Excitement | Today was an exciting day! You received your shiny new Converged Infrastructure package from your leading technology partner. There was a buzz surrounding the delivery, everything was magical – the unboxing of the huge crate, the wheeling of these beautiful package into your datacenter, the plugging in and having all the servers, storage arrays and network switches instantly blink at you. It was a sight to remember.
You know, your CI package is leading edge technology that will bring unprecedented agility and efficiency to your users. Authorized users will be able to request and receive IT resources in minutes, not days and the business leaders will be thrilled by your ability to push out exciting new applications quickly. It was only 4 weeks ago that you had approved the quote and here it was facing you.
And yet no champagne corks are hitting the ceiling.
In the last MetraTech blog I introduced you to the Conferencing and Collaboration (C&C) market and highlighted the way in which C&C players uniquely approach the market. I challenged you to think about what was possible if IT didn’t have “no” in their vocabulary; to imagine the possibilities of empowering product management teams to conceive of and roll out new services; providing an enterprise sales team with the ability to negotiate tailored agreements with enterprise customers and partners; eliminating the need to worry about how the billing system could turn a tailored agreement based on usage, volume, product type, service bundle, region and just about any other metric into reality. We also discussed in another blog why service providers in so many verticals are unable to think about what might be possible in the present never mind the future. Many are faced with the very real challenge of a billing system that is not able to support their business needs, but the fear and risk associated with change often causes decision paralysis.
Foxconn wants to hire 3,000 people to support the development of new devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops and TVs based on Mozilla’s Firefox operating system.
That’s three times the 500-1,000 engineers it initially said it wanted to develop HTML5 and cloud applications for the open source OS.
“There will be no budget limit for fostering software talent,” it now says.
It previously said it is “executing on a vision of eight screens, one network and one cloud” and “developing a brand new integrated approach to providing hardware, software, content, and services.”
On today’s Smarter Planet, enterprises are turning to the cloud to revamp existing business models and manage an unprecedented rate of change. In fact, the number of enterprises moving to cloud computing will double within the next few years as they seek to transition IT from a cost center to a strategic center of business innovation.
In this 12th Cloud Expo General Session, Dr. Angel Luis Diaz, VP of Software Standards, Cloud Labs & HiPODS for IBM Software Group, discusses how the IBM SmartCloud family, including PureSystems, helps enterprises optimize their traditional IT environments while driving rapid business innovation through new engagement models. In addition, he also illustrates through specific client examples the value of open standards initiatives like OpenStack and TOSCA, and how they are crucial to an interoperable and agile cloud computing infrastructure.
AppScale Systems, a newly surfaced start-up that has its own AppScale Cloud Platform, an open source runtime system for web applications and mobile application back-ends, just introduced its first commercial product, ScaleSafe, which automates failover and migration of cloud apps and data that use Google App Engine services for their implementation.
AppScale was started by Woody Rollins, the founding CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, and Chandra Krintz, the University of California, Santa Barbara professor who happens to be married to Rich Wolski, another Eucalyptus founder now on its board.
AppScale’s mission is to commoditize public cloud services beginning with those in Google App Engine, the public cloud Platform-as-a-Service that simplifies writing, deploying and scaling applications and mobile app back-ends so developers can focus on their app rather than worry about its underlying systems and services.
Data security is no joke. Whether composed of clients, patient, or business information, your data is the lifeblood of your business, and can be one of, if not the most, important parts of achieving success. With so many threats facing your data, both in and out of the cloud, the scale of achieving data security can become overwhelming. Here are a few recommendations for getting your data safe and sound.
Recognize the anatomy of a data breach: You need to understand exactly what impact will a breach have on your business. This varies from company to company, department to department. For example, if an online blog has a data breach, the impact criticality of that may be fairly low. Some user accounts might be exposed, but critical information has not been exposed. Compare this to the impact of data breach on a healthcare company (with its volumes of patient data) – you can see quite a significant difference in terms of how the data breach will impact an organization.
There has been quite a buzz around the power of the alleged NSA eavesdropping considering the insights that the NSA Whistleblower, Edward Snowden, presented to the American public.
The NSA Whistleblower exposed how our digital identities are being captured, stored, analyzed, and categorized, allegedly by NSA, as well as companies that publicly state that they store and analyze your data (Facebook, Linkedin, Google email, etc.). The power of the NSA system, according to Snowden, is that they aggregate your digital communications across telephone, internet, web, mobile app, and email data.
Hostway, a provider of cloud, managed and hybrid hosting services, on Thursday announced the results of a survey the company conducted at Cloud Expo 2013 New York, held June 10-13, and widely attended by IT infrastructure professionals and others focused on Big Data and cloud computing issues. The survey was designed to measure participant perceptions about security, scalability and performance of key services in public cloud vs. in-house hosting environments.
On security issues, survey participants were asked which of the following services is more secure in a public cloud vs. an in-house setting: web servers, database servers, email services, CRM and additional collaboration software. Signaling a significant shift in perceptions, even among audiences generally comfortable with cloud services, 62% of survey respondents indicated that key services are more secure in a public cloud environment.
Which market has already demonstrated multibillion-dollar revenues (forecast to grow to more than $7.5 billion by 2016), will have a 1.3 billion-strong mobile workforce reliant on it, continues to push the envelope on business model flexibility and innovation, leads the charge on cloud adoption and has a major impact on the way in which companies conduct business with their employees, customers, partners and suppliers? Would you be surprised if I were to say conferencing and collaboration (C&C)?
How many of us were using Web-based conferencing before the term “software-as-a-service” (SaaS) was even coined? C&C providers were doing multiprotocol mashups with public switched telephone network (PSTN) audio, T.120 data and H.323 video before the concept of a Web services mashup even existed. They were also doing billing on behalf of (BoBo) for resellers more than 10 years ago. Today, this market continues to evolve in many areas, including advanced IP audio codecs and noise-canceling techniques, seamless Web control, telepresence, social networking, unified communications and virtual meeting collaboration tools such as virtual, interactive whiteboards. It has also been a market that has exhibited the greatest innovation in pricing, bundling schemes and distribution and partner strategies. For those of us providing billing and compensation for the leaders in this market, we would say, “Yes, tell us something we don’t already know.” For outsiders, all of this comes as somewhat of a surprise even as they cannot imagine a work environment that does not heavily rely on this always-there service.
Our more interconnected planet is accelerating the adoption and convergence of next-generation architectures, in the form of cloud, mobile and instrumented physical assets. Organizations that can effectively balance optimization and innovation, will be in a position to leverage new systems of engagement, out maneuver their peers and achieve desired outcomes.
In this 12th Cloud Expo Opening Keynote, Dr. Daniel Sabbah, CTO and General Manager, Next Generation Platform, at IBM Corp, detailed the critical architectural considerations and success factors organizations must internalize to successfully implement, optimize and innovate using next generation architectures.