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21 most admired companies making IT a competitive advantage

All enterprises, regardless of what they produce or the services they deliver, are really information businesses.

The accuracy, speed and precision of IT systems means the difference between winning or losing customers, keeping supply chains profitable, and solidly translating new concepts into revenue-producing products and services.  The world’s best-run services businesses have customer-driven IT as part of their DNA; it is very much who these companies are internally.

In the recently published Gartner report CEO and Senior Executive Survey 2013: 21 Top Companies Admired for Competitive IT  completed between October and December, 2012, which was part of the 2013 CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey, C-level respondents were asked to name the companies they most admired in terms of their ability to apply IT-related business capabilities for competitive advantage.   

Respondents were also asked to limit their responses only to their own and related industries.

391 respondents participated in the …

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Cloud Migration Tips #3: Plan to Fail

Planning to deploy or migrate an application to a cloud environment is a big deal. In my last post we discussed the value of using real business and IT requirements to drive the justification of using a cloud architecture. We also explored the importance of using monitoring information to understand your before and after picture of application performance and overall success.
In this post I am going to dive deeper into the planning phase. You can’t expect to throw a half assed plan in place and just deal with problems as they pop up during an application migration. That will almost certainly result in frustration for the end users, IT staff, and the business who relies upon the application.

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Streaming media, Ustream, Video

Ustream Cloud Platform Delivers Global Audiences to Any Broadcaster, Anytime

Ustream today unveiled its next-generation streaming technology. The core of the Ustream Cloud Platform centers around the company’s proprietary Ustream Content Delivery Network (UCDN), Ustream Media Server (UMS) and Ustream TCP Congestion Control Algorithm (UTCP). Together, this technology provides users with redundancy, resiliency, and reliability to broadcast quality live video streams.

Compared to most single-sourced CDN solutions, Ustream’s UCDN architecture aggregates the capacity of all major content delivery networks across the globe into one optimized network to guarantee the best viewer experience, from any location in the world. UMS controls the full lifecycle of live video streams and assures the ability to seamlessly scale to millions of concurrent viewers from any device; further, UTCP ensures smooth, non-buffered playthrough in adverse network conditions. Ustream’s first live video stream in 2007 engaged a small community in the hundreds; today, the most popular live video streams captivate millions concurrently. Earlier this year, Ustream powered two massively-scaled events within one week — NASA’s Russian meteor fly-by and Sony’s PlayStation 4 announcement — each reaching 8 million global viewers, with a peak of 1 million concurrent viewers. The Ustream Cloud Platform is the only global, live video streaming platform that can scale to this level and beyond.

“With the official release of the Ustream Cloud Platform, we are pushing the limits of what’s physically possible on today’s internet architecture,” said Gyula Feher, CTO of Ustream. “Since the founding of the company, our ambition has been to build the world’s most scalable and easiest to use live online video platform. With our APIs, we are inviting web and app developers to take Ustream Cloud to every mobile and web user.”

With Ustream APIs, software and hardware developers can create rich broadcasting and viewing applications that utilize the power of the Ustream Cloud Platform. Partner developers can easily create simple interfaces that connect consumer and professional streaming products to the largest live video streaming network with the click of a button; they can also expand their own network by creating and customizing channels on the fly via the API.  The Ustream HTML5 player API and pre-configured libraries for iOS and Android enable interactive viewing experiences and social chat for desktop, mobile and tablets. Current users of Ustream’s Broadcasting APIs include Panasonic, Samsung, Logitech and Teradek; Sony’s new PlayStation 4 will also utilize Ustream APIs. Users of Ustream’s Viewing APIs include custom mobile apps from Mobile Roadie and Gyde.ly and custom event pages from clients such as Sony, Panasonic, Dell and Salesforce.

“We’ve designed and built a platform that will provide our user community with the highest quality streams, and we’re doing everything in our power to deliver this to viewers without buffering. The Ustream Cloud Platform automatically finds the best route to the end-user, avoiding congested paths, and uses an optimized TCP congestion control algorithm to serve content, even on lossy wireless networks, without buffering,” said Arpad Kun, Ustream’s director of network operations. “We hate the ‘spinning wheel’ as well, so we optimized the underlying protocol of RTMP and HTTP to deliver streams on-time, on-time, so users don’t have to wait for the player to fill up it’s buffer again. Our technology is unmatched and wherever we can, we are taking the single point of failure out of the equation.”

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Cloud Expo NY | IaaS & Shadow-IT: Make Sure Security Isn’t an Afterthought

Let’s face it, business units are bypassing IT and are using the likes of EC2 and Rackspace. Developers are driving this trend for the sake of agility and hindrance-free innovation. Security is not their top priority and is usually an afterthought, and this makes IT cringe.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Swaroop Sayeram, Group Product Manager at McAfee, to discuss how McAfee enables IT to say yes to their business unit’s cloud computing needs.
Swaroop Sayeram is a Group Product Manager at McAfee responsible for Datacenter & Server Security. His area of focus is the design and marketing of security solutions for IaaS Public Clouds.

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Big Data, Cassandra, GigaSpace, GigaSpaces Technologies, NoSQL, XAP

GigaSpaces Releases XAP 9.5: Enhanced for Cassandra Big Data Store, .NET Framework

GigaSpaces Technologies has released XAP 9.5, a new version of its in-memory computing platform that enables a quick launch of high-performance real-time analytics systems for Big Data.

At the core of the latest release of the GigaSpaces platform is XAP 9.5’s enhanced integration with NoSQL datastores, such as Cassandra. Combining the Cassandra datastore with the GigaSpaces in-memory computing platform adds real-time processing and immediate consistency to the application stack, while also guaranteeing dynamic scalability and transactionality – all necessary elements for enterprises that need real-time analytics or processing of streaming Big Data.

In this combined architecture, XAP in-memory computing provide the real-time data processing engine that is interoperable with any language or application framework, while the Cassandra DB provides long-term storage of data for use in real-time analytics.

A GigaSpaces benchmark done for the integration of XAP with Cassandra shows that this integration dramatically improves real-time performance for data retrieval operations. Putting the GigaSpaces in-memory data grid in front of the Cassandra Big Data solution resulted in performance of read that is up to 2000 times faster.

Up until XAP 9.5. this integration was only available for XAP Java users. XAP 9.5 further innovates by allowing .Net users to leverage the same built in Cassandra integration. This integration provides a seamless bi-directional translation between Cassandra’s columnar data model and the richer document and object oriented models available in XAP. This works for both Java & .NET XAP deployments allowing for .NET developers to speed up their Cassandra based big data applications.

“The GigaSpaces XAP Cassandra integration enables companies to enjoy both in-memory data grid capabilities and Big Data processing, easily and for any framework – Java or .NET,” says Uri Cohen, GigaSpaces VP of Product. “This enables companies to be more agile in meeting both current and future data processing challenges.”

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Big data: Visualising the strategic business imperative

The term Big Data is going to become a key part of the forward-looking business technology debate among informed, proactive and ICT savvy executives. But what’s really driving the growing demand for meaningful solutions?

While most companies are collecting, storing and analysing data, they continue to struggle with both the business and IT challenges of Big Data — more data is not necessarily better.

Enormous amounts of data are being generated daily by smartphones, sensors, video cameras, smart meters, and other connected devices, adding to the huge store of information from traditional sources.

This «data avalanche» represents a potential gold mine of insights, but a new study commissioned by Cisco reveals that IT professionals and businesses are challenged to extract strategic value from their data.

The Cisco Connected World Technology Report (CCWTR) surveyed IT professionals across 18 countries to examine the IT readiness, challenges, technology gaps, and strategic value of …

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Cloud one of the five IT “game-changers” in latest survey

Communications provider CommScope has released a report, entitled the 2013 Global Enterprise Survey, to assess which aspects of IT were changing the paradigm for organisations around the world – and found that cloud computing and enterprise mobility were the biggest tickets on the list.

The research, which is taken every three years and gathered over 1100 responses from 63 countries in five continents, found the top five disruptive IT forces as enterprise mobility, cloud services, 40Gb and 100Gb Ethernet, infrastructure intelligence and green power.

Of course, many of these overlap, with cloud and mobility often going hand-in-hand for corporate IT policy. Respondents also stated that server virtualisation and cloud were the key components of a green, energy-saving strategy.

44% of respondents said that cloud services were a game-changer, with the same number citing enterprise mobility as a key trend. The research found other contextual statistics:

  • Just under three quarters (74%) of …
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Anatomy of an Internet Scale Application

Planning scalable environments isn’t terribly difficult, but it does require a change of perspective. During this session we’ll broaden our views to think on an Internet Scale by dissecting a video publishing application built with The SoftLayer Platform, Message Queuing, Object Storage, and Drupal. By examining a scalable modular application build that can handle unpredictable traffic, you’ll be able to grow your development arsenal and pick up a few strategies to apply to your own projects.

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Cloud Expo New York: Is Cloud Safer Than Your Traditional Datacenter?

These days, it seems that every cloud provider claims that cloud is safer than your traditional datacenter. Is it though?
In his general session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Rishi Bhargava, VP of Product Management for Datacenter and Server Security group at McAfee, will help you explore and address the security challenges and considerations for public cloud (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS).
Rishi Bhargava is Vice President of Product Management for Datacenter and Server Security group at McAfee, Inc. He is responsible for Product management and strategy for datacenter solution. A visionary and technology enthusiast, he is also driving all Embedded Security Products Initiatives at McAfee. With over 12 years of diverse experience in product development and product management, he has a reputation for turning small ideas into successful market leading products.

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Cloud Expo New York: Evolving Cloud Computing Models

Private clouds are a great way to provide real-time service delivery of IT resources with a single-tenant, customized, secure environment. However, the challenge of scaling and managing physical resources still exists. The solution may be to leverage an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider to build an off-premise Private Cloud to add scalability to your current private cloud.
In his general session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Duke Skarda, CTO of SoftLayer, will discuss:
How to achieve scalability at Internet speed
Why it makes technical and business sense to host the cloud off-premises
What hosting options are available

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