For those of you keeping score, late last year American Airlines’ parent AMR declared bankruptcy. The Chapter 11 filing of the once largest airline in the world brought to a conclusion the era of disintegration for the legacy commercial airline market. You can argue about the principal cause for the airline industry’s demise, but ultimately it came down to the fact that the market leaders in the industry refused to adapt to the changes going on around it while others embraced it and found creative ways to rise to the top.
How is Google driving mobile video market growth?
Google’s top advertising customers are pushing for convergence of mobile and video quickly, which is turning into a strong catalyst of growth of the global mobile video market. With their largest advertising customers wanting greater flexibility in bringing video to mobile devices, Google will make significant strides this year to make that happen.
During their latest earnings call, Google execs said that Android, Chrome and YouTube are the highest priority areas of their business. I’ve been following the last year of earnings calls closely, and it’s clear that Google’s largest advertising customers are pushing the company to bring video to mobile at a level of performance and usability not accomplished yet. The Q2, 2012 earnings call transcript makes this point clear which can be accessed here Google’s Management Discusses Q2 2012 Results – Earnings Call Transcript.
Mobile and Video: Transforming Convergence Into Cash
Over the last …
Step up to a Higher Cloud
Cloud is a transformational shift in computing that can have a powerful effect on enterprise IT when designed correctly and used to its full potential. In his Day 3 Keynote at Cloud Expo New York, Citrix VP Sameer Dholakia discussed building, connecting and empowering users with cloud services and provided examples of how enterprises are solving real-world business challenges with an architecture and solution purpose-built for the cloud.
Sameer Dholakia is Group VP & GM, Cloud Platforms Group, at Citrix. He drives the company’s product strategy for cloud infrastructure and server virtualization. He joined the company in 2010, when Citrix acquired VMLogix, where he served as CEO. Dholakia brings extensive enterprise software experience to Citrix, having held key leadership roles in sales, business development and product management at companies such as Trilogy, Inc. He received his bachelor’s and master’s from Stanford University and a master’s in business administration from Harvard Business School.
VMware Wants In on OpenStack
Will wonders never cease!
VMware, which – Cloud Foundry aside – doesn’t exactly have open source in its DNA, has asked to join the OpenStack Foundation – the consortium that wants nothing more than to take over VMware’s market share. And it’s willing to pay for the privilege, throwing its cloak of enterprise respectability over open source cloud platform.
Well, what is it they say? Hold your friends close and your enemies closer.
Where better to watch what OpenStack is up to than from inside?
It’s also a chance for Red Hat, a Platinum member since April and now one of the biggest OpenStack contributors, to watch its arch-enemy at closer quarters.
Examining the True Cost of Big Data
The good news about the Big Data market is that we generally all agree on the definition of Big Data, which has come to be known as data that has volume, velocity and variety where businesses need to collect, store, manage and analyze in order to derive business value or otherwise known as the “4 V’s.” However, the problem with such a broad definition is that it can mean different things to different people once you start to put some real values next to those V’s.
Let’s be honest, Volume can be a different thing to different organizations. To some it is anything above 10 terabytes of managed data in their BI environment and to others it is petabyte scale and nothing less. Likewise velocity can be multi-billions of daily records coming into the enterprise from various external and internal networks. When it really comes down to it, each business situation will be quite different not only from a size and speed perspective but also more important from the business use-case or requirement. A large bank’s Big Data problem could be very different to that of an online retailer or an airline. If you compare what say a hospital is trying to do collecting and analyzing all the sensor patient data compared to a utilities provider running a smart-grid or a telecommunications operator. True, all could be categorized as machine generated or raw data but the exact type of data might be different not to mention the volume or growth rate. Probably the one unique common denominator across all aforementioned industries is that everyone is keeping the data for longer time-periods. No one is throwing it away – not even the detailed data.
Rackspace Open Cloud Offers Easily Scalable Computing
Rackspace has announced the unlimited availability of cloud databases and cloud servers powered by OpenStack, along with a powerful and streamlined new control panel.
These solutions further expand Rackspace’s broad cloud hosting portfolio, used today by more than 180,000 customers worldwide.
These products mark the first time a company deployed a large-scale, open source public cloud powered by OpenStack. Customers can now select from private, public or hybrid offerings and have the flexibility to deploy their solutions in a Rackspace data center or another data center of their choice.
Rackspace’s open cloud products also give application developers and IT organizations in businesses large and small the ability to build, test and deploy applications in the cloud for the first time without being locked-in.
The new Cloud Servers powered by OpenStack deliver increased efficiency, scalability and agility to customers, who can launch as many as 200 reliable cloud servers in 20 minutes.
Rackspace recently announced a celebration of the second anniversary of the OpenStack open-source cloud computing platform for building public or private clouds, according to an article on eWEEK.com.
Coalfire Opens VMware Compliance Lab
Coalfire Systems, Inc. today announced that it has established the VMware Compliance Lab, a center of excellence and that designs, tests and promotes IT security best practices and audit guidelines for virtualized computing environments.
The VMware Compliance Lab, housed in Coalfire’s Seattle office, provides partners and end users with the information and tools they need to expedite the audit process and ensure compliance with major IT security standards, including PCI DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, GLBA, FISMA and FedRAMP. As a fully-independent IT Governance, Risk an Compliance firm, Coalfire gathers reference architecture and controls data from VMware, tests those controls in both the lab and the field, and issues guidance documents that security professionals can use to manage risk and compliance. In addition to VMware products, the Lab also houses and tests controls information from other products built on the VMware reference architecture, including solutions from EMC, RSA, HP, Symantec, McAfee and LogRhythm.
“Coalfire is partnering with VMware and other industry leaders to promote security and compliance in virtualized environments,” said Rick Dakin, CEO, co-founder and senior strategist at Coalfire. “Our lab provides a clearinghouse of un-biased, tested and proven best practices, and as those best practices are adopted in the field, end users will be able to streamline and risk and compliance efforts.”
”Coalfire’s thought leadership and IT audit expertise enables our partners and customers to confidently virtualize highly regulated workloads and meet their regulatory requirements. The guidance provided by Coalfire coupled with VMware’s proven leadership and ecosystem enables enterprises to use their virtualization investment as they move business critical applications to the cloud,” said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances.
The Era of Open Clouds Is Upon Us
Last year, cloud computing pundits predicted that 2012 would be the year when the clouds would open. They were right as cloud computing enthusiasts all over are embracing the open ecosystem; however, denying one vendor the right to serve as the de facto API is only the tip of the iceberg of this computing climate change. In his Day Two Keynote at Cloud Expo New York, Rackspace Chief Technology Officer John Engates discussed the open ecosystem and how, ultimately, winning cloud technologies will be based on the ecosystem they represent.
John Engates is CTO of Rackspace. He joined the company in August 2000, just a year after it was founded, as VP of Operations, managing the datacenter operations and customer-service teams. Two years later, when Rackspace decided to add new services for larger enterprise customers, he created and helped develop the Intensive Hosting business unit.
SOA and the Cloud: Why Your Cloud Applications Need SOA
Some consider cloud computing to be a cure-all for virtually any type of IT infrastructure. And while the cloud certainly delivers on many of its promises, it will never truly provide all that it’s capable of unless it’s optimized for integration with other applications and evolution for new requirements. What is the best way to provide this? Use a services-oriented architecture (SOA) as the fabric upon which to build your cloud-based applications. In this article, we’ll outline the reasons why an SOA is so important for the cloud, some principles to consider when creating your cloud platform on an SOA.
Nirvanix and TwinStrata Introduce Cloud Storage Starter Kit
“This Nirvanix-TwinStrata pre-packed solution gives enterprises everything they need at a simple, flat annual rate, making cloud storage for businesses more convenient than ever,” said Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of TwinStrata, as Nirvanix and TwinStrata today announced the availability of a pre-tested, fully integrated cloud storage starter kit that combines 50TB of Nirvanix cloud storage with TwinStrata’s enterprise-class CloudArray to provide a complete solution for a single annual rate of $48K all-inclusive.