There are many important characteristics of great leaders. Team players, good listeners and visionary are clear hallmarks. But being ambidextrous is required now more than ever. Ambidextrous leadership is a balanced approach where flexible leadership behaviors that lead to better business outcomes are the rule.

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In late August, voke, Inc. debuted its “Market Snapshot Report: Virtual and Cloud-Based Labs,” about how companies of all sizes and levels of testing sophistication view, use and benefit from virtual and cloud-based development and testing technologies. The results were pretty amazing―even we were surprised!

Among the many benefits the 503 participant companies (50% of which were U.S. based) cited, 53% saw reduced CAPEX (capital expenditures) from the use of virtual and cloud-based labs. Thirty-nine percent said they help eliminate defects prior to production, and 33% said they improve audits and compliance. Of course, the biggest benefit (58%) was on-demand access to environments, which we see as a primary reason why many organizations adopt virtual and/or cloud-based testing, either alone or in combination with on-premise, physical testing.

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The annual G20 summit, held this year in Brisbane, Australia, has concluded. It follows by a week the conclusion of the 15th Cloud Expo and 3rd @ThingsExpo in Santa Clara, CA.

I could argue that the latter events are more significant than the G20 summit.

To be sure, there is nothing of more importance in the short term than a meeting of the top leaders of the world’s largest nations. Imagine being able to namedrop Obama, Putin, Xi, Merkel, Cameron and others from your recent Australian holiday. Imagine further that your little conclave included the heads of other very large nations from Asia Pacific, South America, and Africa.

It’s In Our Hands
But the longer term is to a large degree in the hands of technologists. There are 3 trillion dollars spent worldwide on information technology and telecommunications, representing about 4 percent of the global economy and driving most of the other 96 percent.

It is technology, particularly the cloud computing, Big Data & analytics, and IoT things that will underpin any great gains in energy use, healthcare and food, transportation, and government improvements over the coming decades. Politicians come and go, but technology is steadfast.

This G20 summit was noted for various public scoldings given to Russian President Vladimir Putin by Western leaders. A little bit of that apparently went a long way for him, as he decided to leave for home before the summit officially concluded so that he could catch up on his sleep and put a full day in the office after the wild week-end.

Significant as the contretemps may prove to be, there are thousands upon thousands of people among the G20 governments who will be working on implementing the thousands upon thousands of words in the official documents that have emanated from the summit.

But…
Here’s the problem: technology isn’t mentioned in those documents.

Each of the G20 members has published a Comprehensive Growth Strategy document and an Employment Plan document. The goal is to add an additional 2 percentage points to the global GDP – about $1.5 trillion – over the next few years. The G20 members further believe their activities will create positive “spillover” effects to the rest of the world.

The efforts are focused on macroeconomic levers – mostly setting interest rates – and generally accepted worthy goals such as increasing trade, reducing bureaucratic impediments, bringing more women into the workforce, educating young people, and improving basic infrastructure. Private-public partnerships, the holy grail of government planning today, is mentioned. Ritual commitments to bolstering small and medium businesses are proferred.

The lack of specific commitment to information technology reflects a reality that almost four decades after the PC revolution was launched, there is a disconnect between technology and government, and a lack of technological understanding by politicians worldwide.

We Must Understand
The technology industry at all levels must appreciate that what often appear to them as obtuse, strutting buffoons are in fact the people who are running the world. They have power.

If the Russians want to station some fierce naval warships off the coast of Australia to accompany their leader’s arrival, they can. If the House of Saudi tires of a plunging oil price and wants to manipulate it, it can. If the leader of Canada wants to get into the face of one of the two most powerful people in the world and tell him to bug out of Ukraine, he can.

Steve Jobs’s un-ironic goal of denting the universe carries no weight among a G20 crowd that dent almost anything it wants to here on Planet Earth.

Our Research
Our research at the Tau Institute over the past few years has created a unique look at the nations of the world and how they have committed to information technology on a relative basis. We show which countries are doing the most with what they have, and which countries lead among their peers by region and income tier.

Among the G20, South Korea is the clear leader. South Korea leads the world, in fact. New Zealand is not an official G20 country but was represented in Brisbane as part of an informal ANZAC hosting of the summit. New Zealand finishes number two in our global rankings.

Other countries that do very well in our rankings among the G20 include the UK, Germany, Canada, Japan, and Australia. The US could do better on a relative basis, as could the rest of the G20 nations. There is promise and potential for all in this group, as well as among all the 103 nations that we survey.

Act
With luck, the world geopolitical situation won’t become more tense after the tense week-end in Brisbane. Government staffs will go back to work, lip service will be paid to many of the Brisbane commitments, but real change will be effected as well. In particular, the Brisbane documents cite energy efficiency and distribution as a key goal, and much of the wording reads like a blueprint for IoT implementation.

I’ll report more on specific country plans over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, the technology industry ignores politicians at our mutual peril, and we must be clear about how serious, explicit commitments to information technology will be the key to the G20 approaching and reaching its ambitious economic development goals.

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Picture credit: CenturyLink

Feature CenturyLink is a cloud provider on a mission. With nearly fifty years’ experience in the traditional telecommunications space, it’s looking to challenge the main storage and infrastructure players.

The Louisiana-based firm is going about it in all the right ways. The company launched CenturyLink Private Cloud back in August, offering the “frictionless hybrid” of private cloud instances plugged into public cloud nodes, and is beginning to make its mark in Europe, opening up a data centre in Frankfurt alongside the five it currently has in London.

Jared Wray, CenturyLink Cloud’s chief technical officer, is in the UK to kick-start proceedings. How has the expansion to Europe been going? “So far it’s been well received,” he tells CloudTech. “A lot of our customers are looking to move to cloud – they’ve already done colocation, they’ve already done managed services.

“When we look at the growth engine we have, we’ve done the United States, we’re now taking a foothold in the UK and our biggest approach right now is to grow our cloud platform,” he adds.

CenturyLink isn’t the only cloud provider to realise the benefits of European data centres to EU-based customers. Wray argues how CenturyLink’s cloud is good enough for the job. “Data sovereignty is a huge topic, especially in the UK [and] Germany, and we’ve built our platform specifically to handle data sovereignty extremely well,” he explains. “We can actually replicate your data on the inside of a specific zone.

“That’s a big critical thing for our customers,” he continues. “Being able to do that and understand the policies in regulations, just like we understand in Canada what they want, we want to be able to do that, and so we built the technology to understand [that].”

The firm’s growth in recent years has been impressive, and fuels the expansion to Europe. Revenue increase in ten years from one billion to 18 billion, and more than 55 data centres globally.

More importantly though, there’s a major opportunity afoot for telecoms operators.

Take a large, built-in customer base, add a sprawling network, and a sprinkling of technologies such as software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV), and the telcos have a great chance to achieve buy-in through cloud solutions, implementing new services, reducing costs and improving the customer experience – generally not operators’ strongest suit.

In September Ericsson bought a majority stake in platform as a service provider Apcera. Verizon has made its intentions perfectly clear with Verizon Cloud. Nokia calls itself a ‘forerunner in developing telco cloud’. Not to be outdone, CenturyLink has a plan. Wray came to CenturyLink through acquisition, as founder of cloud firm Tier 3, and he notes how the senior execs had a plan for ‘cloud-like services’ even before he came on board.

“They said – we don’t want to be just a standard telco, we don’t want to say this is an additional service,” he explains. “When they acquired us they went to the point of actually saying ‘we’re going to build a single platform’. So what you’re going to see from CenturyLink is something completely different than what you see from most telcos, actually going to take the network we have that’s extremely robust and converge it with our computing layers.”

Any service CenturyLink rolls out going forward is going to have three tenets: fully automated; fully programmable; and self service. Wray wryly notes these aren’t telcos’ major strengths either.

“Many telecommunications providers, they’re used to ‘give us an order, we’ll take 90 days, and sometimes we’ll get it right,’” he says. “In our world it’s completely different. We want to make it so you can get up and running, do it all yourself and decide what level of engagement you want us to be on.”

All (internal) change please, all change

So far, so good. Yet if there’s one more thing telcos are notorious for, it’s agility – or lack of it. Most telcos are lumbering behemoths where the simplest memo takes days to sign off, never mind organising business change. Wray notes CenturyLink was a relatively smooth-moving organisation in telecoms land, but he wanted more.

Enter CenturyLink Cloud Development Centre. Opened last month in Seattle, it brings DevOps to the firm’s working environment for cloud platform and innovation. The new ‘offices’ include team rooms organised by function, desks suited to pairing, and built-in collaboration spaces.

“The average developer inside Seattle has four meetings a day, because they’re working for big corporations,” Wray explains. “At CenturyLink Cloud, they have less than one. Most of the time they have a team standup, and that’s it.”

Wray describes the ‘one-to-many communication rule’; wherever possible, avoid one to one discussion as it’s inherently inclusive – this also means, within reason, no phones, which is almost jaw dropping for a telco – and remove meetings. “We used to ban the words ‘good meeting’,” he says. “That was a good meeting. Well what did you get out of it? No, it was a good meeting. They kind of felt like, to run the company, they had to have meetings.”

More organisational change is being ploughed ahead too, collapsing teams and ensuring operations and developers aren’t siloed. In a way, it relates back to the image of a telco becoming more agile through cloud. Telcos can – and have – told customers that cloud is just another payment option, not a concept on which a bunch of stuff hangs. With improved product iteration and a belief in a minimum viable approach, it works both ways.

“I like to say we got rid of trying to have the crystal ball, which a lot of product managers try and do,” Wray says. “It’s almost asinine, if you think about it. They say ‘in three years, this is what our product’s going to look like’. How do you know that the market really wants that?”

The truth is you don’t. But CenturyLink is trying to make things easier for both itself and its customers as the tangled transition to cloud computing takes pace.

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) has published a new document assessing best practice for migrating applications to the cloud, including data transfer requirements and application performance management (APM).

The latest 16 page release is a supplementary document to the 28 page behemoth (pdf) released in December 2013 outlining a migration roadmap for businesses in six easy steps; assess applications and workloads; build a business case; develop a technical approach; adopt a flexible integration model; address security and privacy requirements; and manage the migration.

This paper, however, is more concerned with assessing performance and response time requirements, and offers up some interesting pitfalls for would-be adopters.  “Generally speaking, some applications and workloads are more suitable for cloud computing than others,” the researchers note.

The report assesses a series of data transfer requirements for each workload, be they high, moderate or low latency, yet questions the usage of data discovery tools or questionnaires in assessing each workload – “they do not assess the business requirements and end-to-end transaction flow.”

As a result, the researchers come up with a new three step routine to migrate existing applications to cloud computing:

• Identify business transactions and document their end-to-end application data flow: Understanding specific business transactions, in terms of their throughput and data usage, is much better than questionnaires and discovery tools, the researchers argue. The report cites an eCommerce application which may have both ‘Add to cart’ and ‘Go to checkout’ options. To assess whether it’s right to move to cloud, each facet has to be examined, from preparing the warehouse, to analysing customer behaviour.
• Perform a response time impact risk assessment: There are several factors at play here, according to the researchers: each transaction needs to be assessed based on sensitivity to delay and business importance. Transactions which score highly on both are worthy of being response time tested – again, this goes far deeper than the average questionnaire or discovery tool.
• Perform response time impact testing: Once it’s possible to assess each application’s response on a timed basis, the researchers split the services into two; tier 1 services which become remote, on a wide area network (WAN), from the end users when they were local area before; and application to application or shared services, which become separated across a WAN.

The report also gives advice on application management, with several ways developers can use APM. The researchers recommend end-user experience monitoring, deep dive performance monitoring, analysis of multi-step transactions and transaction based troubleshooting, among others.

You can read the full report here.

Life is difficult. Business life is sometimes argued to be even more difficult. If nothing else, business life is as socially complex as life itself.
This truism obviously means that there are different business types – but different in regard to what? Separating the old and the new is good way to look at how the family tree breaks down.
At one end of the spectrum we find the old languid non-transformative company (or user) who fails to grasp new digital information empowerment – and at the other end we find the true digital native. But the space in between is populated by a degree of other behavioural types.

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The rise of cloud computing has ushered in an era of unprecedented productivity for developers over the past several years. For those who have embraced this new world order, gone are the days of long lead times for hardware procurement and installation, architecture defined by slow-moving hardware upgrades, hardware-constrained scalability and flexibility, and a world where only sys admins have access to the infrastructure. But, as the barriers between development and delivery disappear, new challenges have emerged that can disrupt the lives of developers and slow down delivery of new products and features, giving back some of the efficiency gains that the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) created.
Whether you’re new to the cloud or you’ve been around since before cloud was cool, you are likely to see four common challenges emerge that can make troubleshooting your applications in the cloud more difficult. Let’s take a closer look at these common pain points first to help build awareness around the challenges, and then I’ll offer some suggestions for how to prevent these hurdles from tripping you and your team up when it comes time to unravel an application troubleshooting mystery.

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The top government leaders of the G20 nations are meeting this week-end in Brisbane, Australia. It’s an occasion to hear (and watch) U.S. President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi JinPing, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Instead, maybe everyone should be listening more closely to South Korean President Park Geun-Hye, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper – because these nations are among those setting the global pace of ICT development, which we believe will lead to long-term economic and societal development.

South Korea, in fact, leads the world in our rankings, which integrate several measures of technology and societal development into a unique mix that empasizes relative performance – that is, how well are the 103 nations we survey doing with the resources they have? How quickly are they being developed – not just growing economically, but developing societally – on a relative basis?

Among the G20 nations, South Korea is followed in our rankings by the UK, Germany, Canada, and Japan.

So it’s fair to say that people should also heed the words of UK Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, both of whom carry substantial influence on the world stage. But it’s important to note that the US, Russia, and China finish 8th, 10th, and 18th respectively among the G20.

This economic club of nations represents about 85% of the global economy. Its members include Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UK, the US, and the EU.

The G20 doesn’t strictly include the world’s top 20 economies (sorry about that, Netherlands and Spain), as it seeks to balance all the world’s regions. Including the EU as a member re-balances the exclusion of some large European countries.

The bottom tier of this group includes Italy, Argentina, Russian, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia. These nations could benefit from witnessing the leaders’ commitment to ICT and how it is working to maintain the developed nations and transform the developing nations.

We have significant data and numeros, diverse rankings on all 103 nations that we survey. Our leaders possess a wide range of resources, population sizes, locations, and internal dynamics. There is no one way that they achieved this leadership. But they are all laying down relatively robust ICT infrastructures, often with the transformation and disruption that this implies.

We’re able to create custom reports for government, business, and NGO leaders who would like to know more.

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The software industry has seen a shift away from applications being housed at a company’s premise to the cloud. Such a shift allows companies to focus more on their business needs and less on their IT infrastructure needs.
In this article, we take a look at webapps developed for Tomcat and weblogic and attempt to deploy them into a cloud-based environment.

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