If the leadership in your organization is mature and has a good track record – rest assured that a risk-mitigated decision to dabble in the public cloud is a vote of confidence in your direction.
It’s little more than innate human nature to strive to control the environment around us. From macro-level examples, including the very democratic foundation of our governments, to things we do every day; our desire to control is evident in all aspects of our lives. Have you ever lined up in the automated check-out line at the grocery store even though a “manned” (gasp!) cashier was available? You’re not alone.

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The session being given by Nicos Vekiarides at next month’s 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13, 2013] will examine in depth the problems created, common workarounds and why they fail, and how cloud storage can be a simpler, far more effective alternative. Attendees will learn about the common and often devastating issues surrounding the storage and management of data. Among the issues discussed will be offsite backup, offsite active archiving, business continuity, disaster recovery, disaster tolerance and scaling capacities in the data center and in the public cloud.

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Ariba Vice President Chris Haydon explains the company’s latest news and offers insights into how Ariba will be broadening its services procurement management value, mobile push, and AribaPay rollout.
We have some really exciting innovation coming in the near-term to Ariba in a couple of areas. First, let’s talk about Network RFQ or the Spot Buy. We think this is part of the undiscovered country, where, according to The Hackett Group, 40-plus percent of spend is not sourced.
By linking this non-sourced spend to the Ariba Network, we think we’re going to be able to address a large pain-point for our buyers and our sellers. Network RFQ or Spot Buy is a near-term solution that we announced at LIVE, and we’re bringing that forward over the next six months.

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ServiceNow is a global leader in providing cloud-based services used by enterprises to streamline and automate their IT operations. 

They’re known for their expertise in IT Service Management (ITSM), speed of development cycles, and commitment to open source including MongoDB and NoSQL. 

ServiceNow also has one of the most enthusiastic, rapidly growing and loyal customer bases in enterprise software. 

Matt Schvimmer, VP Product Management at ServiceNow, credits the goal of attaining 100% customer referenceability combined with intensive focus on user experience design as contributing factors to their rapid growth, in addition to continuous feedback cycles they use for capturing and acting on customer feedback.

Update from ServiceNow’s Financial Analyst Day and Knowledge13 

On May 13th they held their Financial Analyst Day at the Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, the same location they hosted Knowledge13, their annual user conference held May 12th through the 16th.  You can download …

Cloudian, the cloud storage software company, has got a Connector for Citrix’ CloudPortal Business Manager 2.0 that simplifies the management and delivery of Storage-as-a-Service (StaaS).

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VMware covered its flank Tuesday when it went into the public cloud business hoping to prevent its installed base of 500,000 strong from skipping off to the likes of Amazon or Azure – which are reaching out to the enterprise – simply because it didn’t have an Infrastructure-as-a-Service alternative that rents out virtual servers and storage over the Internet.

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Although often misunderstood, cloud computing ultimately relies on the same technological underpinnings as traditional server and storage options. While software, platforms and even infrastructure are farmed out to third-party providers, their ability to operate efficiently is constrained by the same physical laws as those which govern local server stacks. IT professionals and service providers, therefore, both have a vested interest in making the best use of the physical hardware available – and that means thinking outside the power box.
One of the most-touted benefits of cloud computing is reduced cost. By offloading server management to a public or hybrid providers, admins can save themselves the price of hardware upgrades, and bypass the costs of local energy. This can result in a significant savings over time, but represents only a transfer of responsibilities, rather than a re-imagining – the price of running multiple servers still exists; it is simply split between multiple users.

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The technology infrastructure of today’s business landscape has undergone dramatic shifts in recent years. The consumerization of IT, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement, and of course the cloud have revolutionized the way corporations manage data, complete transactions and communicate with employees and customers.
Organizations of all sizes are moving their document and email management needs to the cloud, with increasing numbers opting for a private cloud solution, a proprietary computing architecture that provides hosted services behind an organization’s firewall.

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The IT industry is nothing if not a breeding ground for an infinite variety of acronyms and neologisms. Alongside cloud computing today sits the term Big Data, which of course we understand to mean “that amount” of data which a traditional database would find hard to compute and process as a normal matter of job processing.
But what is a neologism if you can’t turn it into a neo-neologism? Big Data in its own right is a term that we are just about getting used to, but the sooner we move towards an appreciation of ‘fast Big Data’ the better.

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