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The need for speed

The advantages of faster connectivity are rarely questioned these days, with consumers told it will improve their access to lifestyle and content services and enterprise users focused on improved productivity. Often the touted benefits are, to a degree, abstract. But in the world of high-frequency financial trading (HFT), the benefits are very measurable and very significant.

High-frequency traders use super-fast computers to trade automatically hundreds of times a second, often arbitraging tiny price differences between stocks listed on different venues. Added up over the course of time, the combined value of all those tiny profitable trades quickly builds into vast mountains of cash.

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20/20 Vision Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

SYS-CON Events announced today that the 20/20 Vision has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
20/20 vision Europe provides an easy-to-use, cost-effective cloud-based solution for Budget2Pay automation on Microsoft Azure. Automated PO, contract and invoice approval not just speeds up the process, but increases track and control over spend. 20/20 vision also supports generic workflow, document and transaction management. Cloud based Budget2Pay!

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“Holland Pavilion” Named “Bronze Sponsor” of Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

SYS-CON Events announced today that the “Holland Pavilion,” eight leading Dutch cloud companies, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Meet the leading Dutch cloud companies at the Holland Pavilion:
20/20 Vision
20/20 vision Europe is a Dutch company that provides successful standard solutions for your entire Budget2Pay process as well as electronic invoicing plus.
http://www.2020vision.eu

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Intel Trots Out New Personal Cloud Platform

Intel continues to churn out reference platforms for what it calls personal clouds, Atom-based storage used by SMBs to manage the dramatic growth of critical files, e-mail and media and consumers for their music, movies, photos, e-books and videos.
Besides local and remote access, the widgets offer centralized backup and restore, video security, sharing, video playback and streaming, compliance and hardware acceleration.
They’re now being built around the Atom D2550 and D2500 and content can be shared anytime across smartphones, tablets, notebooks and Ultrabooks.
The widgets support multiple file transfer protocols and various operating systems. McAfee AV SDK and VirusScan give small businesses protection against data corruption and virus attacks. And businesses with video surveillance systems can now attach up to two monitors to a single platform-based storage device and view up to four camera feeds that feature HD-quality clarity via the HTTP extension.

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Precog to Exhibit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

SYS-CON Events announced today that Precog, the leading developer of infrastructure for data warehousing and analysis, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 11th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 5–8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Precog is the leading developer of data warehousing and analysis infrastructure designed to help developers build sophisticated Big Data capabilities into their applications. Precog’s family of warehousing, analysis and reporting products empower developers to quickly build Big Data applications without the headache of custom data infrastructure development and maintenance. Precog is the author of the Quirrel declarative query language and has developed the industry’s most complete and heavily optimized execution stack for Quirrel. A 2011 TechStars graduate, Precog is backed by RTP Ventures, Resonant Venture Partners, David Cohen and several notable individual investors.

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Cornerstone OnDemand, Employee referral, Employment, Human Resources, Recruitment, Social, Social media, Social network, Talent management

Cornerstone OnDemand Enhances Social Sourcing for Cloud-based Recruiting

Cornerstone OnDemand today announced significant enhancements to its talent acquisition solution, the Cornerstone Recruiting Cloud, that make it easier and more efficient for organizations to tap into social networks, as well as their own employee base, and find the very best candidates for the right roles.

“Research shows that while organizations invest more in traditional recruiting methods, nearly half of positions are ultimately filled by other means such as internal candidates, employee referrals and social networking sites,” said Adam Miller, founder and CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand. “We believe these latest enhancements to the Recruiting Cloud will help companies expand their reach and significantly improve their ability to identify, attract and engage the right candidates. This includes sourcing both internal and external talent, as well as tapping into the personal networks of current employees, to find applicants with relevant skills and experience.”

New Recruiting Cloud features include:

  • Social sourcing, which allows recruiters, employees and
    candidates to share jobs across hundreds of social networks, online
    communities and job boards. Recruiters and hiring managers also are
    able to automate and track the publishing of jobs, as well as segment,
    target and reach specific audiences by the types of social media they
    prefer.
  • Job matching technology suggests contacts for specific jobs
    based on social profile information, significantly improving the
    ability to identify, attract and engage the most qualified candidates,
    especially passive job seekers.
  • Employee referral capabilities help to engage employees at
    every level of the organization in the recruiting process, making it
    easy for them to initiate referrals and use their social networks to
    spread the word. And automatic tracking of referrals ensure that
    employees can get recognized for their contributions.

The Recruiting Cloud integrates with Cornerstone’s comprehensive talent management software suite, giving talent acquisition teams and hiring managers better insight into internal candidates and existing talent pools. Cornerstone’s solution also is typically deployed across the entire workforce, making it even easier for companies to engage employees in the talent acquisition process.


Miscellaneous IT, Project management

Listen. Observe. Question. The Art of Complex IT Project Management

 

By Melanie Haskell, Project Manager, GreenPages Technology Solutions

Managing complex technology projects requires cooperation from multiple resources, spanning different departments and management levels, technology manufacturers, and organizations. Due to the complexity of the modern IT environment, project management in this industry is much more than coordinating phone calls and assigning tasks. The ability to communicate effectively (listening, observing, and questioning) is crucial to positive IT project outcomes.

 

How do I get a networking engineer to provide me a daily status report? How do I explain that disaster recovery between sites depends on bandwidth between those sites?  How do I ensure the project I’m working to deliver is in line with the customer’s expectations?  How do I know if the customer wants to mitigate the risk of BYOD?

There are three simple rules of effective communication when managing complex IT projects:

•             Listen

•             Observe

•             Question

Listen

I was recently attending a webinar on the Importance of Listening and the presenter mentioned an interesting exercise. Ask a person three or four times to recite the word “White,” then ask them what cow’s drink. Nine times out of ten, the person will say “Milk,” not “Water.” This illustrates what happens when people try to solve, rather than listen. If you get ahead of yourself in an IT project, mistakes happen. As an IT Project Manager, my role is to not just watch for this behavior in myself (making an assumption about how a customer will test applications in a VDI pilot for example) but also in other project stakeholders. Perhaps a CTO wants additional storage up and running by the end of the week but the IT Director states he does not have the resources to meet that deadline. What is meant by “up and running?” and what “resources” does the IT Director need to meet the request? Is it a people shortage, bandwidth issues, manufacturer backorder, rack space? A project manager that listens well, can untangle the issue to keep the project on track.

Observe

Effective IT project managers have the ability to quickly gauge stakeholders’ level of technical knowledge, area of expertise, level of responsibility, etc. so they can tailor any message to be clearly heard and effectively understood. But another important skill is the power of observation. Project Managers need to ensure all stakeholders are engaged. I was recently in a meeting where I watched someone subtly tune out another person because they thought that person was discussing a topic that was not in their particular “wheelhouse.” But in the modern IT environment, we cannot function in IT silos any longer. Not only is everything connected from a technology standpoint, but all IT projects are also business projects. Effective project managers use observational skills for better project outcomes by minimizing knowledge gaps and ensuring all stakeholders are engaged.

Question

As an IT Project Manager I work with many different customer contacts (at varying levels of an organization) daily. If I am working with a linear and nimble IT environment and I need a port opened on the firewall, most likely all I need to do is ask.  However, if the project involves a customer environment that is layered (maybe ITIL certified)  and has a team of 8 people responsible for network security and I need that same port opened on their firewall, I need to approach the request very differently (and probably have to wait for a Change window).  If  I am working with the Executive Administrative Assistant of a law firm and ask if all equipment has been received, racked, and cabled and is ready for the engineer to arrive onsite, I need to provide a deeper level of detail in my question than if I were asking the same question to an IT Manager.

By employing strong communication skills—listening, observing, and questioning—IT project managers can ensure successful, effective IT project outcomes.

 

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Consolidation as Cloud Expo Approaches

Citrix has announced a XenServer upgrade, featuring what it calls “enhanced integration” with Apache OpenStack. Its goals are facilitated load balancing and security.

Meanwhile, a recent report from one of those big analyst companies cautions buyers to beware of OpenStack, as it may just be a front for a new era of vendor lock-in.

Oh, and Oracle just bought another company and has announced its latest cloud strategy, which appears to be of the all-in, metered, and efficient nature.

I’m reminded once again of the location at the tip of my home state of Illinois where the mighty, brown Mississippi meets the slightly less mighty, blue Ohio River. The two co-exist side by side for a short distance, gradually browning, before the Mississippi takes over a short distance further downstream.

In my metaphor here, the Mississippi plays the role of traditional enterprise IT, with the Ohio playing the role of cloud computing. Everything appears to be merging into one large stream, in which all the cool new stuff is gradually being submerged.

But what’s the alternative? A couple of years ago, cloud computing proponents promised the age of the grid, in which IT would be delivered and measured like electricity or water. Now, it seems we may settle for a more efficient use of processors and storage, and even in that case at the literal and physical expense of running these machines hotter than what’s been normal for decades.

I’ll be checking my theory out at the upcoming Cloud Expo in Santa Clara. I know I’ll talk to people who remain fiercely resolute about their cloud-computing strategy and offerings, and committed to changing the norms of enterprise IT. Others will be continuing to work to deliver cloud-as-a-utility to companies of all sizes, including the SMBs for whom cloud is a potential field-leveler.

But what’s really happening? Are we already deep into an era of industry consolidation? Will enterprise IT really look dramatically different 20 years from now than it does today?

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APAC-Partners, APS, APS Partners, Cloud Services, Parallels APAC Summit, Parallels Automation, Parallels Cloud Services

Powering Cloud Automation Through Partnerships

 

When SoftLayer began back in 2005, the term “cloud computing” was rarely used if at all. The founders of SoftLayer had an ambitious vision and plan to build a service platform that could easily automate, scale and meet the demands of the most sophisticated IT users. They were obviously onto something. Since then, we’ve emerged as the world’s largest privately held Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider, helping the next generation of web savvy entrepreneurs realize their dreams. But we didn’t do it alone. We had partnerships in place—including working with Parallels.

 

Today, the industry is trying to scramble and figure out how this “new” IT shift will work out. Our partners at Parallels had a similar ambitious undertaking—trying to automate and enable a complete gamut of hosting and cloud services. This created a framework for our partnership. We worked with their engineering and sales teams, starting back in 2005, which resulted in Parallels Plesk Panel being offered as an option on every SoftLayer server. That was just the beginning. We are now deployingParallels Automation for hosting partners, and have plans to integrate with the Application Packaging Standard for delivering the broadest array of cloud and hosted applications.  Plans to integrate with other products like the forthcoming Parallels Cloud Server 6.0 (now in beta for trials) are also on the horizon. It all comes down to helping hosting companies and other joint customers thrive and succeed.

 

To find out more about our partnership with Parallels and how it can help streamline your entry into cloud computing, click here. We were also the only “Diamond” sponsor at the recent Parallels Summit 2012 APAC in Singapore this year, and look forward to Parallels Summit 2013 in Las Vegas early next year.  We share a heritage and understanding with Parallels borne from a need to simplify and solve IT problems on a broad scale. Now that’s what I call a like-minded partnership.

 

George Karidis

Chief Strategy Office

Softlayer

 

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OpenStack Foundation Exec Director to Keynote at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley

Jonathan Bryce, the Executive Director of the newly-formed OpenStack Foundation, and who has spent his entire career building the cloud, is to give the opening keynote at 11th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA, November 5-8, 2012.
The OpenStack Foundation promotes the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud operating system. As the independent home for OpenStack, the Foundation has already attracted more than 5,600 individual members from 87 countries and 850 different organizations, secured more than $10 million in funding and is ready to fulfill the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform.

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