A few weeks ago, Superstorm Sandy ravaged the East Coast, leaving devastation in its wake. Thousands of people were without power, food, and water. It quickly became clear that Sandy’s aftermath would bring life on the East Coast to a standstill for days as the region began to rebuild.
Early estimates of the damage put the business loss associated with the storm as high as $30 billion. But Grudi Associates, The John M. Glover Agency, and many others weren’t a part of that group. Evolve IP’s redundant cloud platform allowed them to run their businesses remotely as the storm raged on.
For example, InformationWeek Cloud picked up the story of how we helped Apria Health Care stay functional during the storm so that they could continue to provide their vital health services to customers in the days after the storm. Thanks to Evolve IP, Apria was able to deliver essential products to each customer, the most important being the personal oxygen tank.
Lean and Low in Las Vegas
Those of you who followed my blog for a while know that the idea of applying manufacturing best practices to cloud computing is a favorite topic of mine*. This week the topic popped up in a fireside chat (the popular term for keynotes delivered from a set of armchairs, often with no fire in sight) between Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogel and CEO Jeff Bezos at re:Invent, the first Amazon Web Services customer conference.
I won’t cover the conference here – many blogs and media sites already did – but in the chat Bezos made a number of interesting points on how principles of lean manufacturing are guiding Amazon’s overall endeavors and how cloud computing both supports and benefits from this approach. He discussed how – for developers- this approach turns the cost of infrastructure operations from an abstract overhead-like concept into a very visible direct cost they can directly influence. And how the cost of quality is always lower than the cost of non-quality, as fixing problems later – after it has shipped to the customer – is many times more expensive than doing things first time right. But also how cloud computing allows to continuously improve products and processes (similar to how factory workers at Toyota were empowered to stop the production line and jointly improve the process). He also stressed the importance of focusing on customers and their requirements (by continuously measuring and providing feedback loops) instead of focusing on competitors or winning.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York Registration Now Open
Recent IDC research shows that worldwide spending on cloud services will grow almost threefold, reaching $44.2 billion by 2013. And a recent Gartner report predicts that the volume of enterprise data overall will increase by a phenomenal 650% over the next five years.
These two unstoppable enterprise IT trends, Cloud Computing and Big Data, will converge in New York City at 12th Cloud Expo – being held June 10-13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York, NY.
As at every Cloud Expo, we are offering in New York City a vast selection of technical and strategic breakout sessions, General Sessions, Industry Keynotes, our signature discussion «Power Panels» and a bustling Expo floor complete with two busy Demo Theaters so that as a delegate you can kick the tires of solutions and offerings, and discuss one-on-one with all the leading Cloud and Big Data players what they are offering and how to make use of it in your particular situation.
Video Guidance, SinglePath Partner for Video Conferencing
Video Guidance, a video conferencing company, has formed a partnership with Single Path, LLC, a Chicago-based provider of technology solutions and managed IT offerings to Illinois- and California-based businesses. The strategic partnership will help Video Guidance grow by increasing its sales presence in its current markets and expanding its geographic reach across Illinois and California.
Strategic partners help Video Guidance – through its cloud-based services — create a more visually collaborative workspace for its customers. In the last decade, Internet, mobile and broadband technologies have redefined our way of life, and visual communication tools have become critical to a business’ efficiencies. And in an era of dispersed teams and reduced travel budgets, enhanced, strategic collaboration and applications are essential to maximizing the benefits of today’s sophisticated technology.
“Our joint partnerships utilize and maximize resources to offer more comprehensive collaboration and visual services to businesses and organizations,” said Michael Werch, president of Video Guidance. “The program is designed to help value-added resellers (VARs) succeed in the highly lucrative video conferencing market, enabling them to take advantage of high-margin sales opportunities with our best-in-class video conferencing solutions.”
Sendmail, Mimecast Partner for Hybrid-Cloud Email Security, Archiving, Management
Sendmail and Mimecast today announced a new strategic partnership that provides additional enhanced options for integrating and configuring email management solutions, which are needed to meet the growing hybrid-cloud email deployment requirements of large global enterprises.
This strategic partnership allows global enterprises to combine the proven on-premises Sentrion Email Integration Platform with Mimecast’s leading in-cloud Unified Email Management in a hybrid-cloud architecture for complete email security, archiving and business continuity with any on-premises or in-cloud email system.
“Gartner has long maintained that enterprises moving email to the cloud may have unique requirements that cannot be entirely fulfilled with cloud-only provisioning,” said Matt Cain, Vice President, Gartner Inc. “Large organizations therefore may require a flexible on-premises/cloud combination that can support a variety of unique email deployment options for mailboxes, security, archiving, routing and policy management.”
Many large organizations are looking to benefit from the cost, flexibility and other gains of cloud-based email deployments, but email-to-cloud migrations cannot be done without also managing the large number of machine-generating emails from business systems that rely on on-premises email infrastructure. Adding to the challenges for global enterprises are the wide range of security, regulatory compliance and corporate email policy requirements.
“Our customers have been asking for scalable cloud email applications that can easily integrate with our on-premises Sentrion Email Integration Platform with single provider support,” said Glen D. Vondrick, Sendmail President & CEO. “We are impressed by the proven Mimecast platform which offers the integration opportunity to deliver the hybrid-cloud architecture options enterprises need in order to consolidate multiple point products, reduce number of vendors, and further simplify the management of business email complexity.”
Sentrion is the de facto standard on-premises email infrastructure platform deployed by major Fortune 1000 enterprises around the globe to manage the complexity of policy-based routing and integration of machine-generated email with human collaboration email. Mimecast’s Unified Email Management platform is the only cloud-based email management solution designed specifically to deliver a broad range of email management capabilities in a tightly integrated, high performance SaaS platform. Mimecast in the cloud supports more than 6000 businesses worldwide.
“Sendmail’s proven success in providing on-premises email infrastructure to Fortune 1000 organizations makes them an ideal global enterprise partner for Mimecast,” said Peter Bauer, CEO, Mimecast. “Businesses are being driven toward evaluating and adopting cloud-based email solutions to control cost and complexity which can be quite challenging in high volume machine generated email environments. By combining Sentrion on-premises with Mimecast in the cloud, organizations can garner the advantages of the cloud while continuing to meet their business systems requirements. The option of a hybrid configuration means no matter what size of business and no matter how complex the requirements, we can enable the ideal email management solution.”
Sentrion Cloud Apps powered by Mimecast are available now from Sendmail. Those applications include: Mimecast Email Security, Mimecast Email Archiving and Mimecast Email Continuity. Deeper enterprise-specific integration between the two platforms is currently underway.
Understanding the Impact of Your Workload on Your Cloud Infrastructure
Enterprises are quickly realizing that their future success is dependent on their ability to adapt their business to the Cloud. That realization however comes with more questions and concerns about executing an effective cloud-based strategy. The explosion of the OpenStack community has made it possible for hosting providers and businesses to create or utilize Amazon-like public and private clouds, but it’s clear that the Cloud is not a one-size-fits-all solution. One prime factor that dictates the success of a cloud strategy is the particular workload an enterprise is tackling. From DevOps, to rapidly deploying dynamic and scalable websites, enterprises’ workload needs should dictate their cloud architecture.
The specific workloads have an impact on many elements of the cloud, particularly the architecture of the infrastructure. It becomes clear how integral infrastructure architecture is to meeting workload requirements as we examine specific workload use cases.
The first element to consider in the architecture of cloud infrastructure is computing power. The number and speed of compute nodes within a cloud configuration will dictate how quickly processes can be executed. This comes into play prominently when assessing a workload, as the computing power required to develop a web app pales in comparison to the compute power required to execute Big Data analysis. Large-scale data analysis projects require powerful compute capabilities. While this kind of project is completely within the purview of well-constructed cloud architectures, that architecture must be designed as such.
SYSPRO Launches ERP Mobile Solution for Mid-Market Manufacturers
SYSPRO announced today the availability of SYSPRO Espresso mobile ERP platform for mid-sized manufacturing and distribution companies. The new mobile solution is purpose built and leverages leading edge HTML 5, Microsoft technology and tools. The announcement was made here today at the company’s Winter 2012 analyst roadshow before 32 leading technology analysts. SYSPRO Espresso applications are available from the SYSPRO App Store.
SYSPRO Espresso is targeted at executives who require immediate access to c-level information as well as all users who are not office bound and who require secure access to real time data. The SYSPRO Espresso architecture is one of the first platforms of its kind to use a single source codebase (for the business logic) to create native applications for any mobile device, with built-in powerful customization capabilities both for the end-user and for developers to engage.
SYSPRO supports multiple mobile and desktop devices, provides easy user customization and an easy growth and change strategy via its component-based Quantum Architecture. The company has a strong mid-market presence with 14,500 customers and value-add industry expertise in the food, medical devices, machinery and equipment, electronics and pharmaceuticals/chemical sectors.
“We have been very careful with our new mobile solution to preserve what is one of our most acclaimed advantages, which is easy customization,” said Phil Duff, CEO SYSPRO worldwide. “The Power Tailoring tools that SYSPRO users have come to expect have not been compromised. SYSPRO Espresso users will be able to access and tailor SYSPRO applications that will work on-line and off-line on any popular device, while retaining the native look and feel of these devices, as well as for the look and feel of their personalized interface to SYSPRO. SYSPRO solutions feel like ‘home grown’ software solutions – as if they were built by their own technology development team.”
IceWEB Launches the IceWEB 6500
IceWEB, Inc. today announced the launch of the IceWEB 6500 Unified Data Storage appliances for cloud and virtual environments.
The IceWEB 6500 unified data system simplifies the management and efficiency of data center environments by providing all-inclusive storage for both block and file data across multiple protocols including Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Oracle databases, virtualized environments as well as unstructured data such as scanned images, files, videos, pictures, graphics, and voice – on IceWEB’s single enterprise-class platform.
Rob Howe, IceWEB CEO said, “The IceWEB 6500 is far more than just an addition to our product lineup. It’s full-tilt clustered storage at eye-popping low prices. The IceWEB 6500 offers simplicity, scalability, flexibility and advanced Integration. While that may just sound like a list of features, and it is; it’s a list of highly advanced features found only in unified storage systems that cost orders of magnitude more than the IceWEB 6500. That translates into massive savings for our customers who desperately need professional-level solutions to solve their storage requirements while they deal with frozen or fast-shrinking budgets. So this is not just another new product from IceWEB; this is an astounding amount of value for our customers at a time when they really need it that makes good business sense.”
2013 Will Be Dominated by Mobile, Cloud Developments: IDC
one of the main movers of the IT world.
The IT industry’s transition to «The Third Platform,» built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking and Big Data analytics technologies, has dominated annual predictions from IDC over the course of the last several years.
For 2013, IDC predicts the transition to The Third Platform will gain momentum as the industry accelerates past the exploration phase and into full-blown, high-stakes competition, according to an article on BizTech2.com.
«The IT industry as a whole is moving toward the mobile / social / cloud / Big Data world of the Third Platform much more quickly than many realize: from 2013 through 2020, these technologies will drive around 90 percent of all the growth in the IT market,» said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC, according to the article. «Companies that are not putting 80 percent or more of their competitive energy into this new market will be trapped in the legacy portion of the market, growing even slower than global GDP.»
Cisco Buys Cariden
is used in capacity planning, designing and engineering networks. It’s paying about $141 million in cash and retention incentives.
Cariden, whose clients include Verizon, Deutsche Telecom, SingTel and Swisscom, specializes in optimizing traffic management and visibility on service provider networks.
The acquisition is seen as part of Cisco’s very necessary move into software-defined networking (SDN). This summer Cariden announced a blueprint for infrastructure SDN – the visibility and control of network resources.