Cloud Computing and ‘Power to the People’
Like many consultants and others in the tech industry, I do a fair amount of travel. This past week, I was in London and New York City, and was struck by how prevalent the Cloud has become no matter where I go.
Banners promoting EMC’s cloud computing capabilities hung above the elevated walkway between central parking and the terminals at Boston’s Logan Airport (my home base) as I kicked off my travels. The first billboard greeting me as I drove out of Heathrow Airport was about the Cloud, courtesy of Microsoft.
An Unlikely Pairing: Analytics and Video
It is the nature of prognostications to be wide of the mark. The famous quip variously attributed to Bill Gates and nearly every other software entrepreneur is that we overestimate what we can do in a couple of years and underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.
Perhaps one reason for our inaccuracy—beyond that no one knows the future—is that we make straight-line extrapolations based on the present. It’s human nature to do so, but it explains our surprise when trends don’t last forever.
Cloud database services launched by Ingres
Database vendor Ingres is targeting public and private clouds, announcing on Wednesday three managed services for application development, storage and analytics.
The company’s new SkySafe platform includes a single repository for transactional, real-time or analytic data stores as well as an array of security features.
Along with SkySafe, Ingres announced SkyInsight, an analytics offering that uses its VectorWise analytic database technology.
Customers will be able to use the reporting and analysis tools of their choosing, according to the company.
Contract Vagueness Yet Another Cloud Computing Snag
Last month I wrote about how overly complex software licensing terms and conditions are emerging as a sticking point for cloud adoption. Most IT procurement organizations probably consider complexity a pretty familiar opponent, however, and at least have some ideas on how to deal with it when it shows up in negotiations accompanied by its trusty sidekick, legalese.
Public cloud computing ‘can suit growing mobile usage’
IT organisations are turning to public cloud computing services when they come to launch mobile applications designed for multiple devices.
According to Mike Vizard, a columnist for IT Business Edge, there is a growing market for these apps, with the cloud being viewed by many as a good system for hosting them.
"Because no one is actually sure how well or how popular a new mobile application is going to be, a lot of IT organisations see public clouds as the perfect place to deploy these applications," he said.
Physicists Build Single Atom Memory For Quantum Information
One of the building blocks for the next generation of quantum computing and communications systems is a way of storing and regenerating photonic qubits. These are generally encoded in the polarisation of photons.
To date, physicists have done this by transferring the qubit from a photon to an ensemble of quantum particles such as a crystal lattice or a small cloud of atoms.