Everyone knows that if something looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck – or at least we have to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae.

Thus according to the duck test if it looks and feels like a private cloud, it should be a private cloud. Yet CenturyLink aims to turn that on its head with its latest private cloud launch, which aims to offer the agility of a public cloud but with the security of a private cloud.

Isn’t this essentially a hybrid cloud? Well, yes and no. Each private cloud instance is plugged in to CenturyLink’s public cloud nodes, thus running off the same platform and providing what IDC research vice president Melanie Posey describes as “a frictionless hybrid cloud option.”

“Hybrid cloud is the enterprise IT operational model of the future,” she adds. “CenturyLink Private Cloud provides a frictionless hybrid cloud option for organisatons that want to source private and public cloud services from a single provider and connect cloud with other IT services through an extensive Tier 1 IP network.”

The reasoning behind the public-cloud-looking private cloud is straightforward enough: you wouldn’t want to put all applications in a public cloud, so delivering the compute, storage and network of private cloud on public cloud nodes aims to be the solution.

The company says its main target base is large enterprise. Enterprises can deploy the private cloud across all CenturyLink’s data centres, spanning 57 in total and across 34 cities worldwide.

“CenturyLink Private Cloud delivers the best of private cloud – from dedicated hardware and physical isolation to enterprise-level security and service level agreements – along with our truly innovative public cloud experience, featuring advanced self-service automation and a fast pace of feature innovation,” said CenturyLink SVP cloud and technology Andrew Higginbotham.

“We spare customers from the drudgery of infrastructure management, while offering more control over what truly matters: everything that happens from the platform up,” added CenturyLink product management Jared Ruckle in a blog post.

The competition at the top of the cloud vendor race is stiff, yet with this offering CenturyLink hopes to have a stab at disrupting the top three of Google, Microsoft and Amazon. The firm slashed its prices on virtual machines and storage back in May in response to the other vendors.

Find out more about the CenturyLink Private Cloud here.

Getting one’s arms around the Internet of Things is a daunting task. In addition to big IoT commitments from all of the big players in computing and telco, there are a number of smaller companies and startups working on devices and services to enable the future of enterprise IT and personal accoutrements.

A recent article in IoT Journal from InfoChimps CEO Jim Kaskade mentioned six of these (the first two owned by PTC): Axeda, ThingWorx, SmartThings, Exosite, Numerex, and Xively.

Chad Jones from Xively is a faculty member of our @ThingsExpo, and we’ve gotten some great input from him before. The others are new ground for me.

So I’ll be reaching out to interview key people at those five companies, to get an understanding of their vision, customers, and products and services. I’ll also contact James Kaskade and Chad Jones to get their current views of the IoT and what they’re doing about it.

Meanwhile, please contact me via Twitter with other suggestions. A little crowdsourcing might go a long way as we continue to cover the big picture and small details of this quickly emerging, hugely dynamic Internet of Things.

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The world’s largest and most successful private cloud operations are revolutionizing their approach to demand management. These organizations have recognized that while self-service portals are a component in the overall cloud architecture, these tools do not enable demand management. In fact, in many cases the portals and end-user interfaces don’t actually capture anything to do with demand, but instead force the user to enter the capacity “supply” requirements that they think will meet their demands. This is very different. Large enterprises have recognized the need to look beyond immediate requests to also model the “pipeline” of new demands that will be coming down the road. It is only by capturing new immediate requirements, an understanding of the pipeline and what is running in environments that organizations can possibly hope to accurately model demand and properly allocate compute, storage and network resources.

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Code Halos – aka “digital fingerprints” – are the key organizing principle to understand a) how dumb things become smart and b) how to monetize this dynamic.
In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Ben Pring, Co-Director (AVP), Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant Technology Solutions, will outline research, analysis and recommendations from his recently published book on this phenomena on the way leading edge organizations like GE and Disney are unlocking the IoT opportunity and what steps your organization should be taking to position itself for the next platform of digital competition.

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My favorite writer, Gil Press, sums it up with, “It’s Official: The Internet Of Things Takes Over Big Data As The Most Hyped Technology” where he talks about how Gartner released its latest Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, and how big data has moved down the “trough of disillusionment,” replaced by the Internet of Things at the top of the hype cycle.
The term Internet of Things was coined by the British technologist Kevin Ashton in 1999, to describe a system where the Internet is connected to the physical world via ubiquitous sensors.

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SYS-CON Events, Inc. named Cisco “Gold Sponsor” of upcoming Cloud Expo, co-located with 3rd International Internet of @ThingsExpo, the largest IoT event in the world. 15th International Cloud Expo will take place November 4-6, 2014 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. Cisco will present a number of technical sessions, including a general session which will be announced next week.

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Delivering any data, anywhere, anytime, EdgeCast is the world’s fastest and most reliable content delivery network. The company was founded in 2006 by technology entrepreneurs with years of experience building companies in the infrastructure, web services, and application delivery spaces. EdgeCast built its global delivery network to provide the fastest, smartest content delivery on the planet. And, according to the independent experts, they did exactly that – they consistently rank among the very best-performing CDNs in the industry.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that Verizon has been named “Gold Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Verizon Enterprise Solutions creates global connections that generate growth, drive business innovation and move society forward. With industry-specific solutions and a full range of global wholesale offerings provided over the company’s secure mobility, cloud, strategic networking and advanced communications platforms, Verizon Enterprise Solutions helps open new opportunities around the world for innovation, investment and business transformation. Visit verizonenterprise.com to learn more.

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SoftLayer, an IBM Company, provides cloud infrastructure as a service from a growing number of data centers and network points of presence around the world. SoftLayer’s customers range from Web startups to global enterprises. Products and services include bare metal and virtual servers, networking, turnkey big data solutions, private cloud solutions, and more. SoftLayer’s unique advantages include the industry’s first Network-Within-a-Network topology for true out-of-band access, and an easy-to-use customer portal and robust API for full remote-access of all product and service management options. SoftLayer was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. SoftLayer was acquired by IBM in July, 2013.

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Microsoft suffered a blow yesterday when its Azure cloud and virtual machines suffered a series of outages before later being restored.

According to Reuters, the downtime was due to interruptions in multiple centres, with a representative from the company explaining that a small section of its customer base was affected.

A cursory glance at Azure’s status history page gives a glimpse as to the various outages suffered, with downtime logged on both August 18 and 19.

“Starting at 18 Aug 2014, 17:49 UTC, we are experiencing an interruption to Azure Services, may include Cloud Services, Virtual Machines Websites, Automation, Service Bus, Backup, Site Recovery, HDInsight, Mobile Services and possible other Azure Services in multiple regions,” the update wrote. “Customers began to experience service restoration as updates were deployed across the affected environment.”

The downtime was Microsoft’s most severe outage since February 2013. But what does this outage mean for the firm?

It’s no secret that the cloud is a major area of potential growth for Microsoft. No coincidence either that CEO Satya Nadella’s experience was in cloud and enterprise, and his first memo to employees – Microsoft’s unique marketing means that periodic rallying calls from the CEO dressed as company-wide emails are used as PR – heavily cited cloud as “the largest opportunity” for change.

Yet it wasn’t all good news in the memo last month, with job cuts inferred through the phrase “engineering and organisation changes”, and promptly delivered. Microsoft isn’t the first, and won’t be the last company to see moving resources to the cloud as a reason to let a few employees go, but it was particularly galling to see the human effects of this particular round of layoffs, as explained by software dev Jerry Berg on his Barnacules YouTube account.

Microsoft has long since been competing with Google and Amazon Web Services among others in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, with a series of price cuts on storage and compute in March and April this year. Microsoft followed Amazon, who followed Google in slashing its prices, with Google SVP Urs Hölzle joking that “you need a PhD” to work out the best options.

Then earlier this month Box moved the goalposts completely and removed its storage limits altogether for business customers, keeping the hypervendors on their toes.

Recent research, from Synergy’s John Dinsdale in particular, indicates that Microsoft, along with IBM, is catching up with AWS in the IaaS race while Google is trailing behind. This latest outage won’t be catastrophic for Microsoft by any means, but it’s not as if there’s a scarcity of other candidates should customers get itchy feet.