IT is an acronym crazed world. So crazy that sometimes – when running out of three letter ones – we simply recycle them or add sequence numbers. Remember MRP, which used to mean Material Requirements Planning, but then became Manufacturing Resource Planning (called MRP II to avoid confusion), to only a couple of years – and a few trillion of investments – later, resurface as ERP.
In that era the term BPR also became popular. BPR stood for Business Process Re-engineering (see for example Hammer, M. and Champy, J. A.: (1993) Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution), a movement that in my perspective*really gained steam from the realization that throwing new technology (ERP) at existing processes, only offered limited improvement potential. As Business Process Re-engineering often resulted in massive redundancies and layoffs, BPR got kind of a bad rap, especially among employees and unions (remember those?).
Working in the Cloud and On the Job
Professionals who work in the service field often have to juggle several tasks at once. Service techs have to make sales presentations and deal with customer service and still fix the problem they were hired for. They’re basically a one-man show that travels from site to site, the ultimate multi-tasker, with so many projects and phone calls to handle that a person can’t help but wonder how most even survive each day. But there’s something out there to help these guys out with their busy life. By working in the cloud, contractors and techs can gain an extra pair of arms to make each day count.
When your techs show up to a job they bring their toolbox and a bulky laptop. Their hands are extremely full. Everything they need to know is on that computer but it takes minutes to load, and they have to be on the phone at the same time talking to the office. If a problem should arise, they may have to leave the site and only return after obtaining the information or ordering the parts that they need. Then what happens if there are errors in that information? They have to head back again to the office. The tech wastes gas and the client wastes time. No one’s a winner here.
Eucalyptus Open Sources Services & Training
Eucalyptus, the open source private cloud platform partnered with Amazon to give people hybrid clouds, has found selling support and professional services, the usual way an open source company makes money, isn’t working as a business because would-be customers are too tight-fisted.
As a result it didn’t grow as much as expected last year.
So it’s regrouping. It’s open sourcing its services and training, CEO Marten Mickos said, to focus on its product business, where it’s seeing early indications of large cloud implementations and the potential for a big business thanks in part to its alliance with Amazon, whose APIs are the recognized cloud standard.
Cloudscaling Productizes OpenStack Folsom
Cloudscaling, the cloud infrastructure software shop, has released Open Cloud System (OCS) 2.0 for general availability in production deployments.
CTO Randy Bias says, “General availability of OCS version 2.0 is a major milestone. As far as we are aware, we’re the only company to ship an elastic cloud infrastructure software solution built on OpenStack technology for public or private deployments.”
The new version adds OpenStack Folsom support and a new scale-out elastic block storage option.
The Consumer Electronics Show: All about enterprise
Mike Sapien, Principal Analyst, Enterprise, Ovum
The 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was the usual media frenzy, with as many new technology announcements as ever. Although CES focuses on mass-market, consumer products, entertainment, and services, it does provide a preview of technologies and products that will most likely enter the enterprise market eventually. It also gives IT departments some idea of what the corporate end user is going to expect in terms of corporate IT services, user interfaces, and service flexibility.
Mobility, cloud-based services, and end-user empowerment
Mobility, cloud-based services, and end-user empowerment were the major themes of many of the new products and services on display at CES. Another prominent topic was the “Internet of Things” or the “Internet of Everything.” Manufacturers introduced devices of all kinds with wireless capabilities, and unveiled enhanced versions of existing devices that had been upgraded with flexible applications such as location-based services, text …
HP Forms New Cloud Unit
HP has hired Margaret Dawson out of Symform to be VP of product
marketing and cloud evangelist for HP Cloud Services, a new start-up unit
inside HP.
She claims that “much of the negative hype reported around HP does not
match reality. HP has a strong foundation to compete and win in the cloud
and is building out the right leadership team, ecosystem, cloud platform and
solutions to escalate that process.”
It’s unclear how many people will believe her.
Data Optimization in Cloud Storage
The promise of “the cloud” is that cloud storage delivers users seamless “just in time” storage scalability to handle growth and quickly respond to peak loads. The economics and business impact of cloud storage also delivers a compelling financial proposition in today’s budget constrained IT environments. To the IT consumer shifting what was a capital expense and a fixed cost to a variable cost operating expense is financially compelling. Additionally, the ability to function in a “just in time” mode versus a “predictive” model for consumable storage also changes the CAPEX impact further assisting in justifying an already strong value proposition for adopting cloud storage.
IDC forecasts that cloud-based storage will represent a $15.6B market by 2015 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32%. They also predict 10,000 service providers will focus on cloud storage with a data protection emphasis. The economics of this market transition will continue to evolve and accelerate as costs of delivering cloud services are optimized by service providers that become more efficient – ever mindful of the cost of their plant/facility, operating expenses and business margins.
Skyera Inc. Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
SYS-CON Events announced today that Skyera Inc., an emerging provider of enterprise solid-state storage systems, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Skyera Inc. is an emerging provider of enterprise solid-state storage systems designed to enable a large class of applications with extraordinarily high performance, exceptionally lower power consumption and cost effectiveness relative to existing enterprise storage systems. Founded by the executives who previously developed the world’s most-advanced flash memory controller, Skyera is backed by key technology and financial partnerships designed to position it at the forefront of the hyper growth in the solid-state storage sector. The company was featured in the Gartner report “Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies, 2012,” was chosen by Flash Memory Summit as a Best of Show award winner for 2012 in the category of Most Innovative Flash Memory Enterprise Business Application, and won the Visionary Product Award at Storage Visions, 2013.
Private Cloud Without Internet Connectivity
Back in 2007, the title of this article probably didn’t make any sense. The cloud was a diagram to represent the Internet. Cloud Services == Services from the Internet.
Now, when someone told you they need a private cloud solution without
Private Cloud Without Internet Connectivity
Back in 2007, the title of this article probably didn’t make any sense. The cloud was a diagram to represent the Internet. Cloud Services == Services from the Internet.
Now, when someone told you they need a private cloud solution without