Texas Cloud Computing Lessons Learned
Late last week the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) released an important whitepaper that reviewed it’s multi-year Pilot Texas Cloud Offering (PTCO). This project was designed to allow a small group of agencies to choose a virtual private cloud-based infrastructure as a service from a marketplace of service providers made available by a cloud broker. For this project, Texas DIR selected Gravitant and its cloudMatrix technology. This approach was selected as it maximized the opportunity to produce the broadest spectrum of experiences for customers. The cloudMatrix software helped to normalize the multiple services available, creating an “apples-to-apples” comparison in pricing and functionality as much as possible. In addition, this solution provided a single, unified web interface for end users to design, procure, provision, monitor, and govern the services. The PTCO allowed DIR and the pilot agencies to a gain a greater understanding of cloud infrastructure offerings for state government and document options and issues with provider selection, pricing, access security, data security, credentialing, provisioning time frames, service levels, service remedy options, terms of use, billing models, interoperability, mobility, scalability, capacity management, provider compliance, and monitoring and licensing.
As far as I know, the PTCO represents the only proven operational model of the cloud brokerage concept deployed within a government setting. Among the lessons learned, this project showed that the use of a cloud broker can:
- Help government agencies screen their applications for cloud feasibility and prioritizing cloud migrations accordingly;
- Address the challenges of cloud model comparisons due to the
variables in product offerings, including the business models, service
levels, and package inclusions; - Translate capacity requirements into provider line items, thus allowing for accurate estimation of cloud cost;
- Provide a cloud service order review or approval workflow facility, a
function not normally provided by cloud service providers; and - Provide a means to regulate payment across multiple government entities.
If you are interested in learning more about the results of this pilot project, download the complete report at http://www.slideshare.net/kvjacksn/pilot-texas-cloud-offering.
NJVC is partnering with Gravitant to bring this advance cloud brokerage technology to the federal marketplace. Currently in limited pilot, you can learn more about cloudMatrix and NJVC’s cloud brokerage offering by visiting http://cloud.njvc.com.
Gravitant also released a whitepaper on how this approach can be used with the federal government. It is available for download at http://www.slideshare.net/kvjacksn/gravitant-whitepaper-cloud-for-federal-govt
( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS – © Copyright Kevin L. Jackson 2012)
VMware Makes Big Data Acquisition
VMware has struck again.
After buying Nicira for $1.26 billion two weeks ago in a threat to Cisco’s networking hegemony, it’s now bought Pattern Insight’s Log Insight analytics and log management platform, team and technology on undisclosed terms.
The widgetry can analyze web-scale amounts of machine-generated data in real time and is used for operational analytics in traditional data center and cloud environments.
Leading a horse to water: Driving out uncertainty in IT cloud projects
“What Cloud solution is right for us?”
“What functionality will be available in this solution?”
“When will I get my training?”
Each of these questions reflects a person grappling with uncertainty at different levels of the organization. From the initial consideration of changing IT strategy, through the design, implementation, and go live, the project team is constantly working on uncertainty loops as uncertainty cascades down the organization.
The senior decision maker starts with uncertainty and has zero commitment, until they commit to a strategy, then the IT manager deals with uncertainty of how to implement the strategy. The IT manager instinctively gathers information to fill in the blanks and then sets to work making commitments to specific design components.
As the final design gets closer to testing and rollout, end users have their own set of concerns and questions and eventually will be fully committed to the solution once they …
Understanding Business Intelligence and Your Bottom Line
The term “Business Intelligence” and its acronym “BI” are so pervasive in today’s data-intensive lexicon that it’s a challenge to know just what to make of it. If you add in all the new trendy terminology such as business process management (BPM), data mining, data warehousing, business process automation, decision support systems, query and reporting systems, enterprise performance management, executive information systems (EIS), business activity monitoring (BAM), modeling and visualization, and so forth, your head can start spinning. Here is a workable definition of BI that was provided in a Technology Evaluation report from a January 10, 2005, Technology Evaluation Centers article by Mukhles Zaman entitled, “Business Intelligence: Its Ins and Outs”: “BI is neither a product nor a system. It is an umbrella term that combines architectures, applications, and databases. It enables the real-time, interactive access, analysis, and manipulation of information, which provides the business community with easy access to business data. BI analyzes historical data – the data businesses generate through transactions or by other kinds of business activities – and helps businesses by analyzing the past and present business situations and performances. By giving this valuable insight, BI helps decision-makers make more informed decisions and supplies end-users with critical business information on their customers or partners, including information on behaviors and trends.”
Google Backs DocuSign
Google Ventures has put $8.2 million into electronic signatures vendor DocuSign, bringing the reportedly unprofitable start-up’s juicy $47.5 million D round, announced last month, up to an even juicier $55.7 million and its total funding up over a handsome $112 million.
Google is reportedly supposed to help DocuSign lower the cost of customer acquisition and boost the quality of its sales leads by “making sure that organic search goes up and paid search goes down.”
The R Language & Big Data
KDnuggets recently posted its annual poll on data mining software, and the R language retains its #1 ranking as the most commonly-used software for data mining: R is now used by 52.5% of poll respondents, compared with 45% last year. Donnie Berkholz provides an analysis of the year-on-year trends for Redmonk. He provides the chart below, and notes “the general trend of newer, open-source languages growing at varying speeds (Python followed by R and Hadoop-based options like Hive/Pig), while older languages including Java, SAS, and Matlab are bleeding users”. Meanwhile, the recently-released Rexer Analytics 2011 Data Miner Survey also ranks…
David Smith
Let Me Tell You Where to Go
One thing in life, whether you are using a Garmin to go to a friend’s party or planning your career, you need to know where you’re going. Failure to have a destination in mind makes it very difficult to get directions. Even when you know where you’re going, you will have a terrible time getting there if your directions are bad. Take, for example, using a GPS to navigate between when they do major road construction and when you next update your GPS device’s maps. On a road by my house, I can actually drive down the road and be told that I’m on the highway 100 feet (30 meters) distant. Because I haven’t updated my device since they built this new road, it maps to the nearest one it can find going in the same direction. It is misinformed.
Rogue IT Buying: Does It Matter?
A recent report from PwC estimates that between 15 and 30 percent of enterprise IT spending is of the roguish nature. That’s a pretty wide range, so we probably shouldn’t rely on the folks who put this survey together to land the next probe to Mars; need a bit more precision than that.
But, to give them a break, maybe we can assume this range means that some companies are at the lower end, others at the higher end. The survey covered companies in the US with revenues of more than $500 million. Its purpose ostensibly addresses rogue cloud-services buying (eg, AWS), but seems also to address the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) issue that’s emerged in an era of smartphones and tablet computers.
As we sit, the smartphone segment has several platforms, slightly reminiscent of the early PC days. This time, though, there are fewer platforms and much less chance that Microsoft will emerge as the monopolist. It’s also unlikely that Apple will do so, as the company stubbornly (and successfully) refuses to license its platform. Thus, the iPhone’s initial market share of 90 percent+ has settled into a market share in the 40s, with the diffused Android OS taking a similar chunk.
The dying RIM platform looks as if its best shot will be to be integrated into an enterprise solution from IBM. I’ve said before that Windows 8 phones will end up being important if major telcos embrace them. I’m having doubts, though, as I see chaos brewing at Microsoft with its unfocused OS story – by January, we could have one OS for phones, a different one for low-end Surface tablets, a slightly different one for high-end Surfaces, and another for laptops and desktops. Not a pretty picture.
The global legal battle between Apple and Samsung is the big story right now in the BYOD space. As a general rule, judges don’t like to make business law and they don’t like to resolve what they view as playground squabbles. Matters of intellectual property in the IT world are particularly difficult to adjudicate, as they represent the worst possible combination of Patent Office buffaloeing and legal casuistry. It’s hard to believe that in the end Samsung will be prevented from hawking its wares.
So we live in interesting times. Rogue cloud-services buying is one thing, but let’s think this through. It seems as if this buying is truly roguish, ie, not central to the mission. I doubt any serious enterprise app deployment will be done on a stealth basis that ignores the IT department entirely. I don’t doubt that people will continue to bring their own devices to work, or demand their own particular device, depending on how many chits they’ve built up with top management. It doesn’t matter if it’s 15 percent or 30 percent. In the end, IT departments will respond to C-suite directives.
The real issue is whether or not your top management is paying attention to what’s going on, and is flexible enough to bring whatever technology is best brought to bear for your company. If it is, these rogue issues will remain on the margins. If it’s not, then your company will die.
Streaming MapReduce with GridGain & Scala
GridGain will present at Twin Cities Java JUG about “Streaming MapReduce with GridGain and Scala”. As always, JUG is hosted by Intertech. Live coding, good introduction into in-memory computing and data processing and plenty of……