February 27, 2012
Volume XXXVIII, Issue 7
How the Cloud Will Transform Production of Film and Video
Despite a tremendous leap forward in the storage and distribution of media, production companies still rely on e-mail and generic office software to manage multimillion dollar productions. Can cloud-based collaboration improve the day-to-day nitty-gritty world of production? The answer is absolutely yes - with your input.
According to a recent industry survey by Production Minds, the biggest bottlenecks in pre-production (everything that happens before the live shoot) involves crew battling one or more of these challenges: 1) Working with partial or poorly communicated information and make assumptions to fill in the gaps (48.3%); 2) Not involved early enough in pre-production leading to poor choices (46.9%); and 3) Working with outdated information, when a new decision has already been made (36.9%).
But don't blame the people when you should blame the tools.
The majority of respondents (81%) are using e-mail to share production documents - mostly Word and Excel files. But a single decision may require an e-mail thread 50 messages long with the attachment constantly updated. Inboxes are filled to overflowing.
So can we make life easier? The #1 answer was "keeping all production relevant communication in one place and easily accessible". That's where the cloud can shine.
Production Minds is developing a follow-on survey of cloud production. What questions do you have for production professionals? Send them to NY@production-minds.com to be considered for a survey running in March.
Consumers Foregoing Pay TV for Internet Video Services
Excerpted from Marketing Daily Report by Aaron Baar
Consumers are looking to on-demand video programming more and more, but the pay-TV operators who generally control those offerings may be facing some disruptive challenges in the near future.
According to The NPD Group, video-on-demand (VoD) revenues from pay-TV services hit $1.3 billion last year, with 15% of consumers age 13 or older having used the services at least once in the 12-month period between August 2010 and August 2011. All told, there were about 40 million users of VoD during that 12-month period, according to NPD.
However, a competitive set of Internet VoD options is growing at a healthy clip as well. Revenues from Internet VoD hit $204 million last year, and the channel (which includes offerings from iTunes, Amazon, Vudu and others) hit seven million users by August 2011. According to NPD, one out of every six (16%) paid VoD movie rental transactions were attributed to Internet sources in 2011.
With the increase in Internet-connected video devices (particularly TVs), that number could accelerate quickly. "Internet-connected everything will absolutely accelerate adoption, and it wouldn't be surprising to see doubling of iVOD in a year to 18 months," Russ Crupnick, Senior Vice President of Industry Analysis for the NPD Group, tells Marketing Daily.
Moreover, the evidence suggests that more consumers are choosing to forego the pay-TV services for the Internet services. According to NPD, iVoD users reduced the time they spent watching television shows, news and sports via pay-TV companies by 12% between August 2010 and August 2011. According to NPD, consumers perceive iVoD movies to be a better value than those offered by pay-TV companies and that the Internet offers greater availability of titles.
"Cable companies need to improve the user experience, become better marketers of VoD, and work with production companies and studios on getting 'most favored nation status,'" Crupnick says. "Consumers will ultimately use a variety of services so there is opportunity for cable to be one. But there also risk they get shuffled out."
"iVoD distributors are effectively using CRM, free trials, and other promotions to gain trial usage of their services by new customers," Crupnick said. "With this new competition eating away at revenues, pay-TV operators need to be equally aggressive with promotions, in order to instill a habit of movie buying among their subscribers."
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 As we continue our countdown to the 2012 NAB Show and the inaugural full-day CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE and CLOUD COMPUTING PAVILION, please join us in advance for a live webinar on what will be a critical area for discussion at the show.
On Tuesday March 20th at 1:00 PM US ET, webinar attendees will be able to take an insightful look at "Legal Concerns & Practical Solutions for Media and Entertainment in the Cloud," produced by DataDirect Networks (DDN) in association with the DCIA and Dow Lohnes Attorneys at Law.
The webinar will discuss the latest contractual, copyright, and fourth amendment consequences of using cloud based services. It will also cover possible private media cloud solutions that may help expedite the adoption of cloud storage and collaboration by media and entertainment companies.
DDN is the world's largest privately held information storage company. It is the leading provider of data storage and processing solutions and services that enable content-rich and high growth information technology (IT) environments to achieve the highest levels of systems scalability, efficiency, and simplicity.
DDN enables enterprises to extract value and deliver results from their information. Its customers include the world's leading online content and social networking providers, high performance cloud and grid computing, life sciences, media production organizations, and security & intelligence organizations.
Deployed in thousands of mission critical environments worldwide, DDN's solutions have been designed, engineered and proven in the world's most scalable data centers to ensure competitive business advantage for today's information powered enterprise.
In many ways, DDN has been mastering big data challenges before the term 'Big Data' was even invented. By supporting the requirements of the world's largest file storage systems and demanding applications for over 10 years, DDN has developed both domain expertise and a unique advantage in today's new data explosion.
In partnership with a worldwide network of resellers and integrators, DDN is ideally positioned to capitalize on its first mover advantage in the Big Data age. As Big Data continues to become more prevalent and democratized across all industries, by businesses looking to capture, analyze and derive insights from new data generators, DDN will continue to enable organizations to maximize the value of information everywhere.
DDN provides storage array, file system, and object storage appliances for the cloud to the world's most data-intensive environments. These scalable and highly efficient storage solutions enable its customers to accelerate time to results, scale simply as data sets continue to grow, and gain competitive advantage through resolving performance and capacity scaling challenges.
By optimizing each element of the I/O environment for performance, capacity, and data-center efficiency - DDN solutions deliver the highest levels of ROI as businesses achieve more with purpose-built tools for data-intensive applications.
Representing DDN on the webinar will be Jeff Denworth, VP of Marketing & Business Development.
Jeff has over a decade of experience with advanced computation and massively scalable big data storage technologies. Before joining DDN in 2006, he ran worldwide sales and marketing at Cluster File Systems. - where he managed all aspects of sales and business development associated with the Lustre file system.
Previously at Dataram Corporation, Jeff specialized in business development for HPC and enterprise server memory designs.
Founded in 1918, Dow Lohnes is a national law firm with offices in Washington, DC and Atlanta, GA, serving clients in a number of growing and dynamic industries including cable, broadcast, media, telecommunications, IT, sports and entertainment, and post-secondary education.
The firm builds long-term, strategic partnerships within those sectors by offering a comprehensive range of legal services including regulatory, litigation, business transactions, and government affairs.
Jim Burger, who will participate on behalf of Dow Lohnes in the March 20th webinar, is a member of the law specializing in representation of technology companies on intellectual property (IP), entertainment content licensing, communications, and government policy matters.
Jim joined the firm's Media, Information and Technologies group in January 1997. Prior to that, he was a Senior Director in Apple Computer's Law Department.
During the nine years he was at Apple, Jim had a variety of assignments, including representing Apple's Advanced Technology Group, USA Field Sales organizations, and World-Wide Operations and Manufacturing, as well as General Counsel for Europe and Latin America and responsible for worldwide government affairs.
In addition, from 1991 until 1996, he was Chair of the Information Technology Industry Council's Proprietary Rights Committee. Jim has worked extensively on legal and policy issues arising from the confluence of digital technology, IP protection, communications, and government regulation, particularly as affecting the Internet.
He has represented technology companies in providing digital video services to motion picture companies and in acquiring motion picture content for digital distribution, and well as in inter-industry efforts to create standards for the online distribution of motion pictures.
Jim has also participated in resolving such complex issues as DVD copy protection, AACS copy protection for Blu-ray discs, and digital download of music - representing the Computer Industry Group in negotiations developing the DVD Content Scrambling System copy protection rules as well as the Secure Digital Music Initiative.
He also has represented IT clients before the Federal Communications Commission in proceedings such as the Digital TV transition, the Broadcast Flag, V-Chip, and Internet-related proceedings. In addition, Mr. Burger has extensive government relations experience and has been engaged in such matters as the efforts to amend copyright law from leading the negotiations to exclude the computer industry from the Audio Home Recording Act to avoid passage of the Digital Video Recording Act.
Jim also has represented information technology companies before the Administration and Congress on international agreements affecting intellectual property law such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the Broadcasting Treaty. In addition, he has been active in lobbying communications matters such as the Digital TV Transition legislation.
Please see next week's DCINFO for information about how to register for the live webinar. And meanwhile, please register early for the 2012 NAB Show and the CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE to take advantage of discounts. This promises to be our most valuable and stimulating conference to date. Share wisely, and take care.
Comcast Media Center Lets Ops Tap VoD in the Cloud
Excerpted from Multichannel News Report by Todd Spangler
Comcast Media Center is letting independent operators hook into its parent company's nationwide content delivery network (CDN) to access thousands of additional video-on-demand (VoD) titles -- without having to add more local VoD storage.
To access the HITS On Demand service, CMC affiliates connect into Comcast's CDN via a fiber connection. The Comcast CDN comprises four regional centers with large VoD content libraries, which feed about 100 mezzanine gateways that cache and deliver content to local VoD servers.
HITS On Demand provides MPEG-2 video content; CMC declined to specify how many VoD titles are available through the service. The availability of large stores of content in a cloud-based environment allows cable operators to increase their on-demand offerings without the need to add incremental local storage capacity. Algorithms in the CDN use centralized content hosting, edge caches, and local VoD servers to maximize storage.
"The new HITS On Demand CDN satisfies growing subscriber demand for more content that fits their schedule, delivered using a familiar interface and leverages cable providers' existing infrastructure," HITS General Manager Leslie Russell said. "This helps to keep customers turning to cable first for compelling video entertainment."
CMC is promoting the new service at the National Cable Television Cooperative's Winter Educational Conference in Austin, TX.
Malaysian Audiences Are Set to Enjoy a Whole New Viewing Experience
Telekom Malaysia (TM), Malaysia's leading new generation communications provider, has unveiled its TM Media Delivery Service (TM MDS) in collaboration with Octoshape, an industry leader in global streaming technologies.
Featured on Octoshape's InfiniteHD platform, this service is equipped with patented resiliency, network efficiency and throughput technologies to deliver the highest quality video without buffering. The portfolio of services rolled out by TM includes both Octoshape's video-on-demand services as well as its proven live video streaming services.
"Today, with the strategic collaboration with Octoshape, TM is very happy to launch TM MDS, our first media delivery service where TM's customers will be able to enjoy excellent HD quality streaming video viewing experiences on the Internet and utilize its numerous benefits, which is among the best offering so far in the market. This will be particularly beneficial during major events live held either in Malaysia or anywhere around the world, where the audience will be able to experience live streaming with no buffering, as if they are physically present at the event venue itself and we are indeed excited to bring this enhanced experience to Malaysian viewers in particular," said Rozaimy Abd Rahman, Executive Vice President of TM Global.
"Octoshape is thrilled to enable the TM MDS platform through the suite of Octoshape technologies," said Michael Koehn Milland, CEO of Octoshape. "With the extensive network and operational assets that TM brings to the table, we are confident the combined solution will bring a new level of consumer experience for live and on-demand Over The Top (OTT) Video to the market in Malaysia."
The collaboration with Octoshape will allow TM to offer an excellent viewing experience over the Internet, supported by HD features, targeting international media broadcasters from South East Asia and North Asia, and also local media broadcasters. Regardless of where the broadcasters content are hosted, TM MDS via Octoshape will provide superior viewing experiences either live or recorded, with no buffering.
TM, Malaysia's leading new generation communications provider and broadband champion, has aggressively enhanced, improved and upgraded its IP service platform to further meet the ever demanding customers' expectations. Earlier in 2011, the company has embarked into IPv6 capability to address the exhaustion of IPv4 in the region. TM IP services are also equipped with the latest security features such as black hole and clean pipes to secure its IP network against any unwanted threats.
TM, via its subsidiary VADS Berhad, provides world class global storage and a major hub for data in this region. As the largest Data Centre provider in the country, TM leverages on its 14 carrier-neutral data centres nationwide which are ISO 27001 certified and fulfill all Tier 3 standards and Tier 4 ready; backed by its extensive nationwide and global high-speed IP network, coupled with its existing vast customer base to offer high Service Level Assurance, superlative levels of availability, security with high redundancy for its clients. It will enable companies to have an IT infrastructure without the complexity of procurement and capital investment.
Flash Networks Takes Harmony Optimization and Monetization to the Cloud
Flash Networks, the leading provider of mobile Internet optimization and monetization solutions, announced that its Harmony Mobile Internet Services Gateway optimization and monetization are available as cloud-based solutions. By shifting resources, such as application software, storage, and hardware, to private or public clouds, operators can gain an additional improvement in user quality of experience, with increased efficiency, scalability, and flexibility. Flash Networks is already working with several of its global strategic partners, with the first cloud implementation to be released soon.
With Flash Networks' cloud implementation, optimization and monetization applications such as the MyPlace web toolbar, content recommendation services, analytics, and video optimization are distributed throughout the virtual network. In addition to reducing system administration and hardware costs, this architecture provides additional optimization and monetization efficiencies which can boost network performance while further reducing data traffic. For example, operators with multiple sites or operator groups with several international operators can utilize the same cloud for central caching, transcoding, content recommendation, and other optimization and monetization capabilities. This improved efficiency is even more significant in countries or regions with multiple time zones. For example, in the US, popular YouTube videos and news items viewed on the East Coast during busy hours are already optimized, centrally stored, and ready to be watched when West Coast subscribers reach their busy hours.
In addition, Harmony's monetization solutions incorporate a cloud-based content recommendation service, which generates targeted recommendations for users by aggregating content from the operator's store catalog, affiliation partners, and content providers. With no-to-low capital and operating expenditure, the cloud architecture helps keep costs to a minimum and has the advantage of offering a single platform for multiple content providers. At the same time, the platform enables operators to increase capacity or add new capabilities on-the-fly without investing in new infrastructure, upgrade cycles, training new personnel, or new software licenses.
"At Flash Networks, it is our vision to provide solutions that raise the bar on operational efficiency," said Merav Bahat, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Flash Networks. "As mobile operators start to evolve their systems to a cloud configuration we are fully prepared to take this road with them, enabling them to experience the benefits of flexible, scalable, and cost efficient optimization and monetization solutions."
Harmony Mobile Internet Services Gateway integrates web and video optimization, analytics, traffic management, web monetization, content control, cell-based congestion awareness, centralized caching, service orchestration, and an intelligent policy engine in a single gateway. By leveraging its unique insight into the mobile operator's data traffic, Harmony provides carriers with the most ways to reduce their network operating expenses while generating revenues from over-the-top content.
BitTorrent for Live Video
Excerpted from MIT Technology Review by Tom Simonite
For the first time ever, this year's Super Bowl was streamed live online, to the initial delight, and then disappointment, of fans, who experienced poor image quality and delays of several minutes.
The man behind the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol, Bram Cohen, is developing software that could fix such problems. This protocol facilitates the distribution of large files by having users serve up fragments of a file to other users as they download it. This makes it possible to share very large files without a single central server.
Cohen's company, also known as BitTorrent, is now working on technology that could allow a person with far fewer resources than a TV studio to stream live footage to an audience of millions.
"To this day, most of the live video people consume isn't over the Internet, it's over the cable system," says Cohen. "Cable is very well optimized for sending out live events at a low delay, which has, to date, been very hard over the Internet."
Cable and over-the-air TV can efficiently target multiple people because viewers can all tune into the same stream of content, but the Internet's design requires a separate copy to be sent to each person. That makes streaming online video of any kind expensive (even Google hasn't found a way to make YouTube profitable yet) and live video especially so. Specialized servers and other infrastructure are typically required.
Cohen's solution, known as BitTorrent Live, could make it possible for almost anyone to offer a live stream to millions. Like the original BitTorrent, the scheme relies on viewers all running software that links into a network that distributes data directly between users, in what is known as a peer-to-peer design, which is much more efficient than every user being served by a central server. A key benefit of the approach is that as more people try to download a file, the network's capacity to serve that file also grows.
Cohen has been running public trials of BitTorrent Live since late last year, streaming live DJ sets from San Francisco. So far, the system has been able to deliver live video with less than five seconds of delay, although the largest audience so far has been roughly 350 viewers.
Cohen says that his main interest is in the technical challenge, but adds that changing how people consume video does matter to him. "I view the one-way nature of television as a bad thing, and moving to a medium with integrated interactivity and social features will be a good thing," he says.
Reducing the resources needed to offer live video could even help journalists, bloggers, or protesters trying show the world what they are witnessing. Online video was important to last year's protests in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries; live feeds with large audiences could have an even larger impact.
Cohen says BitTorrent Live could even help conventional broadcasters and studios distribute their premium TV and movie content more efficiently. He says the approach may even be better than centralized streaming services, which typically cap quality to keep costs down. However, as with the original BitTorrent protocol, the software could potentially be used to stream copyrighted material-without providing a single point where it can easily be shut down.
It's too early for Cohen to say exactly how BitTorrent Live will be made available, and whether (like his original blockbusting technology) it will be done in a way that allows third parties to use it as they wish. "The protocol is still early in development, so we want to maintain the ability to [improve] it in a reliable way," he says. "We'll have more information on potential third-party implementations once we are closer to launch."
BitTorrent file sharing software breaks files into many small pieces so that when a person asks their software to find a download it can assemble it from pieces sourced from many other users, and simultaneously share the pieces it already has. BitTorrent Live uses the same strategy, but with the added constraint of having to distribute data that must reach users at just the right time to keep the live stream working.
That makes lag the biggest challenge for BitTorrent Live, Cohen acknowledges. "Typically, latency may be between one and three seconds longer than it is in a very well optimized centralized system," he says. But the five-second delay achieved so far is likely acceptable for most use cases. Cohen designed BitTorrent Live to automatically drop connections to peers that are unable to serve up fresh data, and to assign high priority to connections that can, to ensure data spreads widely as fast as possible.
Arvind Krishnamurthy, an Associate Professor at the University of Washington with an interest in peer-to-peer systems, says Cohen's approach could unleash a new distribution mechanism for video. "I can start a stream that, if it is of interest, many millions of people can watch it," he says. "You don't have to be YouTube. It's self-scaling in nature."
Vindication that peer-to-peer (P2P) video can serve large audiences comes from China, he notes, where TV services such as PPLive and QQLive serve hundreds of thousands of viewers at once, says Krishnamurthy. However, those services do not typically offer live video or the type of quality that Web users in the West are used to.
Cohen's biggest challenge may be to replicate his success in designing the original BitTorrent protocol to discourage selfish users from downloading but never uploading, says Krishnamurthy. That was done by having peers in a BitTorrent network provide more data to other peers that reciprocate, a strategy that can't work with streaming video data because it gets stale fast. "At any point in time, the data of interest to me is the next 30 seconds of data," says Krishnamurthy. "It's a small number of data blocks, and that makes it harder to make peer-to-peer streaming work."
Krishnamurthy and colleagues used data from PPLive in China to test a scheme of their own that reduced the numbers of users who received incomplete streams by more than a quarter. In that system, users who passed on video data in a timely way to others themselves received data at a higher quality and with less delay. Their design also routed the newest video data via users with the most bandwidth to spare to ensure that it spread out more quickly inside the network.
SharePoint Gets Kontiki Enterprise Video Platform through NewsGator
Excerpted from CMSWire Report by David Roe
One of the collaboration features that didn't come with the release of SharePoint was video collaboration and management, but then that's not really SharePoint's thing. NewsGator, however, has remedied that by offering Kontiki's Enterprise Video Platform (EVP) in SharePoint.
The possibility of offering Kontiki EVP stems from its deep integration with NewsGator Social Sites, which offers SharePoint social and mobile computing possibilities to SharePoint users.
Kontiki is already well established in its own right, offering video on-demand and community video portals over existing enterprise network structure to companies such as General Motors and Ernst & Young
What NewsGator is offering, though, is not just the video viewing capabilities, but also the possibility of managing enterprise videos. The result is that enterprises that regularly use videos and have a SharePoint deployment don't need to jump between SharePoint and other platforms to use video, but can have access to and manage it in SharePoint.
But it's not just video viewing; users will also be able to get social with the video and can post, share and "like" the video in Social Sites activity streams that have been integrated with SharePoint, as well as communities, video repositories and internal TV channels.
This, combined with Kontiki's ability to globally deliver video on demand or live broadcasts to all their employees, regardless of their geographical location and to all business devices including smart phones and tablets, offers SharePoint yet more collaboration capabilities.
And this is how SharePoint had planned its development: it would look after any major platform upgrades, while its partners take care of all the things that enterprises might like, but don't get out-of-the-box with SharePoint.
A video platform, however, is one of the really cool things that a lot of enterprises should be interested in, and probably goes some of the way to explaining why NewsGator was awarded Microsoft
Partner of the Year last year.
Public Cloud vs. Private Cloud: How About a Hybrid?
Excerpted from PCWorld Report by Brandon Butler
When online marketing firm Hubspot started in 2006, the company's IT needs were not very taxing, but they expanded quickly as the company realized success.
Hubspot - which provides software for businesses to coordinate their online marketing efforts - started with a private cloud for its front-end web hosting. Soon though, CIO Jim O'Neill realized he would need additional computing power for the company's web analytics programs and "big data" storage needs.
The public cloud was a natural fit. "We really wanted the flexibility to scale up into a larger capacity when we needed it," he said.
But the cloud environments had to work together, so O'Neill began the task of creating a hybrid cloud, which draws on the resources of both the public and the private clouds. For Hubspot, the hybrid cloud meant having the peace of mind of keeping important web hosting functions in its private cloud and the flexibility to use public cloud resources when needed.
The industry consensus, according to experts, is that most enterprises will eventually end up with hybrid cloud environments. But that's easier said than done. "It takes careful planning," O'Neill says.
A study conducted at Gartner's 2011 Data Center Conference in December showed that 78% of 2,500 attendees surveyed said they plan to build private cloud services by 2014. "We believe that the vast majority of private clouds will migrate or evolve into a hybrid model," says Gartner researcher Thomas Bittman. "We're telling clients to design and build their private clouds with hybrid in mind."
The problem is there are no standards for interoperability between public and private clouds. So when enterprises go to integrate their clouds they face many challenges.
Hubspot's O'Neill, for example, says the company had to resolve IP domain naming issues. When the company went to add public cloud support, O'Neill had to coordinate which IP addresses would be hosted by the company and which would be under the public vendor's control. It took about a month of working with Amazon and Rackspace, the firm's public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) vendors, he says, but eventually the hybrid cloud was created.
While there are no standards for integrating clouds, Bittman says there are four "centers of gravity" for typical hybrid cloud environments, each of which have pros and cons in terms of facilitating the effort.
One of the centers is based on the dominant private cloud vendor, VMware, whose products enable enterprises to build an array of private clouds.
By its own accounting, VMware is a mainstay for more than 80% of private clouds today, and while VMware does not offer public cloud services itself, it has a network of 94 partners that customers can work with to create hybrid environments.
That's the upside. On the downside, it can be hard to integrate public cloud services from suppliers that are not VMware-centric, and Bittman says some enterprises fear building their whole integrated cloud environment around tools from one supplier.
A second center of gravity, Bittman says, is emerging around the OpenStack model. Started by Rackspace and NASA in 2010, the OpenStack community has grown to include 152-member companies and the project's goal is to create open source standards for cloud computing. Bittman says the project has the promise for creating a more friendly interoperability model for a wide variety of cloud vendors. On the other hand, Bittman says, OpenStack is still relatively immature and unproven. Only time will tell if it can serve as a key standard for building hybrid environments.
The third major center is the dominant public cloud IaaS provider, Amazon, which offers a series of cloud options through Amazon Web Services (AWS). These range from its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to its Simple Storage Service (S3) products. The company is working to support compatibility between its public IaaS offerings and the private clouds enterprises already have, Bittman says. Amazon publishes, for example, its APIs, which simplify the job of integration, he notes.
And finally the fourth center of gravity encompasses most all of the other providers, Bittman says. Large vendors, such as IBM, HP, Intel, Microsoft and others, each have their own set of cloud offerings, ranging from Microsoft's Windows Azure platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model, to IBM's SmartCloud, which includes both IaaS and PaaS products. Some of these players, including a growing number of telecommunications carriers such as Verizon, CenturyLink, and AT&T, offer a variety of both public and private cloud services, and are making it easier to create hybrid clouds.
AT&T, for example, this month released its Synaptic Compute as a Service, which makes the company's IaaS public cloud compatible with VMware's vCloud Datacenter offering. Recognizing the integration challenge ahead, many vendors are acquiring assets to help ease the transition. Last year, for example, after purchasing IaaS provider Terremark, Verizon bought cloud integration specialty firm CloudSwitch, and IBM bought Cast Iron, another integration company.
So which camp should you bet on if you see a hybrid cloud in your future?
"It's really about answering the question: 'what problem are you trying to solve?'" says Toby Owen, senior manager of hybrid cloud solutions for Rackspace. If it's to transfer and store data, for example, then questions about bandwidth and data transferring could be top of mind. On the other hand, if an enterprise is using the cloud to support bursting, or a sudden spike in web traffic, perhaps price is a more important consideration.
Whatever sways the decision today, it is important to consider that needs may change in the future. Which is why, Bittman says, it is so important to consider interoperability issues going in.
The Perfect Cloud Is an Open Cloud
Excerpted from TechWorld Report by Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen
There's a good reason why the words "cloud computing" feature in most IT dialogs today. It's a hugely important evolution in the way we consume and operate computing today. More than that, it's a fundamental shift to an operational model in which applications don't live out their lives on a specific piece of hardware, and in which resources are more flexibly deployed than was the historical norm.
But, can it be that simple? With such a wide range of cloud models, which set-up is best for your organization and is there any such thing as "the perfect cloud?"
There are two things that can be assumed when it comes to cloud. Firstly, cloud computing is unavoidable. In one form or another, it is very likely to have an effect on nearly any organization - whether it's the formal evaluation and adoption of a new CRM platform through a formal IT process, the ad-hoc use of public cloud infrastructure by developers, or the 'bursting' of an on-premise cloud to a public cloud to gain temporary capacity.
A survey conducted by Goldman Sachs revealed that 90 per cent of CIOs surveyed expect to use public clouds in the next three years. But a large number of organizations are already on the road to cloud computing, having taken the first step in their journey with the implementation of virtualization technologies. Secondly, the quest to build and run the perfect cloud is keeping a great number of CIOs awake at night.
This year in many parts of Asia, we have seen a general shift away from "recovery" mode to a move towards gearing up for growth, and as part of this, IT departments are becoming mainstream drivers of core business objectives and outcomes. More than ever, CIOs are being relied upon to help achieve organizational goals around productivity and growth.
In fact, according to a report by Forrester called The Asia Pacific IT Market Comes of Age, a 'substantial' portion of the market in Asia is being driven by an increase in spending on foundational infrastructure for automation as well as a need to keep up with rapid economic growth and modernization. Beyond this, the report suggests that "virtualization and Cloud computing are central to new solutions spending and, for many companies, are central to their direction for future IT and business investment strategies."
CIOs may have to face continued pressure, as this year takes off. The line separating business and technology agendas is diminishing, and more than ever business leaders will turn to IT to satisfy critical organizational challenges and issues. With that comes a need for greater accountability and transparency for IT operations. As an industry, we always said that IT was moving from the server room to the boardroom and it's never been further from the truth.
Cloud computing can be the answer to a vast number of technology challenges - and can be the answer to business challenges, as already established - but not any old loud will do. The concept of a "one-size-fits all" cloud doesn't exist, although some proprietary vendors would like you to believe that an out-of-the-box approach is the best fit for your organization and every other one.
It's certainly getting noisy in the cloud - and it is fast becoming a crowded and confusing market - with a number of vendors trying to drive and control clouds, which can make it harder to get a clear view of what's actually available and who's offering what not to mention which cloud is going to be the most valuable for your needs.
In the beginning it's all about understanding the benefits of cloud, which includes cost and elasticity, the barriers to wider usage, such as security and interoperability, and using the decision making process to create the best balance for your organization.
Here are a few important things to know. Across the board, open source is a "foundational" element in cloud computing. In fact, 90 per cent of early clouds are open source-based and many of the major public clouds are built on open source.
When it comes to selecting a cloud solution, it's pertinent to know (and remember) that even within the realm of cloud computing, the core platform principles remain the same. The legacy of the proprietary era is ever-rising costs, pricey maintenance contracts, loss of control and being locked into a single vendor's agenda. In the world of cloud computing, the price you pay for being locked into a proprietary platform is the difficulty of extracting your data and applications from the cloud so you can run them on the platform of your choice.
On the other hand, the open source approach to cloud computing is known for offering optimal interoperability, by enabling customers to build their cloud from components they already have - whether Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux; LAMP, Java, or .Net; Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware vSphere, or Microsoft Hyper-V; infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS); on-premise or public clouds. And here's the best part: Users also avoid being locked in to a single vendor's stack. So, the entire cloud can be built completely on open source - the platform, virtualization, middleware and storage - or if certain platforms are already in place and cannot be changed, that's okay too! It doesn't get too much easier than that.
Certainly, Google as one of the world's most successful companies has long been estimated to be the largest open source-based company in the world*. It efficiently operates tens of thousands of servers, all based on open source. You might not be running an operation of that scale, but I bet maximizing server efficiency is something that interests you.
Taking the dive into cloud computing is exhilarating and challenging, and the potential for your organization is exciting. At the end of the day, making the right technology choices from the beginning will determine the long-term viability of your cloud, and open source solutions provide a solid foundation to build on so that as your cloud investments and architecture evolve, you are in charge and not dictated to by any one vendor.
Six Shining Examples of Cloud Computing in Action
Excerpted from Forbes Report by Joe McKendrick
There's no question that most businesses have been trying out cloud computing in one form or another in recent times. A new report from The Economist Intelligence Unit and IBM finds that among 572 business leaders surveyed, almost three-fourths indicate their companies have piloted, adopted or substantially implemented cloud in their organizations - and 90% expect to have done so in three years. And the number of respondents whose companies have "substantially implemented" cloud is expected to grow from 13% today to 41% in three years.
However, most companies have not yet recognized cloud's full potential. "Although cloud is widely recognized as a technology game changer, its potential for driving business innovation remains virtually untapped," the report observes. "Interestingly, while our research clearly reveals organizations intend to rely on cloud to enhance their business capabilities, only 38% cite cloud as a leading priority for the entire company. Rather, cloud is still viewed by many as an IT solution, with 62% citing cloud as a leading priority for their IT organizations."
The potential of cloud computing extends far beyond the walls of the IT department, the report's authors, Dr. Saul Berman, Lynn Kesterson-Townes, Anthony Marshall, and Dr. Rohini Srivathsa, all with IBM, suggest. "Our survey results suggest that organizations are just beginning to understand the power of cloud to help drive business innovation. Only 16% of survey respondents currently utilize cloud for sweeping innovation, such as entering new lines of business or industries, reshaping an existing industry or transitioning into a new role in their industry value chain."
Interestingly, the authors recommend that companies evaluate whether their cloud strategies should involve becoming a cloud service consumer or a provider of cloud-based offerings - or include elements of both. Cloud platforms make it viable for organizations to play both roles, blurring the lines between consumers and providers, IT and non-IT companies - and this may be the most disruptive element of all.
The Economist-IBM report provides some shining examples of companies that are employing cloud computing to not only cut IT costs, but also play a role in disruptive innovation:
1. Through cloud cost flexibility, online marketplace gains access to more powerful analytics online. This is the most obvious and first reason companies are attracted to cloud, and in the Economist-IBM survey, 31% said they like the cloud's "pay-as-you-go" cost structure. Cloud takes away the need to fund the building of hardware, installing software, or paying dedicated software license fees. This was the appeal for Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade goods that brings buyers and sellers together and provides recommendations for buyers. "Using cloud-based capabilities, the company is able to cost-effectively analyze data from the approximately one billion monthly views of its Web site and use the information to create product recommendations," the report notes. "The cost flexibility afforded through cloud provides Etsy access to tools and computing power that might typically only be affordable for larger retailers."
2. Greater business scalability enables online video retailer to meet spikes in demand: Cloud enables businesses - not just IT operations - to add or provision computing resources just at the time they're needed. In the Economist-IBM survey, 33% of respondents see this as an advantage of cloud. Netflix, for one, is taking advantage of cloud resources as it meets up and down demand for its Internet subscription service for movies and TV shows. "Because it streams many movies and shows on demand, the company faces large surges of capacity at peak times," the report explains. "As Netflix began to outgrow its data center capabilities, the company made a decision to migrate its website and streaming service from a traditional data center implementation to a cloud environment. This move allowed the company to grow and expand its customer base without having to build and support a data center footprint to meet its growth requirements."
3. Greater market adaptability provides online entertainment platform the ability to reach any type of customer device. A third of the executives we surveyed believe cloud can help them adapt to diverse user groups with a diverse assortment of devices. That's been the experience of ActiveVideo, creator of CloudTV, a cloud-based platform that unifies all forms of content - web, television, mobile, social, video-on-demand - onto any video screen, be it set-top boxes, PCs, or mobile devices. "CloudTV leverages content stored and processed in the network cloud to significantly expand the reach and availability of Web-based user experiences, as well as to allow operators to quickly deploy a consistent user interface across diverse set-top boxes and connected devices," according to the report. "The CloudTV approach of placing the intelligence in the network, rather than the device, enables content creators, service providers and consumer electronics manufacturers to create new television experiences for their viewers."
4. Masked complexity enables access to services, no matter how intricate the technology they're built on: About 20% of respondents cite this as a benefit, demonstrating its still-hidden potential. Because complexity is veiled from the end user, a company can expand its product and service sophistication without also increasing the level of user knowledge necessary to utilize or maintain the product or service. For example, upgrades and maintenance can be done in the "background" without the end user having to participate. Xerox, through its Cloud Print solution, enables "workers can get their desired content in printed form wherever they might be by using Xerox's cloud to access printers outside their own organization," the report says. "While printing from the cloud requires quite a bit of data management - with numerous files to be stored, converted to print-ready format and distributed to printers - the complexity is hidden from users."
5. With context-driven variability, "intelligent assistants" are possible. "Because of its expanded computing power and capacity, cloud can store information about user preferences, which can enable product or service customization," the report states. More than 50% of respondents to the Economist-IBM survey see this as an advantage for addressing fragmented user preferences. A classic example, the authors observe, is Siri, the cloud-based natural-language intelligent assistant on the Apple iPhone 4S. Siri, which enables users to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, find restaurants and more, employs artificial intelligence and a growing knowledge base about the user to understand not only what is said but what is meant. "In a nutshell, it leverages the computing capabilities and capacity of cloud to enable individualized, context-relevant customer experiences."
6. Ecosystem connectivity enables information exchange across business partners. About a third of survey respondents like how cloud better facilitates external collaboration with partners and customers. HealthHiway, an online health information network that enables the exchange of health information and transactions among healthcare providers, employers, payers, practitioners, third-party administrators and patients in India. "By connecting more than 1,100 hospitals and 10,000 doctors, the company's software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution facilitates better collaboration and information sharing, helping deliver improved care at a low cost, particularly important in growing markets."
The examples cited above in the Economist-IBM report are mainly online or tech-savvy companies, but the doors of innovation and disruption are open to all types of businesses - from shipping companies to box manufacturers to government agencies. Expect to see a lot of interesting ideas emerge over the coming years, made possible by cloud.
Coming Events of Interest
Cloud Computing World Forum - February 28th-29th in Dubai, UAE. Now in its 2nd year, the Cloud Computing World Forum Middle East and North Africa is the only place to discuss the latest topics in cloud, including security, mobile, applications, communications, virtualization, big data, SaaS and much, much more.
Cloud Computing Imperative 2012 - March 12th-13th in Dubai, UAE. Strategies to implement IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and XaaS. Plan the shift of IT responsibilities, get fresh perspective on managing project budgets, build a strong ROI for cloud computing, understand the shift from managed services to the cloud, master the cloud infrastructure and see cloud security from a hacker's perspective.
2012 NAB Show - April 14th-19th in Las Vegas, NV. From Broadcasting to Broader-casting, the NAB Show has evolved over the last eight decades to continually lead this ever-changing industry. From creation to consumption, the NAB Show has proudly served as the incubator for excellence - helping to breathe life into content everywhere.
CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at NAB - April 16th in Las Vegas, NV. Don't miss this full-day conference focusing on the impact of cloud computing solutions on all aspects of production, storage, and delivery of television programming and video.
Cloud Computing World Forum - May 8th in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Cloud Computing World Forum Africa is the only place to discuss the latest topics in cloud, including security, mobile, applications, communications, virtualization, CRM and much, much more.
Cloud Expo - June 11th-14th in New York, NY. Two unstoppable enterprise IT trends, Cloud Computing and Big Data, will converge in New York at the tenth annual Cloud Expo being held at the Javits Convention Center. A vast selection of technical and strategic General Sessions, Industry Keynotes, Power Panels, Breakout Sessions, and a bustling Expo Floor.
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