Call Centers – Nothing New

Call centers themselves are nothing new. These have been used for decades in order to provide customers and clients with support when needed and assistance when needed. The ability to talk to a live operator is attractive for many people.

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Editorial Staff.

Snowflake Computing, a cloud data warehouse vendor, has closed a $100 million funding round as it aims to expand internationally. The company, built on Amazon Web Services, was founded in 2012 and has raised $205 million so far. The funding round was led by ICONIQ Capital and Madrona Venture Group and included its initial venture partners. Snowflake said it will build out its engineering team as it aims to take more on-premise data warehouse workloads. CEO Bob Muglia, a former Microsoft exec, said the funding will help Snowflake scale. I caught up with Muglia to talk shop. Among the key themes:

Building on Amazon Web Services. Snowflake’s cloud data warehouse service is built on AWS, which also competes via Redshift and other offerings. "AWS has treated us well. We compete with them obviously, but they are great partners," said Muglia. Translation: Netflix is built on AWS and competes with Amazon. Snowflake is a data warehouse spin on that theme…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/article/snowflake-computing-raises-100-million-to-expand-cloud-data-warehouse-footprint/

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Aaron Shelley.

The past decade has brought much change to the IT infrastructure industry as enterprise IT companies scale up their data consumption to unprecedented levels. Today’s enterprise IT giants require far more speed, power and bandwidth to successfully run their businesses and this is only possible via enhancements to the underlying infrastructure.

Infrastructure develops so quickly that industry practices in 2020 will likely be unrecognisable from what they were 10 years ago. Infrastructure has become more powerful, faster and more secure – and we have still only just scratched the surface of what’s possible. This article will examine some of the current trends within the industry as it stands, as well a look at what the future holds for IaaS in 2017…

Read more from the source @ https://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2017/apr/05/key-trends-cloud-infrastructure-hybrid-smart-storage-security-and-more/

Over the last two years, there have been articles in the press suggesting OpenStack is in trouble. These reports typically cite vendors who are exiting the market or laying off OpenStack employees. Clickbait headlines aside, the facts are clear: OpenStack deployments are growing. It is becoming a standard cloud platform in corporations of all sizes, and corporations are consistently growing their usage of OpenStack.

Rackspace is seeing a dramatic growth in customers’ usage of OpenStack as a de-facto platform for the private cloud market for many reasons including:

RightScale Inc., a demonstrated leader in enterprise cloud management, today announced RightScale Optima, a new standalone collaborative cloud cost management and optimization solution, which leverages RightScale’s decade of experience in multi-cloud management and automation. RightScale Optima streamlines collaboration across the enterprise by delivering cost-saving recommendations to the appropriate resource owners, enabling those resource owners to take automated actions, and tracking optimization progress across the entire organization.

"Because cloud use in the enterprise is decentralized, the biggest challenge in reducing cloud costs is the need for tight collaboration between cloud governance teams and the teams that own the cloud resources," said Torsten Volk, managing research director at analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). "EMA research shows that organizations are aware of this requirement, with organizations identifying "Collaboration" as the most significant area for cost savings."

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Lauren Gibbons Paul.

One difficulty of planning to move your ERP to the cloud: The term is largely a marketing creation. Depending on who’s doing the talking, cloud can mean many different things. No wonder there is still a lot of confusion about the different types of cloud computing. "Cloud is more of a branding and marketing apparatus for the industry to package services in a consumable way," than it is a term with concrete meaning, said Stephen Moss, senior vice president of managed technologies at PCM, an IT services provider.

Chris LeBeau, director of IT at Advanced Technology Services chimed in, "Many people are still confused, and sometimes fooled, by deployment options that vendors slap the cloud buzzword on, but [which] are really the old hosting model that simply takes what might have been on-premises and puts it in the vendor’s data center."…

Read more from the source @ http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/feature/Cloud-ERP-move-requires-grasp-of-different-types-of-cloud-computing

Grazed from YahooFinance. Author: Parth Panchal.

“The cloud” and “cloud computing” have become incredible buzzwords. It seems most people are floating around the idea, as the term ambiguously suggests, but don’t seem to have a grasp on how the cloud functions. Believed to be invented by American psychologist and computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider in the 1960’s, cloud computing was created to connect data for people between locations and times. Now, this technology has vastly grown and made publicly available by industry leaders Amazon AMZN and Microsoft MSFT.

What is the Cloud?

In basic terms, cloud computing is accessing and storing data over the Internet. To the end user, benefits of the cloud include: the ability to deliver and manage their own computer resources, scale up or scale down computing levels as needed, and only pay for the amount of computing power they use…

Read more from the source @ http://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-microsoft-cloud-computing-leaders-225510080.html

VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility, and OVH, a global hyper-scale cloud provider, today announced OVH intends to acquire VMware vCloud Air business. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.  The transaction is expected close in calendar 2Q 2017.

vCloud Air is VMware’s cloud offering based on the software-driven data center and designed specifically to meet enterprise needs delivering a secure, hybrid cloud experience.  The recent introduction of bi-directional, zero downtime cloud migration and the hybrid DMZ architecture has enabled our customers to accelerate the pace of migration to the cloud, while maintaining security, compliance and control. Since its inception, vCloud Air has serviced industry leading customers as they embrace a hybrid cloud environment.

VMware has evolved its business strategy to focus on providing hybrid an cross-cloud software and services.  Given this evolution, VMware is transitioning vCloud Air U.S. and European data centers, customer operations, and customer success teams to OVH.  After the close of the acquisition, OVH will operate the service as vCloud Air Powered by OVH, will continue to leverage VMware’s hybrid cloud technology, and will closely partner with VMware on go-to-market and customer support around the three proven vCloud Air use cases: data center extension, data center consolidation, and data center recovery.

Ixia, a leading provider of network testing, visibility, and security solutions, today announced it has further extended the reach delivered by the CloudLens Platform to the public cloud.  CloudLens Public provides Visibility-as-a-Service (VaaS) and is the first to be implemented as a pure Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. It is designed from the ground up to retain the benefits of the cloud – elastic scale, flexibility, and agility. CloudLens Public provides intelligent and automated visibility as a service that scales with public cloud infrastructures.

Access to application and network data in cloud environments is critical for security and monitoring tools to ensure the reliability, security, and performance of mission-critical applications. Granular access to cloud traffic is important to avoiding blind spots in a network that can compromise application monitoring, as well as overall security.

Ixia has extended the benefits of the company’s CloudLens Platform to enable customers to capture and filter data in the public cloud. Designed as a SaaS platform, it does all the heavy lifting behind the scenes, freeing customers from managing visibility.  

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, today announced that it plans to open an infrastructure region in Sweden in 2018. The new AWS EU (Stockholm) Region will comprise of three Availability Zones at launch. Currently, AWS provides 42 Availability Zones across 16 infrastructure regions worldwide, with another five Availability Zones, across two AWS Regions in France and China, expected to come online this year. For more information on AWS’s global infrastructure, go to https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/.

"For over a decade, we’ve had a large number of Nordic customers building their businesses on AWS because we have much broader functionality than any other cloud provider, a significantly larger partner and customer ecosystem, and unmatched maturity, reliability, security, and performance," said Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS. "The Nordic’s most successful startups, including iZettle, King, Mojang, and Supercell, as well as some of the most respected enterprises in the world, such as IKEA, Nokia, Scania, and Telenor, depend on AWS to run their businesses, enabling them to be more agile and responsive to their customers. An AWS Region in Stockholm enables Swedish and Nordic customers, with local latency or data sovereignty requirements, to move the rest of their applications to AWS and enjoy cost and agility advantages across their entire application portfolio."