January 21, 2013
Volume XLII, Issue 6
Cloud Computing: Best Way to Deliver Media
Excerpted from CloudTweaks Report by Abdul Salam
As a long time advocate of cloud computing, I already know most of the technology and terms surrounding cloud computing and if someone mentions a new application or feature I might be able to glean how it works based on the technologies used. This is not necessarily true for most people even if they have been in the IT industry for a long time.
That is why I write "simple" articles that the less informed might be able to grasp easily. But to get a real understanding of something, you need to get an understanding of its internal structure, understand how it works and not just what it does. If someone tells you that an airplane flies because of engines and wings, it will still seem like magic because you are not really informed on the how.
Same as cloud computing: for many it simply provides them with a service that they take for granted without really knowing how it is done. And to understand it better, we must understand the underlying infrastructure of cloud computing.
To put it simply, the infrastructure or how all the hardware technology and other elements come together in cloud computing is very similar to that of traditional network computing. You have your servers that contain the CPUs, RAM, and other processing elements, and then you have your various storage devices like NAS and RAID-style setups.
Of course, to round out the bunch you have your networking hardware, the routers, switches, modems, repeaters, and any and all combinations of networking hardware technology. If you look at the list I just mentioned, it is obvious that the hardware used for cloud computing has been existing, but why hasn't cloud computing existed as long?
To reiterate, cloud computing is an entirely new paradigm, a new approach in using and combining the current networking technology infrastructure, not a totally new technology even though networking technology has evolved in order to meet the paradigm's demands.
Cloud computing is simply a new way of putting together current technology to come up with new and different things, sort of like Legos.
One type of infrastructure might be better, more efficient than others depending on the way it was put together. And of course, the biggest element that distinguishes cloud computing is the way the service is being provided — virtualization and scalability. This allows providers to cater to all clients like they are the only ones using the service.
Clients or users are allocated computing resources only according to their need so the rest of the resources can be provided to others, even if those needs fluctuate. Contrary to the old networking service infrastructures that are installed locally with all the computing power made available to their owners but not all of it necessarily being used and part of it basically wasted.
With this new approach and delivery, service providers are finding new ways of using the technology for day-to-day business operations and are now even catering to individual consumers because of the popularity of mobile computing and entertainment media.
Cloud computing as far as I am concerned, is the best way to deliver media to people that are always on the go. As communications technology become more powerful, so does the reach and function of cloud computing.
DARPA's Approach to Securing Military Cloud
Excerpted from GCN Report by Kathleen Hickey
The core of the Defense Department's plans to reduce its 1,500 data centers to "a number far below that" is implementing a secure, coherent, and consistent computer cloud network architecture, said DOD Principal Deputy Chief Information Officer Robert Carey at a recent cloud computing panel discussion.
While saving money is one reason for these changes, securing data is the most important factor.
"The access, the cost — all those facets of the efficiency of cloud computing — if it isn't secure enough, it will not serve us well," Carey said, according to a DOD report.
The problems with securing cloud computing are many. Today the cloud is secure for only certain types of data, Carey said. The department also faces difficulties transitioning from its legacy systems in a cost-effective manner. And how to measure cloud security is in its infancy. "At the end of the day, the metrics of cloud security are, at best, nebulous," he said.
Then there is the structure of the cloud itself. Centralizing data, while cost-effective and a boon to data sharing, can also create a single point of failure. Shared code means a virus can spread rapidly through the system, which is difficult in siloed computer systems with different legacy coding.
DOD is addressing security on several fronts, one of which is its Mission-Oriented Resilient Clouds (MRC) initiative, announced in 2011. Spearheaded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), MRC aims to develop resilient cloud services that would continue to operate and support military objectives despite being hit by a cyberattack.
DARPA has issued several grants to develop solutions, including one to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a second to Johns Hopkins University, Purdue University, and the University of Virginia. MRC system design and development will run through the end of 2014, with integration and testing ending by 2015.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 The DCIA will present the CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE as a two-day event-track within the 2013 NABShow in Las Vegas, NV on Monday April 8th and Tuesday April 9th.
This year's Cloud Computing Conference at NAB will demonstrate the new ways cloud-based solutions are providing increased reliability and security not only for commercial broadcasting and enterprise applications, but also for government and military implementations.
From collaboration during production, to post-production and formatting, to interim storage, delivery and playback on fixed and mobile devices, to viewership measurement and analytics, cloud computing is having an enormous impact on video delivery.
Topics will include: cloud privacy, reliability, and security issues; advanced capabilities, new features and cost advantages; the impact on consumer electronics and telecommunications; and the years ahead for cloud computing.
If you would like to speak at this major industry event, please contact DCIA CEO Marty Lafferty at your earliest convenience.
The DCIA is finalizing its conference agenda and speakers list to be included in promotional materials and the conference program now.
Call 410-476-7965 or e-mail for more information.
Our preliminary agenda is organized into thematic blocks that will feature keynotes and panel discussions on each subject matter area.
We'll start with an "Industry Update on Cloud Adoption." How are cloud-based technologies currently being deployed throughout the audio/video (A/V) ecosystem? What file-based workflow strategies, products, and services are now working best?
Next, we will address "Outstanding Issues: Reliability & Security." What remaining pitfalls cause producers and distributors to resist migrating to the cloud? How are liability, predictability, privacy, and safety considerations being addressed?
From there, we will explore "Cloud Solutions for Content Creation." How is cloud computing being used for collaboration and other pre-production functions? What do dailies-screening and editing in the cloud offer the content production process?
We'll continue along that line with "Post-Production in the Cloud." What do cloud solutions bring to post-production functions such as animation and graphics generation? How are formatting, applying metadata, and transcoding improved by cloud computing?
Next we'll examine "Cloud-Based Multimedia Storage." How are data centers and content delivery networks (CDNs) at the edge evolving? What do business-to-business (B2B) storage solutions and consumer "cloud media lockers" have in common?
And finally, we'll conclude DAY ONE with a block dedicated to "Content Delivery from the Cloud." How is cloud computing being used to enable distribution and playback on multiple fixed and mobile platforms? What does the cloud offer to improve the economics of "TV Everywhere?"
On Tuesday, we'll open with a number of "Cloud Implementation Case Studies." How was cloud computing used most successfully during 2012 in the multimedia content distribution chain? What lessons can be learned from these deployments that will benefit other industry players?
After a morning networking break, we'll outline "2013 Changes in Cloud Computing." How is the cloud-computing industry changing in relation to content rights-holders? What new specialized functions-in-the-cloud, interoperability improvements, and standardization are coming this year?
And then we'll wrap up the commercially focused part of this conference with "A Future Vision of the Cloud." What do the latest forecasts project about the ways that cloud-computing solutions will continue to impact the A/V ecosystem over the long term? How will the underlying businesses that are based on content production and distribution be affected?
After a lunch break, we'll refocus the discussion on "Government & Military Cloud Requirements." How do the needs of government agencies and military branches for securely managing multimedia assets differ from the private sector? What do these requirements have in common with commercial practices?
Then we'll examine "Unique Cloud-Based Solutions." What are cloud solutions providers currently developing to address specific considerations of the intelligence community (IC) in fulfilling its missions? How will these approaches evolve and change during 2013?
And finally, we'll present "Relevant Cloud Case Studies." How is cloud computing being used to help securely manage sensitive multimedia? What lessons can be learned from these deployments that will benefit government and military organizations?
In addition to the two-day CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at the 2013 NABShow, there will also be exhibition opportunities in an expanded Cloud Computing Pavilion and other new opportunities for industry participants to gain exposure at the 2013 show. Share wisely, and take care.
CES 2013: Sorting the Nuggets from the Dross
Excerpted from E-Commerce Times by Charles King
CES, the international consumer electronics show conducted every January in Las Vegas, NV, is easier to hate than it is to love. Hype drowns out substance. Innovative and interesting products are easily overshadowed by rooms literally full of craptastic junk. Travel/logistics can be a nightmare — especially given the surge in attendance to some 150,000 this year. And let's not forget the myriad ways that Las Vegas seems to transform reasonable people into doltish twits.
CES also offers a macro view into the IT industry that's hard to beat, and this year's show was no exception. That may be because with global economies showing some semblance of life, vendors responded optimistically. At the same time, some tech sectors are in the midst of fundamental, evolutionary changes whose effects were apparent across the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) and the dozen or so hotels on the Strip that were hosting related events. Following is an overview of CES 2013 announcements and products I found especially compelling.
Not surprisingly, mobile technology products, such as smart-phones, tablets, laptops, and hybrids occupied a lot of CES booth space. The mobility theme was apparent across numerous other areas. On the ridiculous side, count in the hundreds of vendors selling skins, earbuds, chargers, and other smart-phone gizmos.
More sublime were automakers whose vehicles sported integrated mobile features, including voice-activated GPS, web browsing, e-mail, and who knows what else. We have seen the future of computing, and it can go anywhere.
While mobility inspired thousands of CES headlines, the deeper story is the degree to which digital intelligence has become common across virtually every sector of consumer electronics. That's obviously the case with computing and entertainment products, but it is also a strong theme in everything from health and fitness gadgets to kitchen appliances to home security equipment.
In other words, what vendors like IBM have always called the "Internet of things" is already here.
For a vendor who regularly snubs CES, Apple and its popular iPhone, iPad, and iPod products were evident everywhere, with some sections of the cavernous LVCC largely or exclusively populated by iProducts of one kind or another.
Microsoft — which announced late year that it would no longer participate in CES — was a similarly ghostly presence in scores of new products and announcements. Plus, CEO Steve Ballmer's surprise appearance at Qualcomm's press conference lent that already-surrealistic event a soupcon of Windows weirdness.
How can you tell when a market or sector becomes commercially viable? When vendors begin spending money on it. That seems the case with smart-phone solutions aimed at developing markets, like Intel's new Atom Z2420 CPU. The company is working with Acer, Lava International, and Safaricom to leverage the new chips in "value" (low cost) smart-phone markets in Asia, Africa, and other regions.
Add to this rumors published by DigiTimes that Apple is developing a cheap iPhone to introduce in emerging markets later this year. Though the rumors were quickly quashed, the idea makes sense, especially if Intel's Atom Z2420 projection of 500 million handset sales is accurate.
For a product class that many claim is in its death throes, personal computers made great strides at CES 2013. First, Intel's announcement of its fourth-gen Haswell Core processors, slated for late 2013, should deliver on the company's Ultrabook vision with all-day battery life, full- blown system performance, touch enablement, Intel's Perceptual Computing features (gesture, facial and voice recognition), and ever-thinner, more stylish designs.
The following day, AMD hosted a press conference to discuss its graphically intensive Surround Computing strategy, as well as the PCs, laptops, and tablets using the company's latest APUs. The event highlight was the SurRound House demo, an immersive 360-degree positional audio system synched with 10 HD-capable TV "windows" that place viewers in the middle of an intense game environment — all of it running off a single AMD-based PC.
Big Data has been a growing subject of interest among enterprises, but its impact on consumers and small businesses is no less profound. In fact, you could argue that it's a bigger headache for those customers since few have the experience, skills or tools to effectively manage crushing volumes of audio/video files, or effectively navigate increasingly complex online sources.
CES 2013 featured an imperial ton of Big Data-related solutions, but two that stood out were HP's Aurasma service and Stremor's Liquid Helium language heuristics engine. The former allows businesses to utilize image and pattern recognition technologies acquired by HP in the Autonomy deal to digitally enrich advertising, signage, publishing and packaging.
The latter leverages language analysis to enhance online content discovery, creation and consumption; think of it as CliffsNotes for the Internet. We expect to hear more about both solutions in the coming months.
Outside of a few lust-worthy hybrid laptops and tablets (mainly from Dell and Lenovo), my favorite CES 2013 products were relatively modest. The new NAS storage products from the LenovoEMC joint venture are well-designed and attractively priced, and offer cloud-based features that could make me rethink my use of local storage.
Fujitsu's ScanSnap iX500 is a terrific, simple solution for scanning and saving paper records, including receipts. Private WiFi offers an intriguingly simple solution for encrypting and securing the data on phones, tablets and laptops being used on public WiFi networks.
CardNinja gets my best-of-show award for best/simplest/most useful product — a sticky-backed pocket designed to hold up to eight credit cards or cash that turns any smart-phone into a physical wallet.
Is there anything more annoying than a car with a blaring sound system? How about a motorcyclist with the same thing but no muffling doors and windows? Now bicyclists can join in the ear-numbing fun with the Scosche boomBOTTLE, a Bluetooth-connected speaker designed to fit in a bike water bottle bracket.
Scosche may have received a CES Best of Show award for its contribution to public noise pollution, but that may lose a bit of shine the first time a boomBOTTLE owner is run into the weeds by an irate driver.
The Advantages of Agile Clouds
Excerpted from CIO Insight Report by Bob Violino
Numerous organizations are either using cloud computing services or planning to deploy them. In fact, the cloud has moved well past the experimental stage to become a keystone of many IT strategies today.
"Both public and private clouds are becoming mainstream in the enterprise and will continue to do so because of the flexibility, ease of maintenance and cost controls," says Janel Garvin, CEO at research firm Evans Data Corp. in Santa Cruz, CA.
"While we're seeing more enterprises embracing private clouds, there is a lot of interest in hybrid clouds, and we expect that to continue with enterprises keeping functions such as enterprise resource management, finance operations, and customer data on private clouds, but making communications, e-commerce, and other outward-facing operations on public clouds," Garvin says.
At Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY, cloud computing has become an indispensable IT resource for students, faculty, staff, outside researchers, and hosted clients of the college.
"If we had not built our cloud and still depended on distributed computing, we would not be able to provide many of the services we provide today," says Bill Thirsk, Vice President of IT and CIO at Marist. "Like all organizations, budgets are stretched tight but demand is endless, so we rely on our cloud to quickly deploy appropriate resources such as specific processor, memory, and storage to our users."
Marist recently built and delivered an education analytics cloud that provides students with a desktop image with their Microsoft applications, advanced open source tools, a big data engine, and any needed middleware, without having to load any software onto their personal computing devices.
Thirsk thinks cloud-based services are still immature, and there are "broad and deep market opportunities for those companies that first look at their service provision through the return-on-assets model," he says. "Add some advanced engineering and software development energy and adaptability to market demands, and the service would be a market winner."
One application area where the cloud still falls short is enterprise resource planning (ERP) designed for higher education, Thirsk says. "We have not yet seen a really good, large niche application or industry ERP that is truly cloud-enabled," he says. "Most of these applications are simply single instances being hosted on behalf of the client."
Marist's experience has been that the large ERP vendors "have not yet moved from the one app/one box/one processor model for either their software development or their software-as-a- service (SaaS) model," Thirsk says.
And while businesses are flocking to take advantage of low-cost software through the cloud, there are still questions about whether they will be able to pull back their data if the cloud provider fails in some way, says Thirsk.
UST Global, an Aliso Viejo, CA technology solutions provider, is moving into cloud computing in a big way in order to be more agile in a highly competitive market. The company is taking advantage of SaaS offerings wherever possible, and moving enterprise applications to a services-based delivery model is a top priority, says Tony Velleca, CIO.
For example, UST Global is using the customer relationship management (CRM) platform from Salesforce.com and human resources applications from SAP's SuccessFactors, among other cloud-based offerings.
"We're going with SaaS for the simple reason that we don't want to deal with software upgrades" in order to get quick access to the latest product features, Velleca says. In addition, he says, most of the cloud applications are being designed for mobile use, and UST Global is making a huge push toward mobility as part of its effort to be more flexible in its markets.
"The key trends today are mobility, social, cloud, and big data, and they're all closely related," Velleca says.
Most of the cloud applications UST Global uses now come with support for social media, Velleca says. "That's extremely important to the way the enterprise works," he notes. "All transaction systems should have a social platform with them. The next generation of applications need to be socially enabled."
The move to SaaS is not the only cloud effort underway at UST Global. The company relies on Amazon.com's public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering to support its innovation lab and corporate website, Velleca says. UST Global also operates a private cloud powered in part through server virtualization technology from VMware and Hyper-V. UST Global is also using ServiceMesh to help manage policies across virtual environments.
With the private cloud, "we can deploy servers into secure networks to set up a development environment very quickly," Velleca says. In addition to greater speed and flexibility, UST Global expects to see benefits such as cost savings from a reduction of capital expenditures on servers and other hardware.
Some companies are running productivity applications in the cloud. Intero Real Estate, based in Cupertino, CA, supports more than 2,000 agents at 14 corporate offices and more than 40 franchise locations. The company implemented Microsoft's Office 365 Exchange cloud-based offering to provide a cost-effective, scalable way to deliver messaging for agents who rely on e-mail to communicate with other agents and clients, and to help close time-sensitive deals.
"Ultimately our reason for moving to the cloud is to provide better scalability, agility, and efficiency to our agents," says Eric Rees, Intero Real Estate's Director of IT.
While cloud services have existed for years, Rees says "today the technology has finally caught up with what its full potential can be. Cloud services are able to accommodate many businesses, especially those in the small to mid-size market space."
The biggest concern Rees has about the cloud is its overall reliability. "There are a lot of variables with cloud-based services, so naturally it's something that you need some sort of reassurance with," he says. "And of course not being in control is something that most IT people have a hard time with."
Expect to see cloud service providers promoting their services with more aggressive marketing and limited time offers to attract customers, in the hope that they will become entrenched in their systems, says Garvin of Evans Data.
"In the private cloud sector better appliances or 'cloud in a box' will be launched, appealing to enterprise IT managers who want the flexibility of cloud with a plug-and-play appliance," Garvin says.
What does Garvin consider to be the biggest challenges and concerns regarding use of the cloud? "Security, security, security — and reliability," she says. "These are two most important factors in cloud services and form the biggest barriers to adoption."
Global Digital Money Will Rock Your World
Excerpted from Wall St. Journal Report by Irving Wladawsky-Berger
For several years now I've been convinced that the development of a global digital money ecosystem is among the most exciting and important societal challenges in the coming decades. It's right up there, in my opinion, with other technology-based transformational innovations, including electricity, the telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet and World Wide Web.
Where are we in digital payments? I recently read an excellent article, 2012: The Year in Payments — A Look Back At The News And The Noise In Payments by Karen Webster, CEO of Market Platform Dynamics and founder of PYMNTS.com.
Webster believes that 2012 will be viewed in the payments history books as a very good year. "Payments innovation fueled by the IP-enablement of devices used by consumers and merchants to interact drove payments innovation into high gear," she says. "Players large and small flooded the market with new applications, new business models, and new approaches to transforming the shopping experience."
She cites five recent market dynamics as significantly accelerating the pace of innovation in payments. Three of these are the major technology advances that are driving just about all recent IT-based innovations: the explosive growth of smart mobile phones, the advent of cloud computing, and what she calls "big data mash-ups," which combine transaction data with behavioral and real time location-based data.
The two other market dynamics are the IPO of Visa and MasterCard in 2006 and 2007 respectively, which is putting shareholder pressure on both companies to expand their core platforms with new offerings; and the growing investments in mobile payment startups by VC firms.
"However, we have a long ways to go," adds Webster. "Innovation in payments is a long journey from idea to ignition and adoption given the complexities associated with igniting innovation in payments."
"The two stakeholders who must ultimately adopt new payments innovations — merchants and consumers — have to be convinced that moving away from what they know and feel comfortable with—is worth the effort. Getting to ignition — when there is a critical mass of consumers and merchants — just takes time."
The global payments ecosystem is complex indeed. It involves huge numbers of individuals, merchants of all sizes, and a variety of financial institutions. It also includes government regulators in just about every country around the world.
More recently, with the evolution to digital payments, this legacy ecosystem is being joined by a whole set of new players, including mobile network operators; IT and Internet companies; startups with innovative technologies, applications and business models; and all kinds of coalitions, partnerships and joint ventures.
An already complex ecosystem is getting more crowded and complex. It is also quite fragmented, with a number of disparate market experiments underway. For example, many companies have developed their own digital wallet, essentially an app in a smart mobile device that aggregates the things we now carry in our physical wallet, including payment and loyalty cards, coupons, passes, checks, and various kinds of identification.
This had led to a digital wallet war, as vendors and vendor coalitions are fighting to be thedigital wallet in your mobile device. But each such wallet only works with the members of that particular coalition. So, an individual would have to carry multiple digital wallets to make sure that they can interact with the various institutions they deal with.
What will it take to get this complex, fragmented ecosystem to ignition, that is, to widespread acceptance around the world?
Most everyone will agree that the Internet, e-mail, and the World Wide Web have achieved the kind of ignition we would like digital payments to achieve. Technology advances were absolutely necessary, but not sufficient. In order to translate these technology advances into widespread market acceptance, their underlying architecture had to embrace a common set of simple standards.
For example, in the early decades of the IT industry, there were a number of proprietary e-mail systems that made it easy to communicate within a company. But, it was quite a bit more difficult to reach out beyond the company's boundaries, especially to one with a different proprietary e-mail system.
Then in the 1980s, a small set of Internet e-mail protocols were adopted — e.g., SMTP, MIME, POP, IMAP — as well as a common format for e-mail addresses - username@domain. These enabled people to communicate with anyone, on any system, from any vendor as long as they all used the common Internet e-mail standards. E-mail usage took off.
Similarly, the success of the World Wide Web is based on a simple set of standards — HTML, HTTP, URLs — developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the early 1990s — and the easy-to-use, graphical Mosaic web browser — developed by Marc Andreessen at the University of Illinois.
This enabled any PC with a web browser connected to the Internet to access information on any web server anywhere in the world. There are multiple web browsers from different vendors, but they are all based on the same standards, have a similar look and feel and, with relatively few exceptions, can access the content of any web server.
To get to ignition, the digital payments ecosystem must equally embrace a common set of standards. The finance industry did so decades ago, when it adopted common payment instruments like checks, credit cards, and debit cards.
There will be a number of digital wallets in the market, but they all will have to be based on a set of agreed upon standards that let them all access different payments mechanisms, identity cards, offers, loyalty programs, etc.
It's fine for vendors to compete on the different features, applications and services offered in their wallets, but they will need to have a common look and feel to make them easily usable by large numbers of people, as well as be able to interact with the many services, information, and applications offered by different institutions in their payments clouds.
How long will it take? It is very hard to predict. Complex ecosystems take decades to build, and they typically evolve over time in a series of incremental steps that build on each other. New, disruptive capabilities generally leverage and co-exist with existing legacy infrastructures.
"With very, very few exceptions, the innovation that is taking place is being done on top of the existing card infrastructure," writes Webster. "Innovators aren't asking consumers to abandon what they use today, just to use it in a different context (e.g., mobile versus plastic card)."
She believes that it will be a decade at least before a majority of our transactions take place using a digital wallet in a mobile device.
Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen — generally recognized as the foremost authority on disruptive innovation — has observed that one of the best ways to establish disruptive products in the marketplace is through what he calls "new-market disruptions," rather than through direct competition against entrenched offerings.
New-market disruptions are new products which are so much more affordable and simpler to use that they can reach brand new customers whose needs were previously unserved by existing offerings.
This is clearly the case with the billions of people without access to traditional financial services. There is growing evidence that the poorer you are, the higher the costs and risks of cash. Being stuck using cash consumes extra time, involves high fees, and makes it hard to rise out of poverty. Mobile digital money is their ticket to financial inclusiveness and membership in the global digital economy.
Mobile phones, cloud-based services, and broadband wireless networks are the platforms now enabling such new-market, low-cost disruptive innovations. An increasing fraction of those billions with no access to financial services already have mobile phones. Given advances in technology, it won't be long before most of them have a smart mobile device capable of supporting digital wallets and access to cloud-based payment and identity services.
It is thus quite likely that digital payment ecosystems will achieve ignition in developing economies where the needs and potential benefits are greatest. But even in the US there are unmet needs in over one-in-four households. A recent FDIC survey reported that 8.2% of US households are unbanked, and an additional 20.1% are under banked.
A well functioning digital payments infrastructure will also help lower costs and reduce fraud with government disbursements and social services to their citizens. In addition, companies will want to offer them products and services through their mobile devices, especially in light of the worldwide economic empowerment predicted over the next 15 to 20 years, including significant numbers rising out of extreme poverty and a growing middle class.
It is very hard to anticipate the consequences of technology-based disruptive innovations, especially those technologies that end up transforming something that's part of the very fabric of society. In the late 19th century, electricity was mostly viewed as enabling the replacement of kerosene lamps and candles with light bulbs.
It took several decades for electric appliances, the assembly line, and mass production to emerge. It was clear from the earliest days that the Internet and World Wide Web would revolutionize communications and access to information.
But the disruptive consequences of e-business, social networks, and online media and entertainment caught most of us by surprise.
Few things are as universal as money, or as integrated into just about every aspect of society and our personal lives. So, once we get to ignition, that is, to the widespread use of a global digital money ecosystem accessed through our mobile devices, we can expect a plethora of innovations that we can barely being to anticipate.
Verizon Expands Terremark Cloud over London and Dallas
Excerpted from The Register Report by Timothy Morgan
It has been two years since telecom behemoth Verizon shelled out $1.4 billion to buy cloud computing partner Terremark. And since that time, this poster child for VMware's vCloud wares has been pretty quiet as corporate types work to absorb it into the telco and realize the $500 million in "synergies" — that means cross-selling and cost-cutting — that the deal required for it to make economic sense.
Two years on, Terremark is integrated into Verizon and is ready to make some noise about its Enterprise Cloud. Not a lot of noise, mind you. But some.
First, the vCloud-fluffed Enterprise Cloud is opening up for business in London — the one in England that is the financial capital of Europe rather than the one in Ontario that is a perfectly fine city of 366,151 souls along the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor that hugs the St Lawrence Seaway, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario and is home to more than half of the Great White North.
Terremark has been operating a single Enterprise Cloud data center in Amsterdam in the Netherlands; and Troy Garrison, Vice President of Cloud Experience at the Verizon unit says that European customers were clamoring for a second data center for disaster recovery that would still provide low latency links to the Amsterdam center.
The new London data center will not just sell Enterprise Cloud services based on the VMware software stack, but will also sell co-location services so companies can build hybrid clouds right in the Verizon facilities if low latency is of primary importance and they still want to retain control of some of their infrastructure. (Financial services companies, for instance, are usually pretty keen on controlling at least some of their own iron).
Terremark got its start in Miami, FL in 1980 and when Verizon snapped it up two years ago it was operating its main data centers there and in Culpepper, VA, from where it supports its Federal government customers. (At the time of the acquisition, the Feds accounted for about a fifth of Terremark's revenues).
The Terremark unit sells Enterprise Cloud capacity, colocation services, traditional hosting, and network services. When the Verizon deal went down, Terremark was running data centers in Amsterdam; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Bogota, Colombia; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Brussels, Belgium; Madrid, Spain; and Istanbul, Turkey.
In the United States, Terremark had two other data centers: one in Dallas, TX, and the other in Santa Clara, CA. Prior to today's announcement, the Enterprise Cloud service was only fluffed up in Miami, Culpepper, Santa Clara, Denver (a Verizon data center), Sao Paulo, and Amsterdam. But now it is not only available in the new London data center, but also in the existing Dallas data center that came to Verizon from Terremark.
Aside from the expanded global footprint, Verizon has made a few other changes with the Terremark cloud. First, the role-based access controls and certificate-based multi-path authentication security that federal customers have from the Culpepper data center is now available at all Enterprise Cloud facilities and to all enterprise and government customers. This makes the Verizon public cloud suitable for use with local, state, and federal governments and from any facility where Enterprise Cloud runs.
Enterprise Cloud has traditionally been sold in chunks of capacity called resource pools, with a certain amount of aggregated GHz of compute and GB of main memory that end users could carve up. Billing is done on a monthly basis and pricing is negotiated with a sales rep under contract for a set term. This is in contrast with the T-shirt sizes — small to extra extra large — preconfigured virtual server instances that Amazon and its other competitors use to peddle virty machines, and also to the published and hourly capacity prices.
Starting today, customers who want to buy capacity on the Enterprise cloud based on instances of CPU and amounts of storage capacity can do so. The instances can scale from 1 to 8 virtual CPUs and from 512MB to 16GB of main memory on the compute side. Pricing is still done under contract and on a monthly basis, but now if your billing for all other cloud services is done on a per-instance basis, you can merge the bills and manage your budget.
Incidentally, the images on the Enterprise Cloud are persistent, so even when you turn an image off, you can keep the virtual server in storage and fire it up any time without having to rebuild it.
While Verizon Terremark doesn't provide pricing for its Enterprise Cloud service, it does do one thing that Amazon does not: charge the same price for CPU and storage capacity no matter what region of its cloud it is running on.
Surf Turns Chrome into a BitTorrent App
Excerpted from CNET News Report by Seth Rosenblatt
BitTorrent's not the first to build a torrent-catching browser add-on, but it is the first to do so with the creator of the torrent protocol behind the wheel.
BitTorrent Surf is a new Chrome add-on (download) that turns the browser into a torrent client. While that's not an innovation on its own, this is the first time the company has built a complete torrent-manager for the browser.
In development for the past six months, according to the BitTorrent blog announcing the add-on, Surf lets you find torrents on the Web and download them.
Still in rough alpha, Surf goes beyond that. It allows for automatic torrent detection when you navigate to a site, and you can save favorite sites to "create your own combined engine," according to the blog.
Surf also tells you the "health" of the torrent, which means how many peers are sharing it, and it lets you download the files within Chrome. A Firefox version is in the works, according to TorrentFreak.
Cloud "Appification" Speed-Ups Software Innovation
Excerpted from Business Insurance Report by Bill Kenealy
Technology trends such as cloud computing and "appification" are changing the frequency and speed of developing software and, in turn, the way technology providers deliver those features to insurers and risk managers.
Kathy Burns, Chicago, IL based CEO of Aon eSolutions, which provides cloud-based and on-premises software to risk managers, said her firm's embrace of the cloud has accelerated the process of innovation. Instead of needing to push updates to separate clients that may be running separate versions of the on-premises software, cloud-based applications allow automatic changes, Ms. Burns said.
"We provide cloud-based solutions to risk managers and it enables us to do more for them more quickly," she said. "If we create a great report or piece of analytics or a new module for a client, I can then make it accessible to our broader client base."
Brian Vannoni, San Francisco, CA based Director of Product Marketing for Guidewire Software, said the firm wanted a hybrid model blending the best attributes of on-premise and cloud-based software. In October, it launched Guidewire Live, a series of hosted applications intended to augment the functionality of the Foster City, CA based company's underwriting, policy administration, billing, and claims systems.
The advent of the cloud and app-driven development has freed business units to adopt new technology without taking the time to involve the information technology department, Mr. Vannoni said. "Previously, the cycle time for technology-based innovation was so long that it stifled business innovation," he said.
Ms. Burns said the advance of technology will help risk mangers shift their focus from the tactical concerns around data aggregation to broader, strategic goals.
"Historically, risk managers have thought more about technology to help them with the efficiency of their processes," she said. "Now that the process-oriented tools are more firmly in place, they want to spend more time evaluating and understanding data that they can use to drive down their total cost of risk. It's becoming more about what you can do with data."
SMBs Grow in 2013 with Cloud Computing
Excerpted from Indianapolis Recorder Report
Small businesses seem optimistic about increasing sales and hiring in 2013 and are looking to squeeze more productivity out of limited time, staffing, and resources.
For these reasons, finding the right business tools that can grow with you but also work well with the tools you already use are essential to helping your business focus on what you do best - serving your customers.
Having the right tools - such as business-class e-mail, online meetings, remote access to documents, shared calendars, and shared contacts - to create, collaborate, connect, and help manage day-to-day tasks can help cut costs and increase productivity.
Naturally Me, a small company in Durham, NC, that makes natural beauty products, uses Microsoft Office 365 to hold regular web conferences. "I downloaded the trial version and fell in love," says Chaundra Smith, founder of Naturally Me. "I had no hesitations moving Naturally Me to the cloud because it's from Microsoft, so it felt safe and secure."
The company also collaborates on documents by using Microsoft SharePoint Online, and sales consultants use it to support their sales efforts. "They don't have to print out paper catalogs anymore. Instead, they bring a portable computer and use SharePoint Online to present our products to party guests."
Kevin Lisota, CEO and Co-Founder of findwell, a real estate startup in Seattle, WA, makes comprehensive use of Microsoft Exchange Online for its shared calendars, support for multiple
e-mail boxes, and mobile messaging.
"Our agents need to be able to send and receive email on all sorts of devices from anywhere they happen to be," Lisota says. "The sync capabilities of Exchange Online mean that I can easily enable my employees to get email on all their phones and computers from any web browser."
Imagination Yoga, a small, family-owned business in Portland, OR, teaches a "kindness-based" curriculum instructing children on yoga concepts and storytelling to spark their creativity and get them exercising.
"Like most small businesses, we thought that the tools available with a service like Office 365 would be outrageously expensive and impossible for us to attain on our own," says Jon Hopkins, Co-Founder of Imagination Yoga. "But that's definitely not the case with Office 365, which makes everything easy to set up and use at an affordable price."
Having the right tools to improve communication and collaboration can make even the most challenging things, such as increasing that bottom line, seem more manageable.
A cloud-powered small business is more nimble and prepares you to adapt to changing business needs - now and in the future. To help get your business on track for 2013, 90-day free trials of Office 365 are available through the end of February.
Coming Events of Interest
2013 Symposium on Cloud and Services Computing - March 14th-15th in Tainan, Taiwan. The goal of SCC 2013 is to bring together, researchers, developers, government sectors, and industrial vendors that are interested in cloud and services computing.
NAB Show 2013 - April 4th-11th in Las Vegas, NV. Every industry employs audio and video to communicate, educate and entertain. They all come together at NAB Show for creative inspiration and next-generation technologies to help breathe new life into their content. NAB Show is a must-attend event if you want to future-proof your career and your business.
CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at NAB - April 8th-9th in Las Vegas, NV.The New ways cloud-based solutions have accomplished better reliability and security for content distribution. From collaboration and post-production to storage, delivery, and analytics, decision makers responsible for accomplishing their content-related missions will find this a must-attend event.
Digital Hollywood Spring - April 29th-May 2nd in Marina Del Rey, CA. The premier entertainment and technology conference. The conference where everything you do, everything you say, everything you see means business.
CLOUD COMPUTING EAST 2013 - May 20th-21st in Boston, MA. CCE:2013 will focus on three major sectors, GOVERNMENT, HEALTHCARE, and FINANCIAL SERVICES, whose use of cloud-based technologies is revolutionizing business processes, increasing efficiency and streamlining costs.
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