September 17, 2012
Volume XL, Issue 12
Oracle Sponsors CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012
The DCIA and CCA proudly announce that Oracle has signed-on as a sponsor of the CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 (CCW:2012) business leadership summit taking place November 8th-9th in Santa Monica, CA.
Oracle Cloud offers a broad portfolio of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and social capabilities, all on a subscription basis.
Oracle Cloud delivers instant value and productivity for end-users, administrators, and developers alike through functionally rich, integrated, secure, enterprise cloud services.
With Oracle Cloud, you get enterprise-grade application and platform services based on best-in-class business applications and the industry's leading database and application server, managed by experts with over a decade of cloud delivery experience.
More than 25 million users rely on Oracle Cloud every day.
CCW:2012 will feature three co-located conferences focusing on the impact of cloud-based solutions in the industry's fastest-moving and most strategically important areas: entertainment, broadband, and venture financing.
Oracle will offer a keynote address on Interconnection at the Network Infrastructure conference within CCW:2012.
CCW:2012 registration enables delegates to participate in any session of the three conferences being presented at CCW:2012 — ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY, NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE, and INVESTING IN THE CLOUD.
At the end of the first full-day of co-located conferences, attendees will be transported from the conference hotel in Santa Monica to Marina del Rey Harbor where they will board a yacht for a sunset cruise and networking reception.
So register today to attend CCW:2012 and don't forget to add the Sunset Cruise to your conference registration. Registration to attend CCW:2012 includes access to all sessions, central exhibit hall with networking functions, luncheon, refreshment breaks, and conference materials. Early-bird registrations save $200.
INTELLIGENCE IN THE CLOUD
The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is partnering with the Distributing Computing Industry Association (DCIA) to present INTELLIGENCE IN THE CLOUD, a workshop on cloud computing for military and government agencies.
INTELLIGENCE IN THE CLOUD will take place on December 4th from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM at NAB headquarters in Washington, DC.
This workshop continues the NAB's series of programs developed for military and government professionals to demonstrate how advances in the commercial industries can benefit the military and government sectors. The atmosphere for the workshop is interactive with attendee participation welcome.
Opportunities offered by services in the cloud may provide cost-efficient alternatives to business as usual based on traditional methods. While security and reliability are concerns for everyone, issues such as procurement policies can impact the implementation of new services in government. More importantly, the lack of common operating standards across government agencies may slow the deployment of new more efficient commercial technologies such as cloud computing.
This program will define issues facing agencies as they look toward implementation of cloud services. Expert presentations based on case studies will then show how commercial industries are dealing with similar concerns, lessons learned along the way and the budgetary impact.
Following the case studies, panels of government and commercial professionals will discuss ways that cloud services are evolving to meet a variety of needs while satisfying outside-the-wall concerns for mission-critical content.
The NAB's partner in this program is the DCIA, which is focused on commercial advancement of cloud computing and related technologies, particularly as they are deployed for the delivery of high-value content.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
Earlier this week, the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) signed-on to the following letter to US Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy and Ranking Member Charles Grassley to help advance better protection of consumer privacy online.
"We the undersigned companies, organizations and individuals are writing to express our support of Chairman Leahy's amendment to H.R. 2471, which the Committee will consider shortly.
The Chairman's amendment would update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to provide protection to sensitive personal and proprietary communications stored in 'the cloud.' We urge all Members of the Committee to support this amendment
ECPA, which sets standards for government access to private communications, is critically important to businesses, government investigators and ordinary citizens.
Though the law was forward-looking when enacted in 1986, technology has advanced dramatically and ECPA has been outpaced. Courts have issued inconsistent interpretations of the law, creating uncertainty for service providers, for law enforcement agencies, and for the hundreds of millions of Americans who use the Internet in their personal and professional lives.
Moreover, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has held that a provision of ECPA allowing the government to obtain a person's email without a warrant is unconstitutional, jeopardizing law enforcement investigations and leaving communications providers in other circuits uncertain of their obligations.
The Chairman's amendment would update ECPA in one key respect, making it clear that, except in emergencies, or under other existing exceptions, the government must obtain a warrant in order to compel a service provider to disclose the content of emails, texts or other private material stored by the service provider on behalf of its users.
This standard would create a more level playing field for technology. It would cure the constitutional defect identified by the Sixth Circuit. It would allow law enforcement officials to obtain electronic communications in all appropriate cases while protecting Americans' constitutional rights.
It would provide clarity and certainty to law enforcement agencies at all levels and to American businesses developing innovative new services and competing in a global marketplace. It would implement a core principle supported by Digital Due Process (DDP), a broad coalition of companies, privacy groups, think tanks, and academics.
For all these reasons, we strongly urge all members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to support the Chairman's amendment to H.R. 2471."
Other signatories included American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, American Civil Liberties Union, American Library Association, Americans for Tax Reform, Association for Competitive Technology, Association of Research Libraries, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, CAUCE North America, Center for Democracy & Technology, Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights, Center for National Security Studies, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Computer and Communications Industry Association, The Constitution Project, Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, Data Foundry, eBay, EDUCAUSE, Future of Privacy Reform, Microsoft, Microsoft, Neustar, Newspaper Association of America, Personal, Reed Elsevier Inc., Software & Information Industry Association, SpiderOak, TechAmerica, TechFreedom, and the US Policy Council of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Share wisely, and take care.
Senate Judiciary to Take Up Privacy Legislation
Excerpted from National Journal Report by Juliana Gruenwald
The Senate Judiciary Committee will finally take action this month on legislation that would update a pair of privacy laws from the 1980s, including a measure dealing with government access to electronic communications.
The committee said late Monday that it would take up an update of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), which the House passed in December, and attach provisions to that bill that would amend parts of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), according to a Democratic aide.
ECPA set standards for law-enforcement access to electronic communications. Many privacy advocates and tech firms argue that the bill is woefully out of date and that it offers inconsistent protections depending on the type of communications. For example, under current law, e-mail stored with a third-party provider such as Google or Yahoo that is older than 180 days can be accessed by law-enforcement officials without a warrant, while a document stored on a home computer for the same amount of time would require a warrant.
Several privacy groups and tech firms formed the Digital Due Process coalition a few years ago to push Congress to update the law. They argue that the out-of-date protections in ECPA for access to e-mail and other electronics could hamper the growth of cloud computing and other technologies. "When Congress first enacted these laws almost three decades ago, e-mail was still a novelty and most Americans viewed movies at home on VHS tapes rented at their local video store," Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said. "The explosion of cloud computing, social networking sites, video streaming, and other new technologies in the years since, require that Congress take action to bring our privacy laws into the digital age."
Leahy introduced an ECPA overhaul last year but held off on bringing up the bill for a committee markup in hopes of attracting GOP support for the measure. However, Leahy is hoping that by attaching some ECPA provisions to the video privacy bill, which was drafted by Congressman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), and easily passed by the House, the legislation may attract bipartisan support in committee, the Democratic aide said.
Digital Due Process (DDP) members "have been meeting with Republican and Democratic senators on the committee to discuss the importance of a move to a warrant standard for cloud computing," said Association for Competitive Technology Executive Director Morgan Reed. His group is one of several tech groups and companies that belong to the coalition.
Leahy had planned to offer an amendment that would update both ECPA and the video privacy bill to cybersecurity legislation earlier this summer. The cybersecurity bill, however, was blocked by Republicans from coming to the Senate floor in early August.
The amendment that Leahy plans to offer to the video privacy law when his committee takes up the bill, possibly as soon as this week, would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant to access electronic communications.
The video privacy legislation would allow companies such as Netflix to obtain onetime consent to share consumers' video rental information with others. The measure is strongly backed by Netflix, which testified at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year.
The original video privacy law bars the disclosure of a consumer's video rental records without written consent. It was enacted in 1988 after Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork's video rental history was leaked to a newspaper,
Public, Private Cloud Markets Set to Soar as Enterprise Adoption Grows
Excerpted from eWeek Report by Darryl Taft
With enterprises continuing to adopt cloud computing, analysts see continued growth in both public and private cloud investment — with worldwide spending on public IT cloud services set to exceed $40 billion in 2012 and reach nearly $100 billion by 2016, according to IDC.
The research firm forecasts that from 2012 to 2016, public IT cloud services will see gains at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26.4 percent — five times that of the IT industry overall, as companies accelerate their shift to the cloud services model for IT consumption.
"The IT industry is in the midst of an important transformative period as companies invest in the technologies that will drive growth and innovation over the next two to three decades," Frank Gens, Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst at IDC, said. "By the end of the decade, IDC expects at least 80 percent of the industry's growth, and enterprises' highest-value leverage of IT, will be driven by cloud services and the other third-platform technologies."
By 2016, public IT cloud services will account for 16 percent of IT revenue in five key technology categories: applications, system infrastructure software, platform-as-a-service (PaaS), servers and basic storage, IDC said. More significantly, cloud services will generate 41 percent of all growth in these categories by 2016.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) will claim the largest share of public IT cloud services spending over the next five years, but other categories — notably basic storage and PaaS, will show faster growth, IDC said. Accelerating PaaS rollouts over the next 12 to 18 months will be critical to maintaining strong cloud momentum, according to IDC.
Geographically, the United States will remain the largest public cloud services market, followed by Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific region (excluding Japan). But the fastest growth in public IT services spending will be in the emerging markets, which will see its collective share nearly double by 2016 when it will account for almost 30 percent of net-new public IT cloud services spending growth, IDC said in its study, Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2012-2016 Forecast.
IDC defines public IT cloud services as those offerings designed for, and commercially offered to, a largely unrestricted marketplace of potential users. The forecast does not include revenue from private cloud deployments, which are dedicated to a specific customer. While private clouds provide the customer with the ability to specify access limitations and the level of resource dedication beyond what is currently available in public cloud offerings, IDC's expectation is that public clouds will mature and eventually incorporate many of the capabilities — particularly security and availability — that make private clouds an attractive option today.
Meanwhile, as the public cloud market will be seeing a CAGR of 26.4 percent through 2016, the private cloud market is expected to show a CAGR of 21.5 percent through 2015, according to research distributed by ReportLinker.
In the report from Renub Research entitled "Private Cloud Computing Market & Forecast to 2015: Worldwide Analysis," analysts said security is a big concern for enterprises that may be considering the use of public cloud. For such organizations, the private cloud represents an alternative with a tighter security model that would enable their IT managers to control the building, deployment and management of those privately owned, internal clouds.
The market for private cloud technology and integrated services is increasingly implemented by larger enterprises. Given the potential for significant cost savings, small and midsized organizations are also becoming early adopters of this technology, the report said. The emerging market for cloud services is being driven by continuing globalization, government edicts, consumer acceptance of technology and the growth of the extended enterprise.
Application virtualization tools is the leading segment in the private cloud with around 37 percent market share in 2011 followed by infrastructure virtualization and business purpose virtualization tools, the report said. The middleware virtualization tools segment is contributing a small fraction to the private cloud market, but it has very high potential to grow in the near future.
Moreover, in a further breakdown of private cloud application virtualization tools, infrastructure application is leading with a share of more than 50 percent in private cloud applications in 2011 and it is expected to continue to dominate through 2014. The IT infrastructure application is the second most popular private cloud-based application. And the application development and collaboration applications are the third and fourth most popular private cloud-based applications. In market sizing, the infrastructure application segment is expected to reach nearly $3 billion by 2014, the report said.
Big Data at USTA: Game, Set, Data Match
Excerpted from Baseline Report by Samuel Greengard
For all the talk about big data there's actually very little action. However, one organization that has achieved net gains with the technology is the United State Tennis Association (USTA), which just crowned its 2012 champs.
Throughout the US Open, the organization tapped predictive analytics, cloud computing, and mobile technologies to connect fans and media with data and transform the sport in ways that would have once seemed unimaginable.
USTA, using an assortment of IBM tools and technologies, delivered streams of match data, access to live video, highlights, and real-time statistical information to tennis fans via dedicated iPad, iPhone and Android apps.
For example, a viewer might want to know how many fewer points a player tallied while winning a match or the percentage of break point conversions occurring during a match.
The big data system also provided predictive analytics capabilities. This included, among other things, what factors were most important for a particular player in winning or losing a given match. And it factored in information about current weather conditions and the effect on player hydration and performance.
The end result was an ability to deliver an insider's view of who had the advantage on court and who was most likely to win a match — well before match point. Some of the statistical and analytics data was also displayed onsite at the Tennis Center via the IBM Game Changer Interactive Wall.
"Our goal, among other things, is to be innovators for the sport of tennis and sports in general," said Phil Green, Senior Director of Advanced Media for USTA. "We hope to provide new and revolutionary tools that transform the way people follow the sport. Today, fans from across the globe crave information immediately on the device of their choice. It's an opportunity to connect them to the sport and to USTA more effectively."
In addition, USTA extended the data analysis into the social media sphere. IBM applied sophisticated analytics software to millions of public tweets generated during the US Open in order to assess which players were fan favorites and to gauge overall sentiment trends.
USTA was integrated with eight social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Google+. Ultimately, this type of data can help businesses determine how to make better business and marketing decisions and connect to customers more effectively, Green notes.
The organization draws and aggregates the data from a number of sources, including proprietary databases and public sources of information such as Twitter hashtags. More than 20 years of historical data is stored in the cloud.
In 2011, the website and mobile apps attracted about 15 million unique visitors and approximately 54 million overall visits.
"The way fans watch and follow sports is changing," Greene points out. "Big data will play an increasingly important role in supporting the overall fan experience. We're attempting to take tennis and the US Open into the future by making the experience as interactive as possible."
High Performance Computing, the Latest "IT" Thing in the Cloud
Excerpted from Network World Report by Brandon Butler
Every few months something new pops up as the latest and greatest feature touted by cloud providers. Earlier this year it was platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings. Recently, vendors have been pushing free or low-cost versions of their clouds. Now, perhaps it's time for high performance computing to have its turn in the spotlight.
This week, a new entrant into the market named ProfitBricks is coming forth with impressive network speed capabilities in its cloud, according to an independent review of the European company's performance. This falls in line with Amazon Web Services, which released a solid-state disk high input/output compute option over the summer.
ProfitBricks uses InfiniBand, a wired fabric that allows more than triple the data transfer rate between servers as compared to two of the industry's biggest players, Amazon and Rackspace, according to a test conducted by Cloud Spectator. "No one really comes up to their level in terms of networking speed in the US," says Kenny Li, co-founder of the cloud analytics firm.
ProfitBricks is a European company founded in 2010 by Achim Weiss and Andreas Gauger, whose former managed hosting company, 1&1, was sold to United Internet and now is a leading international Web hosting company. It raised $18 million in venture funding, including from United Internet, and has had customers in beta in the US and Europe until making its services generally available this week.
ProfitBricks allows users to customize their public cloud to their heart's content, providing a range of computing options that it says is wider than most of the big players in the market.
Many cloud providers, including Amazon and Microsoft Azure, offer tiers of cloud computing resources that include a certain number of cores, virtual machines and memory. ProfitBricks instead allows users to choose as many cores and as much memory as they want, ranging from 1 to 48 cores and anywhere up to 192GB of memory. Some of Amazon's highest offerings, by comparison, include 88 Elastic Cloud Compute units, with 60GB of memory in its XL cluster compute offering.
On its back end, ProfitBricks uses Mellanox dual QDR 40Gb/s InfiniBand switches to connect the server and storage infrastructure, while using a KVM hypervisor and AMD Opteron processor. The company serves up 60 virtual machines per server, about a threefold increase over typical virtual machine per server deployments using 10G Ethernet connections, it says.
The company is one of the first cloud providers to use InfiniBand, Li says. While it's not new technology, analyst Bob Laliberte of Enterprise Strategy Group says InfiniBand just never really found a home in enterprise deployments or service providers. Some fast-trading Wall Street shops and research institutions may use it, but it's unnecessarily high performance for mainstream enterprises, he says. Ethernet's continued development has made that the default options for most deployments, he says, but a growing crop of HPC offerings could foreshadow InfiniBand's increased use.
Bob Rizika is heading up ProfitBricks's US strategy and says the company is going after researchers, media/entertainment organizations with high graphic processing requirements, gaming sites, and web-based companies that need fast access to large databases. The company's intuitive graphic interface deployment chart aims to ease the management of new resources as well.
Melanie Posey, an IDC researcher, says ProfitBricks is carving out a niche for itself around HPC.
"Since ProfitBricks is coming into the IaaS up against established giants like Amazon and Rackspace (and now Google and Microsoft), they need to establish some differentiation in the market — the technology is one of those differentiators," she says. Given the increased role analyzing large amounts of data could play in the future, she expects HPC offerings may continue to be an area that service providers look to up their offerings in. IBM, for example, she says is making a big push to provide data analytics software for use either on-site or as a cloud-based service.
There are a bevy of other providers offering similarly customizable solutions, including getting up into high performance workloads. CloudSigma, for example, is another European cloud provider looking to tap into the US market with its customizable offerings. Having fully customized cloud offerings, like those available from ProfitBricks and CloudSigma, allows the providers to tailor solutions directly to the customer's need, says CloudSigma CEO Patrick Baillie. CloudSigma is looking to tap into the HPC trend itself, touting its work to provide cloud computing resources to European scientific organizations through the Helix Nebula project.
Amazon Launches Marketplace for Cloud Capacity
Excerpted from Data Center Knowledge Report by Rich Miller
When Amazon Web Services introduced Spot Instances in late 2009, it sparked discussion of cloud computing exchanges in which customers could buy and sell capacity.
This week Amazon has launched the Reserved Instance Marketplace, creating a secondary exchange in which AWS users can buy and sell cloud computing capacity that has been reserved for future use.
"If you have excess capacity, you can list it on the marketplace and sell it to someone who needs additional capacity," writes Jeff Barr, Senior Web Services Evangelist, on the AWS Blog.
The marketplace also allows AWS users to do comparison shopping for instances that may be priced at a discount to Amazon's pricing. In this 3-minute video, Barr and EC2 Senior Manager Dave Ward discuss the new marketplace and how it works.
PurpleStream Forges Alliance with Octoshape to Provide Global IPTV Services
PurpleStream Convergence announced this week a strategic relationship with Octoshape, an industry leader in cloud-based streaming technology, to provide IPTV services globally.
PurpleStream's groundbreaking broadband IPTV service, called PurpleCloud, will incorporate Octoshape's Infinite HD-M Federated Multicast Broadband TV platform to provide broadcasters in India and Asia unparalleled value for IPTV delivery services to customers in North America, Europe, and Australia.
PurpleStream's core technology incorporates Adaptive Bit Rate Optimization with Single Source Multiple Device (SSMD) Delivery, which when coupled with Infinite HD-M, dynamically adjusts to the available bandwidth to provide an optimized video viewing experience on any Internet enabled device with zero buffering. Offered as a managed service for Broadcasters and Over the Top (OTT) operators, PurpleCloud leverages the robustness of Octoshape's Infinite HD-M to deliver stable and dependable HD quality video streams to any device, any platform, in any geography at a fraction of the cost of current delivery systems.
"It is prohibitively expensive for all except the largest of TV Broadcasters to deliver live content via the Internet to audiences in other countries," said Karthik Subramanian, CEO of PurpleStream. "Traditionally, this has been accomplished through satellites. The multicasting, multi path capabilities of Infinite HD-M are an ideal fit for PurpleCloud. We are pleased to be the reseller of Octoshape in India, where we have a number of customers eagerly awaiting the solution."
Octoshape's federated linear broadband TV ecosystem will continue to expand globally throughout 2012 in carefully planned phases adding content contribution partners, Tier1 broadband providers, connected television manufacturers, and conditional access providers.
"We have been impressed by PurpleStream's technical capabilities and marketing prowess on the Indian subcontinent," added Michael Koehn Milland, CEO of Octoshape. "We are also keen on collaborating and developing the Live Events broadcast market segment with PurpleStream. Octoshape has successfully supported some of the largest live events on the Internet. The combination of the Infinite HD-M platform with PurpleStream's Single Source Multiple Device (SSMD) capability is a game changer in the market for Live Events Broadcasts."
Aggregating All the Clouds
Excerpted from ITWorld Report by Brian Proffitt
One of the biggest problems with cloud computing for small businesses is having little to no clue how much working with a cloud-based infrastructure is really going to cost. A new Linux-based service in its nascent stage will be working to solve that problem, helping IT managers with monitoring existing cloud computing costs, and projecting costs for new cloud providers to find out which one is best for your wallet.
You might be thinking, how hard could it be to track my cloud computing costs? You've signed up with Amazon EC2, spun up your instances in the closest region, and you have a fixed monthly cost, right?
Turns out? Not so much.
The problem with managing clouds is twofold. First, even if you're using a single cloud provider service, there's the very real issue of spiking. An application's load on a cloud can be steady, until there's an unexpected use case that suddenly sticks you with a bigger monthly bill for which you had originally budgeted. And it might not even be a useful cost. Improperly managed instances can keep right on spinning, racking up the monthly charges like leaving the lights on in a room 24/7.
And, as cloud computing becomes more pervasive, a company's cloud environment can become more heterogeneous, as some cloud services will serve some applications and tasks better than others, which leads to a diverse set of cloud providers to manage for one IT department.
This is the pain point that Xervmon is working to solve. The service was formed after the staff at Hooduku spent years integrating systems for clients and working with apps that ran in datacenters. As time went on, their client base increasingly had the interest to shift to the cloud, but didn't know how to cost such a migration out. It's not just the cost of the cloud instances; bandwidth information for data moving to and from the cloud also has to be factored in.
This, according to Sudhendra Seshachala, is what Xervmon figures out.
"What is the cost benefit for moving to the cloud? Xervmon figures out the impact analysis before they move," Seshachala explained.
What makes Xervmon interesting, besides its development on Linux, is the way it monitors multiple cloud providers - Amazon, HP Cloud, Rackspace, and Windows Azure can all be tracked, as well as network providers like Comcast and Time Warner. It can even monitor datacenter provider services like those from Softlayer.
Since all of this information on usage and cost is aggregated into one place, current cloud and datacenter users can manage their costs and perform detailed analysis on what's coming down the road.
It's a unified analysis packages that is much needed in an increasingly heterogeneous cloud provider environment, and ultimately should help users have more choice in picking and choosing the cloud provider that works best for them.
Kaltura Expands Reach to Google TV, Xbox
Excerpted from CED Magazine Report by Brian Santo
Kaltura has introduced software development kits (SDKs) and reference applications for Google TV, integration with the Xbox gaming console, and native reference applications for iOS and Android devices.
Kaltura has a video management and delivery platform initially aimed at businesses, schools and other organizations looking to distribute video via almost any device, including most mobile devices; Kaltura will also work with service providers.
The company currently supports integration with a number of over-the-top (OTT) set-top boxes such as Roku, Boxee and Flingo.
Customers can use Kaltura's tools to edit, upload, and organize their content (video, audio, and data). The company takes care of transcoding video for distribution to various devices. Customers include HBO, ABC News, Siemens, Zappos, Best Buy, and Columbia Business School, among others.
The new elements to Kaltura's features and services include the Google TV SDK and reference application for Google TV connected TVs and set-top boxes. Xbox Integration is a reference application for native video consumption using Kaltura's .NET SDK on connected Xbox 360 consoles.
The company has also introduced native iOS and Android applications. Together with its mobile SDK, developers get the basic framework of a video-focused application, including features such as a custom player with bit rate selector; managed, resumable file upload from camera capture or gallery; sharing on Facebook, Twitter and email; and browse and search with auto-complete, Kaltura said.
"Online video is increasingly becoming more complex behind the scenes — it's not just about posting a video on a website anymore — today you need to ensure that your viewers can see your content on any device and in the optimal format," said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura's Chairman and CEO. "From the customers' perspective, they can simply manage all content within the Kaltura Management Console, and from there distribute it across the Web, to any device or distribution channel at the click of a button."
The Brute Force Computing Revolution
Excerpted from NY Times Report by Quentin Hardy
Autodesk has announced that it is selling design simulation software that works online, via Amazon's AWS cloud service. This continues the company's move into a lower-paying, hopefully higher-volume, world of mobile devices and cloud computing.
Just as important, it is another sign that the cost of computing has fallen so far that it makes more sense to be wasteful with server power, and harvest the results, than it is to plan everything carefully. It is a triumph of brute force and messes over carefully planned design.
"Simulation is the ability to understand something before you build it," says Carl Bass, the chief executive of Autodesk. "If it doesn't cost much to do it, why not do 10,000, even 100,000 different simulations of anything, rather than build a model, judge it, and keep going back to the drawing board?"
The idea is to try thousands of different conditions, like temperature, humidity, tensile strength, or shape, in just a few seconds. Most of the outcomes will be lousy, a couple of them will probably affirm what a designer thought to begin with, and a few might deliver surprising insights no one had considered. The hope, Mr. Bass said, is that "we give an engineer a greater capacity to understand their product, before they make a million of them."
The brute force computing model is changing a lot of fields, with more to follow. It makes sense, in a world where more data is available than ever before, and even more is coming online, from a connected, sensor-laden world where data storage and server computing cycles cost almost nothing. In a sense, it is becoming a modification of the old "theorize-model-test-conclude" scientific method. Now the condition is to create and collect a lot of data, look for patterns amid the trash, and try to exploit the best ones.
Brute force computing is behind Google's successful language translation. By comparing thousands of web pages in different languages to find patterns, in one year Google was able to discern and refine translation better than linguistic theorists had been able to do with their fancy programs for years. There is brute force in genetics research, too; machines plow though the data looking for novel patterns, which researchers then examine to see if they hold valuable insights.
"As a trained mathematician who is supposed to think about finding one elegant answer, it's kind of offensive, but brute force works," Mr. Bass says. "Once you start thinking about the process a little differently, it allows the engineer and the designer to do more interesting work."
Like many of Autodesk's cloud-based products, the revenue per customer is low, relative to what the company makes on its older packaged software. Still, the simulation product costs anywhere from $3,600 to $10,000 for a year of use, with higher prices buying more functionality and computing power. That is better than its forays into consumer-type design, like a recent $60 million purchase of Socialcam, a company without visible revenue.
As Autodesk is spending a lot to run its cloud, margins at first may be lower than what the company is used to. Mr. Bass says Autodesk is spending "three-quarters of its resources on the future, compared with 5 percent to 10 percent normally." That has got to hurt, in a company that just missed its revenue expectations, taking the stock down more than 10 percent.
He also says he has no choice, and thinks competitors like Dassault and Siemens will in a few years be blindsided by cloud computing's impact on industrial design.
"This is a classic disruptive technology," he said. "They'll see it, they'll understand it, they'll dismiss it as a toy, and they won't be able to do anything about it when it takes over."
Telefonica Signs Deal with Joyent for Cloud Services Deployment
Excerpted from Mobile News Report by Paul Withers
Telefonica has signed an agreement with cloud and systems software provider Joyent to give it access to Joyent's latest technologies and software for the deployment of cloud services.
Telefonica, which has also made an equity investment in Joyent, said cloud-based services are a key focus area for its new Digital unit, and that Joyent's technology expertise will help it enhance its product offering, particularly for SME and SoHo customers.
It said the partnership combines its global scale and infrastructure with the cloud architecture developed by Joyent, which has over 12,000 public cloud customers in the US.
Telefonica Chairman and CEO Matthew Key said, "This investment is further proof of our ambition in the area of cloud services and our strategy of working with the most innovative start-ups.
"Joyent's technology fits perfectly with our in-house developed technologies and our cloud services model and enables us to provide more competitive offerings to a broader range of customer segments."
Joyent founder and CEO David Young said, "This strategic partnership and funding will enable us to expand our product offering to more regions and to evolve our products, taking advantage of the service provider vision brought by Telefonica."
Most Start-Ups Use Mobile & Cloud Computing
Excerpted from LiveMint Report by Deepti Chaudhary
A majority of Indian start-ups in 2012 catered to individual customers, with most entrepreneurs adopting mobile and cloud computing technologies to build their businesses, according to a study by Yourstory.in—an online platform for start-ups and entrepreneurs.
The "State of Indian Tech Start-ups" survey was based on responses from more than 400 enterprises across six cities—Ahmedabad, Mumbai, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore.
The start-ups had to be at least four years old and have a product business in place besides having feedback from customers to qualify for the survey.
Around 28.5% start-ups targeted the "consumer web" with products and services for online commerce and content, and catered to individual customers, according to Shradha Sharma, founder of YourStory.in.
Start-ups catering to the mobile sector accounted for 21.6% of the total companies surveyed while those targeting the education and e-commerce sectors came in next with 16.6% and 14.1%, respectively.
"Entrepreneurs are realizing these products can work out well globally and cloud has been a big enabler," she said. Nearly 34% of the start-ups surveyed said they were actively using the cloud (a metaphor for Internet-based computing that allows users to access content on demand and anywhere) to power their main product.
Young Indians, according to the survey, are also comfortable with the idea of entrepreneurship, with nearly 34% of the start-ups having just one founder. The average age of an entrepreneur is 25-30 with work experience of up to five years. However, there are challenges too with nearly 80% of the entrepreneurs saying the Indian start-up ecosystem is not supportive enough and needs help with marketing and fund raising, according to Sharma.
A majority of the start-ups are also looking for investments. According to the survey, nearly two-thirds of the companies surveyed were looking for an investment, with 41.5% of start-ups looking for investment at the angel stage (high net worth individuals who back start-ups). Only 6% of the start-ups were looking for their second or third round of funding.
When it came to an exit strategy for start-ups, a majority wanted to simply grow to be a profitable company. Around 9.4% of the companies were looking for a buyout, while 12% were looking for an initial public offering (IPO) to create an exit for their founders and investors.
Bangalore continues to be perceived as the best city for a start-up with more 34% of the respondents identifying it as the city of choice, citing low rentals, the presence of investors including venture capitalists (VCs) and angels and the availability of ample technical resources.
"The cost of starting up is not very high in the consumer web space as applications can be hosted on the cloud infrastructure available today," said Deepak Srinath, Director of Bangalore-based boutique investment bank Viedea Capital Advisors. He added that since most entrepreneurs have applications and features and not products, investors tend to question the scalability of such offerings for making money.
"It is difficult to forecast how they will turn into sizeable businesses and make money by offering apps and features. This is a challenge for angel investors," he said.
Cloud Computing Brings Huawei and Intel Together
Excerpted from Easy Web Report by Humayun Shahid
China's premium telecommunication manufacturer Huawei has recently joined hands with global computing giant Intel via signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU), a move that aims at strengthening Huawei's commitment to provide cutting-edge offerings to its existing and perspective consumer base.
The partnership would heighten core mutual engineering collaboration, a step that may bring to the market novel products including servers, storage platforms, data center essentials and most significantly, cloud computing solutions. The cooperation further extends to harmonize long-term objective attainment and cut down product development time-span.
"Technology innovation" was described by Zheng Yelai, President at Huawei IT product line, as being the key binding corporate value that was holding Intel and Huawei together for so long as 10 years now. Huawei's recent hardware marvel publicized in July, the Tecal V2 server, is powered at its roots by Intel's Xeon E7 and E5 processor line — a vivid indicative of the duo's pledge to give consumers with dependable IT solutions.
Huawei also unveiled its latest cloud-oriented product, the FusionCube Converged Infrastructure in addition to 3 storage-related offerings.
The FusionCube boasts software support for virtualization and cloud management. The solution can double to function as a distributed storage engine. Huawei demonstrated hardware interplay and compatibility with other storage options and networked devices. At the heart of the product is the power to fuse, explained Ren Zhipeng, Vice Chairman of Cloud Products at Huawei. FusionCube distinguishes itself as a multifunctional management system that's guaranteed to reduce the otherwise inevitable expenditures including IT installation, commissioning, and continuance. The FusionCube is all about cloud platform optimization, in addition to expediency and resourcefulness.
"Huawei is the primary player within the industry to supply this type of solution", claimed Ren, one that "integrates computing, storage, and networking in one device."
The Huawei OceanStor HVS, Universal Distributed Storage System and MVX Big Data Storage Solution were also announced; offerings which are expected to enhance the previous (and utterly popular) cloud storage models offered by Huawei.
Fan Ruiqi, President at Huawei's IT storage division explained that OceanStor HVS, equipped with Smart Matrix Architecture, conforms to the very best of industrial standards and stands proud as one of the crucial adaptive, consistent and efficient cloud storage architectural hardware accessible.
While the Chinese manufacturer seems ready to make its mark at the global cloud hardware scene, response within the US can be lukewarm as a result of the stained repute as an
outcome of ongoing scrutiny over probable spying allegations.
Jawee Sun, in charge of the promoting division, was positive concerning the North American market. "It is correct the federal government has a good grip over America's big carriers, however the enterprise market in the US is large and open to Huawei. It's a win-win situation."
Sun, beaming with optimism, revealed that Huawei has just secured a $6 million contract with an undisclosed American corporation. This seems wonderful news for each of the cloud zealots out there, for the reason that majority of Chinese firms are known for competitive price quotes.
By Humayun Shahid(Disclaimer: CloudTweaks publishes news and opinion articles from different contributors. All views and opinions in these articles belong entirely to our contributors. They don't reflect or represent by any means the private or professional opinions of CloudTweaks.com or those of its staff.)
Creative Ways to Deliver Cloud Computing Services
Excerpted from Data Center Knowledge Report
With advancements in wide area networking (WAN), datacenter facilities, and the overall technology landscape, organizations have been able to do much more over the Internet than ever before.
Although cloud computing is a relatively new buzz term, the concept around the technology has been around for a while.
Even before the "cloud," users were utilizing Internet and WAN services to house data and deliver it to any device in the world — given a connection of course. Now, this technology has leapt forward even more, promising to deliver newer platforms and more diverse solutions. The idea behind cloud computing is to efficiently utilize shared resources and maximize computing density. With better underlying hardware, developers have been able to become creative with some of the platforms that cloud computing can actually deliver.
To gain a better understanding, we'll take a look at some of these offerings and how the cloud plays a role in their delivery.
Virtual Desktops. Many organizations have begun using technologies from Citrix XenDesktop or VMware View. By virtualizing a desktop, administrators can rapidly provision fully functional desktop experiences to consultants, users, lab workers, and temporary employees all with a couple of clicks. Now, with cloud computing, these virtual desktops can be delivered over the WAN.
A user would simply access a corporate portal, sign in using their assigned credentials and have access to a corporate image. Using WAN optimization technologies and compression mechanisms, the virtual desktop can be effectively pushed over the Internet to the end-user.
Virtual Applications. Like virtual desktops, applications can be virtualized using technologies from Citrix XenApp, VMware ThinApp or other app virtualization platforms. Administrators are able to centralize their application environment and deliver these apps to the end-user based on permissions and policies.
These primary business applications would be controlled at the data center level and can be delivered through a controlled portal over the WAN or LAN. Optimization technologies have improved so much so that resource-heavy applications (SolidWorks or AutoCAD) can now be effectively pushed over the Internet.
Extended Temporary Data Centers. Many industries experience fluctuations in their data flow or user counts. Peak seasons see an influx of users hitting a data center and sometimes even overwhelming existing resources. Using public cloud services, an organization can effectively provision servers on-demand. Using load-balancing devices coupled with a cloud presence, an organization can immediately spin up new servers or resources in the cloud if their existing environment begins to peak.
This allows for rapid provisioning and de-provisioning of resources without actually buying anything in the local data center. By creating a cloud bridge, administrators can have access to a temporarily extended data center.
Backup Solutions. Increased bandwidth on the WAN has allowed the backup market to flourish. Cloud-based data centers are now offering services directly revolving around backup. Whether the backup is synchronous or asynchronous, there are numerous options for many different organizations. Backup offerings can range from simple file-based backup to granular, full infrastructure backup solutions.
Many times backup services are offered as not only a way to secure data for recovery — but also so that this backup can be used as a disaster recovery means as well.
Distributed Testing and Development. Like a data center extension, may organizations have begun to use public cloud offerings for the testing and development practices. Adopting a simple "pay-as-you-go" or "pay-as-you-grow" model, companies can dedicate equipment for certain periods of time based on their testing needs. Furthermore, specific testing metrics can be passed to the cloud provider to ensure that the right resources are in place for the testing to occur.
Once all metrics are gathered and the organization is satisfied with the environment, they can simple cease using the platform and decommission their cloud infrastructure. This can all be done without any additional data center hardware purchases.
Disaster Recovery. Unlike simple backup, creating a disaster recovery strategy can be much more involved. Now, cloud computing can play a role in the planning process. For example, an organization can back up their entire Exchange infrastructure to the cloud. If a disaster occurs, the contract agreement between the organization and cloud provider can stipulate the a new cloud-based server is immediately started up with the relevant mail server information loaded on it.
For organizations requiring greater uptime, hot server VMs can be running in the cloud. These instances can be ready almost immediately to take over the load of the failed environment. DR can be expanded to applications, databases, license servers and much more.
Regardless of the solution, cloud computing has the capability of truly extending the presence of an organization. Now that there is a better understanding of the cloud, companies and IT departments can make better plans revolving around this technology. The expansion of the web can only translate to more utilization of cloud computing and all of the various services that it can provide.
Coming Events of Interest
ICOMM 2012 Mobile Expo — September 14th-15th in New Delhi, India. The 7th annual ICOMM International Mobile Show is supported by Government of India, MSME, DIT, NSIC, CCPIT China and several other domestic and international associations. New technologies, new products, mobile phones, tablets, electronics goods, and business opportunities.
ITU Telecom World 2012 - October 14th-18th in Dubai, UAE. ITUTW is the most influential ICT platform for networking, knowledge exchange, and action. It features a corporate-neutral agenda where the challenges and opportunities of connecting the transformed world are up for debate; where industry experts, political influencers and thought leaders gather in one place.
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 - November 8th-9th in Santa Monica. CA. CCW:2012 will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating and investing in cloud computing services providers.
Third International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery Using Cloud and Distributed Computing Platforms - December 10th in Brussels, Belgium. Researchers, developers, and practitioners from academia, government, and industry will discuss emerging trends in cloud computing technologies, programming models, data mining, knowledge discovery, and software services.
2013 International CES - January 8th-11th in Las Vegas, NV. With more than four decades of success, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) reaches across global markets, connects the industry and enables CE innovations to grow and thrive. The International CES is owned and produced by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the preeminent trade association promoting growth in the $195 billion US consumer electronics industry.
CONTENT IN THE CLOUD at CES - January 9th in Las Vegas, NV. Gain a deeper understanding of the impact of cloud-delivered content on specific segments and industries, including consumers, telecom, media, and CE manufacturers.
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