“Cloud made Big Data what it is today,” stated Scott Morrison, CTO at Layer 7 Technologies, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Cloud gave us the massively scalable infrastructure necessary to practically do Big Data,” Morrison continued, “as well as the engineering mindset that made it a front-of-mind solution for organizations that may not have considered it before.”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?
Scott Morrison: It’s about both, but one or the other may be the driving motivator depending on the organization.
Selling Solutions to Future Generations of Enterprise IT
Younger enterprise IT employees understand how easy it is to consume services from the cloud. They are becoming instrumental in helping corporations find better solution alternatives than currently available.
Enterprise IT‘s focus is moving from software development to data analytics, so it is not surprising that attention is also being paid to help them address these needs. The exhibit hall at the recent Strata conference (run by O‘Reilly Media) was packed with start-up companies demonstrating innovative data analytics solutions. One of the challenges in implementing analytics is customers‘ lack of skills. A common theme among start-up solutions was overcoming that skills barrier. Some of these solutions were designed to help users get started with simple BigData initiatives and then progress to solving more complicated problems.
Krish Krishnan from Sixth Sense presented on the first day of Strata and made an interesting comment on one of his slides: “The Gen Z and Millennial Generation of buyers will not be swayed by traditional engagement models of selling products and services.” Having worked with large enterprise vendors, I have seen many sales deals closed based on relationships between vendor account teams and enterprise IT buyers that often take years to cultivate. Customers take a long time to develop solution requirements in the form of Requests for Proposal (RFP) and then mandate proofs of concepts from vendors before they make a buying decision. While Krish identified these buyers as just Gen Z and the future, I think anyone past generation Y are ready for a new model.
Project Management and the Cloud
A Guest Post by Joel Parkinson, a writer for projectman
In the world of information technology, the “cloud” has paved the way for a new method for managing things on the Internet. In a cloud environment, computing “takes place” on the Worldwide Web, and it takes the place of the software that you use on your desktop. Cloud computing is also hosted on the Web, on a server installed in a “data center”, which is usually staffed and managed by people who are experts at technology management. What does the cloud mean to project management? Here’s an overview of what cloud project management is.
What Cloud Computing Means to Project Managers
Project management is defined as the “set” of activities and processes that are done to execute, and complete, a task that’s outsourced by one party to another. Project management ensures the high probability of success of a project, through the efficient use and management of resources. So what does cloud computing mean to project managers? According to PM veterans, cloud computing offers a greener and more sustainable project management environment, lowers cost, eliminates the use of unnecessary software and hardware, improves scalability, and eases the process of information-sharing between team managers and staff, customers and executive management.
Benefits of Cloud Project Management
In a project management environment, the cloud speeds up the whole process. As cloud services are available anytime, any day, the cloud can help a project management team hasten the process of execution, and provides improved results and outputs too. With the cloud, project managers and staff can also easily monitor, and act without delays as information is delivered on a real-time basis. Let’s look at the other benefits of the cloud for project managers.
Improved Resource Management
The cloud’s centralized nature also allows for the improved utilization, allocation and release of resources, with status updates and real-time information provided to help optimize utilization. The cloud also helps maintain the cost of resource use, whether its machine, capital or human resource.
Enhanced Integration Management
With the cloud, different processes and methods are integrated, and combined to create a collaborative approach for performing projects. The use of cloud-based software can also aid in the mapping and monitoring of different processes, to improve overall project management efficiency.
Overall, the cloud platform reduces the gridlocks and smoothens the project management process, and makes the whole project team productive and efficient in terms of quality of service for the customer, and it also enhances the revenues of the organization.
But does the cloud project management model mean a more carefree and less-costly environment? We could say it makes the whole process less costly, but not overly carefree. Despite the perks provided by the cloud, everything still needs to be tested and monitored, and every member of the project management team must still work upon deployment, and each of them should still be fully supported by project managers, and the clients. The cloud is perhaps the biggest innovation in the IT industry because it “optimizes” the utilization of resources within an enterprise.
The Future of Programming?
It is often the case that when you look at things a certain way, they become filtered over time, and you see what you expected to see. This happens to everyone, and while a wonderful adaptation to help handle all of the various inputs in our lives, has caused just about everyone to jump to conclusions because they think they know what they see. Neville Chamberlain did that. He (and his advisors) was certain that Hitler would keep the peace after he was given what the German people wanted. He saw Hitler as the same as other European leaders, and that was definitely not what Hitler was. There is no definitive proof that things would have gone differently had the allied powers put their foot down on Czechoslovakia. But the Munich accords, and the statement quoted above, definitively did put an end to Chamberlain’s career.
The Emerging IT Stack – Infographic
The IT stacks we saw and worked with until recently are almost things of the past now. This change, of course, can be mainly attributed to the Internet evolution and the way IT is being leveraged these days especially with the blurring of lines between personal and work-related IT use. The role and expectations from IT have vastly changed in an increasingly shorter amount of time than in previous years. The epiphenomenon of these expectations is the emergence of technologies like cloud computing, mobility, Big Data and social collaboration. This has had a dramatic and direct impact on how we look at the IT stack today and in the near future, what we plan to achieve with IT, how we are going to achieve them, and what skills or acumen we should be developing in order to succeed.
Of course, there won’t just be a single IT Stack per se (no one-size-fits-all), but we need a basic framework that will set the direction for future options. Future IT stacks that stem from the proposed one below won’t be driven by technology alone, but by the very nature of the applications and workloads they are created for; and equally, by the end user’s aspiration for newer experiences.
Cloud Expo New York: Delivering Digital Marketing on the Cloud
With the evolution of the Internet, organizations found new avenues to reach consumers in the virtual world. With the ubiquitous reach of cloud technologies, not only has rich media reached consumers in every corner of the globe, the very focus of marketing is shifting from product-centric to consumer-centric.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Ajit Sagar, Associate VP, Digital Transformation Practice at Infosys Limited, will focus on the application of cloud and Big Data to the business of digital marketing. He will cover the shifting trends in digital marketing supported by the cloud, the products that enable marketing applications on the cloud, omni-channel marketing through the cloud, and what it takes to deliver end-to-end marketing solutions on cloud-based infrastructures, exemplified through real-world case studies.
Unlocking the Promise of Open Cloud Computing
“Just as standards and open source revolutionized the Web and Linux, they will also have a tremendous impact on cloud computing,” said Robert LeBlanc, IBM SVP of Software, as IBM – one of the world’s largest private cloud vendors with more than 5,000 private cloud customers in 2012 – this week announced that its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture, including OpenStack.
Industry Standards Drive Cloud Adoption
With a focus on developing affordable solutions that drive innovation for our customers’ missions, I believe that the development of cloud standards can have a positive impact on cloud adoption. The more than 370 members of the cross-domain Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) are providing customer-focused business and mission requirements that help drive the adoption and usefulness of cloud standards, especially in the areas of security, interoperability and data portability. The public and private sectors are making important contributions and we need to continue the progress industry and government have made in the development of standards.
In thinking about the way standards positively impact cloud adoption, three main themes arise.
Unlocking the Promise of Open Cloud Computing
“Just as standards and open source revolutionized the Web and Linux, they will also have a tremendous impact on cloud computing,” said Robert LeBlanc, IBM SVP of Software, as IBM – one of the world’s largest private cloud vendors with more than 5,000 private cloud customers in 2012 – this week announced that its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture, including OpenStack.
Top Considerations for Your Hybrid Cloud Environment
Over the past five or so years, the phrase “cloud computing” has been tossed around frequently, in various contexts and quite often, meaning different things to different people. If you’re like most enterprises, you’ve already explored what cloud computing means for your organization. Businesses everywhere would love to develop or run applications in a cloud environment that accommodates workload bursts or app testing situations without having to purchase additional server equipment for what could essentially be a very short-lived need. In 2012, cloud computing truly became mainstream – and if you aren’t implementing the cloud in your infrastructure yet, you’re most likely planning for it in 2013.
Alternatively, you might be rethinking your cloud approach. Many organizations have implemented a cloud infrastructure that is impulsive and arbitrary, causing more problems than it solves and costing an IT organization time, money and resources. The development of cloud in the enterprise has proven to have a learning curve – one that will now lead to more and more organizations working to seamlessly combine in-house private clouds with the benefits of public and commercially packaged private cloud services in a hybrid mix.