Cloud Expo Europe €550 Savings here! Cloud Expo West $800 Savings here! Cloud Computing Journal recently caught up with Pete Malcolm, CEO of cloud management innovators Abiquo - a major new player in the fast-emerging Cloud ecosystem and Platinum Plus Sponsor of 6th Cloud Expo being held in Prague, the Czech Republic, 21-22 June 2010. Malcolm is keynoting at the event. His theme will be "An Open Cloud Ecosystem - the Gathering Storm." Explore Cloud Expo Sponsorship & Exhibit Opportunities ! Abiquo was also Platinum Plus Sponsor of the 5th International Cloud Expo held April 19-21, 2010 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City Cloud Computing Journal: How would you define the difference between Private clouds and Public Clouds, and why is the distinction so important in the context of Cloud Computing? Pete Malcolm: Actually, I think people get rather too hun... (more)

Programming Web Services with Scripting Languages:Easy Steps, Elegant Methods

Web services is an emerging Internet programming paradigm that enables the remote invocation of software objects among heterogeneous systems over the Internet. There are two sides to Web services programming. On one side is the creation and deployment of Web service objects onto Internet servers; on the other side is the consumption of Web service objects in client programs or server applications. Due to the language-neutrality of the Web services paradigm, Web services can be created or consumed with different kinds of programming languages, including scripting languages such as Perl, Python, Tcl, and PHP. In this article, I'll explain and demonstrate the use of scripting to rapidly create and readily consume Web services over the Internet. Web Services Background Generally, the concept of "Web services" represents an enabling architecture for wide-area distribute... (more)

Autonomic SOA Web Services - Achieving Fully "Business-Conscious" IT Systems

Service-oriented architectures (SOA) and autonomic computing are among the hottest topics in IT today. SOA simplifies integration and facilitates the componentization of enterprise-wide systems, thereby enabling optimal business agility. Autonomic computing allows these systems to operate without human intervention - through self-configuring, self-healing, and self-managing capabilities. By combining autonomic computing with SOA, enterprises can now achieve a new IT utopia, named "Autonomic SOA." However, this new level of autonomic computing goes beyond just reacting to traditional IT issues, such as increasing the speed to diagnose, repair, and prevent future issues. Autonomic SOA is also able to respond dynamically as changes occur within business conditions and processes, thereby empowering enterprises everywhere to achieve flawless execution on a daily basis. ... (more)

My Thoughts on Ulitzer

Ok, so, here are my thoughts on Ulitzer... As a blogger, I focus on traffic and I spend quite a lot of time optimizing my SEO. Since the target audience of my articles is much greater than the reach of my blog, Ulitzer is actually helping me increase my content reach. Moreover, Ulitzer does it in a very fair way since links back to my posts or other locations are without the evil "nofollow" - providing a nice SEO boost. It also gives me some good metrics that are very useful data points on the effectiveness of my blog articles. And last but not least, it allows my article to appears in the news listings of the two major search engines, which is a very nice channel extension. So, all of this means that, while Ulitzer might be seen as a competing channel to bloggers, I think that bloggers should realize the tremendous value it could bring to their blog. I think to mater... (more)

11th Cloud Expo: A–Z of Big Data & Cloud Computing Topics

What's "Cloud 2.0"? Who's behind "SHadoop"? Why is the Cloud so important to the Big Data boom? Are you turning your data into dollars? Which cloud model is right for your company? Register to attend 11th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo Silicon Valley and get your questions answered November 5–8. Here's what you can look forward to, expressed numerically: 1 Convenient Venue – Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA 2 Interlocking Themes – Cloud Computing & Big Data 4 Content-Packed Days – November 5–8, 2012 6 Industry Keynotes 8 Distinct Parallel Tracks 174 Breakout Technical & Strategy Sessions 203 Expert Speakers & Panelists 90,000 Square Feet of Expo Floor and 1 Not-To-Be-Missed Opening Night Welcome Reception on Nov 5 ! The event is co-located with 2nd International BigDataExpo. Registration includes both events. Whether you are a large enterprise, a growing busines... (more)

Inducing Behavioral Adaptations Within SOA and Web Services

Web services have evolved from plain application-integration enablers to value-added stand-alone functionality providers such as getting a quote to a comprehensive business function like processing orders. Enterprises are exploiting this new revenue model by offering such business functions as services on usage basis. Information sharing instances such as Amazon's e-commerce services have helped in the creation of new powerful solutions using business functions as services. Why Do We Need Adaptation in Web Services? In the vision of e-business, it becomes important to address the dynamic nature of business environments. As third parties access more and more business functions, the richness of Web services offered should be adequately addressed. With Web services having to participate and cooperate in a networked system, they may need to frequently join or leave a pro... (more)

Progress Software to Acquire Savvion

Mergers & Acquisitions on Ulitzer Progress Software announced today the acquisition of Savvion, a privately held business enterprise software company based in Santa Clara, California, for approximately $49 million, net of cash acquired. Savvion is a provider of Business Process Management (BPM) technology with 15 years of market experience. The company offers a comprehensive, standards-based BPM suite that helps more than 300 of the world’s top-performing companies – including 24 of the ‘Fortune 100’ – automate and continuously improve critical business processes. Richard D. Reidy, president and chief executive officer, Progress Software said: “We believe that achieving operational responsiveness has become a business imperative, enabling businesses to achieve the highest level of operational performance. Our acquisition of Savvion enhances our goal to provide unpr... (more)

Cloud Computing: What NOT to Do

A shift is finally occurring in the Cloud Computing discourse. Topics like "what is it" have been supplanted by more useful questions such as "should I do it?", "how should I do it?", and "when should I do it?" In appreciation of this new phase of Cloud Computing adoption, we'd like to offer some thoughts on some of the common pitfalls of both public and private Clouds so that you might avoid them as you evaluate and implement cloud solutions. 1. Not understanding the business value It's important to weigh a Cloud solution versus the traditional approach through the lens of business value. If this is an existing service, can the Cloud truly provide a better solution than what you're currently doing? If new, what are the important business requirements that may drive you to select a Cloud deployment model? In the event of a service outage or a security breech, what's ... (more)

Using HTML5 Application Cache to Create Offline Web Applications

HTML5 introduces Application Cache, a new feature that enables you to make web apps and sites available offline. The new specification also provides an easy way to prefetch some or all of your web app's assets (HTML files, images, CSS, JavaScript, and so on) while the client is still online. During this caching process, files are stored in an application cache, where they sit ready for future offline use. Compare this to regular browser caching, in which pages that you visit are cached in the browser's cache based on server-side rules and client-side configuration. But-even if web pages are cached normally, this does not provide a reliable way for you to access pages while you're in offline mode (in an airplane, for example). In addition, an application cache can cache pages that have not been visited at all and are therefore typically unavailable in the regular br... (more)

Cloud Migration Start-up Hires VP Product Management and Marketing

Racemi on Monday announced that James Strayer has joined as vice president of product management and marketing, a newly created position for the growing company of datacenter automation software, which facilitates migration to cloud computing. Strayer joins from Symantec and will report to company CEO, Lawrence Guillory. He brings more than a decade of product management and marketing experience. At the Fortune 500 company, Symantec, he led product management efforts for the Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) business and worked with key OEM partners such as HP and Dell. Before that, at Altiris, he contributed to the company's growth, which led to the acquisition by Symantec for $830 million in April 2007. Strayer graduated from Utah Valley University with a degree in Life Sciences. "James is an important addition to our team as we build out our netwo... (more)

Software Best Practices: Use Cases Are for Everyone

What Are Use Cases and Who Uses Them? Use Cases are NOT just for requirements gathering by project managers. They're far too useful to be relegated to that niche. For those not familiar with use cases, you can look up various confusing definitions which make reference to UML diagrams and such - but generally speaking in the world of software design, they describe how a person interacts with a piece of software. For example, a use case for Amazon.com might describe how a user searches for a book title.  Ultimately, use cases when collected together describe how software is used, who uses it, what problems get solved with it, why customers buy it, and other such bits of knowledge which are critical to creating Great Software. Use cases in their myriad formats and derivations are a primary tool in software marketing, software product management, executive management. In ... (more)