Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

At Oracle OpenWorld last week, Oracle CEO — er  CTO and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison — once again vowed that his company will be king of cloud — in SaaS, Paas, IaaS — you name it.

That’s a tall order but one coming from a company flush in resources which has shown itself willing to buy into new markets. And Ellison and co-CEOs Safra Catz and Mark Hurd trotted out news that Oracle now offers its flagship Database as a Service. Ditto Java as a Service. As for those resources, over the past 12 months, Oracle logged $35.8 billion in revenue and gross profit of $31.4 billion. See what I mean?…

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Ilya Golubovich.

In 2018, a group of organizations from all of the world will begin construction of the largest radio telescope ever built, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).  With one million square meters of collecting area and enough optical fiber to wrap around the Earth twice, this marvel of modern engineering will be sensitive enough to detect airport radar on a planet 50 light years away.

SKA will also generate 700 terabytes of data every second, equivalent to roughly 35 times the data stored in the Library of Congress. At full capacity, the SKA’s aperture arrays are expected to produce 100 times more data than the entire Internet. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that such a deluge of information creates a big data problem, perhaps the biggest we have ever encountered…

Grazed from Economic Times.  Author: Dharmesh Godha.

The role of IT is not just limited to keeping the lights on. IT is also responsible to continuously provide solutions to enhance the business capabilities and to support business processes.

With the evolution of mobile devices and cloud computing the solution architects/ designers now need to expand their thought process and at the same time take care of new factors. The cloud computing provides new possibilities of capabilities that business solutions can provide.   The mobile devices can now be end points and part of the solutions to make it more available and convenient to use.  Before jumping in to create various solutions in the new evolving paradigm the solution architect/designer should consider the following:…

Grazed from Technology.co.uk.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

Cloud adoption has moved beyond the tipping point, and enterprises are driving the trend. By 2017, enterprises will spend £142billion globally on infrastructure and cloud-related services, predicts market research firm IHS. According to a Frost and Sullivan survey of CIOs, a cloud-ready network is the biggest infrastructure element needed for further deployment of cloud-based services.

A fundamental requirement for realising the benefits of cloud computing is high performance network connectivity.  CIOs should consider three key elements when evaluating potential network-connectivity solutions and partners…

Grazed from TheTrademarkCompany.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Size matters in the computer industry, or at least that’s what we were once told.  Computer hard drives once could be measured in megabytes.  But as the size of programs and operating systems grew they moved to gigabytes.  Soon we were told we would need to have storage measured in terabytes to accommodate the latest programs.  But then along came the cloud and size, at least on your home or business devices, was no longer as significant of an issue.

In the past few years cloud computing has swept across the technology industry offering the solution to our programs insatiable need for more and more bytes.  Hand-in-hand with this remedy, cloud computing also purports to provide greater security for your data in the form of redundant servers constantly backing up the same.  Not surprisingly, with the wave of cloud computing there has been a veritable gold rush to register trademarks to identify respective companies’ cloud computing goods and services…

Grazed from CloudComputingToday.  Author: Arnal Dayaratna.

In a stunning announcement, Joshua McKenty, co-creator of OpenStack and co-founder and CTO of Piston Cloud Computing (Piston), revealed this week that he has accepted a position at Pivotal as field CTO. McKenty transitions to Pivotal after a three year stint at commercial OpenStack vendor Piston, during which time he was central to raising approximately $20M in capital, growing the team by a factor of 15 and increasing sales by a multiplier of 1000.

McKenty helped build Piston from a “fledgling startup” into “a real business with an incredible group of customers, an established leadership team, and a mature product” as noted in a blog post reflecting on his tenure at Piston. More importantly, however, McKenty served as an OpenStack evangelist that demonstrated the commercial viability of OpenStack as a prominent alternative to proprietary Infrastructure as a Service technologies such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure…

Grazed from Datamation.   Author: Editorial Staff.

Two of the chief values for the cloud are speed and agility. Cloud orchestration and automation tools promise to allow IT organizations to move significantly faster and become more competitive as service organizations. While orchestration tools typically do a great job of deploying applications flexibly once virtualization is in place, the underlying (or horrors—the non-virtualized and legacy) infrastructure is not very agile or automated.

People are not addressing this head on. Instead, a lot of hand waving has been done at physical infrastructure issues, and it’s the Achilles’ heel of IT when trying to get agile. However, it doesn’t have to be this way…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Naagesh Padmanaban.

In the last few weeks we have seen new products launched by IT majors that have the potential to greatly influence the fortunes of the Analytics and Insights business. IBM’s Watson Analytics and Oracle’s Cloud based Analytics are just two new solutions/ platforms that have hit the market. We can rest assured that many more such offerings will be launched in the coming weeks. As the products keep coming, they raise some important question for the analytics industry. What impact they will have? Is the Analytics & Insights business ready for these changes at all?

It is almost two weeks since Big Blue launched its Watson Analytics. It is a natural language-based cognitive service that can provide businesses instant access to powerful predictive insights and cool reports. Launched as a freemium service, it will provide predictive insights for a small fee and hopes to leapfrog user base…

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Joab Jackson.

Sometimes the best path to success is to learn how to avoid failure.  Netflix was able to keep serving its customers while its cloud hosting provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), rebooted servers, because it had prepared for that happening.

"When we got the news about the emergency EC2 [Elastic Cloud Compute] reboots, our jaws dropped. When we got the list of how many Cassandra nodes would be affected, I felt ill," said Christos Kalantzis, Netflix engineering manager of cloud database engineering, in a Netflix blog post discussing the outage…

Grazed from WallStreet and Tech.  Author: Becca Lipman.

Skyhigh Networks assembles a board of cryptography experts to consider a range of academically vetted cryptographic solutions that do not reduce functionality.  A group of accomplished experts in cryptography research have announced they are forming what is believed to be the first industry-focused Cryptography Advisory Board. The board will provide oversight of encryption schemes for cloud security to ease the adoption of cloud services.



Data security continues to be one of the major hurdles preventing companies from moving data to the cloud, and for good reason. Enterprises worry about cloud data breaches, NSA surveillance, and court orders that can subpoena documents holding sensitive information (with which many cloud providers willingly comply). Increasingly, firms want to secure files with encryption to hinder outside parties who access sensitive documents from being able to read them...