In this fast-moving discussion at the 12th International Cloud Expo, moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, topics discussed will be at a deliberately high level and will include:
What specific Cloud implementations can we be most proud of, to date?
What are the remaining barriers perhaps still preventing some companies from moving some of their on-premise computing to the Cloud, in whole or part?
What impact has the arrival of Oracle, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, HP, Cisco and the other giants had on SMBs – has it increased Cloud traction in that sector of IT?
Cloudant Halves Price for Pre-Revenue Start-Ups
Cloudant has announced an Accelerator Program to help young companies on a start-up budget go to market on its highly scalable, always-on NoSQL Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS).
The goal of the sales program is to make it more affordable for start-ups to launch their businesses on a data layer that gets them to market fast and doesn’t inhibit their growth or profitability.
The services provided through the program are identical to Cloudant’s full-priced services.
Cloudant figures many web and mobile start-ups are financially pressured into going to market without a growth strategy for their back-end operations and that sudden success can cripple the database systems powering their applications.
ScaleOut Software at Cloud Expo New York
ScaleOut Software, a provider of in-memory data grids (IMDGs), has announced that its founder and CEO Dr. William Bain will present at the upcoming Cloud Expo conference in New York City.
In-memory data grids (IMDGs) have seen rapid adoption over the last several years, driven by the need to help applications scale their performance as workloads grow. Because IMDGs host fast-changing (“operational”) data in memory across a cluster of servers, they also offer the ability to perform real-time analytics on this data as it flows through the grid. Recent advances in IMDG technology now enable Hadoop MapReduce-style analytics to be integrated into the IMDG’s architecture, performing parallel analysis even while operational data is changing. This exciting new capability creates the opportunity for real-time analysis in financial trading systems, credit card fraud detection, power systems monitoring, and many other applications.
Dr. Bain’s session will explain how to use an IMDG to perform real-time analytics and will describe recent benchmark results that demonstrate its power to deliver fast results for operational systems.
Panzura Raises Another $25 Million
Cloud storage start-ups don’t seem to be lacking for money. Panzura just raised $25 million in a reportedly oversubscribed D round that
should take it to profitability. That makes $58 million since it got started in
2008.
It’s the one that claims to have the most petabytes under management
and the largest companies in several key verticals like finance, media,
entertainment and government among its customers. It says it grew its
customer base 700% last year and at this point in 2013 has already exceeded
2012 bookings.
Countdown To Cloud Expo New York: SoftLayer CEO Speaks Out
“We really do things differently than anyone else in this space,” declared SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby, in a Q&A published yesterday in conjunction with IBM’s announcement of its definitive agreement to acquire SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. “We provide bare metal dedicated servers with the same delivery model as virtualized cloud instances: self-service, on-demand, pay by the hour or month.”
Lost in mobility: How location, opportunity, skills and time changed IT
In the mobile revolution, modern IT organizations can take advantage of the big loads of data spilling out of phones and tablets to work smarter and faster. These clingy devices are highly efficient information aggregators.
By adding context to each customer engagement, IT can pair a specific job with the best available service agent, based on whereabouts and situation, experience and schedule.
While most sensory data, such as voice pitch, body temperature and handgrip pressure, would overwhelm our analytical needs today, it’s easy to capture four variables with immediate impact on IT. By including context factors, such as geographical location, opportunity to add value, skill set and time of day, when dispatching assignments and managing operations, IT can thrill customers with unmatched service and optimize efficiency with smarter processes.
The benefits of context-based service engagements stretch from the front-office, where employees and customers request services, report issues and ask …
IBM announces SoftLayer acquisition – and competition hots up
Tech giant IBM has announced the acquisition of cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer, evidently hoping to strengthen IBM’s position in the cloud infrastructure as a service space.
It’s not hard to imagine the reasons around this. Dallas-based SoftLayer calls its platform “cloud without compromise”, and describes itself as the largest privately held cloud infrastructure provider in the world.
IBM’s cloud portfolio certainly hits home enterprise-side, particularly with its public backing of OpenStack, and SoftLayer’s technology will give the enterprises a wider range of cloudy options.
Therefore, it’s the perfect sort of company for IBM to swallow up, and adds another player into the bubbling IaaS mix.
The past couple of months have seen acquisitions, launches and rollouts galore from major players looking to get ahead in the race – or, perhaps more pertinently, get closer to Amazon, as CloudTech examined yesterday.
From Google’s Compute Engine release …
Crisis in the clouds – what to do if your service provider goes bust
Like businesses across all sectors of the economy, cloud service providers are far from immune to the worst ravages of the recession.
But when a provider does go bust what happens to the businesses that have put their faith, money and resources in finding a suitable partner and are now threatened with losing services, resources and data as a result of their collapse?
For many organisations, the main challenge is: when their data is held in the cloud; how do they retain control and ownership of it when their service provider goes under – and how easy is it to transfer that data to another service provider? Just as importantly: what mechanisms does the existing provider have in place to protect them if the worst does happen?
Typically, when organisations acquire on-premise software, it is written into their contract that they get control of the code in the event that the …
CloudByte Hires New CEO
CloudByte, the little start-up whose software-defined, software-only
ElastiStor widgetry guarantees cloud service providers (CSPs) quality of
service (QoS) to every application from a shared storage platform, has hired
former SanDisk general manager Greg Goelz as its new CEO.
SAP Named “Exhibitor Lounge Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that SAP has been named “Exhibitor Lounge Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
SAP will showcase the SAP HANA Cloud partner program and how they have made it faster, easier and more cost effective than ever for developers to build cloud applications on top of the SAP HANA Cloud platform.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.