IBM announced a $1.2 billion project in January to build 15 SoftLayer datacenters around the world. One of thosse is scheduled to go online today in Toronto. This is the fifth of a scheduled 15 this year, and is the first SoftLayer datacenter in Canada. It will deploy more than 15,000 servers.

IBM claims more than 1,000 clients for these services in Canada, and not just the usual suspects. In addition to financial services, insurance, retail and public sector organizations as, the company will serve startups who participate in the SoftLayer Catalyst Program. The roster of these companies includes Mnubo, Epilogger, Brika, Greenoffon, Zilyo, TeachIt, maegan and kiwiwearables.

IBM says Catalyst also has established relationships with several Canadian accelerators and incubators, including GrowLab, Communitech, Ryerson University Digital Media Zone (DMZ), JOLT, FounderFuel, Extreme Startups and TheNext36 as well as those affiliated with the Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE).

read more

Today’s workplace is an entirely different animal to just five years ago – and it’s growing and changing at a rapid rate.

The huge amount of enterprise mobility solutions on the market are enabling employees to do various tasks on their smartphones and tablets; as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on the unveiling of the Salesforce1 app, he could run his entire business from his phone.

Yet none of this could be possible without the cloud powering it, as Backupify has been investigating. The cloud provider notes that in the pre-cloud office, “computers were a mess of tangled cords and colossal towers.”

This is of course a bit of a generalisation – you can still be using towers while adopting a corporate file-sharing solution, naturally – but there are some interesting stats. It’s easy to forget that a whopping 13 floppy disks were needed to install Windows 95.

With 93% of US small and medium businesses backing up some portion of their data to the cloud, it’s evident where the trend is going. Take a look at this infographic from Backupify to see how they envisage the cloudy office:

Every healthy ecosystem is diverse. This is especially true in cloud ecosystems, where portability and interoperability are more important than old enterprise models of proprietary ownership. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Baker, Server Product Manager at Canonical/Ubuntu, will discuss how single vendors used to take the lead in creating and delivering technology, but in a cloud economy, where users want tools of their preference, when and where they need them, it makes no sense.

read more

In order to foster high levels of innovation that lead to adaptation to both internal and external disruption, you must foster an organization with low connectivity and furthermore, give them flexible, loosely coupled technology tools. In such environments, teams have the leeway to self-organize, and their innate creativity will foster innovations that will lead over time to the best solutions. And the role of management in this process? Give people the right tools and get out of their way.

read more

The focus of a BI professional in an organization is to help get the right information to the right decision makers at the right time. In modern times, Big Data analytics has been one of the primary sources of business intelligence acquisition. Tools like Hadoop have revolutionized the way enterprise businesses interpret the millions of data points that they own about customer behavior and turn them into meaningful inferences. But before the data reaches this stage, it passes through the several modules of an ERP system – an ERP system handles the whole gamut of operations right from demand estimation, to inventory purchase, stockpiling, distribution, sales and revenue generation.
As a result, cloud ERP plays quite a crucial role in generating the most accurate information for business intelligence. Here are some ways it is done.

read more

“There’s the cloud, then there’s your cloud.”

So goes a tagline from SingleHop, which provides public and private cloud services, dedicated servers, and managed hosting to customers throughout the world. As enterprise IT organizations increasingly recognize the flexibility and agility inherent to services offered by cloud computing providers for their clouds, we can expect the market for such services to continue to grow and competition to continue to heat up. In that context, we asked a few questions of SingleHop EVP Mark Cravotta: Cloud Computing Journal: There’s been a lot of talk recently of the merging of PaaS and IaaS. Where do you stand in this discussion?
Mark Cravotta: SingleHop is focused on delivering IaaS solutions via our bare metal, public cloud and private cloud platforms, coupled with managed services and security services. Our focus is on the Enterprise production systems versus development platforms. The PaaS market is evolving and we will continue to look at strategies as options solidify.
CCJ: You have some fairly serious competitors in your space, and one of them is now owned by one of the largest technology companies in the world. How do you differentiate and win in your marketplace?
Mark: We differentiate by delivering well architected, customer IaaS solutions coupled with high touch services and support, what we call our Service Beyond Support Model. In the end our solutions address specific business needs and are not pre-packaged, are delivered rapidly which enables business agility and are priced competitively based on our underlying cost model being lower than the world’s largest technology companies. We partner with our customers and are flexible and transparent at all points in the relationship. This is also hard to do as companies get larger.
CCJ: On that same note, how fast do you see the need for IaaS growing in the next few years? And do you break it down by regions? For example, Southeast Asia is very dynamic, and all regions of Africa are getting some technology and economic traction these days as well.
Mark: IaaS is constantly growing and that demand will continue to grow consistently. We see demand on six continents. Each market has its own drivers—economic, proximity, global, etc.—based on its sophistication in the global market. We serve customers in 124 countries today.
CCJ: You received a funding round of $14.8 million a few months ago. What gives investors confidence in SingleHop, and how do you apply those investments for your customers?
Mark: We are constantly evaluating and deploying the latest technologies designed to enable our customers to solve their business challenges. This includes expansion into new markets, data center improvements, platform evolution, and network expansion in both capacity and throughput. We also invest heavily in our employees, who make the difference with our customers every day.

read more

Want VM agility with near bare metal performance? How about [milli]second provision/stop/start/restart times? Looking to achieve greater VM density on your hardware assets, or provision applications without worry of dependency hell? Look no further than next-gen virtualization with Linux Containers. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Boden Russell, an Advisory Software Engineer at IBM Global Technology Services, will provide a Linux Container technology overview including underpinnings, throttling, monitoring, tooling/commoditization, images, security, use cases, pros/cons and why containers are poised as “the next VM” in our modern cloud era. By the end of this session you will have a firm understanding of the Linux Container landscape in today’s industry and an appreciation for their realization.

read more

One thing I’m learning this year as I dive deep into the IoT is a new meaning for the word “raspberry.” In particular, Raspberry Pi, the little computer that could.
A new announcement involving this technology comes from Ocean Optics, which has a new set of spectral sensing tools for IoT developers.
The STS Developers Kit features the company’s STS spectrometer—which measures less than 42mm square and 24mm high–a Raspberry Pi, customizable software, and wireless capabilities in single package.
“It can be used to develop handheld devices for applications such as color determination in liquid, gases and solids; color temperature of LEDs; or solar UV data collection,” according to company information. “It could also be used to create cloud-connected measurement clusters, and mounted on UAVs for remote monitoring.”
Once connected to a WiFi network, the spectrometer can be controlled through phone, tablet, or computer web browser. The WiFi range is up to 150 m, and all data is securely stored to the onboard SD card. It comes pre-loaded and ready to use out of the box, but can also be customized, as noted above. The company offers three models of the device.

read more

Telehealth legislation opened the floodgates for investment in modern communications services and APIs since 2010. WebRTC promises a second revolution. In his session at 2nd WebRTC Summit, Ivelin Ivanov, co-founder of TeleStax, will discuss a real-world example where telephony APIs make a difference in improving patient care and reducing healthcare costs. He will then look into a brighter telehealth future with secure, high quality, ubiquitous WebRTC video interactions.

read more

Back when we were doing DB2 at IBM, there was an important older product called IMS which brought significant revenue. With another database product coming (based on relational technology), IBM did not want any cannibalization of the existing revenue stream. Hence we coined the phrase “dual database strategy” to justify the need for both DBMS products. In a similar vain, several vendors are concocting all kinds of terms and strategies to justify newer products under the banner of Big Data.

read more