March 25, 2013
Volume XLIII, Issue 3
Cloud Computing: Blistering Growth in 2013
Excerpted from Formtek Blog Report by Dick Weisinger
The global public cloud computing market will grow 18.5% in 2013 to $131 billion, up from $111 billion in 2012, according to Gartner analysts.
So cloud computing is hot, and some sectors of the market are boiling.
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), including cloud compute, storage, and printing, is expected to grow at rates that exceed 47 percent.
Gartner breaks down the public cloud marketing market into the following segments: 48 percent — cloud advertising; 28 percent — business-process-as-a-service (BPaaS); 14.7 percent — software-as-a-service (SaaS); 5.5 percent — cloud systems infrastructure (IaaS); 2.8 percent - cloud management, security, and automation; and 1 percent - application development/platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner, said, "The continued growth of the cloud services market will result from the adoption of cloud services for production systems and workloads, in addition to the development and testing scenarios that have led as the most prominent use case for public cloud services to date.
Evidence of this growth is found in the increasing demand for cloud services from end-user organizations, met by an increased supply of cloud services from suppliers."
CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at the 2013 NAB Show
Equinix has joined the expanding group of sponsors for the DCIA's upcoming CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE at the 2013 NAB Show taking place at the Las Vegas Convention Center on April 8th and 9th in Las Vegas, NV.
Equinix connects more than 4,000 companies directly to their customers and partners inside the world's most networked data centers.
Today, businesses leverage the Equinix interconnection platform in 31 strategic markets across the Americas, EMEA, and Asia-Pacific.
Previously announced sponsors for this year's CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE include Amazon Web Services, Aspera, DAX, and YouSendIt.
Our 2013 event track 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 military and government 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 big-data analytics, cloud computing is having an enormous impact on high-value multimedia distribution.
The 2013 Conference has been extended from one to two full-days reflecting the increased importance of and growing interest in its subject matter.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 The Cloud Computing Association (CCA) and the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) are proud to present CLOUD COMPUTING EAST 2013 (CCE:2013) from May 19th through 21st at the Marriott Boston Copley Place in Boston, MA.
Cloud computing is revolutionizing the way virtually every sector of the economy does business.
Annual spending on information technology (IT) products and services now exceeds $2 trillion globally.
As recently as 2011, global spending on cloud-based technologies represented a small fraction of that — $28 billion dollars.
However, by the end of 2012, that number skyrocketed to over $50 billion; and according to a recent study, spending on cloud-based technologies will grow by over 70% per year; creating over 213,000 new jobs each year for at least the next 5 years.
Three sectors of the economy that are leading the way in adopting cloud-based IT solutions are government, healthcare, and financial services. CCE:2013 will focus on these three major sectors, whose use of cloud-based technologies is revolutionizing business processes, increasing efficiency, and streamlining costs.
Our speaking faculty will be made up of over 100 thought-leaders who will bring broad industry knowledge, technological savvy, and strategic insight to their frank and candid discussions.
Conference attendees will have access to three opening plenary sessions where expert speakers will conduct a high-level exploration of the role that cloud computing is playing in streamlining government, revolutionizing healthcare, and providing for the secure and safe functioning of the financial services sector at all levels.
Following a networking luncheon, conference attendees will have the option of attending any of the case-study, roundtable, and panel sessions in any of the three conference tracks.
The gCLOUD (government) track will examine the ways that local, state, and federal governments can improve services and protect citizens with cloud-based tools. The explosion of data, advances in security and reliability, the need for redundant storage, and putting it all to meaningful use presents challenges to natural resource management, transportation and utility grid monitoring, public safety, law enforcement, and emergency responsiveness.
The government at all levels has been mandated to move into the cloud, and billions are being allocated to these purposes. Hear from public-sector thought-leaders and private-sector solutions providers on how the cloud is transforming the way government performs its essential functions.
The hCLOUD (health) track will start by acknowledging there is perhaps no business enterprise that is larger -- and at the same time, more fragmented and technologically disconnected -- than the American healthcare industry. Therefore, this sector — more than any other — has the resources and the imperative to benefit from adopting cloud-based solutions to help it become more efficient, collaborative, and interactively connected.
Managing private patient records, collecting clinical research data, and big-data imaging are just three of the many healthcare functions to which the cloud is not only uniquely suited — it is urgently needed! Speakers representing hospitals, clinics, multi-physician practices and more will be joined by providers of cloud-based solutions that serve every part of the healthcare system.
The fCLOUD (financial) track will reflect the fact that international financial transactions and currency exchange; domestic banking and insurance services; as well as timely and efficient investment decision-making are all being impacted by cloud computing. "The Cloud" is becoming the most advanced platform for an industry that makes up over one-fourth of our economy.
How are banks, insurance companies, and private equity and hedge fund investors making use of cloud-computing? Business and technology leaders from the financial services industry will be joined by executives and innovators from the cloud computing solutions-provider sector to examine the ways in which the cloud is being put to use by the global financial services industry.
The gCLOUD, hCLOUD, and fCLOUD conference tracks will share a common exhibit hall, luncheons and networking breaks and receptions. The exhibit hall will serve as a hub around which participants from many industry verticals and multi-disciplinary backgrounds will interact. This event is specifically designed to promote maximum creativity by providing a literal and figurative intersection where technology and human capital meet.
In addition to the in-depth panel sessions and round-table discussions, a technology showcase presented in concise 15-minute keynote presentations will feature entrepreneurs and innovators on how their unique cloud-based solutions are being utilized by governments, healthcare providers, and financial services organizations.
Investors and strategic-minded value-added resellers (VARs) will not want to miss hearing about the next BIG thing in the CLOUD! Share wisely, and take care.
Amazon and CIA Ink Cloud Deal
Excerpted from Federal Computer Week Report by Frank Konkel
Amazon will help the CIA build a private cloud.
In a move sure to send ripples through the federal IT community, FCW has learned that the CIA has agreed to a cloud computing contract with electronic commerce giant Amazon, worth up to $600 million over 10 years.
Amazon Web Services will help the intelligence agency build a private cloud infrastructure that helps the agency keep up with emerging technologies like big data in a cost-effective manner not possible under the CIA's previous cloud efforts, sources told FCW.
Amazon officials would not confirm the existence of the contract, and a CIA spokesperson likewise declined to comment on the matter.
"As a general rule, the CIA does not publicly disclose details of our contracts, the identities of our contractors, the contract values, or the scope of work," a CIA spokesperson told FCW.
In recent speaking engagements, however, CIA officials have hinted at significant upcoming changes to the way the agency procures software, how it uses big-data analytics and the ways in which it incorporates commercial-sector innovation.
Speaking to the Northern Virginia Technology Council Board of Directors on March 12th, Central Intelligence Agency Chief Information Officer Jeanne Tisinger told an audience of several dozen people how the CIA is leveraging the commercial sector's innovation cycle, looking for cost efficiencies in commodity IT, and using software-as-a-service for common solutions.
Two audience members who asked not to be named told FCW that Tisinger said the CIA was working "with companies like Amazon."
CIA Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt would not respond to FCW's questions about the Amazon deal, but did drop the firm's name in relation to software procurement during a conference organized by the Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association's Washington, DC chapter in February.
Hunt was quoted by Reuters as saying, "Think Amazon — that model really works," regarding the purchasing of software services on a "metered" basis for which Amazon is well-known for. Hunt has also spoken publicly in the past about the potential for leveraging public cloud infrastructure for non-classified information.
Historically, the CIA's cloud computing strategy centered on a number of smaller, highly specific private clouds. While the full scope of its current contract with Amazon is not yet clear, it is likely this contract essentially brings a public cloud computing environment inside the secure firewalls of the intelligence community, thereby negating concerns of classified data being hosted in any public environment.
A senior US intelligence official told FCW that IT enterprise decisions within intelligence agencies are framed around the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (IC ITE) strategy.
That strategy outlines five goals and "promotes greater integration, information sharing, and information safeguarding through a common intelligence community IT approach that substantially reduces costs."
The strategy's language suggests other intelligence agencies may benefit through shared information from the private cloud created through the CIA-Amazon deal.
Industry experts, while stressing that they were not privy to the deal's details, told FCW that such a move would be a "game-changer" in federal IT, and that it would show the CIA is acting intelligently with regards to emerging technologies and tightening budgets.
And Dave Powner, Director of IT Management Issues at the Government Accountability Office, told FCW he was unfamiliar with the CIA-Amazon deal, but stated it would make sense — especially given spending cuts across the board at most agencies.
"I'm not aware of that contract but I think in times of reducing budget situations you would expect to see agencies that haven't considered cloud solutions extensively in the past would be looking more and more of doing something along those lines," Powner said.
Can Amazon Stay King of Cloud Computing Forever?
Excerpted from ReadWriteCloud Report by Matt Asay
IBM's decision to throw its considerable weight behind OpenStack has OpenStack has some folks declaring victory for the open source cloud consortium. The hitch? Amazon already claims a considerable lead, with more than 70% of the market, according to Forrester's Forrester's James Staten, and as one prominent Amazon backer declares, the lead grows daily.
Can Amazon Withstand Sustained Cloud Computing Competition?
The question is whether Amazon can withstand a sustained, concerted attack by nearly everyone else in the cloud computing industry.
So far, according to Adrian Cockroft, Director of Architecture for Netflix, Amazon Web Services' biggest customer, the answer is an emphatic "Yes." In a Twitter exchange last week, Infoworld's Eric Knorr asked "Is the choice really between OpenStack and AWS? What about other cloud solutions?" Cockroft's response was clear:
When asked which features, in particular, AWS had that OpenStack couldn't match, Cockroft insisted that there is "too much to list," but "Availability Zones and Autoscale Groups" are two features that stand out. Furthermore, Cockroft indicated that OpenStack's six-month release cycle cripples its ability to catch up with Amazon, which rolls out new features (and price drops) on a continuous basis.
In other words, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
Has Amazon Already Won? Yes and No.
But has Amazon already won? If you look at the absolute number of jobs being created, relative to OpenStack or Cloudstack, the answer is yes. Ditto if you go off general interest, as measured by web searches
But if you look at relative job growth, suddenly OpenStack has a fighting chance.
Perhaps even more tellingly, a foray into the code contributions for OpenStack suggest a truly dynamic, growing entity, one that is no longer Rackspace's pet project, but rather a true community effort. The most recent data I could find is a year old, but already shows growing influence by Red Hat and others.
Does this matter? Absolutely.
Big Players Will Make A Big Difference.
However, I suspect that OpenStack will gain prominence in tandem with a few of its primary supporters gaining outsized influence due to these code contributions. Linux took off as IBM invested $1 billion (and then much more) and Red Hat, in particular, invested armies of engineers to make it into an enterprise-grade operating system standard.
The same will hold true of OpenStack. Right now it's making waves by being the open, community standard. That's nice, but insufficient and somewhat misleading, as Gartner's Kyle Hilgendorf has established. Ultimately, enterprises don't care about community and openness unless the product itself is rock solid.
Which is one reason that Microsoft and Google also can't be counted out. Microsoft holds sway with CIOs, and has been actively welcoming open-source technologies to its Azure cloud service. Google, for its part, was building clouds long before it was cool, and has so many hooks into developers with its various software and services, from Android to Maps to YouTube to Apps, that it cannot help but be a major player. Google Compute Engine's performance compares well against Amazon, too, but it's the ease developers will have tying into Google's services that truly favor it.
Has Amazon won Round 1 of the Public Cloud wars? No question. But some serious competitors are looming, each with attributes (Microsoft, enterprise fealty; OpenStack, community; Google, popular developer services) that give them a real chance to cut into Amazon's significant lead.
Google Targets Amazon with Cloud Acquisition
Excerpted from Strategy Eye Digital Media Report by Sarah Gill
Google is powering up to do battle with Amazon in the cloud with the acquisition of an infrastructure company called Talaria that could help the search giant power more sites from fewer servers. It is thought that Google is looking to compete more closely with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud-based website hosting service the likes of NASA and Netflix use to power their sites, as it attempts to boost its share of Internet traffic.
Amazon is pursuing an aggressive pricing strategy for AWS in order to shore up lucrative contracts and out price its rivals and this looks like evidence that Google is looking for ways to lower the prices of its own cloud services.
Talaria is currently operating in stealth, but appears to offer a suit of programming languages that let mean apps can run from fewer servers, making them more efficient and cutting costs. Google is integrating the firm's software into its Cloud Platform, saying the technology "helps people build and run websites more efficiently."
The acquisition is just the latest activity around Google's cloud offering, with the firm announcing a new pricing structure and full-time technical support, suggesting Google is looking to rapidly scale the reach of its cloud services.
Cloud is the newest battleground for Amazon and Google. The two are already competing in the e-commerce and tablet markets. Google is attempting to elbow its way into the e-commerce space, with a glut of acquisitions last year highlighting the firm's ambitions to tackle Amazon in the online shopping space.
But AWS is a formidable adversary, even for Google, because of the level to which it already penetrates the Internet. Research from Deepfield Networks claims websites using AWS are visited daily by a third of all Internet users.
A significant factor in this is Amazon's pricing strategy, with companies such as gaming giant Zynga finding it cheaper to run their platforms on Amazon's servers, rather than building their own. Winning these contracts has been key to the uptake of AWS to date and Google will have to match or beat its pricing if it hopes to compete.
In its latest earnings Amazon claimed it has lowered prices for AWS 24 times since launch in 2006, with 12 of these coming last year alone. The brutal price lowering mimics the firm's strategy in areas such as sales of the Kindle Fire, with the firm effectively selling the devices at cost price in order to drive up sales and undercut competitors.
Cloud computing is already a lucrative business, with forecasts from Market Research Media suggesting the market will grow at around 30% per year to hit $270 billion by 2020. Forrester estimates that AWS currently accounts for 70% of the US cloud computing market and is therefore well-positioned to benefit from the push to cloud.
With the likes of Google, as well as Microsoft and VMWare, also attempting to make inroads into the space, it looks as though competition in the cloud computing space is set to heat up in the coming years.
Intel Offers Reference for IPTV Set-Top
Excerpted from CED Magazine Report by Brian Santo
Intel has released a reference design kit for IPTV set-top boxes (STBs) and media servers based on the company's Atom CE5300 processor.
Intel has been producing set-top processors aimed at consumer products from the likes of Logitech. The chipmaker designed the CE5300 specifically for products specified by the service provider market. Amino was among the first to adopt the CE5300 for its set-tops.
Intel's CE5300 is a dual core Atom-based SOC that supports hyperthreading, virtualization, an advanced 3D/2D graphics engine, integrated power management, and a H.264 B-picture hardware encoder.
The media server reference design (MSRD) incorporates that chip, along with Futarque's DVB-T2/T/C broadcast and media sharing stacks, Videon Central's aVia media engine, and includes Hillcrest Labs' Freespace Motion Engine software to enable a motion remote control.
The MSRD was introduced at the TV Connect conference in London; the show is aimed largely at IPTV providers and over the top (OTT) companies.
The incorporation of Hillcrest's software enables viewers to use a handheld remote control for mouse-like navigation, including point-and-click selection.
"Computers and smartphones have used motion-based, point-and-click interfaces for years because they are the most efficient way to navigate large volumes of content," said Chad Lucien, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Hillcrest Labs.
Hillcrest's Freespace MotionEngine is currently used across dozens of Smart TV models from LG, TCL, and Roku. Other companies that have licensed Freespace for use in their products include: Sony Computer Entertainment, Universal Electronics (UEI), SMK Electronics, Atmel, and Logitech.
The MSRD will be available in April 2013 from Intel and through the company's distribution partner Videon Central.
Intel has arranged for Prodrive, an OEM, to prepare a hardware platform; Intel said this platform can be quickly ramped into production.
AT&T Releases u-Verse APIs to Bolster TV Apps
Excerpted from Total Telecom Report By Mary Lennighan
Content might be all-important to TV viewers, but telecoms operators keen to capture a slice of the pay TV market need to look elsewhere for differentiation, according to AT&T.
″Content is a commodity at the pay TV level,″ Jeff Weber, President, Content and Advertising Sales at AT&T, told attendees at TV Connect in London on Tuesday.
High-profile content, such as US drama series "The Walking Dead," is the same whether you watch it through AT&T's u-Verse IPTV service, satellite operator DirecTV, or cableco Comcast, Weber noted. There are very few exclusive content deals that matter, which means telcos cannot differentiate on core content, he explained.
However, ″there are a lot of ways that we can differentiate,″ he said.
One advantage telcos have comes from running an all-IP platform that enables greater interaction between end-users and their TV service. AT&T is focusing on offering applications on its u-Verse platform to encourage viewers to interact, thereby creating a deeper experience for them. It currently has around 25 simple TV applications that are being used by two thirds of its u-Verse customers, Weber said.
The next level is what AT&T refers to as u-Verse Enabled Apps, Weber explained. AT&T has opened up access to its platform to developers to bring more apps to its portfolio. One such application is Twonky Beam, an app developed for iOS and Android, that allows users to transfer video content from their mobile device to their TV screen.
Weber admits that AT&T has yet to do a significant amount of marketing around its u-Verse apps. Initially it is relying on the likes of Twonky to market their own specific apps, while AT&T focuses on communicating to customers the existence of its app portfolio generally.
″It's my job to make sure you're aware this capability exists,″ Weber said.
He indicated that AT&T will take a more aggressive approach to marketing its apps and interactive capabilities over the coming year.
Changhong Adds Flingo to Smart TVs
Excerpted from Broadcasting & Cable Report by George Winslow
Consumer electronics manufacturer Changhong is integrating Flingo's Samba interactive TV platform into its line of smart TVs. The Samba application identifies live TV shows and then recommends related online videos and displays a wide variety of additional information, including social media discussions.
It is also capable of delivering check-ins, tweets, polls, quizzes and information about the show and has second-screen features.
"The partnership with Flingo allows us to offer many new content choices at no additional cost to the consumer," noted Wenjun Yu, Marketing Director at Changhong.
Cox Adds Cloud-Based Storage for iPhone, Android Devices
Excerpted from CED Magazine Report by Mike Robuck
Cox Communications has added in a free cloud-based storage element for iPhone and Android devices through its Cox Secure Online Backup.
Cox Secure Online Backup is free to all of the cable operator's data customers. The service lets subscribers store, share and backup files in a cloud. Cox first started offering backup services to its data customers two years ago.
"Our customers are mobile and demand constant connectivity," said Philip Nutsugah, vice president of product development and management for Cox Communications. "Cox Secure Online Backup delivers this mobility, and also has the added peace of mind of backing up important content, like music and photos, in a secure online environment."
The free app can be downloaded via the iTunes and Android stores. It works with iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch devices that have iOS 4.3 or later while Android devices need 2.1 software or higher to run the app. In addition to the smart-phone apps, Cox Secure Online Backup can be accessed via a secure website as well as Windows and Macintosh clients.
Avaya Announces Flexible Collaborative Cloud UC Offerings
Excerpted from ZDNet Report by Dana Gardner
Avaya today announced a set of Collaborative Cloud offerings designed to make it easier for more types of organizations to deploy unified communications (UC), contact center (CC) and video conferencing — all as on-demand services.
The adoption of UC and CC as a service (UCaaS and CCaaS) brings utility-based pricing to cloud-service providers (CSPs) so that they can offer varied and flexible packages to many types of clients. This creates new revenue streams for CSPs by allowing them to deliver app integrations, mobile collaboration, and multichannel customer service for their customers. And it allows buyers to only pay for the IP-based communications services they want and need.
This makes the burgeoning bring you own device (BYOD) trend easier for enterprises to manage because they can off-load more of the complexities of mobile and BYOD environments to their cloud and service providers, said Bruce MacVarish, Director of Cloud Solutions at Avaya. The offerings enable CSPs to evolve and augment enterprise communications with cloud-based solutions, as well as provide greater interoperability across vendors, domains, and protocols, he said.
Santa Clara, CA based Avay is carving out four delivery and distribution models for UCaaS and CCaaS: private cloud/on-premises stacks, managed services for service providers, hosted multi-tenancy services for channel players, and a full software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud capability powered by Avaya focused on the mid-market and smaller organization users.
The video services are more geared toward synchronous video interactions, and not hosted, asynchronous video serving, although Avaya offers both. Think of it as video conferencing as a service on demand, integratable into more mobile devices and therefore business processes.
Avaya's move, like with many evolving cloud models, forms a transition from CapEx to OpEx, utility-based pricing and consumption. It also offers ease and speed in adoption, and a single point of integration for value-added SPs and developers.
I expect to see more SaaS business apps providers and cloud-savvy enterprises integrate Avaya's and other UC services into their web, mobile, and cloud offerings. These would include such benefits as click-to-call, customer support interception points, and embedded video conferencing, brought directly into more business apps, services, and processes.
It will be curious to see how the hybrid deployments of UCaaS and CCaaS are assimilated into other business cloud services as the market matures. Will enterprises and SPs alike seek to embed more UC functions, while themselves controlling the UC stack? Or will communications, like many other business services, be something they expect in any cloud stack? Or what combo of hosting will they prefer in which apps?
A lot of the noise around hybrid cloud fails to take the communications feature and their integration into account. Same for big data; shouldn't all the unstructured data in communications by part of any analytics mix? How to manage that?
Avaya is now in a controlled release of the solutions, and expects general availability in three to six months, said MacVarish.
Earlier this month, Avaya announced new security enhancements for enterprise collaboration.
Avaya Collaborative Cloud solutions also include Avaya Collaboration Pods, a portfolio of cloud-ready, turnkey solutions designed to simplify installation and operations of real-time applications; and the AvayaLive suite of public-cloud based communications and collaboration services.
Apple, Dropbox Lead Cloud Storage Market
Excerpted from InformationWeek Report by Michael Endler
The variety of cheap and attractive cloud options continues to grow. But according to a Strategy Analytics study released Thursday, the US market is being dominated by major companies with developed ecosystems. The report found that Apple, whose fusion between services and hardware has largely set the standard for such ecosystems, is leading the field, followed by Dropbox, Amazon and Google.
Strategy Analytics examined almost 2,300 connected devices and concluded that Apple's iCloud and iTunes Match services accounted for 27% of users. The other players boasting a double-digit usage share were Dropbox with 17%, Amazon Cloud Drive with 15% and Google Drive with 10%. No other competitors claimed more than 4% of the field.
The study found that cloud adoption is heaviest among younger people, particularly those between 20 and 24 years old, and that only Apple attracts more females than males. Not surprisingly, given Apple's large lead, music storage is the leading cloud use case. Around 90% of Apple, Amazon, and Google cloud users rely on the services to store their tunes, and even Dropbox — which, unlike the others, isn't built around a content ecosystem — serves as a music repository for 45% of its users. Strategy Analytics noted that Dropbox is likely primed to grow in this area; thanks to its December acquisition of Audiogalaxy, a music storage and streaming company, Dropbox could soon introduce features such as a native music player.
"Music is currently the key battleground in the war for cloud domination," said Ed Barton, director of digital media at Strategy Analytics, in a statement. He noted that Google is aggressively courting users by offering enough free cloud storage for 20,000 songs along with the ability to stream these files to any Android device. Competing services offer similar free services at a smaller scale, but generally charge fees for the amount of space Google is giving away.
Music has been a cloud battleground for several years but Barton said that demand for streaming video will likely drive future adoption. For that reason, he is bullish on the Hollywood-supported Ultraviolet service, which, according to his company's study, is currently used by 4% of Americans despite initially outraging users with its error-prone and convoluted interface.
In another notable finding, Samsung Music Hub holds more than 3% of Americans' cloud usage. The South Korean electronics giant has been pursuing the sort of hardware-software synergies that propelled Apple's meteoric rise, and an expanding cloud footprint will surely be a part of this goal.
Microsoft's absence from the list is also noteworthy. The company's SkyDrive cloud service now contains more than 1 billion files, and Redmond has been working to integrate the service into its most popular products, such as Office.
Strategy Analytics didn't offer any statistics related explicitly to the enterprise, where cloud benefits include on-the-go access to files, opportunities to boost productivity via virtualization, hooks to big data tools and more. A variety of business-friendly cloud companies have entered the market but many companies are still negotiating what kind of configuration -- public, private, hybrid, etc. -- will best suit their needs.
Even among consumers, though, cloud adoption is still just crossing into the mainstream. According to the study, 55% of connected Americans have never used a cloud storage device.
Those who predicted that 2013 would be the "year of the cloud" might have been unrealistic, Barton said, adding that though cloud storage is becoming a "key pillar of digital platform strategies," it is probably two to three years from ubiquitous use.
Advantages of Cloud Computing Add Impetus to Web Hosting
Excerpted from Host Review Report by Michael Moore
With the immergence of the cloud computing technology, the web hosting services have gone through a revolution in terms of quality, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. In traditional hosting, the business owner makes its website online with help of the Internet servers that are physically situated in a data centre at some place.
But in cloud hosting, all the computing resources such as the storage, applications and services are accessed from remote virtual servers in a network connected by the Internet. That means the web owner does not need to physically possess these computing resources and can easily manage its hosted websites by a computer with a high speed Internet connection only at anytime from anywhere.
The hosting provider takes care of the maintenance and management of the remote virtual Internet servers so that the business owners get sufficient web space and bandwidth for their hosted websites to run faster and without interruption. The hosted websites effectively cater to all the diversified activities of the present web users by sharing with the available resources of any of the unused remote virtual servers in the network.
The websites availing of the advantages of cloud computing services do not face the server downtime issue and hence win the confidence of the web visitors.
The other advantages of cloud computing are found to be of great help to the hosting environment. The remote access of the various applications and services makes the cloud hosting less prone to various virus attacks and intrusions. The information on the hosted website using this advanced technology remains absolutely safe and there is no chance of possible data misuse by the unauthorized entities.
The business owners subscribing to the cloud hosting solutions pay as per the amount of the services used rather than any fixed charge. The web owners also get the flexibility of changing the quantum of the resources according to the load of the web traffic at any particular time.
The cloud hosting services become a preferred choice by the webmasters as they get all the required support and infrastructure for their hosted websites at absolutely minimal possession and maintenance of the computing resources. These hosting solutions are comparatively cheaper in price, offer more security and flexibilities.
Hence this desired service is best suited for either a beginner that wants to venture into the online business platform or an established entity that has the plans to diversify its virtual business. Every enterprise is getting benefited with the advantages of cloud computing and is making its online business more strong and reliable.
Matching with the global trend, the cloud computing in India is growing at a fast pace. The India cloud computing service providers offer the customized packages that match the requirements of the webmaster for a successful online business platform.
The large pool of talented technical manpower supported by updated infrastructure and expertise led the Indian hosts to provide the best quality and customer centric hosting solutions to the online business community. An impressive performance track record and long lasting goodwill of the Indian service providers attract the business enterprises across the globe and result in creating huge related job opportunities at the same time.
Nvidia Helps Start-Ups with Visual Computing
Excerpted from VentureBeat Report by Dean Takahashi
Jeff Herbst and his employer Nvidia "get it" when it comes to emerging technologies. For a long time, he has been finding startups for Nvidia, the world's largest maker of standalone graphics chips, to invest in. Back then, his team found Keyhole, a mapping startup that later became Google Earth and which spurred demand for non-gaming 3D graphics on PCs.
The goal isn't just to make money but to lift the whole ecosystem for visual computing so everyone can prosper. Such investments are aimed at spurring activity in Nvidia's business, which includes Tegra mobile processors and CUDA non-graphics computing functions performed by its graphics chips. This week, Nvidia expanded that further with the launch of its Grid Visual Computing Appliance server and its future graphics chip roadmap.
Herbst, the vice president of business development at Nvidia, has been staging tech contests at company events for the past five years. At this year's GPU Technology conference in San Jose, Calif., Herbst hosted the fifth annual Emerging Companies Summit, where 21 companies made appearances to pitch investors. All of the companies were riffing on the theme of visual computing, which Nvidia espouses as a way to broaden the reach of its graphics processors.
Here's an edited transcript of our interview with Herbst.
GamesBeat: So this is your latest Emerging Companies Summit. What's new?
Jeff Herbst: Yeah, we've come back. Our fifth event in San Jose and our eighth event worldwide. My two themes for this year were to explain to people who Nvidia gets it and that we're here to help.
When I say we "get it," I mean that when people are doing things with graphics processors and visual computing, high-performance computing, cloud computing, mobile computing, and they want to explain it to someone who is going to understand what they're doing and why, we're here. We get it.
There's a story that Keyhole Corporation, now known as Google Earth, came to us back in 2001. Nobody got it. Keyhole itself thought that the application was going to be used for real estate developers and real estate professionals to be able to view property before they bought it. I immediately realized that that's a decent market. It's probably in the millions. But there are billions of people that use Google and Yahoo and all the other search engines and portals. They were having trouble getting people to give them money based on that original business model.
We got it, and we helped. Now they're Google Earth. We're trying to do the same thing over and over. The ECS is a big part of how we do that. People know that we're going to understand what they're doing. The other companies who are here understand what they're doing. The VCs and investors in our network understand what we're doing.
GamesBeat: How have the amounts available to you changed over the years? How much can you invest in a year?
Herbst: We have no limits, up or down, on what we can do. It's all based on the amount of strategic synergy that we find with the companies. We're not financial investors in that we typically don't invest without some kind of strategic partnership associated with the investment. If the companies don't really need our money or there are Sand Hill Road VCs that want to give them money, we're more than happy to facilitate that and watch those companies prosper and those investors prosper. Our ecosystem benefits from that.
To us, it's all about building the ecosystem. It's not about financial returns. However, to the extent that we do invest, we would like to achieve both. We won't invest in things that don't have a promise of financial return. It's a delicate balance.
GamesBeat: Historically, have you been going up or down with the investment amounts over the years?
Herbst: Our investments have ranged from $500,000 to $10 million. We just made another investment in the $2-million range. We haven't announced it. Our sweet spot is probably about $2-3 million. It depends on the situation. There's no reason we couldn't invest a lot more than that if the situation dictated it.
GamesBeat: Have you had a cycle of sorts as well? Was there a peak here for you and a fall-off from that?
Herbst: We were very active about two or three years ago. Then we became a little bit less active for a variety of reasons, one of which was — I think when you invest in companies, you want to have great partners, and you want to have financial investors backing you. The venture cycle tailed down over the last couple of years. I feel it's coming back, though.
We're also seeing a lot more opportunities for us to synergize companies with more than just giving them money. I expect the cycle to keep moving up. Right now our active portfolio is about 10 companies. We've had some exits in the past. I would give you all the names, but we don't publicize all the things we do. It's not about us. We don't feel like we have to put out a press release every time we invest money in some startup to boost our own ego or pump our own company.
GamesBeat: Is this year's financial environment a good one for investment?
Herbst: It feels like things are picking up to me. It feels like the financial investors are more willing to invest in earlier-stage companies. The biggest risk I see with early stage companies and ideas is not that the ideas are not good, but that they run out of money before they can fulfill that potential. You always want to be investing in a situation where there's enough people around the table to keep that thing funded, so it can get to an inflection point of sorts where they become profitable or reach a milestone where they can easily raise the next round of money.
That's where a lot of companies are having trouble. A lot of companies are getting seed money right now, but it's that Series A, Series B void that people are experiencing. A lot of people with late-stage money want to come in after the business model is proven and the company is successful. It's getting the money before the point where you can get profitable that's hard.
GamesBeat: I was looking at the numbers for last year in investments for games. The amount per deal went way down, but then the most common kind of company that got funded was a mobile game company. They just don't need as much money. They're getting to 10 people and then becoming profitable.
Herbst: Yeah. We've invested in gaming companies before. We invested in NaturalMotion. We're looking for applications other than games as well, though. I'd say most of our investments are in software or middleware companies that are not gaming.
GamesBeat: With CUDA (Nvidia's use of non-graphics computing functions on graphics chips), was there a kind of bulge of CUDA investments?
Herbst: No, I think those have been steady. The last one of those we publicly announced was a company called Rocketick, which is building an EDA software tool for verifying semiconductor chips. They're able to accelerate the process by over 50 times, using CUDA and GPUs. They're allowing people, including Nvidia, to build chips faster and get to market faster. We make more money. There's a real ROI to something like that.
GamesBeat: What about allies like Ouya, a startup that is using your Tegra chips?
Herbst: They're using Tegra 3. Let me just say, though, that we're very strategically aligned with Ouya. But I can neither confirm nor deny that we've invested in them. Certain things we don't talk about publicly. I think they will need money — they're going to build a gaming console that requires a lot of money. There's a lot of inventory.
GamesBeat: Does it still require hundreds of millions of dollars, though?
Herbst: Not hundreds of millions. They need to do marketing, though, and they need to build some inventory ahead of launch. Even if it's $100, $200 dollars, if they're trying to sell 10 million of them, do the math. Ten million at $200 dollars is a lot of inventory. They have to have some capital. But you should talk to them about that.
GamesBeat: What is the outlook for this year? Are you finding lots of new companies?
Herbst: Tons. The pipeline is bigger than it's ever been. There's a lot of action in mobile. There's a lot of activity in cloud. There's a lot of activity in gesture recognition and vision. Those are three of the biggest categories I'm seeing. Big data and finance, too.
This morning, one of the things we did for ECS is we stacked the deck with companies doing financial modeling and big data applications. We brought in a guy from this company called Ovum, a financial services company. We purposely stacked the deck this morning to talk with those companies, because we're seeing a lot of activity around using GPUs to crunch massive amounts of data for financial and other applications.
GamesBeat: As far as locations, where you do your investing? Is Silicon Valley still the top spot for you?
Herbst: I'd say it's spread throughout the world. This is one of the challenges for me: being global. It's not easy to invest in companies around the world. Sometimes you're on the board. Sometimes you're on the observer board. It's challenging. But I would not say that, for the stuff we're doing, there's any dominance in the U.S. We see a ton of great stuff in Israel, a ton of great stuff in Europe, and some in the U.S.
GamesBeat: Are there any chip companies there?
Herbst: We typically don't invest in chip companies. [Laughs] No surprise there.
GamesBeat: Cisco invested in a router company.
Herbst: Well, I'm not saying we've never done it, and we wouldn't do it, but here's the thing. The graphics processor is becoming so powerful that if anything, we see companies that used to be chip companies turning themselves into software companies. A great example is Elemental Technologies, which we did invest in. They're doing amazingly well. They started life thinking they were going to build a transcoding chip, but they realized the GPU had more than enough power to go do that. They built the software and an appliance. Elemental now does work for major networks. They were transcoding stuff for the Olympics.
What we want people to do is go figure out how to build on top of our platform and on top of our ecosystem. Don't reinvent what we've already invested billions of dollars of R&D to build. That's a foolish endeavor. If you leverage all that investment we've made, you'll build a business. Elemental is a great example.
GamesBeat: How about for these different projects? Now you've got systems going out, like Project Shield (pictured right) and the VCA thing, the servers. Do you need to seed those areas?
Herbst: We're looking at that. We are very open to that. I think you'll see us make some investments in that area over the next year or two. It's definitely a big area. I call that "cloud" in general when I say that's an area that we're very interested in.
GamesBeat: With Shield, would that mean more game developers?
Herbst: I'd say it's more VCA than Shield right now. Shield really is newer than VCA. In reality, Shield is not yet into the marketplace. Once Shield is out and people are using it, I see that as a very big beachhead for all kinds of partnerships, relationships, and investments that Nvidia could make over the next few years. That's just getting started. Cloud we've been working on for a longer period of time. If you recall even a year ago at GTC, Jen-Hsun [Huang, CEO of Nvidia] was talking about the GRID.
GamesBeat: Shield already has all those Tegra Zone games anyway.
Herbst: Yeah. Once Shield is out, you'll see a lot of content migrate to the platform because they're basically Android and PC games.
If you're around at three o'clock, we have Oculus coming to present. We have a couple of companies at three. Cortexica, they're doing computer vision. At two we've got a panel discussion about how technology will shape the future monetization of visual content, so they're going to talk about new ways people will do advertising — all the business models and how they could change visual search. Then we have companies coming up to do standard 15-minute presentations. We also have a guy from Cortexica on the panel. I'm giving them a lot of airplay, which tells you how I feel about them. [Chuckles] We really like them.
GamesBeat: Any final words?
Herbst: The themes remain the same. We get it. We understand what these companies are doing and we want to help. That's why we do this. We want to support the ecosystem.
Coming Events of Interest
2013 NAB Show - 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 Show - 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 19th-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.
P2P 2013: IEEE International Conference on Peer-to-Peer Computing - September 9th-11th in Trento, Italy. The IEEE P2P Conference is a forum to present and discuss all aspects of mostly decentralized, large-scale distributed systems and applications. This forum furthers the state-of-the-art in the design and analysis of large-scale distributed applications and systems.
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2013 — October 27th-29th in Las Vegas, NV. Three conference tracks 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.
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