“In AppZero what we do is we pick up applications and move them from one machine to another and the cloud context is the big use case is to move stuff from the data center to the cloud,” explained Greg O'Connor, President & CEO of AppZero, 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.
Ten years from now software developers will commute to work only if they’re invited to a corporate party or they have to work for an old fashioned client. Software professionals (not the average 9-to-5 workers) will have a freedom to equip home office to their taste. In our company we already work in this mode [...]
The killer in any IT operation is unplanned work. Unplanned work may go by many names: firefighting, war rooms, Sev 1 incidents. The bottom line is that Operations must stop whatever planned work it was doing to manage this drill. This means little or no normal work is being accomplished. It is a scenario most of you will be familiar with: your application servers are humming along happily until suddenly, without an obvious reason, memory usage starts to increase, soon followed by longer garbage collection suspensions that finally force you to restart the application. The operations team is typically unaware of the actual impact on end users (other than a service being down), and it additionally lacks data and time to further investigate the issue. As communication between the traditional silos of operations, testing and development teams is often less than ideal, a scheduled restart in a “low impact” timeframe is often the easiest solution and turns into something resembling a “Production Best Practice” over time. This adds to the workload of an operations team because unplanned work becomes unnecessary preventative work. It also becomes a suspect every time there is a problem with the application. Wouldn’t it be better to actually fix the issues instead of just working around them? Shouldn’t there be a general understanding across all teams responsible for an application to fix the problem as fast as possible and make sure that it’s prevented in the future?
“Cloud is not so much about a place, it’s about a way of delivering and handling these very dynamic, very large scale computing environments,” stated Kevin Brown, CEO of Coraid, 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.
All too often organizations start with an answer while being unclear on what the question is. Case in point: the US government’s Cloud First initiative. Originally part of former Federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s 25-Point Plan to Reform Federal IT Management, Cloud First called for government agencies to move three existing applications to the Cloud and consider Cloud for any new IT initiatives. Why they would want to take such actions, other than simply to comply with the initiative, wasn’t clear. In other words, the answer was Cloud First. But what was the question?
It is common to see providers deploy cloud instances using automation, but what happens when these same principles are applied to the provisioning of the infrastructure? In his General Session at 12th Cloud Expo, Jean-Sebastien Bruneau, Cloud Architect at OVH.com, provides insider information on how OVH, winner of the VMware Global Partner Network Award 2013, can make automation work to provide IaaS that scales within minutes. Jean-Sebastien Bruneau is Cloud Architect at OVH.com. Based in Canada, he joined the team not long after OVH.com opened its first North American Datacenter and has been working his “Cloud-Fu” since. He divides his time evangelising, facilitating customers’ onboarding and leading the internal cloud training program.
Today four converging IT trends are changing the IT paradigm and will forever change the way businesses communicate, collaborate, store and manage information. Each on its own would have significant impact without the others. However, combined together, they are a disruptive force. They are: Mobile devices (BYOD) are becoming a universal portal for individual access to personal and business information. Social media has moved beyond its initial use case (our kids) to infiltrate businesses for data access, business collaboration, Business to Consumer and more recently Business to Business communication. Information growth (volume) with rapid access (velocity) from multiple sources (variety) continues unabated and is enabling ‘Big Data’ as predicted a few years ago. Cloud is becoming increasingly more mainstream from a compute, data retention and access perspective, enabling global information access.
Big Data has existed since the early days of computing; why, then, is such an industry buzz around it right now? In this Big Data Power Panel at the 3rd International Big Data Expo, moderated by Big Data Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan, Cory Isaacson, CEO/CTO of CodeFutures Corporation; Sam Bisbee, Director of Technical Business Development at Cloudant; Sanjay Sharma, Principal Architect at Impetus; and Jason Mondanaro, Director of Product Management, Metanga, at MetraTech Corp discuss this topic and more. 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.
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.
Apple only has 10 more days before an International Trade Commission’s import ban on the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 2 and earlier takes effect on Monday, August 5. That is unless the White House vetoes it, something that hasn’t happened since President Reagan over 25 years ago, or, in a pinch, like now, by the Court of Appeals. Two months ago the ITC found that the widgets violate a Samsung standards-essential encoding patent. In a recent filing with ITC seeking a stay, Apple said that the ban will “sweep away an entire segment of Apple’s product offering.” There’s still pretty lively traffic in the older widgets.
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.
Apple only has 10 more days before an International Trade Commission’s import ban on the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad 2 and earlier takes effect on Monday, August 5. That is unless the White House vetoes it, something that hasn’t happened since President Reagan over 25 years ago, or, in a pinch, like now, by the Court of Appeals. Two months ago the ITC found that the widgets violate a Samsung standards-essential encoding patent. In a recent filing with ITC seeking a stay, Apple said that the ban will “sweep away an entire segment of Apple’s product offering.” There’s still pretty lively traffic in the older widgets.
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.”