Cisco’s «Kickstart-to-Cloud» Workshop at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, Nov 5-8, 2012, is a free half-day event on Monday, November 5, that will offer Cloud Expo attendees a perspective on all the new technologies out there and how to not be distracted by the bright shiny objects.
Join Wayne Greene, Rodrigo Flores, Joann Starke, and Brian Cinque of the Cloud and Systems Management Technology Group & Corporate IT at Cisco Systems as they describe the habits of effective cloud builders and hear in-depth what made one private cloud deployment a smashing success.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Four Degrees of Separation from SaaS
Four companies moving to SaaS, four different challenges, four different markets and four different solutions.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Jan Aleman, CEO of Servoy, will provide four separate, real case studies detailing how these SaaS companies met the challenges.
Moving to SaaS?
Then you’re going to have to rewrite your software whether you want to or not. How do you manage the process without driving your company’s collective brain insane? We’ll show you how one SaaS company handled it.
Analyzing the costs and risks of transitioning
If you decided to build your new system from scratch, you’re the main technology provider. Are you up to the task? Can you get it done in a timely fashion? Go the outsource and third-party component route and you’re now orchestrating an effort you don’t totally control. Where are the main risks? Our case study will show you how they reduced these risks.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Lunchtime Focus Keynote – Day 3
The cloud is changing the way enterprises consume IT infrastructure and applications. Networks and application deployment strategies are being re-architected to manage an increasingly hybrid network where storage, utility compute and applications are being designed to move seamlessly across private and public cloud infrastructures.
In his Lunchtime Focus Keynote at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Todd Paoletti, Vice President of Product Management at Akamai, will discuss the trends, new products and roadmap to help increase cloud adoption and business agility.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley Speaker Profile: Mark Skilton – Capgemini
With Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley (11th Cloud Expo) due to open in three weeks’ time at the Santa Clara Convention Center, CA, let’s introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical program at the conference…
We have technical and strategy sessions for you dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT?
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Freeing Cloud Data – SQL for SaaS
As data as a service providers are emerging to aggregate and manage large data set sources from multiple sources to make this information more easily available and usable to businesses, it is increasingly imperative to enable an easy-to-use service for data connectivity. As customers put more of their data assets in the hands of cloud vendors, they will demand readily available visibility into the source of their data and how it is used.
The challenge of managing multiple cloud and enterprise data sources is becoming increasingly more complex. With a diverse set of solutions such as CRM, B2B, EAI, accounting, and more becoming more prevalent in the cloud, working together and sharing data can be daunting to IT departments that are used to managing their solutions in-house.
Is the Clock Ticking for OpenStack?
A new Forrester report says “the clock is ticking” for OpenStack, because “have been relatively few enterprise-ready OpenStack-powered products on the market.” The report was quoted as such in a leading tech publication, which had also reported, just five weeks ago, that SUSE had just “thrown its hat into the already crowded OpenStack distribution game.”
Well, which is it? Do prospective OpenStack customers have a surfeit of selections or a plethora of possibilities?
These questions are set against the larger background of the battles among open-source stacks, VMware, Oracle, and Microsoft.
Numerous court intrigues are also present in the picture. Is VCE partner and cloud pioneer Cisco a friend, foe, or “froe” of fellow VCE adventurer VMware? Is VMware’s Ncira-driven entry into OpenStack really a benign, practical move? How many people believe Oracle is truly offering cloud computing, and what does it matter?
How important, and disruptive, are multiple mobile platforms to Cloud Computing? What does the Big Data/Cloud Computing Boolean chart look like, and how much of Big Data is Hadoop? How serious is the oncoming unstructured Big Data onslaught, and how much of a threat is that to Oracle?
Regarding OpenStack’s prospects in particular and Cloud Computing in general, I think it’s also important to consider the role of first-mover advantage. This is one of those business-school concepts that works very well in analyzing arm wrestling, but less well in business. I can’t think of a single technology company today (including IBM) that had first-mover advantage. Somebody please tweet me with evidence to the contrary. I don’t mind looking foolish now and then.
But I doubt any perceived leader in today in either the battle of the stacks or in Cloud Computing is guaranteed leadership five years from now or 20 years from now. I reported from last year’s Cloud Expo West about RightScale’s finding that its varied, multi-cloud customers were supporting a virtual dead heat among Eucalyptus, CloudStack, and OpenStack.
The three are quite different species of duck, but they all seem to walk and quack in the same way to the untrained eye and ear. But if I learn at this year’s Cloud Expo West that one has assumed a clear leadership – ie, in terms of revenue, customers, and momentum – can we assume that will remain the case for long?
Even if a few OpenStack members get disenchanted and disengaged from the project, will that be a death knell or just another story for bit-stained wretches to chew on for a few days?
The driving cacophony emanating from Cloud Computing technology vendors is giving us one of the great golden ages of IT history. In the end, it will make enterprise IT and personal technology more productive, and thereby play a major role in improving the world’s economies. But as I wrote yesterday, cloud computing comprises a small portion of IT today, and will still do so several years from now.
It’s way too early to talk of ticking clocks, unless these are old-fashioned analog clocks with a big hand indicating years and a little hand indicating decades.
Cloud Privacy Contracting
The main evolutionary leap in Cloud services will come from a fusion of both legal and technical maturity.
It’s not enough for CSPs to offer contractual SLAs that dictate how efficiently they will run IT resources or how they will handle outages, they also need to stipulate how they will enable and honor data privacy regulations and best practices.
In short they will need to be able to offer contracting terms that aligns with the buyers controlling privacy laws – What I call ‘Cloud Privacy Contracting.’
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Making Money in the OpenStack Ecosystem
How are companies making money on OpenStack today, and where are the best opportunities for new companies to get engaged and serve the growing user base?
The OpenStack community and commercial ecosystem are not mutually exclusive. To build a successful OpenStack company or product line, you need to invest in the community and to build influence organically. In return, a strong commercial ecosystem means more paid developers and better software, and a competitive market that keeps users seeking OpenStack products.
Cloud Expo Silicon Valley: Impact of Big Data & Cloud on Data Connectivity
How can we regain control of our data and get a complete view of critical information, while still reaping the many benefits that SaaS has to offer? The explosion in Software as a Service has changed the world of data access dramatically. Business critical information that was once within the four walls of the organization is now locked in a variety of SaaS applications deployed on the public Internet. This presents a serious challenge to business decision makers who are driven to make the right choices for their organizations based on a now incomplete picture of the world.
In his General Session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Michael Benedict, Vice President and Business Line Manager at Progress Software, will look at how you overcome these challenges and regain full visibility to your business data wherever it may live.
Microsoft Buys StorSimple
Microsoft said Tuesday that it’s going to buy privately held StorSimple and its Cloud-integrated Storage (CiS) solutions to advance its Cloud OS vision and help customers embrace hybrid cloud computing more efficiently.
It did not say what it’s paying.
As a gauge, the start-up raised at least $31.5 million in VC funding from such companies as Ignition, a retreat of ex-Microsofties.
StorSimple is a partner of Microsoft’s and its widgetry works with Windows.
It integrates cloud storage for on-premises applications and offers a single appliance delivering high-performance tiered local and cloud storage, live archiving, cloud-based data protection and disaster recovery.
Ironically, it also supports VMware and OpenStack, the latter by integrating with Rackspace’s underlying Cloud Files.