Business and IT leaders today need better application delivery capabilities to support critical new innovation. But how often do you hear objections to improving application delivery like, “I can harden it against attack, but not on this timeline”; “I can make it better, but it will cost more”; “I can deliver faster, but not with these specs”; or “I can stay strong on cost control, but quality will suffer”? In the new application economy, these tradeoffs are no longer acceptable. Customers will abandon your brand forever for a slow response or a privacy breach; competitors will steal critical markets if you cannot deliver on time and on budget.
Monthly Archives: March 2015
Announcing @Dyn to Exhibit at @CloudExpo New York [#Cloud #BigData #IoT]
SYS-CON Events announced today that Dyn, the worldwide leader in Internet Performance, 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.
Dyn is a cloud-based Internet Performance company. Dyn helps companies monitor, control, and optimize online infrastructure for an exceptional end-user experience. Through a world-class network and unrivaled, objective intelligence into Internet conditions, Dyn ensures traffic gets delivered faster, safer, and more reliably than ever.
Capital One To Present at @DevOpsSummit New York By @TopoPal | [#DevOps]
In his session at DevOps Summit, Tapabrata Pal, Director of Enterprise Architecture at Capital One, will tell a story about how Capital One has embraced Agile and DevOps Security practices across the Enterprise – driven by Enterprise Architecture; bringing in Development, Operations and Information Security organizations together. Capital Ones DevOpsSec practice is based upon three “pillars” – Shift-Left, Automate Everything, Dashboard Everything. Within about three years, from 100% waterfall, Capital One now has 500+ Agile Teams delivering quality software via Agile and DevOps practices.
The Art of DevOps By @Dynatrace | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
Welcome to my four-part series on what I’m going to call the Art of DevOps. We will embark on a mission to reveal the extremely valuable intelligence that’s been collected about a unique strategy to continuously deliver assets to the operational battleground safely, securely and quickly. This strategy drives optimal monitoring of the frontlines and enhanced communications with the troops supporting the initial development. I do make the assumption that most of you are battle-worthy veterans in one or more of the environments that I’ll review.
Beyond this introduction blog, I’ll brief you on some of the best DevOps tactics to aid in your deployments while providing maximum situational awareness within each environment. I’ll also do my best to expand upon the best lines of defense with minimal disruption. Unfortunately, in my experience, many of you will be deficient either over lack of preparation such as test automation, damaged assets or organizational challenges in one or more areas of deployment. The goal of this series is to help you recognize where your deficits are, how to address certain scenarios and which tactics you need to use to lead a successful DevOps operation.
Business + Dev + Ops = BizDevOps By @AAkela | @DevOpsSummit [@AppDynamics #DevOps]
Hello, from a new member of AppDynamics team. I recently joined the team to lead application performance management (APM) product marketing.
Last month, when I was talking with Jyoti Bansal, CEO of AppDynamics, he shared his vision for the company. Where the market is heading and how application performance and end-user experience insights can influence business outcome. This conversation not only cemented my decision to join the company, but also I came back with a quest to learn more about a term he used – BizDevOps
Box raises $175m with IPO, but what is next?
Box enjoyed a very successful IPO last month, raising around $175 million despite a lot of ridiculous nay-saying about its growth strategy. I have defended its business model extensively in the past, so it was great to see a company that was once foolishly dismissed as “the Groupon of SaaS” enjoys such an emphatic public debut (I hate to say I told you so but I did).
I am sure that Aaron Levie and his management group had a busy and productive IPO Friday (see his tweet above), but what comes next for his company? I do not have any insider information about what Box has up its sleeves, but you can take a look at the firm’s business model for some clues.
Without getting into too many numbers, Box is a very disciplined subscription-based business, which means it has healthy margins before customer acquisition costs are included, and that it is able to efficiently acquire new customers. And similar to other great subscription businesses like Evernote and New Relic, it offers a service that people wind up incorporating into their daily lives, leading to strong renewal rates.
High renewal rates (and correspondingly low churn) are particularly important, because in the Subscription Economy, the “win” does not happen when you convince someone to buy your product. The win only happens when you deliver a compelling experience that makes customers keep coming back for more.
Take music. Just a couple of years ago the experience of legally enjoying digital music used to consist of purchasing and downloading rights-managed digital files through iTunes. Today it is about discovering new music through Spotify: creating playlists, finding curators, sharing songs with your social graph. So the experience has shifted from buying a basic product to enjoying an ongoing service, but the catch is that Spotify has to keep happily surprising its users with new features and smart recommendations to earn their £10 a month.
Box is a great service. It helps more than 280,000 businesses keep their information secure while allowing their employees to work effectively with colleagues and clients. But the storage and collaboration space is rapidly changing. Storage costs are going to zero, and collaboration can be… well, anything. So much like in digital music, the basic Box experience (online file storage) is starting to evolve and collide with all sorts of interesting new features and experiences, from editing an online document to video conferencing to automated workflows.
With that in mind, here are five directions I think Box could go:
1. Open the enterprise
Box now has a significant enough client base that it can persuade other large enterprise companies to open up and collaborate. Along with Citrix and Salesforce they recently announced a cloud storage partnership with Microsoft that will some day allow Word and PowerPoint users to access Box files from any device.
2. Bring legacy sectors into the present
Risk-averse, highly regulated industries like healthcare, banking, and government represent huge opportunities for Box. They are rolling out a new security platform that it will hopefully convince the auditors and law firms to let their employees become more nimble and effective.
3. Enable creative benchmarking
If you are managing a software company, what lessons could you learn about mobile collaboration from a construction firm, or a movie studio? Probably more than you think. Box could turn this fascinating usage study of their client base into a live benchmarking tool that would allow companies to get new ideas from interesting new sources.
4. Revolutionise retail
The big box shopping experience is broken, but showrooms still have lots of inherent advantages over digital product shots and questionable reviews. Box can help big retailers use their vast troves of online shopping behavior to re-imagine their physical spaces and services.
5. Prioritise security
Given all the digital security concerns right now, Box has a huge opportunity in terms of offering government-grade protection protocols to both large enterprises and private consumers. Users may come to see Box as less of a place where they store information securely, and more of a place where to they go to actively secure sensitive information.
The list goes on. Looking past 2020, when nearly every physical device on the planet will have some kind of digital component, Box’s opportunities seem limitless. In the meantime, they’re investing wisely in their product and their growth roadmap. I wish them luck.
Intel and Alcatel-Lucent Announce Their Cloud Mobile Network
One year ago Intel and Alcatel-Lucent, a network builder, formed a wireless partnership, and now they are ready to unveil their plan to move the mobile network from the cell tower into the data center. On Monday they revealed a new networking architecture called vRAN.
vRAN moves the processing that drives the mobile network to the cloud, and its servers are running on Intel Xeon processors, which Alcatel-Lucant runs many of the functions of the networks as software on. This concept is being called Cloud-RAN (RAN meaning radio access network), and it has the potential to change how networks are built.
This move is an apprehensive one, due to the highly distributed way mobile networks are designed. All of the processing power of mobile networks is at its fringes, and most of its expense, right under the radios that transmit signal to our phone. Carriers make the most to maximize the capacity of these base stations so they can handle the large demand for mobile data and voice at peak times.
Cloud-RAN would most the baseband processing into a central data center, and carriers could allow capacity to cell towers as needed. It is more efficient to build a network this way, and it could end up with more reliable and faster mobile service for customers. Rather than maxing out cell sites capacity and dropping LTE connections, Cloud-RAN could increase capacity at congested sites.
However, there are some limitations of the Cloud-RAN. Data centers will need to be close to the towers that they serve. Alcatel-Lucant and Intel have managed to push this distance to more than 100 kilometers, or 62 miles. This is far enough to build a virtualized network of thousands of cells.
The post Intel and Alcatel-Lucent Announce Their Cloud Mobile Network appeared first on Cloud News Daily.
Virtusa to Present “Hadoop as a Service” at @CloudExpo New York | @VirtusaCorp [#BigData]
Hadoop as a Service (as offered by handful of niche vendors now) is a cloud computing solution that makes medium and large-scale data processing accessible, easy, fast and inexpensive.
In his session at Big Data Expo, Kumar Ramamurthy, Vice President and Chief Technologist, EIM & Big Data, at Virtusa, will discuss how this is achieved by eliminating the operational challenges of running Hadoop, so one can focus on business growth. The fragmented Hadoop distribution world and various PaaS solutions that provide a Hadoop flavor either make choices for customers very flexible in the name of options or restrictive in the name of abstraction provided.
Cloud Trends to Watch Out for This Year | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Experts predict that the cloud computing will continue to grow this year. According to the Computerworld Forecast Study, spending on cloud computing is expected to rise by 42% in 2015. Moreover, Esna projects that in a bid to increase the use of mobile, social, customer-facing and collaboration technologies, 40% of IT teams will spend more on software as a service and a mix of public, private and hybrid solutions this year.
How FedRAMP Compliance Can Give You a Competitive Edge | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
FedRAMP defines the requirements for cloud service providers’ security controls, including vulnerability scanning, incident monitoring, logging, and reporting. CSPs in use at federal agencies or in acquisition must meet the cloud computing requirements defined by FedRAMP.
Whether or not your company currently works with government agencies, there are several benefits to preparing for FedRAMP.