All posts by Richard

AutoCAD, AutoDesk, Autodesk 360, Building Information Modeling, Tools

Autodesk Liberates Designers with Cloud-Based Pay-As-You-Go Simulation

Autodesk, Inc. today unveiled Autodesk Simulation 360—a comprehensive set of tools delivered securely in the cloud with a pay-as-you-go pricing model that enables any company to make simulation part of their everyday design and engineering processes.

With Autodesk Simulation 360, designers, engineers and analysts can more easily predict, optimize and validate the performance of things in the world around us. The virtually infinite power of the cloud allows complex engineering tests that were once limited to simulation specialists to be performed by mainstream designers. For example:

  • Product designers can test how various ergonomic designs of furniture,
    such as chairs, will accommodate and adapt to differing body types and
    levels of use well before the piece is ever manufactured.
  • Manufacturers can understand the heat generated by electronics devices
    enabling them to design-in proper cooling, avoid overheating and help
    prevent costly consumer recalls.
  • Architects and engineers can gain deeper insight into how buildings,
    including plants, will perform by simulating air flow to help ensure
    thermal comfort; analyze environmental effects on bridges and
    buildings; and test the behavior of structural materials including
    concrete — all before anything is ever built.

Autodesk Simulation 360 is the latest offering to build upon the Autodesk 360 cloud-based platform. By performing computationally intensive simulation tasks in the cloud, designers, engineers and analysts can test multiple “what if?” design scenarios in parallel. The computational power of the cloud also eliminates the need for specialized hardware, thereby removing previous limitations and helping to increase productivity.

“The ability to run multiple simulation studies in the cloud, in the same time as a typical singular simulation study with single variables, really opens up the game for us by helping us understand much more of the system in a shorter amount of time,” said Matt Nowicki, senior product engineer at BioLite, Inc. “It’s impressive how easy, valuable and seamless simulating in the cloud can be for a company such as ours.”

“Our customers can now visualize building comfort before the project is constructed. This enables them to make more informed decisions pertaining to project costs and lets them evaluate system and energy trade-offs as well. Providing this type of service helps distinguish us from our competition,” said Darryl McClelland, BIM and Virtual Design manager at Heapy Engineering, which provides Mechanical-Electrical-Technology Systems Design Services, LEED and Energy Consulting Services, Building Commissioning Services, and Planning Services.

The Autodesk Simulation 360 software portfolio includes a wide range of cloud-based mechanical, fluid flow, thermal and plastic injection molding tools at an affordable price. Additional benefits include direct geometry exchange; robust meshing tools; extensive material libraries; and proven solver technology to improve simulation accuracy in the areas of greatest concern.

“Businesses simply can’t afford not to understand how their designs will perform before anything gets built,” said Robert “Buzz” Kross, senior vice president, Design, Lifecycle and Simulation at Autodesk. “Autodesk Simulation 360 puts powerful simulation capabilities within reach for designers and engineers at virtually every company, giving them the tools they need to better predict, optimize and validate their designs early in the design process.”

In contrast to traditional perpetual licensing, Autodesk Simulation 360’s easy and affordable, pay-as-you-go model simplifies access and offers unparalleled flexibility. Autodesk Simulation 360 is now available in English, and is planned to be available in other languages in the near future. For additional information on how to access Autodesk Simulation 360 and take part in the Simulation Liberation event, visit www.autodesk.com/simulationliberation. Additional resources such as simulation experts, on-demand videos and tutorials are available at www.autodesk.com/simulation-360.


Cloud & IT Management, Consulting, Infinitely Virtual

Infinitely Virtual Offers Onboarding Service Designed to Get SMBs Up and Running Quickly

Recognizing that some organizations find migrating to the cloud intimidating, Infinitely Virtual, a provider of virtual server cloud computing services for businesses, today announced an innovative Onboarding Service, aimed at eliminating the fear factor from the migration process.

The service, which consists of a free, one-hour tutorial on hosting in the cloud, enables new customers to ask virtually any question of a live company representative and get the relationship off on a sound, secure footing.

“Self-service can be an ideal business model, even in the IT world, but self-serve doesn’t need to be completely hands off,” said Adam Stern, founder and CEO, Infinitely Virtual. “Our goal is to eliminate the fear factor, especially as small and midsize businesses migrate to the cloud, by offering a distinctly high-touch orientation session. As cloud computing grows, it naturally attracts organizations that may not have full-blown technology departments, but it’s especially important that the experience for this population of users is positive and productive from the get-go. With our Onboarding Service, companies can now go from purchase to production in just hours.”

According to Stern, services like Infinitely Virtual’s new user orientation are essential if cloud computing is to achieve true critical mass.

“Building a Virtual Dedicated Server hosting environment requires collaboration among professionals from every discipline,” he said. “What matters is the quality of the total package – the hardware and the software, of course, but also the support and the intangibles that, in the end, define the solution. In the cloud, as on the ground, it’s always buyer beware. Businesses need to know that virtualization/cloud hosting isn’t a commodity business, and that some vendors do emulate the so-called big players both in the quality of the environments they build and the kind of support they provide. It’s entirely possible to provide high function at modest cost, but doing so requires expertise, experience and a genuine understanding of what businesses need.”


Distance Learning, M&A Activity, MindLeaders, SkillSoft

Skillsoft Acquires ThirdForce Group MindLeaders

Skillsoft Limited, a provider of cloud based learning solutions for customers worldwide, today announced that it has reached agreement on the terms of a recommended cash offer to be made by its indirect subsidiary, Skillsoft Ireland Limited, for the entire issued and to be issued share capital of ThirdForce Group plc. The acquisition is being structured as an Offer under Irish law.

The acquisition will add to Skillsoft’s existing offerings in learning content, and supports the company’s overall strategy to continually increase the quality and flexibility of the learning solutions it makes available to its corporate, government, education, and small-to-medium size business customers. Also, the addition of MindLeaders’ capabilities will strengthen Skillsoft’s ability to expand its compliance-related business in the United States and United Kingdom.

“We see compliance-related learning as a growth opportunity for SkillSoft. Currently, we are serving legal compliance and ES&H compliance needs of many our corporate customers, and our success has encouraged us to explore ways to accelerate this part of our business,” said Jerry Nine, Chief Operating Officer of Skillsoft. “MindLeaders’ learning content for food safety and adult care will immediately bring a wider range of compliance solutions to the customers we serve in the United States and United Kingdom. We are also excited about the potential to expand these compliance solutions to serve additional global markets in the future.”

MindLeaders offers many of the same financial and operating characteristics as Skillsoft’s business model, including an annual recurring subscription-based licensing model for access to its learning resources library, a direct sales force distribution system complemented by resellers and telesales support, and a corporate client base offering visibility through multi-year contracts. As a result, the acquisition is expected to support both Skillsoft’s revenue predictability and growth.


Backup, Disaster Recovery, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, VMware

EVault 7: The New Shape of Backup and Recovery

EVault, Inc. today announced the release of EVault 7, a significant update to its cloud-connected backup and recovery platform. The new release offers a more resilient architecture, with enhanced replication and additional deployment options that customers can tailor to their needs. EVault 7 delivers faster backups – up to 100 percent faster for VMware environments than EVault 6 – and is optimized for a distributed environment. As part of this release, EVault is introducing a new management interface built around the ”social business.”

“With EVault 7, our customers are seeing the future shape of data protection,” said Terry Cunningham, president and general manager, EVault. “Our backup and recovery platform is designed for a cloud-connected world – and now it’s faster, smarter and more resilient than ever. We’ve also added a management interface built on a social platform, so customers can stay on top of their data protection operations and collaborate in real-time with colleagues, peers and the EVault team.”

Unlike  solutions that force customers into a rigid deployment model for backup and recovery, EVault 7 now offers geographically-distributed replicas in a private cloud, a service provider cloud, the EVault cloud – or in all three. Should an IT organization want an onsite cache of their data for fast, local recoveries, they can deploy EVault Express Recovery Appliance: Virtual Edition and get LAN-speed backup and recovery. Because the virtual appliance fits within current environments, it lowers total cost of ownership by leveraging existing IT infrastructure and eliminating the need for additional capital expenses.

Smarter, faster and more efficient than ever, EVault 7 helps IT managers put an end to worries about backup and recovery windows. Updated support for VMware environments includes fast granular restores of files and folders from only a single backup of the virtual machine, delivering backups 100 percent faster than EVault 6. With WAN-optimized data transfer that now has faster replication, EVault 7 customers achieve efficient bandwidth usage, storage optimization and end-to-end security. Granular recovery will also be available for mailbox and message-level restores within Microsoft Exchange applications by the end of the year.

“With EVault, we know that we can deploy cloud-based backup and recovery without having to sacrifice security, speed and efficiency,” said Bill McCown, Director of Information Technology at C&J Energy Services, Inc. “EVault 7 also gives us the system and application support we need, at the level we need it. I can protect and recover my data within time windows that don’t disrupt our business.”


NLSS Gateway, Remote access, Security management

Next Level Security Systems Cloud Services Releases Cloud Security Management

Next Level Security Systems, a provider of unified, networked security solutions, today announced the availability of NLSS Cloud Services, which offers users remote access and multi-site security management from anywhere in the world.

NLSS Cloud Services are available for use with the entire suite of NLSS Gateway technologies. Powered by NextConnectTM, a patent-pending peer-to-peer technology that efficiently streams live video to an unlimited number of users from a single site, NLSS Cloud Services delivers access to the NLSS Gateway’s features through any Web browser or mobile device. Users can access camera settings, live surveillance video and door controls, and even view video streams from up to four different sites simultaneously on a single screen. In addition, software can be updated remotely, eliminating the need for on-site support.

“NLSS Cloud Services provides our customers with peace of mind that their security systems are operating and updated from anywhere in the world,” said Peter Jankowski, Chairman and CEO, Next Level Security Systems. “Our managed services used in conjunction with the NLSS Gateway truly delivers a comprehensive view of an entire security infrastructure to simplify system administration and management.”

NLSS Cloud Services improves upon traditional models of hosted video and access control by eliminating the need to route video and other data through a host computer for each update. NextConnect establishes a direct connection between the remote user and the NLSS Gateway, allowing video to stream faster and smoother with reduced bandwidth consumption. In addition, video quality is not degraded as more users log in to view the same video stream.


Managed services, NLSS Gateway, Remote access, Security management

Next Level Security Systems Cloud Services Releases Cloud Security Management

Next Level Security Systems, a provider of unified, networked security solutions, today announced the availability of NLSS Cloud Services, which offers users remote access and multi-site security management from anywhere in the world.

NLSS Cloud Services are available for use with the entire suite of NLSS Gateway technologies. Powered by NextConnectTM, a patent-pending peer-to-peer technology that efficiently streams live video to an unlimited number of users from a single site, NLSS Cloud Services delivers access to the NLSS Gateway’s features through any Web browser or mobile device. Users can access camera settings, live surveillance video and door controls, and even view video streams from up to four different sites simultaneously on a single screen. In addition, software can be updated remotely, eliminating the need for on-site support.

“NLSS Cloud Services provides our customers with peace of mind that their security systems are operating and updated from anywhere in the world,” said Peter Jankowski, Chairman and CEO, Next Level Security Systems. “Our managed services used in conjunction with the NLSS Gateway truly delivers a comprehensive view of an entire security infrastructure to simplify system administration and management.”

NLSS Cloud Services improves upon traditional models of hosted video and access control by eliminating the need to route video and other data through a host computer for each update. NextConnect establishes a direct connection between the remote user and the NLSS Gateway, allowing video to stream faster and smoother with reduced bandwidth consumption. In addition, video quality is not degraded as more users log in to view the same video stream.


Big Data, BigData, Business Intelligence, Endeca Technologies, IBM, Internet of Things, M&A Activity, Pivotal Labs

Big Data Future Spurs Acquisitions

In October 2011, Oracle announced its acquisition of Endeca Technologies, an enterprise search and data management company providing enterprises with non-structured data management, e-commerce and business intelligence technology.

In November 2011, IBM announced its acquisition of Platform Computing, an HPC software company with excellent performance in cloud computing and big data.

In February 2012, Groupon acquired Adku, a startup that uses big data to personalize online shopping experience for people visiting e-commerce sites like eBay and Amazon.

In March 2012, EMC announced its acquisition of Pivotal Labs, a private agile software developer and tool provider headquartered in San Francisco.

In the past two years, international IT giants, including IBM, Oracle, EMC and SAP, have been engaged in an upsurge of acquisition in the big data market, spending more than $1.5 billion in acquiring related data management and analysis companies. Big data becomes a new hot term after “cloud computing” in the IT and financial sectors.

The upsurge of big data results from the integrated development of the new-generation information technology, and the processing and analysis of big data in turn becomes a key support for the said integrated development.

The Internet of Things (IoT), mobile Internet, digital home and social network services are the applications of the new-generation information technology. Big data is continuously increasing together with these applications, whereas cloud computing provides the storage and computing platform for massive and diversified big data. It is estimated that the global data storage volume was 1.8ZB in 2011, and it will hit 2.7ZB in 2012 and exceed 8ZB in 2015. The growth rate of structured data is around 32%, and that of non-structured data 63%.

In the retail sector, analysis on big data enables retailers to master the real-time market trends and promptly take corresponding measures. Walmart has started analyzing the massive sales data of all its chain stores in combination with weather data, economics and demography, so as to select proper products for each chain store and determine the timing of discounts.

In the Internet sector, analysis on big data helps manufacturers develop more precise and effective marketing strategies. Facebook and eBay are analyzing and exploring massive data from social networks and online transaction data, with an aim of providing personalized advertising services.

In the utility sector, big data have begun to play a significant role. Many European cities guide drivers to select the best routes by analyzing real-time traffic flow data, thereby improving traffic conditions. The United Nations also launched “Global Pulse”, a program aiming to accelerate global economic development with big data.

The enormous commercial value of and market demand for big data are driving transformation of the information industry. New big data-oriented products, technologies, services and models are constantly emerging.

On one hand, the challenges such as effective storage, fast read-write and real-time analysis will have significant impacts on the chip and storage industry as well as incubate the integrated data storage & processing server and memory computing markets.

On the other hand, the enormous value of big data will lead to urgent needs for fast data processing and analysis as well as give rise to the unprecedented prosperity of data exploration and business intelligence markets.


Amazon AWS, Archiving, AWS, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Document Retention, Glacier, Hardware

How Amazon Glacier Confronts Entropy

Keeping data around — and readable — for a long, long, time is tough. For users Amazon’s Glacier offers freedom from specific hardware issues. We will no longer be stuck with unreadable zip drives or tapes. But that just moves the problem to Amazon. This interview talks about how they are tackling that problem.

The interview also touches on Amazon’s expectation that if they provide the back-end third-party developers will step and provide archiving and indexing tools.


Big Data, Google, Google Map, Google Streetview, Location, Maps, Search Engines, Searching

The Self-Driving Car Company

Alexsis Madrigal offers an inside look at what Google is doing with Maps and all those Streetview photos they’ve amassed. It’s jaw-dropping in its scope and audacity — and in its implications for the future:

“…as my friend and sci-fi novelist Robin Sloan put it to me, “I maintain that this is Google’s core asset. In 50 years, Google will be the self-driving car company (powered by this deep map of the world) and, oh, P.S. they still have a search engine somewhere.”

Read the article.


Research, Toluna

Study: 44.4% of IT Pros Say They Will Move to the Cloud In the Next Year

Qumu today announced the results of their 2012 IT in the Cloud Assessment Project. A survey of over 700 IT professionals conducted online by Toluna found that 44.4% of them will be moving applications to the cloud within the next 12 months, with up to 33.4% saying that this will include up to half of their applications.

54.5% of respondents touted the benefits of making the move to cloud-based applications. When asked what benefits they thought were most important, surprisingly, more than 30% of IT professionals said better security. This result indicates that companies are becoming more comfortable with the quality of security in cloud based apps. After security, other benefits identified are:

  • Cost savings once deployed – 26.9%
  • Better mobility support – 25.9%
  • Time saved not having to update infrastructure – 22%
  • Quick deployment – 18.5%
  • Better for the environment – 12.6%
  • Elasticity to scale up or down as needed – 11%
  • Outsourced system support and maintenance – 10.9%

Even as IT professionals report they are planning to move applications to the cloud, many organizations already have. The survey found that fully 44.9% of IT professionals are already running some applications in the cloud. The top applications include email (25.9%), storage (24%) and document management (13.9%). Other applications include project management (11%), CRM (10.3%), marketing automation (6.8%), video communication (10.3%) and employee portals (11.3%).

Enterprises are adopting collaborative cloud-based solutions to enable their people to be more connected and productive. For many companies, video communications have become an integrated part of the corporate culture. 55% of respondents site benefits of using a secure YouTube-like service for enterprise video sharing. According to the survey, the biggest benefits that IT professionals see from using such services include:

  • Increased access to training videos – 26.1%
  • Gives employees a “voice” to share ideas – 24.3%
  • Increased access to subject matter experts knowledge – 23.6%
  • Better employee collaboration – 22.5%
  • Improved organization and search of company video assets – 20.6%

Additionally, the survey found surprising differences between large enterprises and small to medium sized businesses. In all cases, large enterprises were more favorable to cloud-based solutions than SMBs:

  • Running current applications in the cloud (51% vs. 42.4%)
  • Seeing benefits in migrating applications to the cloud (59.5% vs.
    52.5%)
  • Seeing benefits of using a secure enterprise video-sharing service
    (63.3% vs. 47.3%)

“The results showing that large enterprises are more inclined to Cloud applications is somewhat surprising. Some may expect large companies to be concerned with Cloud security,” said Ray Hood, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Qumu. “We believe that larger companies have more history with IT outsourcing and see the Cloud as the logical next step.”

The survey results come alongside the release of Qumu’s latest whitepaper, Managing Business Video in the cloud and Hybrid Clouds, as well as Qumu’s attendance at IBC 2012, the premier annual conference and exhibition for professionals engaged in the creation, management and delivery of electronic media.