Big Data, the cloud, and mobile are converging technology trends that represent real opportunities for developers and IT pros to deliver more efficiencies and new value. Join Microsoft on June 11 at 14th Cloud Expo and learn how their strategy is to deliver an integrated and yet open platform centered in cloud that also enables you to extend your existing investments. For developers and architects, this means using familiar tools with enhanced capabilities never seen before. In the past 12 months Microsoft has delivered tremendous innovation including: infrastructure as a service, cloud storage, cloud based device management across heterogeneous devices and Big Data solutions. Learn how you can move your business and career forward by taking our innovation to your business.
It’s a logical suggestion after all, i.e., that the mission-critical enterprise is getting wider. In truth, the mission-critical enterprise is getting wider, deeper, longer, broader and altogether bigger. But what does that mean? In practical terms we are stating that the “granular depth” of the mission-critical enterprise has increased in both overall external size and internal granular richness. Once again we need to ask, what does that really mean?
Infor CloudSuite combines proven industry expertise, differentiated user experience, and world-class infrastructure from Amazon Web Services. Join Infor at 14th Cloud Expo, and learn how to take advantage of AWS's expertise and economies of scale to access resources when they need them, on demand and with auto-scaling built into the Infor applications. Infor CEO Charles Phillips will share in his Day 3 Keynote, on June 12 at 9:10 a.m., how businesses have been looking to move more than just their back office applications to the cloud, yet up to now, mission-critical applications have not been cloud-ready. Find out how enterprise application suites, technology, and economics have finally evolved to realize the vision of the cloud for running the full business - today.
Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions in the cloud are spawning a wide spectrum of services that are revolutionizing the workplace for employers and employees. Instead of HR being just a cost center, cloud computing is affording HR the opportunity to add significant value to the bottom line in the form of reduced expenditures on software and computer systems that are now managed in the cloud, as well as increased efficiencies. With easier access to vital business processes via Wi-Fi networks and mobile devices, cloud tools are driving higher productivity and delivering strategic business results. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Tarik Taman, General Manager, HCM & Cloud ERP at Infor, will examine how HCM in the Cloud is empowering organizations to achieve new levels of success.
A lot of people are heralding IoT as the future, but what can your business do today? Quite a lot, it turns out, if you know what to look for and how to talk about it. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Reid Carlberg, Senior Director at Salesforce.com, will discuss business processes ripe for IoT style solutions and provide real-world examples in operation today. He'll also cover several fun ways to inspire your organization, share some lessons learned about solution development and offer several next steps designed to get you started. Join us and learn how to kick start your company's IoT efforts into high gear.
“All software vendors now or in the near future will need to have “born of the cloud” capabilities in addition to on-premise,” observed Shashi "Sash" Purohit, Founder, President & CTO of Ambernet, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. V”endors will need to develop multi-tenancy, improved security and other features to support true SaaS deployment. There are a lot of vendors that offer “hosted” deployments as the basis of their SaaS offer.” Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers? Shashi "Sash" Purohit: The National Institute of Standard & Technology (NIST) was instrumental in setting the stage for the adoption of Cloud Services in both the public and private sectors. We believe standards help create a rallying point for vendors, service providers and end users to work from. They help create confidence and validate choices and decisions that separate market leaders from others. Most buyers like to know that they are working with thought leaders who have invested time, money, and effort to secure the right approach that is standards compliant. Standards help reduce “short-cuts” and create motivation for the industry to work from. As an example, just look at what the FedRamp Standards/Certification process has done for public markets. It has really started the ball rolling to ensure security, compliance, governance, and other important criteria that makes it possible for agencies to buy with confidence. We offer a Cloud Management & Brokerage product that is based on industry standards including NIST and ITIL, yet offers unique differentiating features.
“A strategy that will work for the new cloud providers is to focus on a vertical industry / application and provide a deeper and more complete solution than the big guys currently provide,” noted Jeff Tabor, Senior Director of Product Management at Avere Systems, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez. “After succeeding in one vertical, move on to the next vertical to grow the business.” Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers? Jeff Tabor: Standards always help users since with standards the users don't have to treat all the vendors as separate entities. Standards can eliminate vendor lock-in and give users bargaining power since multiple vendors can sell them technically equivalent solutions. Standards create an ecosystem of users and vendors that allow new business models to get started. Without this ecosystem, there is too much risk that users will head down the wrong vendor-proprietary path and new businesses can't get off the ground.
Born out of proven success in agile development, cloud computing, and process automation, DevOps is a macro trend you cannot afford to miss. From showcase success stories from early adopters and web-scale businesses, DevOps is expanding to organizations of all sizes, including the world’s largest enterprises – and delivering real results. In this DevOps Summit Power Panel, on June 9 at our New York City studio, led by conference chair Roger Strukhoff, Kevin Behr, founder of the Information Technology Process Institute (ITPI) and the Chief Strategist for the CIO and Board Advisory Practice at Assemblage Pointe; JP Morgenthal, Director, Cloud Computing Practice at Perficient, Inc.; and John Willis, VP of Customer Enablement for Stateless Networks; will discuss how DevOps is changing the way IT works, how businesses interact with customers, and how organizations are buying, building, and delivering software.
The reach and demand of cloud storage services are rapidly expanding as many organizations are expressing interest in storage-as-a service (STaaS) for public, private and hybrid cloud implementations. The next generation of applications and workloads are driving a big change in storage requirements that lead us to develop a new object-based software defined storage platform with elastic Exabyte scalability and enterprise consistency in flexible dynamic and open architecture. A major worldwide telco provider was looking to enter the Storage as a Service market and wanted to reinvent cloud storage services delivering unprecedented capabilities and value to a variety of external and internal customers. They explored a number of options and ultimately choose to work with Amplidata to help them design and build and enterprise class cloud storage platform using their hardware platform of choice.
Static data structures have been at the heart of data processing tools since the dawn of computing, but they have always limited the flexibility of the organization leveraging the data. Recently, the rise of flexible formats like JSON have led to schemaless data as an attempt to increase agility. However, schemaless data have proven difficult to work with, because of hidden rigid structure in the form of implied schemas. EnterpriseWeb addresses the problems of both the inflexibility of structured data as well as the impracticality of schemaless data, by enabling schemaless data to be dynamically and logically structured.
“An agile approach to data is really a requirement of just about any application, but even more so with Big Data,” stated Cory Isaacson, CEO/CTO of CodeFutures Corporation, in this exclusive Q&A with @ThingsExpo conference chair Roger Strukhoff. “What the enterprise needs is a data platform that can adapt to changing requirements in a flexible and rapid manner. This has not been the case with existing databases.” Cloud Computing Journal: With the MapDB announcement, it sounds like to some degree you're bringing the Java Programming Language into the 21st century modern enterprise. To what degree do you agree with that statement? Cory Isaacson: This is a very good assessment, while Java has always been a capable language there have been many barriers when it comes to delivering full-featured database technology. For example, APIs like JDBC have worked for many years, but fast performance, convenience and tight integration in Java applications with the database were not there. With MapDB Java developers now have the convenience and agility of the native Java Collections API, with the power of a very fast database engine.
Today, more than ever, end user experience is at the forefront of every CTO and CMO’s mind as more statistics show websites and applications are easily abandoned if users are not satisfied with their experience. But what makes a good experience? First we need to ask ourselves what is end-user experience? Years ago, end-user experience referred to how “sticky” an application was: how easy was it to use, how engaging was it, and how relevant was it to what users were doing. This approach is still relevant today but new technology has changed what we understand as “end-user experience.”
Whether they admit it or not, the emergence of public cloud providers has dramatically altered the playing field for hardware vendors of every type. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its competitors opened Pandora’s box by introducing the world to a completely programmatic, scalable, evolving, and pay-as-you-go way to procure and utilize network, compute and storage resources on a global scale. They have disrupted many layers of the technology industry from the applications being written to the way companies interact with the infrastructure being used to support those applications. Nowhere is this disruption easier to see than in the virtualization ecosystem. For the better part of the last decade, hypervisor companies like VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Red Hat worked hand-in-hand with hardware manufacturers like Cisco, NetApp, EMC, HP and Dell to define both the infrastructure foundation as well as the virtualized abstraction layer that sat underneath the entirety of the client/server era. These companies provided a direct link between the enterprise applications, the hypervisor and the hardware. They owned the traditional datacenter construct.
Mobile apps are becoming increasingly important in the enterprise. Traditional web apps cannot match the increased levels of engagement and retention achieved through a personalized and responsive experience on each user's favorite device. To build a cross-platform mobile app capable of delivering a truly personalized and responsive experience, however, you need to effectively utilize a cloud-connected app back end that is built to enhance security, scale and speed of development.
In a world of ever-accelerating business cycles and fast-changing client expectations, the cloud increasingly serves as a growth engine and a path to new business models. Dynamic clouds enable businesses to continuously reinvent themselves, adapting their business processes, their service and software delivery and their operations to achieve speed-to-market and quick response to customer feedback. The cloud opens up new possibilities for businesses to continuously deliver software-driven innovation and enables new ways of collaboration between an extended group of stakeholders, including business leaders, developers, operations as well customers and partners.
Normally in a document database such as CouchDB or BigCouch, data is queried using b-tree indexes built with map-reduce functions. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Brad Bonn, Systems Engineer at Cloudant, will discuss how Cloudant has extended the platform to natively take advantage of Lucene and R*-Tree indexes to make obtaining data out of NoSQL DBaaS more powerful and flexible. Brad Bonn is a Systems Engineer at Cloudant.
The Internet has been buzzing over the recent news of a federal proposal that creates the equivalent of “slow” and “fast” lanes online. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted on Thursday, May 15, 3-2 in favor of a new proposal that enables the creation of Internet fast lanes, where broadband and cable providers such as Comcast can charge companies like Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and other over-the-top (OTT) providers to pay for priority traffic over a fast lane. The original FCC Open Internet Order of 2010 didn’t declare that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were common carriers that must transport everything irrespective of the content – but it did outlaw pay-for-play fast lanes. The 2010 Open Internet Order is what companies like Verizon challenged and what led to parts being struck down in January 2014 by the US Court of Appeals. The 2010 Order failed to provide legal reasons for “the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules” and the US Federal Appeals Court agreed with the ISPs. In order to impose such regulations, ISPs would need to be classified as common carriers, and would essentially be held to the same standards and regulations as your telephone company (telco). Your telco provider does not charge you extra to make calls during peak hours or to guarantee that calls won’t be dropped. The public will now be allowed to provide comment, before the FCC enacts the final ruling later in the year. Adding fuel to the debate is whether or not the FCC can enforce policies that do not “divide the Internet into the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots.’” Categorizing the debate this way does have the result of drawing individuals into the discussion that would otherwise have been content on the sidelines.
The cloud wars battle rages on. Gartner predicts that one in four cloud providers will be gone by 2015, making this a very high stakes battle for all concerned. The 800lb gorillas, AWS, IBM, Google, Microsoft, et al. continue their efforts for dominance. The latest salvo has been a price war between Google, AWS and Microsoft for their services. Pricing is spiraling downward at breakneck speeds. The others are sure to follow. Into this fog of war, another player has been working on winning the hearts and minds of customers and developers. SalesForce.com, one of the first and best known Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors, has set its sights on becoming the platform of choice for cloud development and deployments. Will they succeed? They definitely can be considered a gorilla in their own right, approaching $5B in sales, and with a reported 1.5M developers, should not be taken lightly. Their approach is having an impact in the battle, forcing the other vendors and the industry to re-think how they look at cloud services, and could ultimately change the battlefield tactics in the ongoing cloud wars. To understand how a CRM vendor rose to that level of impact, becoming a contender in the cloud wars, one must trace their roots.
Cloud adoption is an evolutionary process that has been leading to hybrid clouds – specifically, open hybrid clouds that provide for portability of applications and data. This new model means avoiding new points of proprietary lock-in and new silos, and breaking from proprietary software and hardware.
Data generation and storage is rapidly accelerating and is expected to grow 44x in the next few years .Strict regulations and compliance combined with the need to mine this data to gain competitive advantage make it mandatory for enterprises to store this data for longer periods of time. To deal with this data explosion, enterprises are switching to a hybrid cloud storage model – a trend that is predicted to accelerate so fast that by 2020 over a third of the world’s data is stored and passes through the cloud. Microsoft’s hybrid cloud storage solution enables enterprise customers to integrate Microsoft Azure Storage with their data center. In his session at 14th Cloud Expo, Marc Farley, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft, will take you through the importance of the StorSimple solution to the hybrid cloud offering and discuss the building blocks you can use to solve data growth problems and cost constraints, as you consider moving your data storage to the public cloud. The final portion provides a future vision for hybrid cloud storage (HCS) with StorSimple and Azure.
In many companies, the business leadership team, the application team and the infrastructure team are all different entities. And while they are all very dependent on each other in many ways, often organizational goals and alignment can be very different for each team. For example, business leaders want maximum business results with minimum cost or investment. As a result, this often applies pressure on IT to squeeze more and more out while continually trying to reduce costs. Application teams generally care primarily about the applications, which are directly linked to the business results, but are also very dependent on the infrastructure team. The infrastructure is often at the bottom of the heap, critical for application success, but primarily viewed by business leaders as a “cost center” where the business value provided can be hard to directly link to individual expenses (until something breaks, that is).
In this Forrester report learn how the infrastructure/operations (I&O) role changes in a hybrid cloud world. How they accelerate the cloud application delivery life cycle to exceed the business expectations of cloud and which management capabilities must be mastered to take on the role of hybrid cloud manager.
5G Networks are being discussed and better defined by key industry manufacturers and network carriers so they can be deployed in the 2020 time period. They will represent a giant leap in capacity, baseline speeds and overall capabilities. They have to. Consumers are turning to Smartphones and tablets as the new ubiquitous edge technology for all their applications. Many people have gotten a good taste of smartphones and all the applications they can utilize with them. Now, the growing demand is there and both the framework of networks as well as their capabilities must be upgraded dramatically to keep up with user demand and exponentially growing traffic.
Reduce networking costs! Increase cyber security! Deploy applications faster! Add connectivity to our new office now! We’re under attack now – drop everything and jump on it now! How does IT management keep up with these demands? On top of that challenge, the promises of the Internet of Things (IoT) are that the pace of change will increase 10x with new applications and new devices added to networks – forecasts are be between 50 billion and 200 billion over the next several years – and using ever more wireless protocols. Almost 2 billion connectable devices already are installed but they lack appropriate access and security models. Business owners, operational managers and operational technologist are demanding more and more to run the business. IT management is already feeling crushed under the weight of all these issues and it’s only getting more challenging.
The Internet of Things will greatly expand the opportunities for data collection and new business models driven off of that data. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Jason Mondanaro, Director of Product Management at MetraTech Corp, will discuss how for this to be effective you not only need to have infrastructure and operational models capable of utilizing this new phenomenon, but increasingly service providers will need to convince a skeptical public to participate. Get ready to show them the money!