In the Age of Cloud Computing and BYOD, Does the Client Even Matter?
Grazed from SQLMag. Author: Michael Otay.
Today, IT is on the brink of a couple of important evolutionary—maybe even revolutionary—steps. At one end of the spectrum, there’s the cloud. The cloud represents a return to a more centralized computing model, in which a cloud provider delivers the control of massive amounts of computing power. At the complete opposite end of the spectrum is the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, in which end users want to choose and use their own low-powered phones, devices, and tablets to access both their corporate resources and their personal data. It’s ironic that these two seemingly opposite trends are developing at the same time. One is about massive scalability and relinquishing control, and the other is about individual choice and personal control.
Slow Going and Fast Moving
The trend toward the cloud is a much slower-growing movement because of a number of factors, including security and the inherent difficulty of changing infrastructure services. However, the proliferation of end user devices in business environments is exploding just as the number of small-form-factor devices is exploding worldwide. The BYOD trend was initially kicked off by Apple’s iPhone, which quickly usurped the then-predominant BlackBerry…
Here’s a point of view: It is now clear that there is a dividing line between MSPs that have a legacy cost structure driven by investments in hardware and people to manage those environments and newer MSPs that have an altogether different cost structure due to investing in cloud-centric solutions. Some in the prior camp will successfully transition their businesses into an annuity cloud business, but the majority will not. The leap is just too significant.
RackWare, the company that brings intelligence and automation to the cloud by integrating data center and cloud resources into a scalable and intelligently managed computing environment, today announced that it will demonstrate its RMM 2.0 software for cloud management in the Savvis, a CenturyLink company, booth at VMworld in San Francisco.
RiverMeadow Software™ Inc., developer of the world’s only automated server migration solution developed specifically for carrier and service provider clouds, will be sponsoring free server migrations into VMware vCloud® Hybrid Service™, using the RiverMeadow Cloud Migration SaaS portal, at VMworld® 2013. The RiverMeadow Cloud Migration SaaS platform represents a simple, automated and customizable approach to onboarding and migrating physical, virtual and cloud-based server workloads into VMware vCloud Hybrid Service environments.
RingCentral, which provides cloud-based phone systems to small businesses, filed on Monday with the SEC to raise up to $100 million in an initial public offering. The San Mateo, CA-based company, which was founded in 1999 and booked $136 million in sales for the 12 months ended June 30, 2013, plans to list under the symbol RNG, but has yet to announce an exchange. RingCentral initially filed confidentially on June 24, 2013. Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and BofA Merrill Lynch are the joint bookrunners on the deal. No pricing terms were disclosed.
Salesforce.com’s next CRM (customer relationship management) software release will contain a slew of new features, with many focused on the Chatter collaboration and messaging tool as well as customer service, according to a set of official release notes. Many new features associated with Chatter concern usability and access to the system. For example, now iOS device users will be able to launch Chatter Mobile from their Salesforce.com email.
Today at VMworld 2013, Dell announced new cloud and virtualization solutions to help customers deliver increased performance, agility and efficiency. The new end-to-end offerings demonstrate the breadth of the Dell and VMware integrations and strength of the partnership.
Hewlett-Packard has introduced a cloud service around SAP’s HANA in-memory database, targeting customers who want to analyse Big Data. Called HP As-a-Service Solution for SAP HANA, it will be available worldwide, but initial roll out is for Australia and New Zealand, HP has said.