One thing that gets lost in the general Big Data hubbub is the critical question of apps. Big Data can provide stunning business insights but unless those insights are embodied into an application that can galvanize new business behaviors they are not worth much.
VMware has been a thought leader in the area of cloud application platforms for some time. Now we are turning our attention to the intersection of Big Data and Cloud Computing.
Service Providers large and small have been delivering network-based services for decades, including infrastructure and software. These have come in the form of enterprise hosting, unified communications, managed security, and managed applications. In fact, it’s not a stretch to include traditional telecommunications services such as Voice, MPLS, and Internet access into a discussion on traditional network services, since networks are shared. Over years of delivering these services, technological advances have taken place, many without interesting names or marketing budgets tied to them.
Enter the newest headline-grabbing network service – “Cloud.” It seems the market still has differing opinions on how to define Cloud. I have heard professionals blur the lines by referring to Cloud as anything in the network, or by lumping it in with services such as managed hosting. Purists call it self-service and unmanaged. There are even sub-categories, such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, where even the lines between these blur. Even though there isn’t consensus on the perfect definition of Cloud, there is agreement that something important is happening.Is the Cloud New?
Maybe you’ve noticed but I’ve been on an infographic kick lately – especially when it’s something interesting.
This time it is an aggregated infographic of data primarily from Forrester, IDC and Gartner as it pertains to the cloud’s impact and adoption thru 2015.
According to Axway, the cloud is expected to become the primary operating system for enterprise by 2014, mobile devices are driving adoption, and the cloud hype is over, this thing is for real.
By the end of 2011, the world held a total of 3.72 million data centers, and more than half of them were located in US and Europe. On the whole, the Central and Eastern Europe, part of Asia-Pacific, North America and West Europe ranked high, but their room for further increase is limited, with a compound annual growth rate of 3.8% during the past three years. By contrast, emerging markets such as Asia-Pacific and Africa that have seen a compound growth rate as high as 14.2% will be the biggest drive for the growth of the whole industry.
announced an updated version of its AzureOps service. AzureOps now allows customers to compose, monitor, and manage disparate cloud services as a single unified cloud application. These services include Azure infrastructure (IaaS) and platform services (PaaS), as well as third party software as a service (SaaS) offerings such as email, messaging, and web analytics. Opstera’s new service improves health management for cloud applications through intuitive dashboards, threshold-based analytics, and configurable alerts, allowing IT managers to quickly make informed decisions to optimize performance and minimize costs.
If you want to position your Web hosting services for maximum growth and revenue, you can’t use a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, you need to identify the specific market segments you’re addressing, determine what their needs are, and frame each offer accordingly, using the style, language, and bundles that will appeal to that particular segment.
In our latest Best Practices paper (available for download on the Marketing Best Practices page within the new Parallels PartnerNet), we identify the best practices our service provider partners listed for effectively merchandising Web services to two groups of customers—those who are less technically oriented and those who are more technically oriented—plus general merchandising recommendations that apply to all customers. By following these best practices, you’ll be able to both maximize your conversion rates – from browsers to buyers – and drive increased revenues.
To download the complete whitepaper, or just a self-diagnostic checklist tool, go to Marketing Best Practices page. Not registered? Sign up today!
– Josh Beil
Director of Service Provider Marketing
@joshbeil
Microsoft has decided it wants to be popular.
It’s remade Windows Azure as both infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) with Linux support – so the rumors were right – since public clouds are largely Linux instances.
The Linux distributions supported include OpenSUSE 12.1, CentOS 6.2, Ubuntu 12.04 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2. (Red Hat itself was, evidently, too much to ask for given it’s a cloud rival and had its own cloud announcement this week but CentOS is a Red Hat clone.)
That should theoretically let Azure chase after Amazon, Rackspace, OpenStack and, as of Wednesday, Oracle, not to mention HP, Dell and everybody else.
Microsoft has also bought into the hybrid cloud, a concept Amazon only supports with Eucalyptus in tow. Azure will also have all-SSD block storage, something Amazon is only grudging with.
Windows Server 2008 R2 and the Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate VMs will obviously be supported. It says it still has to get all the third-party Windows apps over to Azure.
Bill Laing, corporate VP for server and cloud at Microsoft, summarized the changes in a blog posting:
Windows Azure Virtual Machines — Virtual Machines give you application mobility, allowing you to move your virtual hard disks (VHDs) back and forth between on-premises and the cloud. Migrate existing workloads such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft SharePoint to the cloud, bring your own customized Windows Server or Linux images, or select from a gallery. As a common virtualization file format, VHD has been adopted by hundreds of vendors and is a freely available specification covered under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise.
Windows Azure Virtual Network — Virtual Network lets you provision and manage virtual private networks (VPNs) in Windows Azure as well as securely extend on-premises networks into the cloud. It provides control over network topology, including configuration of IP addresses, routing tables and security policies and uses the industry-standard IPSEC protocol to provide a secure connection between your corporate VPN gateway and Windows Azure.
Windows Azure Web Sites — Build web sites and applications with this highly elastic solution supporting .NET, Node.js, and PHP while using common deployment techniques like Git and FTP. Windows Azure Web Sites will also allow easy deployment of open source applications like WordPress, Joomla!, DotNetNuke, Umbraco and Drupal to the cloud with a few clicks. (Expect MySQL and SQL Servers as backends.)
New tools, language support, and SDK — Windows Azure SDK June 2012 includes new developer capabilities for writing code against the latest service improvements with updated support for Java, PHP and .NET, and the addition of Python as a supported language on Windows Azure. Additionally, the SDK now provides 100% command line support for both Windows and Mac. (There will also be a new management portal.)
Availability in New Countries— Availability of Windows Azure is being expanded to customers in 48 new countries, including Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa and Ukraine. Roll-out will be complete later this month, making Windows Azure one of the most widely available cloud platforms in the industry with offerings in 89 countries and in 19 local currencies.
Microsoft is running a 90-day free trial of Azure. During the preview period that started Thursday Linux VMs will be discounted. Depending on size they’ll cost 13 cents an hour to 64 cents an hour.
“Microsoft.” A name that many people say in the same manner as Jerry Seinfield would say “Newman.” I was doing this just the other day…
Yet Microsoft is a company that just won’t acknowledge its critics and doomsayers, a company that continues to grind out $2 million+ in profits per minute and maintain a status as a Fortune 40 company.
Which leads me to believe we should take its Azure expansion and imminent Windows 8 launch seriously.
The tiles will make desktop and laptop users crazy – and yes, there will still be many millions of desktop and laptop users for a long time to come. It’s good to get out of the Valley once in awhile and learn these things. The tiles look-and-feel may crash and burn on traditional PCs, in fact. If this happens, we will see a quick backpeddle to a “Windows Classic” for these systems.
But Windows 8 will not be this decade’s New Coke. Expect it to be a hit on tablet PCs, if recent demo models shown in Taipei by Taiwanese companies Acer and Asus are priced smartly and work well. Expect it to be a hit on future smartphones as well – Windows 7/Nokia phones are already gaining some momentum, and IDC believes Windows will be the #2 smartphone platform by 2016.
I often put as much stock in five-year projections as I do in the stuff my disturbed cousin over there in the rocking chair says, but I’ll make an exception here. The smartphone business is driven by carriers as much as by consumers. As carriers start to throw a range of Windows smartphones in the faces of store visitors, and incentivize specific phones, Microsoft’s market share will grow.
In this environment, the iPhone will remain a single-vendor, high-end option, Android may some day fracture totally, and it’s still unclear whether Blackberry will go the way of Francisco Franco or not. Microsoft should benefit.
Meanwhile, back on the application farm, Microsoft has opened up Azure to other PaaS platforms, and is following the big-vendor approach of HP and IBM of delivering its dev stuff as Infrastructure, with the PaaS frameworks found within. This allows it to be more like Amazon Web Services, and is thought to be a smart move by others of us in the peanut gallery. I’m hopin to get full Azure (and anti-Azure) immersions soon, and will report back.
I got a BSOD the other day, while harmlessly searching for an original Churchill citation, via Google Chrome on a semi-ancient Acer laptop loaded with Windows Vista Home Basic.
Hello darlin’. Nice to see you. It’s been a long time. You’re just as lovely as you used to be. (Apologies to Conway Twitty and George Jones.)
I’m reasonably sure Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer (who are my age) and all the rest at Microsoft have taken a few years off of my life during my decades of becoming an unwilling DOS/Windows demi-guru, forced to learn far, far more than I’ve ever wanted to learn about how the world’s most powerful kludge works.
To be sure, I’ve purchased and used several Apple products as well, but have found neither nirvana nor religion there. So I quit smoking and started eating oranges long ago to counterbalance the toll these Redmond Sons of Babbage are taking on me.
But the blue screen caused no real harm or foul (so far), leaving me free to muse and write an article about the new Azure and the upcoming Windows 8, while contemplating our steady march to the Heat Death of the Universe along the way.
With increasing data storage demands resulting from new content types – rich digital media, social media and machine-generated data – small and mid-size businesses have been challenged to incorporate sophisticated methods to back up critical company data.
For many types of small businesses, it just doesn’t make sense to go out and buy all the storage hardware, software and services that were required before the advent of cloud backup, which now has a track record of about seven years.