The rapid pace of technology adoption growth is driving application consumption. It impacts an ever-increasing spectrum of projects across IT organizations such as data center consolidation/expansion, application distribution, mobile workforce enablement, disaster recovery, backup and security policies, all of which effects the total cost of ownership technologies such as virtualization, VDI and web enablement and has helped improve the ways IT organizations can get more with less. But that’s not enough. A true automated, standardized cloud environment is the next step in truly utilizing the business of cloud computing
In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Darryl Brown, Sr. VP Global Sales & Marketing at Appcore, will cover how everyone can use cloud. He will also discuss how cloud can be used and what the hidden costs are for enterprise IT. He will also cover how cloud truly deliver on total cost of ownership and ROI, plus how Appcore Onsite makes the transition to cloud fast and easy – revenue-ready in 45 days.

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Tech entrepreneurs can see clearly now; the rain is gone, thanks to the cloud. Cloud computing is making it easier and more affordable for people all over the world to be entrepreneurs, and individuals and businesses are acting accordingly.

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Nirvanix announced on Thursday it has raised over $25M in a Series C funding round led by Khosla Ventures. Current Nirvanix investors Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures and Windward Ventures also participated in the round. The company plans to utilize the capital infusion to significantly expand its engineering organization and accelerate the delivery of innovative new cloud storage services while increasing its global footprint across sales and marketing. The new investment brings Nirvanix’s total capital raised to $70M.
«Our enterprise cloud storage focus has clearly resonated with customers, as demonstrated by the fact that we booked more revenue in Q1 of 2012 than nearly all of 2011,» said Scott Genereux, President and CEO of Nirvanix.

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I’m a huge fan of context-aware networking. You know, the ability to interpret requests in the context they were made – examining user identity, location, client device along with network condition and server/application status. It’s what imbues the application delivery tier with the agility necessary to make decisions that mitigate operational risk (security, availability, performance) in real-time.
In the past, almost all context was able to be deduced from the transport (connection) and application layer. The application delivery tier couldn’t necessarily “reach out” and take advantage of the vast amount of data “out there” that provides more insight into the conversation being initiated by a user. Much of this data falls into the realm of “big data” – untold amounts of information collected by this site and that site that offer valuable nuggets of information about any given interaction.

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Recently (well, last night) I had the opportunity to take the Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge exam and just wanted to put out some of my thoughts while they were fresh in my head. I always like to take a random sampling of certifications. It’s fun to challenge myself (some are more challenging than others) and it gives me a good idea of what sorts of training and certificates I’d like my guys to have (if any). I’ve never been the biggest fan of some of the bigger ones out there, but we’ll save that for another post.

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Value Propositions and elevator pitches live in the rarefied air of marketing speak. They are almost seen as mystical accomplishments reachable by only the anointed among us. «But what’s the elevator pitch» we hear time and time again….Give me the 30 second attention grabber, etc, etc.

While I agree that Value matters, and actually matters a lot, I think as sales and marketing professionals, we’ve worshiped at this alter for so long, we’ve lost sight of the end goal. We’ve become Value snobs.

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Two of the biggest stars in business collaboration software in the last few years have been Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint Server respectively. However, running these in-house can suck up 70% of your IT department’s time and help contribute to server sprawl as you attempt to keep legacy servers and software up to date. Consider using a ‘blackbox’ approach to running your IT infrastructure through managed hosting services.   Here are the top five benefits of adopting this approach.

Pure Infrastructure

Very few hosting providers can offer pure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).  Virtual Internet goes beyond this providing blended dedicated and cloud servers to match your business profile.

Orchestrate and innovate

Seal IT complexity inside a VI black box that allows you to orchestrate all your IT assets under centralized dashboards supported by engineers on call 24/7/365.  Further opportunities exist to innovate your systems including automating security, disaster recovery and server …

Over a year ago, I wrote my initial thoughts on VMware's CloudFoundry PaaS platform. Over the past year, the platform has read more

With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now just six weeks away, what better time to introduce you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference…

We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else have they written and/or said about the Cloud that is transforming the world of Enterprise IT, side by side with the exploding use of enterprise Big Data – processed in the Cloud – to drive value for businesses…?

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When designing applications for the cloud, or extending on-premise applications into the cloud, it should go without saying that you can’t just deploy and expect good results.

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