Enterprise-level cloud storage provider Nirvanix has unexpectedly announced it is shutting down effective September 30, with customers frantically searching for another place to store their data by then.

Several sources have reported the news, with the Wall Street Journal claiming that the storage provider had lost its latest round of funding, and had run out of money to continue operating.

The Twittersphere was varied as the community took the news in:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The initial reaction from a lot of the press was pessimistic: what if people can’t trust the cloud?

Yet Ian Moyse, director at cloud CRM provider Workbooks, believes differently.

“Cloud, like any market, will have winners and losers, and customers need to do diligence on their provider, which should include off boarding – meaning how easy it is to get your data back in a useable format and move elsewhere should you choose or need,” he said.

“Good cloud …

Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Enterprise Solutions

IBM’s latest Big Data enhancements for its InfoSphere integration and governance product portfolio promote an emerging approach to reconcile Big Data with master data management (MDM). IBM’s official terminology is “building confidence” in Big Data. The innovation is a probabilistic approach based on the idea that when ensuring the validity and sanctity of Big Data, “perfect is the enemy of good.”

This is very much in line with our recommendations on managing Big Data sets where the actual lineage of the data may not be known with the same degree of certainty as internally generated data.

Highlights of IBM’s announcements include new “2-click” provisioning of data, information governance dashboards covering policy compliance status, integration with IBM’s existing data lifecycle management tools, enhanced data-masking capabilities, and a new “Big Match” MDM integration capability allowing ingested data to inherit policies associated …

Cloud computing is at the forefront for many organizations across the world. Experts believe it is the future of IT. Considering all the benefits offered by the cloud, making the transition may appear inevitable to enterprises. But just like any major technology, it also comes with certain caveats – security and privacy of business data and legal compliance among others. While these concerns are now well known, the most obvious disaster that can befall a business depending on cloud computing is still largely overlooked – what happens when the cloud provider shuts shop?
Consumers have already woken up to this scenario when Google shut down its popular RSS aggregator Reader. A cloud service provider may close its doors for any number of reasons: bankruptcy, business failure, breach of contract, being acquired by a bigger company or even regulatory problems. If the provider is located in another country or is privately held, the risks are even higher.

read more

Today’s announcement by the US Federal Reserve Bank that it will continue to buy $85 billion in commercial bonds per month will no doubt ease a lot of minds in developing countries. A nice story in The New York Times focused on this topic, noting the recent currency weakness in several of the current darlings of international investment: India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa, and Turkey.

No offense intended to anyone, but can we be a little more creative in the countries we cover? This group of countries is in the “BRICS+” group that routinely come up in conversations about investing in developing nations. They are all large economies, with various signs of strong growth in recent years.

But none of them score particularly well in our research, which looks at national ICT commitments and ranks 102 nations on how they are doing on a relative basis, ie, how well they do with the resources they have. Our research indicates that most of the international darlings have under-committed to their information technology infrastructure, and will disappoint a lot of investors and other backers along the way.

Travel to those places, and you’ll find a still-horrendous lack of physical infrastructure here, a large but weakly monetized economy there, enormous social problems here and there, and a boom driven almost singly by real estate over that away.

We encourage the business and government leaders of all the above-named countries to think about ICT and think about how better Internet access, faster Internet speeds, and higher IT budgets will lead to less income disparity and better lives for their people.

In our opinion, investors and companies looking for stronger places to put their money and people include several other places that we’ve identified as regional leaders: to name just a few, Morocco, Ghana, and Kenya in Africa; Malaysia and Philippines in Asia; Chile and Uruguay in South America; Bulgaria and Jordan in Southeast Europe & the Middle East.

Contact me to find out more and learn why we feel this way.

read more

Cool and disturbing at the same time. A fully interactive version can be found here where you can click each circle to get more information. I thought about adding all the numbers but stopped at 140,621,000 between 2012 and 2013.

read more

Cool and disturbing at the same time. A fully interactive version can be found here where you can click each circle to get more information. I thought about adding all the numbers but stopped at 140,621,000 between 2012 and 2013.

read more

Increasing the I/O performance of next-generation data centers and cloud computing environments is essential for supporting enterprise e-commerce, database and email applications. To successfully deploy high-performance storage, it’s essential for storage appliance software to be flash-aware and maximize solid-state drives (SSDs) for performance and hard disk drives (HDDs) for capacity, enabling an optimum price-performance storage solution.
With the explosive growth in and demand for information, next-generation data centers and cloud deployments require cost-effective storage solutions that provide end users with a high quality of service (QoS) in accessing and manipulating data. Usually, data centers – either corporate or cloud-based – run specific applications, such as database indexing and email exchanges. To provide a top QoS, these applications typically run on servers with high input/output operations per second (IOPS) and in turn provide access to data stored within the storage system.

read more

It’s the dream of every Internet entrepreneur to build a business that goes viral. Yet the sad truth is that most do not. It’s hard to think of any other industry with such a winner-take-all mentality as Internet software. The volatile combination of small market entry costs and big network effects creates wave after wave of disruption and consolidation, and quite a few millionaires along the way. Alas, virality is an elusive goal, particularly in SaaS. For this reason, SaaS Don’t #10 insists that you should not depend on network effects. Instead you should focus first and foremost on satisfying each and every single customer. But, if you’ve done that…bring on the hockey stick!

This is the fourth post in a series that paves the path to sustainable SaaS growth. The first post in this SaaS growth series introduced the concept of the SaaS growth ceiling, as well as the three fundamental SaaS marketing levers for breaking through it: customer acquisition, customer lifetime value and viral customer network effects. This installment explores the third, final and most funnest SaaS marketing lever: network effects, offering three proven SaaS marketing strategies to drive SaaS growth by getting your customers to sell themselves.

read more

It’s the dream of every Internet entrepreneur to build a business that goes viral. Yet the sad truth is that most do not. It’s hard to think of any other industry with such a winner-take-all mentality as Internet software. The volatile combination of small market entry costs and big network effects creates wave after wave of disruption and consolidation, and quite a few millionaires along the way. Alas, virality is an elusive goal, particularly in SaaS. For this reason, SaaS Don’t #10 insists that you should not depend on network effects. Instead you should focus first and foremost on satisfying each and every single customer. But, if you’ve done that…bring on the hockey stick!

This is the fourth post in a series that paves the path to sustainable SaaS growth. The first post in this SaaS growth series introduced the concept of the SaaS growth ceiling, as well as the three fundamental SaaS marketing levers for breaking through it: customer acquisition, customer lifetime value and viral customer network effects. This installment explores the third, final and most funnest SaaS marketing lever: network effects, offering three proven SaaS marketing strategies to drive SaaS growth by getting your customers to sell themselves.

read more