Midway through the decade, the experts from Veeva Systems – a leader in cloud-based software for the global life sciences industry – look at what’s on the horizon over the next five years. Their forecasts are informed by a vision for what’s next in technology and insight gleaned from Veeva’s 200+ life sciences customers worldwide. Overall, these predictions reflect how new innovations will enable faster time to market, evolving commercial models, and new ways to support physicians and patients.
Dan Lynn Named CEO of @CodeFutures | @CloudExpo [#Cloud #BigData]
CodeFutures has announced Dan Lynn as its new CEO. Lynn assumes the role from Founder Cory Isaacson, who has joined RMS and will now serve as chairman of CodeFutures. Lynn brings more than 14 years of advanced technology and business success experience, and will help CodeFutures build on its industry leadership around its Agile Big Data initiatives. His technical expertise will be invaluable in advancing CodeFutures’ AgilData platform and new processes for streamlining and gaining value from growing amounts of mission-critical data.
Isaacson states, “Dan Lynn has the experience and passion to lead CodeFutures into the next chapter of its growth, and to help organizations simplify the increasingly complex set of challenges that bog Big Data initiatives down. Dan’s mix of business experience and deep technology leadership is a perfect fit for CodeFutures as it delivers new innovation to the Big Data market space.”
Release Managers at a DevOps Divide By @Plutora | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
An operations group tasked with accepting and supporting a software release. This group wants a predictable process, they view releases as incidents to be managed, and they answer to a business that wants predictability and accountability.
One or more development groups tasked with creating software to be released. These groups tend to be more diverse. You might have one development group that is using bleeding-edge technology to create a next-generation website that is more research than development, and another group developing applications against Oracle that is more predictable.
‘Enterprise DevOps’ By @JPMorgenthal | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
The term culture has had a polarizing effect among DevOps supporters. Some propose that culture change is critical for success with DevOps, but are remiss to define culture. Some talk about a DevOps culture but then reference activities that could lead to culture change and there are those that talk about culture change as a set of behaviors that need to be adopted by those in IT. There is no question that businesses successful in adopting a DevOps mindset have seen departmental culture change, the question remains, is culture the leading edge of this change? I posit that in large enterprises, culture change is the result of effective process and organizational change fostered by good IT leaders and is not the front end of change.
Bluemix and ElasticBox Hackathons at @DevOpsSummit [#IoT #Cloud #DevOps]
15th Cloud Expo, which took place Nov. 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, expanded the conference content of @ThingsExpo, Big Data Expo, and DevOps Summit to include two developer events.
IBM held a Bluemix Developer Playground on November 5 and ElasticBox held a Hackathon on November 6. Both events took place on the expo floor.
The Bluemix Developer Playground, for developers of all levels, highlighted the ease of use of Bluemix, its services and functionality and provide short-term introductory projects that developers can complete between sessions.
DevOps Is Even More Important Than You Think | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
The move in recent years to cloud computing services and architectures has added significant pace to the application development and deployment environment. When enterprise IT can spin up large computing instances in just minutes, developers can also design and deploy in small time frames that were unimaginable a few years ago. The consequent move toward lean, agile, and fast development leads to the need for the development and operations sides to work very closely together. Thus, DevOps becomes essential for any ambitious enterprise today.
The Key to Long-Term Results By @AriaSystemsInc | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Our last post defined customer lifetime value (CLV) as the metric critical in measuring the success or failure of a recurring revenue program. In order for your company to routinely return significant revenue, maximizing CLV needs to be at the top of your priority list. A CLV-supported strategy boosts many aspects of your business, from sales to customer service. When it comes to increasing customer retention and customer satisfaction, the two keys to driving long-term results, this same strategy works to increase both at every available opportunity.
Six Steps for Choosing a Software Vendor for your Start-Up
You’ve decided to take the plunge. Your dream business is on its way to make it big and you’re scaling up rapidly. As a startup entrepreneur you’re conscious of your costs – bottom-line matters the most to you and outsourcing is the answer.
For your business, every decision that you take not only affects you immediately but can have rippling effects. It is important then that these decisions are taken after carefully considering the impact, yet you may not enjoy the luxury of time in this competitive business landscape.
As a budding business house, there are a few challenges that you will face – tight budgets, short turnaround times, robust software support, right skills and people resources, high focus on business development and competitive pricing norms. Most of these challenges will remain, but when it comes to choosing your software vendors, here are six steps that can ease your decision:
Understand your requirements
An in-depth analysis of how software is going to support your business is most critical. You not only need to understand your current requirements, but as a start-up your growth curve is exponential. You would need to have a sense of direction of where the business is headed and how your requirements will change. This will then be helpful for you to match your needs with the offerings of the vendors you screen.
Is the vendor flexible enough?
Sometimes you will have to choose between an extremely well-known name that provides you with a standard set of software offerings or an isv that is more willing to tweak systems as per your requirements. This will probably give you much more flexibility as you grow, enhance or modify your software requirements in a dynamic business environment.
How open are communication channels?
One of the biggest challenges you may face with vendors is the lack of open channels that can help cater to fast moving changes in your systems. Transparent communication channels, no language barriers and 24 by 7 customer support should be top of your list when selecting vendors.
Do they have the right people?
Do they have the right skills and people resources? Are they able to retain these people? Are their teams able to provide expert counsel to you in matters of software, emerging technologies and project management?
Confidentiality and security?
Does your software vendor provide you with a sense of peace when it comes to managing your data? Look at testimonials from other users and conduct a proper survey on how vendors manage their own security, confidentiality and look at legal agreements carefully before signing on.
Expansion capabilities and hidden costs?
Will the software vendor be able to support rapid expansion, do they have open architectures that facilitate growth and revisions? Look at all hidden costs clearly; articulate as much as is possible at the outset. But also do a professional ethics check to see that the vendor adheres to corporate norms when unwritten requirements crop up.
To know more about software vendors please click here.
Tech News Recap for the Week of 1/19/2015
Were you busy last week? Here’s a quick tech news recap of articles you may have missed from the week of 1/19/2015.
Chines companies now sell 40% of all smartphones, Microsoft and the US Government are fighting over data control in the cloud and the governor of New York is calling for statewide 100 Mbps internet by 2019. In other news, iPhone sales continue to increase, big data skills are on the ride overseas, and Switch is building a new data center outside of Reno.
Tech News Recap
- 5 Tips to be Prepared to Answer Cloud Questions from the C-Suite
- These 11 Technologies Will Go Big in 2015
- Chinese companies now sell 40% of all smartphones as overall global sales rise 25.9%
- Microsoft and the US Government fight over data control in the cloud
- Many Passwords Are So Bad They Don’t Need to be Hacked
- Rule of law on internet cracks down on cybercrime: Cisco
- Big Data Skills on the Rise Overseas
- New York governor wants statewide 100Mbps internet by 2019
- iPhones Sales Are Going To Be Off the Charts
- University of Maryland Takes Next Steps With Virtualization
- Switch Plans Massive Data Center Near Reno
- Microsoft Office 365 Adoption Takes Off, War With Google Apps Rages On
- Tips for protecting your personal information in the cloud
[eBook – How has the corporate IT department evolved?]
By Ben Stephenson, Emerging Media Specialist
Examining AWS’ uptime in 2014: Figures show marked improvement
(c)iStock.com/alxpin
Having been ranked as one of the top cloud providers for uptime, new figures show Amazon Web Services (AWS) having a 41% reduction in performance issues quarter to quarter during 2014.
The figures, from CloudEndure, see AWS with 127 errors during Q114, a greater number than the following three quarters combined, with 43 in Q2, 37 in Q3, and 26 in Q4.
AWS EC2 was the most frequent faller in 2014, with 46 errors, compared to scalable DNS provider Route 53 (24), network monitoring service CloudWatch (20) and content delivery network CloudFront (20).
These numbers tie in nicely with CloudHarmony’s one year metrics released earlier in January. These numbers just recorded outages instead of errors, and found CloudFront and Route 53 with a clean bill of health, while EC2 had 12 outages over nine regions at an SLA of 99.9973%.
Picture credit: CloudEndure
By region, AWS’ data centres in North Virginia were hit hardest, with 64 errors in 2014, compared with 28 in Oregon and Sao Paolo, and 20 in Ireland. With new data centre regions springing up everywhere – most notably Frankfurt in October last year – 2015’s figures will certainly be interesting.
Ofir Ehrlich, co-founder at CloudEndure, notes the majority of these errors shouldn’t be a problem if your applications are architected correctly – such as running apps simultaneously in multiple regions, so if one does fall over then there is no impact.
In January the company looked at Microsoft’s 2014 figures and found significantly more Azure service interruptions in the final three quarters, with 28 in Q2. Survey data from Synergy in October saw Microsoft overtake the competition for second place in cloud infrastructure services. AWS, meanwhile, remains the standout performer in the cloud infrastructure space, while research from Skyhigh Networks showed how Amazon remains the most popular enterprise cloud service.
Read the full blog here.