In today’s cloud-filled world, the conversation around operations management is – as it should be – all about service assurance.

Can IT deliver the server, storage, networking, and application resources necessary to meet business needs?

The focus on service assurance isn’t really a new concept – it’s been talked about since the transition from mainframe to client server architectures. But how it is talked about has significantly changed over time, reflecting the reality of datacenter evolution. Because of the emergence of virtualization, cloud, and converged infrastructure, how your organization talks about delivering operational excellence demands a new conversation.

But what shape should that conversation take?  Well, let’s start by looking at a few things that have been said in the past.

Enterprise nirvana

At the beginning of the 1990s, monolithic systems management frameworks from IBM, HP, and CA were the loudest voices in the room when it came to …

Research from Quocirca in conjunction with CA Technologies has revealed that opinion on cloud services in Europe is still fiercely divided.

The Quocirca report divides respondents into three potential categories; ‘enthusiasts’, ‘avoiders’ and ‘blockers’, and found that overall 57% of those polled were ‘cloud positive’.

In Europe, 22% were considered enthusiasts, for whom “cloud is the future for much of [their] IT requirement”, whilst a further 35% said they evaluate options to supplement in-house IT resources.

23%, interestingly, avoid cloud based services whilst a further 3% say they block their use altogether.

The UK figures reveal more overall who were cloud-positive – 60.3% compared to 57% – although only 17.5% were enthusiasts.

It was interesting to note the differences between job sector. Europe-wide results show that the telco sector is the most comfortable with cloud services – nearly 80% were positive. Compare and contrast with the government sector, where 30% polled …

In this demo at 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, Impetus Technologies looks at Ankush, a Big Data Cluster Management Solution and how to manage multiple vendor clusters from a single interface.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
The growth and success of Cloud Computing will be on display at the upcoming Cloud Expo conference and exhibition in Santa Clara, California, November 4–7, 2013.

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Virtustream announced on Thursday that it has been named a 2013 Vendor to Watch by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). In order to be recognized as a Vendor to Watch, companies must demonstrate customer value by delivering solutions for problems that have previously gone unaddressed.
“Virtustream continues to drive innovation in the cloud market by effectively addressing the diverse needs of enterprises,” said Torsten Volk, research director at EMA. “Companies that are moving mission-critical applications to the cloud must meet stringent business demands, and vendors such as Virtustream are making this possible with solutions that deliver a secure, compliant and flexible cloud environment.”

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Report Identifies Artisan Infrastructure’s IaaS Enabling Platform as one of the World’s Top Cloud Computing Offerings for the Service Provider Space
Artisan Infrastructure, the wholesale Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, ranks among the world’s Top 100 Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), according to the third-annual Talkin’ Cloud 100 report. The Top 100 CSPs generated more than $15.7 billion in combined cloud services revenues in 2012, up nearly 37 percent, according to the report, which is available now by visiting http://www.talkincloud.com/tc100.

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Report Identifies Artisan Infrastructure’s IaaS Enabling Platform as one of the World’s Top Cloud Computing Offerings for the Service Provider Space
Artisan Infrastructure, the wholesale Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, ranks among the world’s Top 100 Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), according to the third-annual Talkin’ Cloud 100 report. The Top 100 CSPs generated more than $15.7 billion in combined cloud services revenues in 2012, up nearly 37 percent, according to the report, which is available now by visiting http://www.talkincloud.com/tc100.

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Big data. Little data. Offsite data. On-premises data. Primary data. Archive data. Data comes in all shapes and sizes. As a culture of pack rats, we all love data of all kinds. We even conducted a whole campaign last year where we told everyone to “Embrace Storage Hogs.” And for good reason. The reality is that unless there’s a very compelling reason not to, most of us like to save most of our data “just in case.”
And based on the results of our latest survey, that may be exactly what you’re doing. This summer, while at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York, we conducted a survey of nearly 150 (cloud-disposed) attendees.
So what did we find?

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Involving the community can lead to very successful solutions and several companies are taking advantage of this trend.
Solutions from legacy IT vendors face increasing challenges from start-ups. These legacy solutions, while technologically advanced, fall behind when customers evaluate features/function. For example, Amazon built a very successful cloud solution with experience from a large community of start-ups and beat IBM to win the CIA’s multi-year cloud deal.
Several legacy IT vendors are seeing revenue drop as a result of increased losses to start-ups under current market conditions. While analyzing an uptick of such wins, I noticed a trend that the commonalities between winning solutions included strong community support. In this context, community is a collection of start-ups, partners and/or consumers. Below are some solutions enabled by strong community support that I believe are challenging legacy vendors’ solutions.

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Based on a report from TweetReach, a provider of Twitter analytics reporting, #BigData gets the most impressions on the @CloudExpo Twitter site with an estimated reach of 130,391 accounts and 165,043 impressions on Twitter. As the number one contributor on the topic of BigData, @CloudExpo also provides the highest exposure with over 57,200 followers, with @BigDataExpo providing the most retweets and mentions.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley will feature 175+ sessions from a rock star conference faculty chosen from among the leading industry players in the cloud computing and Big Data worlds.
All the main layers of the Cloud ecosystem will be represented – the infrastructure players, the platform providers, and those offering applications. The high-energy event is a must-attend for senior technologists from CEOs on down – including CIOs, CTOs, directors of infrastructure, VPs of technology, IT directors and managers, network and storage managers, network engineers, enterprise architects, and communications and networking specialists.

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