September 24, 2012
Volume XLI, Issue 1
MEDIAmobz Sponsors CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012
The DCIA and CCA proudly announce that MEDIAmobz has signed-on as a sponsor of the CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 (CCW:2012) business leadership summit taking place November 8th-9th in Santa Monica, CA.
MEDIAmobz is all about agile content production in the cloud.
MEDIAmobz's global footprint of certified producers and web-based tools enables brands to create high-quality video and digital media, affordably and at scale.
Its clients achieve faster time-to-market, greater customer satisfaction, and higher profitability by entrusting the most critical elements of their digital creative supply chain operations and production to MEDIAmobz.
Its award-winning professional services team is also available to manage end-to-end video and digital media creation.
CCW:2012 will feature three co-located conferences focusing on the impact of cloud-based solutions in the industry's fastest-moving and most strategically important areas: entertainment, broadband, and venture financing.
MEDIAmobz will offer a keynote address on cloud dailies at the Entertainment Content Delivery conference within CCW:2012.
CCW:2012 registration enables delegates to participate in any session of the three conferences being presented at CCW:2012 — ENTERTAINMENT CONTENT DELIVERY, NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE, and INVESTING IN THE CLOUD.
At the end of the first full-day of co-located conferences, attendees will be transported from the conference hotel in Santa Monica to Marina del Rey Harbor where they will board a yacht for a sunset cruise and networking reception.
So register today to attend CCW:2012 and don't forget to add the Sunset Cruise to your conference registration. Registration to attend CCW:2012 includes access to all sessions, central exhibit hall with networking functions, luncheon, refreshment breaks, and conference materials. Early-bird registrations save $200.
Cloud to Grow 20% This Year to $109 Billion Market
Excerpted from Network World Report by Brandon Butler
The cloud computing market will grow almost 20% this year to become a $109 billion industry, research firm Gartner predicts, with business-process-as-a-service (BPaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) dominating the market, but infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) quickly gaining momentum.
In 2011, the market stood at $91.4 billion and the research firm expects it to grow to $206.6 billion by 2016. Cloud is still only a very small part of the overall IT spending market though. In July, Gartner predicted total IT spending would be $3.6 trillion in 2012.
BPaaS currently represents the largest share of the cloud market, making up more than three-quarters of the spending in the cloud. This refers to business processes delivered from the cloud, including e-mail, payroll, and cloud advertising -- which is the largest single chunk of cloud spending in the market right now, representing $84.2 billion in spending.
Cloud advertising is expected to continue to make up almost half of spending in the cloud market through the next four years, Gartner predicts.
The next largest market is SaaS, which Gartner expects to finish of the year as a $14.4 billion market, following by IaaS, which is slated to be a $6.2 billion market.
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is the smallest of the three major cloud models, representing about $1.2 billion in spending. Another significant and growing area of the cloud market is around cloud management and security services, which Gartner says will be a $3.3 billion industry this year.
During the next four years, Gartner expects the IaaS market to grow at a faster pace than the SaaS market and for the two to be of about the same size by 2016.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 Again this week, we urge DCINFO readers to take an active role in pressing the US Congress to update the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (ECPA) with these words from Jim Dempsey, VP for Public Policy at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT):
"The failure to update ECPA threatens US competitiveness in cloud computing and risks losing American jobs to foreign competitors.
ECPA sets standards for government access to private information transmitted and stored on the Internet: e-mails, private photos, corporate data, draft reports — everything private or sensitive that businesses and individuals store in electronic form.
Currently, ECPA makes it easier for the government to compel production of e-mails and other sensitive materials if that information is hosted by a third party service provider, such a cloud computing company, than if the same information were stored locally. There is no business or law enforcement basis for this distinction, but the consequences are great.
Businesses all over the world are looking to cloud-based services for their information management needs in order to save money on equipment and achieve better computing reliability and data security.
Cloud-based services allow companies to expand their computing capacity quickly — particularly valuable for start-up businesses and entrepreneurs. Such services give employees the flexibility to share information and collaborate. They can produce huge efficiencies and support new capabilities for all kinds of businesses. The global cloud market is expected to expand to $241 billion by 2020.
American companies have been the global leaders in cloud computing, and cloud computing has been an engine for innovation, economic growth, and jobs.
Currently, ECPA allows the government to compel a third party to produce private communications or materials that are stored by the third party service provider without a warrant and without timely notice to the business or individual that created the data. If the same information were stored locally, the government would have to either get a warrant or serve a subpoena directly on the target of the investigation, giving the target the opportunity to assert its rights.
Companies and individuals understandably want to know what is happening with their data, to defend their rights against government overreaching. Because ECPA allows the government to access data without a judicial order and without notice to the owner of the data, it discourages businesses and individuals from using cloud services.
Cloud computing firms in Europe are trying to exploit the weak American laws by advertising their non-US hosting services. European law has its own problems, but the perception that US law affords poor protections is leading some to avoid U.S.-based cloud services.
Congress could support US industry and send a strong signal to the rest of the world by amending ECPA to apply the same protections to all private data regardless of whether it is stored locally or in the cloud."
The Senate Judiciary Committee this week adopted Chairman Leahy's amendment to update ECPA to require warrants for law enforcement access to communications content regardless of its age, thus extending the warrant requirement to much of cloud computing.
This is a big step forward for ECPA reform. We are grateful to the companies and organizations that joined us in signing onto the letter on the amendment, and especially to those who helped out by contacting Senators' offices in support of the amendment.
We have our work cut out for us going forward. A number of law enforcement entities came out in opposition to the amendment, expressed serious concerns about it, and/or sought other amendments to ECPA, such as a "corporate e-mail" amendment and a statutory deadline for replying to warrants and other law enforcement demands for communications.
Those concerns will be considered when mark-up of the bill continues in November, probably on November 15th.
The CDT issued this statement to the press on adoption of the ECPA reform amendment, this blog about the law enforcement letters, and this response to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding one of those letters. Share wisely, and take care.
Cybersecurity Law - Where Do We Draw the Line?
Excerpted from ZDNet Report by David Gewirtz
Over the past few years, the Obama administration and Congress have taken a variety of legislative runs at creating comprehensive cybersecurity law.
In some of the cases (like SOPA), the legislation was killed because of public outcry over its overwhelming intrusiveness and stupidity. In other cases, legislation didn't make it because those foolish politicians tried to weigh down the proposed laws with unrelated riders, making the bills all but unpassable.
Now, we're hearing that President Obama may issue an Executive Order covering some of the elements that were in CISPA, the most recent bill before Congress.
One area the EO can't cover, though, is information sharing. Information sharing in law enforcement and national security is essential, but in a democracy, so is privacy. The challenge is how we balance those two factors.
For example, it's important that the government have the power to compel a private organization to turn over digital records in the event of a legitimate threat (say, for example, trying to trace down a nuke hidden in one of our cities). But it's also important that the government not have the power to just willy-nilly read our e-mail.
Likewise, it's important that a company, say Twitter, Google, or Facebook, have the legal permission to turn over some of our records in the case of a similar national security threat, but not be permitted to just sell our personal information just so they have some sort of profit model.
Fortunately, a lot of existing case law covers this, and it's probably not necessary to add a layer of cybersecurity law on top of it all.
For example, let's say the FBI is running down a credible threat and they have reason to believe that someone's Facebook account will have messages that may provide clues to the nuke's location. That's simple. Visit a judge, get a court order, and investigate. It's no different than getting a search warrant in meat space.
The issues of privacy we're dealing with aren't hard (unless you get politicians involved). They're essentially a variant of IF/THEN coding:
IF there's a real threat, THEN this might be necessary, so let's go see a judge.
IF we just want to pry into someone's life, THEN when we see the judge, we'll get kicked out.
IF there's a reasonable threat, THEN we allow a company to turn over data to the government.
IF (there's a threat deemed valid by a judge AND we can save lives by allowing two companies to share data), THEN the law can protect the liability of those two companies.
Do you see how we can codify (i.e., code) these situations into a series of relatively clear rules?
The bottom line is this: we do need better cybersecurity guidelines and laws, but we also need to reuse the code we've already got -- laws and regulations that already do what we need.
Tech Giants Form Internet Freedom Lobby
Excerpted from Wired Magazine Report by David Kravets
Another lobbying group hit Washington, DC on Wednesday. But think again before you start screaming that it's just another lobby representing the 1%.
The Internet Association, backed by behemoths Amazon, Google, Facebook and others — 14 groups in all — is focused on Internet freedom — something that's easy in principle and hard when it comes to details.
As a yardstick of what this group's philosophy is, its President Michael Beckerman said that had the group been around earlier this year, it would have lobbied against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Among other things, the measure would have required ISPs to prevent Americans from visiting piracy blacklisted sites by altering the system known as DNS that turns site names like Google.com into IP addresses such as 174.35.23.56. Instead, for the blacklisted sites, ISPs would have to lie to their customers and tell their browsers that the site doesn't exist.
The SOPA legislation — which was heavily backed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Hollywood's lobbying arm, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) — was among the main reasons for the association's founding.
House hearings on the debate, meanwhile, pitted the MPAA against Google. Lawmakers appeared more concerned about Google linking to pirated material than they were about the ramifications of granting the government the power to remove that content.
Giving the Justice Department the power to order ISPs like Comcast and AT&T to block their users from visiting blacklisted sites would be unprecedented in the United States, though it's a common tactic used in countries like Syria, Iran, and China to clamp down on political dissent and adult content.
The non-profit lobbying group, unveiled Wednesday, is "absolutely" against SOPA, Beckerman said.
"We'll make sure Congress understands how the bill will censor the Internet and greatly harm the infrastructure of the Internet," he said.
He added, "Our mission is to be the unified voice of the Internet economy in the policy debates that arise."
Beckerman has 12 years experience on Capitol Hill, most recently as deputy staff director of the House Energy and Commerce Committee working for Republican Fred Upton, a vocal opponent of net neutrality. That issue is likely to rear its head again in DC when a federal court hears a challenge to the FCC's new rules in the spring.
He said the group also supports reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).
"That's obviously important and an issue we care about," he said.
The Internet Association is funded by some of the nation's wealthiest Internet companies. (Giants Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle, an association spokeswoman said, are not a part of the group because it is composed largely of Internet-focused companies.)
The association's members include: Amazon, AOL, eBay, Expedia, Facebook, Google, IAC, LinkedIn, Monster Worldwide, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, TripAdvisor, Yahoo, and Zynga.
Even rival lobbying groups welcomed the association.
"These companies have a crucial role to play in educating policymakers about how what happens in Washington affects online innovation and the ability of Internet-based services to empower citizens and communities across the country," Leslie Harris, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) President, said.
Beckerman isn't spilling details on budgets.
"We'll have the resources at our disposal," he said, "to be effective and get the message out."
Cloud Computing Taking High-Tech Economy by Storm
Excerpted from American Legislator Report by Alex Rued
What do Netflix, NASA, and the Senegal Ministry of Finance have in common? They all operate in the cloud.
Cloud computing is increasingly relevant to businesses, consumers, and even government, yet "the cloud" remains a cloudy concept for Americans, including policymakers.
According to a recent survey conducted by Wakefield Research, a majority of Americans believe that stormy weather would interfere with their cloud computing — it won't — and 95 percent of Americans who believe they do not use the cloud actually DO every time they login to a social network, add an appointment to iCal, or access their online bank account.
Luckily, solving cloud confusion has less to do with mastering the technology behind the cloud and more to do with understanding how cloud computing is fostering innovation in the digital economy.
Cloud computing is basically the practice of using remote computing storage and processing resources via the Internet (in this context, known as "the cloud").
In a setup formally known as enterprise cloud computing, businesses plug-in to the resources, services, even staff of a remote data center. This means that even the smallest businesses and organizations today have the ability to access powerful data processing and storage resources at lower costs than ever before.
These lower costs for computing power are enabling a great deal of innovation and economic growth. One popular example of cloud computing at work is Instagram, the photo-sharing app business that Facebook recently bought for $ 1 billion. With only 12 employees, Instagram shares more than five million pictures per day.
Instagram's success was made possible with the processing and storage power of the cloud, which offered a solution to purchasing costly in-house computer servers or hiring employees.
Tasks that once took a couple thousand workers to accomplish now require only a handful. The cloud is even generating new economic opportunities for businesses in developing nations like India, where the cab company GetmeCab uses Amazon's Web-based data servers in Singapore to provide nation-wide cab service.
Consumers get real value from the cloud because it makes life easier for little, if any, money. Services that use cloud computing, including Google Docs, Gmail, Dropbox, and iTunes, make it possible for anyone with an Internet connection to synchronize documents, applications, or songs from a computer to an iPad.
Cloud computing is also responsible for predicting a consumer's taste in clothing; Etsy, an online marketplace that joins buyers and sellers to exchange homemade goods, is now able to analyze billions of monthly website reviews in order to generate accurate product recommendations.
Online health information networks like HealthHiway use cloud technology to ensure that information is properly shared between hospitals and doctors so that consumers have improved care at a lower cost. Many of these services cost consumers very little thanks to the savings passed on from the cloud.
Even government is turning to the cloud to innovate and save money. Last year, Wyoming successfully completed a migration from traditional IT systems to cloud-based services for the state's 10,000 employees. According to Governor Matt Mead, all of the state's employees will be on a shared email platform for the first time, which will increase efficiency and allow the state to serve constituents better.
According to a recent article in the NY Times, cloud computing is leading the way for the newest "wave" of technological changes.
Today's biggest companies, most notably Apple, Google, and Microsoft, as well as state and local governments, are turning to the cloud in hopes of increasing efficiency and decreasing costs.
What cloud computing will next bring to the 21st century digital economy is not predictable, for even the professionals fueling technological innovation admit that the cloud revolution is happening a lot faster than they would have thought. Therefore, policymakers at all levels should give this vibrant sector of the digital economy ample room to flourish.
How Cloud Growth Disrupts Hardware & Software Vendors
Excerpted from ReadWriteWeb Report by Antone Gonsalves
Businesses are subscribing to software, storage, and computing power delivered over the Internet at a jaw-dropping pace, Over the next five years, global spending on cloud-computing services will increase at a pace five times greater than the growth of the information technology (IT) industry as a whole. To survive in this new landscape, technology makers will have to completely redefine their products, business models, and cultures.
Instead of selling direct to the corporations that actually use computing services, hardware, software, and infrastructure vendors will all need to pivot to serve the new cloud services new market. That's the lesson from the latest forecasts by market researcher IDC.
The difference is stark. IDC estimates companies will spend $100 billion on IT cloud services by 2016. That compares to $40 billion companies are expected to spend this year and represents a five-year, compound annual growth rate of more than 26%.
Huge disruption is expected in the software market. Salesforce.com, launched in 2000, perfected the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market for businesses, and its success has led to big-name companies like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft introducing SaaS versions of their own business software.
"You have to be a strong player in SaaS now, if you're going to survive as a software vendor," said Frank Gens, IDC analyst and co-author of the forecast. Delivering software over the Internet will account for almost 60% of the public IT cloud in 2016.
Heading into to the cloud means redesigning products and making major business model changes for software makers. The lump-sum software sales prices and annual maintenance fees software makers get today will have to be converted into monthly subscription fees. It's not at all clear whether those fees will match the totals of the sales and maintenance charges they replace. And they money will come in at a very different pace - distributed over time rather than with the majority up front.
In addition, customers will pay only for the software and service they actually use, rather than licensing the whole package. "That is hugely disruptive for the market," Gens said. "Traditional vendors are all looking at a financial abyss that they're trying to vault over."
The only way to make the numbers work, vendors and observers agree, is for software vendors to dramatically in increase the number of customers they serve. The days when large vendors could build a robust business selling to just the Fortune 5000 are nearing an end. Instead, most software makers will have to sell to everyone, since success will be measured in volume.
"If you just stay with the Global 5000, it's going to be very hard to be a successful large scale IT vendor anymore," Gens said. "You have to reach out to and you have to love small businesses, even the smallest ones."
Hardware vendors will also suffer stress in the transition. To a large extent, heading to the cloud represents a continuation of the trend toward virtualization that has dominated IT for the last 10 years. Before companies could run multiple operating systems on virtual machines, servers were often used at 20% to 30% of capacity.
With the cloud, on-premise hardware will share computing power with an infrastructure service provider, which will result in companies doubling the amount of capacity they get with their hardware. Assuming equal demand, that's likely to suppress the need for new servers and associated equipment.
To make up the difference in selling less hardware to enterprises, vendors will have to focus on those companies delivering cloud services, whether its SaaS companies or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) vendors like Amazon and Rackspace. Demand from such companies will increase as more businesses of all sizes rent more server capacity in the cloud. Will it be enough to make up the difference?
"The market will absorb as much capacity as the industry can throw out there, if it's cheap enough and easy enough to access," Gens said.
The disruption won't be confined to hardware and software vendors. Corporate IT shops will also have to deal with dramatic change. Their tasks will shift from managing silos of their own technology resources to working with cloud vendors to get the services they need, properly integrated, at the best possible price.
Traditionally, IT shops have been divided into groups with separate organizations taking care of servers, databases, storage, or sets of applications. Under the cloud model, the vendors take much more responsibility for managing and maintaining the software and hardware components.
Many jobs that focused on individual areas of in-house software will become obsolete. Instead, IT staff will be managing cloud service providers to set service levels and make sure those levels are met. "If that cloud service fails, you're in deep trouble," Gens warned. "Suddenly, you don't control it. It's your vendor controlling your IT operation."
That's a big deal for IT departments, since CEOs will still hold them responsible for they the company's technology strategy and execution, even if much of the actual work gets "outsourced." On the plus side, they should be able to save money - on up-front capital costs if nothing else - and take advantage of the latest technology and trends without having to make huge investments themselves.
As the cloud brings significant risks and benefits hardware and software vendors as well as their customers, everyone will have to work together to successfully navigate the technology evolution. But among the many choices for all the parties, opting out won't be one of them.
DDN Integrates Cloud Storage into Media Workflows
Excerpted from Digital Media World Report
DataDirect Networks (DDN) has developed workflows for massively scalable storage to help resolve time and distance challenges in media and entertainment.
DDN has developed workflows for massively scalable storage to help resolve time and distance challenges in media and entertainment. The potential of cloud storage for M&E presents issues of security, speed, cost, and integration.
DDN has continued to update Web Object Scaler (WOS) that stores large digital media assets such as image, film and video so that globally distributed teams can set up workflows. WOS opens different connectivity options for private, secure cloud storage, operating at LAN speeds.
This connectivity also enables cloud storage to be integrated into media workflows. For example, CG content created in one location can be viewed, edited and integrated with live action content created elsewhere, while post production on the same data is handled in a third location.
WOS gives different studios continuous access to dailies to allow production and post production schedules to continue. DDN demonstrated these workflows at IBC and showed how drives in its storage system can fail, rebuild and restore without dropping frames, degrading performance or rebuilding complete drives.
DDN's storage system is capable of frame-accurate service supporting the consistency and predictability required for broadcast, filmmaking, post-production facilities, and video-on-demand (VoD), independent of the size of content files or the number of concurrent data streams.
DDN also demo'd a shared workflow, the Unified Workflow Solution, integrating varied editing suites in an implementation designed to overcome typical efficiency, ease of use and protection problems.
It is based on DDN's storage platforms and FilmPartner's MXFserver media server, which supplies simultaneous, shared access from Adobe, Avid, and Apple NLE suites, with all services, licensing, installation, and optimization required to integrate tightly into an uninterrupted workflow.
Huawei Announces New Enterprise Cloud Solutions
Excerpted from Ovum Report by Roy Illsley
At the third Huawei Cloud Congress held in Shanghai in September, the company announced two new solutions aimed at the enterprise market. Traditionally, Huawei has developed solutions for the service provider or telecommunications market, but 24 months ago it announced a move to become an enterprise cloud supplier.
Huawei has listened to its potential enterprise customers before coming up with its two key principles of the enterprise cloud messaging: make IT simple and make business agile.
At the congress, it announced a new converged infrastructure solution, FusionCube and three new storage solutions: MVX for big data, HVS85/88T for high-end storage requirements, and a new storage service, Universal Distributed Storage (UDS).
The growth in data is a well-documented phenomenon, and presentations from Joel Primack, professor of physics at University of California Santa Cruz, and Alberto Pace, CERN, demonstrated the growth in data expected over the next 10 years.
Primack reported that when the Square Kilometer Project (a square kilometer of different arrays collecting data on cosmic background radiation) matures in 2022 it will generate one exabyte of data per day, which is more than the entire Internet generates currently.
It was these growth figures that drove Huawei to a different approach to storing data. The value proposition of UDS is that it uses lower cost components than other giant, scale-out storage systems. While others use enterprise-grade SATA disk and x64 processors, UDS uses consumer-grade SATA disks and low-cost, low-power ARM processors.
Nodes combine a processor and a disk drive, and are packaged in eight-node configurations that include a network switch, all in a single 1U chassis. CERN is trialing a 384-node version of the solution. The value of this approach is that the nodes are designed to fail and not be replaced or repaired.
According to testing by Huawei, around 5% of disk drives will fail each year, or 15% over a three-year period. Huawei believes that when the racks reach three years old most organizations will upgrade and replace them.
The advantage of this approach is that no human intervention is required, cutting labor costs. Also, according to Huawei the biggest cause of problems with RAID is an engineer disconnecting the wrong drive after one has failed.
As well as selling UDS to enterprises, Huawei is using the storage system to underpin a public cloud service and is compatible with Amazon's popular S3 API which is used to connect public or private data arrays. Also like Amazon S3 and other storage services, Huawei is replicating customers' data across multiple data centers of its own, and is promising eleven nines (99.999999999%) durability or data integrity.
Like other cloud storage service providers, Huawei claims this means that customers who store data in its cloud do not have to worry about backing it up.
The announcement of the Huawei FusionCube converged infrastructure solution is another example of vendors producing products for this new sector of the market. Details on the FusionCube have not been officially released, but it is an example of the shrink-wrapped variant of this sector.
FusionCube differs from most of its competitors as it comes in a 12U form factor which houses up to eight full-width, or 16 half-width, blades and can support up to 64 processors (512 cores) with 12.3TB of memory, with a 5.76Tbit/s backplane bandwidth, and support for both 40/100 Gigabit Ethernet and Infiniband.
Market estimates supplied by Huawei suggest that by 2019 50% of the server business will be in converged infrastructure solutions, and that by 2015 30% of new data centers will be built using converged infrastructure solutions. However, the market estimates are less clear on which approach (reference architecture or shrink-wrapped SKU) will become dominant.
The debate about the advantages of pre-integrated converged infrastructure devices is centered on which approach is best: the reference architecture or shrink-wrapped stock keeping unit (SKU) solution.
The primary benefit that a reference architecture approach provides is that the design is specifically optimized for a range of sub-components to be used in the construction of the solution. This flexibility has two main benefits over an SKU approach.
Firstly, it is fully flexible and enables the solution to be scaled to the exact size or specification of the use case. The second key difference is the cost, as with a reference architecture the user can select the sub-components to install, and this is of particular value if an organization's purchasing power gives them big discounts from a specific vendor.
The weaknesses of a reference architecture compared to a SKU solution are complexity and support. The SKU solution is in effect a shrink-wrapped rack-based plug & play alternative.
The reference architecture approach requires that organizations have internal skills to construct, test, and support any implementation. This process obviously increases the implementation time as all the components need to be assembled and any software installed. The relevant patch levels required by the different components represent the most complex and time-consuming part.
The other element to consider is that of support. If the solution is built internally, support must be either provided from internal resources or external third-party support purchased. SKU suppliers can offer support as part of the package more cost effectively because it has been built and tested according to their specification.
Ovum expects the FusionCube will eventually become a two-variant model; one that provides a common pool of resources for enterprises to implement its own software, and a second, more focused, appliance-like offering providing an in-a-box solution for specific use cases where the converged infrastructure is optimized for a single specific task such as BI or VDI.
Furthermore, we expect the number of models in the range to increase to meet market demand and requirements.
Cloud Computing Companies Get Funding in France
Excerpted from CloudTimes Report by Florence de Borja
To promote cloud computing development, the French Government has invested its Caisse des Depots, France's sovereign wealth fund, in two competing local cloud providers. Each of the companies, Cloudwatt and Numergy, has a backer from the French IT industry and cellular phone industry.
Both cloud providers promise to keep the applications and clients' data secure in France. This promise is to assuage the fear of most European cloud computing clients that their data can be subjected to the provisions of the Patriot Act if the cloud company will host its servers in the US.
Numergy has recently advanced its service by utilizing its parent companies' infrastructure. Caisse des Depots, Bull, and SFR own the new cloud computing company. According to Numergy CEO Philippe Tavernier, Numergy will be building 40 more data centers within the next 8 years to add to its 2 existing data centers. It will initially offer its cloud services to French clients but will eventually include other European nations.
Cloudwatt, on the other hand, was also launched recently and is backed by Caisse des Depots, IT defense contractor Thales Group, and France Telecom-Orange. However, the new company hasn't released any of its products offering yet. No management team has also been assembled but shareholders want former director of CA Technologies, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard Patrick Starck to lead the company as its Chairman.
To differentiate Cloudwatt from Numergy, Cloudwatt has plans of building datacenters in other parts of Europe. This is possible because France Telecom-Orange has networks in Poland, Spain, United Kingdom, and other nations in Europe while SFR is only based in France.
In another development, the European Commission's panel known as Article 29 Working Party is set to release its recommendations and guidelines to fully address privacy and security concerns on cloud computing.
The report, a collaboration among European Union countries, is said to include cloud computing benefits in order to encourage proficiency and innovation. Also, the European Commission is encouraging all parties concerned to create their own guidelines and best practices in order to protect their data stored in the clouds.
Lenovo Buys Cloud Computing Firm Stoneware
Excerpted from Seattle Times Report by Kelvin Chan
China's Lenovo Group said Tuesday it's buying small US software company Stoneware as it seeks to gain a foothold in the rapidly growing field of cloud computing.
Lenovo, the world's second biggest maker of personal computers, did not say how much it was paying for Carmel, IN based Stoneware, but said the acquisition would not affect earnings.
The PC maker said buying Stoneware would help to enhance and expand its cloud computing business. The term refers to storing documents and software applications at remote data centers and allowing users to access them through smart-phones, tablet computers, laptops, and other Internet-connected devices.
Lenovo is beefing up its cloud computing division as it expands into areas with higher margins and growth opportunities than the PC business, which has become one of the technology industry's least profitable and slowest growing areas.
Lenovo has recently branched out into making smart-phones and web-linked tablet computers and the deal, its first acquisition of a software vendor, would help connect those devices.
The company said the Stoneware purchase would add "significant new technologies and accelerate its capabilities for both commercial and consumer cloud offerings." Lenovo said it will aim to sign up more customers for Stoneware's two cloud computing products - aimed at the education industry and the public sector - as well as develop new consumer products.
Stoneware has 67 employees in Indiana and Salt Lake City and Lenovo said none would lose their jobs. The purchase is expected to be completed by the end of 2012.
Samsung Cloud Computing Products Revealed
Excerpted from Ubergizmo Report by Edwin Kee
Samsung Electronics has just lifted the veil on its next-generation cloud computing solution products, which are spearheaded by a trio of devices known as the B Series Cloud Base Station, the C Series Cloud Monitor, and the new X Series Cloud Box.
These were developed in order to respond to increasing customer demand, and intend to further expand the company's lineup of virtual desktop solutions. All three cloud computing solutions let you securely store and access data on one centralized server or network, which helps consolidate servers and doing away with the fear of stolen or misplaced data.
Both zero client and thin client cloud solution products are offered, where the zero client B Series Cloud Base Station and the C Series Cloud Monitor function as cloud devices hooked up to a centralized server, delivering an alternative to a traditional PC infrastructure.
As for Samsung's X Series Cloud Box, this is the first standalone cloud desktop replacement solution from Samsung that delivers flexible user access and the ability to reuse existing customer monitors investments, which will also help organizations reduce the initial investment point for cloud computing.
No word on pricing, but we do know that the Samsung B Series Cloud Base Station (NB-NH) will be available next month, while the Samsung C Series Cloud Monitors (NC191 and NC241) will be available in December. As for the Samsung X Series Cloud Box, those who want to pick it up can do so from November onwards.
OpenStack Poised for Cloud Leadership
Excerpted from Information Week Report by Charles Babcock
The new OpenStack Foundation is taking shape as a potentially potent force in cloud computing. Its governing board has been elected, and working groups are accelerating development in eight technical areas. Perhaps more important, it has organized itself on a self-sustaining basis and now has $10 million in the bank to pursue its goals.
That could have made it a more formidable competitor to VMware, which has also been active in establishing the vSphere and vCloud product portfolio adopted by many of its customers. At VMworld, outgoing CEO Paul Maritz said VMware has 8,500 service providers offering a VMware-compatible virtualization environment, many of them small co-location and regional data center operators.
OpenStack was to form a broad, united front on behalf of a competitive open source cloud stack before the market was swamped by VMware, a proprietary software vendor. That's why it was somewhat surprising, as the group got organized, when VMware applied to become a member. VMware's membership application followed up its July 23rd $1.26 billion acquisition of Nicira, a start-up in the network virtualization space.
VMware said it would join shortly after the acquisition, but the OpenStack board didn't get around to accepting the application until August 28th. VMware became not just a member in good standing, but a gold member, meaning it is committed to supporting developer contributions. In VMware's case, that refers to developers at Nicira, a software-defined networking vendor and OpenStack's technical lead in virtualizing network services in the cloud.
The day the Nicira acquisition was announced, nobody was sure whether VMware would use it to aid or slow OpenStack's progress. VMware quickly resolved the issue by publicly announcing its plan to join the organization.
"There are a lot of members who compete with each other, yet contribute to the OpenStack code base," said Lew Tucker, CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco and Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of the foundation. "Nicira is a heavy contributor. We're confident they will keep contributing," he added.
VMware's decision to join OpenStack was "a very positive move," said Alan Clark, OpenStack's newly elected Chairman of the Board. By collaborating with OpenStack, he explained in an interview, VMware customers will end up with good interoperability between their on-premises virtualized environments and public cloud services. Clark is director of new initiatives, emerging standards and open source at the SUSE unit of Attachmate Group.
OpenStack was originally formed in July 2010 by Rackspace and NASA, which combined their Swift storage engine and Nova cloud compute engine, respectively, to initiate a new cloud stack. NASA withdrew as an active sponsor of the project earlier this year, saying it no longer had the resources to co-develop cloud software.
That left Rackspace, a San Antonio-based vendor of hosting and cloud services, as the sole sponsor. Many observers wondered how an open source project could thrive with its organization impetus coming from a single vendor.
Rackspace itself was sensitive to the problem and transferred governance to a foundation patterned on the Linux Foundation and Apache Software Foundation, open source predecessors that successfully governed large projects.
OpenStack boasts 190 member companies, including 500 active contributors, and a total of 5,600 members. Individuals may join for free. The organization raises money by charging member companies for use of its logo in connection with their products: A startup two years old or less pays $10,000, while an established company pays $25,000. There are currently 36 active OpenStack user groups worldwide.
The OpenStack code base has been downloaded 300,000 times in the last two years, but there are few accurate measures of how many OpenStack implementations currently exist. More important than downloads are the distributions of OpenStack cloud software as part of the Canonical Ubuntu Linux and of Attachmate SUSE Linux.
OpenStack was envisioned as a common code base on which both public service suppliers and private companies could build a cloud infrastructure, sharing common approaches to services and APIs. Currently, Rackspace, eBay's R&D group, and HP's Enterprise Cloud Services are among its implementers.
Ricky Gervais Is Just Talkin' with CloudTalk Social Voice
Excerpted from Digital Media Wire Report by Chris Marlowe
Comedic creator and raconteur Ricky Gervais has partnered with voice-technology company CloudTalk on Just Sayin', a free app that lets users engage with social media using their voice.
In addition to recording, sharing, and responding to each other's voices, users can post any combination of voice, text, photos, and video to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Gervais is co-founder and creative director of Just Sayin'. "Making the human voice a natural part of any social web experience is the next big thing," he said. "Voice as a monologue is narcissistic, voice as a dialogue is social; social media is a place where people desire to be both."
There are several companies competing in this nascent field, among them Bubbly, QWiPS, Voxer, and Yiip, but CloudTalk CEO David Hayden asserts that Just Sayin' is a free cloud-powered app while others are primarily fee-based SMS tools.
Gervais' involvement gives Just Sayin' an obvious lead when it comes to adoption by celebrities, for whom maintaining an authentic and engaging social media voice is increasingly important.
Hayden said, "Voice has been the missing link to a person's online persona. Social media interaction is widely silent and we know text has its limitations; sentiments can be difficult to express in 140 characters."
BitTorrent Downloads Booming - And Benefiting Musicians
Excerpted from ReadWriteWeb Report by Brian Proffitt
A new report from UK analytics firm Musicmetric has pegged the US as the world's leading downloader of music via BitTorrent.
It's the stuff of Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) nightmares: Despite industry efforts to shut down BitTorrent tracker sites, the frenzy of file sharing continues. And - surprise! - recording artists are embracing unauthorized downloads as just another way to do business.
Musicmetric's Digital Music Index also reveals that, while BitTorrent is used to download a huge amount of music in the US - about 96.7 million files in the first half of 2012 - it's not all unauthorized.
First, let's run down the list of the BitTorrent downloading nations. Coming in at number two on the list is the UK with 43.3 million downloads. That's followed by Italy's 33.2 million downloads, Canada's 24.0 million, and Brazil's 19.7 million files pulled in from BitTorrent.
The top five countries pulled down around 217 million files in the first half of 2012, over half of the nearly 405 million files tracked by Musicmetric for the top 20 downloading nations.
The song choices for each of these five nations varied significantly, too. US: Drake, "The Motto," Single. UK: Ed Sheeran, "Plus," Album. Italy: Laura Pausini, "Inedito," Single. Canada: Kanye West, "Watch the Throne," Album. Brazil: Billy Van, "The Cardigan," EP.
Billy Van's download success in Brazil is particularly notable, especially when you consider that "success" is meant without irony. Van's position on the BitTorrent chart is a big win. He released "The Cardigan" solely as a BitTorrent download in March.
Globally, Van's dubstep album has been downloaded just over 1 million times in the first part of the year, which gives him major international exposure.
If the RIAA wants to factor in Van's recordings as lost revenue, it will need to rethink its calculations. And what might those calculations show?
Figuring an average price of $1.29 for the singles and $7.99 for the albums for each of the 20 nations' most-downloaded files (not counting Van's album), that's roughly $32.5 million of music that might otherwise have been purchased.
Of course, there's a lot of supposition in that kind of thinking, number one being that consumers would have bought those songs had the public been completely prevented from downloading them via BitTorrent or other means.
And there's increasing evidence that freely shared music isn't such a bad thing for artists.
Ed Sheeran, the UK artist who currently holds the distinction of having the most BitTorrented song in that country, is sanguine about copyright-infringing songs.
"I sell a lot of tickets. I've sold 1.2 million albums and there's eight million downloads as well, illegally," Sheeran told BBC's Newsbeat earlier this week. "So nine million people have my record in England, which is quite a nice feeling. You get people who actually want to listen to your songs and come to an event like this in London, who wouldn't necessarily buy the album.
"You can live off your sales and you can allow people to download it and come to your gigs. My gig tickets are £18 and my album is £8, so it's all relative," Sheeran added.
Sheeran is not alone. As recording revenue falls, artists have been making up for the loss by increasing concert performances.
A 2010 report from the National Bureau of Economic Research demonstrated that "file-sharing reduces album sales but increases live performance revenues for small artists, perhaps through increased awareness. The impact on live performance revenues for large, well known artists is negligible."
This all fits within the theory that "piracy is the new radio," a statement made by musician Neil Young back in January.
"Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around. That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it," Young said.
Coming Events of Interest
ITU Telecom World 2012 - October 14th-18th in Dubai, UAE. ITUTW is the most influential ICT platform for networking, knowledge exchange, and action. It features a corporate-neutral agenda where the challenges and opportunities of connecting the transformed world are up for debate; where industry experts, political influencers and thought leaders gather in one place.
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 - November 8th-9th in Santa Monica. CA. CCW:2012 will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating and investing in cloud computing services providers.
INTELLIGENCE IN THE CLOUD - December 4th in Washington, DC. This workshop continues the NAB's series of programs developed for military and government professionals to demonstrate how advances in the commercial industries can benefit the military and government sectors. The atmosphere for the workshop is interactive with attendee participation welcome.
Third International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery Using Cloud and Distributed Computing Platforms - December 10th in Brussels, Belgium. Researchers, developers, and practitioners from academia, government, and industry will discuss emerging trends in cloud computing technologies, programming models, data mining, knowledge discovery, and software services.
2013 International CES - January 8th-11th in Las Vegas, NV. With more than four decades of success, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) reaches across global markets, connects the industry and enables CE innovations to grow and thrive. The International CES is owned and produced by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), the preeminent trade association promoting growth in the $195 billion US consumer electronics industry.
CONTENT IN THE CLOUD at CES - January 9th in Las Vegas, NV. Gain a deeper understanding of the impact of cloud-delivered content on specific segments and industries, including consumers, telecom, media, and CE manufacturers.
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