BlueBox bridge the chasm between development and infrastructure. Hosting providers are taking standardization and automation too far. For many app developers it does nothing but spawn mayhem and more work. They have to figure out how their creations live on a pre-fab infrastructure solution full of constraints. Operations-as-a-Service is what BlueBox does. BlueBox utilizes development tools such as OpenStack, EMC Razor, Opscode’s Chef and BlueBox’s proprietary tools give the power to do the unorthodox things which most hosting providers shun.

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Larry Ellison turned 70 and has decided to turn over the CEO reins at Oracle. Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, both in their 50s, will function as a “Ms. Inside and Mr. Outside” as co-CEOs, at least for awhile.

Serious reverberations will be felt within this highly competitive company and the highly competitive industry in which it makes its money.

Even while guiding his yacht to an America’s Cup title, Larry Ellison remained in firm control of the company he founded in 1977. He still has an ownership stake of about 20% of the company–1 billion or so shares of Oracle stock worth about $40 billion. Who can imagine that he’ll be a docile, passive Chairman?

Yes, he is returning as Chairman, with Jeff Henley, currently in that role, moving aside to be Vice-Chairman. Ellison reports he will also serve as Chief Technology Officer. So it’s clear he’s not fading from the scene. But he will not be able to micromanage the company by any measure.

What Does It Mean?
Think of all of the very strong executives over the years who rose quickly and highly in Oracle, only to be banished from the kingdom and/or to start their own big companies. Ray Lane, Marc Benioff, and Tom Siebel spring immediately to mind (with Siebel Systems eventually coming back to the mother ship). There are dozens, if not hundreds, more.

How will today’s generation of willful executives develop and fare now that the lion has retreated?

I’ve already read reports about how Ellison’s decision—which was announced after the markets closed, of course—comes at a “difficult” or “momentous” time for the company. This is the era of cloud computing, Oracle was slow to the dance (with Ellison infamously mocking it a few years ago), and is now furiously developing strategies to maintain its grip as one of the key companies in enterprise IT.

The reality is that things have always been difficult for Oracle. In its early days, it had to fight IBM and a group of seeming equals—Informix, Sybase, and Ingres—for early dominance in the then-new era of relational databases. By cleverly marketing itself as the one company that worked on all platforms and by dint of a hyper-aggressive sales effort, Oracle emerged as the clear leader.

Then its stock got plastered in the early 90s when the company showed its first loss. The stock fell to $5 and Ellison himself lost billions and billions of paper wealth.

I remember him saying a few years ago that he would encourage today’s generation of young and newly rich entrepreneurs to buy tangible things like land and buildings and traditional businesses. Paper wealth comes and goes, but tangible things tend to stay that way. He’s followed his own advice with several eye-popping real-estate purchases in recent years.

We all remember him saying a few years ago that he saw the future of Silicon Valley perhaps looking like Detroit, given that consolidation was going to extinguish most companies and the innovative spirit that drives them. Certainly Oracle has acquired numerous big companies over the past decade, PeopleSoft and Sun Microsystems among this numerous group.

Then there’s the current era of cloud. Oracle’s always been in a struggle, and today’s era is no different.

I’ve pinged a couple of Oracle execs for comment, but nothing has returned my way.

I have no idea what this move means for the future of Oracle, cloud, Silicon Valley, or the world, but I can imagine fistfights in the cafeteria as execs and divisions jockey for position.

Who knows, it might drive an era of incredible innovation at the company now that Larry’s not around to approve every comma in every speech and every line of code in every program.

Safra Catz is known as a hyper-competent operations person and Mark Hurd could sell sand in the Mojave. If they can continue to work splendidly together, as Ellison alleged today they have been doing, Oracle could not only be an enteprise gorilla but dare we say a cool one at that.

My question to Safra and Mark now that they’ve had a few minutes to adjust to the new job: what are you doing in the IoT? That’s your next struggle, and all the other big players area already staking some big claims in the biggest technology market ever.

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Picture credit: Mike Mozart/Flickr

Recent stories that have arrived at CloudTech HQ have focused on the opportunity the cloud provides for telcos, and this one’s no different: AT&T has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for AT&T NetBondSM, its network enabled cloud (NEC) solution.

With NetBond, AT&T customers can utilise a VPN to connect to any cloud compute or IT service environment in AT&T’s partner ecosystem, bypassing the Internet completely. The partnership with AWS enables users to access business applications and information stored in Amazon’s cloud.

Melanie Posey, IDC research vice president, described the collaboration as a “likely game changer” and added: “The addition of AWS broadens AT&T’s already expansive NetBond ecosystem and will give customers highly secure, reliable, and on-demand connections to another key public cloud service provider.”

Current NetBond partners include Microsoft, Salesforce.com, VMware, IBM and Box, covering a large breadth of the cloud computing ecosystem.

AT&T’s particular cloud play is an interesting one. NetBond integrates with the existing VPN, meaning customers don’t need to order more equipment; the technology avoids DDoS attacks through the private global network; and users can save up to 60% on networking costs, and increase performance by up to 50%.

The overall effect is an intriguing one as telcos begin to make their behemoth moves to providing cloud services. It’s always been there in the background, of course, but a litany of recent strategic shifts can’t just be a coincidence.

Last week comms provider CenturyLink announced expansion to China – always a good sign of growth – while Ericsson recently announced it had taken a majority stake in platform as a service (PaaS) provider Apcera, adding to its Ericsson Cloud System portfolio.

Telcos see the market opportunity; they’ve already got an expansive network and customer buy-in, and if they add cloud services on top it’s got all the ingredients of being a winning proposition.

For AT&T in particular, it’s been a long time coming. Back in 1993 the firm released a product called PersonaLink, which aimed to be an ‘electronic meeting place’ for people to share information and documents, and could differentiate between ‘dumb’ and ‘smart’ messages.

“You can think of our meeting place as the cloud,” the video stated. Did AT&T invent the cloud more than 20 years ago, as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted back in May? Not quite – the technology came from now defunct tech firm General Magic, whose goal was to distribute the computing load evenly between bigger and smaller devices in the network.

But with a big telco network and a large partner ecosystem, AT&T might be coming good on that video’s promise.

Over the summer Gartner released its much anticipated annual Hype Cycle report and the big news is that Internet of Things has now replaced Big Data as the most hyped technology. Indeed, we’re hearing more and more about this fascinating new technological paradigm. Every other IT news items seems to be about IoT and its implications on the future of… Read the full post

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As the Internet of Things gains momentum, the focus has been on securing billions of IoT devices and the servers that orchestrate their connectivity. However, the greatest security and authentication risks reside within the communications among devices and servers.
In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Todd Greene, Founder & CEO of PubNub, will discuss the top 10 challenges in securing IoT communications that, unsolved, render it impossible to deliver a secure IoT rollout. Learn the requirements for a ubiquitous, secure, bi-directional communication protocol for IoT. Specific design patterns to deliver secure device updates, as well as comprehensive solutions for malware defense and security credential management will also be shared.

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The devil made him do it. Or maybe it’s that the devil is in the details for Matt Olander, Chief Science Officer of iXsystems and a long-time contributor to FreeBSD.
A red devil icon plays a prominent role in this NAS storage company’s branding and image, which is open souce “in everything we do,” according to the company.
The company now has decades of experience “producing rock-solid solutions on an open source foundation. With more than1,000 clients, we have a proven history of building and delivering the right solution every time – for open source and beyond,” the company says.
We thought we’d find out what Matt has to say about open source and the state of NAS storage today:
Cloud Computing Journal: What advantages does NAS storage bring as cloud computing continues to grow?

Matt Olander: Network Attached Storage (NAS) allows new or existing cloud-computing platforms to easily extend storage capacity as service offerings grow. Since FreeNAS & TrueNAS offer both block & file access, no matter what architecture a deployment is using, our NAS solution can easily integrate into the chosen environment.

CCJ: What advantages have you seen Open Source provide for your customers?

Matt: There are many advantages offered by leveraging Open Source. Using Open Source alleviates one of the main problems with current storage solutions, which is vendor lock-in. By deploying something that is based on an Open Source solution, a client is free to explore other options and can rest assured knowing that they have other options at all times during the lifecycle of their investment.

Using Open Source can reduce costs by eliminating or reducing the proprietary licensing fees of a commercial, closed-source solution.

An Open Source solution also typically means that there are more people looking at the source-code. This means that the Open Source alternative can be more secure as well as higher quality, since more people are using, trying, and reviewing the software.

CCJ: What sort of trends do you see as cloud, Big Data, and the IoT grow? For example, the growth of solid-state storage.

Matt: According to Science Daily last year, 90% of the world’s data has been generated over the last 2 years. This is not slowing down and in fact, as more people and devices access the Internet, the need for storing and analyzing that data is growing.

We are moving into a time where devices at home will communicate with devices at work and even devices on the consumers body, in the form of wearable technology. All of these devices will benefit from a centralized location to share and store data. Storage will get faster and cheaper while the need for that storage will continue to grow.

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I hear this question fairly regularly and would like to walk you through how to host the controller in your own Azure cloud. First off, the pros of having AppDynamics with Azure:

Have full control and ownership of the data collected by AppDynamics
Provide additional security to access the data (for example, lock it down to a corporate VPN only).

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I was able to attend the Oracle’s Open World user conference this week in sunny and warm San Francisco.  This year was a special year.  It was the public unveiling of Oracle’s suite of enterprise mobility solutions – both on-premise and cloud.  In this interview with Oracle’s VP Mobility and Development Tools, Chris Tonas, we discuss how these tools and platforms will be used to mobilize all of Oracle’s solutions and for use by their customers to mobilize their bespoke apps.

[Apologies]: I have a new microphone that does not require me to yell into, however, it takes me a few videos to realize it…

Video Link: http://youtu.be/JxqoloukitE?list=UUGizQCw2Zbs3eTLwp7icoqw

Upcoming Mobile App Testing Strategy webinar: Shift Mobile Testing Left Using Selenium and Eclipse
Date: October 7, 2014, 11am EDT
Description: Learn how the “shift testing left” dynamic is impacting Developers and Testers. Learn how Perfecto Mobile can facilitate this while supporting your Agile and Continuous Integration effort. The webinar includes a hands-on demonstration of the MobileCloud, including:

• How to create a new mobile testing project in Eclipse
• How to run a sample project on multiple devices in parallel
• How to leverage existing Selenium scripts and extend them to mobile 
• How to «Shift Left» and decrease mobile app time to market

Registration link: http://bit.ly/1nH42g4

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JP Morgan Chase has announced that in June and July of this year over 76 million retail clients and over 7 million business clients had there personal information stolen from various company websites. The sites identified were: Chase.com, JPMorganOnline, Chase Mobile and JPMorgan Mobile. At this time it appears that what was stolen was the clients;… Read the full post

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