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Top Stories
If you’ve been paying close attention lately you’ll know that the
“Internet of Things” has become one of the technology
industry’s biggest buzz phrases. It’s not hard to figure why. The
internet has been around for the last twenty years and it has truly
revolutionized our lives, the way we work, and how we interact. Consider the
transformations in business, commerce, culture, education, politics, and
more.
But experts are saying we haven’t seen anything yet. If you haven’t read
the recent Digital Life in 2025 report it’s well worth your time. One of
the major outcomes of this research predicts that within 10 years the
internet will become “an ambient information environment where accessing
the Internet will be effortless and most people will tap into it so easily it
will flow through their lives ‘like electricity.’
The essence of Internet of Things is the linking ... (more)
ClusterHQ, The Data People for Docker, on Wednesday announced Flocker 0.1, a
solution for running databases, key-value stores and queues inside Docker
containers. An open-source volume manager, Flocker is a container management
tool designed to solve the unique set of operational challenges that come
from running data-backed services inside containers. Flocker version 0.1
allows developers to define their application as a set of connected Docker
containers, deploy and then easily migrate them between hosts, even when in
different data centers.
"Managing containers with persisten... (more)
- Azure's scalability and global reach support Centrix Software with the
growing demand for workspace usage analytics
Centrix Software, a workspace management expert and Microsoft Gold Partner,
has adopted Microsoft Corp's cloud platform, Microsoft Azure, to help address
the growing demand for its application (app) and device usage analytics
solution, WorkSpace iQ.
WorkSpace iQ addresses the increasing need for IT to apply business
intelligence and analytics to the huge amount of IT usage data required to
make IT strategy and project-related decisions. Anything from the desktop ... (more)
SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 08/13/14 -- AppDynamics, the
application intelligence leader for the software-defined business, today
announced another quarter of spectacular growth during its second fiscal
quarter of 2015 ending July 31st. Trailing 12-month bookings grew 125
percent, while trailing 12-month revenue increased more than 150 percent. The
impressive numbers underscore and validate the acceptance the company's next
generation Application Performance Management (APM) solution and Application
Intelligence Platform is earning within the largest global enterprises.... (more)
GFT will also sponsor the Big Data Trailblazers Award
LONDON, UK - August 12th 2014 - The highly successful Tech Trailblazers
Awards today announced a new category for the awards, the FinTech
Trailblazers, which is being created with new sponsor GFT, a leading IT
solutions provider in the banking sector. The new category will reward and
recognize the best of breed FinTech startups who are blazing trails in the
financial services sector.
GFT, an expert in big data in the financial services industry, will also
sponsor the Big Data Trailblazers category.
The new category opens up t... (more)
Cloud Expo Breaking News By Elizabeth White  The cloud is everywhere and growing, and with it SaaS has become an accepted means for software delivery. SaaS is more than just a technology, it is a thriving business model estimated to be worth around $53 billion dollars by 2015, according to IDC. The question is – how do you build and scale a profitable SaaS business model? In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Jason Cumberland, Vice President, SaaS Solutions at Dimension Data, will give the audience an understanding of common mistakes businesses make when transitioning to SaaS; how to avoid them; and how to build a profitable and scalable SaaS business. Aug. 13, 2014 01:45 PM EDT Reads: 564 | By Pat Romanski  SYS-CON Events announced today that Solgenia, the global market leader in Cloud Collaboration and Cloud Infrastructure software solutions, will exhibit at SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Solgenia is the global market leader in Cloud Collaboration and Cloud Infrastructure software solutions. Designed to “Bridge the Gap” between personal and professional social, mobile and cloud user experiences, our solutions help large and medium-sized organizations dramatically improve productivity, reduce collaboration costs, and increase the overall enterprise value by bringing collaboration and infrastructure solutions to the cloud. Aug. 13, 2014 11:00 AM EDT Reads: 855 | By Liz McMillan  In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Hinkle, Senior Director, Open Source Solutions at Citrix Systems Inc., will provide overview of the open source software that can be used to deploy and manage a cloud computing environment. He will include information on storage, networking(e.g., OpenDaylight) and compute virtualization (Xen, KVM, LXC) and the orchestration(Apache CloudStack, OpenStack) of the three to build their own cloud services.
Speaker Bio:
Mark Hinkle is the Senior Director, Open Source Solutions, at Citrix Systems Inc. He joined Citrix as a result of their July 2011 acquisition of Cloud.com where he was their Vice President of Community. He is currently responsible for Citrix open source efforts around the open source cloud computing platform, Apache CloudStack and the Xen Hypervisor. Previously he was the VP of Community at Zenoss Inc., a producer of the open source application, server, and network management software, where he grew the Zenoss Core project to over 10... Aug. 12, 2014 11:45 PM EDT Reads: 1,110 | By Elizabeth White  Enterprises require the performance, agility and on-demand access of the public cloud, and the management, security and compatibility of the private cloud. The solution? In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Simone Brunozzi, VP and Chief Technologist(global role) for VMware, will explore how to unlock the power of the hybrid cloud and the steps to get there. He'll discuss the challenges that conventional approaches to both public and private cloud computing, and outline the tough decisions that must be made to accelerate the journey to the hybrid cloud. As part of the transition, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service model will enable enterprise IT to build services beyond their data center while owning what gets moved, when to move it, and for how long. IT can then move forward on what matters most to the organization that it supports – availability, agility and efficiency. Aug. 12, 2014 10:30 PM EDT Reads: 1,159 | By Liz McMillan  Every healthy ecosystem is diverse. This is especially true in cloud ecosystems, where portability and interoperability are more important than old enterprise models of proprietary ownership. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Mark Baker, Server Product Manager at Canonical/Ubuntu, will discuss how single vendors used to take the lead in creating and delivering technology, but in a cloud economy, where users want tools of their preference, when and where they need them, it makes no sense. Aug. 11, 2014 02:45 PM EDT Reads: 1,103 | By Roger Strukhoff  The 15th International Cloud Expo has just expanded its conference program, to bring together Cloud Computing, APM, APIs, Security, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps and WebRTC at one location. Cloud Expo is the single show where delegates and technology vendors can meet to experience and discuss the entire world of the cloud. With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to learn about the latest technology developments and solutions. Aug. 11, 2014 07:00 AM EDT Reads: 1,889 | By Liz McMillan  SYS-CON Events announced today that Bsquare Corporation, a leading enabler of smart connected systems, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's Internet of @ThingsExpo, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Bsquare is a global leader of embedded software solutions. We enable smart connected systems at the device level and beyond that millions use every day and provide actionable data solutions for the growing Internet of Things (IoT) market. We empower our world-class customers with our products, services and solutions to achieve innovation and success. Aug. 11, 2014 06:30 AM EDT Reads: 1,729 | By Pat Romanski  SYS-CON Events announced today that NuoDB, Inc., the leader in webscale distributed database technology, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
NuoDB was launched in 2010 by industry-renowned database architect Jim Starkey and accomplished software CEO Barry Morris to deliver a webscale distributed database management system that is specifically designed for the cloud and the modern datacenter. Aug. 10, 2014 05:30 PM EDT Reads: 4,040 | By Pat Romanski  SYS-CON Events announced today that Cloudian, Inc., the leading provider of hybrid cloud storage solutions, has been named “Bronze Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloudian is a Foster City, Calif.-based software company specializing in cloud storage. Cloudian HyperStore® is an S3-compatible cloud object storage platform that enables service providers and enterprises to build reliable, affordable and scalable hybrid cloud storage solutions. Cloudian actively partners with leading cloud computing environments including Amazon Web Services, Citrix Cloud Platform, Apache CloudStack, OpenStack and the vast ecosystem of S3 compatible tools and applications. Cloudian's customers include Vodafone, Nextel, NTT, Nifty, and LunaCloud. The company has additional offices in China and Japan. Aug. 10, 2014 04:45 PM EDT Reads: 1,977 | By Elizabeth White  Agility is top of mind for Cloud/Service providers and Enterprises alike. Policy Driven Data Center provides a policy model for application deployment by decoupling application needs from the underlying infrastructure primitives. In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, David Klebanov, a Technical Solutions Architect with Cisco Systems, to discuss how it differentiates from the software-defined top-down control by offering a declarative approach to allow faster and simpler application deployment. Aug. 9, 2014 06:30 PM EDT Reads: 1,488 | By Elizabeth White  SYS-CON Events announced today that TechXtend (formerly Programmer’s Paradise), a leading value-added provider of server and storage virtualization, and r-evolution will exhibit at SYS-CON's 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
TechXtend (formerly Programmer’s Paradise) is a leading value-added provider of software, systems and solutions for corporations, government organizations, and academic institutions across the United States and Canada. TechXtend is the Exclusive Reseller in the United States for r-evolution Aug. 9, 2014 01:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,544 | By Liz McMillan  As more applications and services move "to the cloud" (public or on-premise) cloud environments are increasingly adopting and building out traditional enterprise features. This in turn is enabling and encouraging cloud adoption from enterprise users. In many ways the definition is blurring as features like continuous operation, geo-distribution or on-demand capacity become the norm. NuoDB is involved in both building enterprise software and using enterprise cloud capabilities.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Seth Proctor, CTO at NuoDB, Inc., will discuss the experiences from building, deploying and using enterprise services and suggest some ways to approach moving enterprise applications into a cloud model. Aug. 8, 2014 01:30 PM EDT Reads: 1,501 | By Pat Romanski  The move to the cloud brings a number of new security challenges, but the application remains your last line of defense.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Arthur Hicken, Evangelist at Parasoft, to discuss how developers are extremely well-poised to perform tasks critical for securing the application – provided that certain key obstacles are overcome. Aug. 8, 2014 12:30 AM EDT Reads: 1,825 | By Pat Romanski  Video management and delivery has become increasingly challenging due to the diversity of solutions, mobile devices, platforms and video formats. As a result, companies are often required to piece together multiple solutions and vendors to get what they need.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Ralf Jacob, Chief Revenue Officer at Verizon Digital Media Services, addresses the challenges of streaming live and on-demand adaptive video to multiple platforms and devices by moving the workflow from hardware-dependent infrastructure to software and cloud-based infrastructure. He will demonstrate how Verizon Digital Media Services eliminates complexity instead of managing it, with a simpler, more scalable approach that significantly reduces costs. Aug. 7, 2014 08:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,289 | By Elizabeth White  Recurring revenue models are great for driving new business in every market sector, but they are complex and need to be effectively managed to maximize profits. How you handle the range of options for pricing, co-terming and proration will ultimately determine the fate of your bottom line.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Brendan O'Brien, Co-founder at Aria Systems, session will examine:
How time impacts recurring revenue
How to effectively handle customer plan changes
The range of pricing and packaging options to consider Aug. 6, 2014 09:00 PM EDT Reads: 1,370 |
Best Recent Articles on Cloud Computing & Big Data Topics  By Esmeralda Swartz As we enter a new year, it is time to look back over the past year and resolve to improve upon it. In 2014, we will see more service providers resolve to add more personalization in enterprise technology. Below are seven predictions about what will drive this trend toward personalization. Reads: 5,759  By Andi Mann IT organizations face a growing demand for faster innovation and new applications to support emerging opportunities in social, mobile, growth markets, Big Data analytics, mergers and acquisitions, strategic partnerships, and more. This is great news because it shows that IT continues to be a key stakeholder in delivering business service innovation. However, it also means that IT must deliver new innovation despite flat budgets, while maintaining existing services that grow more complex every day. Reads: 8,544  By Elizabeth White Cloud computing is transforming the way businesses think about and leverage technology. As a result, the general understanding of cloud computing has come a long way in a short time. However, there are still many misconceptions about what cloud computing is and what it can do for businesses that adopt this game-changing computing model. In this exclusive Q&A; with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, Rex Wang, Vice President of Product Marketing at Oracle, discusses and dispels some of the common myths about cloud computing that still exist today.
Reads: 9,984  By Elizabeth White Despite the economy, cloud computing is doing well. Gartner estimates the cloud market will double by 2016 to $206 billion. The time for dabbling in the cloud is over!
The 14th International Cloud Expo, co-located with 5th International Big Data Expo and 3rd International SDN Expo, to be held June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, N.Y. announces that its Call for Papers is now open. Topics include all aspects of providing or using massively scalable IT-related capabilities as a service using Internet technologies (see suggested topics below).
Cloud computing helps IT cut infrastructure costs while adding new features and services to grow core businesses. Clouds can help grow margins as costs are cut back but service offerings are expanded.
Help plant your flag in the fast-expanding business opportunity that is The Cloud, Big Data and Software-Defined Networking: submit your speaking proposal today! Reads: 6,568  By Jim Kaskade What do you get when you combine Big Data technologies….like Pig and Hive? A flying pig?
No, you get a “Logical Data Warehouse.”
In 2012, Infochimps (now CSC) leveraged its early use of stream processing, NoSQLs, and Hadoop to create a design pattern which combined real-time, ad-hoc, and batch analytics. This concept of combining the best-in-breed Big Data technologies will continue to advance across the industry until the entire legacy (and proprietary) data infrastructure stack will be replaced with a new (and open) one. Reads: 15,130  By Gene Dragotta and Sachin Agarwal While unprecedented technological advances have been made in healthcare in areas such as genomics, digital imaging and Health Information Systems, access to this information has been not been easy for both the healthcare provider and the patient themselves. Regulatory compliance and controls, information lock-in in proprietary Electronic Health Record systems and security concerns have made it difficult to share data across health care providers. Reads: 9,169  By Liz McMillan Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Vanessa Alvarez has been named conference chair of Cloud Expo® 2014.
14th International Cloud Expo will take place on June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and 15th International Cloud Expo® will take place on November 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.  By Elizabeth White 12th International Cloud Expo, held on June 10–13, 2013 at the Javits Center in New York City, featured four content-packed days with a rich array of sessions about the business and technical value of cloud computing led by exceptional speakers from every sector of the cloud computing ecosystem.
The Cloud Expo series is the fastest-growing Enterprise IT event in the past 10 years, devoted to every aspect of delivering massively scalable enterprise IT as a service. Reads: 9,478  By Liz McMillan Ulitzer.com announced "the World's 30 most influential Cloud bloggers," who collectively generated more than 24 million Ulitzer page views. Ulitzer's annual "most influential Cloud bloggers" list was announced at Cloud Expo, which drew more delegates than all other Cloud-related events put together worldwide. "The world's 50 most influential Cloud bloggers 2010" list will be announced at the Cloud Expo 2010 East, which will take place April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center, in New York City, with more than 5,000 expected to attend. Reads: 11,172  By Howard Brown It's a simple fact that the better sales reps understand their prospects' intentions, preferences and pain points during calls, the more business they'll close. Each day, as your prospects interact with websites and social media platforms, their behavioral data profile is expanding. It's now possible to gain unprecedented insight into prospects' content preferences, product needs and budget. We hear a lot about how valuable Big Data is to sales and marketing teams. But data itself is only valuable when it's part of a bigger story, made visible in the right context. Reads: 5,360  By Elizabeth White Cloud Expo, Inc. has announced today that Larry Carvalho has been named Tech Chair of Cloud Expo® 2014.
14th International Cloud Expo will take place on June 10-12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and 15th International Cloud Expo® will take place on November 4-6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Reads: 11,018  By Sal Visca Everyone talks about a cloud-first or mobile-first strategy. It's the trend du jour, and for good reason as these innovative technologies have revolutionized an industry and made savvy companies a lot of money. But consider for a minute what's emerging with the Age of Context and the Internet of Things. Devices, interfaces, everyday objects are becoming endowed with computing smarts. This is creating an unprecedented focus on the Application Programming Interface (API) as developers seek to connect these devices and interfaces to create new supporting services and hybrids. I call this trend the move toward an API-first business model and strategy. Reads: 5,376  By Karl Van den Bergh We live in a world that requires us to compete on our differential use of time and information, yet only a fraction of information workers today have access to the analytical capabilities they need to make better decisions. Now, with the advent of a new generation of embedded business intelligence (BI) platforms, cloud developers are disrupting the world of analytics. They are using these new BI platforms to inject more intelligence into the applications business people use every day. As a result, data-driven decision-making is finally on track to become the rule, not the exception. Reads: 4,287 |
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Kirk Byers at SDN Central writes frequently on the topic of DevOps as it relates (and applies) to the network and recently introduced a list of seven DevOps principles that are applicable in an article entitled, "DevOps and the Chaos Monkey. " On this list is the notion of reducing variation. This caught my eye because reducing variation is a key goal of Six Sigma and in fact its entire formula is based on measuring the impact of variation in results. The thought is that by measuring deviation from a desired outcome, you can immediately recognize whether changes to a process improve the consistency of the outcome.Quality is achieved by reducing variation, or so the methodology goes. 
Achieving the ultimate ‘Five Nines’ of web site availability (around 5 minutes of downtime a year) has been a goal of many organizations since the beginning of the internet era. There are several ways to accomplish this but essentially a few principles apply.
Web applications come in all shapes and sizes from static to dynamic, from simple to complex from specific to general. No matter the size, availability is important to support the customers and the business. The most basic high-availability architecture is the typical 3-tier design. A pair of ADCs in the DMZ terminates the connection; they in turn intelligently distribute the client request to a pool (multiple) of application servers which then query the database servers for the appropriate content. Each tier has redundant servers so in the event of a server outage, the others take the load and the system stays available.
The focus of a BI professional in an organization is to help get the right information to the right decision makers at the right time. In modern times, Big Data analytics has been one of the primary sources of business intelligence acquisition. Tools like Hadoop have revolutionized the way enterprise businesses interpret the millions of data points that they own about customer behavior and turn them into meaningful inferences. But before the data reaches this stage, it passes through the several modules of an ERP system - an ERP system handles the whole gamut of operations right from demand estimation, to inventory purchase, stockpiling, distribution, sales and revenue generation.
As a result, cloud ERP plays quite a crucial role in generating the most accurate information for business intelligence. Here are some ways it is done.
In the five seconds it takes you to read this, 60% of your visitors just abandoned your site. Another 20% were gone before you even hit the first comma, and 30% of all them are purchasing from one of your competitors. That's what Limelight Networks "State of the User Experience" says, which pretty much falls in line with every other survey of consumers. They are, on the whole, impatient and unwilling to suffer poor performance when there is a veritable cornucopia of choices available out there on the Internet.
Back when we were doing DB2 at IBM, there was an important older product called IMS which brought significant revenue. With another database product coming (based on relational technology), IBM did not want any cannibalization of the existing revenue stream. Hence we coined the phrase “dual database strategy” to justify the need for both DBMS products. In a similar vain, several vendors are concocting all kinds of terms and strategies to justify newer products under the banner of Big Data.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new hot buzzword and like most buzzwords, its purpose and definition are grossly misunderstood. When some people hear the term IoT they immediately associate it with a refrigerator reminding us to order milk or our Fitbit wearable device tweeting how we just “crushed a 4.1 mile run”. Neither of those use cases are very compelling to most of us which makes it hard to fathom how experts can predict that by 2020 there will be greater than a one trillion dollar market that vendors will be trying to claim a piece of.
I like this word re-imagination from Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends presentation. We are seeing so many aspects of our life being transformed by the internet.
Take for example, ordering a cab to go somewhere. Either we phone for a yellow cab here in California or if you are in New York city, then you stand and wave for an incoming yellow cab to stop. The new game-changer is Uber. All you do is touch your smartphone screen for UberX or Black car and you get an instant message about the car coming in less than 5 minutes time with the driver and car info. It is cheaper and you pay by card (pre-registered in your Uber account). This is re-imagining the transport sector. Uber, a San Francisco company is worth about $17B and is operating in 70 cities around the world. Quite a disruptive force! 
Application delivery, as defined as its own little corner of the network industry, has been fairly focused on assuring the performance, security and availability of applications since its inception back around 2003. Oh, the ways in which those three core tenets have been supported by application delivery controllers has evolved during that time, but always the focus was on the goal of making apps fast, secure and available.
But that was then, and this is next. The new world is an application world, and it's not just having them on the Internet that counts. Applications - whether mobile or web, consumer or employee - are what enable and grow business today. The app is a requirement, a competitive differentiator, the keystone of an ecosystem around which businesses will rise and fall.
It's not the first time we've heard the statement that cloud can be too expensive and I doubt it will be the last. This latest episode comes from Alexei Rodriguez, Head of Ops at Evernote by way of Structure 2014:
It is important to note that this admission - like those in the past - have come from what we call "web monsters." Web monsters are, as the name implies, web-first (and usually only) organizations who have millions (or billions) of users. Modern web monsters generally have only one application for which they are responsible, a la Evernote, Netflix, Facebook, etc...
What if you could deploy a new IT service shortly after you defined the requirements? And, just imagine the bliss, if your IT spend could directly translate into a competitive advantage. Predicting the ROI would be relatively easy. You would be the envy of your peer group.
Unfortunately, as most senior executives already know, it's never that simple.
Typically, you perform the technology assessment due diligence up-front, you place your bets based upon the most compelling guidance, and then you closely monitor the results. It's an iterative process, where confidence builds over time. Maybe that's why new business technology spending tends to be aligned with a past success.
But this procurement model doesn't adapt very well in response to unanticipated significant market events or the rapid acceleration of unplanned technology migrations. Moreover, tight budgets and other resource constraints can severely limit an organization's ability to react quickly to changing environments.
I love The Internet of Things. You do, too, even if you don’t know exactly what it is yet. Hardly a day goes by where I don’t find a story about some awesome company creating some new awesome gadget that taps into The Internet of Things. Scrolling through these stories is like taking a peek at the world (and our homes!) three to five years down the line.
But, uh, what exactly is The Internet of Things? And why should you care?
According to Chris Piedmonte, CEO of Suvola Corporation - a software and services company focused on creating preconfigured and scalable Microserver appliances for deploying large-scale enterprise applications, "the Microserver market is poised to grow by leaps and bounds - because companies can leverage this kind of technology to deploy systems that offer 400% better cost-performance at half the total cost of ownership. These organizations will also benefit from the superior reliability, reduced space and power requirements, and lower cost of entry provided by Microserver platforms".
In a previous article, we talked about “Short T’s.” We talked about how, in network engineering, the “T” is very long: Configuring a network to achieve business goals requires considerable skill and knowledge. While we set up a conceptual model in that post to talk about what “T” means in general terms, we did not discuss in detail how to articulate “T” more specifically for network engineering. In this post, we’ll explore this in a little more detail.
Veterans 360 will be attending the Gartner Catalyst Conference. They are also sponsoring the attendance of active duty service members that are currently in the US military and serving in an IT related position. If you are in such a technology role and are interested in attending this “must-attend” technology conference to learn strategies on how to leverage mobile, cloud, and big data. Please visit Vets 360 at http://vets360.org/gartner-catalyst-conference/ to take advantage of this tremendous opportunity.
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