Cisco on Wedesday announced its intent to acquire privately held Metacloud. Based in Pasadena, Calif., Metacloud deploys and operates private clouds for global organizations with a unique OpenStack-as-a-Service model that delivers and remotely operates production-ready private clouds in a customer’s data center.
Metacloud’s OpenStack-based cloud platform will accelerate Cisco’s strategy to build the world’s largest global Intercloud, a network of clouds, together with key partners to address customer requirements for a globally distributed, highly secure cloud platform capable of meeting the robust demands of the Internet of Everything. Since announcing its Intercloud strategy in March, Cisco has made rapid progress, enlisting key technology partners, service and cloud providers, all of whom are standardizing upon the Cisco Cloud Services architecture, which is based on OpenStack open source software for building private and public clouds.

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Amazon is indisputably the biggest name in cloud service providers. They have built up a strong market presence primarily on the argument that access to cheap compute and storage resources is attractive to companies looking to shed IT costs as they move from on-premises solutions to the cloud. But after the initial push for cheap resources, how will this market develop?
Amazon has cut prices to their cloud offering more than 40 times since introducing the service in 2006. The way this gets translated in press circles is that cloud services pricing is approaching some floor. But is that true?

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High performing enterprise Software Quality Assurance (SQA) teams validate systems are ready for use – getting most actively involved as components integrate and form complete systems. These teams catch and report on defects, making sure the customer gets the best software possible. SQA teams have leveraged automation and virtualization to execute more thorough testing in less time – bringing Dev and Ops together, ensuring production readiness. Does the emergence of DevOps mean the end of Enterprise SQA? Does the SQA function become redundant?

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Senior executives at large multinational enterprises are already demanding that their CIO has a plan in place to ensure that they can effectively procure public and private cloud services for their organization. In smaller companies, some IT managers are now expected to acquire the knowledge and skills to perform a similar role.

Are they prepared? To find out, let’s review a current IT resource assessment.

According to the findings from a recent market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), European IT departments still need to make significant improvements before they have fully embraced cloud architectures and transformed themselves into hybrid cloud service providers.

When asked to evaluate their current readiness to execute on their cloud service brokering strategy — where they become a trusted internal advisers to their Line of Business leaders — European respondents admitted to unexpectedly low levels of confidence that they’re ready.

As an example, 56 percent of European IT departments cannot find qualified staff to effectively support cloud projects. Moreover, 61 percent are struggling to up-skill their employees to effectively evaluate cloud service providers. And, 70 percent still need to learn how to make effective use of automation, self-service, and basic orchestration tools.

Why finding talent is still a major roadblock

If you assumed that — based on this insight — the skills shortfall is merely a European problem, you’d be mistaken. IDC interviewed IT and non-IT staff at director level or above in 1,109 organizations globally — including 304 in Europe (100 in the U.K. and 102 in both France and Germany).

The IDC survey confirmed the depth and breadth of challenge — like many of their counterparts, the vast majority of European IT departments still require a great deal of transformation and need to invest further in people, process, and technology.

“The use of cloud computing as an increasingly business-critical technology is quickly changing how companies and institutions evaluate, procure, and deploy IT assets,” said Carla Arend, program director at IDC.

She believes that the effective use of cloud-related tools remains the biggest challenge for IT organizations, while accurately defining costs and implementing charge-back models is a struggle in the business and IT relationship.

According to IDC’s assessment, spending on cloud services and the building blocks for cloud infrastructure has reached 25 percent growth in Europe over the past 12 months. But beyond the early-adopter segment, IDC says that deployments in the coming years could stall if IT buyers are not prepared to systematically tackle the known hurdles to a successful adoption.

Additional findings from the IDC study include:

• IT organizations see themselves as Service Providers focused on business priorities. Almost half of the respondents have achieved this change in mindset, where IT departments have embraced the IT-as-a-service approach and are ready to negotiate service levels and serve their business users like an outside service provider. Only 5 percent of respondents do not have this major transformation as an area of focus.
• Return on investment remains difficult to prove. Only around a third of European organizations are able to build a comprehensive business case for their cloud projects. Understanding all the implications, costs, and benefits of a transformational process like implementing cloud computing is tough, but without creating solid business cases it is hard to demonstrate the ultimate success of cloud projects.
• Ability to use cloud to drive business innovation and competitive advantage. Just 41 percent use cloud to gain a business advantage, leaving 59 percent of European organizations not able to take cloud projects beyond the level of IT infrastructure projects. The real benefits of cloud projects will only be realized if they are used to drive business innovation and competitive advantage.

So, given that backdrop, how can companies solve the apparent cloud infrastructure and business innovation skills gap? One approach is to reach out to consulting and training organizations that have a proven track record of helping other legacy IT organizations evolve towards these 21st Century demands.

Clearly, there are likely a few highly-qualified candidates in every region of the world. In the European marketplace, Paris-based eNovance is an example of the high-caliber consulting talent that’s available to create and deploy cloud infrastructures quickly and cost effectively — plus manage a multitude of web applications on the largest public clouds.

Picture credit: Pattys-photos/Flickr

Achieve continuous delivery of applications by leveraging ElasticBox and Jenkins. In his session at DevOps Summit, Monish Sharma, VP of Customer Success at ElasticBox, will demonstrate how you can achieve the following using ElasticBox and the ElasticBox Jenkins Plugin: Create consistency across dev, staging, and production environments Continuous delivery across multiple clouds to handle high loads Ensure consistent policy management across environments: tagging, admin boxes, traceability Spin up machines and environments quickly Deploy applications to any cloud Enable real-time collaboration between developers and operations

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IoT is still a vague buzzword for many people. In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Mike Kavis, Vice President & Principal Cloud Architect at Cloud Technology Partners, will discuss the business value of IoT that goes far beyond the general public’s perception that IoT is all about wearables and home consumer services. The presentation will also discuss how IoT is perceived by investors and how venture capitalist access this space. Other topics to discuss are barriers to success, what is new, what is old, and what the future may hold.

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Explosive growth in connected devices. Enormous amounts of data for collection and analysis. Critical use of data for split-second decision making and actionable information. All three are factors in making the Internet of Things a reality. Yet, any one factor would have an IT organization pondering its infrastructure strategy.
How should your organization enhance its IT framework to enable an Internet of Things implementation? In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, James Kirkland, Chief Architect for the Internet of Things and Intelligent Systems at Red Hat, will describe how to revolutionize your architecture and create an integrated, interoperable, reliable system of thousands of devices. Using real-world examples, James will discuss the transformative process taken by companies in moving from a two-tier to a three-tier topology for IoT implementations.

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Cloud storage provider Box has announced compatibility with iOS 8 on day one, including support for iOS App Extensions, which allows apps to “lend” functionality with each other.

This means users can access Box content from any other app on their iDevice, provided it supports the Extensions framework. Users can select a document on Box and open it in an editor, or work on Box content from a mobile project management tool, for instance.

“This gives you unprecedented freedom and control when it comes to your information, while maintaining the security you expect with Box and iOS,” wrote Aaron Levie, Box CEO, in a blog post.

“This is a huge milestone for interoperability, and we’re thrilled to support iOS 8 on day one to transform productivity and collaboration for individuals, businesses and industries,” he added.

With the release of iOS 8 yesterday, plenty of companies have announced their support. Enterprise mobility management (EMM) provider MobileIron noted in a blog that iOS 8 was “the first sign of Phase III of mobile enterprise computing.”

In other words, we’ve moved on from only being able to do wireless email, and we’ve moved on from the more recent trend of using standalone apps for working on mobile. Now it’s about workflow. It was a point Levie referenced to close his blog.

“We’re just at the beginning of the post-PC technology shift, with many more years of innovation to come,” he wrote. “What Apple introduced [yesterday] is crucial to the health and success of this transition.”

Box is evidently ramping up its collaboration tools. Box Notes, a tool which allows users to compare notes across mobile, has recently been made available for both iOS and Android-powered devices.

You can find out more about Box’s iOS 8 integration here.

Today, almost every company has a directory that needs to be managed. Spending valuable company time monitoring servers, provisioning and deprovisioning users, auditing, and assessing security concerns takes away from the core competency of the team – building product and delivering to customers quickly. DaaS takes on the burden of those tasks, and allows the team to focus on what they do best. In his session at DevOps Summit, Rajat Bahargava, Co-Founder, Chairman, and President & CEO of JumpCloud, will talk about what DaaS is, how it eases the pain caused by AD and LDAP, and why cloud-based directories are where the industry is heading.

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