Salesforce.com, the poster child of the cloud computing era, has agreed
to pay a giant $2.5 billion – at an equally giant 53% premium – for
ExactTarget, the Indianapolis-based company that got started very late in
2000 intent on stuffing marketing e-mails from mid-sized companies into
people’s inboxes, something now called social marketing.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you’ve got to give Amazon.com credit. Not only is Amazon Web Services (AWS) the undisputed leader in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market, they are moving faster than their competition. Try as their competitors might, they all appear to be losing ground to this Cloud juggernaut.
Amazon’s low-cost Wal-Mart strategy of continually lowering prices as they achieve ever-greater economies of scale is squeezing the profitability of direct competitors, forcing most of them to look for niches Amazon hasn’t targeted…yet.
In fact, Amazon has built a classic virtuous cycle. They got IaaS to work, disrupting the pre-existing data center outsourcing market. They achieved market dominance, enabling them to be the low-cost leader. And they figured out how to scale, facilitating unlimited growth.
This lethal combination of market forces positions them to grow ever larger as they squash competitors like bugs under their sandals …
IBM Tuesday said it’s going to acquire SoftLayer Technologies, the Dallas-based outfit that’s supposed to be the largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider in the world.
Terms were not disclosed but the good ole rumor mill, touched off by a Reuters report in March about how both IBM and EMC were interested in buying SoftLayer, pegged the deal at around $2 billion. Others venture that it could be worth as much as $2.5 billion.
Either amount makes it the largest acquisition of IBM CEO Ginni Rometty’s new reign.
Calling it a full-fledged tree-hugger may be a slight overstatement, but cloud computing is being viewed as an eco-friendly service that reduces the number of machines and the carbon footprint of enterprises.
Thanks to virtualization and server utilization rates of around 60-70 percent, large, shared data centers are usually able to employ fewer physical machines to achieve the same capacity as an equivalent number of in-house data centers, according to an article on GreenerIdeal.com.
Large data centers can also dynamically allocate resources where they’re needed, where individual enterprises must often buy more machines than they need to handle peak data loads. This reduction in physical servers means less energy expended in running, cooling, manufacturing, transporting, and replacing these machines, and that can mean big savings over time.
Hadoop is delivering on its promise to provide Big Data analytics for enterprises at a fraction of the cost of proprietary MPP systems. The combination of industry-standard hardware and open source software is the key combination behind this success.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Wing Au, Director of Server Application at Supermicro, will discuss how to utilize innovative multi-node server architectures for Hadoop DataNode designs. He will illustrate the flexibility that allows using similar building-blocks to build starter Hadoop configuration up to hyper-scale and power-user implementations. He will also share Data Center environmental optimizations and management software suites that help to scale out your Hadoop deployment.
The hybrid cloud provides compelling benefits to the enterprise – the security of the private cloud combined with a public cloud’s scale and scope. However, hybrid clouds also experience similar challenges. Increasing traffic demands combined with their dynamic nature can result in costly overprovisioning or inefficient under-provisioning of resources. OpenFlow-enabled SDN as a foundation for hybrid cloud provides a uniquely scalable and cost-effective solution to these problems.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Marc LeClerc, a representative of the Open Networking Foundation, will discuss this solution to the provisioning issues of the hybrid cloud and the resulting benefits.
IBM is acquiring SoftLayer, a privately held cloud infrastructure provider. IBM hopes SoftLayer will enable IBM to marry the security, privacy and reliability of private clouds with the economy and speed of a public cloud, with Fortune 500 companies the target market.
IBM says the majority of the Fortune 500 have concerns about how cloud will work with the IT investments they have already made, and many have been waiting for a cloud that is better than “good enough.” As a result, although cloud is growing quickly, it’s still only a small part of the total IT spend. There’s a lot of opportunity for IBM to capitalize on.
SoftLayer has a breakthrough capability that provides an easy “on ramp” especially for the Fortune 500 to adopt cloud. And for the SoftLayer born-on-the-cloud customers, IBM opens a new market into the enterprise. Specifically, SoftLayer allows cloud services to be created very quickly on dedicated servers — rather than a virtual ones, which is the norm in the public cloud.
By building out a cloud on a dedicated server , a client no longer has to worry about sharing computing resources with other companies — thereby improving privacy, security and overall computing performance. By using dedicated servers, software that was built for on-premise use can be more easily ported to the cloud. It doesn’t have to go though as much heavy configuration as it does with a virtual server, which it was not developed to work with.
This capability will be added to IBM’s SmartCloud portfolio. IBM SmartCloud offers 100 cloud-based solutions for line-of-business execs including Watson Engagement Advisor; hybrid solutions such as IBM PureSystems, mission-critical cloud services for SAP on our SmartCloud Enterprise+ and the best private cloud solutions in the market.
Headquartered in Dallas, SoftLayer serves 21,000 customers with a global cloud infrastructure platform spanning 13 data centers in the U.S., Asia and Europe. SoftLayer excels at running cloud-centric, performance-intensive applications in mobile, social, gaming and analytics.
IBM is also announcing today the formation of a new Cloud Services division that combines SoftLayer with IBM SmartCloud into a global platform, reporting to SVP Erich Clementi, IBM Global Technology Services.
Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed and the acquisition is expected to close later in 2013 following standard regulatory review.
“Cloud computing in the enterprise is all about workloads,” said Ric Telford is Vice President of IBM Cloud Services, as IBM today announced its intent to acquire SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. – the well-respected provider of a wide array of options for hosting applications in the cloud.
The cloud will soon supplant on-premise security initiatives. IT is at a crossroads: the acceptance of cloud-based computing as the chief business driver.
Erasmus Wilson, the celebrated Oxford professor once proclaimed, “When the Paris Exhibition [of 1878] closes, electric light will close with it and no more will be heard of it.” History is littered with those who refused to embrace the obviousness of the future. Didn’t Digital founder Ken Olsen prognosticate “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” in 1977. (His company was broken up for parts after its acquisition by Compaq in 1998.)
There are many of us who have been around IT long enough can even remember how storing 1MB on a 3.5” hard case floppy disk was cutting edge IT. Yes, I remember punch cards too, but the point is that IT grows up. It advances, evolves. Thirty years on from those halcyon days, IT is facing its latest crossroads: the movement away from on-premise solutions and the acceptance of cloud-based computing as the chief business driver.
Before we talk about the cloud of tomorrow, Kevin Clarke, Director of Cloud Platform Engineering for Verizon Terremark, describes, in his General Session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, what core characteristics compose the cloud of today, and discusses three fundamental features: independent architectures, multi-tenant infrastructures and the concept of ‘different controls.’
While the cloud is able to house different applications in terms of complexity and criticality, most enterprise applications are not apt for virtualized environments, such as cloud computing. Clarke explores the challenges that exist in running enterprise applications, or what he calls the “hard stuff” and the ideal features future cloud offerings should provide enterprises. These include security, dependencies, application management and performance.