«Companies that don’t leverage social will e extinct before long,» noted Sandy Carter, IBM’s General Manager of Ecosystem Development and Social Media Evangelist.
Sandy recently spoke to me about social media, the cloud, and all that it entails for Big Blue. She outlined an ecosystem of traditional partners and «influencers,» a diverse group that includes customers, academia, agencies, as well as technology partners.

«The cloud has really changed the game,» she said. ‘It’s really opened the door for these new types of partners.»

Listen to what else she had to say in our exclusive podcast:

http://tinyurl.com/k5blgva

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Fundamentally, SDN is still mostly about network plumbing. While plumbing may be useful to tinker with, what you can do with your plumbing is far more intriguing. A rigid interpretation of SDN confines it to Layers 2 and 3, and that’s reasonable. But SDN opens opportunities for novel constructions in Layers 4 to 7 that solve real operational problems in data centers. “Data center,” in fact, might become anachronistic – data is everywhere, constantly on the move, seemingly always overflowing. Networks move data, but not all networks are suitable for all data.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Steve Riley, Technical Leader in the Office of the CTO at Riverbed Technology, will discuss how finding (or building) the right network, with the right applications, is still a labor-intensive task. Must it always be this way? No: for networks will soon be expressed as code. Finally, the data, the applications that process it, the networks that move it and the objects that store it can all be described by software constructs – let’s call this collection a super-blob – in the hands of skilled developers. Freed from their dependence on any given location, super-blobs can move around as necessary, resting on any physical fabric that can satisfy their requirements. As requirements change, locations may change – while preserving all application states. Location-independent computing is within our grasp.

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Gary Barnett, Enterprise Mobility and Productivity Software

At IBM Innovate 2014 in Orlando, Florida, IBM announced that its BlueMix PaaS offering will be made generally available at the end of June. BlueMix was first launched as a beta program in February this year at IBM’s Pulse conference, and the platform has seen a considerable amount of development in the four months since its first unveiling.

BlueMix is based on CloudFoundry, and runs on IBM’s SoftLayer cloud infrastructure management platform. IBM has also integrated DevOps services (both from the open source world and from its Rational portfolio), along with a number of pre-built services from IBM and its partners presented via a highly polished user interface (the result of BlueMix being one of the first projects to benefit from IBM’s major Design initiative).

While IBM will be targeting enterprise developers with BlueMix, there is also a significant opportunity …

Experts say that cloud computing is disruptive and then continue on to discuss how the cloud quickly enables innovation while competition between cloud service providers drive costs down. Both of these scenarios are accurate, but the disruption from cloud has additional shockwaves that only now beginning to be felt. Hardware and software vendors are starting to show signs of wear on their revenue streams due to cloud. Eventually, that wave will begin to impact the ecosystems that includes Value-Added Resellers and professional services firms that implement the products for those vendors. Sometime between these two points another wave of disruption will begin to take hold; the move to multi-vendor solutions.

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Enterprise Resource Planning has traditionally been a software for large corporates with million dollar technology budgets. But that has been changing over the past decade with the advent of cloud based ERP systems. According to a survey conducted by Sage, nearly 30% of finance managers at UK based SMEs believe that cloud could make ERP more affordable or viable to them. In another study published by Gartner, the top five fastest growing ERP vendors today are all SaaS companies. Even the larger, mature SaaS players like NetSuite have registered exponential growth rates of nearly 40% while the traditional on-premise vendors like Oracle and SAP are showing signs of stagnation.

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Chris Pennell, Lead Analyst, Public Sector

It is fair to say that the public sector’s view of enterprise resource planning (ERP) is one of a platform supporting a set of tightly knitted solutions that tends to be customized to suit individual enterprise needs, in turn requiring a complex array of maintenance and licensing agreements. But the disruptive forces of cloud provide buyers with a chance to reconsider this preconception. Vendors must now puzzle over how buyers can carry on consuming best-of-breed services that allow for customization while satisfying their increasing demand for flexibility that cloud-based services purport to bring.

SAP provided more insight into how it would address this issue at its annual event, Sapphire Now. Though it reaffirmed that HANA would continue to be the core path for its customers’ migration to the cloud, it recognizes that it needs to make the journey simpler. SAP will need to …

Code Spaces, the web-based SVN and Git hosting provider, has ceased trading after revealing a devastating DDoS attack which wiped its cloudy data would cost too much to both resolve and keep the company going.

The unauthorised user gained access to the company’s EC2 control panel, created a series of backup logins and randomly deleted items to the extent where most of Code Spaces’ data had disappeared, with no backups in place. The attacker had also demanded a large sum of money to stop the DDoS, similar to Feedly’s attack earlier this month.

“Code Spaces will not be able to operate beyond this point,” the company said in a statement. “The cost of resolving this issue to date and the expected cost of refunding customers who have been left without the service they paid for will put Code Spaces in a [sic] irreversible position both financially and in …

In many industries, cloud computing is now vital to remaining competitive. The cloud typically offers superior flexibility, scalability, accessibility, and high availability, enabling businesses to grow more agile and responsive. Regulatory compliance concerns often make banks and other financial service providers slower to adopt the cloud, but even in the financial services industry, the cloud will soon become a necessity.
Banks are already seeing attractive use cases for cloud computing, as Bank Systems & Technology’s Bryan Yurcan and Jonathan Camhi pointed out late last year. Cloud-based payment processing is one hot topic. Cloud-based document management is another. Analytics for business insight and fraud detection are also growing popular. However, all of these applications will require a thorough understanding of the regulatory restrictions and how to comply with them. One of the most essential tools to make sure your cloud adoption meets regulatory requirements is cloud data encryption.

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Electronic signatures are an important component of any web application. They make it possible to keep business processes online even when a signature is required on a contract, form or application. If you are interested in learning how to quickly integrate e-signatures into your cloud applications, this webinar is for you. Mauro Franco, Business Analyst, will demonstrate how to use e-SignLive’s REST API and SDKs to enable end-to-end electronic business processes.

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