IBM recently made three significant announcements about its vision for how cloud computing will be adopted by enterprise customers.
First, IBM believes that open standards are needed to drive increased customer demand for workload portability in a hybrid cloud environment. Second, IBM has segmented the adoption of cloud computing as two different strategies serving two different reasons to adopt cloud computing, namely a cloud-enabled approach and a cloud-centric approach. A third element that IBM introduced to the cloud debate was role-converged infrastructure solutions, and how these will enable both of the cloud adoption strategies.
Ovum considers that the concept of an open standard-based approach to cloud computing represents one such way a technology can gain wider adoption, but cautions that it will need wide cross-vendor support to make an impact on the market.
IBM backs OpenStack as the way to wider cloud adoption
By Luca Smuraglia, General Manager, Enterprise Business, Easynet
I’m a numbers man. I like to look at all the data available and make a decision based on fact, not just instinct. And I’m not alone: whether at work or at home, we all like to arm ourselves with information before we make a decision.
It’s empowering and reassuring. E-Consultancy’s recent Multichannel Retail Survey found that 90% of consumers research online before buying in-store. We amass vast quantities of data as businesses and as consumers, and we’re constantly hearing about explosions of information, tsunamis of data. According to Ofcom’s International Communications Market Report, the average UK mobile connection consumed over 424MB of data – higher even than Japan (392MB) in second place and the United States (319MB).
Information as an asset to a business is more important than ever, but the term ‘big data’ is misleading …
Zoolz is promoting their cloud backup service with an offer to give the first million users 100 GB for free. For life. The catch? It uses AWS Glacier, Amazon’s cheaper alternative to S3. Glacier of course enforces a delay of 3 to 5 hours to retrieve files, and there are limits to monthly retrieval. But for the right purposes (like, “Store & Ignore”) it might be a real deal if you act soon enough. Their intro video explains:
“I came to HP cloud services because of the approach HP is taking with the cloud and how this opportunity was really a culmination of everything I’ve been doing in the industry,” noted Margaret Dawson, former VP of Marketing at Symform, about her recent move to HP Cloud Services as VP of Product Marketing & HP Cloud Evangelist. Dawson has been working in her new position since Feb 11.
HP Cloud Services, a start-up business within Hewlett Packard, will be delivering public cloud infrastructure, platform services, and cloud solutions for developers, ISVs, partners, service providers, and enterprises. Products include HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage, which are built on HP’s hardware and software, with elements of HP Converged Infrastructure and an integration of OpenStack technology.
The concept of “Just-in-Time” was pioneered in the manufacturing supply chain as a critical way to reduce costs by minimizing inventory. Implementing a just-in-time system that can handle unexpected demand is not a trivial undertaking. It requires the confluence of a number of disciplines such as analytics, statistics, sourcing, procurement, production management, brokerage and economics.
An interesting new idea is to take this concept pioneered in manufacturing and apply it to Information Technology resources. Doing this can provide an effective way to meet dynamically changing needs while minimizing the inventory of unused IT resources across a set of cloud services platform and providers.
Planning scalable environments isn’t terribly difficult, but it does require a change of perspective.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Phil Jackson, Development Community Advocate for SoftLayer, will broaden your views to think on an Internet Scale by dissecting a video publishing application built with The SoftLayer Platform, Message Queuing, Object Storage, and Drupal. By examining a scalable modular application build that can handle unpredictable traffic, you’ll be able to grow your development arsenal and pick up a few strategies to apply to your own projects.
“Our customers tell us they need better solutions for managing mobile applications. They started with crash analytics, but as mobile applications have become mainstream, they now want crash, performance and business analytics all in one easy-to-use solution,” said Steve Tack, Vice President of Product Management for Compuware’s APM business unit, as Compuware announced the availability of the free Compuware APM Mobile Application Monitoring Service, a solution that combines crash, performance and business analytics for native mobile applications.
“As mobile applications become industrialized, operations, development and business teams are looking for all three dimensions in a single Mobile APM solution,” said Tack. Compuware pioneered mobile APM, delivering solutions more than three years ago. This new free offering enables mobile application and operations teams to accelerate time-to-market for new applications and ensure great end-user experiences.
Gartner has been looking toward the future, and what it sees is a future in the cloud.
Gartner believes that service-led solutions – software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) – will usurp more traditional sourcing methods by 2015.
IT companies will need to “bridge legacy offerings and new services” to pave a way to the cloud for service providers, according to an article on CloudComputingNews.net.
Cloud services appear to be growing at a much quicker rate than other segments of the IT services market. Hardware and software support will grow slowly compared to IaaS and BPaaS (business process as a service), which will grow 13.1% and 47.3% in 2013, according to Gartner.
“Growth opportunities certainly exist for service providers with life cycle solutions in relation to the Nexus of Forces,” noted Eric Rocco, Gartner managing vice president. “However, this requires IT services providers to adapt to significant changes, including the growing influence of business leaders in technology investment decisions.”
The cloud provides an easy on-ramp to building and deploying Big Data solutions, particularly the latest technologies that favor scale-out architectures. Transitioning from initial deployment to a large-scale, highly performant operation may not be as easy.
Understanding the benefits, weaknesses, and performance characteristics of public cloud and bare metal cloud deployments can help you make the right decisions.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Marc Jones, VP of Product Innovation for SoftLayer, will provide some insight into how to select the correct deployment strategy based on your Big Data application’s needs. This insight is based on SoftLayer’s extensive testing while creating Big Data solutions on our bare metal cloud platform.
“David…, together with our select group of cloud experts, will provide our clients with an unparalleled wealth of cloud knowledge and ensure we deliver the most advanced and sensible cloud solutions possible,” said Chris Greendale, Founder and CEO, Cloud Technology Partners, as he announced that David Linthicum has been appointed Senior Vice-President at CTP.
