GoodData on Thursday announced the addition of sales leadership veteran Philip Carty as Chief Revenue Officer. Carty joins GoodData with over 30 years of experience building and leading competitive sales organizations at top technology companies. In this role, Carty will oversee strategy for GoodData’s sales, account management and business development to drive dramatic growth for the business.
Carty joins GoodData from MongoDB, where he served as Worldwide Vice President of Sales. While at MongoDB, he expanded the company’s international footprint in EMEA and APAC and established the Global Strategic and Volume businesses. Prior to MongoDB, Carty served as Global Vice President of Sales at SuccessFactors, an SAP company. During Carty’s tenure at SuccessFactors, the company announced its initial public offering, ran at an annual growth rate of more than 85 percent and completed an acquisition by SAP for $3.6 billion. Prior to SuccessFactors, Carty led successful teams at ADP, Veritas, Oracle and Red Hat.
Avere Systems Raises $20 Million to Accelerate Growth
Avere Systems has announced that it raised an additional $20 million in venture financing, bringing the total amount invested in the company to $72 million. The Series D funding round was led by Western Digital Capital, with participation from previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital. The funding will be used to accelerate sales, marketing and continued development of the company’s hybrid cloud storage solutions.
Taking the Leap to Virtualization
Many mid-market companies have invested significant time and resources to secure and back up their servers, client computers, data, and overall network infrastructure in what was the traditional client-server setup. Now, what were considered emerging technologies just a few years ago, cloud computing and virtualization have arrived on the scene, bringing both significant benefits and new challenges. Find out more about this transition to get the most out of your virtual environment.
How to Approach Application Failures in Production
In my recent article, “Software Quality Metrics for your Continuous Delivery Pipeline – Part III – Logging,” I wrote about the good parts and the not-so-good parts of logging and concluded that logging usually fails to deliver what it is so often mistakenly used for: as a mechanism for analyzing application failures in production. In response to the heated debates on reddit.com/r/devops and reddit.com/r/programing, I want to demonstrate the wealth of out-of-the-box insights you could obtain from a single urgent, albeit unspecific log message if you only are equipped with the magic ingredient; full transaction context:
Moving to the Cloud: Lessons from Jason Segel & Cameron Diaz
By Ben Stephenson, Journey to the Cloud
As you probably know, Jason Segal and Cameron Diaz recently came out with a new movie called “Sex Tape.” In the movie, Segel and Diaz play a couple who decide to make an adult home movie, and it accidently gets released online.
I saw the trailer a couple of weeks ago and one clip from it grabbed my attention. After Jason and Cameron realize the tape has been released, they start to panic. The clip shows the two driving in a frenzy talking about how the tape got released (you can watch the clip here).
Cameron: “How do you forget to delete your sex tape?”
Jason: “It kept slipping my mind, and then the next thing I knew it went up…it went up to the cloud.”
Cameron: “And you can’t get it down from the cloud?”
Jason: “Nobody understands the cloud. It’s a mystery”
This got me thinking about some companies’ abruptness to go to the cloud without fully understanding the consequences. IT decision makers are under increasing pressure from CEOs & CFOs to utilize the benefits of cloud. If your IT department doesn’t have a well thought out strategy, however, chances are you’re not going to be successful. You don’t want to move to the cloud for the sake of moving to the cloud and then be in a frenzy if something goes wrong. I spoke with one of our bloggers, and cloud expert, John Dixon to get his take on what organizations need to consider before deciding to move to the cloud. Here’s what John had to say:
Not everything is a great fit for cloud
Have some high-end CAD desktops? Not a great fit for cloud (at least right now). Just setup a new ERP system on new hardware? Not a great fit for cloud at the moment. Testing some new functionality on your website or a new brand entirely? Now we’re talking — setup the infrastructure, test the market, scale up if needed, take everything down if needed.
Benefits of cloud are potentially huge, but hard to measure
Back in the datacenter consolidation days, the ROI of doing a virtualization project was dead easy. Consolidate at least 10 physical servers down to 1, and you have instant savings in power, cooling, floor space, administrative burden, etc. Some nice features came from having virtualized infrastructure, like the ability to provision servers from templates, easier DR, etc. Infrastructure teams were the big winners. In short, you could easily calculate the financial benefit of virtualizing servers. With cloud, this is not the case. If you look closely, there is limited benefit in just “moving” servers to the cloud. In fact, it may cost you more to host servers in the cloud than it does in your physical datacenter. However, IaaS clouds allow you to do things that you couldn’t do on your own. A pharmaceutical company can “rent” 10,000 servers to run a 2 day simulation; an online school can build infrastructure in a cloud datacenter in Australia to test a new market in APAC; a startup can use cloud to run ALL of its technical services (with no capital investment). In short, you’ve got to understand your existing costs, your use cases, and the benefits you are seeking. Jumping in to cloud without this mindset may comprise the benefits of doing so.
Portability or optimization? Especially in Amazon Web Services
As of now, you can’t have both. Choose wisely. Optimizing your application for cloud (for example, in AWS) by making use of RDS, SNS, SQS, Cloudformation, Autoscaling, Cloudwatch, etc. can deliver some amazing benefits in terms of scalability, supportability, and reliability. However, doing so destroys portability and any hope of brining that application back in house. On the flip side, VMware vCHS offers awesome portability, but the opportunities for optimization are fewer.
So, lessons for the kids out there? Don’t upload certain home videos online and have a well thought out cloud strategy before jumping into anything you may regret.
Oh, and Jason…borderline offensive when you say “no one gets the cloud”…because GreenPages gets it…
If you would like to hear more from John, download his ebook on the evolution of the corporate IT department.
OpenNebula Partners with Microsoft to Enable Hybrid Clouds with Azure
As a result of the collaboration between OpenNebula and Microsoft, a new set of plug-ins to support Microsoft Azure has been included in OpenNebula. This partnership has been announced today by Microsoft Open Technologies at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON).
«With this set of plug-ins, IT pros and system integrations can use OpenNebula’s rich set of infrastructure management tools to manage cloud deployments across Microsoft’s private, public and hosted cloud platforms.»
Test All Apps to Keep Hackers from Penetrating Castle Walls
Despite all the news about hackers infiltrating major corporations, most businesses continue to leave themselves woefully unprotected. Some surveys estimate more than 70% of businesses perform vulnerability tests on less than 10% of their cloud, mobile and web applications. A majority also confess they have been hacked at least once in the last two years.
While most large businesses have begun application vulnerability testing, there is still a long way to go. After all, you are only as strong as your weakest link; hackers will undoubtedly find and attack any application without sufficient defenses.
Although testing and creating protection for high-value and mission-critical applications is better than not doing anything at all, leaving low-priority applications unprotected is still a major risk. If hackers can exploit just one application, that means they can then access the rest of your infrastructure. They’ll eventually figure out a way to also attack your high-value applications.
VMware opens up second UK data centre, sees customer demand
Virtualisation bod VMware has opened up a second UK data centre, with a new site in Chessington, London, adding to the current data centre in Slough.
The move is evidently designed to represent UK and EMEA customers who want quicker access to their data, and comes a few months after VMware launched its hybrid disaster recovery service (vCHS), which provides a continuously available recovery platform if a data centre goes down.
Gavin Jackson, general manager and VP cloud services EMEA, said: “Our customers have started off using our hybrid service on specific projects for the easy, affordable and seamless movement of workloads between private and public cloud, knowing they can move their legacy and new applications back and forth with ease.
“Now they have seen what VMware vCloud Hybrid Service can enable, they’re turning to it to power their strategic transformation programmes.”
According to VMware, more than 800 EMEA-based individuals at partner organisations have been accredited in its vCloud Hybrid Service since it launched in the UK.
Jackson said in a Q&A blog post on the VMware site that the hybrid cloud service is so popular as it’s “the answer to the cloud dilemma.”
“Businesses are challenged in moving their apps to the public cloud because of the perceived problems it can pose,” he said. “vCHS means you can scale to the cloud without risk, and it’s an example of where highly innovative and trustworthy technology is meeting the needs of increasingly demanding companies and truly responding to business problems.”
It is a bit gushy, yes, but opening up UK data centres and catering for more bespoke, hybrid options from clients seems to be de rigeur with cloud vendors. SoftLayer opened the doors to a UK data centre last month, with further expansion expected in Central Europe.
VMware isn’t the only vendor to advocated hybrid, either. Rackspace unveiled its Managed Cloud offering which enables customers to have a variety of public, private or on-prem, either managed by Rackspace or DIY, while one of IBM’s latest product releases, Cloud Modular Management, offers similar capability.
Monitor App Performance Early and Often
“Vote early and vote often.” Back in the 1920s and ’30s, when neither election technology nor oversight were as effective as they are today, and the likes of Al Capone were at work gaming the system, this phrase wasn’t a joke. It was a best practice.
If you want guaranteed results, what better way than to get people to the polls early, and then repeatedly, to vote for your candidate?
None of this sitting around until the end of the day, hoping that the election goes the way you want. Capone would tell you, “That’s for saps.”
What does this have to do with cloud computing? All too often we see IT teams taking a “buy it and hope it works” strategy when it comes to adopting cloud-based apps. They migrate their entire user base to the cloud on faith, assuming that they can worry about performance and availability issues later, if ever. After all, everybody in the company accesses the Internet today without issues so your cloud apps should work just fine, right?
Cloud migration best practices for law firms
By David Linthicum
Legal IT Professionals’ online survey of its readership presented a split decision on about a move to the cloud. “The online news publication covering international legal information technology asked readers: ‘If your law firm’s management asked for your advice regarding moving key applications to the cloud, would you be in favour of this strategy?’
The 438 responses from legal information technology staff, lawyers and paralegals was nearly split down the middle, with 46% opposing and 45% in favour, while 9% had no opinion.” The complete survey report can be found here.
The participants of this 2013 survey might be a bit more cloud-oriented these days, as more law firms find a new home for IT in the cloud. However, overall, law firms continue to balk at the idea of moving toward the cloud since they do not know how to take the first steps. Moreover, as stated by the law firms’ IT staff who responded to the survey, their firms would require new skills to transition, manage and support the new cloud service services.
The cloud migration path for law firms is not unlike that of other small business, with a few more issues to deal with around privacy, compliance, and governance. Here is a quick process that most law firms should consider:
First, access the mission of the core legal practice. What are the specialty areas? International, family, tax, criminal, patent? In many cases, the practice covers several areas. Understand the patterns of security and the patterns of governance that are required, such as rules and regulations around how client data should be handled, and even ethical requirements. Can data be stored in other states or even other countries? Cloud providers have servers everywhere, but many will isolate data geographically, if necessary. What level of security is a legal requirement?
With the cloud, available security and legal security requirements continue to evolve. Even those skilled with the law often don’t understand the current state of these regulations. Create a security and governance plan from this effort.
Second, access the existing practice management systems, and get a good understanding of the ongoing operational costs. In many instances, systems that run in the legal office’s data center carry a huge cost that most of those who manage the practice don’t really understand. You need to figure out that cost to see if the cloud will be an improvement. This information will allow you to pick the data and applications that are good candidates to relocate to the cloud. Create business cases, and systems migration prioritization from this work.
Third, create a migration plan that includes applications and data sets that will be more cost effective when run from a public cloud. Once you understand the specific applications and the data, figure out how those applications and data will migrate.
In some cases, the applications are packaged and you simply want a SaaS version of the same software systems, or an alternative product that provides a SaaS version. In the case of data, you need to find analogs in the public cloud, including the same versions of the database that run in a public cloud (e.g., Oracle), or opportunities to leverage more purpose-built databases that may provide higher performance and lower costs, such as NoSQL databases.
Finally, execute the plan and include a stepwise path to migrate some of the applications and some of the data. Start slowly. Consider security and governance at each step, and make sure that the migration efforts align with the needs of the users in the practice.
Cloud computing is still a little scary to those who work in law offices, but the more innovative and fastest growing practices are moving to the cloud. The move is certainly for cost reasons, but, more and more, it’s around the practice’s need to grow quickly, without limitations from IT.
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