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.
Windows Azure – Officially Failing to Get Traction?
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 […]
Latin America Lags in IT
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.
Cloud Expo New York: Hosting in the Cloud – What You Need to Know
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.
The Cloud Circle Named “Media Sponsor” of Cloud Expo New York
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.
StorSimple Cloud-integrated Enterprise Storage Connects Enterprises to HP Cloud Services
StorSimple today announced that its family of Cloud-integrated enterprise storage appliances supports HP Cloud Services (http://hpcloud.com). Enterprises can now consolidate primary, backup, archive and disaster recovery storage into a single StorSimple cloud-integrated storage system connected to HP Cloud Services, driving a reduction in storage TCO of 60 to 80 percent in many cases. StorSimple customers can mix and match HP Cloud Services with any other cloud storage services they are currently using, eliminating the vendor lock-in on the data center floor that is common with traditional SANs.
“HP’s open-source approach to cloud services encourages customers to deploy applications in HP Cloud Services with the confidence that they will not be locked into one particular service provider.” said Steve Querner, vice president of sales for StorSimple. “Cloud-integrated enterprise storage from StorSimple provides the same open approach to cloud storage by certifying multiple leading cloud storage services. When adopting an open approach to cloud storage, customers should insist on features that facilitate cross-cloud functionality without compromising on an enterprise high availability feature set.”
HP Cloud Services public beta offering is certified by StorSimple and supports the full range of StorSimple cloud data management features, including Cloud Snapshots™, thin restores, non-disruptive upgrades and dual path redundancy. StorSimple customers can now use HP Cloud Object Storage as a tier of storage, transparently extending their Windows and Linux datasets, which could be running on VMware and Hyper-V, into the cloud.
A key benefit of HP Cloud Services is the open-source approach. Aligned with HP’s approach to a customer-choice model, StorSimple cloud-integrated enterprise storage systems allow HP Cloud Services customers to simultaneously store complete sets of data across multiple cloud providers. This open architecture prevents the limitations of vendor lock-in in data centers for enterprise customers.
RayV Technologies Online Video Supports HD Streaming Without Buffering
RayV Technologies launched RayV Cloud TV – an innovative platform that revolutionizes the way users view Live TV and VOD content on their PCs, smartphones, tablets and connected TVs. RayV Cloud TV enables users to watch VOD content and live streaming at unprecedented quality (OTT – Over the Top) without buffering.
The encoding technology enables the entire video content to be delivered without downloading. The user simply streams the chosen content, regardless of the connection speed. Zapping between various content channels is as immediate as flipping through browser tabs. RayV Cloud TV synchronizes itself with Facebook and the movies’ and TV series’ database.
RayV’s platform receives an external feed (Live/VOD) and relays it to local servers; the signal is then shared by active users. Upon receiving the chosen content, every user passes on a small part of it to other users. Thus, anyone connected receives the entire video, eliminating buffering time.
By utilizing inactive users as ‘amplifiers’ (which contribute a small portion of their bandwidth without actually receiving the video), RayV‘s platform addresses the problem of the DSL networks limited uploading speed.
RayV Technologies markets its technology to communication service providers (e.g. telephony providers, mobile operators etc.), TV channels, content owners and others. RayV Cloud TV is an end-to-end solution which reduces infrastructure investment to a minimum and cable companies worldwide already use RayV’s services to offer their customers video content.
From the Desktop to Cloud and Virtualization
“Dell’s acquisition of Wyse is an acquisition that I thought was important as it creates a great connection from the desktop to potentially much larger virtualization/cloud play,” stated Wayne Ariola, Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development at Parasoft, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan.
Agree or disagree? – “While the IT savings aspect is compelling, the strongest benefit of cloud computing is how it enhances business agility.”
I agree.