Compuware Corporation on Tuesday launched SpeedoftheWeb.org, a new free online cloud service that helps web application and site owners increase the speed of their most important web properties. This cloud service enables organizations to compare the speed of their website's performance against leading competitor sites.
SpeedoftheWeb is available here.
As modern application delivery continues to add complexity at the edge of the Internet, speed is one of the most important factors for improving end-user experience on the web. Studies have shown that improving website performance can lead to increased revenues and reduced operating costs.
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Cloud Computing: Compuware Launches SpeedoftheWeb
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SHI International Goes Back to the Future with New Cloud Briefing Center
SHI International Corp. is going back to the future with its imaginative New York City Briefing Center, which was unveiled on Thursday at 1 Penn Plaza. The center is a futuristic office straight out of the pages of science fiction and delivers an immersive, interactive experience to give visitors a comprehensive view of SHI’s innovative cloud computing services, technologies, and capabilities.
The Briefing Center features bright white walls reminiscent of “2001: A Space Odyssey”; automatic glass doors that can transition from clear to opaque and even display images; and 3-D projectors that will put the world of traditional presentations to shame. A customizable 3-D tour of SHI’s cloud architecture creates an immersive experience from the moment visitors step through the door. It offers clients a look inside SHI’s next-generation data center and cloud solutions to help them find the best fit for their organization’s cloud computing needs.
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Egnyte Secures $16 Million in Financing Led by Google Ventures
Egnyte, the leading provider of cloud and hybrid cloud file sharing solutions for businesses, today announced it has closed a $16 million round of Series C financing led by Google Ventures with additional support from existing investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Polaris. The funds will be used to expand sales and marketing efforts as well as further the development of hybrid cloud and next generation cloud technologies. As a part of today's funding, Karim Faris, Partner at Google Ventures, will join the board of Egnyte.
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DoD Cloud Computing Strategy
The DoD recently released the department's formal cloud computing strategy.
In the forward, DoD CIO Teresa Takai said that:
"The DoD Cloud Computing Strategy has been expanded to address use of commercial cloud services in the Department's multi-provider enterprise cloud environment. Adoption and implementation of commercially provided cloud services are being rapidly accelerated with the maturing of the Federal Cloud Computing initiative, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), and release of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act."
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It’s True. VMware Trades Maritz for Gelsinger, WSJ Says
Paul Maritz, the one-time high-ranking Microsoftee who’s been CEO of VMware for the last four years, is stepping down and will be replaced by EMC COO and Intel veteran Pat Gelsinger, the Wall Street Journal says.
The story broke late Monday night in a scoop by CRN.
Nobody was sure if Maritz was staying or going. Gelsinger has been bruited as a possible replacement for EMC CEO Joe Tucci when he finally retires but now it’s speculated that Maritz could replace Tucci.
Back when Bill Gates was still running Microsoft, Maritz was said to be the third most powerful executive there after Steve Ballmer.
Bloomberg was singular in getting through to Maritz only to be told the report was “just speculation,” which resolved nothing and in fact fanned the flames.
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Cloud Migration Company Announces $7 Million Funding
Racemi has closed a $7 million Series B round of venture financing to further develop and market its software for migrating workloads to cloud computing.
Racemi's software automates migration of existing workloads to all the major cloud platforms. This means it is no longer necessary to rebuild servers from scratch in the cloud, which translates to significant time and cost savings.
The Racemi software provides flexibility to move workloads between dissimilar physical, virtual and cloud platforms in any combination or direction. For customers, this minimizes any unease over vendor lock-in, while enabling high availability or disaster recovery strategies that span providers. Racemi's software supports both Linux and Windows, all of the major hypervisor platforms and major cloud platforms including Amazon EC2, CloudStack, GoGrid, OpenStack, Rackspace and Terremark.
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Cloud Computing Moves from Fad to Foundation
As hype dies down, companies are seeing real success in their cloud deployments, and money is pouring in, according to a recent post on InfoWorld.com.
The cloud is in the process of crossing from the experimental phase to production systems that businesses can rely upon. Yet his has not been an overnight occurrence: Enterprises have been quietly getting smart about cloud computing technology and applying it where appropriate, according to InfoWorld's David Linthicum.
Companies both big and small are making a move to the cloud.
"There are now careers, share prices and bonuses tied to the success of cloud computing in a big way. Those vested in it will hustle like hell to make cloud computing work for them. Some will fail, but the sheer amount of money riding on this technology will ensure that it functions well in the longer term," Linthicum writes.
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BISNOW Data Center Event Highlights Cloud
A big thank you to BISNOW and my fellow panel members for an outstanding discussion and very informative event, last week's Data Center Investment Conference and Expo. The federal marketplace is certainly being changed by cloud and the data center industry is certainly willing and able to support this important transition.
Our federal roundtable, moderated by purple tie-wearing King & Spalding partner JC Boggs, explained that agencies are all moving at different speeds to the cloud. The most mission critical programs are moving the slowest. FAA CIO Steve Cooper says his agency is starting to stand up federal private clouds. And there are plans to share that environment with other government agencies, as well as offer them cloud-based services. But Steve says he won’t be the first CIO to go into a public cloud and risk the public embarrassment of a security breach.
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Lynn DeCourcey Showcased in ExecutiveBiz
Lynn is NJVC vice president and general manager, cyber security. She oversees all aspects of the company’s cyber security business unit, including the creation of technically advanced and state-of-the-art cyber innovations, solutions and strategies to develop new business and financial performance. In her online interview, she discusses how her team is bringing innovation to the marketplace everyday.
Before undertaking this new role in the company, Ms. DeCourcey was
Deputy Director, Cyber Security, for one of the company’s Intelligence
Community customers. She led the effort to support the most successful
Defense Information Systems Agency Command Cyber Readiness Inspection in
the history of that particular contract. Under her leadership, Ms.
DeCourcey’s team also developed the NJVC “Cyber Dashboard”—a
“single-view” threat and vulnerability situational awareness console.
The Cyber Dashboard recently was honored as the winner of the 2011 (ISC)² Government Information Security Leadership Awards Team Award.
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The
NJVC Cyber Dashboard facilitates situational awareness for decision
makers to defend against the proliferation and increasing sophistication
of cyber threats by visualizing, analyzing and generating reports from
the aggregated and correlated data feeds from strategically placed
sensors.
This dashboard is:
- Customizable
- Enterprise capable
- Modified for each stakeholder
- User focused
Each active device or data feed is interrogated for input, and proceeds to:
- Aggregate data for display
- Manage background algorithms
- Provide automated updates
ExecutiveBiz.com is dedicated to covering the government
contracting sector from the perspective of the executive. Our writers
and researchers follow the political and business trends associated with
contracting to find those who matter most to those who make decisions.
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Texas Cloud Computing Lessons Learned
Late last week the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) released an important whitepaper that reviewed it's multi-year Pilot Texas Cloud Offering (PTCO). This project was designed to allow a small group of agencies to choose a virtual private cloud-based infrastructure as a service from a marketplace of service providers made available by a cloud broker. For this project, Texas DIR selected Gravitant and it's cloudMatrix technology. This approach was selected as it maximized the opportunity to produce the broadest spectrum of experiences for customers. The cloudMatrix software helped to normalize the multiple services available, creating an “apples-to-apples” comparison in pricing and functionality as much as possible. In addition, this solution provided a single, unified web interface for end users to design, procure, provision, monitor, and govern the services. The PTCO allowed DIR and the pilot agencies to a gain a greater understanding of cloud infrastructure offerings for state government and document options and issues with provider selection, pricing, access security, data security, credentialing, provisioning time frames, service levels, service remedy options, terms of use, billing models, interoperability, mobility, scalability, capacity management, provider compliance, and monitoring and licensing.
As far as I know, the PTCO represents the only proven operational model of the cloud brokerage concept deployed within a government setting. Among the lessons learned, this project showed that the use of a cloud broker can:
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If you are interested in learning more about the results of this pilot project, download the complete report at http://www.slideshare.net/kvjacksn/pilot-texas-cloud-offering.
NJVC is partnering with Gravitant to bring this advance cloud brokerage technology to the federal marketplace. Currently in limited pilot, you can learn more about cloudMatrix and NJVC's cloud brokerage offering by visiting http://cloud.njvc.com.
Gravitant also released a whitepaper on how this approach can be used with the federal government. It is available for download at http://www.slideshare.net/kvjacksn/gravitant-whitepaper-cloud-for-federal-govt
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As far as I know, the PTCO represents the only proven operational model of the cloud brokerage concept deployed within a government setting. Among the lessons learned, this project showed that the use of a cloud broker can:
- Help government agencies screen their applications for cloud feasibility and prioritizing cloud migrations accordingly;
- Address the challenges of cloud model comparisons due to the variables in product offerings, including the business models, service levels, and package inclusions;
- Translate capacity requirements into provider line items, thus allowing for accurate estimation of cloud cost;
- Provide a cloud service order review or approval workflow facility, a function not normally provided by cloud service providers; and
- Provide a means to regulate payment across multiple government entities.
If you are interested in learning more about the results of this pilot project, download the complete report at http://www.slideshare.net/kvjacksn/pilot-texas-cloud-offering.
NJVC is partnering with Gravitant to bring this advance cloud brokerage technology to the federal marketplace. Currently in limited pilot, you can learn more about cloudMatrix and NJVC's cloud brokerage offering by visiting http://cloud.njvc.com.
Gravitant also released a whitepaper on how this approach can be used with the federal government. It is available for download at http://www.slideshare.net/kvjacksn/gravitant-whitepaper-cloud-for-federal-govt
( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - © Copyright Kevin L. Jackson 2012)
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Apple Offered Samsung a License Two Years Ago
Apple is apparently more reasonable than it lets on.
Back in 2010 it offered Samsung a license. Apple estimates that it might have cost Samsung $288 million back then. Now it’s asking $2.5 billion and that’s just in the current case in California.
FOSS Patents calls it “the most spectacular revelation of the ongoing trial.”
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Think Through Your Cloud Plans – Or Else
Enterprise IT has a disturbing tendency to get excited about technology rather than architecture and planning.
According to David Linthicum, this sorry state is quite evident as cloud computing begins to take hold in the standard IT technology arsenal.
“The fact of the matter is that there are two worlds. One involves the hype and good feelings about next-gen IT, such as cloud computing, that tells us the technology itself will save us from the mistakes of the past. Then there's the world of planning, architecture, and design that makes the technology actually useful – despite IT's aversion to this crucial stage,” Linthicum writes.
The problem is not the fault of hyped technology, nor of those whom build and sell it. In many cases, the hyped technology works. Cloud computing is no exception.
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VMware, Intel, and NEC All to Join OpenStack
At its first full Board of Directors meeting, due to be held Tuesday August 28th, The OpenStack Foundation will be considering among other things applications from VMware, Intel, and NEC to become Gold Members of the foundation. They would be joining prior Gold Members like Cisco, Dell, NetApp and Yahoo! The Foundation already numbers AT&T, Canonical, HP, Rackspace, IBM, Nebula, Red Hat, and SUSE as its Platinum members.
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Ways Cloud Computing Will Change by 2020
Think cloud computing is just the latest IT fad? Think again.
Forrester predicts the global cloud computing market will grow from $35 billion in 2011 to around $150 billion by 2020 as it becomes key to many organizations' IT infrastructures. According to an article on ZDNet, by 2020 cloud is going to be a major – and permanent – part of the enterprise computing infrastructure.
By 2020, a generational shift will have occurred in organizations. A new generation of CIOs will be in charge that have grown up using cloud-based tools, making them far more willing to adopt cloud on an enterprise scale.
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Cloud Brings Foreign IT Spending to U.S.
U.S.-based corporations and government agencies have been shipping application development work to offshore IT services providers for years.
Now, thanks to cloud computing, foreign companies are starting to bring their business to providers of data center services located in this country, according to an article at ComputerWorld.com.
Case in point: Grupo Posadas, a hotel company in Mexico that relies on five data centers to support more than 17,000 guest rooms in over 100 hotels. Grupo Posadas IT personnel run three of those data centers. The other two are run by outsourcing partners.
By moving some operations to the cloud, the Posadas IT group will have more time to focus on developing mobile and social networking tools that could help the business grow, he added.
"Our IT strategy is aligned to our growth, and our growth means that we need to be flexible and agile," he said. Cloud computing makes it possible to deploy new services in a matter of weeks. "That is the type of capability that we were lacking – that agility," said Toro Bala.
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2011: $6.9 Billion Invested in Cloud Startups
Venture capitalists are currently enamored with cloud-based startups, and are investing heavily in the cloud computing industry, according to a post on Cloudtimes.org.
According to statistics shared by PricewaterhouseCoopers, venture capitalists invested as much as $6.9 billion on "Internet-specific" startups in 2011 alone, with "Internet-specific" being a proxy term for "cloud" because that’s what most of them are doing. The $6.9 billion investment is a 68% increase from last year.
In Q4 alone, investments related to cloud amounted to $1.8 billion, which is above the $1.3 billion invested on biotech, and the $883 million invested into cleantech in the same year. It’s more than just the amount, anyway. The amount of deals is also increasing – VCs funded as many as 1,004 software startups related to the cloud last 2011.
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Cloud Computing: A Quiet Game Changer in Education
Cloud computing is increasingly changing the education landscape.
Thanks to could computing, students from different locations around the world can collaborate on assignments, rendering them interactive among their peers in education.
The ability to bring together students and teachers via device and to enable them to accomplish entire learning tasks as if they were together in one classroom is just one benefit of cloud computing in education.
Yet this is not even the entire capability of the cloud effect in education. There is the whole aspect of ‘information durability’ which allows information to be stored in the cloud indefinitely, according to CloudTweaks.com.
Many schools have moved their resources online with libraries filled with hundreds of thousands of books that students can access at any time. The advent of online video has made the idea of cloud in education even more exciting because schools can produce teaching videos in any subject, upload them to their libraries in the cloud, and make them available to their students, according to the article.
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NJVC Unveils Cloudcuity Umbrella Framework for NJVC Cloud Services
NJVC®, an information technology (IT) solutions provider headquartered in Northern Virginia, introduces Cloudcuity™, a new framework for the company’s cloud service offerings to help customers transition their technology applications to a cloud environment while cutting spending, improving process and billing efficiencies and complying with a myriad of regulatory and security requirements.
The first service being introduced under the framework is the Cloudcuity Management Portal—the first commercial, multi-cloud broker service specifically designed to support federal government customers.
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Can Cloud Computing Scuttle Software Piracy?
With a growing amount of software applications using the Software-as-a-Service model, experts claim that software piracy will eventually be eliminated.
Others, however, are claiming that users will just find ways to circumvent everything so that they won’t pay for software use.
The Business Software Alliance (BSA) released new survey results revealing 42 percent of the 15,000 PC users-respondents in 33 countries admitted to sharing their login credentials to paid cloud computing services with other people within their organizations, according to an article on CloudTimes.org.
According to BSA President and CEO Robert Holleyman, such an act doesn’t constitute piracy, as some cloud computing services do allow simultaneous logins using just one account. Other than that, sharing login credentials can cause terms of service violations or license abuse.
Some members of BSA believe cloud applications will greatly minimize software piracy. Last year, in an interview with Forbes, Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen said that piracy will be significantly reduced because cloud and Software-as-a-Service applications will continuously require an Internet connection.
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ManageIQ: IT-as-a-Service for All Species of Cloud
This’ll resonate.
ManageIQ says that when the management majors – and you know who that foursome is – saw the cloud bearing down on them like a Kansas tornado they ducked into the basement and scrawled cloud all over their wares to salvage their position.
Its point is you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Legacy stuff ain’t cloud-worthy.
A few days ago ManageIQ announced EVM Version 5, a unified cloud management scheme that provisions and manages IT services across physical, virtual, private and public cloud infrastructures including Amazon.
The release builds on ManageIQ’s experience servicing enterprise IT organizations, including some Fortune 1000s they can name, so they can adopt and manage virtualized private clouds.
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