Customer engagement has long benefited from data and analytics. Knowing more about each of your customers, their attributes, preferences, behaviors and patterns, is essential to fostering meaningful engagement with them. As technologies advance, and more of people’s lives are lived online, more and more data about customers is captured and made available. At face value, this is good; more data means better analytics, which means better understanding of customers and therefore more meaningful engagement. However, volumes of data measured in terabytes, petabytes, and beyond are so big they have spawned the terms “Big Data” and “Big Analytics.” At this scale, there are practical considerations that must be understood to successfully reap the benefits for customer engagement. This article will explore some of these considerations and provide some suggestions on how to address them.
C12G Labs Announces the Release of OpenNebulaPro 3.6
C12G Labs has just announced an update release of OpenNebulaPro, the enterprise edition of OpenNebula. OpenNebulaPro integrates the most recent stable version of OpenNebula (3.6) with the bug, performance, and scalability patches developed by the community and by C12G for its customers and partners.
OpenNebula 3.6 (codename Lagoon), released one month ago, featured several enhancements focused on making it a more robust and user friendly cloud manager. The main new feature is the new hotplugging mechanism for disk volumes that supports attaching either volatile volumes or existing images to a running VM. Also, Quota and Accounting tools were re-written from scratch , so now they are included in the OpenNebula core to enhance their integration with the existing AuthZ & AuthN mechanisms and other related tools (e.g. Sunstone). Some new features like VM rescheduling, hard reboots, or cloning of disk images were added as well. Apart from the core, Lagoon came with improvements in other systems, especially in Sunstone’s interface with the redesign of several tabs as well as in the OpenNebula Zones. There was also an important milestone reached in this release, with OpenNebula 3.6 fully integrated with the new OpenNebula Marketplace. Any user of an OpenNebula cloud can very easily find and deploy virtual appliances through familiar tools like the SunStone GUI or the OpenNebula CLI. The OpenNebula Marketplace is also of the interest of any software developer to quickly distribute a new appliance, making it available to all OpenNebula deployments worldwide.
Cloud Computing: Using the Cloud to Scale Security
“We are a provider of IT security solutions. We are all about trying to simplify IT and making all the problems our customers have go away in a simplified fashion. We have a broad product portfolio that helps our customers,” explained John Peterson, VP of Technical Services for Barracuda Networks, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
GoodData Gets $25 Million for Business Intelligence Tools
GoodData announced today that it has closed $25 million in Series C funding led by Tenaya Capital, with participation from new investor Next World Capital, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners. The company has raised $53.5 million in total to date.
Brian Paul, Managing Director at Tenaya Capital will join the board of directors. Other existing board members include John O’Farrell, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz; Larry Bohn, Managing Director of General Catalyst Partners; James Gellert, Partner at Windcrest Partners, Dave Girouard, former General Manager of Google Enterprise, and Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of GoodData.
Since the company was founded, more than 6,000 customers have adopted GoodData to monetize their data. In 2011, the company posted 600 percent bookings growth and more than doubled employees and customers, making GoodData one of the fastest growing companies in the space.
GoodData will use the new funding to continue to invest in technology innovation as well as build sales and marketing programs to raise awareness and accelerate adoption of its disruptive, cloud-based platform.
“It’s time to pull the plug on the old business intelligence model — it’s clear that it is obsolete,” said Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of GoodData. “We are pioneering a new approach to business intelligence that will monetize and bring big data to life.”
BMC Software Delivers Chart and Compass to Help IT Map the User Experience in the Cloud
BMC Software has created a “chart and compass” to quickly map and navigate the end user experience. BMC End User Experience Management is a solution that helps IT organizations rapidly diagnose and improve customer satisfaction rates. The latest release includes applications running in the cloud, with visibility from the end user all the way back to the code.
“End user experience monitoring is a critical criterion of the interaction between the human, device, and customer-facing software applications,” said Jonah Kowall, research director at Gartner. “While this criterion is only one part of a complete application performance monitoring strategy, this one criterion will have an ever increasing role in which applications are successfully deployed and sticky – particularly in the cloud.”
“The BMC solution has really increased the pace at which we identify problems,” said Steve Conine, CTO and co-founder, Wayfair, the largest online retailer of home furnishings. “We don’t want customer service calling us up, walking over and telling us something is down. We want to know it is down before they call us.”
Workload Centric Approach to Cloud Computing
«We think about cloud at multiple levels inside of Citrix as a company. There are cloud platforms and around that we have cloud networking, and the third area is delivering desktops and applications as a cloud service,» stated Sameer Dholakia, Group VP & GM, Cloud Platforms Group, at Citrix, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
DataIQ Aims for Big Data Visualization Simplicity at Low Cost
StoredIQ today announced DataIQ, designed to give organizations a simple, low-cost, visualization solution to understand their unstructured data — without first moving it to a repository — to help answer data intelligence questions that challenge many of today’s IT organizations such as:
“Every company has more data than it can manage. But few can precisely locate it, assess the value of it, or make much sense out of it when they need to,” said Ted Friedman, vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner. “Information management projects can be very intimidating. To set a course for success, organizations need to build insight regarding the whereabouts, meaning, and usage of their data.”
Designed to run on the StoredIQ Platform, DataIQ scales from terabytes to petabytes, from single corporate offices to global enterprises, and provides a single, holistic view across a multitude of enterprise data sources and hundreds of file types — without moving any data from its native location. With DataIQ, organizations have the power to make informed decisions before starting any information management initiative including: data migration, storage optimization, records management, eDiscovery, data clean up, and information governance. DataIQ gives companies the ability to:
- Identify – interesting subsets of information without moving
any data across the corporate network - Analyze – data using advanced visualizations to spot compliance
violations, get out in front of the eDiscovery process, make
infrastructure planning decisions, jump start records initiatives, etc. - Act – copy, collect, and move data that requires further
processing or retention; defensibly delete data that provides negative
value to the company
“As we worked with customers on information management initiatives from eDiscovery, information governance, storage, and records retention, one common theme bubbled up over and over…customers needed a simple tool to give them a comprehensive understanding of their unstructured data,” said Phil Myers, CEO of StoredIQ. “DataIQ was designed as a quick start data intelligence application that empowers customers with knowledge about their data to better plan and prepare for any information management project.”
Cloud Computing: GoodData Raises $25 Million
GoodData and its Cloud BI Platform, which got started in the Czech Republic, have closed a $25 million C round from Tenaya Capital, along with Next World Capital and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Fidelity Growth Partners and Windcrest Partners. Tenaya, the old Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, gets a board seat.
The Big Data analytics start-up has raised $53.5 million to date.
It claims more than 6,000 customers, including Capgemini and Software AG, have adopted its widgetry to monetize their data and says it posted 600% bookings growth last year, more than doubling employees and customers.
Cloud Computing: Capacity Control Systems in the Cloud
“Version 7 has an advanced control console – it’s an interactive visualization of a data center, it could be virtual or cloud-based, and it tells you if you have any inefficiencies or risks,” stated Andrew Hillier, CTO of CiRBA, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Automation & Orchestration Part 1: What’s In A Name? That Which We Call a “Service”…
The phrases “service,” “abstraction,” & “automation & orchestration” are used a lot these days. Over the course of the next few blogs, I am going to describe what I think each phrase means and in the final blog I will describe how they all tie in together.
Let’s look at “service.” To me, when you trim off all the fat that word means, “Something (from whom) that provides a benefit to something (to whom).” The first thing that comes to mind when I think of who provides me a service is a bartender. I like wine. They have wine behind the bar. I will pay them the price of a glass + 20% for them to fill that glass & move it from behind the bar to in front of me. It’s all about services these days. Software-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and Platform-as-a-Service. Professional services. Service level agreement. No shirts, no shoes, no service.
Within a company, there are many people working together to deliver a service. Some to external people & some to internal people. I want to examine an internal service because those tend to be much more loosely defined & documented. If a company sells an external service to a customer, chances are that service is very well defined b/c that company needs to describe in very clear terms to the customer exactly what they are getting when the customer shells out money. If that service changes, careful consideration needs to be paid to what ways that service can add more benefit (i.e., make the company more money) and in what ways parts of that service will change or be removed. Think about how many “Terms of Service & Conditions” pamphlets you get from a credit card company and how many pages each one is.
It can take many, many hours as a consultant in order to understand a service as it exists in a company today. Typically, the “something” that provides a benefit are the many people who work together to deliver that service. In order to define the service and its scope, you need to break it down into manageable pieces…let’s call them “tasks.” And those tasks can be complex so you can break those down into “steps.” You will find that each task, with its one or more steps, which is part of a service, is usually performed by the same person over and over again. Or, if the task is performed a lot (many times per day) then that task can usually be executed by a member of a team and not just a single person. Having the capability internally for more than one person to perform a task also protects the company from when Bob in accounting takes a sick day or when Bob in accounting takes home a pink slip. I’ll throw in a teaser for when I cover automation and orchestration…it would be ideal that not only can Bob do a task, but a computer as well (automation). That also may play into Bob getting a pink slip…but, again, more on that later. For now Bob doesn’t need to update his resume.
A lot of companies have not documented many, if any, of the internal services they deliver. I’m sure there is someone who knows the service from soup to nuts, but it’s likely they don’t know how (can’t) to do every task—or—may not have the authority/permission (shouldn’t) to do the task. Determining who in a company performs what task(s) can be a big undertaking in and of itself. And then, once you find Bob (sorry to pick on you Bob), it takes a lot of time for him to describe all the steps he does to complete a task. And once you put it on paper & show Bob, he remembers that he missed a step. And once you’ve pieced it all together and Bob says, “Yup, that about covers it,” you ask Bob what happens when something goes wrong and he looks at you and says, “Oh man, where do I begin?”
That last part is key. When things go well I call it the “Happy Day Scenario.” But things don’t always go well (ask the Yankees after the 2004 season) and just as, if not more, important in understanding a service is to know what to do when the Bob hits the fan. This part is almost never documented. Documentation is boring to lots of people and it’s hard enough for people to capture what the service *should* do let alone what it *could* do if something goes awry. So it’s a challenge to get people to recall and also predict what could go wrong. Documenting and regurgitating the steps of a business service “back” to the company is a big undertaking and very valuable to that company. Without knowing what Bob does today, it’s extremely hard to tell him how he can do it better.