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.

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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

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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 …

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.

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Everyone suspected that Windows Azure was not a blazing success. Now the official stats seem to suggest that it is pretty much a failure. Microsoft does not tell the exact number of users it has on their cloud platform – Windows Azure, however a couple of day ago we got the latest vague estimate from […]

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Yesterday, I wrote about Greece and neighboring Bulgaria, contrasting two seemingly similar nations and their respective commitments to ICT. The verdict, based on research I’ve been conducting for the past 18 months, was that Bulgaria is doing much better than lagging Greece.

Today, let’s take a look at a lagging region: Latin America. When thinking of the region, people often think first of Brazil, the Portuguese-speaking giant in a sea of mostly Spanish-speaking nations. Brazil ranks fifith in the world in area, and is in fact larger than the continental United States. It also has the world’s fifth largest population.

Brazil was identified years ago as one of the world’s great developing nations; it is the “B” in the BRICs (joining Russia, India, and China). Its popularity as a tourist destination is matched these days by its popularity as a business-first destination. In our business, there is not a major IT company that doesn’t have a presence and key annual event in Brazil.

Yet the country is a laggard in my research, which integrates raw IT expenditures, per-person income, local cost-of-living, income disparity, bandwidth, and other societal and economic factors. I use openly available data from the World Bank, United Nations, and other global organizations as the basis.

Brazil’s commitment to IT is not stellar, coming in at 4.7% of GDP. Compare this to 8.0% in world leader South Korea, or even to the 5.1% of neighboring Bolivia. Brazil also has a very high level of income disparity, and relatively slow bandwidth.

Among the 14 Latin American nations I researched, Brazil finished 9th; Honduras led the pack, followed by Mexico. Venezuela and Paraguay trailed the pack.

A World View
Latin America as a group trailed many regions of the world, including Asia and Europe. Its top performer, Honduras finished 29th in the world among 82 nations researched. Its next best performer, Mexico, finished 42nd.. Latin America as a region had an average placement of 60 on the list.

Compare this to Eastern and Central Europe at 22, the US & Canada at 28, Asia at 36 (a group that includes Korea in 1st place and Indonesia in 76th), Western Europe at 40, the Middle East at 48, and the five African nations surveyed at 59.

My research seeks the most dynamic places, so it can be almost as difficult for highly developed nations to score well as it is for developing laggards. So, for example, the United States finished 33rd. Yet Canada cracked the Top 25, finished 22nd, and you’ll also find Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, and Singapore in the Top 25. Russia and China (two of the other BRICs) also made the Top 25.

As far as size, I’ve found no correlation between population size or area size in my research. Top performers range from low-population Sweden to high-population Bangladesh, from small Senegal to large Ukraine.

My view of Latin America is that it remains full of opportunity, and despite overcoming huge economic and political obstacles as a region in recent decades, must re-fortify its commitment to IT and the economic development it can bring. The contrast of Latin America with Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe is instructional, in my opinion.

As we approach the upcoming Cloud Expo, this global view of IT may be valuable to decision-makers who are considering not only new technologies, but new locations, sources, markets, and investments.

I think it’s worthy to survey the global dimension of IT and what IT means to the world, am glad to enter discussions on this topic, and to share how my rankings are derived and how they can be used.

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If you’d like to be able to use a PaaS offering to quickly and securely deploy your website, blog or web-based application, come see a demo and deep dive on Rackspace Cloud Sites.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Jereme Hancock, a Rackspace Cloud Sites Linux Systems Administrator, will walk you through load balancing, planning capacity, managing DNS and your domains as well as setting up WordPress on Cloud Sites, MySQL DB’s, and everything you need to know to optimize your web hosting needs on the cloud.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that The Cloud Circle has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
The Cloud Circle’s mission is to provide a forum for members to exchange ideas, expertise and best practice on Cloud Computing. The Cloud Circle’s aim is to get beyond the hype, to the business issues around Cloud Computing, and to help members.

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