Terracotta would love to stick its knee in the groin of the relational database and figures its new BigMemory Go, a free version of its BigMemory in-memory caching widgetry for Java apps, will put it in easy striking distance by expanding its installed base.
It’s counting on users not being content with the single-node 32GB production instance Go offers even if they can put it on as many servers as they want.
The company, now an independent subsidiary of Software AG, calculates that Go users will upgrade within a year to the full, more scalable BigMemory that goes for $500 a gigabyte. And the more mainstream BigMemory goes to speed application performance the less competitive disk-backed databases will be.
AppNeta Launches Unified Application, Network Performance Management
AppNeta today announced the launch of its unified solutions for End User Experience Monitoring including full-stack application performance tracing and unprecedented network performance insight. With the recent acquisition of Tracelytics, AppNeta now provides industry-first performance visibility that IT teams have never had before, across the complete network and application infrastructure.
As business organizations become completely dependent on Internet and web-based technologies such as unified communications, CRM systems, ecommerce, hosted email, and other custom applications, it is necessary to know how they are running and where problems are occurring. With AppNeta’s integrated performance management solutions, IT teams and developers can easily see into the datacenter applications, down to the specific layer and code, and out to the remote sites where end users are experiencing performance degradation or service failure. With this comprehensive level of visibility and analysis, IT teams can quickly identify if the issues are happening in the network or the applications, and save hours chasing down problems and finger-pointing.
“End users have little tolerance for application performance problems,” said Jim Melvin, CEO of AppNeta. “As today’s applications have become more sophisticated and performance-sensitive, the risk of service disruption is at an all time high. AppNeta solutions provide a level of breadth and depth of performance insight that the industry has never seen before. Our customers solve technology problem before they become business problems.”
“The Application Performance Management market is moving to a SaaS delivery model that allows developers and IT teams to assure performance of distributed applications across datacenters and private/public clouds,” said Bernd Harzog, CEO, APM Experts. “This is leading to innovative, disruptive performance management solutions that are truly transforming the way IT teams assure application performance and end user experience.”
AppNeta’s new TraceView application performance monitoring service delivers immediate time-to-value by providing full-stack application tracing capabilities through application tiers and stacks to get real-time insight into actual web application performance. TraceView offers deep, detailed analysis of performance problems and provides actionable data for quick resolution and optimization.
AppNeta’s award-winning PathView Cloud service provides integrated insight from every element of the network performance stack including active path performance analysis, application-aware traffic flow analysis, automated remote site packet capture, and on-demand device status (SNMP). This complete suite delivered from the cloud brings thousands of global customers the fastest time to resolution in the industry and superior End User Experience monitoring.
Free trials of PathView Cloud network performance management service and the TraceView application performance monitoring service are both available today at www.appneta.com.
AppFirst Launches New Partner Program
AppFirst, the SaaS application management system, today unveiled a comprehensive new Partner Program designed for both Cloud and Solution Providers. The program offers a new, expanded free subscription available only via AppFirst partners and provides ongoing training and product support, enabling partners to deliver innovative solutions to their own customers. The rollout of this Partner Program follows the company’s launch earlier this month of its new DevOps Dashboard, an application performance monitoring solution that delivers a clear, unified status view of infrastructure, applications and business metrics to all stakeholders in an organization.
“Our focus today is on growing our global ecosystem to increase the number of AppFirst experts as well as the overall availability of our product,” said David Roth, AppFirst CEO. “By offering access to our solutions through the primary source customers use to deploy their applications in the cloud, our Partner Program complements our partners’ solutions with AppFirst technology, delivering added value to our respective customers. This expanded universe is designed to provide our partners with the solutions and support they need to succeed and grow within their own markets.”
Under the Cloud Provider Partner Program, qualified cloud service providers such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) can offer the enhanced free version of AppFirst to its customers via their own marketplace or dashboards, as an extension or add-on to their own service. AppFirst partners deliver value to their end customers by offering a solution that provides the visibility needed across the infrastructure, application and business as an application is running in production, with the added benefit of AppFirst’s extended free program.
“In today’s online world, keeping applications and websites up and running is business critical,” said Mal Knox, Director of Business Development at Engine Yard. “With Engine Yard Cloud, we provide the tools and resources to ensure the optimum performance of our customers’ applications. Partnering with companies like AppFirst enables us to deliver enhanced performance monitoring services, giving customers the visibility they need.”
Solution Provider Partners, which include systems integrators, application development shops and cloud consultancies, will have access to AppFirst products and training, while also receiving implementation tools and assistance, technical resources and implementation support from the company. As these partners become competent with AppFirst’s solutions, they can integrate them in their customer deliverables and even customize and optimize the solution. Solution Providers are also able to offer the free version to their clients, allowing direct visibility into the applications their customers want to actively monitor themselves. Building a global ecosystem of trained Solution Provider Partners allows AppFirst to scale to deliver implementation and industry-specific configuration services at the local level through their partners.
Because AppFirst’s DevOps Dashboard is also easily customizable, any partner company can offer broad custom solutions for internal use, and for their own customers, whether executives, IT ops or DevOps.
“Our customers, with our assistance, are making strategic decisions about if, when and how they migrate to cloud,” said Eileen Boerger, president of CorSource Technology Group. “Partnering with AppFirst provides us another tool in our quiver to assist with those decisions. With the DevOps Dashboard being so customizable, that allows us to provide individualized solutions for our customers, something they demand.”
AppFirst collects millions of infrastructure, application and business metrics that are aggregated and correlated in a single big data repository that eliminates the need for users to look for data in multiple places. Data is collected continuously to provide customers with unprecedented visibility into their entire infrastructure and every application running in production, bringing overall system management to a whole new level.
The DevOps Dashboard’s ability to auto-detect application stacks and configure data collection from the relevant sources delivers a customized dashboard specific to the user’s environment — all automatically, with no extra effort required. With the smart threshold feature, AppFirst time learns over time what is “normal” for a user’s business metrics and delivers alerts when metrics shift one standard deviation from normal levels, saving time and money.
For more information on AppFirst’s Partner Programs, please visit the AppFirst partner section or call 1.800.782.2181.
Cloud Comptuing: Nasdaq Partners with AWS
Nasdaq OMX has gone to Amazon for a new service called FinQloud, where US financial services clients can store the data needed to meet increasingly granular SEC regs or analyze trade data.
FinQloud will host a patent-pending regulatory data retention product called Regulatory Records Retention, or R3, and a fast, on-demand analysis tool is called Self-Service Reporting, or SSR. R3 should be out in the coming months.
Brokers will be able to store order and transaction data and maintain records using FinQloud. That means multi-source data, not just Nasdaq-related trading info.
Rand Secure Archive Implements Hosted Archiving Solution for Ampersand Capital Partners
Rand Worldwide announced that their Rand Secure Archive division has implemented their proprietary hosted archiving and retrieval solution for Ampersand Capital Partners.
“As a private equity firm, Ampersand has to deal with a constantly evolving regulatory environment, including reporting requirements by the SEC, the impact of Sarbanes-Oxley and the Dodd-Frank Act,” says Rick Charpie, Ampersand’s founder. “To address those requirements we followed the advice that we always give to the CEOs we mentor – to select the best partners possible. That’s why we chose Rand Secure Archive, a partner who shares our commitment to success by delivering world-class technology and service.”
“In the financial services industry, it’s critical that electronic information and communication is both archived and easily retrievable – regardless of the file type or medium,” says Chris Grossman, vice president, Enterprise Applications at Rand Worldwide. “Our robust, hosted solution not only meets the legal requirements, but also offers robust functionality with simplicity and security.”
Key functional requirements for financial services organizations safeguarding their data include:
- Preserve every electronic business record and store them securely.
- Find and produce electronic communications quickly, and be prepared
for SEC and other regulatory examinations or requests with on-demand
data production for investment advisor compliance. - Enables the creation and enforcement of retention policies while
maintaining a full audit trail to ensure compliance with these
policies. - Offload the cost and operational burden of managing complex and
disparate email and messaging platforms.
Compared to competitors, Rand Secure Archive provides faster, more advanced search capability and integrated eDiscovery tools, as well as more convenient user access to archived data.
The Evolution from a Provider of Technology Components to a Broker of Technology Services
A 3 Part Series from Trevor Williamson
- Part 1: Understanding the Dilemma
- Part 2: Planning the Solution
- Part 3: Executing the Solution, again and again…
Part 1: Understanding the Dilemma
IT teams are increasingly being challenged as bring-your-own-technology (BYOD) policies and “as-a-service” software and infrastructure multiply in mainstream organizations. In this new reality, developers still need compute, network and storage to keep up with growth…and workers still need some sort of PC or mobile device to get their jobs done…but they don’t necessarily need corporate IT to give it to them. They can turn to a shadow IT organization using Amazon, Rackspace and Savvis or using SAS applications or an unmanaged desktop because when all is said and done, if you can’t deliver on what your users and developers care about, they will use whatever and whoever to get their jobs done better, faster and cheaper.
Much of this shift toward outside services comes down to customer experience, or how your customers—your users—perceive their every interaction with IT, from your staff in the helpdesk to corporate applications they access every day. If what you are delivering (or not delivering as the case may be) is more burdensome, more complicated or doesn’t react as fast as other service providers (like Amazon, Office 365, or Salesforce, etc.), then they will turn (in droves) toward those providers.
Now the question hanging heavy in the air is what do those providers have, except of course scale, that your IT organization doesn’t have? What is the special sauce for them to be able to deliver those high-value services, quicker and at a lower cost than you can?
In a few words; IT Service Management (ITSM)…but wait!…I know the first reaction you might have is that ITSM has become a sour subject and that if you hear ITIL chanted one more time you’re going to flip out. The type of ITSM I’m talking about is really the next generation and has only passing similarities to the service management initiatives of the past. While it is agreed that ITSM has the potential to deliver the experiences and outcomes your developers and users need and want, today’s ITSM falls far short of that idea. Process for process sake you’ve probably heard…but whatever, we are still measuring success based on internal IT efficiencies, not customer or financial value or even customer satisfaction. We still associate ITSM exclusively with ITIL best practices and we continue to label ourselves as providers of technology components.
As it turns out, the adage “You cannot fix today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions” is as right as it ever was. We need to turn ITSM on its head and create a new way forward based on customer centricity, services focus, and automated operations. We have to rethink the role we play and how we engage with the business. Among the most significant transformations of IT we need to complete is from a provider of technology components to a broker of technology services. We have relied on ITSM to drive this transformation, but ITSM needs to change in order to be truly effective in the future. Here’s why:
The roots of service management focus was on the customer: “Service management” originated within the product marketing and management departments and from the beginning, service management placed the customer at the center of all decision making within the service provider organization. It’s the foundation to transform product-oriented organizations into service providers where the customer experience and interaction are designed and managed to cost-effectively deliver customer results and satisfaction.
But when we applied service management to IT, we lost customer focus: Applying service management to information technology produced the well-known discipline of ITSM but, unfortunately, IT professionals associated it exclusively with the IT infrastructure library (ITIL) best practices, which focus on processes for managing IT infrastructure to enable and support services. What’s missing is the customer perspective.
In the age of the customer, we need to proactively manage services via automation: In the age of the customer, technology-led disruption (virtualization, automation, orchestration, operating at scale, etc.) erodes traditional competitive barriers making it easier than ever for empowered employees and app developers to take advantage of new devices and cloud-based software. To truly function as a service provider, IT needs to first and foremost consider the customer and the customer’s desired outcome in order to serve them faster, cheaper, and at a higher quality. In today’s world, this can only be accomplished via automation.
When customers don’t trust a provider to deliver quality products or services, they seek alternatives. That’s a pretty simple concept that everyone can understand but, what if the customer is a user of IT services that you provide? Where do they go if they don’t like the quality of your products or services? Yep, Amazon, Rackspace, Terremark, etc., and any other service provider who offers a solution that you can’t…or that you can’t in the required time or for the required price.
The reason why these service providers can do these seemingly amazing things and offer such diverse and, at times, sophisticated services, is because they have eliminated (mostly) the issues associated with humans doing “stuff” by automating commodity IT activities and then orchestrating those automated activities toward delivering aggregate IT services. They have evolved from being providers of technology components to brokers of technology services.
If you’re looking for more information on BYOD, register for our upcoming webinar “BYOD Webinar- Don’t Fight It, Mitigate the Risk with Mobile Management”
Next…Part 2: Planning the Solution
IBM Buys Butterfly
IBM Monday said it’s going to buy Butterfly Software, a privately held data
analysis and migration software firm in Maidenhead, England.
It would be nice to know what IBM is really doing with its stockpile of
analytics acquisitions or if it’s just taking them off the market. It expects to
generate $16 billion from business analytics by 2015.
CTO, Comcast: “We believe in convergence; we believe in change”
Tony Werner, executive vice president & chief technology officer of Comcast Cable in the US, talks about how Comcast is using innovation to keep the cable company at the forefront of the broadband market.
ISPs don’t come much bigger than Comcast. As the largest cable provider in the US, the company is also one of the largest broadband service providers in the world. As such, the decisions it makes in terms of technology and strategy will inevitably have an impact in other parts of the world.
IT leaders prepare for the arrival of the federated cloud
“The future of the cloud is federated, and when you look at the broad categories of apps moving to the cloud, the truth of this statement begins to become clear.” ~ Ditlev Bredhal, CEO, OnApp
And the federated cloud will be coming to a city near you, allowing your team to take advantage of a globally scattered array of datacentre infrastructure that will power the next generation of gaming apps, social media, e-commerce and online publishing applications.
While Virtual Internet continues to deploy new virtual datacenters in locations such as Singapore and Utah, there are considerable advantages to ‘sharing’ infrastructure from other Telcos, ISPs and providers who have built facilities in far-flung, remote areas, which do not include the VI footprint.
By the year 2015, it’s expected that over 15 billion devices will be connected to the Internet requiring massive bandwidth to satisfy the global demand. No single hosting provider …
Microsoft Private Cloud 2.0 – BYOD Virtual Infrastructure
In my first contribution to the Allstream blog I introduced the concept of the Cloud-based workforce.
Here is an article that explains how this model can be achieved via the Microsoft Private Cloud platform.
Microsoft provides reference documents for describing their Private Cloud Fast-track best practices, which explains in detail how their core suite of Windows Server, Hyper-V and Systems Management Centre can be used to build internal ‘IaaS’ – Infrastructure as a Service.