Had a short but interesting twitter exchange with @securityincite @Gillis57 and @essobi (Mike Rothman, Gillis Jones and not sure (sorry!!) respectively) about using Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt when talking IT security services. @Gillis57 initially asked, ‘Question: We discuss FUD constantly (and I agree that it’s too prominent) But isn’t security inherently built upon fear?’ I sent an ‘09 Rothman article (@securityincite said it was ‘old school’ but still has some great comments)about that very topic. Soon, @essobi chimed in with, ‘Our foundation shouldn’t be fear, it should be education. 😀 ,’ @Gillis57 responded, ‘So, look. I agree wholeheartedly, but why do people need to be educated?’ @essobi answered, ‘imo? Bad programming/exploitable logic processes. we need to raise the bar or lower expectations.’ @Gillis57 added, ‘I really don’t think we need to keep selling fear, but denying that we are a fear based industry isn’t helping.’ @securityincite wizdom’d with, ‘Fear is a tactic like anything else. Depends in situation, context, catalyst. And use sparingly.’ And I conceded that, ‘splitting hairs but I try to talk about risk rather than fear – what’s the risk if…which often generates fear.’
Cloud Computing in 2013
Marc Andreesen said recently that 2012 will be remembered as the year of SaaS. What he meant is that SaaS has been around for a while, but it came of age this year, with examples of successes such as the Workday IPO. No one questions the significance of SaaS any more. But the year 2013 will see a shift to PaaS (Platform as a Service) with “most” new activities. There is already a blurring of the lines between IaaS and PaaS, as seen from Amazon’s AWS stack. But programmatic interface in PaaS will dominate as we move forward, catering to the developer community. The incumbents such as IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and Adobe (representing “on-premise” software) will have to combat with pure-play cloud players.
I saw a list of cloud pioneers and new cloud tools that should be worth sharing. Among the names (arguably) of cloud pioneers here are the often quoted – Warren Vogel (Amazon CTO), Chris Pinkham (architect of EC2, now head of start-up Nimbula), Randy Bias (CloudScaling, formerly GoGrid), Jonathan Bryce (Rackspace/Openstack), Lew Tucker (CISCO), Rich Wolski (Eucalyptus), Chris Kemp (NASA CTO), Urs Holzle (Google), and Frank Frankovsky (Facebook). You can google their names to see the pioneering work they have done in moving cloud computing forward.
CipherCloud Gets $30 Million from Andreessen
CipherCloud, the cloud data protection outfit, has gotten a sweet $30 million
round from existing backer Andreessen Horowitz.
It plans to use the money to accelerate its global go-to-market strategy
with expanded sales and marketing and to develop its cloud information
protection some more.
ClearStory: Sensemaking Over Big Data
By RyanKamauff
Led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures Palo Alto, Calif. (December 5, 2012) – ClearStory Data, a company delivering a new big data solution that makes it simple for business users to find, combine and interactively analyze data from corporate sources and disparate third-party sources, today announced the closing […]
Looking back at CRM forecasts and market estimates from 2012
Showing signs of growth through 2013 and beyond, the latest round of CRM forecasts illustrate how quickly behavioral and predictive analytics, greater usability, integration with social media and mobility are transforming this market.
Even with the most usable, easily learned CRM systems, enterprises at times struggle with adoption rates however. That problem has venture capitalists very interested in finding the next Salesforce.com, which a few have told me will look more like Facebook than a traditional CRM application.
Facebook’s future is going to be defined by how well they manage their migration to mobility, and the same holds true for CRM. Today there are 110 CRM applications in the Apple App Store and 47 in the Android App Store. Gartner predicts an exceptional growth rate of 500% by 2014 for mobile CRM. For CRM vendors to get there from here, they need to make usability and streamlined user …
The Age of Cloud Will Be Hybrid: IDC Connections
IDC Analyst Simon Piff answers questions on behalf of IT Executives regarding the benefits and challenges of using one or a combination of clouds with an enterprise IT architecture, to include private, an on-premise, privately owned architecture; public, an off-premise, shared utility; and hybrid, any combination of the previous two. Regardless of what is selected, cloud has firmly established itself within the enterprise IT architecture and all organizations need to have a strategy to take advantage of what it has to offer.
Cloud Strategy First
The article discusses cloud strategy as the first and foremost step towards cloud adoption by larger enterprises. It talks about its merits and how vendors need to provide this critical piece in order to be successful in selling their cloud services.
Just returned from the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. It was a grand event with three days of serious business nicely interspersed with fun. With fifteen tracks to choose from, it had sessions for every IT role from developer to CIO, every cloud-based technology, companies of all sizes from startups to global enterprises, and partners to customers.
Utility Computing Gets Closer in the Cloud
Jack Clark at ZDnet recently published a great series of articles on the current state of cloud computing, which included an article on utility computing called “Cloud computing’s utility future gets closer“. It’s one of the best reviews of where we are in the progression toward utility computing I’ve seen recently – probably since John Cowan’s blog series on a similar topic or the GigaOm white paper by Paul Miller called Metered IT: the path to utility computing.
First, Clark states the cloud is changing nearly every aspect of the technology markets and more importantly how technology is accessed and used by organizations and individuals. Completely concur. The question of “what is cloud” is getting clearer every day. Cloud computing is clearly not just a new term for an old model, but a very real shift in the way IT resources are delivered and consumed.
Cloud Computing: EMC & VMware Spin Up Pivotal Initiative
EMC and VMware confirmed Tuesday that they’re reshuffling their assets and forming a so-called cloud and Big Data “virtual organization” called the Pivotal Initiative under EMC’s chief strategy officer, VMware’s former CEO Paul Martiz.
VMware is contributing Cloud Foundry, SpringSource, Gemstone and Cetas. EMC is putting in Greenplum and Pivotal Labs. The move involves 1,400 employees, 600 from VMware and 800 from EMC.
The companies said they “expect to formally unite these resources by Q2 2013, with a specific operational structure to be determined.” So evidently for now it’s being run out of EMC.
Red Hat CloudForms: Open Clouds Under Your Control
Red Hat CloudForms is an open hybrid cloud-management product ideal for enterprises looking to move their Red Hat Enterprise Linux workloads to the cloud. It delivers the flexibility and agility that businesses want with the control and governance that IT needs. This lets your organization build a hybrid cloud that encompasses your heterogeneous infrastructures – thereby avoiding vendor lock-in – while managing the applications running in that cloud. Download this whitepaper to learn more.