This thought leadership interview examines the latest efforts to make global supply chains for technology providers more secure, verified, and therefore trusted.
The Open Group has a vision of boundaryless information flow, and that necessarily involves interoperability. But interoperability doesn’t have the effect that you want, unless you can also trust the information that you’re getting, as it flows through the system.
Therefore, it’s necessary that you be able to trust all of the links in the chain that you use to deliver your information. One thing that everybody who watches the news would acknowledge is that the threat landscape has changed. As systems become more and more interoperable, we get more and more attacks on the system.
As the value that flows through the system increases, there’s a lot more interest in cyber crime. Unfortunately, in our world, there’s now the issue of state-sponsored incursions in cyberspace, whether officially state-sponsored or not, but politically motivated ones certainly.

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Coraid on Tuesday unveiled the new Coraid ZX-Series family of NAS servers. Designed for cloud, video and Big Data customers, this high-performance unified storage solution is powered by the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system combined with Coraid’s EtherDrive technology to enable unmatched scalability, performance and operational simplicity.
Carl Wright, executive vice president at Coraid noted that “organizations are increasingly challenged to provide predictable, cost-effective file performance in the face of uncontrolled data growth. By extending our product family to include a best-in-class NAS offering, Coraid can meet that challenge with a unified storage solution that takes full advantage of the scalability and performance of Ethernet SAN.”

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Yahoo’s going with another plainspoken blonde.
After the market closed Monday Yahoo’s board named Marissa Mayer, one of Google’s first employees and long-time protector of the stripped-down look of Google’s homepage, CEO replacing interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.
The Yahoo board is taking another flyer on Mayer, 37, considering she’s coming out of Google’s product side, responsible for the look and feel of such things as Google Mail, Google News and since 2010 Google Maps and other Google location and local services. She has no CEO or turnaround experience. She did sit on Google’s operating committee and is on the board of Wal-Mart.
It’s speculated that the Third Point contingent on Yahoo’s board, who got there recently by way of a threatened proxy fight, were instrumental in recruiting her. Presumably they think Yahoo’s products and technology need an overhaul to get more competitive with Google and Facebook.

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Although sometimes portrayed as a big computer in the sky, the reality of cloud computing is far more mundane. Clouds run on physical hardware, located in data centres, connected to one another and to their customers via high speed networks. All of that hardware must be powered and cooled, and all of those offices must be lit. Whilst many data centre operators continue to make welcome strides toward increasing the efficiency of their buildings, machines and processes, these advances remain a drop in the ocean next to the environmental implications of choices made about power source. With access to good information, might it be possible for users of the cloud to make choices that save themselves money, whilst at the same time saving (a bit of) the planet? Greenpeace has consistently drawn attention to the importance of energy choices in evaluating the environmental credentials of data centres, with 2011′s How Dirty Is Your Data? report continuing to polarise arguments after more than a year. The most efficient modern data centres deploy an impressive arsenal of tricks to save energy (and therefore money), and to burnish their green credentials. They use the most efficient modern processors, heat offices with waste server […]

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Egnyte, the leading provider of cloud and hybrid cloud file sharing solutions for businesses, today announced it has closed a $16 million round of Series C financing led by Google Ventures with additional support from existing investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Polaris. The funds will be used to expand sales and marketing efforts as well as further the development of hybrid cloud and next generation cloud technologies. As a part of today’s funding, Karim Faris, Partner at Google Ventures, will join the board of Egnyte.

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With Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley (11th Cloud Expo) due to open in just four months ‘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?

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The detractors of cloud computing benefits will state that the typical adoption is still limited at most enterprises — they’re deploying cloud services to a few early-adopters. That being said, some leading markets are confidently moving ahead with mainstream deployments, regardless of the caution. While others, such as western Europe, are apparently in transition.

The western European private cloud market will grow at a CAGR of 23.2 percent for the next five years to reach $7.9 billion in 2016, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

IDC has been looking in-depth at the private cloud marketplace — from a hardware, software, services and networking points of view.

«The growth of private cloud is even more impressive in the context of the current economic situation,» said Mette Ahorlu, research director, IDC European Services.

According to IDC’s assessment, demand in the region is being driven by the need for cost savings and efficiency and with a longer perspective of creating increased flexibility, and is across the board — from hardware, to software, to management, networking and services.

Creating a private cloud has an impact on all aspects of IT infrastructure.

Key findings from the market study include:

• Most enterprises are still in early phases of cloud adoption, typically testing out cloud and perhaps rolling out one or a few cloud services to the full range of relevant users, but not deploying cloud on a really large scale.
• There is growing interest in pre-packaged private clouds, pre-configured with servers, storage, network and management that speed up implementation and reduce need for services.
• The cloud computing approach is to become a critical part of the IT strategy for the majority of EMEA organizations in the next two to three years.
• While security, compliance and data location are barriers to public cloud they become drivers for the adoption of the private cloud.
• Partnering between technology companies and service companies is important to help create transparency in a complex market where clients think there are too many moving parts.
• Hosted private cloud is not nearly as popular as clouds on customers’ premises, but hosted private cloud will grow even faster and revenue will exceed on-premises clouds by 2016.
• While the market is serviced by traditional IT providers and outsourcing companies, telecom service providers have also seen it as a great opportunity to expand their businesses.

IDC believes that managed cloud services is fundamentally a network-based offering. It’s becoming an established commodity, scales to a mass market customer base, and builds on the kind of support or billing relationships that telecom service providers are capable of offering.

More…

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SilkRoad Technology Inc. has launched Point, the latest tool in the social talent management solutions provider’s Life Suite product range. The new employee-centric social networking solution connects employees to each other and their organisation by uniting the popular features of social networking with talent management.

SilkRoad Point gives employees the forum they need to share expertise and be recognised by peers and leaders while simultaneously helping companies to better understand what and who is driving their business.

The launch follows positive feedback from industry experts and HR professionals in attendance at the HR Software Show, Olympia, where Point was previewed last week.

“Our research shows that organisations that adopt peer-to-peer learning, recognition, and knowledge sharing dramatically outperform their peers in customer service, time to market, and employee engagement,” says Josh Bersin, Chief Executive Officer and President of Bersin & Associates, the leading provider of research-based HR best practices that drive business results. “SilkRoad Point represents a new breed of consumer-like social talent tools that organisations can use to easily leverage the power of social connections in corporate learning, collaboration, and project management.”

Employers often have a limited view of what employees are actually doing as job descriptions and performance reviews don’t always accurately depict employees’ knowledge and contributions across the organisation.  With Point, organisations can increase knowledge and insight through the use of social collaboration and learning. Employees identify centres of influence by contributor, content and topic.   As a result, organisations create a self-motivating culture where employees can be identified and recognised for their influence and recognise others for their contributions.

“HR has struggled to understand how knowledge and information flows across the organisation,” says Lisa Rowan, Program Director for HR, Learning, and Talent Management Strategies, IDC. “With Point, organisations now have the ability to reveal not only the connections between its employees but the meaning behind them and how it impacts the company. Point enables companies to share goals, inspire innovation, and increase efficiency to drive organisational change and success.”

Features include:

• People and Connections – Increase collaboration and connections to share links, files, questions, photos, polls, announcements and feedback across the organisation.
• Groups – Connect people with similar interests by creating Groups.  Groups can be used to align a team around a particular topic or set of goals encouraging knowledge sharing and collaboration.
• Content – Share content in the form of articles, thoughts, Q&A and files by posting on either a personal landing page or a group home page.  Comment, reply and discuss to build better solutions through collaboration.
• Points and Influence – Tag topics with a ‘Point’ to help categorise content for more efficient search strategies. By identifying Points, which can include thoughts, documents, files etc., influential content and its author(s) will emerge.
• Integrated Learning Platform – Allow users to easily access and manage their learning plans directly from Point.  Informal social learning supplements the knowledge gained by the learning programs found in GreenLight.

“With Point, we’ve closed the gap between social networking and talent management by converging them together to drive even higher levels of employee engagement and performance,” says Brian Platz, COO of SilkRoad. “Using Point, companies can more easily encourage and increase knowledge sharing for greater productivity, innovation and collaboration.  Organisations are enabled to better engage and retain employees using social networking features already familiar to employees while decreasing risks with greater insights into strategic workforce planning.”