As I am writing this, I am crossing the Atlantic for the seventh time in about two months. I’m on my way to CloudExpo West in Santa Clara, one of the few technology trade shows that are still growing. At the event I will be sitting on the last Object Storage for Big Data panel of the season. Robin Harris – aka StorageMojo – and I have been working hard this fall educating the industry on the benefits, challenges and opportunities of Object Storage. We’ve been trying to explain how the current generation of Object Storage platforms is so much different from the first attempt at it (EMC’s Centera), how it enables companies cope with the massive amounts of unstructured data that we are all generating and how companies can even monetize archived data by re-activating their archives.
Five Essential Components of Virtual Desktop ROI
Server virtualization was, for many in IT, a major win. IT departments and data centers were suddenly able to do a whole lot more with a whole lot fewer resources. Naturally, as time goes on, it’s become more and more attractive for IT to consider desktop virtualization.
Yet, the virtual desktop requires an infrastructure that’s simply not in place for many companies, and the ROI isn’t always clear from the start.
Big Data at Sears
Sears plus its acquired entity Kmart belong to Sears Holdings whose goal is to get closer to its customers. That requires big time analytic capabilities. While revenue at Sears has declined from $50B in 2008 to $42B in 2011, rivals like Wal-Mart. Target and Amazon have grown steadily with better profit. Amazon’s retail business has gone from $19B in revenue in 2008 to $48B in 2011, passing Sears for the first time.
Sears used IMS (IBM’s first generation database product) on mainframe plus Teradata. Its ETL process using IBM DataStage software on a cluster of distributed servers took 20 hours to run. Since their adoption of Hadoop back in 2010, one of the steps (taking 10 hours out of the 20 hours) ran at 17 minutes. Their slogan is “ETL must die”, as they would like to load raw data directly to Hadoop. The old systems consisted of EMC Greenplum, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle Exadata (four boxes) for analytical workload. That is all being replaced by Hadoop, Datameer, MySQL, InfoBright, and Teradata.
AppZero Offers Go Daddy Rescue Program
This free application migration offer is available to Go Daddy customers through the end of the year. Additional migrations, if any, will be priced on a case-by-case basis.
Commenting on the program, Greg O’Connor, AppZero CEO notes, “The Go Daddy situation is a great example of why there is a real business need to avoid cloud lock-in. AppZero’s Zapp application migration software will identify, extract, and migrate server applications from/to any cloud and will do it in minutes. In this case, for each Go Daddy customer, we will do the first two migrations no charge and deliver those applications to any cloud of choice. At the very least, this offer gives Go Daddy cloud customers the breathing room to make strategic decisions.”
Four Minute Lesson on Infrastructure as a Service
As a follow up to my article on Infrastructure as a Service, here is a four minute video:
Cloud Computing Is the One True Path
Walking around Cloud Expo in Santa Clara yesterday, sitting in on various sessions, grabbing conversations with old friends and new acquaintances, I learned a few things:
The technologists are still ahead of the customers. Although AWS has been around since 2006, the impression here is that most enterprises are still migrating to the cloud very slowly. I take this as a good sign, as the best is yet to come. I wrote last year that it was still only Year One for the cloud; this may still be true.
I love PaaS and its potential, but this seems be a mystery still to many companies. I think it’s because decades of legacy, stovepiped architecture, applications, and data have resulted in 80-90% of IT budgets and time to be spent on routine operations rather than innovation. This habit is hard to change, especially so since most people, to be honest, would rather focus on the routine rather than the innovative, because the innovative is hard.
Green continues to emerge. At Cloud Expo and what I’ve seen in the industry in general, it’s taking a sensible, efficiency-oriented approach, rather than cast in apocalyptic global warming or nanny-state terms.
There’s been a lot of consolidation in the industry lately. I’m seeing dozens more companies who seem to be staking their claim to a single area of superior core competence, and are waiting for someone to buy them out.
Great to see the Holland pavilion in full swing. Lots of fresh ideas in the areas of collaboration, cloud management, and real-time monitoring.
Cloud’s inevitability is as strong as ever, even if most people’s day-to-day routine may not pick up on this. But one speaker said the amount of data on the Internet continues to double every five years or so, and I’m starting to hear the word “yottabyte” thrown around. The disconnect is that grand, abstract visions don’t help anyone get the milk delivered today. But we need to know that, even with a perpetual Moore’s Law, data storage and transmission does have a price (eg, 18 cents a gigabyte for bandwidth delivered by Rackspace), and as we start to think in terms of billions and trillions of gigabytes we simply must have the means to deal with this amount of data. Cloud computing is the one, true path.
Swivel Secure launches in North America
Swivel Secure, a provider of tokenless authentication technology that is capable of securing Microsoft Office 365 as well as other cloud and virtual private network (VPN) remote access solutions, announced its expansion into North America and the opening of its first office in Seattle, Washington.
Swivel Secure is a UK network security solutions provider that has pioneered the development of tokenless, multi-factor authentication technology. The Swivel authentication platform, first launched in 2003, is now used in over 35 countries by governments and global enterprises in a range of sectors including healthcare, pharmaceuticals and logistics as well as in hundreds of smaller businesses around the world.
Swivel’s strategic entry into North America marks the launch of an aggressive channel expansion programme targeting value added resellers (VARs) in the Washington State area and beyond.
“The market for tokenless authentication is growing rapidly as US businesses start to take cloud solutions seriously,” comments Fraser Thomas, VP International, Swivel Secure, who is spearheading the US expansion and VAR recruitment programme. “Given that Swivel is an approved tokenless provider for Microsoft Office 365, a Swivel partnership will enable VARs to offer a compelling remote access proposition for businesses that are migrating to the cloud, together with those that are employing more traditional VPN solutions.”
The unauthorised access of sensitive corporate data is one of the biggest fear factors holding businesses back from migrating to the cloud. Securing a corporate infrastructure with multi-factor authentication means that business owners can be assured that only permitted individuals will be able to gain access to their corporate systems.
B & L, Progress Software Partner to Deliver Cloud-Based ERP for Metalcasters
Progress Software Corporation announced that B&L Information Systems, developers of metalcasting-specific ERP software, has successfully transformed its Odyssey ERP offering to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model with the help of the Progress® OpenEdge® product.
B&L’s Odyssey software provides foundries and die casters with precise and timely information to balance customer satisfaction, operational efficiencies and profitability. With the help of Progress Software, B&L transformed its traditional ERP software to a SaaS model and doubled its close rate for the application. The Odyssey SaaS application offering outsold the traditional model by 300% in the first year and has seen a revenue increase of 880% since 2009. The SaaS model has enabled B&L to spend more time on site with customers instead of keeping up backend systems.
The Progress OpenEdge platform helps Progress’ Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) Partners build dynamic, business process-enabled applications for secure deployment across any platform, any mobile device and any Cloud. The OpenEdge platform has evolved over the last 30 years incorporating new technologies such as multi-tenancy, data encryption and auditing, security and compliance and user-interface flexibility.
“Progress has given B&L the resources and support needed to grow our business beyond expectations,” said Matthew Gacek, vice president of Business Development for B&L Information Systems. “A major benefit for us was the Progress SaaS Empowerment Program, which helped B&L develop a business plan, determine costs, and market our applications. Progress’ tools, market intelligence and expertise are unmatched by any other provider we’ve looked into.”
Gacek continues: “Progress has allowed us to do two things very well. First, they have given us a rock solid platform to work with which means no crashes or downtime – that’s critical in our industry. Generally, our customers are smaller, privately held firms. They don’t have resources for a formal IT department. The Progress OpenEdge product has empowered us to give them a product that does not require a vast amount of maintenance resources, which, in turn, allows us to help them improve their bottom line.”
“Progress has always strived to provide our partners with the information and services needed for market success,” said Kimberly King, vice president, Global Partners and Channels for Progress Software. “It’s great to see that our Empowerment Program played a key role in growing B&L’s business, and our OpenEdge platform continues to provide loyal partners, like B&L, with new opportunities to drive their business forward.”
Which Asia Pacific country knows the most about the cloud?
The third annual VMware Cloud Index survey has shone light on trends in Asia Pacific cloud computing, including which was the most knowledgeable nation.
The research surveyed 6,500 senior IT workers across the Asia Pacific region in 11 countries, including Australia, China, India, Japan and Korea.
Yet it appeared Singapore and Hong Kong were top of the class. 82% of respondents in Singapore claimed they had a strong knowledge of the cloud, with nine out of ten people in Hong Kong having a strong knowledge of virtualisation.
The key takeaways from the research included:
- Three quarters of those surveyed were either in the cloud or planning to go there
- Data privacy was the biggest barrier to cloud computing, ahead of security
- Most companies see cloud as having multiple benefits, with optimising existing IT management the most important
- 71% of respondents believe cloud computing has made their job less complex …