As enterprises move to all-IP networks and cloud-based applications, communications service providers (CSPs) – facing increased competition from over-the-top providers delivering content via the Internet and independently of CSPs – must be able to offer seamless cloud-based communication and collaboration solutions that can scale for small, midsize, and large enterprises, as well as public sector organizations, in order to keep and grow market share. The latest version of Oracle Communications Unified Communications Suite gives CSPs the capability to do just that. In addition, its integration with Oracle Communications WebRTC Session Controller enables CSPs to quickly and easily add integrated real-time and near real-time capabilities to their menu of secure, enterprise-grade services.
Elisa Uses @ThingWorx for Internet of Things Service | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]
“The age of the Internet of Things is upon us,” stated Thomas Svensson, senior vice-president and general manager EMEA, ThingWorx, “and working with forward-thinking companies, such as Elisa, enables us to deploy our leading technology so that customers can profit from complete, end-to-end solutions.”
ThingWorx, a PTC® (Nasdaq: PTC) business and Internet of Things (IoT) platform provider, announced on Monday that Elisa, Finnish provider of mobile and fixed broadband subscriptions, will deploy ThingWorx® platform technology to enable a new Elisa IoT service in Finland and Estonia.
Cloud: Where Are We Going?
I followed a meetup last night in Austin presented by Michael Cote of 451 Research and CloudCamp co-founder Dave Nielsen. John provided a review of the past five years of cloud computing and Dave talked about some current strategies in using PaaS. The overall program provided a nice and thorough review of where we’ve been and where we are.
The global nature of the cloud reaches to most nations. In the modern era, enterprise IT evolves at a similar pace worldwide, rather than in North America and Western Europe first, as in days past. Depending on what particular aspect you’re examining, it even moves more quickly in some developing nations – “eMoney” services on mobile phones in places such as Kenya and the Philippines are an example of this phenomenon.
Similarly, in the research we’ve been conducting at the Tau Institute since 2011 on the relative dynamics of IT development on a national basis, we’ve found far-flung bright spots in all regions of the world.
Cut Through It
With all this simultaneous development comes confusion. Cloud often continues to be defined in whatever manner a technology vendor wishes. Its perceived benefits become conflated, its power reduced.
In his talk last night, Michael Cote urged some renewed clarity by referring back to the definition of cloud published by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in November 2011:
“Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
The definition further deems the following characteristics to be “essential”: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. The NIST definition also lays out the familiar an still-used terms IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, but defines public anad private cloud in ways different from today’s usage: private cloud is for the use of a single organization, and public for the use of many, regardless of whether the actual computing resources are on-site or provided by a third party.
The definition was written by Peter Mell and Timothy Grance, both of whom are still with NIST. Neither has a high profile, though are well-known and respected throughout the technology community. I don’t see either buying an NBA team or doing a GQ spread anytime soon.
I Prefer PaaS
Within this construct, it seems to me that PaaS is the catalyst in forming clouds out of the raw materials of infrastructure and ethereal functionality of software. Thus, Dave Nielsen’s look at PaaS served as a nice book-end to John’s presentation. Dave dives into the particulars of the Cloud Foundry PaaS and how to deploy an app with it.
So given these two talks, where are we going? Cloud computing, for all the good work that so many have done over the past few years, still commands only about 5% of enterprise IT spending.
Cloud revenues are counted in the billions – take IBM’s recently reported $7 billion in cloud revenue as an example – rather than the tens or hundreds of billions. IBM’s total, which includes such ancient technologies as Rational and Notes, accounts for only 7% of its total business. I imagine a similar percentage among its peers.
Amazon’s public cloud revenue appears to be running at a rate of about $4 billion per year. Its reent growth has tapered a bit, but is still running at about 40% annually. Amazon AWS has set the standard and is the clear market leader for public cloud. But even in this outlier case, cloud revenue accounts for only about 5% of the company’s revenue.
A negative person would ask, “what is wrong with the cloud?” A skeptical person would ask, “has the cloud been overhyped?” A more positive-minded person would say “we’ve only just begun.”
.@Virtustream xStream CMP Now Certified Vblock Ready | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]
Virtustream has announced its xStream cloud management platform (CMP) software is now certified as Vblock® Ready for VCE® Vblock Systems. Targeting customers running SAP applications, xStream will enable enterprises to easily move existing mission-critical workloads to Vblock System-based Private or Hybrid cloud environments, gaining performance and security improvements without re-engineering software. Virtustream is now also a member of the VCE Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program.
Automatically Resolve Email Incidents By @PagerDuty | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
To automatically resolve email incidents, you’ll want to set up your monitoring service to send an email at the onset of an incident (Trigger Emails) as well as when the system returns to normal (Recovery Emails). These two sets of emails are linked by an Incident Key, a unique identifier shared between these two emails- often the name of the host, server, or application experiencing the problem.
To parse emails, you need to add rules that tell PagerDuty whether an email is a trigger or a recovery email, as well as where to find the incident key to match them up. You can find an in-depth guide on doing this here.
ChatOps: Let’s Talk Plugins By @PagerDuty | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
Many sites have internal status pages of one kind or another. And when there’s a problem, that’s often the first place people have to check out what’s going on. The status plugin helps us keep that information in-line within our chat client. You can avoid the «repeating what the computer said» effect on phone bridges, Google Hangouts or whatever it may be during an incident or outage. It also keeps a convenient log for postmortem review. (Note, this plugin is not yet open-sourced, but will be shortly.)
Implementing these plugins (and many more) at PagerDuty has really helped us as we’ve scaled our team and infrastructure over the last year. We value things that help make engineers more productive, and want to be able to share those things with other engineers and businesses. Because of that idea, we work to open source many of the things we build internally.
5 Tips to be Prepared to Answer Cloud Questions from the C-Suite
Okay, so here we are in 2015 in this new age of cloud…what should IT professionals do to be ready to answer cloud questions and to migrate? It’s not a matter of if the CIO/CEO asks the question; it’s a matter of when. We, as IT worker bees, often are not privy to the conversations between the uber competitive CEOs of the world. They wouldn’t be CEO’s if they weren’t A-type competitive individuals. So the rule is how do I keep up with the Joneses, AKA my competitors in my marketspace.
Here are 5 recommendations that should help prepare the IT Director for this request from up on high.
Update your server and application stack
You probably should have run all your updates at year’s end, but you may have been too busy. So now is the time to do this. Update servers, desktops, router firmware, and mobile devices. This is often one of the most time-consuming, often overlooked and problem-causing tasks you can undertake (especially when a server doesn’t come back up after a reboot). Do it now and do it right, and you’ll start the year way ahead the game.
Educate yourself
Now is the time to read what the market analysts say. Read what the vendors are saying. See what Gartner has to say for top of mind solutions, like Microsoft Azure. Don’t wait until the CEO says “Hey what is our cloud strategy” to run back to your desk and start training. Rollout is for usage, not for running up the learning curve. Also, proactively educate your staff, educate your users, and educate your management. In the end, you will be glad you did.
Clarify for cloud strategy
I’m not talking about a hair rinse you should use once a week. This is about clarifying your intentions around adoption of cloud for the year with upper management. Get out ahead of this, make sure they know what to expect then you will foster conversation that leads to insight on what they expect. Starting 2015 without clear expectations on both sides leads to confusion and eventually a year goes by and nothing has been accomplished.
Timeline your cloud migration
Take the calendar and break it into milestones. For example, by end of Q1 you want to have any hardware or software issues resolved per the Office365 Readiness toolkit results. By end of Q2 you want to have a pilot functioning for the testing of Office365 or Azure. Fail to plan, plan to fail as my friend and peer Randy Becker says…
Purge the spam
Many technology consumers feel that, much like at home, at work they should keep any and every e-record. That obviously leads to bloat in Exchange databases, file server solutions and other places. Backups become uncontrollable, and finally when you need to migrate, that little piece of corrupted spam will stop the mailbox from migrating. Seriously — the beginning of the year is a great time to get rid of all those pieces of hardware you no longer need. And when you do purge, make sure to do it responsibly (i.e. empty the ‘Deleted’ and ‘Sent Items’ folders). Run the Exchange Maintenance Tasks and compact that database. In regards to hardware, larger cities usually have computer recycling services that can safely get rid of your old technology. Use them. By tossing out the junk, you’ll make for a much more efficient start of 2015.
So this should help you, the IT director, find a path to be ready to answer the “Cloud Ready” question. To reiterate, it is not a matter of if that question is coming, it is a matter of when. Good Luck and May the Cloud be with You.
If you’re interested in speaking more with David about how you can better prepare yourself for your organization’s transition to the cloud, click here.
By David Barter, Practice Manager – Microsoft Technologies
Top 10 DevOps Hashtags By @XebiaLabs | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
Twitter is used by just about every business, IT professional and expert in our industry. It can be difficult however to figure out which hashtags to use and which ones are a waste of time. Today I have compiled a list of the Top 10 DevOps #hashtags you should be using if you want your tweets to be seen, read, and maybe even retweeted by your peers.
Top Eight DevOps Podcasts By @XebiaLabs | @DevOpsSummit [#DevOps]
DevOps podcasts are a thing and they are here to stay. Whether you are traveling, working, or just love talk radio, these Top 8 DevOps Podcasts are a great way to keep up with the industry and listen to what the experts are saying.
It’s All ‘Bout That Access, ‘Bout That Access By @Vormetric [#Cloud]
While a year ago the big breach of the day involved likes of Target, now the breach landscape – which was once about financial gain – has exploded. It’s exploded to a world of state-sponsored attacks, of hackers getting more intelligent and of political organizations cyber-attacking alongside using physical force. Today we issued our 2015 Vormetric Insider Threat report. Coming off of the Sony breach and Obama’s State of the Union address, we can’t think of a better time to deliver a report that provides so much insight into where the cyber security industry stands. Here’s one stat that really stands out: