May 7, 2013
Is it time to change your social platform?
CloudCow Contributed Article. Author: Evelyn Watts, PMM – Dell Software
In the long, long ago when social media was shiny and new, and people were MySpacing and AOLing with wild abandon, enterprises were trying to figure out what "Web 2.0" would actually mean for their business. New social tools, online applications and interactive websites with user-generated content were becoming very popular, and more and more employees were accessing these tools in their day-to-day workflow. Instant messages instead of email, blogs and wikis instead of static updates, cloud storage and file-sharing instead of networks and FTP ─ it was all changing.
Naturally, every new product or technology has early adopters, and those companies who jumped on board and opted for an enterprise social platform were definitely forward thinkers. The advantages of having an entire workforce communicating and collaborating in the same familiar environment, with the ability to share content, connect easily with other teams to share ideas and innovate quickly provided a huge competitive advantage.
Naturally, every new product or technology has early adopters, and those companies who jumped on board and opted for an enterprise social platform were definitely forward thinkers. The advantages of having an entire workforce communicating and collaborating in the same familiar environment, with the ability to share content, connect easily with other teams to share ideas and innovate quickly provided a huge competitive advantage.
At any given moment, Netflix Inc. is serving up thousands if not millions of videos online that are hosted in a big data center that the company’s 33 million subscribers couldn’t care less about as long as those shows run immediately on demand.
Dell announced on Monday it will acquire Enstratius, an enterprise cloud management software firm, for an undisclosed amount. Founded in 2008, Enstratius offers cloud management services to hybrid and single-cloud customers as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that sits either as a hosted service or within the network. By embracing a "cloud agnostic" platform, the technology works with both Dell and non-Dell customers, including OpenStack, Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon Web Services, VMware and Rackspace, just to name a few.
Sprint (NYSE: S) is taking its partnership with CSC to another level with the introduction of its new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) service called CloudCompute. The new service, which couples CSC’s utility-based cloud computing solution with Sprint’s Global MPLS network, has been designed to provide its mid-sized domestic customers a path to cloud services.
The Debian Project has released the finalised version 7.0 of its latest free operating system distribution, with tools to set up private clouds built into it. Code-named Wheezy, Debian 7.0 provides testing packages for the open source OpenStack cloud operating system, and also the Xen Cloud Platform enterprise server virtualisation and cloud computing platform.
I’ve been using Chrome OS since the Chromium project was in beta, when I tested out the CR-48 for the Chromebook pilot testing program. This time, I took about two months to completely road test the Chromebook Pixel, Google’s latest hardware for Chrome OS. I tested the ‘cloud laptop’, with the help of my son in two natural computing environments: work and school. For this review, my testing focused on what you can do on the Chromebook Pixel, using apps on Chrome OS to complete everyday computing (and not so everyday development) tasks. During two months of testing, I used the Chromebook Pixel for my writing work, and my son used the unit for his school work.
Four years after becoming the first account reconciliation/financial close software provider to successfully complete a SAS 70 (now Statement on Standards for Attestation Engagements No. 16 or SSAE 16 SOC 1) audit, the internationally recognized standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) to set guidelines for auditors to use in order to objectively assess the internal controls of service organizations, BlackLine Systems is now also first in its space to successfully complete a SOC 2 Type 2 examination – adding even greater focus on controls related to the security and availability of the BlackLine Financial Close Suite, and demonstrating the operating effectiveness of these controls over the entire period of the audit.
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