Agility is top of mind for Cloud/Service providers and Enterprises alike. Policy Driven Data Center provides a policy model for application deployment by decoupling application needs from the underlying infrastructure primitives. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, David Klebanov, a Technical Solutions Architect with Cisco Systems, to discuss how it differentiates from the software-defined top-down control by offering a declarative approach to allow faster and simpler application deployment.

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Until recently, many organizations required specialized departments to perform mapping and geospatial analysis, and they used Esri on-premise solutions for that work.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Dave Peters, author of the Esri Press book Building a GIS, System Architecture Design Strategies for Managers, will discuss how Esri has successfully included the cloud as a fully integrated SaaS expansion of the ArcGIS mapping platform. Organizations that have incorporated Esri cloud-based applications and content within their business models are reaping huge benefits by directly leveraging cloud-based mapping and analysis capabilities within their existing enterprise investments. The ArcGIS mapping platform includes cloud-based content management and information resources to more widely, efficiently, and affordably deliver real-time actionable information and analysis capabilities to your organization.

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BetaBoston is reporting a shake-up at LogMeIn’s Xively Internet of Things division. “Several top execs focused on launching new services to support the “Internet of Things” — sometimes called machine-to-machine communication, or M2M — have left Boston-based LogMeIn in recent months. Among those who have left the Xively division in 2014 are chief technology officer Philip DesAutels; Chad Jones, a vice president of strategy; and Les Yetton, the one-time general manager of the group.”

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Cloud computing is one of the great disruptions in the history of IT, fundamentally because of its promise to deliver software, platforms, and infrastructure from afar. The SaaS/PaaS/IaaS continuum has brought a revolution to enterprise IT, and accelerated another revolution, the movement toward DevOps.

Disruption and revolution are very exciting things to talk and write about. But the topics bring chills down the spines of most IT executives and managers. Disruption and revolution can mean chaos to the people who are responsible for setting and maintaining policies and governance within the complex enterprise IT systems they build and manage.

Enter Apcera with a platform it calls Continuum, which aims to disrupt the disruptors in the PaaS space with “a policy-driven platform that gives IT the agility it wants and the governance it needs,” according to the company. Apcera has just announced the sale of a majority stake in the company to Ericsson,

Apcera was founded in 2012 by former Google and VMware executive Derek Collison, who serves as CEO, “with the intent of bridging the divide between developers and ops organizations with an enterprise-class platform that integrates policy and security from the start.”

We had a few questions for Derek, and here’s what he had to say:

Cloud Computing Journal: We think of Apcera as a PaaS vendor. Yet you say that you’re going beyond that, that “PaaS is not enough.” Why is this so?

Derek Collison: Traditional PaaS was designed with a limited purpose: To speed up the deployment and lifecycle management of modern greenfield apps. Essentially, it was designed by developers, for developers, to enable fast innovation and deployment.

When you take a holistic view of the enterprise, you will see that traditional PaaS doesn’t address traditional needs for security, access control, governance and additional features that are critical for other departments within the enterprise. And enterprises need a platform that is capable of handling more than just new apps.

A platform also must be able to handle legacy applications, operating systems and containers, such as Docker images. Traditional PaaS is simply a black box when it comes to handling such a diversity of workloads.

CCJ: And how do you go beyond this?

Derek: As we innovate beyond the traditional PaaS, we took these important considerations to heart and developed our policy-driven platform, called Continuum, which empowers both developers and operational teams to quickly and efficiently deploy, orchestrate and govern a diverse set of workloads on premise and in the cloud.

By integrating policy and governance a part of the core of the platform, Continuum will enable developers and operations teams to deploy workloads of any kind significantly faster without sacrificing crucial security requirements.

CCJ: Governance and policy are enterprise IT linchpins, along with security. They seem to cause anxiety to many enterprise IT managers who are starting to work with cloud computing. How are you addressing this anxiety?

Derek: The anxiety exists because, in increasingly complex and heterogeneous IT environments, enterprises often face a critical trade off. They can develop new services faster with increased risk or maintain security by implementing policy after solutions are developed, which hampers their agility.

These trade-offs in agility and security often cause conflicts between the developers and operations team within an enterprise.

Developers innovate at warp speed. But ops organizations often put the brakes on their development progress to ensure that the enterprise can maintain compliance and new solutions work well and adhere to policy within the current environment.

The reason for the hesitancy is because ops fear these innovations may break the complex balance they’ve created to prevent data breaches, outages and other problems, whether done unintentionally or with malice. They don’t want to be responsible for their companies being in the headlines because of significant data breaches or outages that impact large swaths of the economy.

CCJ: And your specific approach to this is…?

Derek: While there are many approaches being considered today for bridging this divide, most of them attempt to “bolt on” the security and governance to the existing platforms designed to enable them to innovate faster.

But these bolt-on solutions don’t work very well. The system quickly becomes very brittle and fragile, because one incorrect change can cause a spiraling effect across the entire system. And when these types of problems occur, it makes the ops team even more resistant to change.

What we’ve done with Continuum is to build a modern platform capable of deploying a diverse set of workloads, from a basic operating system, to a greenfield application, and everything in-between, while presenting the proper layer of abstraction for each. Our platform makes it possible to transparently compose systems, without any code changes or dependencies and offers a policy-driven core that drives compliance, trust and safety.

CCJ: What strategies and principles have you carried over into your present work from your days as architect of Cloud Foundry? What sort of journey has this been for you?

Derek: I carried many strategies and principles over from my experience with Cloud Foundry. With Cloud Foundry, we were really focused on just the developers.

But after that product launched, I realized that a platform had to be more universally useful to the enterprise, and address the needs of the whole organization. My fundamental belief is that technology should be presented to the enterprise in an intuitive, simple package that adds value to the business.

While the innovation coming from developers is incredibly important, I believe we must establish trust to effectively drive this innovation across the finish line. That is where Apcera is focused—enabling customers to derive real value and real innovation from our next-generation platform.

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In this challenging environment, a combination of automated integration testing and test virtualization can enable test teams to improve software quality and keep up with the rate of change. This white paper helps address these needs by describing the benefits that can be gained through a proactive and continuous approach to integration testing with IBM® Rational® test automation solutions.

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35% of all ads posted for engineering jobs in the last 30 days prioritize 3D printing and additive manufacturing as the most sought-after skill.

Wanted Analytics’ latest analysis of the 3D printing and additive manufacturing job market found that IT and management expertise were the second most common skill sets mentioned in ads seeking to recruit engineers.  Key take-aways from their study and the growing market for engineers with 3D printing skills are provided below:

Key Take-Aways

• The number of job ads requiring workers with 3D printing skills increased 1,834% in 4 years and 103% when comparing August 2014 to August 2013.  The following graphic illustrates the accelerating growth of 3D printing and additive manufacturing expertise needs of employers over the last four years.

• Wanted Analytics found that the most in-demand jobs requiring 3D printing and additive manufacturing expertise include the following:
  • Industrial Engineers
  • Mechanical Engineers
  • Software Developers, Applications
  • Commercial and Industrial Designers
  • Marketing Managers – High demand for marketing and selling expertise as manufacturers, software and service providers look to launch new business models that capitalize on 3D printing’s many business advantages.

• Manufacturing has the highest number of positions for 3D printing and additive manufacturing skills, with the following industries generating the majority of the jobs in this field today:
  • Other Computer Peripheral Equipment Manufacturing
  • Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools
  • Tire and Tube Merchant Wholesalers
  • Search, Detection, Navigation, Guidance, Aeronautical, and Nautical System and Instrument Manufacturing
  • Aluminum Sheet, Plate, and Foil Manufacturing

• Demand for freelance 3D printing and additive manufacturing expertise is flourishing globally.  Elance has an impressive 76,979 portfolio samples used by freelancers to promote their 3D printing, 3D modeling and additive manufacturing expertise.  There are 2,444 freelancers actively looking for 3D printing, 3D modeling and additive manufacturing projects, and 88 projects currently open.
• Freelance exchange ODesk currently has 2,395 freelancers listed as 3D printing specialists and designers and 78 projects currently open.
• Guru.com lists 367 freelancers with 3D printing expertise available and 180 open projects.
• CAD Crowd has 3,760 3D printing freelance experts and provides a global map of their locations, which is shown below.

• Job boards entirely dedicated to 3D printing are being launched this year and growing fast.  One of the fastest growing is 3D-Printing-Jobs.com, which just launched last May and already has dozens of open positions listed.  Another is 3DPrintingIndustry.com’s job portal which can be found here at the 3D Printing Industry Jobs Page. The 3D Printing Job Board includes open positions worldwide and has many located in the United Kingdom, India, Canada and the United States. MediaBistro has 89 positions listed on their job board as of today for engineering, marketing, customer service and technical professionals with 3D printing expertise. The MediaBistro 3D Printing job board can be found here.  

• Indeed.com has 474 job positions open today that require 3D printing, nine of which pay over $130,000 per year.  You can find the listings of open positioning on Indeed.com requiring 3D printing expertise here.

Picture credit: Keith Kassel/Flickr

Goodness there is a lot of talk about cloud computing. This ‘talk and chatter’ is part of the problem, i.e., we look at it, we prod it and we might even test it out – but do we get down to practical implementation, deployment and (if you happen to be a fan of the term) actual cloud ‘rollout’ today?
Cloud offers the promise of a new era they say – and a new style of IT at that.
But this again is the problem and we know that cloud can only deliver on the promises it makes if it is part of a well-coordinated effort that brings together both existing IT infrastructure and these new service-based technologies.

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DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley announced today a limited time free “Expo Plus” registration option through September. On site registration price of $1,95 will be set to ‘free’ for delegates who register during special offer. To take advantage of this opportunity, attendees can use the coupon code, and secure their registration to attend all keynotes, DevOps Summit sessions at Cloud Expo, expo floor, and SYS-CON.tv power panels. Registration page is located at the DevOps Summit site. Your DevOps Summit registration will also allow access to @ThingsExpo sessions and exhibits. Register For DevOps Summit “FREE” (limited time) ▸ Here

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Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison has stepped down from the chief exec role, with co-CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd appointed to steer the ship.

Ellison isn’t leaving Oracle full stop however, assuming the role of CTO and executive chairman at the software giant. In an earnings call, Ellison admitted that not much would change under the bonnet.

“I’m going to continue doing what I have been doing over the last several years, [Catz and Hurd are] going to continue what they’ve been doing over the last several years,” he said, according to Seeking Alpha.

It would seem this is a case of ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’, then.

The news came alongside Oracle’s first quarter results, which were again on the spotty side. New software license revenues were down 2%, net income stood still at $2.184bn – noting a very slight decrease in constant currency – while total revenues were up only 3%, considerably lower than Wall Street predicted.

In the call, new CEO Catz immediately got the excuses in early. “Those of you who have followed us for a while know that Q1 is a seasonally smaller quarter which can mean more volatility in our results, and that’s what we saw this quarter,” she said.

Not surprisingly, the new chief execs focused significantly on cloud as the way forward. “As the movement to the cloud grows, we expect this transition will affect our revenue to the positive,” said Catz. “These customers will essentially replace their software support payments with a cloud subscription which will mean substantially more revenues to Oracle.”

Yes, this may sound a bit like ‘welcome to cloud’. SAP and IBM, other legacy hardware and software businesses, got there a little earlier with their aggressive transformations. IBM shoots out new iterations at a rate of knots, and remember SAP’s bigging-it-up quote that they were going to become ‘THE cloud company’ (their emphasis, not ours)?

When Ellison grabbed the reins for the earnings call, he discussed Oracle’s new multi-tenant database as a service offering, to be unveiled next week at Oracle Open World. “With the push of a button, your data is automatically compressed 10 to one and encrypted for secure and efficient transfer to the cloud,” he said. “With the push of a button, your existing application automatically becomes a multi-tenant application and it’s moved to the Oracle Cloud.”

To be fair, this does seem like an improvement, especially with the NoSQL brigade of MongoDB, Couchbase et al breathing down Oracle’s collective necks. Yet the analysts, naturally, were more interested in the boardroom shuffle.

On the promotion of Catz and Hurd, Ellison said: “They deserve the recognition. They deserve the CEO title and I’m happy that our management team continues forward as a team.”

When one analyst enquired about whether there would be a change on the sales leadership side, Hurd curtly replied: “No.”

There was a little back and forth between the analysts over whether Ellison was staying on these executive calls. “You’re going to have to wait a little while longer before you get me off the call,” he joked. “I apologise to everyone for that.”

This may reveal more than is let on. Even though Catz and Hurd are the new faces at the top of Oracle, Ellison will still be doing his fair share of backseat driving.

This isn’t to say there aren’t good precedents for this change, however. Catz joins HP’s Meg Whitman, IBM’s Ginny Rometty and Good Technology’s Christy Wyatt in the influential female tech CEO camp, while the concept of two co-CEOs is not new: SAP has been doing it for years.

Ellison, if you recall, was initially dismissive about cloud computing. Oracle has since then been playing one long game of catch up – and if the latest results are anything to go by, then they could be playing this game for a while longer yet.

Picture credit: Oracle