I flew into Tacloban airport for the first time in 2009. This provincial capital (pronounced “Tac-LO-ban”) of 200,00 people is hot, crowded, and gritty – as is its airport – and populated by the fierce Waraynon people. These are not the friendliest folks in the Philippines, and their largest city has a seething edge to it that one doesn’t normally associate with the country.

But become part of this culture and you will be fully accepted as a member of what must be one of the strongest, most loyal communities on Earth. I married a Waray, and have become one of the 24 members of her immediate family, 60 or so members of her close family, and hundreds of cousins and other relatives. I love them all, and they love me, unconditionally.

The Waray put their propensity for settling disputes with machetes to good use at the end of World War II, marching side-by-side with MacArthur after his return to Leyte Island, to drive the Imperial Japanese off of the island and out of the country. The US should be eternally grateful for their sacrifice and friendship.

Now these most resilient of people are being put to a most extreme test. The shocking damage caused to Tacloban and much of the surrounding area by Typhoon Yolanda means that an already impoverished part of the world will become more so, with the prospect of any sort of normalcy years, if not decades, away.

I wonder about the old man standing near the airport entrance, amused by my feeble use of the local language and who wished my wife and I a fond farewell when we left Tacloban, bound for the US a couple of years ago. He probably lived close to the airport. Did he drown in the typhoon’s surge?

I wonder about the joking, towering security guard at our downtown hotel – 18 dollars a night for a double that was home to five of us for a couple of days – who was proud to be as tall as the strange “Kano” (short for “Americano”) with the sunburnt skin. Did he die in the storm?

I wonder about the high-school kids working in the local McDonald’s, next to the harbor,; the squadrons of workingmen who loaded our new refrigerator and about half a ton of other goods onto the ferry, across a plank that on its best days would be described as “rickety”; the tricycle drivers who took us across the city and down to the MacArthur Memorial in Palo; the nice young woman in the Waray bookstore who helped me find a local professor who specialized in the origin of the local language; the guys in the street testing the noisy 6HP engines that are a staple of the region’s small fishing boats; and the endless parade of kids, teens, and adults hustling around the city trying figuratively to keep their heads above water. What happened to all of them?

My wife’s immediate family is safe and sound, tucked away in their tiny village in Samar Province, north of Tacloban. The tin roof flew off their main house, one wall came undone, two of their three small bamboo huts were flattened, and the small grove of coconut trees upon which they make much of their living was destroyed utterly. But nobody was hurt, the seven babies and toddlers are doing fine, the roof and wall have already been nailed back on, and new huts will be completed soon.

Many cousins from the neighboring village, who were attending high school in Tacloban, are still missing a few days after the storm blew through. There will be trauma and tears somewhere in the family. “Life is hard” is one of the foundational phrases among all Filipinos, and life among the Waray people remains as hard for most today as it was when their families first populated these islands many thousands of years ago.

Yet life there is also vibrant. I’ve drunk the local coconut wine (called “tuba”) while noisily engaging in chicken fights in the ocean cove that lies at the foot of my wife’s village. I’ve ridden in the small, outrigger bangka boats, helping to paddle when the engine conks out, on short jaunts and on the four-hour trip to Tacloban.

Awakened by roosters and the implacable sun, fed chickens that were running around just a few minutes before, enlisted to help fasten the fishing net one day and to scrape coconuts the next, and lazily sitting around in an apparent tropical paradise, I’ve lived the “maupay” (good) life there.

I’ve danced the local “kuratsa” for hours on New Year’s Eve. And I’ve laughed, my God how I’ve laughed along with the endless, divine comedy innate to a tightly knit, often battling, always loquacious family and people who will tell you their choice in life is to laugh often or never stop crying.

We will all cry many tears as this tragedy continues to unfold, and will mourn for the loss of life that has occurred. Many of my wife’s family will likely take the 24-hour bus ride to Manila in search of work. Christmas and New Year’s won’t be as joyful this year as in years past. The shadow cast by this storm may last for generations.

But the Waraynon will fight, as they always have. They will fight to rebuild their houses and lives. They will fight, fight, and fight some more to restore their world, with a fire inside that will not be extinguished. They will endure.

read more

I flew into Tacloban airport for the first time in 2009. This provincial capital (pronounced “Tac-LO-ban”) of 200,00 people is hot, crowded, and gritty – as is its airport – and populated by the fierce Waraynon people. These are not the friendliest folks in the Philippines, and their largest city has a seething edge to it that one doesn’t normally associate with the country.

But become part of this culture and you will be fully accepted as a member of what must be one of the strongest, most loyal communities on Earth. I married a Waray, and have become one of the 24 members of her immediate family, 60 or so members of her close family, and hundreds of cousins and other relatives. I love them all, and they love me, unconditionally.

The Waray put their propensity for settling disputes with machetes to good use at the end of World War II, marching side-by-side with MacArthur after his return to Leyte Island, to drive the Imperial Japanese off of the island and out of the country. The US should be eternally grateful for their sacrifice and friendship.

Now these most resilient of people are being put to a most extreme test. The shocking damage caused to Tacloban and much of the surrounding area by Typhoon Yolanda means that an already impoverished part of the world will become more so, with the prospect of any sort of normalcy years, if not decades, away.

I wonder about the old man standing near the airport entrance, amused by my feeble use of the local language and who wished my wife and I a fond farewell when we left Tacloban, bound for the US a couple of years ago. He probably lived close to the airport. Did he drown in the typhoon’s surge?

I wonder about the joking, towering security guard at our downtown hotel – 18 dollars a night for a double that was home to five of us for a couple of days – who was proud to be as tall as the strange “Kano” (short for “Americano”) with the sunburnt skin. Did he die in the storm?

I wonder about the high-school kids working in the local McDonald’s, next to the harbor,; the squadrons of workingmen who loaded our new refrigerator and about half a ton of other goods onto the ferry, across a plank that on its best days would be described as “rickety”; the tricycle drivers who took us across the city and down to the MacArthur Memorial in Palo; the nice young woman in the Waray bookstore who helped me find a local professor who specialized in the origin of the local language; the guys in the street testing the noisy 6HP engines that are a staple of the region’s small fishing boats; and the endless parade of kids, teens, and adults hustling around the city trying figuratively to keep their heads above water. What happened to all of them?

My wife’s immediate family is safe and sound, tucked away in their tiny village in Samar Province, north of Tacloban. The tin roof flew off their main house, one wall came undone, two of their three small bamboo huts were flattened, and the small grove of coconut trees upon which they make much of their living was destroyed utterly. But nobody was hurt, the seven babies and toddlers are doing fine, the roof and wall have already been nailed back on, and new huts will be completed soon.

Many cousins from the neighboring village, who were attending high school in Tacloban, are still missing a few days after the storm blew through. There will be trauma and tears somewhere in the family. “Life is hard” is one of the foundational phrases among all Filipinos, and life among the Waray people remains as hard for most today as it was when their families first populated these islands many thousands of years ago.

Yet life there is also vibrant. I’ve drunk the local coconut wine (called “tuba”) while noisily engaging in chicken fights in the ocean cove that lies at the foot of my wife’s village. I’ve ridden in the small, outrigger bangka boats, helping to paddle when the engine conks out, on short jaunts and on the four-hour trip to Tacloban.

Awakened by roosters and the implacable sun, fed chickens that were running around just a few minutes before, enlisted to help fasten the fishing net one day and to scrape coconuts the next, and lazily sitting around in an apparent tropical paradise, I’ve lived the “maupay” (good) life there.

I’ve danced the local “kuratsa” for hours on New Year’s Eve. And I’ve laughed, my God how I’ve laughed along with the endless, divine comedy innate to a tightly knit, often battling, always loquacious family and people who will tell you their choice in life is to laugh often or never stop crying.

We will all cry many tears as this tragedy continues to unfold, and will mourn for the loss of life that has occurred. Many of my wife’s family will likely take the 24-hour bus ride to Manila in search of work. Christmas and New Year’s won’t be as joyful this year as in years past. The shadow cast by this storm may last for generations.

But the Waraynon will fight, as they always have. They will fight to rebuild their houses and lives. They will fight, fight, and fight some more to restore their world, with a fire inside that will not be extinguished. They will endure.

read more

Forward-looking companies are now exploiting cloud efficiencies and agility to deliver applications better to their end users.
The next VMworld innovator panel discussion focuses on how two companies are using aggressive cloud-computing strategies to deliver applications better to their end users.
We’ll hear how healthcare patient-experience improvement provider Press Ganey and project and portfolio management provider Planview are both exploiting cloud efficiencies and agility. Their paths to the efficiency of cloud have been different, but the outcomes speak volumes for how cloud transforms businesses.
To understand how, we sat down with Greg Ericson, Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at Press Ganey Associates in South Bend, Indiana, and Patrick Tickle, Executive Vice President of Products at Planview Inc. in Austin, Texas.

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Forward-looking companies are now exploiting cloud efficiencies and agility to deliver applications better to their end users.
The next VMworld innovator panel discussion focuses on how two companies are using aggressive cloud-computing strategies to deliver applications better to their end users.
We’ll hear how healthcare patient-experience improvement provider Press Ganey and project and portfolio management provider Planview are both exploiting cloud efficiencies and agility. Their paths to the efficiency of cloud have been different, but the outcomes speak volumes for how cloud transforms businesses.
To understand how, we sat down with Greg Ericson, Senior Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer at Press Ganey Associates in South Bend, Indiana, and Patrick Tickle, Executive Vice President of Products at Planview Inc. in Austin, Texas.

read more

How many net-connected doodads are secure? The answer: none of them. Every device is woefully unprotected from various attacks, and to make matters worse, many of them might contain confidential information ripe for the picking. And if all that weren’t sufficiently disconcerting, the vendors of such miscellany aren’t particularly motivated to make them secure – even if they knew how to do it properly. Which they don’t. Nevertheless, we blindly forge ahead, building out the Internet of Things (IoT), as though the security issues will somehow resolve themselves. Just how worried should we be?

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Despite the economy, cloud computing is doing well. Gartner estimates the cloud market will double by 2016 to $206 billion. The time for dabbling in the cloud is over!
The 14th International Cloud Expo, co-located with 5th International Big Data Expo and 3rd International SDN Expo, to be held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, N.Y., announces that its Call for Papers is now open. Topics include all aspects of providing or using massively scalable IT-related capabilities as a service using Internet technologies.

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You probably know from personal experience how tough it can be to change from one service provider to another. Think about the last time you changed your Internet service or gym membership. It was probably a pain, and there’s a reason. Most vendors don’t want you to have a seamless transition from their product to a competitor’s.
vendor lock in cloud software. But you might not know that some less-trustworthy vendors build roadblocks specifically designed to lock customers into their service. They make it hard for you to switch vendors so they can raise prices or change policies without worrying too much about losing customers—a practice called “vendor lock-in.”

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Moving your data storage to the cloud is a smart move as there is an explosion of data day by day and systems are struggling to store all that data effectively and securely. Cloud computing has proven not only to be cost effective but also frees the businesses to concentrate on the daily workings while the cloud takes care of details such as security, support, maintenance and the ever-so-important backup. Therefore, the demand for cloud computing is also growing and there are many companies sprouting up by the minute. So the consumer ends up in a dilemma of how to choose the right one.

To select the right type of cloud for you, analyze what type of data you are basically dealing with. For example, videos, photos and online documents will require software based cloud services. Other type of cloud services include Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) where the customer can transfer his data with virtually no changes made. All that the customer needs to manage is the operating system and its applications. When the customer wants to use the cloud or offer it as a service to others, then the Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is the right choice.

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By Eoin Jennings, General Manager Hosting Services, Easynet

As St Jude raged around the UK last month felling trees and bringing commuter trains to a standstill, a collective sigh could be heard: cloud naysayers finally admitting defeat.  

Whether or not businesses had a mobility or cloud strategy, those tech-savvy employees across the country armed with BlackBerries, tablets and Dropbox accounts were comfortably and productively working away, and their organisations were thankful. For many businesses, it will take these 90mph winds to blow in the seeds of change.

Businesses are adopting cloud services, albeit more cautiously than anticipated. Much has been written about vendors hyping cloud services, and adoption rates not living up to the propaganda.  Indeed TechTarget’s Cloud Pulse Survey found that public and private clouds have reached the same level of market penetration at around 25%.  

Adoption is moving in the right direction, though, and research from ISG …