Cisco, EMC and VMware Going Orange
The cloud is getting an infusion of color thanks to a new global alliance among Cisco, EMC, VMware and Orange Business Services. Orange, a global IT service provider, is a unit of France Telecom.
With the new alliance, Orange is aiming to deliver a turnkey managed private cloud approach to users around the world, leveraging technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware. The new Flexible 4 Business alliance builds on the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition that Cisco, EMC and VMware forged in 2009.
Cloud computing can be integrated with existing management processes
While cloud computing appeals to startups and small businesses due to its responsiveness and the way it avoids capital expenditure, larger organisations need to blend it with their existing IT practices, Herb VanHook, vice president of strategy at BMC, told iTWire.
Such organisations want to adopt the dynamic, self-service, agile model that cloud offers, while retaining their existing request management, change management and software release management systems. For example, a self-service request for a particular function should generate a change ticket which is automatically closed when the function is delivered.
A Cleaner Printout, with Some Extra Ads
What is the Private Cloud?
It’s no big surprise that people are still asking, "What is the cloud?" A concept this broad and with so many ramifications for all manner of enterprise architecture cannot possibly confine itself to any easy definition.
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Corporate cloud adoption still faces obstacles
Organisations adopting cloud computing – whether internal, external or hybrid – still face a number of problems, according to Herb VanHook, vice president of strategy at BMC.
"Not all cloud providers are created equal," he said, referring to fundamental differences in their offerings, such as the way Rackspace will supply a bare virtual machine but Amazon will not. Furthermore, providers have their own APIs, and BMC’s management software can only abstract them to the extent the services are similar. This makes workload portability challenging.
Infrastructure, Data Integrations Huge for Hybrid Clouds
Right now, there’s a lot of focus on the public cloud versus private clouds, but there’s a good chance that long term, organizations will want to embrace both. And why not? There are some things you want to keep in-house, but certainly being able to acquire a bit of extra boost from a public cloud would be a nice cost-cutting feature.
Admittedly, this is a model few are capable of considering at this point. But it’s worth remembering, whether you’re trying public or private, that at some point, you may want to have both.
The Greening of CRM
I’ve been writing about sustainability as a natural outgrowth of CRM for a couple of years now. I know it takes time to refine a message—and, since the message of sustainability represents a major market turn, it has to be done right. But there’s been scant progress thus far, and certainly not enough.
By “sustainability” I mean using CRM to help organizations reduce the cost of business processes and increase revenues along three specific dimensions: