What’s an example of on-premise software being threatened by the emergence of a SaaS upstart operating in the cloud?  Answer: Mint Vs. Quicken

Quicken, for years, had cultivated a devoted base of users who waited for each new version of the software to appear from Intuit. This nifty little personal finance tool is easier to use than QuickBooks albeit more limited in scope.  

Then came along this amazingly simple and intuitive online offering called Mint, which promised to integrate all your personal finance into one single web interface, with no requirement to download software. And it was free!

In 2009 TechCrunch reported that Mint claimed it gained 3000 users per day jumping from 600,000 to 850,000 in just a few short months. The numbers were disputed by Intuit, who suddenly understood how the cloud could reshape a landscape it had for years dominated.

This led Intuit to …

A big thank you to BISNOW and my fellow panel members for an outstanding discussion and very informative event, last week’s Data Center Investment Conference and Expo. The federal marketplace is certainly being changed by cloud and the data center industry is certainly willing and able to support this important transition.
Our federal roundtable, moderated by purple tie-wearing King & Spalding partner JC Boggs, explained that agencies are all moving at different speeds to the cloud. The most mission critical programs are moving the slowest. FAA CIO Steve Cooper says his agency is starting to stand up federal private clouds. And there are plans to share that environment with other government agencies, as well as offer them cloud-based services. But Steve says he won’t be the first CIO to go into a public cloud and risk the public embarrassment of a security breach.

read more

Cloud computing solutions offer organizations tremendous opportunities for efficiency, flexibility, and scalability. They also create some scenarios in which a business can find themselves in trouble. A single cloud outage can shut an organization down, for example.

While it may seem unlikely that a provider will experience a severe interruption of service, it’s important to realize that it does happen. Amazon Web Services, for example, experienced a four-day outage for some of its clients in 2010. That kind of outage can grind business to a halt.

Fortunately, there are some things you can do to make sure your mission-critical apps survive a cloud outage. Here are some procedures you need to put in place as soon as possible:

1. Take advantage of cloud provider options. Some providers will offer you multiple availability zones or multiple availability regions. What this boils down to is that your particular solution is being housed in multiple locations, each independent of a disaster at the other. This usually results in a premium, but in many critical applications it will be worth it.
2. Consider multiple providers. Sometimes, especially with mission-critical applications, you can develop a multi-provider architecture. To be sure, you need to do some investigation here; some cloud providers are actually likely to share data center resources with each other. It doesn’t do you any good to have multiple providers if each is relying on the same physical location to provide you services.
3. Include availability in your service level agreement. Whenever possible, you need to make sure that your SLA outlines specific consequences when there is a disruption in service. Define an acceptable level of availability for the given cloud application. For example, if you’re relying on a cloud provider to give you disaster recovery services, you might require 99.999% availability.
4. Think twice before putting some applications into the cloud. If you’re not willing to take the risk and do what needs to be done to insure availability or survive an outage, you may not be ready for public cloud solutions. It’s not that cloud solutions can’t meet your needs; you just need to go in with eyes wide open and be ready to accept the associated risks.

read more

There is a data explosion occurring in the world. As more and more data is being collected, the challenge is how to use it effectively and securely. Data that is being created is not just transaction oriented and is not structured. Such data cannot be managed effectively with some data management systems since traditional systems cannot process such data. . Big data requires adequate storage and distributed processing. Big Data also injects heterogeneous data types that need proper integration into the existing infrastructure. Social networks have been generating tremendous amounts of such data. Big Data is truly a nightmare and it is important to effectively manage such data. Big Data tools can manage and analyze structured and unstructured data and can obtain information from large data sets.

read more

DocuSign, which claims to be the global standard for legally binding, secure electronic-signatures, has raised a $47.5 million D round led by Kleiner Perkins, an investment that will put Kleiner partner Mary Meeker, once Wall Street’s leading Internet analyst, on its board.
Accel Partners and Salesforce.com, Comcast Ventures, SAP Ventures and the National Association of Realtors also participated, the cloud-based San Francisco operation said.
The round brings total investment in the digital platform that replaces slow, expensive paper transactions to $104 million.
The widgetry is accessible from any Internet-connected device and is supposed to support virtually any document and form type. It provides broad user authentication options, data collection, secure document and data storage and retrieval as well as real-time negotiation and collaboration tools.

read more

“We started ODCA about 18 months ago and it was one of the first user-driven organizations. It was a group of CIOs coming together to collaboratively decide what we want the cloud to be,” explained Marvin Wheeler, Chairman of Open Data Center Alliance, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

read more

“Every organization has a storage hog, maybe many, and they get all the blame for the growth in storage capacity. With cloud storage we’ve provided organizations with a way to deal with this storage growth,” stated Nicos Vekiarides, CEO & Co-Founder of TwinStrata, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

read more

Scale-out networking using fast, fat and flat network topologies deliver the best ROI when building private or public cloud computing networks. A key ingredient of such high performance and highly efficient network designs is the Ethernet switch system that connects server, virtual machine and storage nodes together to deliver desired application level performance.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Sujal Das, Director of Product Marketing for Broadcom Corporation’s Infrastructure and Networking Group (ING) will discuss the following:
1. Technology requirements in Ethernet switch system for delivering the largest network nodes scale with flexible network topologies that optimize application performance
2. How to deliver the highest performance and support multi-tenancy and seamless workload placement across data centers
3. Practical deployment options that showcases use of these technologies at lowest CAPEX and OPEX with available solutions

read more

I’m living in a small town in Illinois near the Mississippi River these days. I often find myself crossing the river to a larger town in Iowa to get certain things I need. I know a lot of people who work in Iowa and live in Illinois. I know others who’ve moved to the Iowan hinterlands for job and career opportunities.

Sometimes I find myself wondering what things would be like here if this were Europe and not the United States. Bound by a common currency, an open border, but without the virtually friction-free mobility of labor.

This thought comes to mind as I read today that Eurozone leaders remain confident about the future of the currency and the nations it encompasses, even as a report from the London-based Center for Economic Policy Research shows the Eurozone ecnomony contracting for the second consecutive month.

Survey Says…
Research at the Tau Institute, which I’ve co-founded here in Illinois (with an Asian office in Manila) shows that the Eurozone countries significantly lag their Central and Eastern non-zone neighbors. Only the Netherlands continues to perform well.

This research is focused on ICT adaption and how it relates to a nation’s future prospects and attractiveness to investors. It is designed to provide a truly relative, “pound-for-pound” picture of which countries are doing the most with what they have. It therefore tends to favor lower cost developing nations.

South Korea tops the list, which is no surprise. But most of the world’s other clear leaders come from Central and Eastern Europe, which are unbound by currency yokes. In the past, this may have seemed to be a disadvantage, as a single currency can be very volatile.

But today, these nations are able to keep their living costs low and chart their own unostructed economic courses. So, places such as Ukraine, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and many others perform well. Laggards include Greece and Italy.

Trained & Untrained Eyes
Back to Iowa and Illinois, there are some economic differences. Illinois has a much larger economy because Chicago is part of it. Iowa tends to have a healthier economy with a lower unemployment rate. Illinois is corrupt through and through; Iowa is not. Illinois has a few good commercial-free radio stations from various colleges and universities in the area; Iowa has a statewide system.

People here are quite free to make their choice of where they want to work and live. In doing so, what appear as big differences to us natives will be inconsequential to the untrained eye. This is simply not the case across the borders of Europe.

I realize there are certain areas – such as where France, Germany, and Switzerland meet at Basel – in which local opportunity trumps any border problems. But I also know people from my little town in Illinois who’ve moved everywhere from New York to San Francisco to build their dreams, with very little need to adjust and very few problems “fitting in.” This just doesn’t happen in Europe.

Even though the labor-flow problem is endemic to all of Europe, at least the nations unbound by the single currency are able to differentiate themselves, and it appears this is a big advantage to them.

One of our institute’s key Advisory Board members is from France. This is a great country and great location from which to view all of Europe. And France does OK in our research, if not great. That said, when the time comes to locate an office in Europe, we’ll be looking at Kiev, Sofia, and Vilnius first.

read more