SYS-CON Events announced today that Column Technologies, a global technology solutions company, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s DevOps Summit 2015 New York, which will take place June 9-11, 2015, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
Established in 1998, Column Technologies is a leader in application performance and infrastructure management for commercial and federal markets. The company is headquartered in the United States, with a diverse and talented team of more than 350 employees around the world, and offices in Canada, India and the United Kingdom.
Monthly Archives: April 2015
Parallels 2X RAS Took Home the Govies Government Security Award!
The Govies Government Security Awards were created to acknowledge the efforts of the IT industry in data protection. By generating solutions capable of reducing data risks, the industry supports the government in maintaining high security standards. An independent panel of judges from the security industry selected the top entries in the 2015 categories and named […]
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5 Reasons We Love Parallels Access (And You Will, Too)
We love Parallels® Access™—and not just because it’s our product. On a personal note, I love Parallels Access because of the freedom it’s given me away from my laptop. Here are a few other awesome reasons to try the app: 1. It’s light. Because Parallels Access lives on my iPad and iPhone (both are always with […]
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Wearables: Design, Value and Relevance | @ThingsExpo @Wipro [#IoT]
Recent technology advances in miniaturization has positioned the wearables as the pinnacle of technology convergence with the human body.
We inquire if wearables are mere standard miniaturized devices extended with the connectivity and present our views on considerations like design, applications, performance, efficiency, interoperability, usage scenarios, human device interaction and consequent trade-offs enabling wearables to impart optimal value.
From Data Collection and Analysis to Business Action
Guest post from Azmi Jafarey. Azmi is an IT leader with over 25 years of experience in IT innovation. He was CIO at Ipswitch,, Inc. for the last nine years, responsible for operations, infrastructure, business apps and BI. In 2013, he was named CIO of the year by Boston Business Journal and Mass High Tech. You can hear more from Azmi on his blog: http://hitechcio.com/
Here is a progression that most businesses experience in the data arena.
- You go from no data or bad data to “better” data.
- You start having reports regularly show up in your mailbox.
- The reports go from being just tables to showing trend lines.
- You evolve to dashboards that bring together data from many sources.
- You fork into sets of operational and strategic reports and dashboards, KPIs driven, with drill down.
By this point, you have Operational Data Stores (ODSs), data warehouses, a keen sense of the need for Master Data, keeping all systems in synch and an appreciation of defined data dictionaries. You expect data from all functions to “tie together” with absolute surety – and when it does not, it is usually traced to having a different understanding of data sources, or data definitions. But you are there, feeling good about being “data driven”, even as you suspect that that last huge data clean-up effort may already be losing its purity to the expediency of daily operations. How? Well, someone just created a duplicate Opportunity in your CRM, rather than bother to look up if one exists. Another person changed a contact’s address locally, rather than in a Master. And so it goes.
Sadly, for most businesses “data-driven” stops at “now you have the numbers” — an end in itself. At its worst, reports become brochure-ware, a travel guide for the business that is “interesting” and mainly used to confirm one’s suspicions and biases. Also, at its worst, many “followed” KPIs consume enormous amounts of time and effort to come up with a number, paint it green, yellow or red when compared to a target, and then these act mainly as trigger points for meetings rather than measured response.
I have nothing against meetings. I am just anxious for the business mindset to go beyond “descriptive” and “predictive” analytics to “prescriptive” analytics. Thus for Sales we seem to stop at “predictive” – forecasts are the holy grail, a look into the future, couched in probability percentages. Forecasts are indeed very useful and get reacted to. It is just that it is a reaction whose direction or magnitude are usually delinked from any explicit model. In today’s world instinct cannot continue to trump analysis. And analysis is meaningful only in the context of suggesting specific action, tied to business results as expected outcomes. The data must not only punt the can down the road – it must tell you exactly how hard and in which direction to punt. And the result must be measured for the next round to follow.
One of the really interesting things about data modeling, predictive and prescriptive analytics is that for all three the starting point is precisely the same data. After all, that is what you know and have. The difference is the effort to model and the feedback loop where measurable action and measured consequence can be used to refine action and hence outcomes. Part of the problem is also that the paradigm in today’s business world is for leaders who provide direction on actions to be farthest from those who know data well. Without personal exploration of relevant data, you revert to an iterative back-and-forth requesting new data formats from others. The time to search for such “insight” can be dramatically shortened by committing to modeling and measuring results from the get go. Bad models can be improved. But lacking one is to be adrift.
Before you begin to wonder “Is the next step Big Data? Should we be thinking of getting a Data Scientist?” start with the basics: training on analytics, with a commitment to model. Then use the model and refine.
Microsoft doubles cloud revenue in Q3
Nadella said Microsoft is well on its way to becoming a cloud-first, mobile-first company
Microsoft pulled in $21.7bn in revenues for the three months ending March 31, 2015, up 6 per cent year on year. But the company said its commercial cloud revenue more than doubled in the past quarter alone.
Microsoft reported mixed success in its devices segment (Surface revenues increased 44 per cent; phone revenues decreased, with volumes this quarter shifting from 10.5 to 8.6 million units sold) and Windows OEM revenues declined.
But he company reported commercial cloud revenue grew 106 per cent (111 per cent in constant currency), driven by Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM Online. Microsoft claims its cloud services now have an annualized revenue run rate of $6.3bn.
Office 365 and Azure accounts for a great deal of that growth according to Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief exec. Office 365 consumer subscribers increased to over 12.4 million, up 35 per cent sequentially
“We have 50 trillion objects stored in Azure, a three times growth year-over-year in storage transactions, and more than five trillion in March alone. And Azure websites are growing with nearly half a million sites hosted,” Nadella said during a call with analysts and journalists this week.
“It’s clear that we are well on our way to transforming our products and businesses across all of Microsoft. The early signs are evident in how our customers are using our products.”
“Our momentum in the cloud is a highlight. Increasingly, customers are choosing Microsoft cloud services to transform their own businesses, going beyond just moving existing workloads to the cloud. These results showcase our ability to transform and perform simultaneously.”
However, Office commercial products and services revenue declined 2 per cent.
“Enterprise penetration is accelerating with over half of all agreements signed during the quarter including cloud services,” added Amy Hood, the company’s chief financial officer.
Why your cloud needs more than great customer service
(c)iStock.com/davidstuart
When start-ups and enterprises first evaluate cloud providers, they often choose an out of the box solution that fits their immediate needs. Their hosting provider promises great customer service, but they have essentially the same stack as thousands of other customers and still need a large SysOps staff to monitor their infrastructure.
This solution may be adequate for several months or even years. But most enterprises ultimately find that a one-size-fits-all cloud solution no longer actually fits – if it ever did in the first place. Whether due to performance hiccups, rapid growth, a desire for a more automated DevOps approach, or new compliance challenges, they begin looking for other options.
The combination of a powerful infrastructure like AWS and a hands-on managed service provider is frequently the best solution.
A public cloud like AWS is a set of expertly designed tools – powerful, revolutionary, capable of building an incredible machine. AWS does not, however, tell you how to architect an environment from the resources it provides. It is an unassembled F-22 without a pilot or mechanic. As complexity increases, enterprises need someone to assist them beyond just fixing things when they break. They need someone to customise, right-size, and automate their infrastructure for their specific requirements and integrate with their internal IT teams – not just answer the phone when they call. They need someone who will take responsibility for security concerns and have the capacity to provide detailed reports to meet audit requirements.
In fact, Amazon understands that infrastructure is only half the battle for most enterprises. That is why Amazon invites Consulting Partners to help enterprises understand the full possibilities of the cloud. A managed cloud services provider allows enterprise clients to take full advantage of AWS services beyond elastic computing and VM provisioning.
These are the functions and services enterprises are usually looking for in a managed services partner:
1. Cloud migration
Most enterprises need help learning about which AWS resources can best replicate or improve their bare metal infrastructure. While AWS has provided extensive documentation for its services, each application is unique and internal IT teams often do not have the time to perform extensive testing on instance size/capacity, security, etc. The best managed service partners will offer a thorough audit and discovery process on the current environment, not a cursory “lift and drop” solution that usually results in improperly-sized instances and poor performance. It may take time to test the application, beginning with the smallest possible instance and conducting extensive performance testing to ensure the solution is cost-effective while maintaining the level of performance they expect from on-premise infrastructure.
A key part of cloud migration is also expertise in both cloud engineering and traditional IT. If your managed service provider was “born in the cloud,” meaning that they opened their doors five or so years ago and employ only cloud engineers, will they understand an enterprise’s legacy applications? Will they understand why the database in on-premises infrastructure needs a special blend of resources in the public cloud or how to get higher I/O out of AWS? Are they capable of understanding when an application needs to be hosted on a private cloud? Only a partner with extensive managed private hosting experience and AWS expertise can understand where an enterprise is now help get them where they are going.
2. Cloud management, not customer service or consulting
Obviously, managing cloud infrastructure requires a very different set of skills, and maintaining an external team with cloud expertise is often more cost-effective than maintaining a staff of cloud engineers in-house (or suffering from downtime due to a lack of staff experience). There are, however, vastly different levels of support; some offer ticket support, others offer 24/7/365 phone support, and still others integrate with your internal IT team to support code pushes, seasonal events, etc. Enterprises are generally looking for the latter, no matter how “fanatical” the phone support promises to be.
Some enterprises get stuck with a managed service provider that only really offers consulting services. While they may provide some technology guidance and implementation, they hold no responsibility for the ultimate product and must be hired again if the infrastructure ever changes. Before you hire a managed service provider, understand where the responsibility ends and who is responsible for what. As we explain in detail here, it is often not a long-term cost savings to engage a consulting partner rather than a managed services partner.
3. Cloud SLAs
AWS offers a high guarantee on uptime. But for mission-critical IT applications, this guarantee may not be enough. Managed Services providers that offer 100% uptime SLAs do so because they are able to configure a unique blend of native AWS and third party tools to create a self-healing, auto scaling environment that never goes down. Very few providers are able offer this, due to the fact that they must constantly monitor and test the environment to meet this requirement. Smaller cloud providers are certainly unable to guarantee zero downtime.
4. Automation/DevOps
DevOps is a buzzword that has been used to apply to nearly any development framework. A true DevOps shop will encourage clients to focus on automation and integration; they will make it possible for a client to bring up environments in new regions in a matter of hours and use a configuration management tool like Puppet to maintain a single source of consistent, documented system configuration, deploy environments prescriptively, and enforce a mature Software Development Lifecycle. An automated AWS environment is neither easy nor automatic, and does require a significant upfront investment to bake AMIs, write custom configuration management scripts, etc. to be able to deploy new environment in a matter of hours.
5. Security services
After a string of high profile security attacks, security is the #1 concern of CIOs and CTOs in 2015. While Amazon guarantees the security of the physical infrastructure with the kind of physical security measures that few datacenters can boast, the user is responsible for security “in” the cloud. Enterprises look to cloud managed service providers to minimize risk and carry a significant portion of the responsibility for infrastructure security.
AWS has a number of native resources that make enterprise-grade security possible.
6. Compliance services
Beyond traditional security best practices, compliance requirements necessitate a level of monitoring, reporting, and data storage that internal IT teams are either unfamiliar with or do not know how to translate to the cloud – exposing a multi-million dollar fine risk for large enterprises. Enterprises will often need to sign a BAA with AWS and their managed services provider. AWS has in fact Amazon has always been on the leading edge of compliant storage solutions in the cloud.
Managed service providers that specialize in compliance, have a long history managing compliant infrastructure, and have been through multiple audits are better equipped to deal with security threats – even if the specific application does not have compliance requirements. Providers that specialise in compliance use security best practices as default for all instances.
7. Cloud integration
Increasingly, enterprises have realised that enlisting the help of multiple service providers for their infrastructure can lead to fragmentation, poor communication, excessive contract negotiation work, and wasted resources. They need a managed service provider who will be able to move them to AWS while still hosting some legacy applications in a private cloud that is connected to their AWS deployment and united under a single SLA and SOW. This facilitates the migration over time of applications to AWS.
As the above list outlines, infrastructure built a managed services provider and powered by AWS is much more sophisticated than customer service on top of a smaller, less frequently updated cloud. With the right managed services provider, it is possible to create an enterprise-grade, self-healing, dedicated and highly secure infrastructure on AWS that has significant advantages over other solutions.
The post Your Cloud Needs More than Great Customer Service appeared first on Gathering Clouds.
Dropbox targets France with new Paris office
Dropbox has opened a new office in Paris
Dropbox has announced the opening of its Paris office, the company’s third European location. The cloud storage incumbent wants to redouble efforts to target French businesses.
The company also has offices in Dublin and London, and the Paris team, led by Philippe Plichon (who up until recently served as director retail & tech at Google), will seek to grow the company’s business in France.
“We’ve seen huge success in France, so Paris is a natural choice for us. The number of Dropbox users in France has doubled over the past two years, now accounting for one out of every five French Internet users. The Paris-based developers of Genius Scan, Stupefix, and Polabox have also taken to Dropbox, building integrations into their popular apps. And more French companies are choosing Dropbox for Business every day to help them work smarter,” the company said in a statement.
“In the next three years, we expect over 2.5 million French businesses to be using at least one cloud service.”
The company said it has a strong position internationally – over 70 per cent of Dropbox users are located outside the US.
The office opening comes just a couple of weeks after cloud storage rival Box moved to strengthen its business in the region. Box hired former Microsoft cloud sales exec Jeremy Grinbaum to lead its commercial expansion efforts in France and southern Europe.
AWS a $5bn business, Bezos claims, as Amazon sheds light on cloud revenue
Amazon publicly shed light on AWS revenues for the first time
Amazon reported first quarter 2015 sales revenues of $22.7bn, an increase of 15 per cent year on year from $19.7bn, and quarterly cloud revenues of $1.57bn. This is the first time the e-commerce giant has publicly disclosed AWS revenues.
North America saw the bulk of Amazon’s sales growth, with revenue swelling 24 per cent to $13.4bn and operating income increasing 79 per cent to $517m. Outside North America, revenues actually decreased 2 per cent to $7.7bn (excluding the $1.3 billion year-over-year unfavourable foreign exchange impact, revenue growth was 14 per cent).
The company was for the first time pleased to report AWS revenue grew close to 50 per cent to $1.57bn in Q1 2015, with operating income increasing 8 per cent to $26m and a 16.9 per cent operating margin.
“Amazon Web Services is a $5 billion business and still growing fast — in fact it’s accelerating,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.
“Born a decade ago, AWS is a good example of how we approach ideas and risk-taking at Amazon. We strive to focus relentlessly on the customer, innovate rapidly, and drive operational excellence. We manage by two seemingly contradictory traits: impatience to deliver faster and a willingness to think long term.”
Brian Olsavsky, vice president, chief financial officer of global consumer business said that excluding the favourable impact from foreign exchange, AWS segment operating income decreased 13 per cent. But speaking to journalists and analysts this week Olsavsky reiterated the company was very pleased with the results, and that it would “continue deploying more capital there” as it expands
AWS has dropped its prices nearly 50 times since it began selling cloud services nearly a decade ago, and this past quarter alone has seen the firm continue to add new services to the ecosystem – though intriguingly, Olsavsky refused to directly answer questions on the sustainability of the cloud margins moving forward. This quarter the company announced unlimited cloud storage plans, a marketplace for virtualised desktop apps, a machine learning service and a container service for EC2.
NetSuite buys Bronto to bolster retail marketing capabilities
NetSuite is acquiring Bronto Software to blend its marketing automation capabilities with its ERP platform
Cloud ERP incumbent NetSuite has acquired Bronto Software, a provider of cloud-based marketing automation software for omnichannel commerce, in a deal worth about $200m.
Founded in 2002, Bronto offers retailers cloud-based omnichannel marketing software for campaign lifecycle management and claims to sell its services to over 1,400 businesses including some of the world’s top brands (Armani Exchange, Timex ,Trek Bikes).
NetSuite said Bronto’s offerings will complement its SuiteCommerce, an ERP platform tailored to B2B and B2C commerce.
“This combination, for the first time ever, ties a rich marketing automation system with a cloud-based omnichannel commerce platform. The capabilities this solution will deliver are transformational,” said Zach Nelson, chief executive of NetSuite.
“Just as customers demand seamless cross-channel shopping experiences, they increasingly expect companies to communicate consistently through all of their digital experiences – on site, at stores, in email or through social or mobile. By combining the two companies’ offerings and technology, we can help merchants deliver relevant and consistent digital commerce experiences throughout the customer journey,” Nelson said.
Joe Colopy, chief executive of Bronto Software said the two companies will integrate their respective offerings.
“Today’s consumers expect brands to know them across every channel and marketing touchpoint. Providing that type of experience demands a unified approach to digital engagement, whether driving transactions online or offline or engaging with them through website, email, mobile or social,” he said.
“This will help merchants to better engage with their customers, drive repeat purchases and build lifelong loyalty.”
Over the years many large incumbents like Oracle and SAP as well as newer upstarts like Salesforce have moved quickly to strengthen their position in marketing automation through acquisition. Integrating ERP with marketing automation is a no-brainer, particularly when catering to firms with complex supply chains, so it’s no surprise NetSuite, a relatively new player in the field, is following in the same footsteps as other ERP players.