In this CEO Power Panel at the 10th International Cloud Expo, moderated by Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, David Canellos, President and CEO of PerspecSys; Lawrence Guillory, CEO of Racemi; John Keagy, Founder, Chairman and CEO of GoGrid; Treb Ryan, Co-Founder & CEO of OpSource; Joe Weinman, Sr. VP of Cloud Services & Strategy at Telx; Jeff Newlin, Vice President and General Manager of OutSystems North America; and Darryl Brown, CMO at Appcore discussed such topics as: Is it just wishful thinking to depict the Cloud as more than just a technology solution? If not, then what concrete examples best demonstrate cloud computing as an engine of business value?
The Age of Big Data: How to Gain Competitive Advantage
We have entered the “Age of Big Data” according to a recent New York Times article. This comes as no surprise to most organizations already struggling with the onslaught of data coming from an increasing number of sources and at an increasing rate. The 2011 IDC Digital Universe Study reported that data is growing faster than Moore’s Law. This trend points to a paradigm shift in how organizations process data where isolated islands and silos are being replaced by large clusters of commodity servers that keep data and compute resources together.
Another way of looking at this paradigm shift is that the growing volume and velocity of data require a new approach to networked computing. A good example of this change is found at Google. The industry now takes Google’s dominance for granted, but when Google launched its beta search engine in 1998, the company was late entering the market. At the time, Yahoo! was dominant; other contenders included infoseek, excite, Lycos, Ask Jeeves and AltaVista (dominating technical searches). Within two years, Google was the dominant search provider. It wasn’t until 2003, when Google published a paper on MapReduce, that the world got a glimpse into Google’s back-end architecture.
Data Centers: Where Big Data Will Be Exploited
On any given day, it’s not uncommon for a company to generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, pushing the amount of data that must be processed and managed to unimaginable levels. Because of the requirements for power and low-latency connections that such data growth entails, many companies have become more inclined to outsource their big data needs to colocation data center facilities. In turn, this has created a huge demand for colocation space as additional processing grounds for big data. According to analyst firm Nemertes, colocation providers will not have the available space to capitalize on approximately $869 million of market demand by 2015. This is with good reason, though, as colocation data centers offer huge benefits for big data, including high-density power, opportunities to decrease latency and a community of like-minded companies with which to cross-connect.
Public Cloud Reportedly Coming from VMware
VMware is going to go up against Amazon, Microsoft, Google and presumably Rackspace with its own public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service developed as Project Zephyr according to CRN, which thinks it could create some channel conflict for vCloud service providers that will have to compete with VMware.
The story is unconfirmed but the book quotes “sources with knowledge of the matter” saying that VMware has been quietly beta testing Zephyr for the last few months on Cisco USC servers and EMC Avamar storage at a big data center space in Nevada.
Apparently it’s afraid if it waits much longer it’ll be closed out. Market share will depend a lot on how aggressive its pricing is.
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’ve had training and cut over to the new solution. In each case, the person is expected to make a commitment but won’t feel comfortable making a choice until much of the uncertainty is driven out, thereby reducing the risk of the decision. People take action to reduce uncertainty instinctively, and as long as they feel uncertain they won’t be comfortable to make a decision. Understanding this, and helping drive out uncertainty to encourage commitment can make a difference between analysis paralysis and steady progress toward the goal. Providing answers to reduce uncertainty can “lead the horse to water” trying to get them to decide.
At GreenPages, we’ve done numerous assessments to create recommendations for companies on what cloud solutions are good for them. It’s a tough decision for the CIO, and a big leap of faith for the company, especially putting your IT organization’s success in the hands of an external Cloud Provider. We research the providers, check references, compare them to industry benchmarks, but it is still a tough decision.
When we meet with IT Managers in the process of implementing Cloud solutions, they grapple with how to fit the standardized cloud services into their organization. One company had a complex Active Directory environment, and although a particular tool claimed to integrate with AD, it had very limited functionality, only allowing a single OU selection, and this customer is still working through how to get the tool to fit their organization. IT Managers know these things can happen and are skeptical until they see a solution first hand, and experience it for themselves.
When users hear about the changes coming, they have their own questions. This is the time when people wonder if their cheese is about to move. People want to know how their job will change with the new tools or strategy. These concerns can pop up unexpectedly if not addressed.
Knowing that people are extra sensitive to uncertainty, the resourceful IT professional can get out in front of people’s most anxiety producing concerns and help to drive out uncertainty:
- Including people affected downstream is a good way to get their input as well as lay the groundwork for commitment.
- Most people need to have an initial exposure to understand something new, a time to contemplate the impact to them, and some forum to voice their concerns, in order to really feel ownership and buy in
(i.e. commitment). - Any information that can be provided to help people understand as early as possible can defuse possible frustration later.
- It’s important to respond clearly when people express their urgency to resolve uncertainty. They want to be heard, and frustration will continue to grow if not addressed.
- The goal is to help people to be comfortable in the project timeline, understanding the designs early, and seeing the actual output as implementation gets closer.
It’s risky to proceed to the next phase without fully addressing uncertainty. There will always be some uncertainty, but recklessly discounting someone’s concerns or putting off understanding the concerns will increase the risk of having the concern blow up unexpectedly at some point. The blowup will create rework as the foundation is questioned and the design is revisited.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. For Cloud projects, helping team members resolve their uncertainty leads them to water and makes them ready and able to take the drink.
The Cloud Computing Transition
“ServiceMesh is an enterprise software company. Our product is the agility platform, which is an enterprise-ready cloud application management platform,” stated Frank Martinez, Chief Strategy Officer at ServiceMesh, 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.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Building Secure Multi-Tenant Environments
“We are a cloud hosting provider with 14 years of experience and we are focused on building multi-tenant secure environments,” stated Aaron Hollobaugh, Vice President of Marketing at Hostway Corporation, 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.
Cloud Computing: Cloud Storage as a Service
“Atmos is EMC’s cloud storage solution. It’s a distributed object storer that enables Enterprise IT and service providers to offer their own storage as a service offerings,” noted Brian Olson, Cloud Business Development Manager at EMC, 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.
Nuance Introduces Nina, the Virtual Assistant for Mobile Customer Service Apps
Nuance Communications today introduced Nina, the virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps. With Nina, companies can add speech-based virtual assistant capabilities to their existing iOS and Android mobile apps, enhancing the self-service experience for their customers. Nina combines Nuance speech recognition, Text-to-Speech (TTS), voice biometrics, and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology hosted in the cloud to deliver an interactive user experience that not only understands what is said, but also can identify who is saying it.
Nuance also announced that USAA, a leading financial services provider that serves members of the U.S. military, veterans and their families, has adopted the virtual assistant for use within its popular mobile app. A pilot is planned for August and the functionality will launch to all USAA members early next year.
“USAA’s innovative solutions are designed to make life easier for our highly mobile military service members, and increasingly for all members who now expect to get things done when, where and how they want,” said Neff Hudson, assistant vice president of emerging channels for USAA. “We believe that the virtual assistant has tremendous potential to make it simpler, faster and more satisfying for our members to manage their financial affairs on their mobile devices.”
Nina is significant because it is the first virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps to incorporate both speech recognition and voice biometrics into a single integrated solution. Nina is also the first solution that provides an open software development kit (SDK) to support the rapid integration of virtual assistant capabilities into existing mobile applications. In addition, Nina is the first to allow organizations to brand their own virtual assistant persona, including the visual appearance and implementation of optional custom TTS voices.
“Nina is a watershed innovation for the automated customer service industry, not only because it brings the virtual assistant directly into an app, but because it raises the bar through its level of interactive dialog and language understanding,” said Robert Weideman, executive vice president and general manager of the Nuance Enterprise Division. “Nina provides our customers a major competitive differentiator by enabling more successful self-service through their mobile apps. We are especially pleased to further our partnership with USAA, a company known for its innovation and approach to delivering a premier mobile customer service experience to its members.”
Infoblox and F5 Do DNS and Global Load Balancing Right.
If you’re a large corporation, two things that are a significant challenge for your Network Administrators’ are DNS management and Global Load Balancing (GLB) configuration/management. With systems spread across a region, country, or the globe, the amount of time investment required to keep things running smoothly ranges from “near zero” during quiet times to “why am I still here at midnight?” in times of major network change or outages.
Until now.
Two market leaders – Infoblox and F5 Networks have teamed up to make DNS – including DNSSEC – and GLB less time-consuming and error prone.
Infoblox has extended their Trinzic DDI family of products with Infoblox Load Balancer Manager (LBM) for F5 Global Traffic Manager (GTM). The LBM turns a loose collection of load balancers into a dynamic, automated, Infoblox Grid.