SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloud Sidekick, developer of the open source Cato Cloud Orchestration Platform, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cato provides an AWS-compatible, on-premise, agentless and brutally efficient framework to automate your applications on both cloud and datacenter infrastructure. The technology behind Cato goes back to 1999 with the mission to automate as many recurring IT tasks as possible while delivering a self-service interface for users ranging from customer support to systems administrators. Today, Cato provides a platform to consistently automate your application infrastructure to drive reliability and efficiency.
Rethinking IT: Using the Cloud as Change Catalyst
As the technology evolves, so do the roles of the IT Department. There is a sea change whereby an effective organization doesn’t need those to plug in cables and write endless code as much as to recognize and broker IT needs for the betterment of the enterprise.
There are a lot of experts and process gurus who are more qualified than I to tell you how to manage change. They will offer a great deal of high level advice such as “define the vision,” “create a change proposition,” “promote staff input to shape the solution.” And these are very wise nuggets of advice. And we (in IT) are at a crossroads for change. The landscape of the role, the challenges of the responsibilities, the tools of the trade are all evolving.
On Plate Tectonics, Glacier Shifts and Cloud Forecasts
Not all major changes are visible to the naked eye. Standing next to a glacier it is difficult to determine direction (does it grow or shrink across seasons) and watching continents move takes even some stamina for the casual observer. Luckily this is not the case for cloud computing.
Apart from the very noticeable cloud hype (more on the cycle of that soon) there is also very noticeable growth. At the end of a deep and wide group effort, Gartner published its “Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2010-2016, 2Q12 Update” accompanied by Market Definitions and Methodology: Public Cloud Services. As I highlighted several years ago in Can the Real Cloud Market Size Please Stand Up? definitions are all important when trying to compare various cloud forecasts and especially cloud forecast categories.
On-demand Cloud Service from ControlCircle
A scalable, on-demand infrastructure has been developed by ControlCircle, a leading UK managed service provider, utilising industry-leading technology, including VMware, NetApp, Citrix, HP and Brocade.
The Hybrix enterprise cloud service has been developed for customers who require a reliable and secure environment to develop and test new applications or to enable on-demand capabilities for business critical systems. With Hybrix, customers can use the powerful Max3000™ portal to create and deploy new cloud services whenever they are required, to whatever specification. Max3000 enables a comprehensive view into the performance of the customer’s cloud and overall IT estate by leveraging ControlCircle’s fully integrated monitoring services.
Big Data: How Can Data Providers Position Themselves for Growth?
As applications move to SaaS Data Providers need to focus on the opportunity to deliver customizable data components in the style and in the context in which developers, architects imagine and build SaaS applications could greatly accelerate the adoption of “uber catalogs” of all things that stream, quote, change, price. These developers in turn will build new applications that use Data Provider catalog data in yet unimagined and useful ways.
Microsoft and Google Put RightScale on a Roll
Guess who benefits when two industry giants compete with each other offering exactly the same set of services? It is RightScale! While the Cloud ecosystem is still recovering from the euphoria of witnessing Microsoft and Google launch IaaS, RightScale is busy porting their ServerTemplates to both the Public Clouds. They are in an enviable position […]
Is Cloud a Threat or an Opportunity for the Channel?
One of the key tenets of the Cloud is self-service. Anyone from an individual entrepreneur to an enterprise CIO with a valid credit card can subscribe to the Cloud. This has been the biggest driver of Cloud adoption especially among the startups and SMEs. While this is definitely an advantage for the Cloud providers and […]
Forecasting public cloud adoption in the enterprise
The economics of public cloud computing are accelerating the pace of change occurring in enterprise software today.
Many of the scenarios that Clayton Christensen insightfully describes in The Innovator’s Dilemma are playing out right now in many sectors of this industry, shifting the balance of purchasing power to line-of-business leaders away from IT. True to the cases shown in the book, new entrants are bringing disruptive innovations that are being successfully used to attack the most price-sensitive areas of the market.
Winning customers at the low-end and making their way up-market, new entrants are changing the customer experience, economics and structure of the industry. Salesforce.com is a prime example of how the insights shared in The Innovator’s Dilemma are alive and well in the CRM market for example. This is an excellent book to add to your summer reading list.
Defining The Public Cloud
The National Institute …
Outages and the Weakonomics of Public Cloud
The latest Amazon outage again begs whether or not Amazon’s customers are technology leaders or laggards simply trying to reduce IT costs to their bare minimum. Certainly some enterprises are properly using the public cloud for key projects where a non-critical application or service needs to be created quickly and within a low budget.
Wrong strategy: 5 ways not to compete with Amazon AWS
These days, it seems that the whole world is gunning for Amazon.
Who can argue with the success of their on-line retail ventures, Kindle franchise, and of course AWS?
The secret to Amazon’s success is their ability to tune out the noise and focus on innovating, disrupting and creating new markets. Here’s five reasons how not to compete with Amazon AWS:
1) Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
While Amazon’s competitors are busy building out their cloud infrastructure offerings, they are too closely aligned to Amazon’s vision and business model. Meanwhile, Amazon is innovating and disrupting their own market by offering new features while reducing costs.
Therefore, it seems that AWS is always one step ahead of the competition and thus customers continue to flock to their services. Rather than copy Amazon, competitors need to focus on innovation, features and benefits for the consumers of …