Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy, an off-again-on-again buddy of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, testified for Oracle Thursday in its infringement suit against Google and Android.
His surprise appearance – in the middle of Google’s laying out its copyright defense – was used to scotch testimony given minutes before by his pony-tailed successor at Sun Jonathan Schwartz who testified for Google. (It’s just so utterly Sun.)
As in all jury trials the decision could come down to personalities.
From the industry’s point-of-view it’s the first – and long-overdue – time McNealy has publicly butted heads with Schwartz whose appointment as Sun CEO is at least as unfathomable as why HP ever let Mark Hurd go.

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“While there is still a lot of interest in Big Data Analytics, we see an increasing focus on Big Unstructured Data,” observed Tom Leyden, Director of Alliances and Marketing at Amplidata, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. And, Leyden continued, “Object storage is the new paradigm to store those massive amounts of Big Unstructured Data.”
Agree or disagree? – «While the IT savings aspect is compelling, the strongest benefit of cloud computing is how it enhances business agility.»

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As organizations are investing hundreds of millions of dollars on cloud-related technologies and services, many within the organization have no clue what cloud is and the derived value and benefit of embracing a sound cloud strategy. With new cloud solutions, such as iCloud, Facebook, etc., that impact non-IT folks, more and more people are wondering and asking the question: What is cloud computing and what is my organization doing to leverage the latest cloud technologies? When the organization is not transparent about such initiatives, people will start to leverage other cloud solutions as they are much easier to access in the market than in the past and are available at a lower cost; however, they are much more vulnerable than the IT services delivered by the IT organization. As the implications of cloud computing touch so many within the organization even outside of IT, it is imperative to have a sound cloud education strategy in place to ensure alignment within the organization to optimize cloud-related investments.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Marc Halcrow, the North America Regional Manager at ITpreneurs, will delve into the value of investing in a sound cloud education strategy to ensure alignment and optimize cloud-related investments. He will also share a case study from a large multinational organization as they embarked on a cloud strategy, with a key component being around educating staff to optimize cloud investments.

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Cloud has dramatically changed how we think about and utilize services. Cloud facilitates rapid deployments due to quick availability of scalable services. It provides the high service velocity to manage changes incrementally and less time for provisioning storage and applications. Cloud can enhance productivity by providing the infrastructure or application platforms and related tools to respond to customer needs faster, giving organizations an edge over others that have not assessed such mechanisms. In addition, the on-demand capabilities can lead to efficient utilization of resources. I have seen applications that traditionally would take months to deploy, being rolled out in several weeks due to the Cloud and new environments being set up very quickly. The key is to carefully assess existing capabilities and focus on service and process integration.

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IT managers at enterprises of all sizes are exploring cloud computing and virtualization as a way to address conflicting demands within their organizations. These mounting pressures include a lack of internal resources, mandates from the CFO to lower costs, and the struggle to complete key initiatives while also performing mundane server maintenance and application storage tasks. These same IT professionals are also being asked to build and implement battle-tested disaster recovery and business continuity plans that not only reduce data loss and downtime, but present a recovery time objective that prevents the organization from further interruption in the wake of an outage.
You may have read some controversial articles in the early days of cloud computing stating that there is no such thing as ROI for cloud computing. These early cloud pundits believed that buying into cloud services is not an investment, but an avoidance in an investment – therefore, ROI cannot be measured.

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The mantra of «reusing» existing application assets as services has become established as part of the lingua franca, or common language, associated with Cloud-based infrastructure sharing. The key to exposing application functionality is through APIs and this is well understood by developers. While, at first glance, API management might be an old concept, cloud-based API management presents a new discipline with added security, visibility, integration, and scale requirements. As applications are shared outside the protective firewall to/from the cloud and among cloud providers, traditional firewalls do not provide the mediation or XML threat protection required to expose these applications safely. Management of Cloud APIs presents a challenge and tremendous business opportunity that some are calling «the single biggest growth area for cloud computing.» In this webinar, Forrester Research will decompose the cloud broker’s role as an on premise or third-party intermediary and how cloud API management opens new doors to connect smartphone applications, browsers, middleware, legacy apps and just about anything that can talk HTTP.

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While Big Data has been thought of as large stores of data at rest, it can also be about data in motion.
Of the 3 «V’s” of Big Data – volume, variety, velocity (we’d add «Value” as the 4th V) – velocity
has been the unsung ‘V.’ With the spotlight on Hadoop, the popular image of Big Data is large petabyte data stores of unstructured data (which are the first two V’s). While Big Data has been thought of as large stores of data at rest, it can also be about data in motion.
«Fast Data” refers to processes that require lower latencies than would otherwise be possible with optimized disk-based storage. Fast Data is not a single technology, but a spectrum of approaches that process data that might or might not be stored. It could encompass event processing, in-memory databases, or hybrid data stores that optimize cache with disk.
Fast Data is nothing new, but because of the cost of memory, was traditionally restricted to a handful of extremely high-value use cases.

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Teradata, the doyen of the Big Data set, has got a new purpose-built appliance for SAS high-performance analytics that uses an in-memory approach for hyper-fast results.
In other words, it distributes complex analytics in parallel across a vast pool of memory looking for patterns in large volumes of data.
It reportedly whittled what would normally have been a 167-hour project in financial risk analysis at some Wall Street bank or another down to 84 seconds.
Teradata claims other customers can expect as much and expects it to “kick competitive butt.” It claims IBM, Oracle and SAP, which have their own in-memory systems, “lack the foundational analytics.”

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