Fed Tech Magazine recently released their list of “50 Must-Read Federal Technology Blogs,” which included CTOvision.com. The list is a great resource, featuring the blogs of numerous government CIOs, CTOs, cybersecurity experts, and departments, as well as top federal news sources. I noticed that most of these blogs and experts also had a Twitter presence […]
This post by AlexOlesker was first published at CTOvision.com.
Innovations in streaming application code… rather than streaming pixels… will kill VDI before it even fully arrives.
From the start, the concept of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) is flawed for most real-world applications and use-cases. The future application delivery method will instead use the server-side to deliver application functionality, data, and licensing on-demand to devices directly rather than just screen shots of the monitor output; enabling previously unattainable accomplishments like “Cloud-bursting” to become a reality.
IBM is going to buy privately held high-performance flash memory house Texas Memory Systems (TMS).
It did not disclose the terms of the definitive agreement. The deal is expected to close later this year.
The Houston company has been around since 1978. It sells its solid-state solutions as the RamSan family of shared rack-mount systems and Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) cards. They’re supposed to improve performance and reduce server sprawl, power consumption, cooling and floor space requirements.
The purchase is a shift from IBM’s usual concentration on software.
First Google created, and wrote papers on, Hadoop and MapReduce, which got reverse-engineered into the current state of the art for Big Data.
But Google has moved on to Dremel, and the rest of the world is slow in catching up.
With BigQuery Google offers a simple-to-user service that doesn’t sacrifice Big Data scale OR speed.
As Armando Fox, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in these sorts of data-center-sized software platforms. put it in a Wired article:
“This is unprecedented. Hadoop is the centerpiece of the “Big Data” movement, a widespread effort to build tools that can analyze extremely large amounts of information. But with today’s Big Data tools, there’s often a drawback. You can’t quite analyze the data with the speed and precision you expect from traditional data analysis or “business intelligence” tools. But with Dremel, Fox says, you can.
“They managed to combine large-scale analytics with the ability to really drill down into the data, and they’ve done it in a way that I wouldn’t have thought was possible,” he says. “The size of the data and the speed with which you can comfortably explore the data is really impressive. People have done Big Data systems before, but before Dremel, no one had really done a system that was that big and that fast.
“Usually, you have to do one or the other. The more you do one, the more you have to give up on the other. But with Dremel, they did both.”
Bull HN Information Systems is rolling out IT support services with the launch of its MOVE IT (Modernize, Optimize, Virtualize and Economize Information Technology) campaign to showcase products and services that it recently announced and plans to announce in the future. These products and services help customers derive maximum value from their legacy IT investments and get the most out of their IT operations while opening enterprise data to the cloud and mobile devices.
Bull’s newest MOVE IT service offerings are PostgreSQL support subscriptions; database design and build assessments; database performance and tuning services; and forms and reports migration services. These service offerings support migration to PostgreSQL—recognized as the world’s most advanced open source database—enabling organizations to reduce costs and open enterprise data to the cloud and virtualized environments.
According to Bull’s Data Migration Business Unit Director Jim Ulrey, “MOVE IT services and software help free companies from high licensing and maintenance costs, and offer both dramatic operational efficiencies and the agility required to flourish in competitive business environments.
“We developed MOVE IT enterprise solutions including database migration services, software and our newest support services to meet the needs of IT departments that prefer to manage work internally, as well as those that prefer to outsource—whether due to skill sets, resources or project objectives,” concluded Ulrey.
Bull’s MOVE IT products and services work effectively standalone by providing solutions to specific challenges, and they’re also engineered to work together to provide enterprise IT clients with multiple benefits. From cost-saving database migrations from Oracle to flexible open source PostgreSQL, to LiberTP™ software to migrate transaction-processing applications, Bull’s solutions open enterprise data to modern environments that support the cloud, virtualized environments and mobile devices. Most importantly, Bull can help free companies from high licensing and maintenance costs, offer dramatic operational efficiencies and the agility required to flourish in competitive business environments.
City Lifeline, the central London colocation data centre, has announced a strategic partnership with Gamma, a network communications provider. This new partnership will provide Gamma with first rate colocation services, which will in turn boost its reliability and recommendations among potential channel partners.
Working with City Lifeline, Gamma will deliver a broad range of voice, mobile and data services designed specifically to take to market through its channel partners. Gamma is the UK’s market leader in the provision and supply of SIP Trunking services to mid-market enterprises and hosted voice and application service providers. SIP Trunking and the centralisation of telephone numbers is enabling the hosting of voice and data services previously handled by PBXs in colocation centres.
Adding Gamma SIP Trunking services to a colocation infrastructure will add cost effective, easy to deploy voice services that will enable the support of its customers that work across more than one location. Further, this will allow the company to drive more colocation space sales.
Alan Mackie, Head of SIP Services at Gamma, said: “Thanks to the help of City Lifeline, we can take our market leading services to the next level.The trend for SIP Trunking is accelerating at a rapid rate, so a service that allows us to save money and improve service really is invaluable. As a company we are dedicated to innovation and efficiency, which is why we chose to partner with a company like City Lifeline, which shares these values so openly.”
Roger Keenan, managing director at City Lifeline, explains: “We are thrilled to partner with Gamma, as we can both benefit from one another’s expertise, locations and connectivity. This new relationship enhances both our company’s portfolio of product offerings and will lead to further business opportunities for us both. Most importantly, this new relationship is helping to boost the productivity of two ambitious UK businesses – which shows our economy is really getting back on track.”
Cost reduction is often perceived as the most compelling adoption driver for new technologies. However, in many cases, looking beyond bottom line benefits often uncovers additional intrinsic value.
Such is the case for cloud storage. While frequently touted benefits of cloud storage include cost savings, maintenance reduction and better utilization of IT resources, there is actually more to the value equation than meets the eye.
Earlier this week I wrote an article titled, “What Do Mobile Technology Vendors Really Think?“, which covered technology vendors’ responses to my “2012 Mid-Year Enterprise Mobility Survey.” This article is reviewing the answers from enterprise mobility consultants and comparing and contrasting them with the mobile software vendors’ answers.
Q: What are your biggest challenges to implementing enterprise mobility today?
A: #1 answer – Developing an enterprise-wide mobile strategy, #2 – Determining anticipated ROIs, and #3 – Finding qualified mobility experts to assist with implementations.
The first two rankings were the same between mobile technology vendors and mobile consultants, but finding qualified mobility experts was a bigger problem for mobility consultants.
Q: Where do you expect to find the biggest ROIs as a result of implementing mobile solutions?
A: #1 answer – Increased productivity of mobile workers, #2 – Real-time data collection and reporting from mobile workers, #3 – Improve decision making by receiving real-time data.
Mobility consultants share the same answer #1 as mobile technology vendors, but consultants placed “Real-time data collection and reporting from mobile workers” as their 2nd highest ROI and it was #4 for mobile technology vendors. Improved customer service was #3 with mobile technology vendors, but ranked #5 for mobility consultants.
Q: How important is it to select a standard MADP (mobile application
development platform) before developing mobile solutions for your
company?
A: Mobility consultants ranked it #3 – Very Important
Mobility consultants ranked it 3 – very important, and mobile technology vendors ranked it similar at 2.9.
Q: How important is mobile security to your company’s mobile strategy?
A: Mobility consultants gave it a 2.7 score which is between “Somewhat Important” and “Very Important”
Mobility consultants and mobile technology vendors rated it nearly the same. Mobile technology vendors gave it a 2.8.
Q: How important is HTML5 or HTML5 hybrid apps to your company’s enterprise mobility plans?
A: The answer was 2.6 out of a 4 – with 1 being “Not Important” and 4
being “Critical.” The 2.6 weighted average is between “Somewhat
Important” and “Very Important” on the scale.
Mobile technology vendors gave it a 2.8 rating, slightly higher in importance than mobility consultants.
Q: How difficult is it to find third-party consulting talent with the right expertise in enterprise mobility?
A: The answer was a weighted average of 2.3 out of 3 – with 1 being “Not difficult” and 3 being “Very difficult.”
Mobility consultants rated it slightly higher (2.3) in difficulty that did mobile technology vendors (2.2).
Q: How important do you believe tablets will be to your enterprise mobility plans?
A: The weighted answer was 2.8 out of 3 – with 1 being “Not important” and 3 being “Very important.”
Mobility consultants rated it slightly lower than mobile technology vendors (2.9).
Q: How important is enterprise mobility to your company’s future success?
A: The answer was a weighted average of 3.2 out of 4 – with 1 being “Not Important” and 4
being “Critical.”
Mobile technology vendors rated it higher in importance at 3.5, than did the mobility consultants.
In summary, the answers were very close between mobility consultants and mobile technology vendors with the exception of where they anticipated finding the biggest ROIs.
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All around the world, governments at national, state, and local levels are facing huge pressures to do more with less. As cloud computing gains traction and momentum, many public sector organizations are exploring its usage to achieve large-scale efficiency savings while simultaneously improving organizational agility. However, the nature of these relatively novel systems requires some […]
We’re excited to announce the latest outpost of the Revolution Analytics team, with the opening of a new office in Singapore! This office will serve as the local HQ for Revolution Analytics serving our customers in the Asia-Pacific region. It was opened with the support of the support of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, which is responsible for the development and growth of the infocomm sector for the country, and has identified loud cloud computing and data analytics as strategic growth areas. Revolution Analytics is also the sponsor of the Singapore’s R User Group. For more information about our…
David Smith