Cloud facilitates a new generation of technology and related impacts that have never been seen before. With utility computing and on demand capabilities, many organizations want to jump on the bandwagon as soon as possible. As the Chief Executive, there are some tough decisions to be made. There will be people in your organization who say that Cloud is the best thing that happened since the emergence of the internet. Others will paint a picture of gloom and doom by citing issues such as security, privacy, control over data etc. Cloud can enhance productivity by providing the infrastructure or application platforms and related tools to respond to customer needs quickly, giving organizations an edge over others that have not assessed such mechanisms, and the on-demand capabilities can lead to efficient utilization of resources. Cloud also facilitates mobility services since such services are available at a cheaper cost to the enterprise.
Cloud Computing: HP Betas Its OpenStack Public Cloud
HP, the public cloud’s Johnnie-come-lately, made its first public cloud services available in public beta Thursday and, to make up for lost time HP is going to charge utility prices to use the beta albeit at half what it’ll cost when it goes GA.
The widgetry, which reportedly went to private beta in September, is not the homegrown cloud of HP’s dreams that it was working on a year ago. It frankly didn’t have the technology in-house to build it and was lucky that the open source effort to produce the OpenStack public cloud infrastructure came along.
Of course, OpenStack is not supposed to be quite ready primetime yet so HP’s widgetry will stay a beta until it proves it can scale and HP can figure out its SLAs.
Unicorns more likely than cloud migration, says survey
Many IT decision makers feel they are more likely to have a close encounter with a flying saucer than see the completion of their company’s cloud migration in the next six months.
This was one of a number of alarming findings contained within Cisco’s 2012 Global Cloud Networking survey this week.
The company polled 1300 IT decision makers in 13 countries spanning five continents, and revealed a lack of universal confidence in the cloud among IT professionals unless a proper cloud migration strategy is adopted.
The survey included a series of irreverent comparisons designed to put “cloud deployments in perspective”, with 31% of the experts surveyed stating that they could train for a marathon or grow a mullet in less time than it would take to migrate their business fully to the cloud.
Nearly a quarter of those polled stated they would in the next six months be …
Mobile Commerce in the Cloud: The Impact of Cloud-based Operations on Mobile Business Models and Operations
Research and Markets has announced the addition of the “Mobile Commerce in the Cloud: The Impact of Cloud-based Operations on Mobile Business Models and Operations” report to their offering.
Cloud computing has dramatically changed IT operations and enterprise business support functions. It is poised to facilitate substantial impacts in mobile business models and operations.
This research predicts the future of Mobile commerce applications in the cloud. The report evaluates market opportunities and forecasts to 2017 for cloud based operations. The report also analyzes key issues and concerns such as how other industries effect the mobile commerce industry and offers solutions to overcome challenges. The report includes evaluates global market dynamics through analysis of specific regions and countries. This research also analyzes the current and anticipated future market for cloud-based mobile commerce applications through 2017.
Target Audience:
– Mobile network operators
– Wireless service providers of all types
– Wireless/mobile infrastructure providers
– Mobile commerce application providers
– Cloud infrastructure and service providers
Keywords: Mobile Commerce, Cloud Commerce, Mobile Operations in the Cloud, Evolution of Cloud Computing, Mobilizing the Cloud
For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/dwqbq5/mobile_commerce_in
How Red Hat Plans to Conquer the Enterprise PaaS Space
Red Hat claims that the enterprise isn’t using these newfangled platforms-as-a-service to develop software very much because they don’t meet its needs.
The enterprise is worried about compliance, enterprise architecture standards, IT governance, security, application lifecycle management, application development methodologies, organizational and process restrictions, data and compute locality and privacy restrictions. Itches other people’s PaaSs don’t scratch according to Red Hat.
Ah, but analysts like 451 Research say the enterprise PaaS market could be worth $3 billion by 2015, a mere three years away, and surpass the SaaS market. And then there’s Red Hat’s great enemy VMware with its new Cloud Foundry open source PaaS.
So to meet the opposition and give the enterprise what it wants Red Hat has been evolving its OpenShift PaaS, which it put out for as a developer preview a year ago.
AWS, SAP Announce Cost-saving AWS Infrastructure for SAP Business All-in-One Solutions
Amazon Web Services today announced the expansion of SAP certified solutions on AWS including SAP Business All-in-One solutions for both Linux and Windows, and expanded certification for SAP Rapid Deployment solutions and SAP Business Objects business intelligence (BI) solutions to include Windows Server 2008 R2. Today’s announcements provide customers the flexibility to rapidly deploy SAP solutions on the scalable, on-demand AWS platform without making long-term commitments or costly capital expenditures for their underlying infrastructure. As more enterprises seek to understand cost savings of cloud deployments, Germany based consulting firm, VMS AG has also announced industry research that finds running SAP applications on AWS provides infrastructure cost savings of up to 69% compared to the same solution on-premises. For more information on deploying SAP solutions on AWS as well as detailed research on infrastructure cost savings of running SAP solutions on AWS, visit http://aws.amazon.com/sap
“LIONSGATE is a $2 billion diversified global entertainment corporation that produces feature films and television programming to a worldwide audience,” said Theresa Miller, Vice President, Information Technology, LIONSGATE. “Faced with IT challenges including expanding infrastructure and costs, and increased enterprise application workloads, LIONSGATE began using AWS in 2010 to avoid acquiring additional data center space, saving an estimated $1M+ over three years. Now utilizing SAP solutions in a Windows environment, LIONSGATE has migrated their SAP development, test and QA systems to run on the AWS cloud.”
Emergency Medicine Business Intelligence (EMBI) provides HIPAA compliant analytic tools for hospital emergency departments to monitor productivity, utilization and patient care. “Cloud computing allows hospitals the ability to buy mission critical software and hardware as a service instead of trying to manage demand internally,” said Scott Richards, CEO at EMBI. “Deploying SAP Business Objects BI solutions on AWS, with solution provider DecisionFirst, allows us to leverage industry-leading business intelligence toolsets to provide our customers web-based, on-demand, key performance metrics they need to manage their operations and business. With these solutions our emergency department clients are able to focus on providing a higher level of service to their customers.”
Merrifield Garden Center, one of the largest and most complete garden nurseries in the US, is using SAP Business All-in-One on AWS to manage inventory, purchasing and accounts. “Our IT operations were simply not keeping pace with the rapid growth of our business,” said Bryan Moore IT Director at Merrifield Garden Center. “Running our SAP Business All-in-One solution on AWS, with systems integrator Savantis and managed services provider Protera, provided dependable infrastructure and offered an affordable solution that enhanced security and the flexibility needed to scale up and scale down during seasonal demand swings.”
Leveraging its industry-leading intelligence VMS AG has developed detailed cost analysis of running SAP solutions on AWS using the best practices of more than 2,600 SAP environments. The research found infrastructure savings of up to 69%, on AWS, compared to an SAP Business All-in-One system running on-premises.
“Customers have experienced tremendous success when running their SAP applications on AWS,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, Ecosystem and Channels, SAP. “Today’s announcement offers enterprises and midsized companies alike the flexibility to deploy SAP applications and analytics solutions quickly and scale up as the business grows.”
“We have seen a rapid increase in businesses deploying SAP solutions on AWS,” said Terry Wise, Director of AWS Worldwide Partner Ecosystem. “Whether it’s running SAP applications for development and testing or production applications, businesses can take advantage of the AWS pay-as-you-go model and quickly scale capacity both up and down as needed, paying only for the resources used.”
To learn more about cost savings of running SAP solutions on AWS, visit http://bit.ly/IVsXYI
Thinking Global as Cloud Expo Approaches
A randon news thread: If Apple were part of the Dow, the DJIA would be at 15,000. Michelle Bachmann is no longer a Swiss citizen. President Obama approves of gay marriage and federal intrusion into our workplaces, if not our bedrooms. Sony is down, JP Morgan is down, oil is down, and hiring is down. Cloud computing is up. Austerity is not popular. Facebook/Instagram may be off.
In the few weeks left before the next Cloud Expo, I sit and contemplate the odd mosaic of the state of the world. I won’t comment on the endless violence everywhere; it must be part of the human condition.
That aside, I’m optimistic about our industry and about cloud computing. We’re now in an age where we have to think globally first, whether buying and deploying technology, or selling it. Gone are the days when we could see what was working in the US, then figure the same things would work in Europe 18 months later and in Japan five years later. That is such an 80s notion.
Since the Scandinavians and Finns shot ahead of the rest of the world in the area of mobile technology and bandwidth, sometime in the 90s, the rest of us have had to take heed that the US is not necessarily the technology leader anymore.
To be sure, Silicon Valley is still the global innovation crucible, reflected by the location of more cloud startups than any other place in the world. But we have to be aware that the world’s highest bandwidth is found in South Korea, Japan, and those stubborn Nordic states; that the world’s most avid social-media addicts are in the Philippines; that India is becoming a creative software developer; that China is building a cloud-based Information Superhighway the likes of which may never come to fruition in the US; that some of the world’s most aggressive IT cultures can be found in Bangladesh, Ukraine, and Honduras.
I wrote earlier this week about Bulgaria. A government agency in Sofia sent me a report that outlines in great detail the country’s commitment to IT and its recent success. And heck, the brochure claims one can even play golf there during any odd off-minutes. The report reinforced my belief in my research about the country, rather than the other way around.
I know the conference rooms and exhibit aisles at the Javits Center in June will be filled with conversations of stacks, of layers, of single panes of glass, and of APIs and their value. There will be many international visitors there. My guess is there will also be conversations of the great things happening in St. Petersburg, in Toulouse, in Sao Paulo, and in Nairobi.
AWS and SAP Announce Certification of AWS Infrastructure for SAP Business All-in-One
Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), on Friday announced the expansion of SAP certified solutions on AWS including SAP Business All-in-One solutions for both Linux and Windows, and expanded certification for SAP Rapid Deployment solutions and SAP Business Objects business intelligence (BI) solutions to include Windows Server 2008 R2. Today’s announcements provide customers the flexibility to rapidly deploy SAP solutions on the scalable, on-demand AWS platform without making long-term commitments or costly capital expenditures for their underlying infrastructure. As more enterprises seek to understand cost savings of cloud deployments, Germany based consulting firm, VMS AG has also announced industry research that finds running SAP applications on AWS provides infrastructure cost savings of up to 69% compared to the same solution on-premises. For more information on deploying SAP solutions on AWS as well as detailed research on infrastructure cost savings of running SAP solutions on AWS, visit http://aws.amazon.com/sap
Four actions every CIO should take to capitalize on cloud
No doubt, cloud computing brings with it the promise of choice:choice in how you source and deliver services to drive out cost, in how you ramp up delivery time, and in how you achieve higher quality. But choice typically comes with complexity, raising questions like:
- How do I know which services are right for cloud and which are not?
- What is the appropriate mix of private cloud and public cloud, and how does it change over time?
- What is the most effective way to build a private cloud for today and tomorrow?
- How secure are my cloud services?
- How do I manage my service portfolio to see that I get the benefits I expected?
- How do I build a flexible environment that can adjust rapidly to changing business requirements?
The best cloud solutions are designed to help you and your IT organization become the builder and broker of services …
A Million Monkeys Demonstrate the Power of Hadoop
There are many great use cases for Apache Hadoop, the open source framework for scalable, reliable, and distributed computing on commodity hardware built around Hadoop Distributed File System and MapReduce, such as delivering search engine results, sequencing genomes, and indexing entire libraries of text, but the Million Monkeys Project by Jesse Anderson may be the easiest to understand and the most fun.