Is your aging software platform suffering from technical debt while the market changes and demands new solutions at a faster clip?
It’s a bold move, but you might consider walking away from your core platform and starting fresh. ReadyTalk did exactly that.
In his General Session at 19th Cloud Expo, Michael Chambliss, Head of Engineering at ReadyTalk, will discuss why and how ReadyTalk diverted from healthy revenue and over a decade of audio conferencing product development to start an innovative project that reflects shifts in cloud, dev tools, web standards, enterprise mobility and video. Lessons learned could help your company take a similar plunge that will reshape your product portfolio and culture for years to come.

read more

Thomas Bitman of Gartner wrote a blog post last year about why OpenStack projects fail. In that article, he outlined three particular metrics which together cause 60% of OpenStack projects to fall short of expectations:
Wrong people (31% of failures): a successful cloud needs commitment both from the operations team as well as from «anchor» tenants.
Wrong processes (19% of failures): a successful cloud automates across silos in the software development lifecycle, not just within silos.

read more

Enterprises and service providers are moving to cloud. Cloud providers are expanding their infrastructure, reach and ease of adoption. Users are becoming mobile, they access their information and services on their personal mobile devices first. We have seen game changers like Netflix and AirBnB become vastly successful by using the power of public cloud as their infrastructure of choice. Service providers like Microsoft, Adobe and Oracle are quickly moving their services to cloud, offering them as a SaaS subscription. So why are we seeing this new «app store» model of development, delivery and consumption gain so much popularity now than ever? and what does it mean for the internet? Is the internet infrastructure equipped to handle this additional load? Lets first look at it from the three main constituents cloud effects: Enterprises or app providers, public cloud vendors and, of course, the consumers of these services.

read more

Using new techniques of information modeling, indexing, and processing, new cloud-based systems can support cloud-based workloads previously not possible for high-throughput insurance, banking, and case-based applications.
In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, John Newton, CTO, Founder and Chairman of Alfresco, described how to scale cloud-based content management repositories to store, manage, and retrieve billions of documents and related information with fast and linear scalability.
He addressed the challenges of scaling document repositories to this level; architectural approaches for coordinating data; search and storage technologies, Solr, and Amazon storage and database technologies; the breadth of use cases that modern content systems need to support; how to support user applications that require subsecond response times.

read more

Clouds are typically classified into four different topologies: private, public, community and hybrid clouds. Let’s focus on hybrid clouds: what are the use cases that require this topology, what are the challenges, and who stands to benefit from the hybrid cloud trend?
First off, a definition: A hybrid cloud is a topology in which more than one cloud infrastructure is utilized to solve a particular problem.

read more

The competitive landscape of the global cloud computing market in the healthcare industry is crowded due to the presence of a large number of players. The large number of participants has led to the fragmented nature of the market. Some of the major players operating in the global cloud computing market in the healthcare industry are Cisco Systems Inc., Carestream Health Inc., Carecloud Corp., AGFA Healthcare, IBM Corp., Cleardata Networks, Merge Healthcare Inc., Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp., and Oracle Corp.

read more

Enterprise networks are complex. Moreover, they were designed and deployed to meet a specific set of business requirements at a specific point in time. But, the adoption of cloud services, new business applications and intensifying security policies, among other factors, require IT organizations to continuously deploy configuration changes. Therefore, enterprises are looking for better ways to automate the management of their networks while still leveraging existing capabilities, optimizing performance and reducing operational risk through standardization and best-practice architectures.

read more

Enterprise networks are complex. Moreover, they were designed and deployed to meet a specific set of business requirements at a specific point in time. But, the adoption of cloud services, new business applications and intensifying security policies, among other factors, require IT organizations to continuously deploy configuration changes. Therefore, enterprises are looking for better ways to automate the management of their networks while still leveraging existing capabilities, optimizing performance and reducing operational risk through standardization and best-practice architectures.

read more

(c)iStock.com/ratch0013

Cloud maturity is on the rise, although plenty of problems remain, according to the latest survey data from service management technology provider Fruition Partners.

The study, which was undertaken by Vanson Bourne and polled 400 CIOs from the UK and US, found that for almost three quarters (73%) of respondents, “significant” financial waste is occurring with cloud adoption without IT insight. Yet 85% of CIOs polled believe cloud is reducing their organisations’ control over IT.

“The maturity of cloud services has started to improve, but it is still leagues away from where it needs to be,” said Paul Cash, Fruition Partners UK managing partner. “There has to be a recognition that the need for rigorous management is greater, not less, in the cloud.”

The numbers continue to be worryingly high. 62% of respondents say there are cloud applications being used in the business without IT’s knowledge – otherwise known as shadow IT – while CIOs say more than two thirds of their colleagues (68%) do not feel the need to consult IT when procuring cloud services.

Comparing these figures with 2015’s findings, there is certainly a change afoot. Last year’s analysis found that CIOs were not applying traditional IT service management (ITSM) processes to cloud technologies. One eye-opening example was of a construction firm which had 300 copies of a cloud-based project management tool for only 200 project managers. This time around, in-house IT is on average managed by a combination of six processes; cloud, in contrast, has on average four.

Yet the knock-on effect of the infiltration of cloud applications is that while employees move cloud services into the business, the CIO will end up getting the flak. “CIOs cannot blindly trust that public cloud services will work flawlessly and be delivered perfectly at all times,” said Cash. “The more responsibility CIOs hand over to providers, without ensuring that established ITSM principles are applied, the more they open themselves up to blame if one of those services fails.

“CIOs should still be managing cloud services internally, rather than abdicating responsibility to the provider,” he added. “Otherwise they risk losing control, and increasing both cost and risk to themselves and the business.”

Fruition, which was bought was CSC in 2015, put together three steps for CIOs to, as they put it, ‘bring the cloud under control’ for last year’s report. Focus on the user to provide a better service, focus on business needs and collaborate across functions, and focus on IT strategy and how to make better use of ITSM. Perhaps worryingly, the company feels that not enough has changed for it to alter its message this year.