As soon as Apple’s fiscal first-quarter numbers hit Wall Street Wednesday,
its stock dropped.
Thirty minutes into the after-hours conference call it was down 8% to
under $475 after losing 30% of its value since it hit a $705 all-time high in
September and was roundly cheered as the most valuable company on earth.
Fifteen minutes later it was down 10% to $462 and change. By the end of
the call it was grazing the other side of $460, down 11%.
A new survey from Brocade has revealed the extent of the changing CIO role in enterprise – and put cloud adoption as a major driver of it.
The research, which asked 100 CIOs from the EMEA sector (Europe, Middle East, Africa) found the following top-line takeaways:
There were other interesting results, with 75% of respondents unsure whether their company’s SLAs (service level agreements) will meet minimum requirements, which may come as a surprise.
Of course, a downwardly revised SLA will mean downtime and greater IT costs, but Forrester …
Just over ten years ago I went backpacking in Brazil for a month with some friends. We arrived in Rio de Janeiro, one of the world’s great party towns, at nightfall and found, to our dismay, that we couldn’t get a caipirinha for love nor money. It turned out that we’d landed on the day of the presidential elections and there was a blanket ban on sales of alcohol because the authorities were concerned that violence might erupt if politics mixed with booze.
Eventually we managed to persuade a man running one of the street food outlets on the Copacabana beach to sell us a beer. He told us that the winner of the election would be a man known as Lula. Lula, leader of PT, the worker’s party, went on to become perhaps the most popular president in the history of Brazil, introducing sweeping social reforms designed to lift millions of Brazilians out of poverty.
Red Hat closed its acquisition of ManageIQ in December shortly after it agreed to buy the joint for $104 million and on Tuesday morning it said in a webcast that it’s going to integrate ManageIQ’s cloud management and automation widgetry with its CloudForms Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform to expand its all-important open hybrid cloud portfolio.
When this will happen is unclear.
ManageIQ lets users deploy, manage and optimize across private clouds, public clouds and virtualized infrastructures.
Red Hat’s Cloud Business Unit general manager Bryan Che said, “We’ve worked with ManageIQ as a partner to our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization platform with successful joint customers and saw an opportunity to expand our hybrid cloud management capabilities with an even closer relationship with ManageIQ’s compelling portfolio. With the closing of the acquisition, we now begin work to integrate ManageIQ’s enterprise cloud management and automation technologies with our complementary Red Hat CloudForms hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution and our open Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management solution. With this combination, we can offer our customers an unparalleled open hybrid cloud management portfolio.”
Hybrid cloud is early, yet promises to accelerate the enterprise adoption of cloud computing. The question is: who will lead and what impact will they have on how enterprises buy technology solutions?
There are a handful of publicly-traded companies vying for leadership in cloud computing, among them Amazon, VMware, Microsoft, and Rackspace. There is even a cloud ETF (SKYY). That is why the current debate regarding the future of public, private and hybrid cloud operating models is significant to the futures of these companies, as well as many others in hardware, software and even data center co-location.
If the public cloud becomes the cloud of choice for enterprise IT pros, Amazon will have a commanding position in the evolution of the multi-trillion enterprise IT market. Likewise, if private cloud establishes market leadership then VMware could transform its leadership in server virtualization into cloud leadership and have even greater access to IT budgets. On the other hand, hybrid cloud promises the opportunity for VMware and others (including Microsoft and Rackspace) to establish leadership by delivering even greater levels of IT power and efficiency by integrating public and private cloud functionality into more powerful hybrid clouds.
First Data Corporation and web host Go Daddy today announced Go Daddy Payment Solutions. The application is designed to serve the electronic payment needs of the small business community.
Go Daddy customers will be able to leverage Go Daddy Payment Solutions to process eCommerce transactions online. Go Daddy gives customers the ability to go from an idea to a full-blown Web presence – including a website, shopping cart and online payment acceptance – in a few simple steps.
“Go Daddy’s main focus is to help small businesses get bigger without investing a lot of time, money or energy,” said Neil Proctor, senior director of Development, Go Daddy. “First Data’s payment processing gives Go Daddy customers the chance to quickly enable credit card payments online, expanding their revenue growth opportunities exponentially. The best part is, if customers have any questions, they can reach out to Go Daddy’s world-class customer service to get them answered quickly.”
To find out more about Go Daddy Payment Solutions, please visit http://www.godaddy.com/ecommerce/merchant-services.aspx.
Prelert today announced Anomaly Detective, an advanced machine intelligence solution for Splunk Enterprise environments. The introduction of Anomaly Detective expands Prelert’s line of diagnostic predictive analytics products that integrate with a customer’s existing IT management tools and quickly provide value by finding problematic behavior changes hidden in huge volumes of operations data.
Anomaly Detective’s self-learning predictive analytics with machine intelligence assistance recognize both normal and abnormal machine behavior. Using highly advanced pattern recognition algorithms, Anomaly Detective identifies developing issues and provides detailed diagnostic data, enabling IT experts to avoid problems or diagnose them as much as 90 percent faster than previously possible. IT personnel who utilize Splunk Enterprise software in infrastructure, applications performance and security can now additionally benefit from machine learning to automatically spot anomalies and isolate their root causes in minutes, saving time and resolving problems before the business is impacted.
Anomaly Detective is downloadable software that installs as a tightly integrated application for Splunk Enterprise. Because it leverages recent advances in machine intelligence, Anomaly Detective is 100 percent self-learning and requires minimal configuration. Anomaly Detective augments existing IT expertise, empowering IT staff to spend less time mining data, reduce troubleshooting costs and improve compliance with service-level agreements — all of which contribute to a rapid return on investment.
“Prelert Anomaly Detective is like a machine intelligence assistant, using advanced machine learning analytics to analyze the massive amounts of IT operations management data produced by today’s online applications and services,” said Mark Jaffe, CEO of Prelert. “We’ve packaged the power of big data analytics, normally focused on solving business problems, in easy-to-use machine intelligence solutions that are greatly needed in the real world of IT operations.”
Prelert Anomaly Detective is now available and easily downloadable from the Prelert website and from Prelert resellers. Pricing is based on the amount of data analyzed per day, starting at $1,200 for environments indexing more than 500MB of data per day. For information on pricing for Splunk Enterprise, go to http://www.splunk.com/view/how-to-get-splunk/SP-CAAADFV.
Private clouds are a great way to provide real-time service delivery of IT resources with a single-tenant, customized, secure environment. However, the challenge of scaling and managing physical resources still exists. The solution may be to leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider to build an off-premise Private Cloud to add scalability to your current private cloud.
In his General Session at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer, discusses:
How to achieve scalability at Internet speed
Why it makes technical and business sense to host the cloud off-premises
What hosting options are available
ManageEngine today announced it now manages Android devices in the latest version of its desktop and mobile device management (MDM) software, Desktop Central. The move extends the mobile device management support in Desktop Central to include smartphones and tablets running Google’s popular mobile OS as well as devices running Apple iOS.
“The mobile usage trends will eventually drive sharp increases in demand for enterprise MDM solutions that embrace BYOD while ensuring enterprise data security,” said Mathivanan Venkatachalam, director of product management at ManageEngine. “The growing Android market and increasing demand for Android support among our customer base encouraged us to add Android support to Desktop Central as quickly as possible.”
Android MDM in Desktop Central provides data wipe, mobile application management, configuring profile/policy and default option to run mandatory background applications
Desktop Central 8 is available immediately. Prices start at $10 per computer annually for the Professional Edition. The MDM add-on module support is available on all the editions, and prices start at $15 per device annually. The Free Edition of Desktop Central manages up to 25 computers and two mobile devices. A free, fully-functional trial version is available at http://www.manageengine.com/products/desktop-central/download.html.
FlixMaster, the platform for Enterprise Online Video, today announced it has secured $1.125 million in additional funding from a syndicate of investors led by New York-based investment firm Golden Seeds.
The company said the investment would be used principally to expand sales and marketing efforts, particularly in the corporate enterprise markets. The company also announced it was launching new industry modules for its video editing and deployment platform designed for online retailing, corporate customer service and media markets.
FlixMaster is addressing the growing need for more creative uses of video by corporations and media properties alike. To date, Enterprise Video technology has been primarily focused on video distribution and content management, but as those technology challenges fade, creative professionals are looking for platforms that improve content quality and increase viewer engagement.
“The promise of Enterprise Video has been high engagement that converts interaction into action,” said Erika Trautman, co-founder and CEO of FlixMaster, a Boulder, CO-based graduate of the prestigious TechStars program. “The problem is, most videos simply transfer a conventional TV-like experience to the web, and even though most viewers go to the video first, they’re gone in a matter of seconds.”
“Brands need to produce interactive video experiences that draw viewers in and keep them there. And companies need to be able to produce those experiences at scale and at a reasonable cost. That’s what FlixMaster offers,” she continued.
The company was recently engaged by HBO to develop an interactive online experience for the newly launched Cinemax series, “Banshee”, that incorporates FlixMaster video technology and makes heavy use of the Player API. The online destination, Banshee Origins, provides audiences with an enhanced viewing experience, driven through interaction with the video player itself, and gives them an opportunity to explore the show and interact with its characters and themes. Last summer, FlixMaster’s technology powered an acclaimed web experience for the USA Network show, “Covert Affairs.”
