Aphrodite Brinsmead, Senior Analyst, Customer Engagement

At its industry analyst conference in Phoenix, Arizona in January 2014, Aspect proudly discussed its newly refocused business. Two years ago the vendor was working closely with Microsoft and struggling to gain new business in a saturated contact center infrastructure market. However, Aspect begins 2014 with new products, strong financials for 2013, and a positive growth forecast.

The strategic acquisitions it made in 2013 have helped Aspect get back on track. Most significantly, the decision to acquire Voxeo in July 2013 and take on some of its business practices means that the company is now better poised to respond to enterprises’ demands for multichannel capabilities, analytics, and flexibility in deployment options.

The Voxeo acquisition changes everything

The Voxeo acquisition appears to have been the turning point in securing Aspect’s future success. Aspect gained a robust IVR solution, cloud expertize, and new data centers …

The use of in-memory data grids (IMDGs) for scaling application performance has rapidly increased in recent years as firms have seen their application workloads explode. This trend runs across nearly every vertical market, touching online applications for financial services, ecommerce, travel, manufacturing, social media, mobile, and more. At the same time, many firms are also looking to leverage the use of cloud computing to meet the challenge of ever increasing workloads. One of the fundamental promises of the cloud is elastic, transparent, on-demand scalability — a key capability that has become practical with the use of in-memory data grid technology. As such IMDGs are becoming a vital factor in the cloud, just as they have been for on-premise applications.

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ScaleOut Software has announced the availability of ScaleOut StateServer Version 5.1. The latest version includes C++ APIs, additional solutions on Amazon Web Services, a Windows version of ScaleOut hServer, performance improvements in data management, and SSL support for enhanced security.
ScaleOut provides in-memory data grid (IMDG) products with breakthrough performance to the rapidly expanding in-memory computing market. ScaleOut’s products enable applications to seamlessly scale performance to handle increasing workloads and provide real-time analytics.

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Until recently, when I would talk about “APIs”, I would qualify it by saying “Web APIs”, in order to distinguish from the older meaning of APIs as more the tightly-coupled APIs used in Java, C/C++, or even Visual Basic. If you just said “APIs”, until recently, some people may think you mean APIs like the Windows API (I can remember Charles Petzold’s excellent Windows API book was on my desk back when I was a programmer at an EDI VAN in the 90s).

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There is a question we need to ask. It is a question which might end up annoying some people in the Cloud industry however it is one which we need to ask. Was the Cloud designed to be this way? This is to say, was the Cloud designed as terminology meant to distract everyday consumers from what really goes on in the world of data centers? Was the Cloud designed as a distraction? Cloud Education For the past two years, we have dedicated this space to one thing above the rest: explaining, highlighting and educating consumers on how the Cloud works and more importantly, how Cloud solutions can work for you. We have done this because here at Solar VPS, we firmly believe the more you know about how the Cloud works and how Cloud services can positively impact your business, the more prone you will be to investing in said Cloud services. And yet, on another level, we have dedicated this space to explaining Cloud and IT concepts because we know, just as other providers know, the more the public understands about the Cloud, the more the public will demand better IT solutions from providers. The more you know, the more you push for higher level services. This stated, we have something to admit. For all the effort we have put into educating our readers and consumers concerning Cloud services, we have the feeling that we have failed. For all the information we have presented and created, we have the feeling that the marketing effort behind the Cloud was never meant to be educational. We have the feeling, the marketing behind the Cloud, for the most part, has been designed to mislead the consumer. Much like the first rule of magic, the marketing behind the Cloud has been nothing more than a purposeful distraction designed to make the viewer look one way to mask the truth. All said, the marketing behind the Cloud has been everything but simple. Is the Cloud Battle Over? Published on January 15, 2014 in InformationWeek, Reuven Cohen hits on this very subject. “There’s been a renewed debate recently over the various layers of Cloud Computing stacks. At stake is a fight for Cloud Computing market share and mind share — and possibly, the future of Cloud platforms.” “Beyond a small group of technologists, Cloud Computing remains largely a mystery for most people. Ironically, I believe that’s the point of the Cloud: To act as an abstraction of the complexity found in more traditional data centers and application hosting infrastructures.” That sentiment bears repeating: “Beyond a small group of technologists, Cloud Computing remains largely a mystery for most people. Ironically, I believe that’s the point of the Cloud: To act as an abstraction of the complexity found in more traditional data centers and application hosting infrastructures.” To act as an abstraction of the complexity found in more traditional data centers and application hosting infrastructures. Another way of saying this: the Cloud is meant to distract … Continue

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There have been a flurry of “green cloud” announcements recently, and that got us thinking about the relationship between green IT and saving money. Green is also the color of money, after all, and companies are discovering that reducing data center costs leads to substantial green benefits. The cloud takes cost reduction and green even further.
In the first announcement, IBM continues to innovate in cloud and in green, and it has patented technology for distributing compute workloads for cloud computing in a way that reduces power consumption. I’d liken it to a load balancer, but instead of trying to reduce response times, they’re trying to reduce power utilization overall. Now, it’s really interesting because this is not just a green initiative but it is also a cost-savings opportunity for cloud service providers.
Power consumption is a major cost driver for cloud service providers. Often, it’s pay-as-you go for storage, for compute, even for bandwidth. But no cloud provider is really charging for power utilization. This is a way for cloud service providers to reduce their sunk cost and improve their margins without having to charge the customers more. It’s green, but it’s also green for your wallet.

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OpenText Corporation has announced that it has completed its acquisition of GXS Group, Inc. (GXS), expanding OpenText’s leadership in EIM by combining OpenText’s Information Exchange portfolio with GXS’s cloud-based business-to-business integration services and managed services.
“I am delighted to welcome GXS customers, partners, trading community and employees to OpenText,” said OpenText CEO Mark J. Barrenechea. “We are committed to leading Enterprise Information Management with the market’s best products and cloud-based services. Our combined cloud will now manage over 16 billion transactions per year, approximately 600,000 trading partners and 40,000 customers.”

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Mission-critical functions at the heart of your business – such as order entry, finance, human resources, customer relationship management, and enterprise resource planning – frequently depend on “always-on” and scalable Oracle Database functionality. In the past, many businesses have selected HP-UX/Itanium systems as the backbone of an Oracle Database infrastructure because they could supply the throughput and availability needed for key database workloads.
The life cycle of an HP-UX/Itanium infrastructure for Oracle Database, however, is rapidly coming to an end. On July 1, 2013, Oracle announced the availability of Oracle Database 12c. Because cloud deployments are the projected direction for IT services, Oracle Database 12c follows a multi-tenant architecture that facilitates cloud delivery of database services. It seeks to simplify database management tasks by managing multiple co-located databases as one, while simultaneously enabling data isolation and database resource prioritization. Changes to existing Oracle database tables and applications are not required. However, Oracle supports this new release only on Solaris, Windows, and Linux® operating systems – and not on HP-UX. This means that current HP-UX customers must migrate to a different platform to take advantage of Oracle Database 12c and its ability to ease the transition to a database service cloud.

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I had the privilege of interviewing the CEO of Capriza, Yuval Scarlat, last week. We discussed a wide range of topics such as cloud mobility, MADPs, MBaaS, mobile strategies and why he thought the market needed another mobile solutions vendor.
On a side note, I think Capriza’s website design is very effective. Enjoy!

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Recent reports of a massive data breach affecting popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo have many companies rethinking security practices and wondering how to protect vital data. If your company uses cloud services to conduct business and manage data or is contemplating a hosting partnership, it’s natural to wonder if your service provider is taking all the steps necessary to keep your confidential information secure.
It’s an important issue: Cloud resources are becoming a must-have service for businesses since they offer scalability without requiring a massive investment in hardware. But before choosing a cloud service provider, it’s crucial to make sure the company can deliver the security your business needs. Here are some questions to keep in mind when making an evaluation.

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