Category: News

interviews with Regional lead Microsoft office and Regional Managing Director SAP outlined the future of the business community with regard to corporate IT infrastructure. The premier highlights were the advent of cloud computing and the increased use of mobile computing.

Darren Rushworth, Regional Managing Director SAP, in an interview, pointed towards three developments in IT in the next five years; firstly, increased use of mobile computing which will diminish the usage of traditional laptops and desktops. The growing prominence of smartphones and related devices is a testament to this prophecy…

A paper released this year, “Enterprise Risk Management for Cloud Computing,” produced by Crowe Horwath L.L.P. for the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission, stressed the importance of a well-developed plan setting out the organization’s cloud computing objectives and the specific role cloud computing will play.

“Some of the ERM prerequisites that should be factored into a quality cloud computing plan, and ultimately the cloud solution, are a strong governance model, a sound reporting structure, an accurate understanding of internal IT skills and abilities, and a defined risk appetite,” the paper said…

Two Los Angeles cloud computing firm have joined the new Openstack Foundation, an industry group looking to promote the open cloud computing system spawned out of Rackspace. Los Angeles-based Dreamhost, and Los Angeles cloud computing software firm Morphlabs both said this week that they have become founding Gold members of the new group.

The foundation said it will help the development, distribution and adoption of the OpenStack cloud software. OpenStack is a set of cloud-based software which can be used to host private and public clouds; the idea behind the software is to make it easier for cloud computing users to migrate or tap into multiple, cloud hosting firms with their software, rather than being locked into a proprietary cloud…

Google’s servers refresh 20 billion pages a day, process over 100 billion search queries a month, provide email for 425 million Gmail users and process 72 hours of video uploaded per minute to YouTube. And yet we’re able to do all that work with relatively little energy, compared to other industries.

Data centers are responsible for between 1.1 and 1.5 percent of global energy use (compare that to transportation at 25 percent), and Google’s data centers are less than a percent of that. It’s a testament to the almost unimaginable improvements in computing power per watt that Moore’s Law has brought us over the past decades. Searching virtually all the world’s online information for a billion users with just 0.01 percent of global energy use illustrates how much less energy it takes to move electrons (information) than atoms (physical things)…

A new division, headed by Saar Gillai, is charged with weaving the disparate pieces of HP’s cloud strategy and together, according to the report which cites an internal HP memo as its source. One of HP’s problems has long been that it fields a diverse and sometimes incomprehensible array of products and services. That may have been fine when HP was top dog and could sell anything. Now, that lack of clarity is a serious problem for a company that’s been trying to downsize its way to profitability. (HP will cut 29,000 jobs before October 2014.)…

Oracle will announce a new IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) offering at the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, CEO Larry Ellison said on Thursday.

The service will provide customers with access to secure, virtualised compute power hosted in an Oracle data centre, Ellison said. Oracle will also sell software for customers to build "identical services" in their own data centers, allowing them to move workloads back and forth between the public and private clouds, he said…

Why use open source for building and designing cloud? Because open-source software stacks offer a huge amount of customizeability so the cloud you build actually does what you need it to do — and without huge licensing fees.  How can open-source cloud management tools like Eucalyptus, CloudStack, OpenStack and OpenNebula (the European open-source cloud effort of which I am director) impact the adoption of cloud technology?  I see it happening in a few broad ways.

Lowering the barrier to entry

First, most organizations adopt cloud to optimize their IT investment, to improve existing services or to support new business and service models. In this scenario, open-source lowers the barriers for new organizations to build their private cloud. Many organizations have adopted OpenNebula to build their private cloud. Some are very small clouds with tens of hosts, some are very large infrastructures composed of several data centers. In many of these cases, paying license fees for commercial software was simply not an option. In such cases, the choice comes down to open source cloud or no cloud at all…

Salesforce has helped revolutionize cloud computing for business, and its social media and collaborative technologies help advance business processes in sales, customer service and improve the interactions between employees, partners and customers. Salesforce has made great advancements in cloud, social and mobile technology, as I have assessed and my colleague did too.

I thought Dreamforce would be a good time to investigate the state of its analytics that have been evolving since last year. I have spent the last couple of decades in the analytics industry across business and IT and thought it might be useful to provide objective analysis on Salesforce Analytics so I went to educational sessions on the products and demonstrations of their software and use by customers. I also have noted in my analysis from the 2011 Dreamforce event that they needed to improve and was not one of its strengths. The role of business analytics is critical for Salesforce’s entire software portfolio, and especially for software within sales organizations, of which almost two-thirds (64%) plan to improve their sales analytics…