XirSys, a California-based tech company recently launched by the founders of Influxis, officially announced today that it is now providing cloud accounts for developers interested in testing the BETA services for their WebRTC hosting platform. WebRTC is being touted as the leading disruptive communication technology, as it will allow people to communicate conveniently through their HTML5 compatible browsers in real-time, without any plugins. However, there are some real world challenges to overcome in order for users to properly connect to one another, such as traversing complex firewalls and configuring reliable and scalable STUN and TURN servers; that's where XirSys comes in.
I just heard an interesting story from Runtastic, who is one of our Mobile Real User Monitoring customers. Runtastic’s main mobile app allows their users to track their sport activities such as running, biking, hiking or skiing. They had a user complaining about too high speed. He didn’t actually complain about the performance of the app but instead complained about his average speed during his workout as calculated by the app. After his one hour biking session, the app showed the he covered a distance of 490 km – that would probably be a world record and give him the yellow shirt in a small French bicycling event.
When I was asked about innovation, the first thing I did was review my research to get an idea of what my peers in the industry were predicting for our parallel IT futures. Not surprisingly, they all reflected the same sentiment: the cloud is growing, and employees will continue to bring their own devices (BYOD). BYOD is a trend that has remained a hot topic, and point of controversy, throughout the year. Now that we’re entering the second half of 2013, I think we can safely say that those predictions have been realized. Because the cloud is the common theme throughout all innovation and tech conversations, I am going to focus solely on where I believe the cloud is heading. At this time I would like to take this opportunity to look even deeper into the crystal ball and provide some insight into where the cloud conversation is heading for the remainder of 2013 and 2014.
“I think 2013 is the year of hybrid cloud – it’s really starting to take off now. It’s the combination of public cloud, private cloud and dedicated infrastructure working seamlessly together to provide the best application platform, but it’s also providing reliability, availability, performance and lowest TCO,” stated Lisa Larson, VP of Enterprise Cloud Solutions for Rackspace, in this interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at our Times Square Studio in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
“IBM’s perspective on cloud computing has been about a systematic approach, to saying what’s the impact on the underlying business as a whole and from that perspective saying cloud computing certainly is the way we need to move,” stated Bruce Otte, Director of the IBM SmartCloud Platform and Workload Services, in this interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at our Times Square Studio in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
For most enterprises, cost savings and increased efficiencies are the primary motivations for making the move to cloud computing. But recent studies from Gartner and other firms have identified concerns over cloud security and data privacy as being the leading barriers to cloud adoption. In this piece, Ron Ross of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Purdue University professor, Eugene Spafford, discussed the question of whether adopting the cloud actually brings more or less risk to an enterprise. Ron Ross’s belief is that a portion of an enterprise’s operational complexities can be mediated by moving certain types of data to the cloud. He specifically believes that when a company is able to classify data as critical versus not as sensitive, it helps organizations identify what data can be moved to the cloud without the same level of concern over security. Moving less sensitive data off premise reduces complexity by decreasing the data the enterprise must manage and secure internally. This shift in data storage essentially puts the security concerns on the public cloud provider and removes it from the organization.
Compelling consumer applications are created every day. Are you ready for the IT implications both internally and externally? As your datacenter needs more capacity, the cloud will be critical to success. What are the key considerations to help plan for the needed capacity over time? And how can the cloud best work with your existing applications? In his General Session at 12th Cloud Expo, Brian Jawalka, Enterprise Solutions Architect at Rackspace Hosting, talks about the SaaS consumer apps that are forcing IT to evolve. Learn how a hybrid approach can add agility, flexibility and speed-to-market for your organization.
These days, it seems that every cloud provider claims that cloud is safer than your traditional datacenter. Is it though? In his General Session at 12th Cloud Expo, Rishi Bhargava, VP of Product Management for Datacenter and Server Security group at McAfee, helps you explore and address the security challenges and considerations for public cloud (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS). Rishi Bhargava is Vice President of Product Management for Datacenter and Server Security group at McAfee, Inc. He is responsible for Product management and strategy for datacenter solution. A visionary and technology enthusiast, he is also driving all Embedded Security Products Initiatives at McAfee. With over 12 years of diverse experience in product development and product management, he has a reputation for turning small ideas into successful market leading products.
In their General Session at 12th Cloud Expo, Kedar Poduri, Director of Product Management, Cloud Platform Group, at Citrix Systems, and Jonathan Cohen, Technology Solutions Business Development Professional at Alcatel-Lucent, discuss CloudBand, a joint cloud solution and architecture. Kedar Poduri is Director of Product Management, Cloud Platform Group, at Citrix Systems. Jonathan Cohen is a Technology Solutions Business Development Professional at Alcatel-Lucent. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
“With all the attacks that have been going on recently around the password where users are no long under threat individually but en masse, we decided to scrap the password and replace it with something visual,” explained Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO of Leeward Security Ltd, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Want the secret to user provisioning/de-provisioning in an enterprise setting, The one word answer,…Integration.The question is why, how & with what? The need to credential authorized users to your network and other proprietary assets is clear. You only want those with the proper rights in…and all others out. Complicating matters is that there are so many users these days…employees, channel partners, contract employees, suppliers, vendors, customers, prospects--all needing some sliver of access. Further muddying the water is that each of the mentioned user types are not all equal. Consider employees. Do you want your junior admin assistant to have access to payroll information or other files type specifically aimed at senior executives? The volunteer coordinator at a local branch of a national non-profit may need social media access to spread activity messaging, but probably doesn't need the log in credentials to ServiceNow.
Join us and guests Kim Celestre, Forrester Research Senior Analyst, and Bill Hussey, Manager of Developing Platforms at Bell Media, for this compelling educational webinar on Wednesday, August 21, 2013, at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. Kim will share Forrester's Total Economic Impact report to show you the specific, hard-dollar results businesses have driven by engaging customer communities with gamification. Forrester will provide real life data on how companies leveraging gamification have: Dramatically increased customer retention revenue Significantly lowered product support costs Sourced innovative ideas through the community From Bell Media, you will learn how they drove up registrations and fan engagement, ultimately driving greater value for advertisers and their brand.
Cloud computing’s promise is becoming reality, but cloud integration is an ongoing challenge. As the use of cloud applications spreads throughout the enterprise, there’s just no way to escape data exchange, change management, and related user issues. Why? The fact is, most top cloud and even enterprise software solutions require integration with other applications or data sources for optimal functionality and performance. Whether corporate performance and business management, CRM, ERP, or operational and transactional data analysis, an enormous number of applications benefit from being interconnected to maximize business value.
Over the last year there have been an influx of new graphical user interfaces (UIs) as monitoring and dashboard vendors scramble to keep up with large enterprises increasingly focused on understanding the business impact of IT, and Netuitive is no exception. Today’s enterprises are challenged with monitoring and interpreting increasing volumes of infrastructure performance, application data, and business metrics. Like Big Data, advanced predictive analytics have moved to the forefront for their ability to identify anomalies that could lead to business and revenue impacting performance problems. As such, the UIs visualization capabilities have become an increasingly important means to this end, and ultimately to proactive management of critical application performance. But to understand where the UI is now, and where it must go, one must look back at how APM use cases have evolved and changed.
ARM has cut a multi-year deal with Oracle to optimize the Java Platform Standard Edition for its 32-bit chips further and to add Java SE support to its v8 64-bit platforms expected to be used in servers. The company said the pact will focus on delivering throughput and efficient scalability to ARM-based multi-core systems. ARM also said, “This agreement reflects the increasing applicability of the combination of ARM and Oracle technology in server and network infrastructure. It also benefits emerging applications in the machine-to-machine, or M2M, market, such as industrial control, factory automation and single-board computers, where energy-efficient ARM technology is increasingly being deployed.”
Technology sure does make strange bedfellows. The federal government’s newest cloud service provider is one that may elicit surprise. It’s the same agency that oversees farm policy and food safety – the US Department of Agriculture. The USDA has been certified to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platforms as a Service (PaaS) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, a rigorous security-approval program overseen by the General Services Administration. The USDA now offers FedRAMP-certified cloud services to other federal agencies, as well as to state and local government, via its National Information Technology Center. It’s the latest example of an emerging cloud model, called shared clouds, in which one government agency gets the most from its data center resources by making them available to other agencies, according to an article on Forbes.com. The USDA offers virtualized desktops and servers, storage, networking, databases, and content management as cloud services.
In a previous article, I summarized that Gartner was seeing increased inquiries and spending on IT analytics platforms from buyers that traditionally purchased application performance monitoring tools. This suggested that one of Gartner's "five pillars of APM" - namely analytics, was taking center stage. Now, it seems, Gartner is going one step further in its forecast in a session at the recent Gartner Infrastructure & Operations Management Summit. I attended a session by Research VP Will Cappelli and was very interested in a Strategic Planning Assumption that was revealed. "By 2018, 25% of the Global 2000 will have deployed an ITOA platform taking data feeds from a variety of P&A systems up from 2% today and spending on IT operations analytics will account for 10% of the global spending on ITOM tools and services, up from less than 1% today"*
“SharePoint in the cloud – that is what we do in a nutshell. SharePoint is a complex platform and we try and simplify that by saying we’ll take care of it, we’ll put it out there in the cloud and we’ll manage it for you,”explainde Rob LaMear, CEO & Founder of Fpweb.net, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.
Five-year-old Big Data start-up Ayasdi, out only six months, has gotten B round funding worth $30.6 million led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) with newcomers GE Ventures and Citi Ventures kicking in as well as existing investors Khosla Ventures and Floodgate participating. That makes at least $42.6 altogether. IVP gets a board seat. Ayasdi’s built what it calls an Insight Discovery platform designed for domain experts and business people who are supposed to use it to automatically derive insights from complex data and “operationalize” them to help enterprises solve difficult and expensive problems. According to GE it can find a “needle in a haystack.” Its approach combines advanced machine learning techniques with a branch of mathematics called Topological Data Analysis (TDA) to discover insights without coding, scripting or querying manually.
As you may already know, SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY") is a new networking protocol introduced by Google and designed to reduce the web latency associated with HTTP. With SPDY, web pages load up to 64 percent faster than HTTP alone, according to Google. It accomplishes this by adding a session layer between HTTP and SSL that supports concurrent, interleaved streams over a single TCP connection. The initial draft of HTTP/2.0, the future of the web, is based on SPDY, which is a welcome step forward considering that HTTP/1.0 was released in 1996. SPDY holds great potential for mobile devices, for which latency is more of an issue, and the market is catching on. As evidence of this, Microsoft recently announced the next version of Internet Explorer will support the new protocol.
The very name is kind of ridiculous, don’t you think? The word “ephemeral” means it can go away. It’s temporary. Fleeting, even. So why would I want to depend on storing something in a medium that can disappear without warning? And why am I forced to buy more of it when all I want is more CPUs or RAM? Welcome to the paradox of ephemeral storage from cloud computing providers. Ephemeral storage exists only because of how first-generation cloud providers chunk up servers. The business model is simple: they buy a physical server and try to sell as many virtual machines (VMs) as possible on top of that physical server. Since the VMs are trapped on physical machines in this approach, first-generation providers dictate cookie-cutter sizes that make that stacking game easier for themselves.
The tweet from @sweetlew, a.k.a. New Relic CEO Lewis Cirne looked ordinary enough: Very excited to have @plscurrie join the @newrelic board! http://t.co/KEWab00wYY — Lew Cirne (@sweetlew) July 18, 2013 But Cirne's tweet sent a signal across Silicon Valley that his company is headed one way and one way only - on a fast track to an IPO.
Managing projects is not an easy job and in most cases the manager would greatly benefit from the use of a dedicated software. Starting from this necessity project management tools were created. But the main problem is if these tools are a real help for those that are using them or it is just a loss of time. It is a well-known fact that computers became a necessity in our lives by simplifying our work. Increased computational speed, huge memory and lack of fatigue are the main reasons why computers have so much success. Let’s admit it: in certain aspects robots are better that humans. So why not use them for such purposes? It is obtained an increased execution speed and accuracy. But all these come with one cost: time. Someone has to lose some time to teach computers how to do the job right.
Don’t correct me if you’ve heard this one before: Information wants to be free. The Internet, cloud services plus mobile devices offer limitless possibilities to experience this freedom. With Big Data, information wants to be relevant, too. There are now more mobile phones in the world than people, so querying and interacting with data has become ubiquitous and affordable. That vast ocean of structured and unstructured tidbits online is talking to us. Are we listening? The empowered consumer can discover nearly anything, anywhere and anytime with a few taps or clicks. Consumers will research what they might buy, often right at the store. And I’m not just talking about price comparisons. A potential buyer will do hardcore data sleuthing, looking into the brand’s history, scan reviews and seek out input from friends and family before ever putting anything into the shopping cart.
“We are a tier-1 carrier for the US. For the last year and a half we have been launching Infrastructure as a Service platforms and today we are announcing our enterprise cloud platform – it’s a network-centric cloud offering,” stated Tripp O'Hara, Managing Director, Cloud Solutions at XO Communications, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City. Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.