Only eight weeks lie between now and the next US Presidential election and the next Internationl Cloud Expo – the latter to be held Nov 5-8 at the Santa Clara (CA) Convention Center.

Politics often become part of cloud discussions, particularly in the areas of open source and its unloved cousin, cloudwashing. But where said alleged cloudwashing was a big topic of discussion in the aisles and after-hour parties of the recent Cloud Expo in New York, I think that topic is being washed away, so to speak, but a few other large items:

The importance of software-defined networking, or dare I say it, cloud networking
The continued importance of Big Data – how to define it within the context of your specific organization, whether and how to handle it, what to do with it
Social media and social networking – the topic just won’t go away, despite the schadenfreudistic plunge in Facebook’s stock over the summer. Most businesses still have no clue about how to use SM/SN effectively, whether its effect can truly be measured, and how it can drive new, perhaps useful Big Data streams
Standards. Whoops, almost forgot, we’re nowhere near standardized ways of doing things throughout the ideotypes of cloud computing. And I’m not talking about what NIST does. The cloud industry is almost willy-nilly erecting new silos of babble

The last topic seems to be the most important, by far. Where’s the standard electrical outlet or USB of cloud APIs, not to mention user interfaces? When will we have “brake on the left, accelerator on the right,” in Scott McNealy’s timeword phrase about the enterprise IT industry? Will we be able to stop the madness before Oracle simply buys up everything and puts a rude end to all this idealistic cloudy talk?

I’ll be roaming the halls of the SCCC in November, after having duly voted early and often in my Illinois hometown.

Will I see you there? Let me know.

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Cloud services and solutions play a critical role in the cloud ecosystem. With the cloud comes increased complexities and an increased need for integration, aggregation and automation capabilities. This is a disruptive change for both business and IT, and constitutes a series of challenges, coupled with new requirements. Leveraging the cloud requires more than just technology and platform migration. It requires a common platform across providers to design, build and operate a solution with a single point of accountability and transparency to enable successful transition to the cloud model.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Chad M. Lawler, Director of Consulting, Cloud Computing at Hitachi Consulting will explore the aggregation integration, customization, and automation of cloud solutions design, architecture, provisioning, procurement, deployment, management and governance in the cloud service broker model. Attendees will receive an overview of how innovative cloud brokerage technologies are helping government agencies streamline cloud sourcing, procurement, on-boarding, integration, aggregation, billing and use of different cloud services for cost savings, centralized management and increased governance control.

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Compuware has announced that Netmagic Solutions has expanded its application performance management (APM) partnership with Compuware. Netmagic will offer Compuware APM® products—Gomez—to its customers in a pay-as-you-use service model as part of the company’s existing Managed Services Portfolio (MSP) offerings.
Neeraj Dotel, Managing Director at Compuware India, stated: “We are pleased to partner with Netmagic Solutions and help its clients improve business productivity and application performance. Companies need to understand how customers use their sites to capitalize on every single interaction and application usage. Compuware strives to provide the most inclusive set of technologies to optimize all aspects of application performance.”

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Clal Insurance Enterprises Holdings, based in Tel Aviv, both satisfied current requirements and built a better long-term enterprise architecture, illustrating the multiplier effect of value and capabilities from IT transformation efforts.
One of the things that’s interesting to me is the speed and depth of how your organization has embraced virtualization. You went to nearly 100 percent server virtualization across mission-critical applications in just a few short years. Why did you need to break the old way of doing things and why did you move so quickly to virtualization?

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There are multiple trends putting pressure on IT today to radically change the way they operate. From SDN to cloud, market pressure on organizations to adopt new technological models or utterly fail is immense.

That’s not to say that new technological models aren’t valuable or won’t fulfill promises to add value, but it is to say that the market often overestimates the urgency with which organizations must view emerging technology.

Too, mired in its own importance and benefits, markets often overlook that not every organization has the same needs or goals or business drivers. After all, everyone wants to reduce their costs and simplify provisioning processes!

And yet goals can often be met through application of other technologies that carry less risk, which is another factor in the overall enterprise adoption formula – and one that’s often overlooked.

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