Book: Behind the Cloud
Now that Do More Faster is out and I appreciate how hard it is to write and publish a book, I read every book through a different (more appreciative) lens. This morning, I spent three hours on the coach and plowed through Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry. It was excellent.
Takeaways From the Facebook and Foursquare Outages
Poor data quality ‘concerning many businesses’
A large number of organisations are concerned about the effects poor data quality could have on their business.
According to recent research conducted by global independent software industry analyst the Business Application Research Center (BARC), data quality was named as the issue most concerning business intelligence application end users.
Barney Finucane, a BARC analyst and lead author of the survey, told the Computing website this year’s study is the first time in the annual report’s history that data quality has been in the top position.
Cloud Services—What’s Selling, Who’s Buying
Fujitsu launches Australian cloud services portal
According to Fujitsu, the ready accessibility of the portal overcomes the challenges otherwise blocking the adoption of cloud services at the enterprise level: security, border controls compliance issues, lock-ins and restricted licence options. Fujitsu claims the portal enables customers to adjust services and usage in real-time with actual pay per use.
Fujitsu claims to be the only vendor currently operating a true cloud environment for Australian customers with a single point of customer interaction for the provision and coordination of every type of cloud service.
Centrica plumbs into SaaS service desk
Gas and electricity utility Centrica has switched on an cloud-based service desk system from supplier Service-now.com.
The Service-now.com system was implemented with support from Fujitsu, which called it one of the most complex single phase implementations of the technology. Centrica already outsources application management to Fujitsu.
Indian outsourcer Tata offers cloud computing services
India’s Tata Communications is offering cloud based computing infrastructure services in India, with plans to extend the services to other markets including the US, Europe, Singapore and South Africa. The new InstaCompute service, launched on Thursday, takes advantage of Tata Communications’ investment in global communications infrastructure, managed services, and data centres, Vinod Kumar, president and COO of Tata Communications said at a press conference in Mumbai.
Ubuntu 10.10 desktop reaches through the cloud
The software, also known as Maverick Meerkat, will be versions 10.10 of the Linux distribution, the company said on Thursday. They will be available for free download from 10 October, sidestepping the usual Thursday release window to tie the launch in with the 10/10/10 date stamp.
Software-as-a-service solutions ‘enabling enterprise collaboration’
Software-as-a-service solutions are allowing companies to work more effectively while also cutting IT costs.
This is the suggestion of IT Pro Portal columnist James Nixon, who stated that such cloud-based services are helping to "revolutionise" technology for both personal and business users.
"Hosted apps known as ‘software-as-a-service’ … enable workers to collaborate, sharing documents and spreadsheets online," he pointed out.
Mr Nixon added that such offerings frequently have an impact on a company’s bottom line.
Heterogenous Mobile Computing Meets the Federated Cloud
Most people fail to realize that cloud computing was made for mobile computing devices. Just about every user of a mobile computing device touches a cloud service somewhere.
But all those cloud computing services are silos of data. Syncplicity, which offers a file-synchronization service for mobile computing devices, heralds a future when this issue will be overcome because files can be synchronized using a Syncplicity service hosted on an Amazon cloud and with GoogleDocs applications.