In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Nathan Anderson, an IT Leader – Innovation at GE Capital, will provide a look inside of a project at a large global financial services organization that embarked on an ambitious journey towards continuous delivery, private cloud, agile and DevOps. He will set aside the hype, and focus on successes, challenges, and real-world practical lessons learned.
Nathan Anderson is an IT Leader – Innovation at GE Capital.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10–12, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The Problem with Cloud SLAs
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) offered by cloud providers are too often about Specification and not Service. It should come as no surprise that vanity metrics, like Availability, are used instead of business metrics because they are simple to measure and easy to misconstrue. Metrics that truly matter, like “will I be able to delight my customer,” are about as far removed as one can imagine. It should come as no surprise, then, that in a recent survey of 740 CIOs and IT Leaders 97% wanted more than a simple Availability guarantee.
Imagine a company selling a premium new car whose warranty includes 2M piston revolutions, 10k door latch cycles, and 20k window open and closes. And even then, with 99.5% availability, you might still be unable to start the car two days a year, or during winter there might be two weeks where the doors won’t unlock until the sun melts the ice in the door locks. Ready to buy?
Wasted IT Resources
David Rubinstein’s post “Industry Watch: Be resilient as you PaaS” makes a very good point about underutilized hardware in IT data-centers.
Millions of enterprise workloads remain in data centers, where servers are 30% to 40% underutilized, and that’s if they’re virtualized. If not, they’re only using 5% to 7% of capacity.
The reason for this?
Take, for example, servers that are spun up for a project two years ago that were never decommissioned, just sitting there, waiting for a new workload that will never come. And, because the costs of blades and racks went down, cheap hardware has led to a kind of data center sprawl.
Cloud Management in a Hybrid World
In this Forrester report learn how the infrastructure/operations (I&O) role changes in a hybrid cloud world. How they accelerate the cloud application delivery life cycle to exceed the business expectations of cloud and which management capabilities must be mastered to take on the role of hybrid cloud manager.
Cloud Management in a Hybrid World
In this Forrester report learn how the infrastructure/operations (I&O) role changes in a hybrid cloud world. How they accelerate the cloud application delivery life cycle to exceed the business expectations of cloud and which management capabilities must be mastered to take on the role of hybrid cloud manager.
Red Hat to Acquire Inktank
Red Hat, Inc., on Wednesday announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Inktank, a provider of scale-out, open source storage systems. Inktank’s flagship technology, Inktank Ceph Enterprise, delivers object and block storage software to enterprises deploying public or private clouds, including many early adopters of OpenStack clouds. Combined with Red Hat’s existing GlusterFS-based storage offering, the addition of Inktank positions Red Hat as the leading provider of open software-defined storage across object, block and file system storage.
If hybrid is the Holy Grail of IT, we must look beyond the clouds
By Paul Cragg, CTO, Easynet
Golf clubs, cars and IT rarely get talked about in the same sentence outside a board meeting, but surprisingly they have one thing in common: they all come in hybrid form. All combine different features to create a single, better product with improved performance. And all are created from designs based on technology innovation.
For the sake of argument, I’m going to leave golf clubs and cars well alone so we can focus here on hybrid IT, which several surveys confirm to be ‘the new normal’. Hybrid IT, though, means different things to different organisations.
Generally it refers to IT which integrates different clouds from different providers. It could be a private/public cloud combination of a local server and a cloud service, which bring the benefits of private cloud without the prohibitive costs. Global analysts Gartner talk about it being ‘a new mission …
Oracle’s recent acquisitions fill gaps in the Oracle Marketing Cloud
Gerry Brown, Senior Analyst, Customer Engagement
Between October 2013 and February 2014 Oracle made three acquisitions that enhance the Oracle Marketing Cloud proposition. The first acquisition was Compendium for marketing content management; the second was Responsys, a cross-channel marketing platform; and the third BlueKai, a data management platform and data marketplace focused on the marketing industry.
Many “core” marketing technology applications are already provided by the Oracle Marketing Cloud. The three acquisitions are enhancements designed to supplement, add value to, and differentiate Oracle’s offer, and certainly give Oracle a larger footprint in cloud marketing applications. It should also be noted that the Oracle Marketing Cloud is part of the larger, more embracing Oracle Customer Experience Cloud, which includes commerce, sales, service, social, and marketing.
Oracle has unfulfilled ambitions in the “Marketing Cloud” area, and believes that the market offers a strategic business opportunity. These acquisitions provide three key challenges …
Six of the best: Business, backups and the BBC
The latest edition of Six of the Best, featuring the CloudTech editorial team’s favourite links from around the web, has either a slightly hotchpotch feel to it, or covers an extremely wide range of cloud computing stories over the past couple of weeks. We’ll leave it up to you to decide.
1) Moving to the cloud? Don’t rush to kiss legacy applications goodbye [Forbes]
Dominick Paul, national vice president of strategic solutions for SunGard Availability Services, opens with an anecdote. He kicked off a presentation at a CIO summit by explaining that “with the advent of the cloud, UNIX was now a legacy platform.” The audience got the joke – given that UNIX was the hottest thing just five years ago, it seems bizarre to consider it legacy because of the cloud.
As a result, Paul’s theory in the article goes: “Just because cloud-based technologies are the …
Instant, Integrated and Data-Rich Business Cloud Services
Ariba’s product and services roadmap is rapidly evolving, including gaining more analytics capabilities. BriefingsDirect had an opportunity to learn first-hand how at the recent 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.
To learn more about the recent news at Ariba LIVE — and also what to expect from both Ariba and SAP Cloud in the coming months — we sat down with Chris Haydon, Senior Vice President of Solutions Management for Procurement, Finance and Network at Ariba, an SAP company. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.