Category: News

The Shift to Subscription Only Services

The traditional model of selling computer games was selling a cartridge or DVD from which someone installed the game. World of Warcraft became incredibly profitable by offering an immersive, interactive experience for around $20 a month, every month for years. Minecraft offers subscription based versions and server rentals for those who want to run their own, custom Minecraft worlds. Contrarily to Roblox, for instance. In this case, they make money off both subscriptions and renting virtual servers. After being bought by Microsoft in 2014, the company also started selling games for the Xbox, a rare example of a cloud based game becoming a hybrid product available both via the cloud and the traditional installation disk. If you want a complete rundown of what separates Minecraft from its closer competitor, visit this page.

The LiveNX platform maximizes a company’s investments in IT network management by ensuring users consistently have optimal online experiences without interruptions or delays. LiveNX performs network diagnostics, monitors service delivery to ensure service level agreements (SLA) are met, automates device discovery to make it easier for users to access the network, and issues proactive alerts to potential problems. It visualizes the entire network and presents a comprehensive view of performance through a dynamic dashboard. LiveNX also integrates with the Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) as well as other multi-vendor environments.

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Mike Wheatley.

Google Inc.’s efforts to establish itself as a major player in cloud computing received a small boost Wednesday when it was named by research firm Forrester Inc. as the undisputed leader in a part of the market Forrester calls “Insight Platform-as-a-Service.” It should be noted that Insight PaaS is just a small subsection of the overall PaaS market, so Google still has some way to go.

Forrester defines the Insight PaaS category as an integrated set of data management, analytics and insight application development and management components, offered as a platform. PaaS more generally is the middle layer of cloud computing, customarily defined as services to allow software developers to create applications that run on the Internet…

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Richard Vester.

Cloud computing has revolutionised the way people work, consume applications, and the way they store their data. However, although it was born out of the need to simplify IT environments and make their business lives far easier, today, many companies are opting to have many cloud vendors, instead of just one. Multi-cloud is the future of computing. A recent Dimensional Research survey found 77% of businesses are planning to implement multi-cloud architectures in the near future.

Many businesses want to have different options, and will choose to use multiple cloud providers to support their various workloads and applications. They can select a cloud that will best meet their individual requirements. It’s a matter of not putting all their IT eggs in one basket. The flexibility of multi-cloud is one of the main drivers behind its increased adoption…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Tricia Morris.

As once common objections and concerns around moving to the cloud (such as security) begin to wane, organizations are identifying and prioritizing their IT and business initiatives that might benefit most from a cloud deployment. Business intelligence and analytics is one of those key initiatives. Within the next few years, it is predicted that cloud will be the preferred delivery mechanism for analytics.

But many organizations are already there. In a Deloitte, EMA and Informatica State of Cloud Analytics Report survey, 70.1% of the respondents say cloud is already an essential part of their analytics strategy. Does the forecast call for greater cloud coverage in enterprise analytics? See what’s trending now and what’s in store:…

Read more from the source @ http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/17-statistics-forecasting-future-business-intelligence-cloud-01891332#AUBwcExpEbi9GLtd.99

Recent research carried out by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a leading IT research, analysis, and strategy firm, and sponsored by storage innovators including Excelero, a disruptor in software-defined block storage, has revealed that:

• Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) flash is expected to eventually replace traditional flash storage by 87% of European IT professionals whose organizations are currently using or considering NVMe technology (60% of all respondents).
• Almost 60% of organizations have begun to implement a Software-Defined Storage (SDS) solution or are committed to it as a long-term strategy.
• Business intelligence/data analytics, digital media, collaboration and Internet-of-Things (IoT), are most responsible for storage capacity growth today, with eCommerce, and social networking data not far behind.
• Over half of organizations are likely to consider purchasing their storage infrastructure from a startup, a reversal of longstanding perceptions.

Grazed from FnLondon. Author: Yolanda Bobeldijk.

Gavin Jackson, head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Amazon Web Services, loves to talk about snowballs. Not the lumps of mush and ice that children chuck at each other, but Amazon’s portable information storage devices, big grey suitcases that hold huge amounts of data.

When clients such as banks sign on with Amazon Web Services, the ecommerce juggernaut’s cloud-computing service, they upload encrypted data from their old legacy IT systems into the snowball, or the larger-capacity snowball edge. These are then shipped to an Amazon data centre where the data is transferred into the AWS cloud…

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Days after Apple yanked anti-censorship tools off its app store in China, another major American technology company is moving to implement the country’s tough restrictions on online content. A Chinese company that operates Amazon’s cloud-computing and online services business there said on Tuesday that it told local customers to cease using any software that would allow Chinese to circumvent the country’s extensive system of internet blocks.

The company, called Beijing Sinnet Technology and operator of the American company’s Amazon Web Services operations in China, sent one round of emails to customers on Friday and another on Monday. “If users don’t comply with the guidance, the offered services and their websites can be shut down,” said a woman surnamed Wang who answered a Sinnet service hotline. “We the operators also check routinely if any of our users use these softwares or store illegal content.”…

Read more from the source @ https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/business/amazon-china-internet-censors-apple.html

CloudPhysics, one of the fastest growing channel automation platforms for next generation data center product and service delivery, today announced that it has joined the Microsoft Enterprise Cloud Alliance. CloudPhysics has worked with Microsoft technologies for many years, and this collaboration further demonstrates the commitment of both companies to deliver value to Channel Partners wanting to build strong engagement with their customers.

CloudPhysics’ Private and Public Cloud Assessment model provides rightsizing and instance recommendations that enable partners and customers to accurately plan migration strategies to all major cloud providers. It enables the quick rightsizing of on-premises workloads, saving costs by fitting storage, memory, and CPU provisioning accurately to usage demands.