Grazed from SMI.  Author: Event Announcement.

Competition between the telecoms industry’s cable and fixed line, mobile network operators and mobile virtual network operators has never been greater. While there is ever more choice on availability of devices and network band combined with tariff structures for every conceivable need, such differences between suppliers are soon dissipated. Telecoms companies are, more than ever before, in need of finding new ways of differentiating their respective offerings.

The latest strategy being pursued to meet the challenge of the commoditisation of mobile services is that of driving customer experience as a point of difference. As today’s customers social media use goes into overdrive fixed line operators, MNOs and MVNOs now need to look to social media to deliver the type of differentiated experiences that translate to long-term customer loyalty…

Grazed from TMCNet.  Author: Event Announcement.

ITEXPO, to be held in August 11-14, 2014, in Las Vegas, is the event with an educational program that teaches resellers, enterprises, SMBs, and Government Agencies how to select IP-based voice, video, fax, and unified communications to purchase or resell.

It’s where service providers learn how to profitably roll out services their subscribers are clamoring for. ITEXPO is where buyers, sellers, resellers, and manufacturers meet to forge relationships and close deals…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud computing prices for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) continue to plummet. Maybe it’s an exaggeration, but it sometimes seems like Amazon Web Services (AWS) is hitting new pricing lows on a weekly basis, and other IaaS providers aren’t pulling any punches, either. So can other IaaS providers compete on price when Amazon (AMZN), Google Cloud (GOOG) and Microsoft Azure (MSFT) are on a constant pricing downslide?

CenturyLink (CTL), which has competed in the market largely through its previously named Savvis brand, thinks it can. Whereas others in the space, such as Rackspace (RAX), have chosen not to play the neverending game of cloud pricing limbo (how low can you go?), CenturyLink is poised to follow suit and fight the incumbents on what has become a common battleground—the almighty dollar…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Nick Hardiman.

WordPress is a popular CMS written in PHP that powers websites around the world. The factory settings for WordPress provide a blogging site aimed at individuals. With some work, WordPress can be configured for many uses, from intranet to e-commerce. It’s meant for B2C transactions — that is, websites used by people. WordPress is not used for B2B web service work like behind-the-scenes information exchange.

WordPress isn’t enterprise-friendly out of the box. It requires plenty of architecture work, adding plug-in extensions and theme work to match it to business needs. WordPress isn’t the most developer-friendly either, although how a developer defines "friendly" has more in common with religious belief than with social comparison. Should WordPress be taken seriously for use in the enterprise? How well does it work in an enterprise cloud computing environment?…

Grazed from CloudWorldSeries.  Author: Event Announcement.

AS THE ONLY BIG DATA event covering ALL of Latin & South America and with an outstanding agenda and speaker line-up , the Big Data LATAM Congress is the platform for the authorities to present their “how-to” strategies for dealing with and profiting from the rise of ‘infinite’ big data.

With many countries in the region quickly emerging as global leaders in Data Generation, this is a market with huge growth potential; from Brazil to Mexico to Argentina, emerging markets are quickly making an impact in the big data analytics space…

Grazed from IIR Telecoms & Technology.  Author: Event Announcement.

Software Defined Networking & Network Functions Virtualisation will fundamentally redefine how service providers across the world manage and deploy services across the network.  The industry metamorphosis towards virtual and software based networking platforms has been gaining significant momentum over the last 3 years. 2014 has seen an increase in Proof of Concept and lab trials undertaken between vendors and service providers.

Across the remainder of the year, and going in to 2015, there is widely anticipated uptake and deployment of SDN enabled networks and NFV based services in an increasing number of service providers. In previous years, the biggest question in the industry has been “what is SDN? What is NFV?”. The fundamental principal of both is now more commonly understood and acknowledged within the industry, and the forthcoming 18 months will see a shift in emphasis from “what is” to “how”…

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

When I was started work, many years ago, the IBM360 ruled the computing universe and networks, even on-premise networks, were almost non-existent. Part of my job as a university laboratory technician was to trot across the campus every afternoon with a computer program represented on a stack of punched cards and offer these up at the great IBM 360. The following day I would go and collect the cogitations of this colossus, spelt out on reams of computer print out.

Then one day that task disappeared overnight: terminals were installed in my department that read the cards and transmitted the data electronically to the IBM360. I tell this tale to reinforce these comments by Peter Coffee of Salesforce.com blogging on GigaOM to argue that the age of cloud has well and truly arrived and the era of dedicated, on-premise hardware is well and truly over…

Grazed from Gravitant. Author: PR Announcement.

Gravitant announced that it has integrated its cloudMatrix cloud brokerage and management applications with ServiceNow’s service request portal. This capability will be demonstrated at Knowledge 14. With this integration, ServiceNow customers can:

• Enable their IT organizations to become service brokers that can deliver services at the speed of cloud while still maintaining governance and control.
• Extend their ServiceNow catalog to become a dynamic IT-as-a-Service Catalog.
• Extend ticket-taking workflows with new cloud solutions, procurement and governance apps from Gravitant, which are critical to cloud consumption and governance.
• Match their application and business needs to the best-fit cloud provider from a broad ecosystem…

Grazed from CDMMedia.  Author: Event Announcement.

The CIO GAS Summit, to be held on September 17, 2014, is a unique opportunity for the region’s greatest IT thinkers to collaborate on current industry challenges and trends. Attending CIOs and IT executives engage in peer-on-peer networking, whilst discussing the issues currently affecting CIOs from a variety of industries.

Here are a few topics to be discussed:

• Cloud Computing as a Transformational Business Enabler
• DBaaS (Database as a Service)
• Network Functions Virtualisation
• Big Data – Storing & Protecting Your Most Valuable Assets
• Securing Your Business for Mobility, Cloud Apps and Social Media…

Grazed from ODCA.  Author: Event Announcement.

Forecast is the Open Data Center Alliance’s flagship conference created by enterprise IT executives for enterprise IT executives. With topics scoping the latest best practices and emerging challenges facing enterprise cloud deployments and top opportunities in business analytics, Forecast delivers a wealth of new content, unparalleled networking opportunities, and insight on deepening engagement with the ODCA under one roof.

Now in its third year, Forecast 2014 is regarded as a destination conference for honing IT strategy, discovering solutions and services that meet business needs, and delivering real results to your company’s business…