By RyanKamauff
Led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures Palo Alto, Calif. (December 5, 2012) – ClearStory Data, a company delivering a new big data solution that makes it simple for business users to find, combine and interactively analyze data from corporate sources and disparate third-party sources, today announced the closing […]
Showing signs of growth through 2013 and beyond, the latest round of CRM forecasts illustrate how quickly behavioral and predictive analytics, greater usability, integration with social media and mobility are transforming this market.
Even with the most usable, easily learned CRM systems, enterprises at times struggle with adoption rates however. That problem has venture capitalists very interested in finding the next Salesforce.com, which a few have told me will look more like Facebook than a traditional CRM application.
Facebook’s future is going to be defined by how well they manage their migration to mobility, and the same holds true for CRM. Today there are 110 CRM applications in the Apple App Store and 47 in the Android App Store. Gartner predicts an exceptional growth rate of 500% by 2014 for mobile CRM. For CRM vendors to get there from here, they need to make usability and streamlined user …
IDC Analyst Simon Piff answers questions on behalf of IT Executives regarding the benefits and challenges of using one or a combination of clouds with an enterprise IT architecture, to include private, an on-premise, privately owned architecture; public, an off-premise, shared utility; and hybrid, any combination of the previous two. Regardless of what is selected, cloud has firmly established itself within the enterprise IT architecture and all organizations need to have a strategy to take advantage of what it has to offer.
The article discusses cloud strategy as the first and foremost step towards cloud adoption by larger enterprises. It talks about its merits and how vendors need to provide this critical piece in order to be successful in selling their cloud services.
Just returned from the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. It was a grand event with three days of serious business nicely interspersed with fun. With fifteen tracks to choose from, it had sessions for every IT role from developer to CIO, every cloud-based technology, companies of all sizes from startups to global enterprises, and partners to customers.
Jack Clark at ZDnet recently published a great series of articles on the current state of cloud computing, which included an article on utility computing called “Cloud computing’s utility future gets closer“. It’s one of the best reviews of where we are in the progression toward utility computing I’ve seen recently – probably since John Cowan’s blog series on a similar topic or the GigaOm white paper by Paul Miller called Metered IT: the path to utility computing.
First, Clark states the cloud is changing nearly every aspect of the technology markets and more importantly how technology is accessed and used by organizations and individuals. Completely concur. The question of “what is cloud” is getting clearer every day. Cloud computing is clearly not just a new term for an old model, but a very real shift in the way IT resources are delivered and consumed.
EMC and VMware confirmed Tuesday that they’re reshuffling their assets and forming a so-called cloud and Big Data “virtual organization” called the Pivotal Initiative under EMC’s chief strategy officer, VMware’s former CEO Paul Martiz.
VMware is contributing Cloud Foundry, SpringSource, Gemstone and Cetas. EMC is putting in Greenplum and Pivotal Labs. The move involves 1,400 employees, 600 from VMware and 800 from EMC.
The companies said they “expect to formally unite these resources by Q2 2013, with a specific operational structure to be determined.” So evidently for now it’s being run out of EMC.
Red Hat CloudForms is an open hybrid cloud-management product ideal for enterprises looking to move their Red Hat Enterprise Linux workloads to the cloud. It delivers the flexibility and agility that businesses want with the control and governance that IT needs. This lets your organization build a hybrid cloud that encompasses your heterogeneous infrastructures – thereby avoiding vendor lock-in – while managing the applications running in that cloud. Download this whitepaper to learn more.
http://www.something.com. This string of characters — the domain address for a web site or other internet service — pervades our culture. Today, virtually every organization and individual has confronted the challenge of reducing their professional or personal brand to fit into this namespace. But, after years of planning and debate, a big change is coming that will alter the way organizations and individuals identify themselves online; they will be able to personalize their web addresses in ways never imagined before. Even more compelling, Web Hosters will have a ripe new opportunity to “cash in” on this new sales conduit.
The governing body that manages Top Level Domains (TLD) is set to authorize and release over 1,000 new TLDs starting next year. Some examples of these include: .APP, .HOME, .STORE, .BLOG, .BOOK, .MOVIE and .MUSIC. Businesses and consumers will be able to get descriptive, memorable and relevant domain names for their Web Presence to a degree unprecedented in the history of the Internet. If I owned a bookstore in Manhattan, I probably already have .COM or .NET domain just like every other bookstore in the world. Next year I could have a .NYC domain to make search more relevant and a .BOOK domain to clarify that I am a bookstore and a .BARGAINS domain if I sell used books.
As a Web Hoster, you have a unique opportunity to grow or create your domain business. You will benefit from the increase in registration volume and higher prices that many of the specialized TLDs are expected to achieve. You can tailor offers and packages around specific TLDs that optimize customer acquisition and generate new revenue from existing customers.
At Parallels we want to make taking advantage of this opportunity as easy as possible by attracting customers now and preparing for the coming change.
This is a huge evolution of the Web and an opportunity not to be missed. Help your customers be successful by being their trusted Web advisor and generate new revenue at the same time… Don’t get left behind!
ScaleIO today announced the release of ScaleIO ECS v1.1 scale-out storage software, bringing operational flexibility and cost savings to high-performance databases, virtual servers, end-user computing, and high-performance computing.
ScaleIO ECS eliminates the dependence on complex, expensive external SAN storage and fabric by presenting business application servers’ local disks as a robust, high-performance, shared virtual SAN. ECS provides hyper-scalability and enterprise-grade resilience while also reducing storage costs by more than 80%, delivering a direct savings of over 28% on an organization’s total IT budget.
“As enterprises consolidate into mega-data centers and SMEs move to cloud and hosting infrastructures, data centers are rapidly expanding to many thousands of servers. As a result, data center operators face constantly increasing levels of complexity and costs,” explained Boaz Palgi, CEO of ScaleIO. “ECS helps organizations manage these challenges by providing a scale-out storage solution that was designed for hyper-scalability, high performance, unprecedented elasticity, and low total cost of ownership. ECS makes storage as inconspicuous as CPU and RAM. Running seamlessly alongside business applications, ECS enables data centers to be built wall to wall from commodity servers only.”
With ECS, any administrator can add, move, or remove servers and capacity on demand during I/O operations. The software responds automatically to any infrastructure change and rebalances data accordingly across the grid. ECS helps ensure the highest level of enterprise-grade resilience by deploying advanced clustering algorithms whose distributed rebuild capabilities achieve the quickest handling of failures while maintaining maximum storage performance.
Breaking traditional barriers of storage scalability, ECS scales out to hundreds and thousands of nodes. Performance scales linearly with the number of application servers and disks. Deploying ECS in both greenfield and existing data center environments is a simple process and takes only a few minutes.
ECS can be managed from both a command-line interface (CLI) and an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI). ECS v1.1 natively supports all the leading Linux distributions and hypervisors; works agnostically with any SSD or HDD, regardless of type, model, or speed; and runs on x86, ARM, and other chipsets—giving organizations complete freedom of choice. Additional functionality includes encryption at rest and quality of service (QoS) of performance.
“Software-defined storage enables IT organizations to break out of the traditional SAN model that requires a staff of minions to perform mundane storage tasks,” commented Matthew Brisse, storage research director at Gartner. “Software-defined storage enables the promise of storage elasticity to match storage needs for traditional, virtual, and service-oriented cloud strategies in response to the ever-changing business requirements found in most IT organizations.”
“ScaleIO offers an innovative solution enabling customers to utilize capacity on hundreds of compute nodes and to aggregate that capacity into a single shared LUN,” said Julian Fielden, managing director, OCF. “OCF has deployed and tested ScaleIO ECS on a cluster with several hundred nodes in a large customer’s high-performance computing environment. The software made previously unused capacity available to the business applications and to a distributed file system while demonstrating impressive performance and resilience.”
Cloud security and cloud compliance are one of the hottest topics in cloud computing. During the course of 2012 we’ve seen many companies, specifically software vendors providing healthcare solutions, migrating or implementing their software in the cloud. While cloud computing brings many advantages to such ISVs’ (pay per use, scalability, and automation to name a few), specific regulations, such as HIPAA in the healthcare space, forces such players to pay attention to specific cloud issues around regulatory compliance.
The HIPAA regulation specifically requires Protected Health Information (PHI) data to be encrypted while in motion and while at rest. Any decent security engineer will tell you that implementing cloud encryption can be easily achieved using the same tools used on-premise. Right? Wrong (or to be more exact, partially wrong): Creating an encryption scheme is indeed an easy task to achieve, but that’s the easy part. Doing so without trusting a third party (your cloud provider or the encryption provider) is the tricky part. While implementing encryption as part of an overall software enrollment strategy, one should consider the following: Is the key management server installed on premise or in cloud? On premise is the secure option yet limits many of the cloud benefits, while a key management cloud deployment is attractive from a total-system stand point, but until recently required you to trust a third party with your encryption keys.