Amazon Web Services, AWS, AWS Marketplace, IT Management, Private Cloud, Saas, Software as a service

New AWS Marketplace Offers Pre-Configured Software for the AWS Cloud

Image representing Amazon Web Services as depi...

Amazon Web Services today launched AWS Marketplace, an online store that makes it easy for customers to find, compare, and immediately start using the software and technical services they need to build products and run their businesses. Visitors to AWS Marketplace can use 1-Click deployment to quickly launch pre-configured software and pay only for what they use, by the hour or month, while benefiting from the scalable, flexible and on-demand features of AWS. With AWS Marketplace, software and Software as a Service (SaaS) providers with offerings that run on the AWS Cloud can benefit from increased customer awareness, simplified deployment, and automated billing. AWS Marketplace features a wide selection of commercial and free IT and business software, including software infrastructure such as databases and application servers, developer tools, and business applications – available from popular vendors such as 10gen, CA, Canonical, Couchbase, Check Point Software, IBM, Microsoft, SAP AG, and Zend, as well as many widely used open source offerings including Drupal, MediaWiki, and WordPress. To get started with AWS Marketplace please visit: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace.

AWS Marketplace simplifies many of the traditional challenges software and SaaS companies face, such as acquiring customers, developing distribution channels, and billing for their software. With AWS Marketplace, a simple listing process makes it quick and easy to add products and expose them to AWS’s hundreds of thousands of active customers. Product prices are clearly stated and charges appear on the same bill as a customer’s other AWS services. Customers can quickly deploy products found in the marketplace and software providers can easily add billing to their products by specifying hourly or monthly charges, without undertaking costly code changes. Billing is managed by AWS Marketplace, relieving sellers of the responsibility of managing customer accounts and processing payments, and leaving software developers more time to focus on building great software.

“AWS Marketplace brings the same simple, trusted, and secure online shopping experience that customers enjoy on Amazon.com’s retail website to software built for the AWS platform, streamlining the process of doing research and purchasing software,” said Terry Hanold, Vice President of New Business Initiatives, AWS. “AWS Marketplace makes it even easier to run software on AWS because you can find a wide variety of AWS ecosystem providers’ solutions, in one place, where much of the work involved in building and deploying solutions on top of AWS has already been done for you by these solutions providers.”

AWS is the leading cloud platform with a fast growing ecosystem of providers building solutions on top of the platform.

“Zend Application Fabric enables developers to confidently deploy fast, elastic and dependable PHP applications,” said Zend CEO Andi Gutmans. “AWS Marketplace makes it simple for our customers to access Zend on the AWS cloud and pay only for the infrastructure needed to run their applications. By providing customers a single invoice for combined software and server capacity, businesses can operate more effectively than ever before.”

“AWS Marketplace provides companies like ours an opportunity to easily reach new customers,” said Carolee Gearhart, SAP’s National Vice President of OEM & Strategic Partner Group for North America. “We expect our customers will benefit from SAP’s robust BI functionality, while taking advantage of the quick deployment capabilities provided by AWS Marketplace.”

Customers can browse AWS Marketplace or learn more details about its features and benefits of AWS Marketplace by visiting https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace.


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Cloud Expo New York: Embracing the Mobile Cloud from Start to Finish

As workers continue to demand business apps on their connected devices, the mobile cloud will play a key role in changing the enterprise IT landscape forever. The mobile cloud provides users with the ability to go beyond the capabilities of their smart devices by offering unlimited data storage, processing services and other functions not native to the devices – typically through the intermediary of mobile apps.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Faraz Syed, President, Keynote DeviceAnywhere, will discuss how, to make it work, companies must plan for the whole application life cycle from development and testing through to monitoring, or risk failing to realize the potential of the mobile cloud.

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In Apple’s iCloud, One Key to Rule Them All

Earlier this month it became widely publicized that Apple maintains complete control over the master encryption key to their marquee cloud offering, iCloud. Now, to anyone familiar with security and encryption this should come as no surprise. In order for nearly all consumer cloud services to provide anywhere access to data the provider must be able to encrypt and decrypt data on the fly. But it brings up the bigger question of, who should I trust with my data?
To even begin to answer that question, we need to first look at what types of data are being stored inside Apple’s iCloud. For our purposes, we’ll break the data into two sets: general media files and personal files. The first group consists of music, movies, books, and mobile apps – not exactly what you’d call sensitive data. If a third-party were to gain access to your music library, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. The second group, however, is made up of much more personal documents, including notes, calendar events, mail, contacts, and user settings. This is personal information, there’s no question about it, but would a hacker or rogue Apple employee really go through the effort to read your email, text messages, and photos? Maybe if you are Scarlett Johansson – but that’s a different story…

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Performance Management in ‘Big Data’ Applications at Cloud Expo New York

Do applications using NoSQL still require performance management? Is it always the best option to throw more hardware at a MapReduce job? In both cases, performance management is still about the application, but “Big Data” technologies have added a new wrinkle.
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Michael Kopp, Technology Strategist at dynaTrace Software, will explain some of the main application performance problems of “Big Data” applications and how to solve them.

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The Dramatic Shift in Cloud Computing Intentions

A new survey suggests that as cloud moves into the mainstream of business, it brings new sources of anxiety as well. This disruption and the dramatic shift in cloud computing intentions over the past few years is revealed in a report by Saugatuck Technology.
“Buying and deployment patterns have shifted rapidly toward a near full embrace of the cloud, from the more tactical and point solution-focused initiatives not long ago,” writes Bill McNee, author of the report.
Saugatuck Technology conducted in-depth interviews with CIOs and CTOs at 12 large organizations. The CIOs and CTOs see themselves as now entering a “crisis of opportunity” and innovation, McNee wrote in the report. The crisis is about more than just a revolution in service delivery, McNee said. The dilemna is also fueled by the drive toward mobility, advanced analytics and social business. What this calls for is “a new mission for IT, with a new set of roles, responsibilities and skills required for success.”

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Cloud-Oriented Architecture and the Internet of Things

Quick quiz for all you Cloud aficionados out there: what’s missing from the NIST definition of Cloud Computing? To make this challenge easy for you, here’s the definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

Give up? What’s missing is any mention of data centers. Sure, today’s Clouds typically consist of resources in data centers, running one way or another on racks full of physical servers. But there’s nothing in the definition of Cloud that specifies anything about the physical location of Cloud resources.

Look at the NIST definition again. If you’ve seen this definition before, you may notice a new word that NIST presumably added after their …

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Amazon Web Services Launches AWS Marketplace

“AWS Marketplace brings the same simple, trusted, and secure online shopping experience that customers enjoy on Amazon.com’s retail website to software built for the AWS platform, streamlining the process of doing research and purchasing software,” said Terry Hanold, Vice President of New Business Initiatives, Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS), as AWS, today launched an online store to make it easy for customers to find, compare, and immediately start using the software and technical services they need to build products and run their businesses.

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Business Processes, Data migration, JD Edwards, Tools

Best Practices for Managing Data in the Cloud

Managing Data In the CloudThe importance of data management is increasingly evident as companies find themselves having to respond to change faster than ever to remain competitive. Without best practices, volumes of data cannot be leveraged effectively to give companies a competitive advantage.

The way to mitigate this is to implement efficient business practices that are regularly evaluated and streamlined to generate results in a real-time environment.

What Are Best Practices for Managing Data in the Cloud?

Businesses hire analysts to manage data in real time. Online analytical processing (OLAP), online transaction processing (OLTP) and specialized reporting are all required to help businesses improve processes and increase revenue.

Data warehouse information and OLTP data may be combined in cloud-based solutions to provide organizations with more flexibility. For some enterprises, cloud-based solutions meet the “practical sense” test and for others these solutions do not. Common factors of the “practical sense” test include: Cost effectiveness, scalability, migration capability and return on investment. Once these factors are determined, a set of best practices can be implemented.

Efficient Infrastructure Solutions. Efficient infrastructure solutions allow IT professionals to focus on mission-critical tasks rather than managing infrastructure problems. The infrastructure supports the integration, design and configuration of a database in a cloud-based solution. Consolidation efficiency should be monitored and a set of practices should be developed to achieve optimal performance. With efficient best practices, IT can use the cloud to eliminate some customization issues and deploy solutions in a fraction of the time.

Data Migration. Best practices for data migration require that businesses learn to convert data efficiently at a database level. Efficient migration must occur regardless of the format generated. Databases, which are not required to be combined for security or operational reasons, can be migrated to a virtualized server. All source data must be converted into a standardized format to facilitate consolidation before migration to a shared server. 

Consolidate to Minimize Costs. Consolidation reduces costs associated to hardware, cooling and power. It also reduces operational complexity which reduces the time required by IT management to complete projects. Consolidation can also assist IT managers with developing disaster recovery strategies and adopting best practices for a uniform backup routine. Best practices for an update and patch schedule should also be established. 

Use Cloud-Based Data Center to Meet Demands of Faster Service. A cloud-based data center allows companies to share the capacity and equally divide the workload of applications across numerous servers for more efficient data manipulation and recall. This allows for faster innovation and ability to meet customer demands. Overall performance will not be affected when large amounts of data can be processed in the cloud.

Next Steps…

JD Edwards helps businesses integrate data management best practices into organizations. Consultants help clients understand how to apply best practices and how to maintain competitive advantage in a fast paced work environment. The result is an affordable and high performance cloud-based solution. Cloud-based solutions are easily scalable, easy to deploy and cost effective.

The result: lower operating costs and increased efficiency.