It’s been a great 2013. Out of the global $1.2 trillion dollars’ worth of business conducted online in 2013 across the globe, SOASTA is trusted with protecting 10% of that figure – or $150 billion. Based on the hundreds of brands SOASTA worked with this year and listened to the challenges they face, there are five predictions that are pretty clear as we look ahead to 2014. Hint: Simplify, the User Experience, and M-commerce will be buzz words for successful enterprises and e-commerce vendors. The Top 5 Predictions for 2014 are:
Acquisitions vs Innovation Drive Legacy Tech Companies into New Frontiers
We’ll see the larger legacy vendors take a proactive approach to buying into social, mobile, cloud, and Big Data environments. They’ll begin to buy into the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) space. “With the changing face of application development, I suspect we’ll see increased M&A activity and increased consolidation in the market for cloud -based and social-based tools.”
DaaS Re-Boot: Citrix Execs Move to VMware
VMware execs Bob Schultz and Sumit Dhawan were in leadership training in Boston during their first day at their new company. They promised to respond to my inquiries regarding their new positions as soon as possible. When they do, I’ll report what they said.
The news of their move came as a seeming lightning strike on the first real work day of 2014. Officially, they give Wmware “even deeper end-user computing and industry expertise going into 2014 and position us very well to continue to provide customers with industry leading solutions,” according to a blog entry by Sanjay Poonen, EVP & General Manager of the company’s End-User Computing (EUC) Unit.
Schultz fills a new positions as chief strategy lead for the EUC, “and will be responsible for driving our business, technology and alliance strategies,” according to Poonen. He’s a 30-year veteran (writer’s note: I personally like this age group) and was Group VP and General Manager of Desktop and Applications at Citrix.
Sumit Dhawan, who was with Citrix for almost 16 years, “will lead our desktop business and organization and be responsible for the overall business including overseeing the strategy, product portfolio and engineering,”
Not to be lost in this announcement was the promotion of long-time VMware exec Kit Colbert to the position of CTO of the EUC.
DaaS Re-Boot
So let’s call this “DaaS Re-Boot,” with apologies to the creators and fans of the 1981 film with a similar name. That film centered around a submarine crew in a crisis situation, and perhaps serves as a close analogy to the virtualization business.
It’s hard for me to pin a dollar figure on the size of DaaS (and desktop virtualization by other names). But it’s clear that VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft are now competing hard in a tight, claustrophobic environment for access to every desktop in the world.
Poonen specifically mentions Vmware’s acquisition of Desktone (the folks who were trying to patent DaaS) in October as part of the dynamism of the desktop virtualization market. He also mentioned “enterprise mobility and enterprise social collaboration” as growth areas in this space.
Citrix Announces New Exec
For its part, top management at Citrix is remaining outwardly calm. “We have a strong leadership team in place, including the new executive for our app and desktop virtualization business, which was announced this morning,” a company spokesperson told me in an email.
The newly named Citrix exec is Rakesh Narasimhan, a 25-year industry veteran “with 15 years in leadership positions at Microsoft, and whose expertise fits squarely in the Citrix market space,” according to Citrix’s note to me.
Narisimhan served as a General Manager in Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, covering Microsoft Azure, SQLServer, Windows Server, Windows Client, virtualization, storage, data protection and security products,” according to Citrix.
He was most recently President and CEO at InstallFree, a developer of application portability, virtualization and access soluions that delivered Microsoft Office as a subscription-based cloud service to any device. He also has experience at Oracle.
Hong Kong unveils government cloud, funding put in
Hong Kong has launched the Government Cloud Platform, joining an array of countries with established cloud computing initiatives.
Yet the scheme, named GovCloud, is different from the US and UK initiatives as it is only for internal government use.
“GovCloud is the government’s first major private cloud computing initiative and is important central information technology infrastructure with full cloud computing functions,” a spokesman for the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) said, adding: “With robust and fully resilient infrastructure, GovCloud provides a stable and reliable environment for bureaux and departments to develop and host their e-government services.”
According to OGCIO, there’s a lot of capital in this venture: a total of HK $242m (US $31.2m) has been set aside to implement GovCloud in the next five years, with the doors opening on December 27.
Hong Kong is of course a major area for growth in …
Should Quantum Computers Cracking Encryption Matter to You?
Many news organizations including The Washington Post are reporting that the latest documents leaked by former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden show the NSA is in the early stages of working to build a quantum computer that could possibly crack most types of encryption. The NSA actually discloses they are working on quantum computing technology on their website, however, the status of the research was previously unknown. According to these new documents the agency is working on a “cryptologically useful quantum computer” as part of a research program called “Penetrating Hard Targets” and the goal is to use it for cracking encryption.
With headlines that scream, “NSA Secretly Funding Code-Breaking Quantum Computer Research,” it’s easy to see why many executives and enterprises are anxious and perhaps starting to lose faith in internet communications and transactions. Encryption is used to protect medical, banking, business and government records around the world. But, as many of the articles in the media today point out, the reality today is quantum computing is a theoretical research topic and is many years away from being a usable real-world technology. The Washington Post article quotes Scott Aaronson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “It seems improbable that the NSA could be that far ahead of the open world without anybody knowing it.”
Continuous Infrastructure
SYS-CON Events announced today that Windstream, a leading provider of advanced communications, has been named “Silver Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. IBM is strengthening its software defined environment (SDE) portfolio with the introduction of IBM Platform Resource Scheduler, a dynamic resource management tool for private and public OpenStack cloud that automatically allocates the right resources to the right job, balances workload demand with infrastructure supply and ensures adherence to service level agreements. While unprecedented technological advances have been made in healthcare in areas such as genomics, digital imaging and Health Information Systems, access to this information has been not been easy for both the healthcare provider and the patient themselves. Regulatory compliance and controls, information lock-in in proprietary Electronic Health Record systems and security concerns have made it difficult to share data across health care providers. CloudSigma on Monday announced that it has enhanced its solid-state drive (SSD) storage offering with highly-granular, affordable snapshot management technology to improve data protection and access in the cloud. Now, customers can seamlessly and cost-effectively incorporate enterprise storage strategies into their cloud infrastructure while meeting complex compute requirements. With CloudSigma’s snapshot management capability, customers are not only able to snapshot live running drives, but also clone them to create full drives to run separate VMs from. The new drive can either be at the same site or a second site, assisting with off-site data recovery and eliminating companies’ cloud backup concerns. Off-site backup is easily managed from the WebApp, allowing CloudSigma to not only guarantee that IOPS bottlenecks are avoided thanks to its SSD storage, but that data can be recovered on a drive-by-drive basis. As one of the few cloud providers that offers this level of granularity, CloudSigma is uniquely able to meet companies’ custom requirements and complex workloads, ensuring enterprise information is highly-available, regardless of its dataset type. Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Vanessa Alvarez has been named conference chair and Larry Carvalho has been named Tech Chair of Cloud Expo® 2014Windstream Named “Silver Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN), a FORTUNE 500 and S&P 500 company, is a leading provider of advanced network communications, including cloud computing and managed services, to businesses nationwide. The company also offers broadband, phone and digital TV services to consumers primarily in rural areas. IBM Introduces Platform Resource Scheduler for OpenStack Cloud Management
“IBM Platform Resource Scheduler provides a fully virtualized, open and programmable architecture that ensures enterprises are taking advantage of all available cloud resources – from application software licenses to available network bandwidth,” said Jay Muelhoefer, Director Strategy, IBM Platform Computing. “IBM Platform Resource Scheduler is an important building block of SDE and helps cloud clients optimize infrastructure usage, reduce cost of cloud ownership, and deliver higher workload quality of service.”Accelerate Mobile Application Development within Healthcare
The opportunities inherent in mobile technology are dramatically changing the way healthcare business gets done. Healthcare provider professionals are adopting mobile devices and tablets as an alternative to desktops/laptops and using mobile applications to augment gaps in existing patient management system capabilities. Developing mobile applications for the healthcare industry has some unique challenges, particularly protecting your backend data services while making them available to mobile application frameworks and SDKs. CloudSigma Advances Data Recovery in the Cloud
Cloud Expo Names Top Industry Leaders Conference Chair and Tech Chair
14th International Cloud Expo® will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and 15th International Cloud Expo® will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
“We are thrilled to see Vanessa Alvarez joining Cloud Expo as conference chair and Larry Carvalho as Tech Chair. Our upcoming event in June will offer the best sessions and faculty to date,” said Carmen Gonzalez, co-founder and CEO of Cloud Expo, Inc. “Since the 13th international conference in November, we have received the highest number of sponsorship and exhibit inquiries for Cloud Expo 2014.”