Eurozone Not Where IT’s At
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.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Simplify Networking Within the Data Center
“We’re really about simplifying networking within the data center. We allow our customers to pre-provision all their Ethernet fibre channels connections,” observed Mike Heumann, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Marketing at NextIO, 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 People in the News This Week (July 27, 2012)
Velti Names Former Microsoft Veteran as Chief Revenue Officer
Velti announced the addition of Harry Patz as Chief Revenue Officer to the Velti Executive team. Patz joins Velti after 20 years of experience at Microsoft Corporation, where he most recently served as Vice President of the Communications Sector North America for Mobile, Media Video, Cloud and Enterprise. As CRO at Velti, Patz will be responsible for driving the revenue strategy and operations in North America.
GraphOn Corporation Appoints Sam M. Auriemma to the Board of Directors
GraphOn Corporation announced that the company has appointed Sam M. Auriemma to its board of directors. Auriemma is a financial executive with over 30 years of senior-level experience at a variety of technology companies. He has been responsible for over 25 acquisitions and divestitures with combined cash considerations in excess of $1.5 billion. Most recently he held the position of executive vice president and chief financial officer at MSC Software.
Alert Logic Names Paul Marvin Chief Financial Officer
Alert Logic announced the appointment of Paul Marvin as the company’s new chief financial officer (CFO). In this position, Marvin will be responsible for all of the company’s financial, accounting and human resources operations.
DataCore Software Appoints Steve Houck to Newly Created Chief Operating Officer Role
DataCore Software announced the appointment of its first Chief Operating Officer (COO), Steve Houck. The new position was created to organize and drive DataCore’s rapid growth and market leadership in storage virtualization. Houck is a highly regarded veteran in virtualization, flash storage, cloud computing and data center technologies. His previous roles included vice president of worldwide channels for VMware, along with various global sales leadership posts at EMC Corporation. Houck has also held executive posts for global field sales and go-to-market strategy development at start-up ventures focused on cloud computing and flash storage, with the most recent executive role at Astute Networks, an innovative SSD technology company.
Preventive IT Analytics
Managing software application performance is complex and increasingly challenging. Surprisingly, even today, massive IT resources remain chained to ensuring applications and infrastructures are up and running smoothly, rather than proactively leveraging strategic technologies to solve business problems or achieve competitive advantage.
That world is changing.
A new generation of preventive analytic technologies is emerging in the APM (Application Performance Management) industry, unlocking untapped value in this $2+ billion market that is growing $300 million per year. These technologies are only now achievable via revolutionary machine learning technologies, advanced quantitative analytics, and the natural evolution of BI … as BI-like analytics are bleeding into the APM world.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Cloud and Big Data Strategy
“Big Data genuinely fits well with cloud computing. It’s fundamentally a clustering architecture and it’s fundamentally possible because cloud offers the best price performance for processing any type of computing task,” observed John Keagy, CEO of GoGrid, 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.
Terracotta’s BigMemory Capacity Swells
Terracotta put out a new 3.7 version of its BigMemory Wednesday that can squeeze 10x more data into in-memory where it can hug ultra-fast processing and search. Poof, instant analysis of real-time Big Data.
The move will let it support the multi-terabyte servers that are now becoming standard fare. Those boxes now come with 2TB-4TB of RAM. Terracotta’s compression technology can squeeze a terabyte of data into 500 gigs of inexpensive RAM and multi-terabyte servers can be added linearly to create massive in-memory Big Data solutions.
Symantec Dumps Its CEO
Symantec Wednesday pushed its CEO and president of three years Enrique Salem out and installed its chairman, former Intuit CEO Steve Bennett, in his place. Shares rose a cheery 13.5% to $14.96 on the news.
“While progress has been made over the last three years in many areas,” Bennett said in a statement, “it was the board’s judgment that it was in the best interests of Symantec to make a change in the CEO.”
“My view is that Symantec’s assets are strong and yet the company is underperforming against the opportunity. I’m looking forward to working with the team to build upon the significant assets in place to help Symantec accelerate value creation for all of its stakeholders.”
He intends to follow up on Symantec’s push into mobile security. He also intends to conduct a 90- to 120-day review and interview customers, employees and partners to figure out what’s wrong.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: The On-Premise Private Cloud
“We have 25,000 Eucalyptus Clouds started up every year, over 20% of the Fortune 100 running Eucalyptus, and more reference deployments last year than all of our competitors put together,” noted Brady Murray, Vice President of Alliances for Eucalyptus Systems, 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.
AppFog Promises Cloud-on-the-Cheap
Two-year-old AppFog, which started out in life as PHP Fog, is proposing to rent out cloud infrastructure that it in turn rents from Amazon, Azure, Rackspace and HP charging only for the total amount of RAM used in deployments.
It doesn’t matter if it’s coming from multiple backend infrastructure vendors it’s a flat price and promises the fast servers available.
It claims it can set people up on multiple cloud and multiple availability zones to avoid the inevitable cloud crash for less than it would cost them to make the arrangements directly with the infrastructure vendors.