Over the last week, the cloud world has witnessed a few important announcements from a couple of major cloud players. There were some new feature releases from Amazon and Microsoft. In addition, Amazon has announced the SAP Business Suite certification on AWS. Also, there was a ‘must read’ post published by Microsoft. Plus, ActiveState has announced about its significant revenue growth from the past year.
Here’s a quick summary of cloud happenings over the last week.
Beginning with the IaaS leader, Amazon has introduced the integration of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) with Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). This service allows a user to set up notifications for any RDS instances by creating an Event subscription. Next, Amazon has announced that AWS has been certified to host the SAP Business Suite environment in full production mode. Thus, increases the agility of the business, shorten deployment times, reduces deployment cost and scales up and down as needed.

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Compuware Corporation on Monday announced the publication of its latest Application Performance Management (APM) Best Practices collection, titled: “Optimizing Cloud & Virtualized Applications.” Written by thought leaders from Compuware’s APM Center of Excellence, this new volume provides best practices and techniques that enable senior managers, IT team leaders and practitioners to manage and optimize application performance in cloud environments.
Cloud and virtualization are two of the most transformational technology trends in the IT industry today. Initially, a common concern with the migration to these environments is centered on data integrity and security. As adoption moves from departmental applications and test environments to business-critical applications, managing performance and availability has become a critical issue. This volume examines the business and operational challenges associated with these changes.

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Collaboration in the cloud is a genius idea. Massively scalable and low-cost infrastructure is just what businesses need to bring seamless communication back to a mobile, global workforce. But the way that cloud has taken hold in most enterprises, via software-as-a-service (SaaS), may be too fast and loose for some of today’s enterprise data, which is highly regulated and thus must be highly secured.

Private clouds are growing in popularity as a result. A private cloud provides scalability while slashing IT costs and complexity, all without compromising security. For many organizations, it offers the best blend of public and private network.
As organizations plan their private cloud deployment, they should be aware of the typical issues that they may face. According to a June 2012 Forrester survey of US IT decision-makers that had deployed private clouds at their enterprise, 62 percent encountered problems with security and compliance, while 52 percent faced trouble integrating the cloud with existing tools and apps. Meeting service level agreements with customers and end users was a problem for nearly four out of 10 users, while nearly a third of IT buyers faced problems with software licensing or creating self-service access for users. The likelihood of these issues arising increases if your organization is running high-bandwidth applications such as video collaboration.

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IT is an acronym crazed world. So crazy that sometimes – when running out of three letter ones – we simply recycle them or add sequence numbers. Remember MRP, which used to mean Material Requirements Planning, but then became Manufacturing Resource Planning (called MRP II to avoid confusion), to only a couple of years – and a few trillion of investments – later, resurface as ERP.
In that era the term BPR also became popular. BPR stood for Business Process Re-engineering (see for example Hammer, M. and Champy, J. A.: (1993) Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution), a movement that in my perspective*really gained steam from the realization that throwing new technology (ERP) at existing processes, only offered limited improvement potential. As Business Process Re-engineering often resulted in massive redundancies and layoffs, BPR got kind of a bad rap, especially among employees and unions (remember those?).

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Professionals who work in the service field often have to juggle several tasks at once. Service techs have to make sales presentations and deal with customer service and still fix the problem they were hired for. They’re basically a one-man show that travels from site to site, the ultimate multi-tasker, with so many projects and phone calls to handle that a person can’t help but wonder how most even survive each day. But there’s something out there to help these guys out with their busy life. By working in the cloud, contractors and techs can gain an extra pair of arms to make each day count.
When your techs show up to a job they bring their toolbox and a bulky laptop. Their hands are extremely full. Everything they need to know is on that computer but it takes minutes to load, and they have to be on the phone at the same time talking to the office. If a problem should arise, they may have to leave the site and only return after obtaining the information or ordering the parts that they need. Then what happens if there are errors in that information? They have to head back again to the office. The tech wastes gas and the client wastes time. No one’s a winner here.

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Eucalyptus, the open source private cloud platform partnered with Amazon to give people hybrid clouds, has found selling support and professional services, the usual way an open source company makes money, isn’t working as a business because would-be customers are too tight-fisted.
As a result it didn’t grow as much as expected last year.
So it’s regrouping. It’s open sourcing its services and training, CEO Marten Mickos said, to focus on its product business, where it’s seeing early indications of large cloud implementations and the potential for a big business thanks in part to its alliance with Amazon, whose APIs are the recognized cloud standard.

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