OpTier, which has a handsome collection of customers with some very impressive names, quotes a Gartner guesstimate that 85% of the Fortune 500 won’t be able to exploit Big Data for competitive advantage until the other side of 2015. Hmmm, and this is 2012. “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”
OpTier says the way to make sense of it all is to track and analyze it in context and not leave a factoid here and a factoid there in separate silos so you don’t know what the heck you’re looking at unless you invest the time and energy running down all the missing pieces of the puzzle.

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Cloud-delivered applications are often perceived as riskier than applications delivered on premises. Why is this still the perception, and how will the industry overcome these concerns?
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Jon Matsuo, VP Emerging Products & Technologies at Symantec, will describe what is needed to realize a truly safe cloud service and illustrate how an all-new cloud service from Symantec is delivering a safe experience for consumers and businesses. Hear the CIO from a major business bank discuss safe cloud applications.

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Oracle turned in its fiscal Q1 scorecard Thursday when the market closed and said earnings were up 11% to $2 billion (41 cents a share) on revenues down 2% to $8.2 billion. Wall Street expected $8.4 billion
New software licenses and cloud software subscriptions revenues were up 5% to $1.6 billion, none of it due to a large deal. The cloud portion, which it broke out for the first time, amounted to $222 million mostly in the US and Asia-Pac. Software license updates and product support revenues were up 3% to $4.1 billion.
Hardware, however, plummeted 24% to $779 million.

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In a logical extension of its cloud-pleasing subscription billing system, Zuora, the start-up near Oracle where Marc Benioff has parked some of his money, is going after the next big thing, which for it is the finance department, keeper of the corporate treasury.
This week it launched Z-Finance, trumpeted as the world’s first finance application built for the subscription economy.
According to Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo, the double-entry bookkeeping, invented by Venetian merchants in the 15th century, memorialized in the Ur-textbook written by the Franciscan friar Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli in 1495 and, as a result, practiced by every modern finance department today, doesn’t accommodate subscriptions.
So Zuora has invented a framework to capture the dynamic, ongoing revenue that’s the foundation of the subscription business model.

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The journey to the cloud has created demanding new challenges for IT departments who are tasked to support global users accessing applications from a multitude of devices. As the pace of application development and deployment increases, organizations need ways to provide global scale and optimal performance without sacrificing security.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Brian Goleno, Product Manager at Akamai Technologies, will provide technical details for how dynamic content can be accelerated with a globally distributed platform and how applications can be instantly supported with minimal effort.

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By Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Software – IT Solutions

Users are unsure of – or have very different views on – what constitutes a private cloud, which makes any survey about the subject rather meaningless.

They approach private clouds from a variety of viewpoints including bottom–up versus top–down, technology versus design, and long-term versus short-term perspectives.

Ovum does not advocate moving from a short-term, technology-centric, bottom-up approach to a long-term, design-centric, top-down approach, but we do believe the latter is more useful than the former.

In the Ovum report, Cloud Computing Needs Service Level Management, Ovum advocates a balanced approach according to specific company requirements and culture, based on a shift from supply-led to demand-led IT.

Look at private cloud from all angles

The bottom-up viewpoint is that of the IT department. It looks at private clouds from a data centre industrialisation, consolidation, and standardisation perspective based on:

• virtualisation technologies (to …

There’s an unwritten rule that says when describing a network architecture the perimeter of the data center is at the top. Similarly application data flow begins at the UI (presentation) layer and extends downward, toward the data tier. This directional flow has led to the use of the terms “northbound” and “southbound” to describe API responsibility within SDN (Software Defined Network) architectures and is likely to continue to expand to encompass in general the increasingly-API driven data center models.
But while network aficionados may use these terms with alacrity, they are not always well described or described in a way that a broad spectrum of IT professionals will immediately understand.

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With business application traffic over the Web expected to double in less than five years, the need for a solution that can meet and exceed this demand grows increasingly urgent.
In his General Session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Gary Ballabio, a Product Line Director for Akamai’s Application Performance Solutions, will discuss how to meet this challenge head on and extend application delivery out of the origin and across the public Internet without sacrificing security, performance or control.

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