allows people to automate their data analysis so they can build a better future.
Customer Showcase: Glen Isla House
Glen Isla House, a multi-award winning boutique country house accommodation on Phillip Island in Victoria, Australia—and amongst the world’s Top 10 Luxury B&Bs—has deployed Parallels Desktop for Mac Enterprise Edition and Parallels Access to further streamline its operations and introduce new levels of efficiency to the already excellent customer service the property is known for. “We […]
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Virtual Machine Performance Myths, Debunked
Guest blog by Mervin Christopher, Parallels Support Team Let’s say you use your virtual machine for online trading software, but it takes a long time to log in to Windows and start the actual application. Or, maybe you prefer to run video-editing software in a virtual environment. Or, like many others, you use Parallels Desktop […]
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WebRTC, un standard du Web, pas un produit By @Louisnaug | @ThingsExpo [#IoT #WebRTC]
WebRTC? Si vous n’en avez pas encore entendu parlé, il est important que vous découvriez une technologie qui va profondément changer les modes de communication de tous vos collaborateurs.
Je vais m’intéresser en priorité aux potentiels à moyen terme de cette technologie ; il existe encore des limites techniques importantes, mais elles vont sauter dans les mois qui viennent.
Les entreprises peuvent et doivent, aujourd’hui, prendre en compte WebRTC dans leurs choix de solutions de communications synchrones.
EU data protection authorities rubber-stamp AWS’ data processing agreement
EU data protection authorities have rubber-stamped AWS’ data protection practices
The group of European Union data protection authorities, known as the Article 29 Working Party (WP29), has approved AWS’ Data Processing Agreement, which the company said would help reassure customers it applies high standard of security and privacy in handling their data, whether moved inside or out of the EU.
Amazon said its inclusion of standardised model clauses within its customer contracts, and the WP29’s signoff of its contract, should help give customers more confidence in how it treats their data.
“The security, privacy, and protection of our customer’s data is our number one priority,” said Werner Vogels, chief technology officer, Amazon.
“Providing customers a DPA that has been approved by the EU data protection authorities is another way in which we are giving them assurances that they will receive the highest levels of data protection from AWS. We have spent a lot of time building tools, like security controls and encryption, to give customers the ability to protect their infrastructure and content.”
“We will always strive to provide the highest level of data security for AWS customers in the EU and around the world,” he added.
AWS already boasts a number of highly regulated clients in the US and Europe, and has made strides to appease the security and data-sovereignty-conscious customers. The company has certified to ISO 27001, SOC 1, 2, 3 and PCI DSS Level 1, is approved to provide its services to a number of banks in Europe, and is working with the CIA to build a massive private cloud platform.
More recently AWS added another EU availability zone based in Franfkurt; it operates one in Dublin.
The rubber-stamping seems to have come as welcome news to some European members of parliament, which have for the past few years been actively working on data protection reform in the region.
“The EU has the highest data protection standards in the world and it is very important that European citizens’ data is protected,” said Antanas Guoga, Member of the European Parliament.
“I believe that the Article 29 Working Party decision to approve the data proceeding agreement put forward by Amazon Web Services is a step forward to the right direction. I am pleased to see that AWS puts an emphasis on the protection of European customer data. I hope this decision will also help to drive further innovation in the cloud computing sector across the EU,” Guoga added.
Ingram Micro expands cloud marketplace to EU
Traditional IT resellers are trying to rebuild the business model to fit cloud services
IT tech distributor Ingram Micro has launched a marketplace for cloud services in Europe in a bid to bolster its appeal to channel partners, many of which are increasingly offering their products as-a-service. The move is aimed at making its proposition in the cloud economy more compelling, particularly as other traditional IT vendors and cloud incumbents move in on reseller turf.
The Cloud Marketplace, which handles billing and service deployment for a range of services offered by cloud vendors, is already up and running in the US. But the most recent announcement will see the platform launch imminently in France, the Netherlands, and the UK.
The company said it plans to launch the marketplace in Belgium, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Sweden in the second quarter of 2015.
In prepared remarks the company said it wanted to enable channel partners to more effectively sell their cloud wares to clients, and in particular, exploit what Ingram sees as a growing opportunity in the SME market for resellers. With the Cloud Marketplace, channel partners can manage the complete end-customer subscription lifecycle from a single, automated platform, provided and supported by Ingram Micro, the company said.
“For our channel partners, enabling businesses to operate in a hybrid environment that includes cloud-based solutions is as much about business transformation as it is about technology,” said Carl Alloin, executive director Europe, Ingram Micro Cloud. “Our Cloud Marketplace was designed to help channel partners quickly scale as they seek to expand their footprint and profitability in the cloud.”
Ingram is among a growing number of resellers refitting their channel models for the cloud (Arrow is another big one in Europe that recently launched a cloud app marketplace), in part because other traditional vendors and cloud service providers are starting to threaten their role in the market. Vendors like IBM, which launched its cloud service marketplace last year, are much more willing to cooperate with other vendors they would otherwise compete with at different levels of the stack, while cloud incumbents like AWS are attracting a range of other software and service providers to its fast-growing ecosystem.
IBM to pour £2bn into Internet of Things business unit
IBM is putting billions of dollars into creating a standalone IoT division
IBM announced it plans to spend up to £2bn over the next four years to consolidate and revamp its Internet of Things technologies and services into a standalone business unit. The move seems aimed at broadening its appeal beyond proto-IoT segments it traditionally caters to.
Through its Smart Cities and Smarter Planet programmes the company has effectively been offering what many today refer to as Internet of Things technologies, but the renewed investment will see IBM mobilise and train a massive fleet of consultants (over 2,000) on its consolidated IoT services portfolio, and offer a cloud-based platform for companies to help them marry data real time IoT data streams with other data sets and services.
The company also plans to carve out a section in Bluemix, IBM’s platform-as-a-service, for specialist IoT services, and expand IoT-focused partnerships with a range of technology and service providers.
“Our knowledge of the world grows with every connected sensor and device, but too often we are not acting on it, even when we know we can ensure a better result,” said Bob Picciano, senior vice president, IBM Analytics. “This is a major focus of investment for IBM because it’s a rich and broad-based opportunity where innovation matters. Over the next decade, integration of IoT in business operations and decision-making will transform business.”
The move is part of a broader reorganisation effort currently underway at IBM, which is seeing the company realign internally (and trim headcount) to more effectively support service and technology development around cloud, mobile, security, and data analytics. Its Internet of Things offerings are both increasingly drawing from those other segments, and broadening beyond traditional smart cities or intelligent manufacturing segments use cases – areas where IBM has traditionally played.
In February for example ARM and IBM jointly announced an Internet of Things starter kit to enable developers to rapidly prototype mbed-based IoT applications using Bluemix, which ships with a development board from Freescale, powered by an ARM Cortex-M4 processor. The companies are aiming the kit at startups, which hasn’t traditionally been IBM’s nor ARM’s target demographic.