Now held three times a year, in New York, Prague, and Silicon Valley, the organizing principle of each International Virtualization Conference & Expo remains the same: our aim is to ensure, through an intense and carefully chosen program of technical and strategic breakout sessions, that attending delegates leave each Conference with abundant resources, ideas and examples they can apply immediately to leveraging Virtualization, helping them to maximize performance, minimize cost and improve the efficiency and flexibility of their Enterprise IT endeavors. The Call for Papers for the 7th International Virtualization Conference & Expo, which will be held in Santa Clara, CA, on November 2- 4, 2009, is currently still open. The submissions URL is here, and the deadline for submissions is June 30, 2009. Topics welcomed include every aspect of virtualization. For example: ... (more)

Making the Case for Data Virtualization

Achieving compelling value from information technology is critical because IT is typically an enterprise or government agency's largest capital expense. Increasing business complexities and technology choices create greater demands for justification when making IT investments. Cambridge, MA-based analyst firm Forrester Research recently reported that, "Business and government's purchases of computer and communication equipment, software, IT consulting, and integration services and IT outsourcing will decline by 3% on a global basis in 2009 when measured in U.S. dollars, then rise by 9% in 2010." With smaller budgets, IT must validate purchases by correlating tangible business and IT returns that align with corporate strategic objectives. This validation should come early in the acquisition process as well as after the implementation to demonstrate actual value and j... (more)

Big Data: Taming the Beast for Competitive Advantage

I recently presented, "The Moneyball Approach to Big Data - Creating an Unfair Advantage," at the Wall Street Technology Association's Hot Technologies Forum in New York. Everyone is talking about Big Data, but when it comes to taking action, most are taking a "wait-and-see" approach, and that concerns me. Skepticism or "late-adopter" mentality is understandable - if you want to forego a low-risk, high-reward opportunity and let your competition gain the advantage. My job is to create value for my customers, and I'd hate to see anyone miss out on the opportunity presented by Big Data. What's the Problem? The Corporate Executive Board identified three potential barriers to Big Data implementation: Information Attainability (the right information is available and easy to find) Information Usefulness (information is of good quality and is usable in format) Employee Cap... (more)

Gartner: Cloud Security Will Triple by 2013

Security applications delivered as cloud-based services will more than triple by 2013, according to Gartner. The firm said 20 percent of the revenue of messaging security tools, such as antimalware and antispam services for email and instant messaging, currently comes through the cloud delivery model. But this will jump to 60 percent by 2013.  Popular on-demand enterprise applications, such as those provided by Salesforce.com, are allowing mobile workers to bypass the corporate network to access business data. Gartner said this will force security teams to put controls between mobile workers and cloud based services.  "Although perimeter security controls will be required to protect the remaining data center functions and the large portions of enterprise populations that are not mobile, new approaches will be needed to secure cloud-based IT services," John Pescatore... (more)

Sun adds 64 bit guest, OS X GUI for Virtualization folks for free!

Sun is pretty serious about this business. Would Sun be shipping a ESX-like (ep, we all know that xVM is not really taking off) version soon out of all the development experience out of VirtualBox? I know, its a bit too late or that but you just never know! Cloud Computing is coming and whether you like your own hypervisor there or not, desktop is definitely what Sun is poised for! This now adds the ability to run 64-bit OSes on a virtual machine, an improved GUI on OS X and paid support subscription for its customers. This new release comes only a few days after the release of the maintenance release 1.6.6 which already included some important fixes, like improved stability and performance on AMD CPUs that support AMD-V virtualisation, plus better SATA drivers, shared folders performance, improved support for recent Linux kernels, and some fixes for OS-X users as wel... (more)

Appirio Predicted Windows Azure Disappointment in 2009

Windows Azure at Cloud Expo Exactly one year ago one startup cloud outfit posted a press release on their website with their 2009 cloud computing predictions for 2009. Here is their press release from a year ago to see how they did with their top 10 cloud predictions. "As the year (2008) draws to a close, many companies are left wondering what next year will bring for this year's hottest technology trend -- cloud computing. To answer these questions, today released its top 10 predictions for how cloud computing will evolve in 2009 and the impact those trends will have on IT and business. Appirio is a leading on-demand product and professional services company, and one of the fastest growing companies in the cloud computing space. "Appirio's predictions reveal that in spite of our current economy, cloud computing will continue to see strong growth and investment ove... (more)

USA.gov "Flips the switch" to Cloud Computing

Last weekend, USA.gov shifted to a cloud computing platform. This move is expected to reduce infrastructure expenses by 90% and drastically improve flexibility. "'We are flipping the switch tomorrow to the cloud computing platform, so this is a nervous day,' said Martha Dorris, acting associate administrator for the General Services Administration's (GSA) Office of Citizen Services and Communications, on Friday, May 1. The office operates USA.gov which receives more than 100 million visits per year. Dorris spoke at the 2009 mid-year conference of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO)." Ms Dorris also highlighted the fact that this was not a technology story, but represented the completion of a "difficult cultural shift for agency staff ". Provided by Terramark, this also provides an important proof point for government cloud computing. ... (more)

RightScale Supports Freebie DB2 in the Cloud

RightScale, the cloud manager, claims to be first to support IBM’s latest freebie DB2 software. Users can create, manage and automate a DB2 Express-C 9.7 database on, say, EC2 directly from RightScale’s complexity-fighting management platform. DB2 Express-C is supposed to have self-managing capabilities and the RightScale Platform now includes so-called “cloud-ready” ServerTemplates for the database on both the CentOS and Ubuntu. RightScale CTO, Thorsten Von Eicken, third from left, at SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Expo The pre-built templates are for common server configurations, such as front-end web servers, redundant database servers, or grid processing servers. They launch servers that know how to operate in the cloud – how to obtain an IP address, how to access and manage storage, how to submit monitoring data and how to collaborate with other servers in a cloud d... (more)

ParaScale Founder & CTO to Speak at 4th Cloud Computing Expo

According to Cameron Bahar, Founder and CTO of ParaScale (pictured), hundreds of definitions from swarms of providers "have created confusion and devalued the cloud storage landscape." At his breakout session at SYS-CON's upcoming 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo , being held November 2-4 in the Santa Clara Convention Center, Bahar will he says skip to the real questions, namely who is using cloud storage and why? His session will detail cloud storage customer examples and the benefits achieved by leveraging this technology. "No boring definitions or hand waving technology pitches, instead real-world use cases complete with lessons learned and best practices," adds Bahar. As Founder and CTO, he leads ParaScale's technology direction and manages engineering, bringing over 20 years of systems software development and deep expertise in distributed ope... (more)

Confirmit and DMG Consulting Announce Webinar Showcasing Contact Center Feedback Best Practice

NEW YORK, NY, LONDON, UK and OSLO, NORWAY – 29 September 2009: Confirmit has announced that it has joined forces with DMG Consulting LLC to deliver a webcast highlighting the ways in which businesses running contact center operations can use a Voice of the Customer program to increase customer retention, while reducing operational costs. In this webinar, Donna Fluss, founder and President of DMG Consulting will share best practices for building a Voice of the Customer program that optimizes customer retention and satisfaction. She will highlight how successful programs enable businesses to improve the customer experience, reduce agent attrition and produce a more competitive and cost effective contact center environment. Fluss comments "Even in the era of social networking, surveys are still the most effective ways to determine how satisfied customers are with a c... (more)

CloudBerry Backup Notification email enhancements

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Backup 1.4 and later. CloudBerry S3 Backup is a powerful Windows backup and restore that automate backup and restore processes to Amazon S3 cloud storage. In release 1.3 we introduce CloudBerry Backup notification service and you can learn here how to configure it. Notification email used to provide fairly minimum information on the backup completion. We got quite a lot of feedback on our notification email content and with the release 1.4 we are sending more comprehensive information in our backup completion notification email. Here is how our new notification email looks like. In the future releases we will be extending our email even further and you will be able to optionally choose to get a complete report of the list of copied files. Stay tuned! CloudBerry Backup is a Windows program that leverages Amazon S3 storage. You... (more)