We have previously written about Recorded Future, a company providing new ways of exploring what the web knows about coming events. Mankind knows things about the future and the analytic tools provided by Recorded Future helps extract the meaning and relevance of this knowledge and apply it to organizational missions. Their public cloud-based capabilities are […]
This post by BobGourley was first published at CTOvision.com.
“cCommerce” – Cloud-based eCommerce, will be made possible through Cloud hosting providers achieving compliance with security frameworks like PCI, the requirements for credit card processing. This will unlock the floodgates of Cloud adoption and usher in a new age of IT models. Cloud Security best practices Cloud Providers should be able to provide details on […]
Operations is increasingly responsible for deploying and managing applications within this architecture, requiring traditionally developer-oriented skills like integration, programming and testing as well as greater collaboration to meet business and operational goals for performance, security, and availability. To maintain the economy of scale necessary to keep up with the volatility of modern data center environments, operations is adopting modern development methodologies and practices.
devopsisaverbCloud computing and virtualization have elevated the API as the next generation management paradigm across IT, driven by the proliferation of virtualization and pressure on IT to become more efficient. In response, infrastructure is becoming more programmable, allowing IT to automate, integrate and manage continuous delivery of applications within the context of an overarching operational framework.
One of the most challenging things about being an advocate for a broad horizontally applicable technology is that it does not solve a particular business problem. Instead, it solves about 100,000 business problems. That means that everyone is impacted by it, yet nobody is particularly interested in it.
What’s the solution? Perhaps it’s to reframe the discussion around specific business or technology problems that people face – like Legacy Application Modernization, Quote to Cash automation, the Recruit to Retire process or Procure to Pay.
The Euro was started so that Germany would never attack France again. This was an historical diplomatic breakthrough.
But today, although Europe’s financial leaders have not sought my advice on either economic policy or hotel behavior, it is clear that the Euro must let some of its members go.
The root problem is that a continent of Eurocrats could not leave well enough alone. They were compelled instead to extend the new currency into Europe’s fabric as deeply and widely as possible. Doing so furthered grand notions of a “united” Europe, and addressed paranoic fears of Franco-German economic domination. Only the UK among the larger nations of Europe resisted the Euro’s sales pitch.
The Euro is used by a group of unequal nations. You can contact me for the details I’ve compiled on the topic if you’d like, but the basic fact is this: the Euro makes it more expensive to live in the less wealthy Eurozone countries than it should be. This distorts the costs of housing, labor, and many other goods, thus making it very difficult for, say, Portugal and Greece to compete with Germany and France.
Furthermore, there may be open borders, but the language barriers and cultural traditions make it difficult for a truly free flow of labor, such as is found in the U.S.
So, after an experiment lasting more than 16 years now, it is clear that the Euro works fine for Germany, France, and the Netherlands, less so for Spain, Italy, and others, and doesn’t work at all for Greece and perhaps Portugal.
A dramatically shrinking drachma or escudo would cause screaming headlines and TV shoutfests for a few weeks, but in the end would allow their issuers to grow on their own terms. This assumes that the countries’ investment climates would be liberal, ie, foreigners would be allowed to invest very freely in markets, real estate, and businesses.
Unleashing less wealthy Eurozone nations should also cause a dramatic rise in the value of the Euro – with the ironic rebuttal to earlier fears that German and French businesses would have to work harder to keep their products competitive in a world market.
I say all these by peering through the lens of the research I’ve been conducting for the past 18 months. By weighing countries’ ICT expenditures on a truly relative basis, I’ve found the Eurozone to be lagging.
Sweden and the UK – both non-Eurozone countries – lead the wealthy Western European nations. Estonia is the leading Eurozone country, and in fact leads both Sweden and the UK. But it lags many of its Eastern European neighbors, something that I think it would not do if it still had the kroon in place.
Among the larger Eurozone countries, the Netherlands stands first, followed by Germany and Finland. With the latter, I see another Euro-drag – had it stayed with the markka, would Finland have finished closer in the rankings to neighboring Sweden?
The non-Euro countries of Central and Eastern Europe are the big winners in my rankings, as they have shown a commitment to IT purchases, have relatively low costs of living, have maintained relatively income parity, and continue to shed their corrupt Communist pasts.
And a final note: halfway across the world from Europe, phenomenal South Korea tops my rankings overall. Its currency, the won, has steadily shed value over the decades. At 1150 to 1 USD today, it has lost about 99.99% of the value of its original post-WWII currency.
Floating freely since 1997, the won’s exchange rate has little to do with the absolute value of its country’s issuer. I can’t imagine the country would do as well as it has, by all world measures, if it was somehow yoked into some sort of currency zone.
For the last two years, enterprise mobility has had a high place on the technology agenda of most companies. However, the mobile enterprise remains a highly complex and expensive endeavor that can only be afforded by a small group of organizations. Even more importantly, the enterprise mobility stacks are technologically archaic compared to the equivalent consumer market technology which is causing companies to start embracing open, consumer-based technologies as part of the enterprise mobile applications.
If you agree that connected devices are becoming a predominant force in the enterprise, then you can also agree that the industry is in desperate need for technologies that provide simple, open and yet robust mechanisms to develop enterprise applications that can run on these devices.
SYS-CON Events announced today that ServerCentral, Chicago’s leading provider of colocation, cloud, network connectivity, and managed services, 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.
ServerCentral provides highly reliable IT infrastructure in secure facilities across North America, Europe, and Asia. Delivering industry leading service levels on colocation, cloud, IP connectivity, and managed services, ServerCentral is a trusted name to a wide range of global companies seeking turnkey data center solutions.
Studies suggest that businesses are adopting cloud much faster than IT, which is fair considering the fact that tightly coupled on-premise applications and outdated platforms from the previous decade made businesses realize only 30% of their budgets as business capabilities and the rest has gone towards maintenance activities.
The biggest supporting factor for businesses to get agile in the cloud is the availability of a large array of BpaaS (Business Process as a Service) solutions.
However, businesses cannot realize all their needs wilth solitary or individual BpaaS solutions, rather they need the option of integrating multiple business processes and to arrive at the desired business capability.
Traditionally IT has set up EAI, SOA-based application frameworks and application servers so that the orchestration of multiple business processes can be done toward realizing a business capability.
SYS-CON Events announced today that Net Optics, Inc., the industry’s leading provider of intelligent access and monitoring architecture, 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.
Net Optics is the leading provider of Intelligent Access and Monitoring Architecture solutions that deliver real-time IT visibility, monitoring and control. As a result, businesses achieve peak performance in network analytics and security. More than 7,000 enterprises, service providers and government organizations – including 85 percent of the Fortune 100 – trust Net Optics’ comprehensive smart access hardware and software solutions to plan, scale and future-proof their networks through an easy-to-use interface. Net Optics maintains a global presence through leading OEM partner and reseller networks.
One thing people can agree on is that the cloud is the most transformative information technology to come along in decades – on the same level as the rise of the personal computer or the Internet. And that means there is a lot at stake for enterprises struggling to lay down the foundations needed to support cloud operations going forward, according to a post on IT Business Edge.
It’s possible to identify the key factors in successful cloud development that will encourage the cloud’s transformative aspects while diminishing its disruptive ones. These include user attitudes, technologies and processes, all of which have a lot to gain and lose depending on the way cloud systems are architected and implemented, according to Arthur Cole of IT Business Edge.
“With something as complex as the cloud, it would be foolish to think that finding the optimal mix of services, infrastructure and resources would be easy,” he writes, adding that pursuing the deployment, management and governance of the cloud is well worth it.