Enterprise IT organizations today often are bypassed as employees and LoBs use cloud services; in fact cloud computing is considered the revenge of the business unit. 2014 will be year that the Enterprise IT organizations move from role of helpless bystander to role of strategic partner to the business unit. It will be the year that the CIO carves out a new role of strategic importance, namely the enabler of cloud apps that drive agility, productivity and competitive advantage for their business units. In 2014, CIOs and IT departments will use rapidly emerging cloud security solutions to accelerate the adoption of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) within the enterprise and will embark on security transformation.
Windstream’s RevChain Solutions Executes Contract Extension with ETB
RevChain Solutions, LLC (RCS), part of Windstream and a provider of enterprise carrier grade billing, account management and customer care solutions, announced on Tuesday that it has executed a three-year, $5 million extension for professional services and support with Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Bogotá (ETB). ETB is primarily focused on serving Bogotá, but also maintains a presence in eight other regions of Colombia.
RCS provides billing, customer care and account management solutions to worldwide service providers across various industries through its RevChain platform. Throughout these industries, RevChain is recognized as offering the most sophisticated rating and pricing engine, allowing it to address any discounting or contract T&C pricing requirements. RevChain is also known for its ability to process very high volumes of data, transactions and invoices through its distributed processing system architecture, Internet Integration Architecture.
DaaS Re-Boot II: Schultz & Dhawan Speak!
As promised, newly minted VMware execs Bob Schultz and Sumit Dhawan responded to my inquiries about their new jobs. Both came over from Citrix, signalling a clear escalation in the battle for desktop virtualization supremacy between the two companies.
Schultz has been named to a new position as chief strategy lead for Vmware’s End-User Computing (EUC) Unit, while Dhawan, who was with Citrix for almost 16 years, “will lead our desktop business and organization and be responsible for the overall business including overseeing the strategy, product portfolio and engineering,” according to EUC unit head Sanjay Poonen.
According to Bob and Sumit…
When asked what key, compelling reasons prompted his move, Schultz told Cloud Computing Journal, “My decision to make a career change came down to two related reasons. The first was VMware’s momentum in the market and the company’s commitment to investing in growth areas.” (He gave Desktone as an example here, as did Poonen in a formal company announcement.)(example: acquisition of Desktone).
“The second reason,” Schultz said, “was the competitive advantage I saw with the company’s vision of integration between their three major focus areas, the Software Defined Data Center, Hybrid Cloud and End-User Computing.”
Dhawan told us he “enjoyed every minute” of his time at Citrix, but decided to leave Citrix last summer “so I can get an experience of growing and building a business somewhere else. I found that VMware was the best place for me to come and join – best positioned with a great strategy for enabling IT as a service via a portfolio of products across (the three areas also mentioned by Schultz).”
“Everyone can see that the desktop and the way people work through technology is changing,” Schultz said. “So IT needs to think broadly about the desktop, mobile devices, applications and data.” He cited a new report from Gartner that estimates that by 2017, more than 60% of organizations will have to support Windows applications across multiple devices.
Dhawan noted that “there is a lot of research available from various sources regarding growth opportunities of virtual desktops and apps. However, my move was based on my personal belief that virtual desktops from both private and public cloud is still largely an untapped market.”
What Will They Be Up To?
Schultz said he plans “to help the business continue the momentum that is already in place, win customers over by clearly differentiating the many benefits of our integrated solutions, and continue to lead in desktop-as-a-service (DaaS). In addition, cost and complexity are two challenges that VMware End-User Computing is well positioned to solve thru integration with vSphere, vSAN for storage and unified management with vCOPS.”
For his part, Dhawan said “our goal is to target two major barriers that customer have experienced with virtual desktops – cost and complexity. Customers and partners have always put VMware View as the simplest VDI product in the market, and VMware has the leading DaaS platform with Desktone.
For a glimpse into the future, he told us, “look for us to leverage our assets across VMware, and key partnerships, to radically simplify customer experience in leveraging private and public cloud for delivering virtual desktops at low costs.”
Citrix Seems Satisfied
As I reported earlier, top management at Citrix is remaining outwardly calm. “We have a strong leadership team in place, including the new executive for our app and desktop virtualization business, which was announced this morning,” a company spokesperson told me in an email.
The newly named Citrix exec is Rakesh Narasimhan (pictured), a 25-year industry veteran “with 15 years in leadership positions at Microsoft, and whose expertise fits squarely in the Citrix market space,” according to Citrix’s note to me.
Narasimhan has served as a General Manager in Microsoft’s Server and Tools division during his career. He was most recently President and CEO at InstallFree. He also has experience at Oracle.
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The Optimization Taxonomy Analysis Test
People care a lot about technology augmentation, refinement and fine-tuning. We talk about performance acceleration, pushing processing power and the required levels of storage we need to underpin modern IT needs. It’s a never-ending cycle of regenerating work all focused on producing the optimal performance out of our technology stack at any one moment in time.
The ‘optimal’ word is important; it has produced a technology term that falls into a sub-classification all its own.
Arguably more than any other single word exposed to the transatlantic incongruence which sees the use of the letter S replaced with a Z, the term optimisation (or indeed, optimization) is one we fight over with a passion. This passion is a result of the close feeling of ownership we attribute to optimisation. We care about it and it’s a sensitive thing. But what does it mean?
Web Host Industry Review “Media Sponsor” of Cloud Expo NY & Silicon Valley
SYS-CON Events announced today that the Web Host Industry Review has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Since 2000, The Web Host Industry Review has made a name for itself as the foremost authority of the Web hosting industry providing reliable, insightful and comprehensive news, reviews and resources to the hosting community. TheWHIR Blogs provides a community of expert industry perspectives. The Web Host Industry Review Magazine also offers a business-minded, issue-driven perspective of interest to executives and decision-makers. WHIR TV offers on demand web hosting video interviews and web hosting video features of the key persons and events of the web hosting industry. WHIR Events brings together like-minded hosting industry professionals and decision-makers in local communities. TheWHIR is an iNET Interactive property.
Solinea Joins the OpenStack Foundation
Solinea, the OpenStack™ software and services company, has joined the OpenStack Foundation. The OpenStack Foundation promotes the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud operating system.
“Joining the OpenStack foundation gives Solinea the ideal platform to deliver innovative service offerings in enabling Enterprises, SaaS providers and Service providers to accelerate the adoption of cloud.” says Solinea CTO, Ken Pepple. “As part of the Foundation, Solinea will continue to contribute software and its proven delivery expertise to the OpenStack cloud ecosystem.”
World’s Top Expert Named “DevOps Summit 2014” Tech Chair
Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Andi Mann has been named Tech Chair of DevOps Summit 2014.
2nd International “DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo” will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, and the 3rd International DevOps Summit will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“We are excited that Andi Mann is joining us as DevOps Summit Tech Chair. Our upcoming event in June, the largest DevOps conference in the world, will offer the best sessions and faculty,” said Carmen Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO of Cloud Expo, Inc. “DevOps Summit 2014 in June will feature 75 world-class sessions over three days, presented by more than 50 rock star faculty members who join the conference by invitation only!”
Migrate Oracle Database from HP-UX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
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.
OK 2014, Now What
So I’ve been staring at this blinking cursor for the last 5 minutes wondering what story to tell. ‘Once upon a time, there was a….‘ No that won’t work. ‘It was a dark and dreary night as our protagonist grudgingly dragged his feet toward the impending…‘ No, not that either. How about, ‘The waves were big, mean and fast that day…the kind of day where Eddie would go.’ Nah, too local boy.
After a few weeks break and with so much going on within information technology, I sometimes find it difficult to zero in on something interesting with so many choices. So I decided to do a mini blog buffet….the best in town, I say!
3rd Annual World Congress of Cloud Computing 2014
Today I am proud and honored to announce that I will be participating in this year’s 3rd Annual World Congress of Cloud Computing 2014! Highlighting the theme of “Chinese Dream in Cloud” the event will be held in Dalian, China from June 19 to 21, 2014.
CloudCon-2014 aims to strengthen the technical and business ties in cloud computing area, to bring
together experts and industry leaders to share technological advancements and business
experiences, and to jointly explore opportunities in emerging technologies. This congress provides an ideal platform for industrial practitioners and academia to keep up to date with current technology trends, interact with industry experts and network with peers. CloudCon-2014 is presenting an ambitious and unique program based around major themes “Chinese Dream In Cloud”, and will feature an exciting line-up of keynote speakers and intense breakout sessions, where lively and interactive debates will take place among the delegates. The newly launched sectors are Parallel Thematic Forums, Frontier Technological Program, and IT/ICT Business Matchmaking and Career Fairs.