Who are the world’s ICT leaders? What separates them from the pack? Where are the emerging ICT stars? Why are they important? How can you go “beyond the BRICs” in your analysis?

These are questions we’ve been working to answer over the past two years, with original research that looks at national ICT expenditures on a relative, “pound-for-pound” basis. We’ve engaged directly with government and business leaders in several countries – from each region of the world – to see how our findings can be used to improve national technology environments and, by extension, economic and societal growth.

In addition to our primary study, which is known as the Tau Index, we’re now embarking on targeted research for specific aspects of national ICT commitments—bandwidth, government policy, and the growth of various aspects of cloud computing.

As I’ve written extensively (search “Tau Strukhoff” – bing does a much better job than google), there are numerous results that may appear to be surprising. But if you’re looking for something that goes beyond traditional rankings that, in essence, show developed countries on top and developing countries on the bottom, visit us at www.tauinstitute.org or contact me via Twitter.

We have 102 countries in our index, and can provide views by region, income level, and other parameters.

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Who are the world’s ICT leaders? What separates them from the pack? Where are the emerging ICT stars? Why are they important? How can you go “beyond the BRICs” in your analysis?

These are questions we’ve been working to answer over the past two years, with original research that looks at national ICT expenditures on a relative, “pound-for-pound” basis. We’ve engaged directly with government and business leaders in several countries – from each region of the world – to see how our findings can be used to improve national technology environments and, by extension, economic and societal growth.

In addition to our primary study, which is known as the Tau Index, we’re now embarking on targeted research for specific aspects of national ICT commitments—bandwidth, government policy, and the growth of various aspects of cloud computing.

As I’ve written extensively (search “Tau Strukhoff” – bing does a much better job than google), there are numerous results that may appear to be surprising. But if you’re looking for something that goes beyond traditional rankings that, in essence, show developed countries on top and developing countries on the bottom, visit us at www.tauinstitute.org or contact me via Twitter.

We have 102 countries in our index, and can provide views by region, income level, and other parameters.

read more

CDW report looks at the health of cloud computing in terms of drivers, barriers and cost and says that ‘work imitates life’ with cloud adoption

It’s that time of the year again; companies have stopped predicting what the cloud is going to look like for 2013, with organisations instead concentrating on what the ecosystem is currently looking like.

CDW is a case in point. The IT product supplier has issued its ‘2013 State of the Cloud’ report, surveying 1,242 tech professionals, and concluded that ‘work imitates life’; a big driver of corporate cloud adoption is users’ experience of consumer services.

Nearly three quarters of respondents (73%) claimed that, in their company, employees’ use of personal cloud apps has “significantly influenced” the decision to move wholesale to the cloud. Similarly, just over three in five (61%) cloudy organisations agreed that employee personal devices have culminated in a faster move …

by, Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Parallels

Hypervisors were the right solution for the enterprise. Triple gains in efficiency over standard servers with added bonus of simplified manageability made it a king of the IT hill.  When ROI calculation can be done on the back of a napkin and IT can show the CEO millions in cost savings, problems are overlooked, careers are made, software vendors grow to multi-billion valuations and technology adoption jets to supersonic speeds. But a perfect solution for a cost center is not enough for a profit driven business.

The hosting business model depends on the ability to satisfy needs of customers not bound to annual budgets or locked to a single IT provider. Customers who have a choice. A choice of provider, cost, and performance for the solution they need. To profitably satisfy these needs, hosters use an alternative virtualization solution, container virtualization. The reason for that is that containers have a 3x efficiency advantage over hypervisors. Unlike the IT cost center, hosting providers need a high-density virtualization solution to compete in the market.  Container virtualization had no equal in hosting scenarios where efficiency matters.

In the pre-cloud enterprise, container usage was limited to specialized high density and performance scenarios like technical computing. Now cloud puts a new demand on virtualization in both enterprise IT and hosting worlds and for the first time brings these two separate worlds closer together. No matter where applied the cloud requires high density, instant provisioning, elasticity, and portability.

These requirements are now met by a new breed of container technology. Already, containers are powering Google search, Facebook sites, and internet banking in addition to hosting businesses. These new containers come equipped with optimized memory, rebootless updates and not only maintain the 3x performance advantage over hypervisors but further extend it.

The latest and most impactful cloud containers innovation comes in the form of a container in a file enabling simple backup, migrations, geo replication, and as demonstrated with Parallels Cloud Storage, High Availability solutions.  The new generation of containers show advantage over hypervisors in most cloud scenarios and for most user types, solidifying the container position in the hosting space and opening a new opportunity for container powered clouds and the enterprise.

Although a lot has been talked about becoming a social business, adoption is not universal in enterprises.
I have attended IBM’s Lotusphere conference many times, but this year was a different experience. The long-familiar yellow Lotus branded signs were missing as the conference was renamed “IBM Connect.” The move away from Lotus branding was expected after IBM’s recent repositioning of Lotus products, along with some new acquisitions under the umbrella of IBM Collaboration Solutions.
The change also reflects IBM’s overall direction away from selling products to customers to focusing on business outcomes. The three main themes of the Connect 2013 conference were Social Business, Smarter Commerce and Smarter Workforce. These new focus areas are designed to enable IBM to expand into new markets while enrolling new clients.

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This blog is the formal introduction to the CRaSH console for Mule on which I’ve been working for the past month or so. I’ve decided to interview myself about it because, hey, if I don’t do it, who will?
It is a shell that is running embedded in Mule and that gives command-line access to a variety of Mule internal moving parts. It’s built thanks to the excellent CRaSH project, a toolkit built by Julien Viet and sponsored by eXo Platform, which allows the easy creation of embedded shells.
Well, it’s easy to find it out. Let’s connect to CRaSH for Mule and ask for help:

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Public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, cloud bursting, cloud storming, elastic compute, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, the list of terms goes on and on ad-nauseam. Like it or not, cloud computing has taken hold as an important design consideration in companies ranging from small startups to large established enterprises. The concepts and technologies behind cloud computing have been around for quite a long time now so why is it taking so long for so many companies to move their applications and realize the benefits that cloud computing offers?
Getting beyond the ridiculous fear of the unknown, security concerns are a major inhibitor to cloud adoption but between private cloud and a slew of security technologies and methods that should only impact a small portion of applications. The real problem, in my opinion, is that nobody wants to fail and suffer damage to their personal and/or corporate brands. I’ve seen so many companies make a poor transition to cloud computing and it impacts their revenue and customer retention.

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Big Data analytics doesn’t go far enough according to Anant Jhingran, who was the brains behind IBM’s cunningly clever Watson computer as CTO of IBM’s lab in Silicon Valley.
“The information an enterprise typically collects – point of sales, procurement, even web site data – is not enough anymore,” he says. “In the new world of apps and APIs, the real value of data – the interaction with customers – has moved one or two tiers away from the enterprise and the more you know about the data in your app ecosystem, your ‘broad’ data, the better you’ll understand your business.”
This thinking has been distilled in Apigee Insights, the latest product from the increasingly promising Apigee, where Jhingran is now product chief.
Apigee Insights is supposed to leverage Big Data in a new way so a computer can draw sophisticated conclusions from weak unstructured data and produce business insights beyond what is currently possible.

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by, Vidya Ravichandran, Founder and President, GlowTouch Technologies

The promise of cloud computing has been plastered on every industry and technology outlet imaginable. The word “cloud” itself is overused and often applied in disparate, and even contradictory, contexts.  As technology professionals and service providers, it’s our job – our responsibility really – to filter through the marketing jargon, the sales fluff, and the rampant hype to fundamentally examine what the cloud, namely cloud-based infrastructure, can offer our business (and more importantly, our clients!).

It’s no secret that cloud technology has shifted the way many hosters approach their infrastructure planning challenges. Mounting pressure to “do more with less” and a fiercely competitive environment has forced the whole industry to become more savvy and resourceful.

A “rent-as-you-go” infrastructure is certainly appealing in today’s rapidly changing world. Cloud-based infrastructure allows hosting providers to leverage flexible, secure environments while keeping staffing lean and CapEx down. Plus, they provide improved speed-to-market, wide accessibility, redundancy, and syndication capabilities that traditional datacenters may not be able to offer. 

However, while back-end infrastructure configurations produce legitimate concerns for service providers (costs, maintenance, support, etc.), the front-end customer experience must remain top of mind. Today’s market increasingly demands “always on” service and hyper-responsive support. Thus, it’s the obligation of service providers to explore infrastructure configurations that allow them to expand in new directions quickly while delivering superior value and service to their customers. The notion of hybrid and diversified cloud infrastructure has emerged as a recent and potentially viable consideration for service providers looking to exploit the cloud to their customer’s advantage.

What factors should you consider when evaluating your organization’s current and future infrastructure plans? How can hosting providers effectively service and maintain their infrastructure to deliver high-quality services to their clients? How will a purely cloud-based infrastructure impact your customers’ user experience? How can I find a partner to help me implement, upgrade and manage my changing infrastructure?

These are just a few of the questions that service providers must thoroughly examine in order to determine how to best configure their infrastructure in a way that lets them quickly and effectively respond to evolving customer demands.

The Coverity Development Testing Platform enables developers to test early and often so they can assure code quality at each development sprint. By finding and addressing the most critical issues early, defects are cheaper and faster to fix. In addition, seamless integration with existing Agile development methodologies and tools helps maximize development productivity.

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