Andy Jassy, the head of Amazon’s cloud business and the Harvard MBA who wrote its business plan, told the Sunday Telegraph in London over the weekend that AWS could some day displace Apple as the world’s most valuable tech company.
“We don’t say to ourselves, ‘What we’re really doing is trying to build the largest technology company in the world,’” he told the paper. “We just happen to think, with how much computing is going to move to the cloud, and with the breadth and global footprint that we have, and our continuing [commitment] to iterate at a very fast pace, it just has the chance to be the largest technology company.”
Thirty-One Days of Servers (VMs) in the Cloud
Happy New Year!!!! For the New Year all of my IT Pro teammates across the country wanted to get together and talk about 31 things we love and want to teach about having Servers (VMs) in the Cloud. Throughout this month we are going to be talking about Windows Azure IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). Windows Azure now offers a new feature currently in customer preview called Virtual Machines & Virtual Networks. This new functionality provides Windows Azure with an IaaS (Cloud) platform for you to deploy your own virtual machines. In Windows Azure IaaS you can easily deploy and run Windows Server and Linux virtual machines in Windows Azure. In this 31 part series we will teach you most of what you need to know about cloud computing and Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service.
Imation Acquires Nexsan
Imation today announced that it has acquired privately held Nexsan Corporation, a Thousand Oaks, Calif.-based provider of disk-based storage systems. The combination cash-and-stock transaction included approximately $105 million in cash and 3,319,324 Imation common shares, the equivalent of approximately $15 million.
“Imation’s acquisition of Nexsan is an exciting next step in our strategic transformation, which includes investing in growth platforms in data storage and security solutions, where we are targeting markets with strong growth rates,” said Mark Lucas, president and CEO of Imation. “Our strategy includes focusing on the underserved SMB market with purpose-built storage systems and appliances. This is a market that Nexsan knows well. Nexsan’s management team has grown this business from start-up to more than $80 million, with strong gross margins. Nexsan is a successful company that is addressing some of today’s fastest growing trends in storage, and we are pleased that its management team, including CEO Philip Black, will join Imation. The combination of Nexsan’s products, technologies, and talented teams with Imation’s global reach and infrastructure will be an excellent accelerator for our growth strategy in storage solutions,” concluded Lucas.
“We are excited to have Nexsan become part of Imation,” said Philip Black, CEO of Nexsan. “Imation provides us the scale and global footprint to expand our business, while still keeping intact our award winning partner program, our strong management team and employees, and our innovative products and roadmap. We look forward to working as part of Imation to deliver compelling solutions that meet the growing storage, archive and compliance requirements of businesses worldwide. This is good news for Nexsan channel partners, employees and customers.”
Nexsan’s 2011 revenues were $82 million and are continuing to grow, with gross margins in the 40 percent range. This acquisition is expected to be immediately accretive to Imation’s EBITDA.
Approximately 200 employees, based in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, have joined Imation with this acquisition. The Nexsan business will continue to operate within Imation from Nexsan’s current headquarters in Thousand Oaks, Calif., under existing management. Integration and global expansion activities between Imation’s Tiered Storage and Security Solutions business and Nexsan will be determined in first quarter 2013.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: Architecture for the Cloud
“Ramco is a cloud ERP company – we have end-to-end ERP solutions available on the cloud and architecture for the cloud,” explained Venky Viswanathan, VP at Ramco Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
TriZetto Acquires Cloud-based Claims Workflow Automation Company
TriZetto Corporation today announced its acquisition of Franklin, Tenn.-based Healthcare Productivity Automation (HPA). HPA’s healthcare workflow automation solutions will be integrated with TriZetto’s business management services unit over the coming months. Terms of the transaction, which closed on Dec. 17, were not disclosed.
HPA solutions employ a highly advanced, cloud-based claims workflow tool, Health Mason®. The Health Mason solution automates certain manual processes in claims administration, which can greatly improve the efficiency and quality of the provider reimbursement process. The tool replicates human decision-making to review large volumes of claims, enter data and determine the best way to process claims. Processing can be up to 30 times faster than typical manual processes, with high reliability – more than 95 percent first-pass accuracy on a rolling 12-month average across HPA’s book of business.
“The acquisition of HPA underscores TriZetto’s continuing investment strategy to provide innovative, integrated technology and service solutions that simplify healthcare and improve both its efficiency and effectiveness for payers, providers and members,” said Harish Mysore, senior vice president of corporate development and strategic alliances at TriZetto. “This acquisition builds on our commitment to enhance payer-provider collaboration by increasing the quality, accuracy and efficiency of claims processing and payment.”
“We’re excited to join TriZetto because its large payer and provider client base allows us to make a bigger impact on healthcare,” said Sal Novin, HPA’s CEO. “In managing the claims administration function of dozens of health plans, TriZetto will leverage HPA’s technology to bend the cost curve of processing claims and increase administrative efficiencies for both healthcare payers and providers.”
Lightning in the Clouds, Big Data
Cloud has been marketed as one of the key advances in technology and every day we hear about new areas where cloud services are being utilized. Cloud is the bright shining star that is being leveraged for it’s elastic, on-demand, resource pooling capabilities. However there have been Cloud outages recently that have adversely impacted businesses. These outages highlight the risks of the Cloud and bring into focus that such risks need to be effectively managed. Cloud outages are like lightning in the Clouds, lightning can cause problems where it strikes and preparation is important to avoid damage.
This year Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Gmail, Google App Engine, Microsoft Office 365, Azure had outages that impacted businesses. During this holiday season, some Netflix subscribers were hit with an outage on Christmas Eve that was caused by Amazon cloud servers. Amazon tracked the issue to Elastic Load Balancing, that enables spreading traffic across many servers.The wasn’t good timing for the outage as subscribers were looking forward to watching movies during this period. Microsoft Azure storage had an outage during the holidays that impacted the management portal. Big Data services and providers have also reported access issues.
SYS-CON.tv Interview: The Cloud Service Broker
“Our company has been around for a long time – we started in 1978 with microcomputer operating systems and we found ourselves in the cloud,” explained Jamie Marshall, CTO of Prologue, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Cloud Expo Trademarks Infringed Again
Cloud Expo and Cloud Expo Europe, registered trademarks of parent company SYS-CON Media, Inc., are being infringed by an event in London that is using the Cloud Expo Europe name.
Cloud Expo is not affiliated with the London event that is using its Cloud Expo Europe name, it is not Cloud Expo’s company, and it is not Cloud Expo’s show. Cloud Expo provides the best events in the business and will continue to do so.
Cloud Expo, Cloud Expo East, Cloud Expo West, Cloud Expo New York, Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Cloud Expo Europe, Cloud Expo Tokyo, Cloud Expo Prague, Cloud Expo Hong Kong, Cloud Expo Sao Paolo are trademarks and /or registered trademarks (USPTO serial number 85009040) of Cloud Expo, Inc.
What are the top 3 myths about cloud ERP software?
The growth of cloud computing has caused a paradigm shift in all sorts of business applications, but perhaps most notably in ERP software.
As noted in a previous article, cloud ERP is growing like wildfire as more and more businesses move to their ERP system to the cloud.
But as cloud ERP becomes more popular, misconceptions about it also spread and it becomes more difficult to separate fact from fiction. In an effort to do just so, here are the top 3 myths about cloud ERP:
Myth #1: Cloud ERP is the same as hosted ERP
This is somewhat analogous to saying that renting a house is the same as leasing a house, which obviously is false. There are numerous differences between cloud ERP and hosted ERP involving software maintenance, network traffic, security, and statelessness.
Hosted ERP requires users to install and maintain software; cloud ERP does not. This saves …
How cloud computing is accelerating contextual advertising
Retailers and marketers often face the challenge of getting coupons, offers and promotions delivered at the perfect time and in the right context to their customers.
The rapid advances in cyber foraging, contextual computing and cloud computing platforms are succeeding at revolutionising this aspect of the retail shopping experience. Context-aware advertising platforms and strategies can also provide precise audience and segment-based messaging directly to customers while they are in the store or retail outlet.
What makes context-aware advertising so unique and well adapted to the cloud is the real-time data integration and contextual intelligence they use for tailoring and transmitting offers to customers.
When a customer opts in to a retailer’s contextually-based advertising system, they are periodically sent alerts, coupons, and offers on products of interest once they are in or near the store. Real-time offer engines choose which alerts, coupons or offers to send, when, and in which …