Malicious Android apps to increase threefold in 2013: Trend Micro The volume of malicious and high-risk Android apps will hit 1 million in 2013, says the security firm Read More ...
Visa introduces managed service platform for mobile money Visa Mobile Managed Service is designed to enable financial institutions and mobile network operators to quickly deploy mobile money programs across the country Read More ...
What the new face of the Dell-Microsoft nexus means for cloud computing With Dell going private last week, the cloud computing ecosystem is poised for a major change believes LS Subramanian. Let’s take a closer look at what the new face of the Microsoft-Dell partnership could mean Read More ...
Growth of digital consumerism will drive the convergence of new-age technologies: KPMG report Technologies like social, Big Data, cloud, and mobility have been buzzwords for a while now, the next wave of growth will emerge from convergence of disruptive technologies Read More ...
‘User-driven BI on mobile arms workforce to take real-time decisions’ Mobile BI will predominantly benefit sales people and field service personnel, however it will also cut across the organizational hierarchy, says Ramendra Mandal – Country Manager, QlikTech India. In an interview, he discusses how mobility is taking user-driven BI to the next level Read More ...
C-DAC launches India's fastest supercomputer; becomes first R&D institution in India to cross 500 teraflops milestone The premier institution has launched PARAM Yuva - II, the new version of its earlier PARAM Yuva Read More ...
Stellar becomes first data recovery firm to reach 2 million customer mark Since its establishment in 1993, the firm has now a presence in more than 170 countries Read More ...
WebNMS set to tap 100 million dollar M2M solutions market The telecom network management company has recently introduced a machine-2-machine (M2M) solution for ATMs to tap the Indian M2M solutions market, which is growing at a CAGR of 33.81 percent from 2011-16 Read More ...
Microsoft and Symantec team up to take down dangerous Bamital botnet that has infected more than 8 million computers The Bamital botnet hijacked people’s search results and took them to potentially dangerous websites that could install malware onto their computer, steal their personal information Read More ...
Maximizing the value of cloud-based development and testing environment While development and testing in a cloud-based model addresses the traditional roadblocks of cost, scalability, and lack of process and methodology, it has its own challenges. Here are critical success factors to maximize the value of cloud-based development and testing environment Read More ...
PCI Council releases cloud compliance guidance PCI Special Interest Group offers guidance for securing payment card data in cloud environments Read More ...
Android powered a third of all mobile phones shipped in Q4 Android smart phones accounted for 34 percent of all phone shipments and iOS phones 11 percent, says analyst firm, Canalys Read More ...
Financial cyber-crime in India set to explode exponentially: Expert In the wake of the recent reportage in the mainstream media regarding credit card fraud to the extent of 30 crores, Security expert Dinesh O Bareja believes this is the tip of the iceberg unless the stakeholders get their act together Read More ...
Chander Damodaran of Collabera Labs on the transformational power of the Internet Today, everything is going virtual – we pay our bills online, look up for reviews on places to visit/hotels, plan for our vacation, and catch up with people online. Chander Damodaran, Principal Architect, Collabera Labs shares how the Internet has changed our lives Read More ...
Google India takes crowdsourcing route to improve quality of India maps The search engine giant has announced Google’s first ever mapping competition called Mapathon 2013 Read More ...
Indian CIOs to invest 20 percent more in IT in FY 2013-14: Zinnov study Emerging verticals such as retail, healthcare along with manufacturing and telecom to drive the IT budget growth this year Read More ...
UC evolving from on-premise application to service-based offering Declining telecom costs and shift to an OPEX-based investment model have led to increasing adoption of cloud-based or hosted services amongst Indian enterprises Read More ...
How telecom sector can benefit by harnessing the power of Big Data Generating cross-channel insights, deriving customer location data, and studying customer sentiments through network analysis and social media analytics are some of the business benefits that the telecom vertical can derive by tapping into the power of Big Data Read More ...
Why is India’s UID Aadhar a Big Data challenge and opportunity? Building the world’s largest biometric identity platform for authenticating the identity of 1.2 billion residents is a Big Data challenge and a big opportunity for improving governance Read More ...
Mobile Internet connections will exceed world's population by 2017, says Cisco Cisco Visual Networking Index forecast projects 13-fold growth in global mobile Internet data traffic from 2012- 2017 Read More ...
Facebook, Google, Kaspersky and Microsoft come together under DSCI aegis to launch Internet safety campaign in Delhi The campaign involves a college outreach programme in the top Indian metros - Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata Read More ...
4 ways Microsoft-Dell deal could benefit IT What's in it for business customers if Microsoft invests USD 1 billion or more in Dell's buyout deal? Read More ...
Gartner expects social network identities to drive half of new retail by 2015 Says the cost of mitigating risks posed by social network identities may offset savings Read More ...
Dell goes private aided by USD 2 billion loan from Microsoft After weeks of rumors, the company on Tuesday announced it had agreed to a buyout led by CEO Michael Dell Read More ...
How Indian IT companies are ensuring safety of women employees With 800,000 women employed across levels, The Indian IT-BPM sector employs a sizeable number of women employees, who work in wee hours. Let’s look at how the sector is handling the important issue of women security Read More ...
Nasscom refutes press report on software product companies leaving association Contradicting press reports, Nasscom has said that iSpirit is a focus to create a policy think tank and not an association Read More ...
NASSCOM Foundation announces winners of Social Innovation Honours 2013 Organized in partnership with Genpact, the annual awards recognize innovation in the use of Information and Communications Technology for social development Read More ...
Aircel and ICICI Bank launch ‘Mobile Money’ Aircel and ICICI Bank have announced the joint launch of their Mobile Banking service - Mobile Money, running on Visa’s mobile managed service Read More ...
Seemant Chaudhry, Citrix on how the Internet has changed the way we work Seemant Chaudhry, Desktop Transformation Evangelist, India Subcontinent, Citrix shares how communication and collaboration among employees was a challenge in the pre-Internet era Read More ...
Is BlackBerry 10 right for you? Use these smartphone decision points to compare BlackBerry 10 to its Apple, Android and Windows Phone rivals Read More ...
Oracle acquires Acme Packet for USD 1.7 billion Acme Packet’s solutions are deployed by more than 1,900 service providers and enterprises globally, including 89 of the world’s top 100 communications companies Read More ...
Apple Macs will take on iOS characteristics, and will be accepted by enterprise IT, by 2014 By 2014, Apple will be as accepted by enterprise IT as Microsoft is today, says Gartner Read More ...
Why enterprises need a Security Business Analyst Traditionally, the Information security team is too focused on physical security of devices and less focused on security of information itself, which can be overcome by a Security Business Analyst Read More ...
Bill Shocker - a mobile malware that uses your android phone to send costly messages The malware has already taken remote control of more than 6,00,000 user phones Read More ...
Twitter hacked: Over 250,000 accounts may be compromised As a precautionary security measure, Twitter has reset passwords for potentially compromised accounts Read More ...
Online shopping sites as likely to deliver malicious content as a counterfeit software site Cisco recently released findings from two global studies that provide a vivid picture of the rising security challenges that businesses, IT departments and individuals face, particularly as employees become more mobile in blending work and personal lifestyles throughout their waking hours Read More ...
E-mail that self destructs is new BYOD threat Employees who bring apps like Wickr to work could bypass enterprise security systems Read More ...
Spam levels hit 5 year low According to Kaspersky Lab data, the share of spam in e-mail traffic decreased steadily throughout 2012 to hit a five-year low Read More ...
Kaspersky Lab outlines most popular Nigerian scam letters Kaspersky Lab filters intercept tens of thousands of Nigerian scam letters each month in different languages. Explore some of the most common Nigerian scam letters seen by Kaspersky Lab experts Read More ...
How Big Data will transform security approaches and technologies by 2015 Security experts from Booz Allen Hamilton, Northeastern University and RSA predict Big Data will likely transform nearly all core technology segments in information security within the next two years Read More ...
Cyber espionage campaign Red October targets global government institutions Recent research from Kaspersky Lab reveals that attackers have created unique, highly-flexible malware to steal data and geopolitical Intelligence from computers, mobile phones and enterprise network equipment Read More ...
9 things that you did not know about the Indian Cyber law Cyber law and security expert, Adv Prashant Mali, points out 9 things about the Indian cyber law which can get you punished with imprisonment of up to three years Read More ...
7 top information security trends for 2013 From sandboxing enterprise apps on mobile devices to hacking websites via high-bandwidth cloud attacks, experts detail the security trends they expect to see in 2013 Read More ...
5 tips to keep your small enterprise cyber-safe this festive season As festive mood is in the air, Dell India offers tips to small enterprises to keep themselves cyber-safe this season Read More ...
Mobility to accelerate the pace of growth in 2013 2012 was a monumental year for several companies, especially in the mobility space. If that is any indication of what 2013 will be like, tech lovers could be in for a wild ride Read More ...
Delhi Airport becomes world’s first airport to get BSA CSS (O) certification The airport has received the BSA (Business Software Alliance) certification in Standards-based Software Asset Management (SAM) for organizations, a program known as CSS(O) Read More ...
2013 will witness rise in malware targeting android devices, predicts ESET During the first quarter of 2012, according to IDC statistics, the Google operating system has recorded a year-over-year rise of 145 percent in market share Read More ...
ManageEngine launches MDM solution for India The web-based mobile device management solution will ensure safe adoption of BYOD along with information security related to company given devices for corporates Read More ...
McAfee warns of the 12 scams of Christmas ‘Tis the season for consumers to spend more time online - shopping for gifts. But Cyber-Scrooges work overtime during holiday season; new threats to hit mobile, email and the Web Read More ...
Blue Coat to acquire Crossbeam Systems Acquisition lays foundation for a broader strategy to transform the way businesses secure and optimize their networks Read More ...
Was Information Rights Management defined 40 years ago? Prabhakar Deshpande, Product Evangelist, Seclore Technology, argues that Information Rights Management was invented almost 40 years ago and finds mention in a document called the Rand report Read More ...
DSCI honors organizations, individuals for undertaking excellent security initiatives Receives overwhelming response for nominations in the Corporate segment and Law Enforcement Agency segment; introduces new sub-segments and new awards to recognize security leaders and the police force Read More ...
5 things to know about Twitter password security Twitter's response to compromised accounts teaches us lessons in social (networking) security Read More ...
23 percent of users are running old or outdated web browsers Research from Kaspersky Labs reveals that when a new version of a browser is released, it takes more than a month for most users to make the upgrade Read More ...
McAfee: Security will be a challenge with 50 bn connected devices Says intelligent, automated real-time asset monitoring is the way to close key gaps in enterprise security Read More ...
Malicious spam targets Skype users Malware steals user credentials, engages in click fraud activities and poses as ransom-ware Read More ...
A third of businesses have not fully implemented anti-malware protection A survey conducted by Kaspersky shows that measures being taken by IT specialists are woefully inadequate - only a little more than half of the respondents believe their company is really secure Read More ...
eScan announces security solutions for Android devices at INTEROP Mumbai 2012 The firm's security solutions are customized in order to ensure complete protection to Android-based devices from evolving cyber security threats in real-time Read More ...
Top 5 deadliest mobile malware threats of 2012 Security pros discuss the most prolific and complex mobile malware threats to appear so far in 2012 Read More ...
Federal Bank implements Finacle enabled two factor authentication solution Finacle from Infosys, through its strategic partnership with CA Technologies has put in place a vigorous security framework Read More ...
5 frequently forgotten factors in assessing risk The most common mistakes organizations make when going through the risk assessment process Read More ...
Cisco releases cloud IPS, upgrades security products Network equipment vendor's new products and services focus on improving security for mixed physical, virtual, and cloud environments, as well as BYOD Read More ...
Discovering security breaches within organizational setups Organizations can learn about potential security incidents faster only if their employees are well-equipped to recognize that something is amiss and react accordingly Read More ...
60 percent of organizations in India struggling to manage digital information In the last year, 89 percent of organizations have lost information, while 94 percent of businesses in India have had confidential information exposed outside the company, says a survey by Symantec Read More ...
Check Point launches ThreatCloud – a collaborative network to fight cybercrime The network gathers threat data from an innovative worldwide network of threat sensors and distributes threat intelligence to security gateways around the globe Read More ...
BYOD users expected to double by 2014 According to a new report from Juniper Research, 350 million employees will be using their own devices for work by 2014 Read More ...
5 Black Hat security lessons for CIOs Beyond the bearded coders and men in black suits was a trove of security best practices for enterprise IT Read More ...
Understanding security concerns in large networks The best protection against high profile attacks is to keep your software updated at regular intervals, says Govind Rammurthy, MD & CEO, eScan Read More ...
7 lessons learned from Yahoo’s password breach What should businesses, users, and regulators take away from the Yahoo password breach? Start with encryption for all stored passwords Read More ...
Bank of India’s Sameer Ratolikar conferred with ‘Best CIO’ award The Institute of Public enterprises ( IPE) has awarded Sameer Ratolikar, CISO, Bank of India as the “Best CIO” working for Information Security Read More ...
Android researchers demo clickjacking rootkit vulnerability Proof-of-concept malware can be used to launch malicious applications, with no warning or rebooting required, computer scientists show Read More ...
Mobile phones set to provide access control with NFC With the advent of Near Field Communications (NFC), your humble smartphone could replace the access control card you use when you enter your company Read More ...
Context-aware security is our best defense against APTs: Chris Young, Cisco Chris Young, Senior VP Security, shares his perspective on why context-aware security is key for thwarting new age threats Read More ...
Can IRM solve security issues related to BYOD? Unlike the device-centric strategy advocated by major vendors to solve the BYOD problem, security vendor, Seclore is proposing a simple content-centric IRM approach that it claims will work on any device Read More ...
New fraud campaign targets Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo users What the attacks share in common, besides being scams, is their use of a specific variant of Zeus Read More ...
Establishing controls and assurance in the cloud Business must work with legal, security and assurance professionals to ensure that the appropriate levels of security and privacy are achieved Read More ...
Indian Government to spend 368 billion rupees on IT in 2013, says Gartner The Government of India (GoI) will spend 368 billion rupees on IT products and services in 2013, an increase of 10.5 percent over 2012 revenue of 333 billion rupees, according to Gartner, Inc. This forecast includes spending by government organizations on internal IT (including personnel), hardware, software, external IT services and telecommunications. Telecommunications, which includes telecommunications and networking equipment and services, will remain the largest overall spending category throughout the forecast period within the government sector. It is expected to grow 6.8 percent in 2013 to reach 118 billion rupees in 2013, up from 111 billion in 2012 – most of this growth will be in enterprise network equipment. Software is achieving the highest growth rate amongst the top level IT spending categories – forecast to be 18 percent in 2013, led by investments in desktop software and infrastructure software. The IT industry is expected to indirectly benefit from government projects such as the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which will create an online database with biometric and identity details of Indian residents, the launch of the National Optical Fibre Network and the computerization of commercial taxes in states. “The Indian government is starting to leverage UID identities to authenticate citizens for transferring welfare benefits directly to the recipient’s bank accounts, in the form of cash transfers, thereby creating a new system for welfare benefits,” said Anurag Gupta, research director at Gartner. “India goes to the national polls in 2014, and the GoI will aim to expand the UID operational infrastructure by speed tracking ‘financial inclusion’, allowing easy access to banking for poor & encouraging micro ATMs. To expand the benefits of IT, GoI aims to invest more than INR 20,000 crores in expanding broadband penetration. The electronic chip making project, digitization of academic databases across all educational institutions, vehicle registrations, driving license databases etc will be the major focus areas” Read More Read More ...
Microsoft launches five free Bing Apps for Office 365 Home Premium Microsoft has created the Bing Apps for Office, which are free Bing-powered apps that can be used with the new Office 365 Home Premium. The software giant recently announced that Office 365 Home Premium was available to everyone as a subscription service. In a blog post, Microsoft said, "Our goal is to make Bing available in convenient and intuitive ways that take advantage of knowledge Bing has assembled for search. You can see this today with features like: voice search on Bing for Mobile, implicit search such as Local Scout on Windows Phone, the ability to search using your phone’s camera with Bing Vision, and touch/contextual search with Bing on Windows 8, With Bing Apps for Office we are introducing ways for you to be more productive without having to leave the applications." There are currently five Bing Apps for Office including: Bing Finance for Excel, Bing Maps for Excel, Bing Image Search for Word, Bing News Search for Word and Bing Dictionary for Excel and Word. #1 Bing Maps for Office helps people plot location data on a Bing Map. It is a data visualization tool for Excel that lets you use location names and map controls so you can zoom in and out of the map using touch or your mouse. You can adjust the map view to road or birds eye. Imagine overlaying census data on a state map. #2 Bing Finance (Beta) for Office helps you take control of your finances by letting you build a finance portfolio table in Excel. You can input stock symbols and customize the fields you’d like to display by selecting from a wide range of data columns, including current price and news. #3 Bing News Search for Office lets you search for news and related videos from within a Word document. Bing search results can be inserted into the document by clicking on the insert plus icon. You can also add frequent searches to your favorites list. #4 Bing Dictionary (English) for Office continuously discovers and distills high quality language knowledge so you have the latest definitions and spellings available. Aren’t sure of how to spell something? Simply enter words as they sound and Bing can suggest letters, words or phrases, optionally specified by part-of-speech. #5 Bing Image Search for Office allows you to search for images on the web from within your Word document. You can search for images by selecting text in the document or typing in the search box. Results are displayed in a grid and when you click on a result, a larger preview is displayed at the bottom with additional details and options. Any result can be inserted into the document at the location of your cursor by clicking on the insert plus icon. Read More Read More ...
Indian geo services industry generated USD 3 billion in revenue in 2011, says Google Today, we use maps every day to find a variety of information, whether it’s a nearby hospital or a good cup of coffee. Yet have you ever stopped to think about the industry behind the maps we use every day, the contributions it makes to our economy, and the benefits it provides to both consumers and businesses? According to a BCG report commissioned by Google, the Indian geo services industry generated USD 3 billion in revenue in 2011 alone while accounting for approximately 1,35,000 jobs. More significantly, the impact of the geo services industry is valued at approximately 15 times its own size. In India, geo services help Indian businesses drive USD 40-45 billion in revenue, save USD 70-75 billion in costs and affect 8-9 million jobs in India. The BCG report also found that Indian consumers are also willing to pay USD 1.5-2 billion more than they currently do for geospatial services such as online maps, navigation systems and local searches. Commenting on the report, Lalitesh Katragadda, Country Head - India Product, Google said, “Geo services helped generate USD 2 billion in revenue within the Indian accommodation and food services industry alone. In the report, restaurants reported benefitting from new customers finding them through local searches. Users benefit as it makes it easier for them to find the information on local offerings and creating valuable efficiencies in their day-to-day lives.” “Geo services such as the Google Maps APIs are helping to grow the Indian economy by enabling job opportunities, and paving the way towards future innovation. To enable continued growth, governments, companies, researchers and consumers all need to encourage mapping innovations and investments in India,” he added. The Indian geo services industry is comprised of companies that process the location data, companies that produce geo-enabled software, and expert industries that use geospatial data to generate insights. Beyond the industry itself, a wide variety of other industries in India also use geo services to make their businesses more efficient and productive. Consider Meru Cab, India’s largest cab provider and the third largest taxi operator globally. Meru Cab oversee over 20,000 trips a day across the four massive metros of Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad and Bangalore — using geo services, they’ve pioneered the concept of GPS-enabled taxis in India, using a GPS-based tracking system to identify match customers with the nearest cab and swiftly scheduling pickups. “As seen in the variety of case studies we've used in the report, geo services have the ability to transform all aspects of life from business to government,” said Prashant Agrawal, one of the BCG consultants who worked on the report. “Currently, geo services represent 0.2 percent of India’s GDP and affect 2 percent of the national workforce; however there is tremendous room to grow this industry and create a lasting source of competitive advantage for India.” Indeed, geo services industry in India is still at a nascent stage. To ensure that geo services continue to be a valuable driver of the Indian economy, there is a need to invest in it—through support of open data policies, product innovation, better satellite technology, and pushing for more geography education programs in schools. Read More Read More ...
Oracle sees huge uptake of SPARC T4 servers in India Oracle has said that its SPARC T4 servers have been adopted by customers across industries, including Reliance BIG Entertainment, Tata Sky, Reliance Mumbai Metro, Rico Industries, Cairn Energy, Tata AIA Life Insurance, Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Communications, Tech Mahindra and Tata AIG. Venkatesh Krishnan, Vice President, Systems Business, Oracle India said, “Our growing customer base is proof that enterprises find a compelling value proposition in SPARC T4 servers with Oracle Solaris to power their most critical systems and to deliver outstanding business growth. With over 25 years of enterprise reliability and scale, SPARC servers and Oracle Solaris continue to be the preferred solution for running mission critical workloads. Our customers also choose SPARC T4 server for its full binary compatibility, which makes it easier for them to run and move their applications across other SPARC/Solaris OS based servers.” Over 3,000 enterprises worldwide are now running SPARC T4 Servers for mission-critical workloads; an increase of 4x since a year ago. “Mumbai Metro is running its critical enterprise applications on Oracle SPARC T4 Servers. These applications will ensure a seamless experience, enhanced safety and timely delivery of service to our esteemed customers on the Versova-Andheri-Ghatkopar metro line. The SPARC T4 servers have allowed us to implement solutions faster and better and enabled us to be more agile to respond to the dynamic requirements of the business,” said Hemant Garg, Head IT, Reliance Metro. SPARC T4 servers come with built-in OS, virtualization and system management featuring Oracle Solaris, Oracle VM Server for SPARC, and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c. “Oracle SPARC T4-based servers continue to be a key pillar of our business offerings designed for data center needs of some of the most demanding enterprises today. We are committed to sustain our leadership position as a provider of the latest and most efficient systems that protect investments of our customers and drive disruptive efficiencies in the datacenter, and Oracle SPARC servers therefore are a natural fit in our portfolio. We have been able to deliver our customers significantly improved performance levels that are unmatched in the industry through our partnership with Oracle, said Rohit Adlakha, Vice-President and Business Unit Head, ITS, Wipro. Read More Read More ...
Delhi International Airport launches India’s first virtual shopping wall Heralding India’s big leap into the world of mobile shopping, HomeShop18 in association with Delhi International Airport (DIAL) has introduced a Virtual Shopping Wall. The Virtual Wall offers premium merchandise to consumers at Terminal 3 (T3) domestic side of New Delhi’s-IGI Airport (IGIA). Around 45000 passengers depart daily from T3 of IGIA with each having an average of 60 minutes at hand before boarding a flight. With this HomeShop18 virtual shopping wall, the passengers will get a new and innovative shopping experience as they will be able to view range of products like consumer electronics, mobiles, tablets, clothing, accessories, fashion jewellery, perfumes, etc. on dynamic screens. At HomeShop18’s virtual shopping wall, Scan N Shop flyers will be able to order by simply scanning the QR code displayed against each item or over the phone at the call centre. HomeShop18 has also enabled the convenient cash on delivery payment method to drive trials and will follow it up with mobile payments subsequently. As Sundeep Malhotra, Founder & CEO, HomeShop18 explains, “With the Virtual Shopping Wall, HomeShop18 embarks on the next major journey into mobile-commerce (M commerce). By bringing M-commerce to India, HomeShop18 is taking the convergence of mobile and retail to a new high. The brand today offers the widest portfolio of products, addressing a wide range of consumer needs. The idea behind ‘Scan N Shop’ is to enable tech-savvy, smart-phone and tablet users to experience a smart new way of shopping.” Malhotra further added, “This new mobile shopping format is consistent with our legacy as the virtual retail pioneer in India. We are glad to introduce such evolved technology leading shopping experience to consumers in India. HomeShop18 has deployed truly unique technology to present customers a dynamic shopping environment, where the products offered are refreshed remotely on the basis of stock availability, performance and host of other dynamic factors. In many ways, Scan N Shop is India’s big bang dive into the world of mobile shopping.” Speaking about this innovative product, I Prabhakara Rao, CEO, DIAL said, “At Delhi’s IGI Airport our endeavour is to partner with best brands, offer wide range of products and a great experience to all the travellers. The proposed Virtual Shopping Wall is an addition to an eclectic list of innovations that Delhi airport already hosts. IGI airport is now a preferred destination in India amongst brands for various innovations and unique offerings such as experience zones, brand lounges, snooze pods, India’s largest digital exposure amongst others. HomeShop18 is an apt choice for this activation because of their popularity and expertise in virtual shopping in India. With Scan N Shop we continue our on-going journey to provide world class experiences here at Delhi’s IGI airport.” Read More Read More ...
BlackBerry 10 platform launched on two new smartphones BlackBerry unveiled the new BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 smartphones at events held simultaneously in New York, Toronto, London, Paris, Dubai, and Johannesburg. “Today sees a re-invented BlackBerry launching an entirely new mobile experience,” said Thorsten Heins, President and CEO of BlackBerry. Some important features include:
- BlackBerry Hub, which is a single place to manage all your conversations whether personal or work email, BBM™ messages, social media updates or notifications, and the ability to “peek” into the BlackBerry Hub from anywhere
- BlackBerry Flow, where the BlackBerry 10 experience excels by enabling features and apps to flow seamlessly together, helping you complete the task at hand effortlessly and efficiently. For example, you can tap on an attendee listed for a meeting to see their latest tweet or LinkedIn profile. Or tap the thumbnail of a picture you just took to launch the Picture editor and quickly apply a transformation or filter, then instantly share it with your contacts.
- BBM which allows you to share things with the people that matter to you in an instant. BBM in BlackBerry 10 includes voice calling and video chat, and introduces the ability to share your screen with another BlackBerry 10 contact.
- BlackBerry Balance technology, which elegantly separates and secures work applications and data from personal content on BlackBerry devices.
- Time Shift, an astonishing camera feature that lets you capture a group shot where everyone is smiling with their eyes wide open. Story Maker, which lets you bring a collection of photos and videos together, along with music and effects, to produce an HD movie that you can instantly share.
- The new BlackBerry 10 browser, which sets the industry benchmark for HTML5 support on smartphones, is incredibly fast. Scrolling or zooming is fluid and responsive. The browser includes many advanced features, supports multiple tabs, lets you browse sites privately, includes a reader mode, and integrates with the platform for easily sharing content.
- BlackBerry Remember, which combines memos, tasks and much more into a single experience. It helps you organize and manage information you have on your smartphone around projects or ideas, letting you collect content such as websites, emails, photos, documents, and other files, and then like a To-Do list, lets you create tasks, assign due dates, and track your progress. If your BlackBerry smartphone is set up with a work account, your Microsoft Outlook tasks will automatically be wirelessly synced with BlackBerry Remember. If you have configured an Evernote account with your smartphone, BlackBerry Remember will sync Evernote workbooks as well.
- BlackBerry Safeguard technology that helps protect what is important to you, and the business you work for.
The four steps to IT consolidation nirvana Tell your spouse that you’d like to consolidate your neatly organized home storage to a single closet and the idea may be met with a startled face twisted into a smirk. Why would you want to destabilize the status quo if what you have is adequate? Similarly, broader IT consolidation initiatives in enterprises are often met with skepticism because of complexity, distance and latency, and the constraints of traditional IT organizational silos. And if things go awry, IT is in the hot seat to fix the problem and potentially backtrack on the project as executives and end users shake their heads in disappointment. But progressive organizations are exploring ways to use the latest virtualization technologies to move beyond server consolidation to deliver an efficient data center infrastructure and expand the benefits of consolidation enterprise-wide. The benefits of a well planned and executed consolidation approach can not only save money, but also mitigate risk while boosting efficiency and business agility. The path starts with adopting advanced consolidation strategies that build upon a foundation of basic server virtualization, deepen the use of virtualization, and extend consolidation across the enterprise. It goes without saying that any consolidation strategy requires careful analysis and planning before execution. The strategies below all involve the data center, which has been the focus of much recent investment, and serves as the bastion of cost-efficiency and control for IT branch offices. 1. Consolidate data centers Returning to the closet analogy, wouldn’t it be great to store all of your tax documents, family pictures, and textbooks in a single closet? Imagine how easy and quick it would be to find your tax return in neatly organized and properly labeled drawers? The benefits of having such a “dream” closet at home are similar to having a consolidated data center in the IT world, where IT is completely centralized. The big question is how to eliminate data centers without impeding performance and the productivity of employees. The first step is to analyze and plan with application performance baselines and dependency maps to reduce the risk and to brace for challenges, such as migrating data and applications so that there is no interruption to the business. With selected data centers outfitted to assume greater load and remaining data centers scheduled for closures, you must replicate applications to the surviving data centers and then transition users to the new host. You can use application delivery controllers (ADCs) to redirect users between facilities and increase the ongoing reliability and performance of those applications. ADCs have global and local load balancing capabilities that allow you to shift application resources between locations, manage and upgrade underlying infrastructure, and distribute application load between multiple servers and data centers, all without disrupting end-user access to applications. The remaining data centers will have to support more users from further locations, so you may think that more bandwidth is required to support the increased traffic over the WAN. However, that may not be the silver bullet – and in many cases is not necessary. Latency combined with application protocol inefficiencies is the real culprit that bottlenecks WANs. By implementing a WAN optimization solution between the remaining data centers and field offices before migrating applications, you can accelerate the migration of data and applications to the new location, as well as ensure that end users continue to experience consistent levels of performance. 2. Virtualize application delivery Does the idea of a fully virtualized, highly automated, and highly efficient concentration of computing resources appeal to you? Then consider how the architecture underpinning the applications hosted in your data centers can be structured to realize this vision. Server virtualization, storage provisioning, and deduplication technologies can drive greater efficiency from infrastructure investments, but they are largely agnostic to applications. That means applications remain as resource inefficient as ever. Spikes in user requests can cause many mission-critical application servers to become unstable and fail. ADCs can improve the resource utilization of an application by offloading compute-intensive functions, like compression, SSL decryption, and content caching. Virtual and software ADCs take it a step further to help with scaling and improving the end user performance of applications that become more distributed and virtualized. They can be deployed on demand anywhere, anytime, on any platform, physical, virtual, or in the cloud, and can be managed centrally. This gives you more choice and more flexibility on how and where to deploy ADC resources, which means more control over your virtualization projects. 3. Centralize infrastructure Whatever the reason, application infrastructure has found its way into makeshift server closets and micro-data centers in branch offices at many organizations. Address this complexity and improve security and data protection practices by centralizing application infrastructure. Doing so will let you take advantage of even greater cost efficiencies at data centers, where virtualization and automation have maximum impact. But note, relocating an application requires the same planning and analysis as eliminating an entire data center, as well as factoring new or increased dependency on the WAN. This means adjusting for the impact of distance between the central data center and distributed end users. Fortunately, you can use WAN optimization solutions to accelerate applications for users in branch offices or remote locations, edge virtual server infrastructure (edge-VSI) to consolidate your branch office storage to the data center, and quality of service (QoS) to finely control the mix of application traffic across the WAN and make better use of scarce network resources. 4. Minimize branch IT Local print, DNS, and DHCP servers are “edge” services that defy many infrastructure centralization efforts. Such services can still benefit from innovations like server virtualization. Leading WAN optimization solutions now allow organizations to run these services on their appliances, so you can eliminate these redundant branch servers to further reduce hardware, software, maintenance costs, and complexity. It also helps to have an application-aware network performance management solution in place to passively collect network performance data and capture packet details from existing infrastructure, such as routers and even WAN optimization appliances. This provides the visibility you need into branch traffic without introducing additional hardware or taxing the network. After all, you can’t control what you can’t see. Consolidation projects have moved beyond beginner tactics. But the goals of advanced consolidation strategies remain largely the same – greater efficiency and the opportunity to streamline and automate IT processes. Implementing the four strategies discussed can help you realize a trinity of benefits: users in the branch get the performance they require, IT maintains total control, and the business enjoys a high return on IT investment. As for a winning formula for consolidating your home storage without peeving your spouse…we’ll have to get back to you on that. - Robert Healey is Marketing Evangelist at Riverbed Technology, APAC & Japan Read More Read More ...
By 2016, 50 percent of large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks, says Gartner Enterprise social networks will become the primary communication channels for noticing, deciding or acting on information relevant to carrying out work. However, Gartner, Inc. estimates that through 2015, 80 percent of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology. "Businesses need to realize that social initiatives are different from previous technology deployments," said Carol Rozwell, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Traditional technology rollouts, such as ERP or CRM, followed a "push" paradigm. Workers were trained on an app and were then expected to use it. In contrast, social initiatives require a "pull" approach, one that engages workers and offers them a significantly better way to work. In most cases, they can't be forced to use social apps, they must opt-in." This means that the leaders of social business initiatives need to shift their emphasis away from deciding which technology to implement. Instead they should focus on identifying how social initiatives will improve work practices for both individual contributors and managers. They need a detailed understanding of social networks: how people are currently working, who they work with and what their needs are. "There is too much focus on content and technology, and not enough focus on leadership and relationships," said Rozwell. "Leaders need to develop a social business strategy that makes sense for the organization and tackle the tough organizational change work head on and early on. Successful social business initiatives require leadership and behavioral changes. Just sponsoring a social project is not enough — managers need to demonstrate their commitment to a more open, transparent work style by their actions." Gartner outlined two additional key predictions around social and collaboration: By 2016, 50 percent of large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks, and that 30 percent of these will be considered as essential as email and telephones are today "The popularity and effectiveness of social networking sites as a group communication tool among consumers is prompting organizations as well as individual employees to ask whether similar technologies can be deployed privately," said Nikos Drakos, research director at Gartner. "There is increasing interest for using social technologies within organizations to connect people more effectively, to capture and reuse valuable informal knowledge, and to deliver relevant information more intelligently where it is needed through social filtering." Using Facebook-like enterprise social networking software for communication has several advantages over email and traditional check-in/check-out repository-centric collaboration in terms of information capture and reuse, group organization, and social filtering. A Facebook-like social networking environment within an organization can be used as a general-purpose communication channel where information and events that originate in external systems — such as email, office applications and business applications — can be injected into conversations, and vice versa. With an understanding of the key influencers in the social network, communication channels will become even more effective. In 2017, the majority of all new user-facing applications will exhibit gamified-social-mobile fusion. Three key feature sets (social, mobile and gamification) are already emerging in the marketplace in user-facing applications. These features increase the attractiveness, usability and effectiveness of the applications they are found in. Over the next five years, these three feature sets will continue to co-emerge and fuse into a superset, such that, by 2017, they will appear in the majority of user-oriented applications and apps. "Users should include gamified-social-mobile fusion as a desired set of characteristics when evaluating new application investments," said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner Fellow. "Applications and app-providers that fail to exploit the benefits of gamification-social-mobile fusion should expect underwhelming adoption, and therefore sales, of any user-facing products competing against alternatives that exploit the benefits of this fusion." Read More Read More ...
Government of India partners with Infosys to launch first Government to Business portal The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), Ministry of Commerce and Industry - Government of India announced the launch of eBiz – India’s first Government-to-Business (G2B) portal which has been developed by Infosys in a public private partnership model. The eBiz portal which aims at transforming and developing a conducive business environment in India was launched by Union Minister of Commerce, Industry and Textiles, Anand Sharma at the CII Partnership Summit in Agra. The eBiz platform will provide a one-stop shop for convenient and efficient online G2B services for the investor and business communities in India, reducing delays and complexity in obtaining information and services. It will serve as a gateway to obtain services relating to planning, starting and operating businesses in India including licenses, approvals, clearances, obtaining no objection certificates, permits and filing returns. Infosys has launched the first phase of the project which will provide investors an interactive tool to assess license and permit requirements to setup and operate a business in India. Speaking on the occasion, Anand Sharma said, “We are firmly committed to wide-ranging initiatives aimed at fostering the business environment in the country in a holistic manner. Our approach includes leveraging technology to bring transparency, improve efficiency and promote convenience. eBiz is an important step in this direction and we are pleased to work in partnership with Infosys on this project, which we hope will become a benchmark for successful public private partnerships in the country.” V Balakrishnan, Member of the Board and Head - India Business Unit, Infosys, said, “The eBiz portal is a program of national importance and will provide better governance, transparency and ease of use for businesses in India. We are confident that our prior experience of working with the Income Tax department and our strong consulting and systems integration capabilities will enable us to continue executing the future phases of this project successfully.” As a part of the 10 year program, Infosys will roll-out services in a phased manner. In the first year of the three year-long pilot, 29 services will be unveiled in the five states of Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. Further, over the course of the second and third years, an additional 21 services will be launched and five additional states will be brought under the scope of this project. From the fourth year onwards, the project will see more than 200 services rolled-out across the country. eBiz adheres to global e-Governance standards under the National e-Governance Plan of the Government of India. It is an Integrated Mission Mode Project that aims at providing Central Government, State Government and Local Administration related services. Read More Read More ...
Host Analytics to invest USD 10 million to expand R&D presence in India Host Analytics, a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) player, recently announced that it has expanded its Hyderabad R&D center and relocated to new 12,500 square foot facility in HITEC city. It also named Anurag Garg as its new General Manager of Indian Operations. Host Analytics projects India R&D investment of more than USD 10 million over the next three years. The R&D center in Hyderabad currently employs 80 engineers. The company looks ahead to incremental growth in the center as the company scales its R&D efforts and grows in the region. Host Analytics offers cloud-based financial applications for planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics. Host Analytics recently completed a record 2012 fueled by revenue growth in excess of 100 percent. The company won transactions at key customers including Essar Oil, WD-40, Sprouts Farmers Market LLC, NEC, and Splunk. It also closed a USD 17 million series D venture capital funding this year from investors Advanced Technology Ventures, Trident Capital, StarVest Partners and Next World Capital. “I am happy to announce the continued expansion of our India operations and thrilled to welcome Anurag Garg to Host Analytics,” said Dave Kellogg, CEO at Host Analytics, who joined the company in August, 2012 from Salesforce.com where he served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Service Cloud. ”Because Host Analytics was founded simultaneously in India and the USA, Hyderabad has always been a strategic location for us. With this announcement, we continue to step-up our commitment to India and to our highly successful distributed R&D strategy.” “The cloud has revolutionized the way we deliver complex software applications, and it is rapidly becoming the preferred software delivery model for enterprises of all sizes,” said Aravind Balakrishnan, VP of Engineering at Host Analytics. “Hyderabad provides an outstanding talent pool for developing enterprise cloud applications, and I am happy that we are investing today so that we can continue offer the industry’s leading suite of cloud-based applications for enterprise performance management.” According to Gartner, Inc. Global spending on software as a service (SaaS), or cloud-based applications will grow 17.9 percent in 2012 to USD 14.5 billion. SaaS market growth will remain strong through 2015, when spending on the SaaS is expected to hit USD 22.1 billion. Newly appointed General Manager of Hyderabad R&D center Anurag Garg will be responsible for both R&D as well as oversight of India-based finance, support, and services. Garg was previously director and head of Polycom R&D in India and brings on board strong international experience having lived and worked in India, the USA, and Germany. Garg began his career in engineering at Siemens and AT&T Bell Labs. He is also a serial entrepreneur who founded and sold three companies. Read More Read More ...
CSI launches ‘CSI IT2020’ with focus on making emerging technologies a boardroom agenda With the theme of ‘Making Emerging Technologies a Boardroom Agenda’, the CSI Mumbai chapter is launching its biggest annual event, CSI IT2020, at IIT Bombay, Powai on February 1st 2013. The event will have renowned speakers in 4 tracks: Security, Mobility, Social Media and Analytics & Big Data. The event will also see the release of a thought leadership paper on emerging technologies by CSI & KPMG. Another key highlight of the event is a CIO theme discussion, moderated by Kunal Pande, Partner, Management Consulting, KPMG. Additionally, the event will have hands on Spoken Tutorial workshops by Spoken Tutorial Projects, IIT Bombay on C, C++, Java, PHP, Python, Blender, Grip. Some esteemed speakers include: Plenary Session:
- Prof. Kannan M Moudgalya, IIT Bombay Department of Chemical Engineering
- Keynote Speaker – Sanjeev Dali, Worldwide Director, GSSO, Colgate Palmolive
- Suresh Anantpurkar, Consultant Mobile Governance, Ex–President, mChek
- Jayanta Prabhu, Group CTO, Essar Group
- Manjula Sridhar, Director, Solution Sales, Advanced Authentication APAC, CA Technologies
- Sowri Santhanakrishnan, VP & Venture Leader, Mobility Solutions, Cognizant Technology Solutions
- Anish Gupte, IT Infrastructure & Services Lead, Kraft Asia Pacific
- Gerard Rego, Director – Developer Experience, Nokia
- Dr A B Pandey, Deputy Director General, Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)
- Harish Ganesan, CTO and Co-Founder, 8K Miles
- Arun Gupta, CIO, Cipla
- Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA
- S S Mulay, Sr. Vice President and Head Engineering ,Netmagic Solutions CSI
- Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager, IBM Social Business & Collaboration solutions
- Deepali Naair, Country Head - L&T Insurance
- Sandeep Walunj, CMO, Magma Fincorp
- Binay Tiwari, Head - Global Marketing, V SERV.mobi
- Bharati Lele, Head - Innovation Labs, L & T Infotech
- Mark Fernandes, Partner, Deloitte Canada
- Burgess Cooper, VP Information Security, Vodafone *
- Anantha Sayana, Vice President & Head - Corporate IT, Larsen & Toubro Limited
- Vishal Salvi, Chief Information Security Officer, HDFC Bank *
- Pervez Workingboxwalla, Corporate Senior Vice President, WNS *
- Rajesh Shewani, Technical Sales Head - Business Analytics, IBM India*
65 percent of packaged analytic applications will come embedded with Hadoop by 2015, says Gartner Business intelligence (BI) and analytics need to scale up to support the robust growth in data sources, according to the latest predictions from Gartner, Inc. Business intelligence leaders must embrace a broadening range of information assets to help their organizations. "New business insights and improved decision making with greater finesse are the key benefits achievable from turning more data into actionable insights, whether that data is from an increasing array of data sources from within or outside of the organization," said Daniel Yuen, research director at Gartner. "Different technology vendors, especially niche vendors, are rushing into the market, providing organizations with the ability to tap into this wider information base in order to make sounder strategic and prompter operational decisions." Gartner outlined three key predictions for BI teams to consider when planning for the future: By 2015, 65 percent of packaged analytic applications with advanced analytics will come embedded with Hadoop. Organizations realize the strength that Hadoop-powered analysis brings to big data programs, particularly for analyzing poorly structured data, text, behavior analysis and time-based queries. While IT organizations conduct trials over the next few years, especially with Hadoop-enabled database management system (DBMS) products and appliances, application providers will go one step further and embed purpose-built, Hadoop-based analysis functions within packaged applications. The trend is most noticeable so far with cloud-based packaged application offerings, and this will continue. "Organizations with the people and processes to benefit from new insights will gain a competitive advantage as having the technology packaged reduces operational costs and IT skills requirements, and speeds up the time to value," said Bill Gassman, research director at Gartner. "Technology providers will benefit by offering a more competitive product that delivers task-specific analytics directly to the intended role, and avoids a competitive situation with internally developed resources." By 2016, 70 percent of leading BI vendors will have incorporated natural-language and spoken-word capabilities. BI/analytics vendors continue to be slow in providing language- and voice-enabled applications. In their rush to port their applications to mobile and tablet devices, BI vendors have tended to focus only on adapting their traditional BI point-and-click and drag-and-drop user interfaces to touch-based interfaces. Over the next few years, BI vendors are expected to start playing a quick game of catch-up with the virtual personal assistant market. Initially, BI vendors will enable basic voice commands for their standard interfaces, followed by natural language processing of spoken or text input into SQL queries. Ultimately, "personal analytic assistants" will emerge that understand user context, offer two-way dialogue, and (ideally) maintain a conversational thread. "Many of these technologies can and will underpin these voice-enabled analytic capabilities, rather than BI vendors or enterprises themselves developing them outright," said Douglas Laney, research vice president at Gartner." By 2015, more than 30 percent of analytics projects will deliver insights based on structured and unstructured data. Business analytics have largely been focused on tools, technologies and approaches for accessing, managing, storing, modeling and optimizing for analysis of structured data. This is changing as organizations strive to gain insights from new and diverse data sources. The potential business value of harnessing and acting upon insights from these new and previously untapped sources of data, coupled with the significant market hype around big data, has fueled new product development to deal with a data variety across existing information management stack vendors and has spurred the entry of a flood of new approaches for relating, correlating, managing, storing and finding insights in varied data. "Organizations are exploring and combining insights from their vast internal repositories of content — such as text and emails and (increasingly) video and audio — in addition to externally generated content such as the exploding volume of social media, video feeds, and others, into existing and new analytic processes and use cases," said Rita Sallam, research vice president at Gartner. "Correlating, analyzing, presenting and embedding insights from structured and unstructured information together enables organizations to better personalize the customer experience and exploit new opportunities for growth, efficiencies, differentiation, innovation and even new business models." Read More Read More ...
NASSCOM takes proactive step to ensure safety of women employees The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) today highlighted various measures undertaken by the IT-BPM industry to enhance awareness on the safety of its women workforce. The Indian IT-BPM sector is one of the largest employers in India and with over 800,000 women employed across levels and has been driving the agenda of gender diversity across large and small companies. NASSCOM along with leading BPM players highlighted the various best-practices and support systems that are in place to ensure this. Announcing the measures, Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM said, “The contribution of women to the growth of our industry has been immense and it is our constant endeavor to provide a safe and secure working environment for all our employees. I must compliment the courage and commitment of our women employees that despite the heightened security concerns, we did not see any decline in attendance, productivity and applicants to jobs in this industry”. He further added, “The industry follows robust practices and has further enhanced its awareness programs for employees to make them aware of these practices. The NASSCOM Best Practices compendium on women security being released today showcases the comprehensive practices adopted by the industry that can be adopted by other industry sectors.” Vikram Talwar, Chairman, NASSCOM BPM Forum said, “It is important to reiterate that it is the fundamental right of every woman to work and it is the responsibility of the entire ecosystem to ensure that there is a conducive environment created for the same. It is time for all the stakeholders – Industry, Organizations, Governments and law enforcement agencies to work towards this. The industry will continue to enhance and strengthen its own initiatives; however it cannot take over the role of the government and enforcement officials”. Further, to enhance the level of awareness on safety and security, NASSCOM announced February as the Women Safety Month in the NCR region, wherein industry and NASSCOM will organize a series of events and activities to educate engage and empower its workforce. Over 50 different activities will be organized across companies in the region. NASSCOM also announced the AppFame contest, wherein corporate, developers and students will be encouraged to build technology applications for women safety. The shortlisted applications will be showcased for adoption to NASSCOM members and other stakeholders. Read More Read More ...
Infosys launches AssistEdge – an integrated cross-channel product for contact centers According to various industry reports, customers say that having to repeat their problems as their query is passed across multiple agents, is the most frustrating aspect of dealing with contact centers. This is further magnified when switching across traditional and new media channels. Using an innovative context-passing capability, AssistEdge integrates the customer history from various channels and presents it to a call center agent within a single window dashboard. This distinct capability enables faster query resolution and helps companies significantly reduce average call handling time. The product’s distinctive context-passing capability, patented self-care technology and intuitive dashboard helps enhance customer experience and boost agent productivity, both of which are persistent challenges for the call center industry. AssistEdge empowers customers to resolve issues by themselves through a powerful self-care engine. Equipped with interactive text, visual and video troubleshooting mechanisms, it also offers recommendations from relevant social forums and communities for peer-to-peer assistance. This helps significantly reduce contact center call volumes. Sanjay Purohit, Senior Vice President and Global Head – Products, Platforms and Solutions for Infosys, unveiled the product at the 8th Annual IQPC Call Center Summit 2013 in Orlando, Florida. Purohit said, “Customers not only expect quick service but also want companies to know them intimately. Customer service experience management is also gaining significant importance with the increasing influence of new media. With our unique context passing capability and patented self-care technology we are enabling companies to bring an integrated, cross-channel and personalized experience to their customers. The launch of AssistEdge further accelerates our strategy to bring innovative products that help our clients transform their businesses for tomorrow.” AssistEdge incorporates an intelligent routing algorithm which analyzes and directs queries requiring expert assistance, in real-time, to the right expert based on parameters such as skill, geography, priority, and workload. This aids faster call resolution, along with a better understanding of customer’s interaction history and social preferences, creating opportunities for greater cross-sell and up-sell. Infosys claims that early deployment at a Fortune 500 company has delivered faster query resolution reducing average call handling time by up to 50 percent, reduced contact center call volumes by as much as 25 per cent, estimated annual savings of over 25 percent and delivered a payback in less than three months. AssistEdge is available both on-premise and on a hosted private cloud. In the case of Openreach, a BT Group Company, using AssistEdge has shown a quantum jump in advisor productivity and seamless experience for customers across channels. Colin Buchanan, Director – Service Management Business Operations and Transformation, Openreach said, "We're always looking for ways to improve service for our customers by simplifying the systems that our people use. Advisers have to access multiple systems using different navigation processes - all in the course of one job. Infosys AssistEdge helped us simplify the work by delivering a single interface for our people and making it easier for our advisors to navigate the systems. Our advisors are now able to complete calls quicker with fewer transfers. The deployment of the new product has helped us improve the experience for customers and users and was achieved in a very short period of time". Read More Read More ...
Attitude towards customers does matter for Social Media success Not all, but majority of Twitter and Facebook accounts of big brands have more number of fake followers than real followers. Most brand conversations that happen in social media sphere too are messages sent out by micro-blogging robots, created on the behest of some digital service agencies or even internal corporate communication departments that are hard pressed to show results on social media investment. However, alongside, we also hear of amazing success stories of how brands are able to build a true fans and crowd source different types of business value: from market reach to product innovation. So, what makes or breaks business in the social sphere? Organizations can spend on social media listening products or hire social media experts, but it requires a real change in the attitude of a business towards how it treats its customers and other external stakeholders. When we analyse what brands are doing using social media, we can rate them to be at four different stages of maturity: baby steps, firm feet, mainstream, and torchbearer. Companies that take baby steps in social media are those that are setting up accounts in a few social media networking sites just because it looks nice. Mostly a marketing or corporate communication staff will occasionally put the company’s TV commercial or print newspaper ad or worse, update the Facebook page status congratulating Indian cricket team’s win over Pakistan. Companies at the next stage, may find social media gaining a firm-feet internally. These companies involve more business functions (not just marketing or corp com) in their social media activity, invest in social media listening, promptly respond to queries/complaints, create and post content adhering to clearly laid out guidelines, and so on. Companies at mainstream stage will have an exclusive c-level position - their titles and mandates may differ: chief innovation officer or chief collaboration officer, or a senior executive getting their hands dirty with social media campaigns, idea contests, and developer challenges as a way of enlisting the participation of customers and other external stakeholders in the core value creation process. And, torchbearers are those firms that consider social collaboration a core competency. These are companies that make not only their product development life cycle but also business life cycle open for external participation. And the attitude is the underlying factor that helps business mature in their social media adoption. In the industrialized era when corporates focused on mass scale production, the customers were treated as some demographic numbers. However, we are not in industrialized era any more. With computers came automation, and Internet made business truly digital. We are witnessing disruptive business models emerging across sectors that find do-it-yourself - or treating customers as niche or creative people - very attractive and feasible. Threadless.com in t-shirts, and Local Motors in cars are examples of companies who are in the torch bearer stage of social business or co-creation. And it is difficult to find websites of consumer product companies not having online product configurators to enable customers customize products before adding them to shopping cart. The social media initiative and investment made by companies could be small. All a company wants to use Facebook or Twitter is for creating a positive brand image or reaching its brand image to new markets. Maybe that is the priority number one. However, the initiatives should be guided by a co-creation or democratization road map. In other words, realizing the power of people as co-creators, can automatically lead organizations to realize the power of social media/technology platform for external collaboration. In a way, social media helps you make society - external stakeholders - a part of your business as much as your internal stakeholders are, by giving them opportunities to contribute ideas and influence your business, the way your internal stakeholders do. Say no to social media, only if you are very sure that your business does not want any outside ideas. G Sankaranarayanan, is the Managing Partner of Younomy, a co-creation consulting firm, based out of Chennai. Read More Read More ...
5 free smartphone apps that can be used in emergency situations for women Ever since the shocking Delhi-rape incident stunned the nation, there has been wide spread concern on how safety can be ensured for women. While technology can never be the finite answer, here is a list of smartphone apps that can be used in distress situations: Nirbhaya
Oracle eyes huge growth from ‘democratization of BI’ As competition intensifies, business analytics has become extremely important for organizations to gain insights from the massive amount of information being generated. With the need for faster decision making, organizations can no longer afford to restrict access to BI or analytics tools within the top management. Accordingly, many organizations are increasingly providing access of their BI tools to a broader audience, by making it easier for employees to access information via user friendly interfaces. “We see a big trend of democratization of BI. While earlier, usage of BI tools was restricted to the top management, today, we see usage percolating down to users,” says Vikash Mehrotra, Director EPM/BI, Oracle India
Facebook Open Compute project shapes Big Data hardware Facebook and the Open Compute Project (OCP) announced Wednesday that they've made huge strides toward the goal of setting standards for the most efficient server, storage and data center hardware available for scalable computing. Facebook launched OCP 18 months ago hoping to crowdsource the problem of creating better hardware for high-scale computing. From its start with one member, Facebook, and 200 participants, the group now has more than 50 member companies and saw more than 2,000 participants attend this week's Open Compute Platform Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. OCP says its standards promise to deliver hardware that is 24 percent more energy efficient and 38 percent more cost efficient, on average, than so-called commodity hardware. The group is working on specs for storage, motherboard and server design, racks, interoperability, hardware management, and data center design. "We know what we need and we see the current and future challenges that the deluge of data, analytics, compute power and these massively scaled data centers are bringing forward," said Frank Frankovsky, VP of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook and chairman of OCP's Open Compute Foundation, which is modeled after the Apache Software Foundation. Hardware vendors have also joined OCP and are designing hardware to its specs. AMD and Intel announced in May collaborative work with OCP members Fidelity and Goldman Sachs to develop new boards to suit their financial processing workloads, and both chip makers presented finished products at this week's event. Intel has contributed specs to OCP for Silicon Photonic interconnect technologies that already surpass 100 gigabits per second -- nearly twice the speed of the fastest interconnect technologies currently available. Presenting on the technology, Intel CTO Justin Rattner said the products will soon be commercially available from Intel and would solve data I/O constraints both inside servers and in connecting servers within racks and racks within data centers. "It has been a decade-long effort to create the technology, and it has enormous potential due to its combination of speed, low power consumption and low cost," Rattner said. Dell also presented at the event, showing off Intel- and ARM-based OCP-compliant servers that will soon be commercially available. Other manufacturers working on or delivering OCP-compliant hardware and components include Applied Micro, Calxeda, Delta, Emerson and Hyve Solutions. Many of the cost savings in OCP-standard products come down to two design themes: commonality and disaggregation. In an example of commonality, OCP unveiled a "common slot architecture" that will enable ARM and X86 chips to coexist on the same motherboard. The design will give end-user organizations flexibility to test and configure servers for best possible performance and then reconfigure as workloads change without facing proprietary design constraints. The spec is being supported by AMD, Applied Micro, Calxeda and Intel. Disaggregation is about separating and modularizing storage, compute, interconnects, power, cooling and other components so companies can custom configure to their workload requirements. This approach also supports smarter technology refreshes, so companies can swap out and replace quickly evolving components, such as CPUs, while keeping in service slowly evolving components, such as memory and network interface cards. "You might be five generations behind on the processor while 80 percent of the other components of the server are still good," Frankovsky said, noting that monolithic designs don't let you replace dated components such as CPUs. "Smarter technology refreshes not only make sense from a financial perspective; think about how much less IT equipment is going to go into the waste stream." While many OCP members are hyper-scale Internet companies, the point was made Wednesday that the group's efforts will benefit companies with mainstream computing requirements within a few short years. "Hadoop, Hive, Hbase and other new platforms are accelerating the growth of big data adoption, so our big data challenges of today are everyone's big data challenges of tomorrow," said Jay Parikh, Facebook's VP of infrastructure engineering. Read More Read More ...
Persistent Systems acquires PLM specialist, NovaQuest Persistent Systems has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held NovaQuest, a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and search based technology solutions company and a leading Value Added Reseller (VAR) and services provider of Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform and applications. With this acquisition, Persistent Systems enters into a strategic partnership with Dassault Systèmes to sell and offer support, maintenance and deployment services as an authorized VAR for Dassault Systèmes’ in the United States. The acquisition furthers Persistent Systems’ objectives in expanding its PLM practice, strengthening its existing partnership with Dassault Systèmes, and growing its North American footprint. Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, NovaQuest’s team of about 20 seasoned PLM specialists have joined Persistent Systems to expand the Company’s expertise in 3DEXPERIENCE and PLM applications and to support a growing client base across the aerospace, automotive, business services, consumer goods, energy, industrial equipment, life sciences, high tech and government verticals. “Persistent Systems and Dassault Systèmes have developed a strong partnership, and now with the acquisition of NovaQuest, we are further able to expand our relationship and support for Dassault Systèmes applications, as well as grow our PLM business across new industry verticals,” said Hari Haran, President, Persistent Systems Inc. “NovaQuest brings a proven track record of successfully helping companies with knowledge capture and better decision-making and we look forward to continuing to serve and add value to NovaQuest’s customers. We are delighted to have the NovaQuest team of experts join the Company and, as a Dassault Systèmes VAR, we look forward to helping companies increase their adoption and extract the maximum value from their Dassault Systèmes investments.” “Persistent Systems brings significant value to the Dassault Systèmes community and we are pleased to partner with them,” said Bruno Latchague, Executive Vice President of Value Solutions and Managing Director of North America for Dassault Systèmes. “Their deep expertise in product development and technology services, combined with NovaQuest’s knowledge of Dassault Systèmes solutions, will help companies compete more effectively by transforming their innovation processes.” Read More Read More ...
Facebook’s Graph Search – your own personalized private social search engine For a firm that has over a billion users, who share a huge amount of data between themselves and their connections --- Facebook undoubtedly holds a virtual goldmine of information. The real big advantage for Facebook is that this data is private, and cannot be accessed by any other competitor – such as Google. Facebook took a giant step to fully tap the huge potential of this advantage by launching Graph Search – a feature that lets you find out information in a clustered or analytical way. The first version of Graph Search focuses on four main areas -- people, photos, places, and interests. So you can perform simple queries to find people based on things they have shared with you, including their interests and profile info. Some examples are mentioned below: People: “friends who live in my city,” “people from my hometown who like hiking,” “friends of friends who have been to Yosemite National Park,” “software engineers who live in San Francisco and like skiing," "people who like things I like," "people who like tennis and live nearby" Photos: “photos I like,” “photos of my family,” “photos of my friends before 1999,” "photos of my friends taken in New York," “photos of the Eiffel Tower” Places: “restaurants in San Francisco,” “cities visited by my family,” "Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India," “tourist attractions in Italy visited by my friends,” “restaurants in New York liked by chefs," "countries my friends have visited" Interests: “music my friends like,” “movies liked by people who like movies I like,” "languages my friends speak," “strategy games played by friends of my friends,” "movies liked by people who are film directors," "books read by CEOs" In other words, you can use simple English phrases to find out relevant information in your community. As always, your privacy choices determine what is searchable. Facebook has said that this application has been built with privacy in mind, and it respects the privacy and audience of each piece of content on Facebook. Facebook has also clarified that Graph Search and web search are different. Web search is designed to take a set of keywords (for example: “hip hop”) and provide the best possible results that match those keywords. With Graph Search you combine phrases (for example: "my friends in New York who like Jay-Z") to get that set of people, places, photos or other content that's been shared on Facebook. Graph Search is only available in English and you can search for only a subset of content on Facebook Graph Search is now in beta. To access Graph Search, please visit: www.facebook.com/graphsearch to get on to the waiting list Read More Read More ...
The opportunities and challenges of open standards We see today’s IT ecosystem being natively scrambled with heterogeneous components running the show. Gone are the days wherein the show was run by a single unilateral technology/solution. While the “Closed Standards” ecosystem through standardizations and compliances are also getting better and better year by year, we still struggle to manage such varied environments with several technology OEMs and several variants of similar solutions. For a long period of time, established OEMs have been thriving to sustain their offerings through structured standardization and focused technology baselines. Products or solutions having “Open standards” on the other hand have also been able to deliver profound most of the benefits that products having “Closed Standards” can offer. Let us now look at the challenges of solutions or products which adopt ‘Open Standards’. Challenges Open Standards are questioned every time to prove their mere reason of existence via a reference case or a success story. That’s where it becomes more challenging to justify past records which has relatively small tenure. While Open Standards have been around since more than a decade, we still see good amount of lack of endorsements. It hence becomes more difficult to sell them or get their buy-in as compared to the world of Closed Standards. Basic blocks come as a part of pre-defined specifications and are free to tweak. This opens up an altogether a different paradigm with several of variedness although originating from the same basic block. While it offers wide range of flexibility for “tweaking for right purpose”, it also poses a greater threat when this boon is not utilized in the right sense. This segment is yet not that mature although lots of blogs and web consortiums are doing a number of substantial activities to promote open standards. The absence of a uniform standardization body across the horizontal plan that covers all IT components make it more difficult for ‘open standards’ vendors to justify their acclaims as against the “right-set-world” of established ones. Open Standards does not mean they are not governed; in fact the smaller the subset, the better is the content adhered to set standards. However, the next level of customization that is open to all also needs a better governance model with set right directions and will definitely prove boon to the customer community. Clearly not a uniform body is seen around although several best practices are being followed under such scenarios, thanks to the widespread world of the Internet. After the initial stage, which may be termed as “basic blocks” – the rest depends on the mercy of the cook. It is also important to remember that too many cooks always spoil the final outcome. Several success stories from one basic block – results into more and more varied demarcations between the end products and the way it is being deployed and utilized. This segment is huge in terms of its bandwidth and life span since there are constant innovations and customizations. A calculated tap and check will result into a highly efficient and effective outcome. Different flavors of success points make it more difficult to map with business requirements and at times even more difficult when solution architects thrive to knit solutions based on these characteristics of Open Standards and commodity architectures. Business solutions can be mapped after tweaking and customizing the basic blocks. This demands a vision of envisaging and not every customer understands and grasps this. A foresight of To-Be state will prove beneficial for both the requestor and fulfiller. Unaccounted success-story poses biggest challenges for such standards since the absence of the mere creator limits itself to the first few basic blocks. Further innovations are created by several intermediaries. This segment of intermediaries is not much organized as yet and hence it accounts to lesser success stories being registered yet in the world of mighty OEMs. Hence, there is need of a focused effort which can be further accelerated through recognitions. While this does not mean that there is complete lack of such platforms – this is definitely far below and far from the “Closed Standards” group. Opportunities Solutions based on ‘Open Standards’ are beneficial as they offer customizations to end clients. Specifics are touched upon through this channel. Needless to mention, the results are far superior as compared to generalized packages. Since now the customer community has become smarter enough to even step in the developers shoe at times, Open Standards are perfect for several business requirements. In recent times, even vendors who propagate ‘Closed Standards’ are opening their products free for customization. The recent ‘Microsoft Windows 8’ release is one of the best examples wherein developers are given a freehand to develop and integrate packages that can integrate seamlessly with Windows 8. Such capabilities also exist in the ‘Open Standards’ world. However, adequate marketing needs to be done to the customer community. IT has now been the core enabler behind several business success stories and this has raised the expectation bar of IT solutions. More and more specifics and customizations are being demanded by customers and today, “Open Standards” equally offer the same features as those of ‘Closed Standards’ vendors. Innovation does not stop once. Open Standards and Commodity Architectures bear this mantra indigenously. Besides better empowerment to the customer community, such solutions can be better tweaked and hence, better is the outcome. In the long run, this opens up a much larger world of ‘create your own IT Ecosystems’. - The author is Project Manager - Enterprise Architecture at CTO Office, Essar Group Read More Read More ...
Maruti Suzuki partners with Hughes Communications to provide “live” training across distribution chain Hughes Communications India, Ltd (HCIL), a subsidiary of Hughes Network Systems, LLC (Hughes), today announced that it is providing Maruti Suzuki, Ltd with a digital training academy incorporating satellite broadband technology, to provide “live” training across their distribution chain including company factories and offices, as well as key dealer outlets. Hughes will provide the studio integration at the Maruti Training Academy, classroom integration at the regional training offices, and set up the interactive delivery platform through a high-powered Ku- band satellite network. The training sessions will be conducted from a centralised studio at Maruti Suzuki’s Gurgaon plant to over 30 locations across India. Training programmes will include technical, commercial, HR, and product module sessions. Training sessions will be offered through the Hughes Interactive Onsite Learning (IOL) platform which seamlessly integrates the strengths and advantages of the traditional method of education with the latest in technology. Using a very powerful interface, the platform is easy to use, high quality, and integrates solutions that are usable across heterogeneous networks. The platform allows Maruti’s trainers to have high quality, interactive, real-time and two-way engagement with dispersed participants across the most remote locations individually or simultaneously. At the launch of the Maruti Suzuki Training Academy, S. Y. Siddiqui, chief operating officer, Maruti Suzuki, said “The idea of the Maruti Suzuki Training Academy stems from the need to have skilled manpower in all aspects of our growing business. While colleagues within Maruti Suzuki will benefit from this academy, this facility is expected to bring value to the entire value chain of our operations. This academy will meet the need for appropriate training for the existing employees and will specifically orient new employees to the contemporary manufacturing culture.” “We were looking for technology which is stable, proven, and scalable. We are happy to partner with HCIL for such a critical project”, said Rajesh Uppal, executive director of IT and CIO at Maruti Suzuki. Partho Bannerjee, president and managing director of HCIL, commented, “We’re looking forward to a long and successful partnership with Maruti Suzuki. We’re now seeing many companies with large branch networks take advantage of the Hughes satellite broadband solution to create a robust training infrastructure that spans the entire distribution ecosystem from employees to partners.” The Hughes Interactive Onsite Learning platform provides breakthrough solutions for employee- friendly corporates like Maruti for learning and development across even the most remote locations since physical classroom training and residential courses are becoming difficult to manage, especially when people are geographically dispersed. Read More Read More ...
TCS delivers yet another robust performance in Q3 In Q3, TCS reported operating income at Rs 4,381 crore; a growth of 13.4 percent y-o-y and 4.8 percent q-o-q. The firm reported an operating margin at 27.3 percent, an expansion of 51 bps. TCS had a gross addition of 17,145 Employees (Net addition: 9,561). Attrition in IT Services fell to 9.8 percent; overall attrition including BPO was at 11.2 percent. Utilization rate was at 81.7 percent (excluding trainees) Commenting on the Q3 performance, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, N Chandrasekaran said: “We have had an excellent quarter of well rounded performance and have driven a higher quality of revenue and increased profitability through focus on productivity and innovation. We had good revenue growth, balanced across service-lines, industries and geographies; our agile, customer-centric organization is delivering an increasing number of larger and deeper client relationships.” He added: “We believe that clients are going to invest in making their operations ‘digital-ready’ in 2013 and drive business growth. TCS is well positioned to help our clients in this journey.” S. Mahalingam, Chief Financial Officer and Executive Director, said: “The overall performance has been in line with what we had outlined at the beginning of the year. Our superior execution in this seasonally weak quarter has delivered productivity gains and an expanded operating margin.” He added: “Our business model of delivering growth with the desired profitability requires us to invest in the front-end and in new capabilities and we will continue to make those investments.” Growth in Q3 was broad-based. Among mature markets, USA and UK led the growth story. Amongst growth markets, Latin America showed double digit growth sequentially, followed by India. Amongst industries, growth was led by Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), Energy & Utilities, Manufacturing & Retail & Distribution. In terms of services, TCS’ full services capabilities continue to be leveraged by customers with newer service lines like Enterprise Solutions, Infrastructure Services and Global Consulting driving growth. Asset Leveraged Solutions and Engineering and Industrial Services also showed higher growth. As of December 31, 2012, the company has applied for 1088 patents including 71 applied for during the quarter. Till date, the company has been granted 76 patents. Read More Read More ...
Infosys beats analyst expectations as revenues grow 5.7 percent on a QoQ basis Infosys today surprised analyst expectations by posting encouraging numbers. Revenues were Rs 10,424 crore for the quarter ended December 31, 2012; QoQ growth was 5.7 percent YoY growth was 12.1 percent. Revenues excluding Lodestone were Rs 10,210 crore; QoQ growth was 3.6 percent YoY growth was 9.8 percent Net profit after tax was Rs 2,369 crore for the quarter ended December 31, 2012, which remained unchanged compared to the quarter ended September 30, 2012. Earnings per share (EPS) was Rs 41.47 for the quarter ended December 31, 2012 against Rs 41.46 for the quarter ended September 30, 2012. The company won 8 large outsourcing deals amounting to USD 731 million of total contract value. In totality, the firm had 14 new wins for Infosys’ products and platforms. Infosys and its subsidiaries added 53 clients during the quarter. Infosys and its subsidiaries witnessed gross addition of 7,499 employees (net addition of 977) for the quarter by Infosys and its subsidiaries. As on December 31, 2012, Infosys and its subsidiaries had 1,55,629 employees. “We have done well in this quarter despite an uncertain environment,” said S. D. Shibulal, CEO and Managing Director. “We continue to gain confidence from a strong pipeline of large deals. However, the broader economic environment remains difficult. Even so, we remain cautiously optimistic about the January-March quarter”, he added. “We were able to maintain our margins through efficiency improvements despite increased operating expenses. We remain focused on making the right investments for profitable and sustainable growth in the longer term", said Rajiv Bansal, Chief Financial Officer. During the quarter, Infosys also completed the acquisition of Lodestone Holding AG, a leading management consultancy based in Switzerland. Read More Read More ...
LinkedIn reaches 200 million members worldwide LinkedIn has added more than 13 million members since its last announcement on November 1, 2012. Since reaching 100 million members in March 2011, LinkedIn has added 13 new languages, making the site available in 19 languages. Today, LinkedIn counts more than 160 million unique monthly visitors and is the 23rd most visited Web property in the world. Currently, more than 64 percent of LinkedIn members are located outside the United States. In a blog post (blog.linkedin.com) about the milestone, LinkedIn’s SVP of product & user experience, Deep Nishar, reflects on how the professional network has grown to 200 million members in over 200 countries and territories, and plans for continued growth in the future. Nishar gives the examples of individuals who have used LinkedIn appropriately to grow professionally. Says he, “Take for example, Akshay Chaturvedi from New Delhi, India who was able to use LinkedIn as a launch pad for his career. Not only was he able to lead an international project at AIESEC for a project on AIDS right out of university, with the help of LinkedIn, he was recruited by KPMG and continues to receive career guidance from his LinkedIn network. Then there’s Robyn Shulman who stepped out of her comfort zone from teacher to now a published writer and leader of a ESL Bilingual Educators group on LinkedIn. She has rediscovered former talents and changed her life through LinkedIn. One of my favorite stories comes from Leonardo Brant from Brazil who founded Cemec, an organization to help Brazilian professionals and entrepreneurs think creatively about their business challenges.” With 18 million members, India is counted as one of the five countries with the most number of LinkedIn members. Read More Read More ...
Can your smartphone be used as a Big Data analytics tool? Many data analytics providers, including RetailNext, LightHaus, and Immersive Labs use in-store cameras to track and record the activities of retail shoppers. But Silicon Valley startup Euclid has an alternative solution for data gathering: the smartphone you carry everywhere you go. Calling its platform "Google Analytics for the physical world," Euclid's software can detect if a customer in or near a physical store has a smartphone with Wi-Fi enabled. If so, Euclid can then monitor the person's movements inside the store and in front of it. The company last week announced a new version of its analytics tool, Euclid Zero, which requires no dedicated sensors or complex in-store setup, according to John Fu, Euclid's director of marketing. "What we had been doing previously -- and we still do for some customers -- is install a sensor in the store. It's like a little Wi-Fi access point, basically. It's not providing Internet access, it's just reporting these broadcasts from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones," Fu told InformationWeek in a phone interview. But with Euclid Zero, IT managers can turn on the monitoring feature in their Wi-Fi management consoles. The new approach makes sense for retailers, who can leverage their existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to collect data about customer behavior, Fu said. Brick-and-mortar stores often already have Wi-Fi in place for their customers, employees and point-of-sale systems. "There's a ton of data out there already, whether it's from register receipts, website traffic, or what have you," said Fu. "They've got tons of numbers, but not a lot of time." Euclid's analytics platform is designed to help retailers answer specific questions about what their customers want. It provides a variety of metrics, such as a store's "engagement rate," as well as tools to help retailers measure the effectiveness of specific sales, circulars and other marketing campaigns. "A convenience store transaction might take five minutes. In that case, a visit of five minutes or longer could definitely be an engaged customer," said Fu. "But in the case of a jewelry store, you're looking at a much longer sales process. For that, someone who stays for, say, twenty minutes up to an hour, that's considered engaged." Retailers can use Euclid's web-based dashboard to set appropriate parameters for their businesses. A jewelry store manager, for instance, could configure Euclid to count any shopper who stays in the store longer than 20 minutes as an "engaged" customer. The platform looks at several key metrics, including: 1) Are their people outside the store? 2) Do they come in? 3) Once they're in the store, how long do they stay? 4) Do they return for a visit? 5) How frequently do they visit? So what's the price? "Our standard pricing is based on how many sensors you have in the store," said Fu. "Typically for a small retail location, like a mall shop, you probably only need one sensor, one axis point. So our standard rate for that is USD 200 a month." As with camera-based analytics solutions, Euclid's Wi-Fi solution is bound to raise privacy concerns, particularly as smartphone owners become unwitting participants in a store's analytics infrastructure. But Fu sees Euclid's smartphone approach as the less troublesome option. "Both solutions have privacy implications, obviously. But in terms of how comfortable people feel about it, once you get into taking people's pictures, there's a certain level of discomfort that people get," said Fu. Euclid isn't the only analytics vendor enlisting shoppers' smartphones to collect customer data. Nearbuy Systems, for instance, offers a similar solution. "One of ways we're trying to differentiate from other services is by helping retailers answer questions, not just give them more data," said Fu. Read More Read More ...
Healthcare portal aims to arrest rising trend of corporate health issues Last year, a survey of ASSOCHAM, found out that due to demanding schedules, high stress and lack of physical activity, close to 72 percent of corporate employees were more prone to cardiovascular diseases. What was also alarming was the fact that around 55 per cent of the survey respondents fell under the age bracket of 20-29 years, followed by 30-39 years (26 per cent). Clearly, these trends point out to an unhealthy trend, whose root cause, unless identified can lead to disastrous issues for not only individuals, but corporates, as well. Healthcare portal, HealthcareMagic, is seeking to address this core issue, with its online platform that connects healthcare professionals (GPs, specialists, dietitians, counselors etc) to the end users online who have health related questions. For example, if an online user wants to ask a cardiology related question, a cardiologist will answer to his questions for a small fee within a couple of hours.
- Online Retail – where a user searches for a health condition online and reaches HealthcareMagic.com and pays through his credit card to ask questions.
- Enterprise (Corporate) – HealthcareMagic has signed up with over 54 clients in India to provide services to its employees and dependants
- Insurance Companies – HealthcareMagic services are bundled with health insurance policies and sold along with the policy. Two of the largest private health insurance companies in India are working with the company.
- Better Health Awareness: Organizations battling increased Insurance claims have started off with more health awareness towards the long-term goal of structured health interventions for their employees. Structured health intervention means better healthcare decisions and hence less chance of claims in the long term
- Better Access: Employees and dependents enjoy huge advantage when compared to traditional healthcare service delivery models. This is simply because they don’t have to wait and they get access to some of the most experienced professionals right from the comfort of home or office. They enjoy the advantage of our health advocates (customer care) who have vast experience in the way health problems need to be approached and managed
- Better Results: Instead of being just a cost, organizations are able to see return on investments in terms of employee health engagement and in terms of clear-cut experience sharing through our platform
Why you will need a Big Data ethics expert Big data is a big deal for companies in 2013. The prospect of outdistancing your competition by leveraging your company's data with huge data sources such as NASA, the government, video and demographic services is compelling. But there's evidence that technology is advancing faster than companies and governments can manage it. Along with big data technology developers, your company should be thinking about adding a "big data ethicist." The need for big data technologists is well covered in the media. At the annual Gartner IT Symposium, I reported on a looming gap between big data needs and technologists to fill those needs: "The Gartner analysts predicted that by 2015, 4.4 million IT jobs globally will be created to support big data, with 1.9 million of those jobs in the United States. That employment projection carries further weight when, as the Gartner analysts pointed out, each of those jobs will create employment for three more people outside of IT. "However, while the jobs will be created, there is no assurance that there will be employees to fill those positions. Sondergaard provided the dour prediction that only one-third of the jobs will be filled due to a lack of skilled big data applicants. One of the biggest tasks for CIOs is to rethink how to hire and train a workforce able to meet this demand for big data talent." As InformationWeek executive editor Doug Henschen explained in an article on the big data talent war, technology executives need to engage a seven-point hiring and training plan for big data professionals. So the need for technology talent in the big data segment is clear. But recent tragic events also show how big data extends far beyond a company's technology or marketing departments. Recently, the Journal News, a newspaper based in White Plains New York, touched off a furor when it published a Google map showing the location for 44,000 registered handgun owners in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties in New York State. The registration information obtained under the Federal Freedom of Information Act is a vivid example of, as the Christian Science Monitor reported, the disputes that can arise when constitutional rights -- in this case, the First and Second Amendments -- clash. The tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School was the catalyst for the Journal News' decision to publish the gun owner information. The ease with which the paper published information obtained from the Freedom of Information Act and Google Maps shows how data is becoming more accessible in the big data era. While Putnam County officials have so far resisted providing the newspaper with gun ownership information, it appears they are unlikely to block access going forward. Marc Parrish continues the discussion of big data's role in Second Amendment rights in The Atlantic. In his article he states, "Big data might have stopped the massacres in Newtown, Aurora, and Oak Creek. But it didn't, because there is no national database of gun owners, and no national record-keeping of firearm and ammunition purchases. Most states don't even require a license to buy or keep a gun. "That's a tragedy, because combining simple math and the power of crowds could give us the tools we need to red flag potential killers even without new restrictions on the guns anyone can buy. Privacy advocates may hate the idea, but an open national database of ammunition and gun purchases may be what America needs if we're ever going to get our mass shooting problem under control." While it is beyond the editorial mission of business publications like this one to take a side on the Second Amendment controversy, one technology-related aspect of Parrish's article is undeniably correct: The task of developing a database of 300 million guns and their owners is now so trivial it hardly falls into the big data category. The looming issue in big data isn't technology but the decisions associated with how, when and if results should be provided. Widespread access to public information, interfaces that make it easy to combine big data sources, and the ability to publish information to the Internet is going to yield some difficult decisions for the big data community. And those decisions are only going to become more intense. A substantial amount of data by government organizations, for example, is still locked up in paper format. However, companies such as Captricity have developed innovative ways to turn massive amounts of paper-based data into digital form. Companies such as Panjiva are using big data and business intelligence to meld buyer and seller data in multiple public and private databases to create a unique global commerce engine. In the enthusiasm around big data, there has been little discussion about what that data might uncover. Privacy issues will surface as data analytics becomes able to reveal identities by combining what was previously considered anonymous data with location and purchasing information. Alistair Croll, at O'Reilly Media, put it succinctly in an article entitled "Big Data Is Our Generation's Civil Rights Issue, and We Don't Know It": "Time for you to plan for not just how your big data strategy will be implemented, but what are the implications of the data your company will be creating and publishing." Read More Read More ...
Cloud in 2013: From hype to hyper growth Like earlier transformative phases in IT – the adoption of personal computing in the 1980s, client/server in the 1990s and the uptake of SaaS earlier this century – cloud has reached a similar tipping point that will create unprecedented opportunities for both new entrants and established vendors. For many industry soothsayers, 2012 was going to be the year cloud went mainstream. Are we there yet? With IDC reporting that global spending on public IT cloud services will be more than USD 40 billion this year with a compound annual growth rate of more than 25 percent, it looks like 2013 will be the year that cloud pays off for many vendors and customers. This represents a significant shift, from the “testing/development” stage that characterized a large share of enterprise cloud activity in 2012, towards a much broader adoption and deployment of cloud solutions. The evolution and rapid industrialization of cloud is transforming nearly every facet of information and communications technology. Following are five key trends we see shaping the cloud landscape in 2013: 1. Increased adoption of applications as a service impacts capital expense While not a zero sum game, we are already seeing the inroads cloud is making against capital expense allocated to traditional IT infrastructure. Businesses are seriously considering buying services on-demand rather than purchasing physical hardware (e.g. servers, racks, network switches, PCs ), software licenses and maintenance contracts. This shift is not only limited to public clouds, but also to private clouds, where more and more businesses are moving towards paying for X-as-a-service type solutions on-demand within their own data center or that of a provider. Part of this can be summarized as a trend towards a business model that favors OPEX rather than CAPEX. Conversely, cloud service providers are becoming much larger customers of hardware and software vendors. 2. The rise of specialist cloud consultants As the money shifts to cloud, we are witnessing an entire new industry of specialist cloud consultants spring up to help businesses build and use cloud architecture. Joining the ranks of smaller independent niche consultants and hardware vendors with professional service arms, the traditional big consulting firms are all working to assemble the talent and skill sets needed to beef up their newly formed cloud consulting practices. At the same time they are shifting resources away from consulting on legacy hardware and applications. It’s no longer about integrating the latest release of an ERP app, instead it’s about which cloud solution works best for which business unit and workload mapping to public/private/hybrid clouds. At the same time, there are increasing opportunities for enterprise IT departments to become internal cloud specialists and play a more strategic role in helping provide their businesses greater agility in leveraging cloud capabilities. 3. Evolution of mobile cloud The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend and the continuing demise of the PC as the dominant computing platform will serve to accelerate the move towards mobile cloud as more businesses become increasingly mobile and shift IT assets from their own data centers to the cloud. In this environment, security becomes more important than ever. As a result, enterprise IT will be entrusted with setting clear policies that provide security for accessing cloud applications on mobile devices and doing so without squashing the innovation enabled by cloud. 4. Cloud clarity will start to emerge in 2013 Today, there still exists a great deal of confusion over the conflicting approaches to deploying cloud by various vendors and service providers and it’s not clear who businesses should turn to. This fragmentation should begin to dissipate later in 2013 and beyond as the marketplace coalesces around standards and clear winners emerge. According to Gartner, by 2015, low-cost cloud services will cannibalize up to 15 percent of top outsourcing players' revenue, and more than 20 percent of large IT outsourcers not investing enough in industrialization and value-added services will disappear through mergers and acquisitions. In the meantime, open source alliances will make a play against the traditional vendors. Open source will continue to gain relevance, and we’ll see more commercialized services based on open source platforms coming to market. 5. Cloud standards slowly emerge For cloud to truly go mainstream it needs to evolve from a vendor-by-vendor solution, as it is today, to a utility platform differentiated by reliability, scalability and standardization. Marketplace standards are driven by vendors, standards groups and market forces. APIs will have to be standardized, and interoperability and federated cloud formations will need to happen – both in a geographic sense and within industry verticals. Following the evolutionary trajectory of equally transformative periods in IT history, cloud has shifted from hype to hyper growth and its impact is not just changing IT delivery models but overall business models as well, unleashing innovations that have the force to reorder not only the IT industry but also nearly every industry. Steve Caniano is VP, Hosting, Managed Applications and Cloud Solutions, AT&T Business Solutions Read More Read More ...
Can an Indian startup provide answers to global data center energy woes? In September 2012, the New York Times carried a thought provoking article, which claimed that data centers can waste 90 percent of more of the electricity they pull off the grid. This received a huge amount of backlash from some industry veterans. The same article also estimated that globally data centers consume about 30 billion watts of electricity – which is roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants. Considering the amount of power data centers consume, the time has come for data center owners to seriously take a relook at their power conservation strategies. This is both a huge challenge and a massive opportunity. VigyanLabs, an Indian startup, believes that it has the answers. The company’s pedigree is impressive. VigyanLabs was founded in 2010 by a team of IIT-ians specializing in high-performance computing. With more than 15 patents and a high patent hit ratio, VigyanLabs was recognized by NASSCOM as one of India’s top ten IT product startups of 2012.
The Internet celebrates its 30th birthday What would the world be without the Internet? No Facebook, no Google and no e-mail? What would be the Indian IT industry without the Internet? Exactly 30 years ago, on January 1, 1983, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) switched from using Network Control Protocol to Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol or TCP / IP – the basic foundation or the backbone for the Internet. While the ARPANET network began as a military project in the late 1960s, work on the TCP protocol began in 1973. The protocol was designed to replace the Network Control Protocol and was designed to avoid a single point of failure. In 1973, work on the IPS and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) technology began. The new systems were designed to replace the more vulnerable Network Control Program (NCP) used previously, and made sure the network was not exposed to a single point of failure. By January 1, 1983, the Internet, as we know today was born. If you have some nostalgic experience of using the Internet in the earlier years, please tell us your experiences by sharing your comments in the comments box below: Read More Read More ...
YES BANK ensures hassle-free remittance for the masses For migrant workers working in cities, sending money to their families in hometowns is a cumbersome task. Since a large population of workers does not have KYC documents to open their accounts in cities where they work, they open a bank account in their hometowns. These workers rely on anywhere banking module offered by various banks to deposit cash in their hometown account. As the banks typically open only couple of counters for three-four hours in the morning for this segment, the workers have to stand in long queues, which in turn results in the loss of their daily wages. Considering the pain points of these migrant workers, YES BANK embarked on a mission to offer convenient domestic remittance services to the masses. While interacting with the masses for the project, the bank realized that to be able to participate in remittance service, a bank needs to have a vast expanse of branch and network presence — and its 250 branches will not completely serve the purpose. To resolve this issue, the bank came up with a service model of having convenient Banking Correspondent Agents (BCA) stores. It decided to re-align the available infrastructure of BCA by leveraging the available NEFT technology platform to facilitate the public at large to deposit cash at these BCA outlets. Thus, the bank along with its first BCA partner, Suvidhaa Infoserve, developed an application and tested it for customer friendliness, security penetration and central monitoring. The application was deployed in the market at 40 BCA locations in June 2011. With the help of this program, the users can deposit cash at the bank’s Banking Correspondent outlets and are not required to go to their own bank branches. Also, users do not need to be customers of YES BANK to avail this program. To transfer cash, the sender is first required to register himself and the recipient at the BCA store by providing state, city, bank and branch details. The sender then gets an One Time Pin (OTP) along with details of the beneficiary and has to confirm the details by sharing the OTP with the BCA Store. The request is queued up in the bank’s NEFT cycle and sent to the beneficiary’s bank. In case a transaction fails due to any reason at the beneficiary’s bank, the system initiates an SMS to the sender along with an OTP. The sender can then go to the BCA store, share the OTP and collect the refund; the fee charged to the sender is also refunded. The service is increasingly gaining popularity — starting with 12 senders in the month of June 2011, the base has grown to include 53,000 senders by December 2011. The transactions have also been growing — 400 a week in July to 20,000 a week in December 2011 and there has been similar quantum growth in the value of transactions, increasing from Rs 50,000 a day to Rs 20 million a day. Total value of remittance has been Rs 800 million that generated a fee income of Rs 8 million. Today, the bank has a total of 1,500 active BC agents, with 1.41 lakh sending customers availing this service and 73,700 receiving customers in various banks. The bank also noted 7 percent transactions within the same city, which implies that business users were also using this service. With the current charges of minimum Rs 10 per Rs 1,000 remitted (1 percent approx), the bank has already created crores of rupees income for the program since inception. Keeping an average of 5 transactions of Rs 5,000 per day per BCA Store, through 100,000 stores by end of March 2013, the bank is expecting to achieve daily top-line run rate of Rs 21 million for the program and bottomline of Rs 3.7 million for the bank. The bank sees huge potential in offering the service to retailers and distributors and intends to offer this service across the country under the brand name YES Money. Project Head: Amit Sethi, Senior President & Chief Information Officer Highlights
- Round-the-clock services available at the nearby kirana shop at an affordable fee of 1 percent
- In 10 months of the roll out, the bank has registered 4.19 lakh transactions, and Rs 254.85 crore has been remitted during this period
- 45 percent transactions took place in after-banking hours
Microsoft's big hits and misses of 2012 Microsoft's effort to embrace a computing market in which the PC is taking a back seat to tablets and smartphones has been well documented in this column. Many of Redmond's troubles of late have arisen directly from that market evolution. But don't count the company out just yet -- it had some solid breakthroughs in 2012. There were also several misfires. Here's a look back at Microsoft's biggest hits and misses of the past year. Microsoft's 4 Big Hits 1. Windows 8 Microsoft has taken a lot of heat for Windows 8, and early sales are likely below expectations. Critics complain that the OS, with its Live Tiles interface, is too difficult to learn. But Redmond should be given credit for its bold move to introduce a truly innovative platform that separates Windows 8 devices from the iPad and me-too Android tablets. Granted, Windows 8 could use some tweaking to make it more user friendly, and sales and distribution have been anything but smooth. But the software itself is rich, technically impressive (how about those seven-second boot times?), and secure. It should eventually make Microsoft a player in tablets while keeping its PC franchise intact. 2. Yammer Acquisition Microsoft in June bought out business social networking and collaboration specialist Yammer for USD 1.2 billion. On its own it would have been a smart deal, as biz collaboration is one of enterprise software's hottest categories. But the deal makes even more sense given the synergies Microsoft can achieve by adding Yammer to its existing collaboration technologies. Among the products that will benefit from getting bits and pieces of Yammer added in are Dynamics CRM, Skype, Sharepoint and Office 365. 3. Xbox SmartGlass For the past couple of years, Microsoft has dribbled out a host of new products that appeared to have little connection to each other. Windows Phone, Windows 8, Live, Bing, Kinect, Azure and so on. Enter Xbox SmartGlass, a game-changing technology that ties it all together and promises to make Microsoft relevant again in the consumer market. SmartGlass is a collection of apps and embedded technologies that form an ecosystem, one in which digital content can migrate from one platform to the next, be it a phone, tablet, desktop or home theater. In a demo at E3 earlier this year, SmartGlass pulled together the capabilities of Xbox 360, Kinect and Windows 8 tablets to show how it can take gaming to the next level. With Madden NFL 13 running on one screen, a user drew up plays on a Win8 tablet, which the game then executed on an HDTV. Pretty cool stuff. 4. Hardware Entry With the introduction of the Surface tablet this year, Microsoft stole a page from Apple's playbook to become a vendor of integrated systems. It was a smart move. Software margins are declining and hardware is a commodity, but by bundling Microsoft can continue to ensure decent profits. From a technical standpoint, CEO Steve Ballmer said it best at the company's shareholder meeting last month: "What we've said to ourselves now is that there is no boundary between hardware and software that we will let build up as a kind of innovation barrier." Up next? Watch for a Microsoft-branded smartphone. Microsoft's 4 Big Misses 1. Windows 8 Windows 8 is a hit, but it's also a miss? Yep, because right now, Windows 8 is all about potential. But that will be lost if Microsoft doesn't clean up a few things. For starters, the company needs to unify the user experience across Windows 8's dual (and dueling) Metro and desktop interfaces. For example, Internet Explorer 10 in Metro relies on a host of commands and touch gestures that don't function in the desktop version. That's just going to breed user frustration and confusion. Microsoft also needs to give users the option to bypass Metro and boot to the more familiar Windows Explorer desktop if they like. No need to strong-arm users into Metro if that's not what they prefer. 2. Surface RT Similarly, Microsoft's decision to get into hardware should be a hit long term, but its execution in the short term has been poor. By all accounts, Surface is not selling well -- and with good reason. With a starting price of USD 499, it's USD 200 more expensive than Amazon's Kindle Fire HD and priced on par with the new iPad. Microsoft needs to bite the bullet on price to establish Surface in the market. USD 399 would have been a good starting price, and we may yet see that. Microsoft also erred by withholding Surface Pro until after the holidays. Buyers who want a fully functioning Windows 8 tablet in time for Christmas can opt for one from Dell, Acer or a number of other OEMs. That's good for the PC makers, but it doesn't help the Surface franchise. 3. Windows Phone 8 Like Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 is technically impressive. It supports quad-core processors, and features scaled down and more customizable Live Tiles. But unlike Windows 8, it doesn't have a 400-million user installed base of previous-generation software on which to ride. It's out there on its own. As a result, Windows Phone, including Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8, holds a market share less than 3.2percent, according to ComScore. Unless those numbers pick up soon, the Windows Phone experiment will have to be considered a flop. 4. Bing Taste Test In September, Microsoft stood up a website through which users could take a blind test to rank search results from Bing and Google. Microsoft claimed that users, who didn't know which results were from which search engine, preferred Bing almost 60 percent. InformationWeek invited readers to take the test and report back to us. The numbers weren't even close to Microsoft's claim. InformationWeek readers preferred Google's results by a ratio of almost 2 to 1. Sorry Bing. Source: InformationWeek USA Read More Read More ...
Signed malware and Bring your own Application, listed among top threats for 2013 by McAfee In the wake of rising threats, it is important for everyone to be geared with new cyber challenges that would arise in the New Year. McAfee India’s Jagdish Mahapatra shares his top 10 enterprise security predictions 1. Targeted Attacks: 2012 saw an increased growth in targeted attacks that proved successful in disrupting service and fraudulently obtaining significant amounts of intellectual property. We expect Cyber Criminals will continue to use this method and as a result, in 2013, we are likely to see significantly more targeted attacks and targeted malware. This type of attack is more difficult to protect against. Uniform attacks are still out there but as soon as they are identified and a security fix is released they are no longer effective.One disturbing development in this trend across 2012 was that we started to see more targeted attacks that also destroyed evidence of the attack afterwards and we are likely to see this continue. We have seen attacks where 30,000 hard drives were left non-operational after an attack. Dealing with the clean-up distracts the IT administrators who don’t immediately realize they have been hacked. It also adds to the difficulty in ensuring effective incident response as hackers literally attack any hardware on the way out. Protecting against this will be a major challenge – particularly for enterprise and government. 2. Signed malware: Signed malware was prevalent in 2012 and this is likely to continue. Signed malware is present when a hacker obtains a digital certificate from an organization and appends it to malware, allowing the malware to pass through an organization’s operating system. Stuxnet is a high profile example of this threat. There will be a large increase in this type of threat and it will be harder to stop because it appears more legitimate. 3. Big business at risk: Enterprises can be at a higher risk of an attack as there is often a greater attack surface and more ‘visibility gaps’ in their security posture. With targeted attacks on the rise, the motives to target a large enterprise are often greater than a smaller organization. 4. Non-Windows attacks: We suspect non-Windows attacks will continue to increase in 2013. Android devices are now the highest selling mobile devices in the Asia Pacific market and hackers will take advantage of that by developing mobile malware. Consumers aren’t the only ones at risk of mobile threats. Enterprises, particularly those embracing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), are also at risk. Interestingly, the mobile malware growth rate is similar to what we saw for Windows malware some time ago, which shows it is a genuine threat. McAfee’s Q3 Threat Report for 2012 showed mobile malware almost doubled when compared to the previous quarter’s numbers. 5. Ransomware: This will also be prevalent in 2013. Ransomware is operated by encrypting files on a victim’s computer which can only be unlocked by paying the criminals a ‘fine’. It has been a big issue in other countries around the world in the past. 6. Impact of changing regulations: The Indian banking regulator (RBI) has generally been proactive in advising banks on issues relating to security and has acted as an important institution to drive the importance of this matter at the level of Board of Directors. According to the Reserve Bank of India report released in January 2011, the regulator acknowledges that given the increasing reliance of customers on electronic delivery channels to conduct transactions, any security related issues have the potential to undermine public confidence in the use of e-banking channels and lead to reputation risks to the banks. The regulator has institutionalized a whistle-blowing system by means of a quarterly assessment of all banks towards their progress on these guidelines in the AFI (Annual Financial Inspection) cycle 2011-2012. To conform to these guidelines, financial services organizations in India will need to demonstrate compliance with RBI regulatory mandates, which include data protection, event collection and analysis, endpoint controls, and related security measures. 7. Need for incident response: In 2013, I expect organizations will have to review their processes for dealing with a targeted attack. If the organization falls foul from a targeted attack or Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) they will need to adopt a process of incident response and many organizations don’t necessarily have the technologies in place to ensure timely investigation and remediation is possible .As such, solutions providing incident response capabilities will become a security infrastructure priority for many organizations over the next year. 8. Security Process Automation: Interestingly, many organizations’ cyber security function is one of the only IT functions that have not yet leveraged the speed, visibility and comprehensive capabilities provided through automation. With an increasing number, variety and complexity of the threats faced by organizations, many security technologies still require significant hands-on management. We expect that IT managers will have to embrace security automation in order to keep up. 9. Connected Devices: We also anticipate the growth in number and variety of new connected devices will provide additional gateways for hackers to access personal or business networks – these ‘connected devices’ include connected homes and connected cars. While the home or car may not be hacked, they are used as a vehicle to access other networks. 10. Bring Your Own Application (BYOA): With BYOD comes Bring Your Own Applications where many employees are now downloading Apps within the organization. As a result IT Administrators are losing control of what tools and applications are used inside the Enterprise and business users (often lacking in an understanding of the potential security risks these applications can pose) are becoming their own system administrators. There are many examples of Apps that transmit information with no security, Apps that leak sensitive information, through to Apps that are malicious and place the user and the information at risk - Jagdish Mahapatra is Managing Director, McAfee India & SAARC Read More Read More ...
How Big Data could help tame cancer UK cancer scientists say a huge DNA database could help prolong the lives of some patients Read More ...
Kingston to unveil world’s largest capacity USB flash drive at 1 TB The firm’s DataTraveler HyperX Predator 3.0 is the world’s largest-capacity USB 3.0 Flash drive and will boast of transfer speeds up to 240MB/s (read) and 160MB/s (write) Read More ...
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Dell showcases how technology can drive business strategy At INTEROP Mumbai 2012, Sridhar S, Director, Enterprise Solutions, Dell India, shared how CIOs can use emerging technologies to transform their IT functions from being tactical to delivering strategic value Read More ...
Tulip Telecom bags Rs 87.23 crore deal from UIDAI Tulip will provide data center and associated services to UIDAI from Tulip Data City located in Bangalore Read More ...
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EMC powers Tulip Telecom’s on-demand cloud storage and backup services Tulip’s hosted data center will deliver managed backup & storage services using EMC storage technologies, to address the explosion of data in enterprises and the demand for utility-based storage Read More ...
HGST demonstrates industry's first 12Gb/s SAS SSD Doubling Today’s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Speed, 12Gb/s SAS SSDs and HDDs will be the Drives of Choice for Future Generations of High-Performance Enterprise Servers and Storage Solutions Read More ...
Storage trends for 2012: Iomega The year 2012 will see consumers moving from external hard drives to Network Attached Storage (NAS) products with cloud capabilities Read More ...
‘Dell is investing in IP to accelerate adoption of cloud computing' Dell is betting big on cloud computing and investing substantial resources to build a comprehensive portfolio, says Joseph Kremer, President-APJ in an interview Read More ...
How Walmart plans to use Big Data By analyzing the huge volume of data produced every day on social media, Walmart is trying to shape the future for retail Read More ...
'Due to sheer size of our databases, RCOM has been actively involved in Big Data solutions' Alpna J Doshi, CIO, Reliance Communications talks about the enormous growth of data and the solutions the company is using to handle it Read More ...
Iomega announces nationwide storage support services for SMBs The company becomes the first storage vendor to provide a three-tiered support structure in India Read More ...
India leads in cloud storage adoption A survey by IDC sponsored by Hitachi Data Systems reveals that the Indian market is the most mature in terms of the adoption of cloud technologies and has the highest usage levels of converged systems Read More ...
'Predictive analytics can help organizations gain a competitive edge' Jaskiran Bhatia, Country Manager- Information Management Software Group at IBM India/South Asia discusses in detail about the importance of Big Data and predictive analytics in improving an organization’s products, services and customer experience Read More ...
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Capgemini and EMC form global strategic alliance for cloud computing The first offering to be rolled out by the alliance will be Storage-as-a-Service Read More ...
NetApp to create storage infrastructure for BSNL’s cloud services The firm will partner with Sai InfoSystem to power cloud offerings by BSNL Read More ...
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India to see 85 percent growth in scale-out storage systems Gartner says that accurate planning of storage resources is a huge challenge, which is in turn generating increased interest in scale-out systems Read More ...
World’s data more than doubling every two years, says study Global digital data created in 2011 equal to every person in India tweeting 3 tweets per minute for 6,883 years non stop Read More ...
Storage maps the future of digital data The future of storage management must be simple, cost efficient and environmentally friendly Read More ...
Storage demands reduced by 25 percent Evalueserve has also been able to control the number of tape cartridges it was using for day-to-day backup by implementing a progressive incremental methodology for storage Read More ...
IBM is the leader in external disk storage market: IDC report IBM had eight percentage points lead in comparison with its nearest competitor in revenue terms in the external disk storage market in Q1 2011 Read More ...
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Gulf Oil opts for IBM servers Gulf Oil Corporation has selected IBM servers and storage technology to allow their Lubricants division to manage, track, and leverage information and processes more effectively Read More ...
EMC announces 40 new storage products in India A highlight of today’s announcement is EMC’s new simplified unified storage solution for the SMB segment Read More ...
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IBM tops India external disk storage market According to newly released data from IDC, IBM India has emerged as the number one vendor in revenue for Q4 and full year (2010) in the India external disk storage systems Read More ...
Pointers for adopting cloud storage Done right, cloud storage promises to free up your I&O staff from complex and onerous storage management tasks Read More ...
Tackling the data monster The world’s data already exceeds available storage space — and demand for storage capacity will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of over 43 percent in the next three years Read More ...
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EMC sets new records for storage Launches 41 new products for mid and lower tiers Read More ...
Commvault releases IT storage spending survey results A recent survey conducted by CommVault, the data management and storage solutions provider, revealed that managing data growth (i.e., data reduction) will be the top budget priority for 2011 Read More ...
Symantec takes on unstructured data with Data Insight New tools provide visibility and control to utilize stored data more efficiently and strategically Read More ...
NetApp storing the India advantage The India R&D center contributes to 40 percent of NetApp’s advanced design that goes global Read More ...
Virtualization and cloud technologies add complexity to disaster recovery initiatives in India Symantec research reveals gap in downtime expectations versus reality among Indian enterprises Read More ...
IBM wants to maintain storage leadership with Storwize v7000 With this new solution, Big Blue is aggressively targeting the mid sector Read More ...
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Does SSD make sense in the small data center? The small data center with two to three servers may be an ideal match for disk form factor SSDs Read More ...
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Gartner: India Printer Copier and Multifunctional product shipments declined 4.7% in Q3, 2012 Organizations adopted a ‘wait and watch’ approach on their IT spending for peripheral devices Read More ...
Belkin aspires to touch USD 100-million mark in India by 2016 With a market share of 30 percent, Belkin is oscillating between the number one and two slots in the wireless networking space in India Read More ...
Vedanta ropes in IBM to enable strong business growth The company has tied up with IBM to create a robust infrastructure for the resource planning system of its power business Read More ...
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Oracle SPARC T4 server line crosses 100 server mark in four months SPARC T4 servers with Oracle Solaris have emerged as one of the fastest ramping server products in Oracle’s history Read More ...
IBM launches PureSystems – touts expertise, integration as differentiators Big Blue recently announced a new category of "expert integrated systems", which the company claims is the first with built-in expertise based on IBM's decades of experience running IT operations for tens of thousands of clients Read More ...
Server vendors see big potential in Intel Xeon E5 processor Major server providers, like IBM, HP and Dell are announcing products based on Intel Xeon E5 processor Read More ...
IBM tops India’s storage, non-x86 UNIX server market IBM maintained its market leadership of the overall disk storage market in 2011 with 28.3 percent market share Read More ...
Intel’s Xeon E5 gets thumbs up from customers At the formal launch of Xeon E5, the companies already using the product shared their experiences about it. Intel claims that the product will increase the performance by up to 80 percent and will reduce the latency by up to 30 percent compared to its previous generation processor Read More ...
HCL Infosystems wins Rs 278 crore order from ELCOT The firm will provide 2 lakh units of HCL ME Laptops to Government and state aided schools and colleges across Tamil Nadu Read More ...
Manikchand group slashes power utilization by 60 percent Conglomerate saves up to 30 percent in IT costs after implementing IBM BladeCenter solution Read More ...
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Building a leadership culture Neelam Dhawan, Managing Director, HP India, shares unique insights on how organizations can identify and nurture successful leaders and managers early on Read More ...
Apple CEO Steve Jobs: The man, the method and classic jobs moments Watch these classic Jobs videos -- performance and candid scenes. Steve Jobs jokes, chides and waxes eloquent discusses his thoughts on his childhood, his love of design, early work with Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, views on Microsoft, Xerox PARC, innovation and, most poignantly, how to live life with an acute awareness of inevitable death Read More ...
IBM reveals chip that acts like human brain IBM is testing a computer chip modeled on human neural processing, as it tries to create silicon better suited to real-world, multi-source data processing at low power Read More ...
D-Link India appoints Tushar Sighat as CEO Sighat has been earlier associated with D-Link India for over 12 years and was also a member of the founding team Read More ...
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HP gears up to tap managed print services market in India This is HP’s first-of-its-kind Enterprise Solutions Center in India to showcase innovation Read More ...
‘Next-gen services is the new focus for Dell’ India plays a pivotal role in Dell’s global services strategy. In fact Dell has 23,000 Indian employees (a quarter of its workforce) servicing global customers from delivery centers in India. Suresh Vaswani, EVP Dell Services and chairman of Dell India tells InformationWeek about his goal to build next generation service offerings and to grow Dell’s process capabilities on a global basis across industry verticals, service offerings and market segments Read More ...
Just Dial dials into open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux powers more than 200 servers in Just Dial for its various Intranet and Extranet applications Read More ...
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Lenovo India management undergoes major revamp Lenovo India has made new appointments to its management team in an attempt to strengthen the organization Read More ...
PC sales tumble as consumers, workers eye tablets New market data shows that the iPad and Android-powered slates may be taking a bigger bite of the PC market than expected. Read More ...
HP advances 'Converged Infrastructure' strategy in India With a list of 15 client wins in India, HP is finding acceptance for its ‘Converged Infrastructure’ Read More ...
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Dell makes laptop battery recycling easier Dell has announced the launch of its free laptop battery recycling program in India for consumers Read More ...
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IBM in hybrid chip breakthrough Technology could lead to exaflop computing—systems that can perform one million trillion calculations per second Read More ...
iPad, smartphones dragging down PC sales Gartner lowers 2010 and 2011 forecasts for global PC shipments, as Apple and other tablets and smartphones cut into conventional computer shipments Read More ...
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Methane powered laptops could arrive soon Harvard researchers develop platinum-free solid-oxide fuel cells, which could be reliable and cheap enough for mobile technology Read More ...
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Energy costs account for 12 percent of overall data center expenditures Energy-related costs are the fastest-rising cost in the data center, say researchers at Gartner Read More ...
Dell to launch second tablet Chief Executive Michael Dell showed off a prototype of the 7-inch tablet at Oracle OpenWorld, but did not offer details Read More ...
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Research In Motion changes its name to BlackBerry Research In Motion (RIM) has announced that it will now operate around the world under the iconic name BlackBerry, effective immediately. Read More ...
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ICICI Lombard launches mobile claim intimation app ICICI Lombard’s motor insurance mobile app allows customers to intimate a claim directly through the company’s mobile app ‘Insure’ Read More ...
Apple hits 40 billion App milestone Even more impressive: Apple has 500 million customer accounts Read More ...
Simmtronics launches XPAD X-720 The XPAD X-720 will be available in all the leading stores along with e-commerce websites at price point of Rs. 4600 Read More ...
HCL Infosystems launches MyEduWorld Interactive, self-learning platform encompasses curriculum, applications, videos, animations, quizzes and more Read More ...
3 factors to consider for framing BYOD policy Gartner believes that organizations must consider and take action on three major impacts when moving to a BYOD policy Read More ...
Windows 8 will make Microsoft a serious player in the mobile market: Steve Ballmer Microsoft's pitch is that Windows 8 unifies the tablet and PC worlds, in contrast to Apple, which uses one operating system for desktops and laptops, and another for the iPad Read More ...
IndiaFirst Life Insurance looks to carve unique identity using Mobility The insurance firm is investing approximately Rs 3.5 crore in setting up required IT infrastructure for issuing policies in just 15 minutes Read More ...
Asia-Pacific leads race to engage digital mobile consumers in 2012 An average company will spend USD 13 million- 22 million to market, sell and service digital mobile consumers in 2012, finds a research undertaken by TCS Read More ...
Apple iPhone 5: Opportunities and threats iPhone 5 delights on a device level, but has plenty of rivals to worry about. Take a look at our competitive assessment Read More ...
Tech Mahindra forays into the world of mobility Acquires controlling stake in Comviva Technologies, and builds 360 degree portfolio in Mobile VAS, Mobile Money and Mobile payments space Read More ...
Apple iPhone 5 still delivers a few surprises Though most of the new iPhone 5 features--including the design and appearance--were leaked in advance, Apple managed to offer a few hidden gems Read More ...
BlackBerry 10 - RIM doesn't show key pieces At BlackBerry World 2012, Research In Motion gave a preview of its forthcoming BlackBerry 10 platform. Unfortunately, RIM left too much out of sight and didn't deliver on enterprise focus Read More ...
53 percent of organizations experience data breaches due to insecure mobile devices A survey conducted by Websense and Ponemon Institute, has revealed that a majority of organizations in India are woefully unaware of the security risks posed by mobile platforms Read More ...
Tablets in the enterprise: Drivers and challenges Businesses that wish to embrace tablets need to maintain a balance between user preference and productivity and corporate security and compliance, says Mahesh Gupta of Cisco Read More ...
BYOD compels re-framing of enterprise security policies With BYOD emerging as an undeniable trend, enterprises across the globe are being exposed to a new set of threats. Organizations are realizing the incompetency in their current security strategy and are exploring new technologies that would enable them to accommodate BYOD in a secure manner Read More ...
Pre-Budget Quote: Karbonn Mobiles I wish to seek a cut in taxes on mobile phone brands of Indian origin, as this will help the Indian phone makers to compete well with the international competition: Pradeep Jain, Managing Director, Karbonn Mobiles Read More ...
Pre-budget Quote: RIM The Government can play a vital role by re-considering the taxation module on mobile devices. This would make it affordable -- reaching out to larger section of the audience: Sunil Dutt, India MD, RIM Read More ...
OnLive Desktop brings Windows apps to iPad Virtual desktop based on cloud gaming tech claims to bring speedier Microsoft Office, Flash to iPad than market leader Citrix Receiver can deliver Read More ...
Global mobile Internet data traffic to grow 18-fold by 2016: Cisco According to Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast, global mobile data traffic will outgrow global fixed data traffic by three times during 2011-2016 Read More ...
Essar turns BYOD into an advantage Faced with the growing trend of many of its employees bringing their own devices to work, Essar addressed this challenge by implementing a comprehensive solution from Juniper Read More ...
Google's bouncer ejects malware from Android market Google is using a technology called Bouncer to monitor and remove malicious apps Read More ...
‘Unified Communications on route to become pervasive’ Dinesh Malkani, Managing Director, Collaboration Solutions, Asia Pacific and Japan, Cisco shares how UC is evolving from a boardroom technology to become pervasive. Excerpts from an interview with InformationWeek: Read More ...
Verizon introduces new Managed Unified Communications and Collaboration service for Microsoft Lync Businesses can now leave UC&C service and infrastructure management to Verizon -- and focus on promoting greater adoption and productivity Read More ...
Adoption of video in Unified Communications on the rise in India Aided by developments in the telecom and communications technology space, such as cloud computing and wireless networks like 3G and 4G, even smaller companies can now easily incorporate video into their collaboration tools Read More ...
ArcelorMittal to use UC as a service to cut costs ArcelorMittal has chosen Siemens Enterprise Communications to deliver a global Private Cloud Service for Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) based on a centralized OpenScape UCC Solution Read More ...
Changing landscape of Unified Communications market in India While on-premise Unified Communication solutions have already gained acceptance, UCaaS is also slowly gaining momentum Read More ...
Will Atos have "Zero email" by 2013? Organizations like Atos have set up initiatives to reduce the amount of internal email, which is deemed as a productivity damper. Here's Atos's plan to reduce email significantly, if not to zero Read More ...
Vidyo free cloud service bridges videoconferencing systems VidyoWay will let users of Cisco, Polycom, Lifesize, and Microsoft Lync talk to each other. In the meantime, Vidyo starts the conversation about how much better off they would be using its technology Read More ...
Unified Communications slashes communication costs for refinery Bharat Oman Refineries recorded savings of Rs 73 lakh on communication and Rs 82 lakh per annum on operational and maintenance costs Read More ...
Cisco Cius: The little tablet that could What chance does another tablet have in a crowded market? Cisco has cleverly made Cius the centerpiece of its suite of collaboration technologies and tools. We think it could succeed Read More ...
To lure Indian SMBs, Unified Communication providers must develop comprehensive solutions UC in India will grow, when bundled with remotely managed services or hosted collaboration suites, says AMI Read More ...
'Indian men put in ‘extra’ effort to look good for a video conference business meeting' A research conducted by Cable&Wireless Worldwide revealed that Indians are of the opinion that their appearances play a vital role in a face-to-face or a video conference with business associates as it helps to leave a good impression Read More ...
Cisco introduces 15 minute video conferencing system Facing growing competition from Polycom, Vidyo, and others, Cisco introduces a low-cost unit designed to be set up and running in 15 minutes Read More ...
Polycom buys HP's Halo videoconferencing unit Hewlett Packard said Polycom also will be a partner for telepresence and certain unified communications systems and will make its video applications available for HP's webOS platform Read More ...
Skype Deal: Collaboration is Microsoft's game to lose Microsoft’s USD 8.5 billion deal to buy Skype shows it building around its strength in enterprise collaboration software. But will it squander its advantage? Read More ...
Why Microsoft plus Skype is an enterprising idea If Microsoft can meld Skype and Lync, building a sensible enterprise and consumer offering while making Skype the de facto mobile unified communications platform, this may just be a winning combination Read More ...
Tackling the uncertainty of core network planning To avoid breaking the economics of core network provisioning, service providers must extract every bit of cost out of their networks without compromising services or reducing quality of experience for their end users Read More ...
Videoconferencing, telepresence spending to double by 2015 Cisco-Tandberg, Avaya, Lifesize, and Polycom are focusing on conference room systems, projected as the area of greatest growth, according to Infonetics Read More ...
Why is Cisco betting big on video? The networking giant believes that video will drive the next wave of communications for enterprises Read More ...
Cisco unifies enterprise communications with Jabber Cisco rolled out Jabber, a unified communications application that brings together presence, instant messaging (IM), voice and video, voice messaging, desktop sharing and conferencing into a single consistent experience across PCs, Macs, tablets and smart phones Read More ...
Communication trends for 2011 Explore how communication will be influenced by Unified Communications, Video, Tablets, SIP Trunking and the cloud Read More ...
IBM’s cloud version of Lotus Notes finds good uptake in India 12 percent of Lotus Notes adoption has been via the cloud Read More ...
HP partners with IIIT-B to launch Network University The University will aid IT professionals to advance their knowledge in the delivery of next-generation enterprise networks Read More ...
Unified Communications: The new mouthpiece in enterprises Indian enterprises are taking UC beyond basic communications, by using forms such as UC-as-a-service and virtual teams, for R&D, training and client interactions Read More ...
Facebook becoming ultimate CRM system The social network's latest messaging features point to a future in which you can contact someone wherever they are with a single click Read More ...
Verizon outlines top 10 technology trends for 2011 Technology trends include cloud, unified communications, convergence, mobile apps and IPv6 Read More ...
The Office: Who needs it 60 percent of employees in study say they don't need to go into an office to be productive; IT execs worry about security of mobile workers Read More ...
Taj Hotels selects NEC as preferred network solution provider NEC to provide IP telephone systems for eight new hotel locations Read More ...
Cisco to introduce home telepresence system A USD 600 video conferencing system that includes a video camera and a device to connect to a HD TV will reportedly be launched by the network equipment maker Read More ...
Collaboration possibilities for organizations are 'infinite' Right tools and right approach enhance the communication paradigm for employees Read More ...
Interop Mumbai 2010 kicks off Opens up with keynotes which describe IT to be converging, networks going borderless Read More ...
BT delivers B2B telepresence solution for Wipro in India BT’s B2B exchange connectivity will enable seamless video and voice communications between Wipro and its customers Read More ...
Microsoft, Polycom team on Unified Communications Partnership will integrate voice, instant messaging, and videoconferencing for large enterprise, government, and SMB customers Read More ...
Educational training goes virtual at NIIT The educational institute has conducted over 248 training sessions using the UC platform it deployed two years ago Read More ...
"Immersive telepresence has a great future" Managing Director of Polycom India & SAARC, Neeraj Gill, says that Polycom is witnessing increased demand for telepresence solutions Read More ...
SIP gives Avaya a new ‘Aura’ in UC Based on the open standard SIP protocol, Avaya Aura is an important milestone in the evolution of UC architecture Read More ...
The shape of UC to come: On-demand, personalized and ubiquitous In the future, conversations will follow you from one device to another, and you will be able to collaborate from any device–yes, even your television set Read More ...
Spectranet and nivio to jointly offer hosted messaging and collaboration The firm plans to offer a range of hosted solutions such as basic email solutions and high end enterprise applications based on the Microsoft Exchange platform Read More ...
Bharti Airtel, Cisco and Servion team up to provide hosted contact center solutions The consortium is launching ‘customizable’ hosted contact center services Read More ...
Tata Communications and BT to extend Telepresence facilities to each other Using the intercompany service, customers of both the companies can invite clients of the other service provider to join them in multipoint telepresence meetings Read More ...
‘Cisco will focus on Smart Connected Communities’ The network is getting smarter and Cisco wants to apply intelligent networks in other industries through connected communities. Naresh Wadhwa, President & Country Manager, Cisco India & SAARC told Brian Pereira how Cisco plans to achieve this through strategic alliances with domain experts. Internet technology also has a major role in building connected communities Read More ...
AGC Networks to be acquired by Essar Group Essar will acquire Avaya’s stake in AGC Networks, previously known as Avaya GlobalConnect Read More ...
Unified Communications’ day has arrived It seems that all those studies on collaboration along with a couple of years of Web 2.0 messaging have had their effect on us Read More ...
"Our products and technologies will be the foundation for Borderless Networks" Padmasree Warrior, CTO, Cisco tells us why she thinks that the troika of video, virtualization and cloud computing will push enterprise-level productivity to a new level Read More ...
Orange Business Services appoints Bala Mahadevan as India CEO In this role, Mahadevan will be responsible for driving business growth for the company in India in the network related services and IT services domains Read More ...
Siemens Enterprise Communications and T-Systems now speak with one voice This new agreement will let Siemens Enterprise Communications and T-Systems simplify migration Read More ...
Videoconferencing booming during flight ban Travelers stranded by the Icelandic volcano are using telepresence and videoconferencing to stay in contact with their businesses Read More ...
CSC launches Unified Communications as a service Targeted at Fortune 1000 companies, this offering is based on Cisco’s collaboration portfolio Read More ...
Does Green IT make business sense? Finding the right inflection points for “green” change is key for business success Read More ...
Polycom expands its partnerships with HP and Microsoft The new partnerships are aimed at delivering open and interoperable collaboration solutions Read More ...
Cisco to help Government accelerate e-Governance initiatives The initiative aims to deliver transformational education and health care solutions to citizens across India Read More ...
‘Connected devices will present new business opportunities for enterprises’: Akamai CIO As new growth comes from emerging geographies and new platforms such as mobile, Akamai is relying on its state-of-the-art IT infrastructure to power its growth. Kumud Kalia, Senior VP and CIO, Akamai, shares with us the opportunity and the challenges for being a CIO at Akamai, and how he is focusing on building an agile and efficient user experience for Akamai’s customers Read More ...
Sunil Dutt, RIM takes a nostalgic look at the Internet Sunil Dutt, MD, India, RIM takes a stroll down the memory lane and shares how the Internet was in its initial days in India Read More ...
Internet key to poverty alleviation and social empowerment: S Ramadorai, TCS S Ramadorai, Vice Chairman, TCS shares his views on the transformational power of the Internet Read More ...
5 things Facebook Graph search means for business Graph Search creates new social business opportunities, but not without some elbow grease. Here's what you must do to take advantage Read More ...
Is social networking dominating e-mail? According to survey results, social media is emerging as a preferred mode of communication, whereas e-mail communication has depreciated and is limited to only record-based communication Read More ...
Indian Internet economy forecast to contribute Rs 10.8 trillion to the overall economy by 2016 India's Internet economy growth rate of 23 percent places it as the second fastest across the G-20 and ahead of many other developing nations in the G-20, as per a report by Boston Consulting Group Read More ...
India and APNIC reach agreement on National Internet registry Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers (IRINN) will be run by the National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) and serve ISPs within the country Read More ...
Google privacy change provokes outrage One user profile and privacy policy to rule all of Google's services. Simple, or evil? Read More ...
CIOs must leverage social media to increase their presence in the boardroom Arun Sundararajan, NEC Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, discusses with InformationWeek the relevance of social media to the overall business, and how CIOs must handle social media Read More ...
2012: India gets set to adopt IPv6 HP partners with Government of Karnataka and IIIT-B to help enterprises adopt the new Internet address standard Read More ...
Google and O-Zone Networks partner to offer free Wi-Fi access As per the deal, YouTube and Google+ users will get free Wi-Fi access across all O-Zone hotspots Read More ...
10 Wi-Fi trends to watch for in 2012 Several trends and developments are emerging and catching up to make a big impact on unabated growth of Wi-Fi. Ajay Kumar Gupta, WLAN Access and Security Specialist, elaborates on 10 such trends Read More ...
Compuware targets 50 percent of APM market in India As the application performance management market is still in its nascent stages in India, the company is confident of becoming the numero uno player Read More ...
6 lakh account logins get compromised every day on Facebook The statistic was revealed in an infographic published alongside an official Facebook blog post trumpeting new security features introduced by the firm Read More ...
Companies will generate 50 percent of web sales via social presence and mobile apps by 2015, says Gartner As the number of mobile phones overtakes PCs, customers will use mobile browsers and applications as the main points of interaction, says Gartner Read More ...
Worldwide social media revenue to reach USD 14.9 billion in 2012, says Gartner As per a report released by Gartner, worldwide social media revenue is forecast for a consistent growth Read More ...
Malware attacks up due to social media, reveals Global Survey More than 50 percent of the respondents report an increase in malware due to social media use Read More ...
Social media for corporate networking or corporate espionage? Today, corporates are looking at social media like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to broaden their online outreach. In a session at INTEROP Mumbai 2011, Abilash Sonwane, Senior-VP, Elitecore Technologies, talked about how social media networks are the next frontier of corporate espionage Read More ...
Social Media: Not a matter of choice anymore Adoption of social media by enterprises is not a matter of choice anymore. It is a must, said Umesh Jain, CIO, YES BANK at INTEROP Mumbai 2011 Read More ...
Internet as important as food and water, says Cisco study A Cisco study reveals that nearly 95 percent of college students and young employees in India have admitted that the Internet is as important in their lives as water, food, air and shelter Read More ...
What Facebook should learn from George Lucas Facebook's latest tweaks are reminiscent of the Star Wars creator's continued changes to his iconic films: No one asked for--or wanted--them Read More ...
Security issues to consider while migrating from IPv4 to IPv6 Despite its innumerable virtues, IPv6 is still vulnerable and poses various security threats Read More ...
How vulnerable are you in the virtual place? As the Internet and new technologies grow, so do their vulnerabilities Read More ...
IPv6: The next-generation Internet When IPv4 addresses are completely depleted, any business expansion, new service, smart device, anything Internet-related will need IP addresses that are IPv6 Read More ...
India ranks 17 globally in terms of unique IP addresses The number of unique IP addresses connecting to Akamai's platform from India grew by 21 percent in the first quarter of 2011 Read More ...
The memory game To safeguard the password, we invented the two-factor authentication. It could be a token, which we now trust to suggest us a ‘one-time password’ Read More ...
Is social networking part of the CIO job description? Should CIOs be responsible for the enterprise's social networking use? Read More ...
How IPv6 contributes to a more agile and responsive organization IPv6 can usher in new opportunities for the way people do business and communicate Read More ...
‘IPv6 seeds have to be planted now ' While Indian Internet Service Providers still have some reserves of IPv4 addresses left, the stocks will be likely depleted before the next growing season, says Yves Poppe, Head-IPv6, Tata Communications, in an exclusive interview with InformationWeek’s Srikanth RP Read More ...
Global tech leaders promote open internet Leaders from 34 countries, including notable technology pioneers, have released principles aimed at maintaining the Internet as a forum for open communication and expression Read More ...
Enterprises are not ready for IPv6 With the move to IPv6 imminent, enterprises need to re-work on their IT infrastructure to support the new protocol Read More ...
ICANN's domain name plan could spell trouble Companies next year will be able register their own top-level domains, but the price may be more intellectual property litigation and security problems Read More ...
HCL Infosystems gets broadband connectivity project from Indian Railways The company will provide end to end ADSL 2+ Broadband Network on Indian Railways enterprise Wide Area Network through RailTel Corporation of India Read More ...
80 percent of browsers have known vulnerabilities Most problems are caused by insecure plug-ins, such as Java, Adobe Reader, QuickTime, and Flash, finds Qualys Read More ...
57 percent Indian SMEs use websites as a sales channel: Google Majority of the online spend (43 percent) comes from SMEs who spend between Rs 12 to 25 lakh on advertising on an annual basis, reflecting the low-cost benefit of the Internet Read More ...
Microsoft challenges Google to offer patent indemnification If Google is so sure that the WebM video codec is safe, it should guarantee legal protection against patent claims, Microsoft argues Read More ...
Ipaidabribe.com - a crowdsourcing initiative to weed out corruption The website provides transaction-wise data on the number of bribes paid. It also has a bribometer which gives city wise ranking based on the reports received Read More ...
Low-bandwidth website delights customers ICICI Securities has created a low-bandwidth website that allows customers to access the site over slow Internet connections Read More ...
Top 10 Google predictions for 2011 In the new year, Google TV will struggle but gain traction while Android thrives and Chrome OS proves surprisingly popular Read More ...
Mozilla releases eighth Firefox 4 beta Latest version includes support for graphics rendering in the browser without the use of a third-party plug-in Read More ...
You Tube gives users a terrorism flag YouTube is leaving it up to the users to decide what does and does not promote terrorism Read More ...
Microsoft launches Office 365 Home Premium for consumers Microsoft Corporation announced the availability of Office 365 for consumers, a reinvention of the company’s flagship Office product line. Families can now subscribe to Office 365 Home Premium, which includes the latest set of Office applications. It works across five PCs/Macs and five mobile devices, and comes with extra SkyDrive storage. “This isn’t just another version of Office. This is Office reinvented as a consumer cloud service,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft Corp. “Together with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Office 365 gives you the freedom to do things when and how you want.” Microsoft also announced it will now deliver many new features and services to the cloud first, transforming the company’s traditional three-year release cycle. Now, new features and services stream to subscribers as soon as they’re ready, eliminating the hassles of upgrading and keeping subscribers always up-to-date. “This is a major leap forward,” said Ramkumar Pichai, GM - Microsoft Office Division, Microsoft India. “It’s a service designed to help you manage the tasks of your work and home life, wherever you are, whenever you need, online or offline. Also, it’s a perfect fit for busy families and individuals who can connect multiple devices with a single subscription.” Office 365 Home Premium will be available for purchase in India at an annual subscription of Rs 4,199. Simultaneously, Microsoft also announced in India the availability of the updated FPP version of its traditional Office suite for consumers – Office Home and Student 2013. To help people find more time to do the things they want, Microsoft is introducing Time to 365 (www.office.com/timeto365), a new crowd-sourced website, where people can find and share tips, tricks, ideas and inspiration from around the world. Tips on the site include, for example, an idea for organizing your grocery list with OneNote on your phone, a pointer on how to pick the right sized TV for your living room and ways to use Office applications to plan a child’s birthday party. Read More Read More ...
5 areas CIOs must examine before moving to the cloud Cloud computing is about delivering massively scalable IT-enabled capabilities, as service to external customers using Internet technologies. Instead of saying that Cloud computing is a hyped tech-trend, I will say it is a buzz word today and still many service providers actually interchangeably use SaaS and Cloud Computing in their discussions. Not all SaaS solutions leverage cloud-based computing and cloud computing is not another term for SaaS. In fact it is a broad technological concept where some types of SaaS offerings could qualify for to be included under cloud computing. That is, if the IT application being delivered under SaaS concept is one which is highly scalable; it could qualify for being considered as a cloud computing application. Will Cloud Computing really take off? I think yes, it is poised to grow - and not just private cloud but public cloud also. There are lot of people who say that large companies will take private cloud route while SMEs will take public cloud route. But I feel that even large companies will benefit a lot from public cloud route and many enterprises have already ventured out on this path. However, as I see today, before taking a decision whether to move forward on cloud computing or not, each CIO has to evaluate certain key areas, which are as follows. 1. Firstly, fully understand the concept and implications of cloud computing before taking a decision whether to maintain an IT investment in-house or whether to buy it as a service through the cloud - and for that to happen even the service providers need to understand the concept fully. 2. Look at the overall ROI and understand short term costs versus long term gain, comparing not just hardware, software, implementation and maintenance costs but also bandwidth and related costs, especially in case one is moving enterprise applications to cloud and one may need to enhance internet bandwidths significantly. 3. Evaluate the service levels being offered by providers – in terms of uptime, response time, performance etc. 4. To understand whether implementation time will be more efficient -- in terms of time to deploy or scaling up an application infrastructure – by going cloud computing way or one has in-house capabilities. 5. Lastly, I think culture and mindset has to change, and this could be perhaps the most difficult barrier in adoption of Cloud computing. The mindset in the organization – not just IT managers -- needs to be aligned to the fact there will be a transition from on-premises to off-premises computing. This is not easy. e.g. While there are obvious advantage in terms of the fact that someone else is managing my day to day technology issues but this has to be weighed against the fact that we are leaving the business-critical information resources in the hands of third parties. I strongly feel that not everything can become cloud computing – as each one of us has specific requirements – whether on functionalities, performance, or even security and privacy needs which may be unique to the organization and may not be supported through public cloud. Secondly, I guess we need to start small by first understanding the concept from a practical perspective and then deciding whether to go ahead or not. As told to Amrita Premrajan Read More Read More ...
3 ways the cloud can complement virtualization Most IT professionals correctly refer to the internal cloud as their virtualization project, and often roll their eyes when a vendor refers to it as a cloud. Nevertheless, virtual infrastructures can benefit from the actual public cloud to augment what they are doing. The public cloud can help provide smaller businesses a place to send data for off-site backup storage, a place to recover in the event of a disaster, and even a place to move applications when peak loads have exceeded the capabilities of the internal data center. Let's look at the possibilities. 1. Public cloud as off-site backup One of the earliest and most frequent uses of cloud storage is as a backup target. First, it was used to back up laptops and desktops, but now it is being used to protect physical and virtual servers. Using cloud storage creates an ideal separate location from the data center, and most providers have multiple geographically dispersed facilities as well. The farther your data is away from you the better protected it is from a regional disaster. The challenge, though, for many virtual backup processes is that the use of cloud storage is not integrated directly into the virtual backup software. It has to be added on as an afterthought via some sort of gateway appliance. This separation reduces efficiency and increases complexity. Integration with the cloud is critical for virtualized backup applications going forward. It should be just another checkbox within the backup software. 2. Public cloud as disaster recovery site Several data protection suppliers and cloud providers are beginning to leverage the fact that they have your virtual machine images in the cloud to provide disaster recovery in their facility. As I discussed in the article "Hybrid Cloud DR", this capability is ideal for the small- to medium-size business that does not have a fully staffed second site that can be used for disaster recovery. It allows cloud providers to add value by becoming more than just a storage tank at the end of an Internet connection -- they are providing full-service recovery. 3. Public cloud as bursting option Finally, you can use the cloud for more than just backup and disaster recovery. You can use it as a destination point for applications when peak loads hit the data center. The concept, called cloud bursting, allows for additional instances of an application that can be started in the cloud or less active applications can be moved to the cloud temporarily to accommodate a peak load. The challenge has been how to integrate the move to the cloud with the existing virtualization investment. Bridging the gap between a local hypervisor and a cloud compute environment can be complex and expensive. But help is on the way. Companies such as HotLink are providing the capability to integrate multi-hypervisor management, including cloud compute, into the vCenter infrastructure. The cloud can offer many benefits to data centers of all sizes, but its benefits can be especially useful to the medium-size business. These data centers need to start considering the cloud for more than off-site data storage. Cloud-hosted disaster recovery and bursting are now within the reach of these companies. - George Crump is lead analyst of Storage Switzerland, an IT analyst firm focused on the storage and virtualization segments Read More Read More ...
Red October claims 14 victims in India, says Kaspersky Kaspersky Lab recently published a new research report which identified a huge cyber-espionage campaign targeting diplomatic, governmental and scientific research organizations in several countries, including India. What’s surprising is the fact that the attackers managed to evade detection of most antivirus products for more than five years.
Vaultize introduces Data Privacy Option in its File Sharing and Endpoint Backup Data security has been the primary inhibitor preventing enterprises from adopting cloud solutions. Aiming to address this issue, Vaultize recently unveiled a Data Privacy Option (DPO) for enterprises, helping them comply with various data privacy, data residency and data protection regulations –hence further strengthening cloud adoption. DPO is an innovative concept through which Vaultize lets its enterprise customers retain the full control over encryption keys. With DPO, the encryption keys are never stored on any infrastructure that is not under enterprise control, ensuring that the customer is in complete control of data. The data is thus completely secured from any unauthorized access while in motion and at rest in the cloud, and the ability to access useable data remains solely with the enterprise customer as it only has the encryption keys. "Cloud service providers often store customer data across various geographical locations to ensure resiliency, scalability and efficiency. But regulations put restrictions in terms of where and how to keep data that is sensitive in nature,” said Ankur Panchbudhe, CTO and Co-founder of Vaultize. “DPO option lets our customers take the full control of the encryption keys. Our at-source encryption technology ensures that the data, while in motion and at rest, is secured from any unauthorized access. Moreover, to achieve this Vaultize does not require any special software or any hardware on-premise.” DPO is available with all the deployment options of Vaultize - public cloud (hosted in Rackspace), private cloud (hosted on-premise or with any cloud provider of customer’s choice), and “Cloud-in-a-box” appliance. Read More Read More ...
Icertis enters into strategic partnership with Prasanna Purple Mobility Solutions Prasanna Purple Mobility Solutions announced that it will roll out Icertis Public Transport Management product. Leveraging the latest advances in cloud technology, Icertis PublicTransport helps city and inter-city bus operators optimize efficiency and maximize revenue. The advanced technology of the product will provide Prasanna Purple Mobility Solutions with a centralized bus network planning capability to optimize routes, schedules and driver utilization, as well as a fleet management and maintenance platform, said company’s media release. The partnership will also offer world class in-bus information and entertainment services. In-bus infotainment as a service has never been fully available to bus passengers in India. The new infotainment systems will provide travel and location specific information to passengers, such as popular tourist attractions, historical facts, shopping avenues, advertisements, and so on, in addition to transmitting social and security related messages. The two companies will also collaborate to deliver a hi-tech and contemporary travel experience to passengers, who will soon be able to check bus schedules, route details, estimated travel time and fares, bus timings, as well as traffic information both online and on mobile devices, all in real time. Prasanna Patwardhan, Chairman and Managing Director, Prasanna Purple Mobility Solutions said,“The strategic alliance with Icertis marks an important milestone in our long term commitment to the development of an effective, reliable, and engaging bus transportation system. We are excited about harnessing the power of this next generation of information technology product to transform our people transportation operations into the best network in India.” Srikanth Karnakota, Country Head for Server and Cloud Business at Microsoft Corporation, India, said, “The Windows Azure Cloud platform empowers businesses to increase their operational efficiency and run applications with unbounded scalability and ease of use. Icertis PublicTransport Management built on Windows Azure is a perfect illustration of how cloud computing can change the operating dynamics of a very important sector like public transportation.” Read More Read More ...
Dell sees big potential in Indian healthcare sector A big domain player in the global healthcare segment, Dell believes that it has the potential to repeat its success in the Indian market too. With a growing Indian middle class and rising disposable income, patients are demanding better quality healthcare. Healthcare service providers are looking at investing in IT to automate paper-based processes and improve customer satisfaction. “The Indian healthcare segment is highly fragmented in nature, and has relatively low exposure to IT. As compared to other countries, the percentage of IT spending on healthcare with respect to GDP is quite low. Hence, the potential to transform existing processes using IT is huge,” says Sid Nair, VP and Global GM, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Dell Services. Independent market research reports corroborate this huge potential. Market research firm, Zinnov, estimates that the annual IT spending within existing hospitals in India is expected to reach USD 1.5 billion by 2020. Larger hospital chains specifically are looking at automating paper-based processes by deploying solutions for automating back-office functions and digitizing patient records through Electronic Medical Records (EMR). A case in point is the deal Max Healthcare signed with Dell Services. Nair believes that over the next few years, hospitals will significantly upscale their IT investment. Can cloud aid healthcare? Dell also sees a huge role for services related to cloud computing in the segment. For example, a study by Zinnov estimates the total addressable opportunity for cloud solutions in the sector to be approximately USD 600 million by 2020. Zinnov also believes that the cloud can potentially address close to 40 percent of the total annual healthcare IT spending in India. “In a country where there are large number of individual practitioners and mid-sized hospitals, the cloud is a natural fit. Usage of the cloud can eliminate paper-based processes, help save costs, enable best practices and improve efficiencies,” states Nair. For example, with the growing usage of digital records, storage and archival needs are growing at a fast clip for hospitals. Hospitals perform thousands of radiology tests every year, which require enormous storage capacities. Electronic Health Records are also growing at an equally fast pace. This is creating a unique market, where hospitals need to share image information to better coordinate patient care. However, with images lying in isolated systems, physicians and hospitals struggle to share this information.
Cloud shines bright in Infosys’ Q3 results The latest Q3 results of Infosys show that the focus on cloud continues to yield results. Infosys said in the press release that the business has more than 190 engagements and 3,500 experts. Over the last quarter, it won more than 15 engagements across cloud services, Big Data and Security. Infosys said, “Our vision of being a Cloud Ecosystem Integrator has gained increasing acceptance with clients and we are working with more than 30 partners to help clients create and manage their unified hybrid cloud environments.” Read More Read More ...
SAP taps niche areas in cloud to grow beyond traditional base The immense potential of the Indian SMB market is well known. Market research firm, Zinnov, says that with over 50 million units, India has the largest number of SMBs across the world. While a majority of SMBs in this sector have global aspirations, they are way behind in technology adoption – a vital parameter for competing against global players. While this sector wants to use technology, a majority of SMBs seldom adopt technology as they are either too expensive or too cumbersome to deploy. The cloud is a perfect technology for SMBs as it gives them the ability to conserve cash, and scale without technology infrastructure restrictions. Like other mainstream enterprise application vendors, ERP giant, SAP, has been quick to recognize the potential of this market, and has accordingly started offering a slew of options using the cloud route. The firm initially started offering solutions using the Business ByDesign (BYD) model and Business Intelligence (BI) model designed for the SMB sector. Today, as the demand from this sector has grown rapidly, SAP is expanding its cloud solutions portfolio. The firm has launched a new range of offerings including CRM OnDemand, Financials OnDemand and SAP Social Media Analytics.
1.7 million open cloud positions just waiting to be filled, says IDC A recent Microsoft-sponsored IDC report claims that currently there are 1.7 million open cloud jobs worldwide that organizations are having a tough time filling. "Despite modest growth in the IT sector overall in the U.S., cloud-ready jobs are increasing as we head into 2013," said Cushing Anderson, a program VP at IDC, in a statement. "With this increase comes the harsh reality that workforces around the world are steps behind when it comes to attaining the skills necessary to thrive in the cloud computing industry." The study's authors contend that cloud computing will drive demand for individuals with a hard-to-find mix of business and IT skills, given that many of the new jobs will involve architecture, design, advisory, and transitional services as opposed to just hands-on tech functions. "Unlike IT skill shortages in the past, solving this skills gap is extremely challenging, given that cloud brings a new set of skills, which haven't been needed in the past," said Anderson. "There is no one-size-fits-all set of criteria for jobs in cloud computing. Therefore, training and certification is essential for preparing prospective jobs candidates to work in cloud-related jobs." The study found that worldwide, almost two-thirds of businesses plan to implement, or are already using, cloud technologies in their operations, with the U.S. accounting for 62 percent of spending on public cloud infrastructure. It also found that lack of training, certification, and experience are the top three reasons cloud positions are not being filled. To address the problem, Microsoft recently announced that it has revamped many of its certifications to take into account cloud computing technologies and methods, including forthcoming certifications for Windows 8 specialists. Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 are designed to work in concert with Microsoft cloud services such as Azure and Office 365. The study is bound to create some controversy. Microsoft has long claimed that there are worker shortages in a number of key IT areas, and has been pushing the U.S. government to increase the number of H-1B visas available to foreign tech workers. Currently, the number is capped at 65,000, with an additional 20,000 available to foreign graduates of advanced STEM programs at U.S. colleges and universities. Redmond also wants Congress to pass legislation that would make it easier for U.S. companies to procure permanent resident status (or green cards) for foreign tech hires. Under one plan floated by Microsoft, private businesses could pay up to USD 15,000 to procure green card approval for a foreign hire. Critics of such proposals, including The Programmers Guild, argue that U.S. tech companies should focus on retraining older IT pros, many of whom have been laid off in recent years, in cloud and other new skills before hiring foreigners. Read More Read More ...
5 cloud app trends to expect in 2013 Some of the trends we'll see in cloud-based enterprise applications in 2013 are obvious, while some might surprise. Here's my take on five trends to expect in the new year, along with examples and advice on how to ride each wave. Mobile options multiply. This is one of the obvious trends, as it's clear that tablets and smartphones are the preferred interface for executives, salespeople, managers and even not-so-mobile employees who accept that there are no longer barriers between work life and home life. Every credible cloud apps vendor is addressing mobile, but one standout is Salesforce.com, which offers native apps as well as growing HTML5 support. There's no single right way to support mobile, so look for options. Does your vendor (or prospective vendor) have separate native apps for tablets and phones that do justice to each form factor? If not, has the vendor progressed to HTML5 content that adapts to a range of devices? If the vendor relies solely on Web-based access, has it at least designed with mobile browsers in mind? If you still see scrollbars and tiny buttons that were designed for mouse-and-keyboard interaction, it's not mobile-friendly. Try before you buy. Embedded analytics proliferate. Here's another established trend that's sure to keep growing in 2013 because users naturally want reporting and dashboarding options right in the context of the apps they use every day. One standout on this front is Workday, which offers particularly deep and configurable embedded analytics. What should you look for? Start by considering the out-of-the-box options for reporting and dashboarding. Next, consider the configurable options. Can you bring external apps and data sources into the mix, or is it a stovepipe of analysis of data generated within the app? What's the latency of the data -- will the reports and metrics show up-to-the-minute data, up-to-the-hour data or yesterday's information? Don't forget to consider the analytics embedded in mobile apps. Can your phone truly be smart if it's not serving up metrics and dashboards? When it's mobile, it really should be up-to-the-minute data. The need for insight usually goes beyond the confines of a single app, so it's important to consider partner offerings and options for working with well-known BI systems and data warehousing platforms. Salesforce.com has a panoply of partner options, while Microsoft (with Dynamics CRM Online), Oracle (with Fusion Apps, Taleo, RightNow and so on), and SAP (with SuccessFactors, Business ByDesign and other cloud options) offer ways to work with their popular respective BI and data warehousing platforms. Configuration options abound. Configuration options are quickly replacing the need for customization across all applications, whether delivered in the cloud or on-premises. That's because most organizations want to avoid developing and maintaining custom code. In the configuration approach, the vendor supplies menu- or wizard-driven interfaces that let you expose industry-specific functionality or set company-specific controls. Workday, for example, uses configuration to deliver features designed for colleges, universities and government agencies. It's not that configuration is easy; it's a setup step that will likely have to be handled by deep technical experts during an initial deployment. But at least you won't have to worry about tweaking and testing code every time the application gets an upgrade. When you're using custom code, there's always a chance it will have to be redeveloped when changes are made to an underlying application. There are cases when custom development can be a big help, particularly when you need functionality that the vendor just doesn't offer. That's why Salesforce.com, for one, offers the Force.com development platform while NetSuite provides SuiteBuilder customization tools and a SuiteFlow workflow engine. Consider both configuration and customization options when choosing a cloud app, but customize only when there's a clear return on the ongoing investment required. {pagebreak} Financial apps emerge in the cloud. Cloud-based financial apps are growing in number and seeing healthy demand. Cloud suite vendors Workday and NetSuite provide the general ledger and accounting functionality associated with ERP systems. The same is true of FinancialForce.com, minority owned by Salesforce.com and majority owned by European ERP firm Unit4. On-premises giants Oracle and SAP seem to be waking up to the threat. Oracle introduced cloud-ready Oracle Fusion Financials in late 2011, and SAP released Financials OnDemand in November. The latter is based on functionality from the SAP Business ByDesign suite, and it's likely to be paired with SAP SuccessFactors human capital management applications to answer the competitive threat from Workday. For a deeper level of planning and budgeting functionality in the cloud, look to pure-play financial performance management vendors such as Adaptive Planning, Anaplan, Host Analytics, and Tidemark. Adaptive Planning, founded in 2003, has more than 1,200 customers and 30,000 users, and in 2012 it acquired cloud business intelligence vendor MyDials to bolster its dashboarding capabilities. Host Analytics, founded in 2000, has deep CFO-oriented functionality, including consolidation, and it's the second-largest vendor in this group, with more than 800 customers and 14,000 users. Anaplan and Tidemark are fast-growing startups. SAP and Oracle are just starting to bring performance management functionality into the cloud, so check their roadmaps if you're inclined to stick with your on-premises software vendor. Financial apps may never become as pervasive as CRM in the cloud, but the increasingly global nature of even midsized organizations -- with income streams and financial management needs on several continents -- makes cloud-based deployment an attractive option. Big data adds benchmarking value. A few cloud vendors have recognized that they're sitting on an incredibly valuable asset: the data generated by their many customers. The trick is aggregating this information in a secure, de-identified way such that it can't be traced back to a particular customer. This idea is not new. ERP vendors and user groups have collected and aggregated data for years in order to compile benchmark statistics. It's usually a data-swap affair in which you agree to provide your own data to the aggregated pool in exchange for access to the average and best-in-class statistics across your industry. SuccessFactors jumped on the benchmarking bandwagon even before it was acquired by SAP, tapping into aggregated data from thousands of cloud customers to deliver by-industry employee, departmental and total-workforce metrics such as operating profit per full-time employee, the turnover rate among top-performing employees, internal hiring rate and voluntary termination rates. Workday recently announced plans for a Workday Big Data Analytics offering, set for release in the second half of 2013, that will bring third-party data sources into the analysis without complex ETL requirements. The more data you can bring to an analysis, the more accurate it's likely to be, so we like the idea of big-data-enabled benchmarking. These are five cloud apps that we'll be watching in 2013, and given Oracle's plan to acquire Eloqua, announced recently, there's one more trend to watch in 2013: continued acquisitions of cloud-based marketing automation and marketing analytics companies. That trend started with IBM's purchase of Unica a few years ago, and since then SAS, Teradata, Oracle, Salesforce.com and others have jumped on the bandwagon. As we see it, most of the demand for marketing applications is in the cloud. Read More Read More ...
‘The world will be surrounded by intelligent social machines by the end of 2013’: Atos CTO In movies like Matrix, and Terminator, we have seen imaginary machines which can learn, now we will be seeing this in reality. This will be done by four key enablers namely social media, cloud, mobility/ machine to machines (M2M) and location powered with Big Data, which will bring a lot of business opportunities. Trends of 2012 Let's go back to see what happened in 2012 when cloud computing started maturing. Lot of enterprises started embracing cloud for non-critical business like e-mail etc. Enterprises found log benefits in doing so reducing the CAPEX and going to OPEX. Meanwhile, with evolution and adaptability of smartphones, enterprise started exploring "smartphones apps" for business purposes. It started with very simple applications like approvals which could be easily done through mobile phones, this actually helped business to go beyond approvals to mobile banking etc. We saw somewhere functionality of laptops coming on to smartphones/ tablets. On the other hand, we saw huge success of social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc., outside the enterprises. There was a thought leadership going in IT industry to see how this concept could also bring in advantages inside the enterprises (enterprise social networking). Enterprises have collected data over years now; however they were not able to bring out substantial information from this data that will help them make mature decisions and bring in new strategic path for business to evolve. This is where new concept called "Big Data" came where enterprises started doing small proof of concepts to find patterns. So as to say, 2012 was an exploration stage where IT companies were coming up with new tools and methodologies to bring in efficiency and at same time enterprises doing proof of concepts around those tools and methodologies to see how it could benefit them and enable smarter way of working. In 2013, we will see the roadmap of IT companies converging around the above concepts and providing focused solution which will bring in new business opportunities. Road Ahead – 2013 Going forward, a Nexus of converging forces – Social, Cloud, Location and Mobile powered by Big Data will transform user behaviour, creating new business opportunities. Location will be a King and will be most important aspect of context aware computing. It will be at centre where companies will be providing location based services on cloud. Location will be captured either through a mobile or through a M2M. Social will be the enabler in making collaborative decisions/discussions. Let’s take the case of a Connected Car. Imagine you driving a car and fuel level is going low, through a machine inside the car, it alerts user on the mobile. Mobile will then take the location of the car and will alert the connected ecosystem of partners connected on cloud which could be petrol stations, malls. Taking this information, the partners will try to provide best services for this customer; this will be enabled through Big Data, which will help partners identify which will be the best service for the customer. Social media will then be used by the customer to help him make a decision. Mobile devices will become an integral part of social media, collaboration will define a new way of working and cloud will enable delivery of information and functionality to users and systems. The power of social and mobile will bring in acceleration in business process and way of working and at the same time mobile and cloud will bring in distributed workforce, and cloud and social will bring in collaboration. Hence, it’s of key importance for the enterprises to strategize this as one rather than having independent strategy for cloud, mobility etc. This will also bring in lot of challenges: Cloud The business processes will not be confined in a single cloud environment but span across multiple clouds demanding for hybrid cloud situation. Further, the business processes will start connecting and communicating with smartphones, devices, sensors, electronic appliances and social media demanding following challenges to IT industry a) device agnostic messaging, b) cloud portability c) standardization. Once these challenges are addressed, this will enable contextual information from virtually any relevant source to be directly integrated into the dependent data sources. With standardization of services, analysis is that in future the customer will get best commercial pricing based on context (Quality of Service, SLA, service pricing, choice of cloud service providers). The analogy of this is a travel agent who can provide the best offer to the customer based on the context (Weekend, time of day, vacation time, season and special offers). More and more vertical or industry specific Platform as a Service (PaaS) services will emerge. Mobility Employees are already tapping on the nexus of social, cloud and mobility at the office – opting to buy their own smartphone over the company issued devices using online storage for corporate documents needed from home without the hassle of VPN – these are inevitabilities of today’s social and mobile workforce. Enterprise firewall strategy had to be thought of. Big Data Further, with enablement of new services, more and more data will be generated. Emphasis on tools and applications for pattern analytics and association will increase. The power will be in how close to real time are you to identify the data against this pattern and this will be achieved by making use of cloud. Social, cloud, location and mobile will revolutionize the way of working in a big way and truly the convergence of social, mobile, cloud and location will open new avenues of doing business and will eventually revolutionize business and society. The author is CTO, Atos India Read More Read More ...
Top 4 technology trends for 2013: Intel Technology and computing experiences today are pervasive – increasingly integrated into the fabric of our daily lives and our expectations and human desires for technology. The need to express ourselves, create, share, learn and protect our personal information is growing. We are at the beginning of what is another significant transformational moment for the personal computing experience as we move into 2013. Intel foresees a renewed vigor in computing in 2013 with the emergence of a highly connected multi-device world landscape. Some of the key technology trends that Intel predicts for the year 2013 are as follows. Cloud computing
2013 will be a turning point for cloud deployment in the APAC region. Cloud users will begin to demand standardized, open, interoperable platforms for cloud computing. As businesses begin to rely on the cloud for general business operations, the demand for unrestricted use - bringing data in and out of the cloud - will become a focus in 2013.
Big Data analytics
A trend that is fast being touted as the ‘next big thing’ that will help the industry move forward is Big Data. Storing and analyzing the massive amounts of user data to give near real time insights into customer behavior to tailor products and services to exceed customers’ expectations will gain momentum in 2013.
Compute experience reinvented
The new generations today are experiencing computers for the first time, using intuitive input methods such as touch. And the Indian market has shown a lot of potential for mobility devices and tablets and this has, in particular caught the fancy of the young consumers.
Intel believes that traditional input devices such as keyboards and mouse will be challenged by new input methods like voice and gesture recognition. Tablets, convertibles and new devices will enter the market blurring the boundaries between PCs and tablets.
Online collaboration
The increasing internet penetration means that in 2013 there will be new populations coming online who will look for newer ways to connect and share amongst themselves. Enterprises will also experience resurgence in connectivity, as employees look for better ways to create connections and work efficiently with colleagues.
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Top IT agendas for 2013: Cloud, mobility and analytics According to Symphony Teleca, the year 2013 will see a fundamental reshaping in the way commercial software and software related products are built and deployed in a rapidly merging environment of the cloud, mobility and analytics. Some of the key predictions for the year 2013 are as follows: Computing becomes task-centric There will be a shift to task-centric computing as user interfaces become truly multi-modal and content, services and applications grow to be pervasive, moving with the user across device types. UI keeps leaning towards voice, not touch There will be an increased emphasis on voice recognition enablement technologies such as ECNR as the next phase of UI is not keys or touch, but voice. Consumers will control their digital personas Consumers will demand federated control of their identities across platforms and devices as they seek to manage their digital personas not just on their own devices but across all. Mobile continues to drive impulse purchasing There will be growth in the number of consumers using their mobile devices to perform impulse or opportunity-driven purchases. Retailers will create a simplified transaction process leveraging desktop account credentials. Dynamic analytics using in-memory databases will enable targeted promotions from retailers and other B2C companies on mobile devices. An industry of digital infomediaries will evolve As companies look to leverage social media data, an industry of digital infomediaries will evolve that can provide syndicated, individual consumer level data that is current and actionable. NFC has its day Near Field Communication (NFC) will reach a tipping point. A tremendous number of people will have devices with NFC (in addition to RIM, Nokia, Sony, Google and many others are now shipping with NFC) - a critical mass of NFC-equipped phones just may be coming together and it may find a home in the enterprise as well. NFC tags will enable consumer lifecycle engagement NFC tags on individual consumer products will allow companies to engage and maintain a relationship with individual consumers throughout the lifecycle of the product. Consumers start to pick a car for its infotainment system, not its horsepower The auto industry will see a buying trend around infotainment capabilities and rear-seat features versus historic qualities of evaluation such as engine size or cabin room. The car becomes the new smartphone The auto industry will realize that they're facing the same challenges that phone and tablet developers faced in the last few years and will start to adopt similar approaches to their software development problems. Tablets become workstations There will be continued growth of tablet use in the enterprise as well as a more enterprise apps developed for tablets in particular. Companies will start to consider the devices and technologies necessary for increased collaboration where employees can not only access material via the tablet but can also use it as a mutual working station. Homes get connected with second devices There will be increased sales of the second-screen devices at home. Lower price point tablets like the iPad Mini and Samsung Galaxy will see growth as families will only want to spend USD 300-USD 400 on a second tablet device for their home. Same platform, all devices becomes the new normal There will be a rise in the “all-screen strategy” – using the same platform across device categories, including TV sets. ISVs tap new markets with partners Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) will see new profits generated from aggressively adapting their solutions for new markets. To do this, ISVs will continue to work with innovation partners to reduce time to market including product ideation sessions. Read More Read More ...
5 key enterprise technology trends for 2013: Brocade The Year 2012 will be remembered for many remarkable events, including the Summer Olympics in London that not only showcased the best in human achievement and global collaboration, but also illustrated how technology-obsessed the world has become. More than 4.8 billion people watched the event, with digital viewers outnumbering traditional television viewers for the first time in history. While 2012 was a breakthrough year for broadcasters, enterprises and consumers, let’s see what 2013 holds: 1. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) deployments begin The Olympics proved that consumer demand for information accessibility shows no sign of abating. However, as service providers try to meet said demand, and juggle the complexities of running a profitable business – for instance, to reduce CAPEX (capital expenditure) and OPEX (operating expenditure) and increase service responsiveness – they are looking for technology alternatives that will streamline service creation and foster innovative applications and services. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) offers a means of doing this. SDN links networks and applications, enabling direct programmatic control of both networks and orchestration layers in line with end-user application needs, rather than programming around the network, as is done today. IDC predicts that by 2016, the market will be worth USD 2 billion a year, up from just USD 168 million today. With the promise of SDN architectures radically decreasing total cost of ownership (TCO), and vendor innovation/support continuing to increase, I predict that we’ll see pockets of actual SDN service deployments across the globe, primarily in the U.S. and Japan. The year 2013 will see the start of great things for this technology. 2. Death of the “Transaction-Based” user A “transaction-based user” is an individual that will connect to the Internet to conduct an activity (such as to make a purchase or to stream content), and then log off. The premise is that the user will sparingly use bandwidth and not rely on connectivity for every aspect of their life. With the roll-out of higher-performing networks (such as 4G and LTE) and devices that offer seamless connectivity, I predict that 2013 will be the year that we see the decline of the “transaction-based” user and the rise of the “always-connected” user. Operators will vie for consumer loyalty by offering attractive pricing models, fuelling the trend for 24/7 connectivity. Businesses will leverage this phenomenon and increasingly turn to social media and communities to host a larger portion of their customer experience and support processes. While this will transform engagement models; to be successful, operators and business will need to ensure that their back-end networks can meet user expectations. In situations such as this, even one service disruption could be fatal to the customer relationship. 3. Cloud under the microscope Last year Brocade predicted that non-IT organizations would move towards “Cloud Service Provisioning” in order to uncover new ways of optimizing and monetizing cloud and service provider networks. For the next 12 months, I see this trend continuing, but in an evolved state. First, businesses will scrutinize the impact of the cloud, its benefits, usage and ROI more than ever before. For example, are deployments delivering the agility and cost savings predicted? Are users benefitting? How can one measure cloud ROI when, by design, the assets are not owned by the organization? With this in mind, I predict that IT organizations will attempt to take back control of their own assets and budgets and the deployment of private cloud architectures will accelerate during the second half of the year. IT organizations will also challenge the new breed of service provider by offering competing hosted services. This strategy will help them to bolster revenue opportunities from a market that will be worth USD 73 billion by 2015. This will be good news for users, but will need to be accompanied by a thorough evaluation strategy to ensure that performance, resilience and cost models meet organizational expectations. 4. Customers bite back on vendor lock-in As consumers, we don’t like being shackled. More generally, “product de-siloing” is a clear macro-trend. Whether it is the flexibility to personalize apps on our phone, or select the optional extras on our vehicles, choice is paramount. Within the networking space, choice is even more imperative. As alliances ebb and flow, and integrated offerings continue to break into the mainstream, the importance of open architectures and multivendor solutions will become more prevalent in 2013. Trust is essential when building a network to support mission-critical applications, and enterprises will turn to trusted vendors to deploy flexible and scalable solutions. As such, those vendors not able to coexist in multivendor environments will struggle in this more demanding, and competitive, landscape. Only the agile and collaborative will prosper, and I expect at least one major vendor casualty in the coming year. 5. Technology will begin to overcome human shortcomings I remember when desktop icons did not exist; a time when a user had to manually type the name of an application in a shell-like text window to access applications. This was time-consuming, error-prone and frustrating, but the desktop icon revolutionized the user experience. Innovations such as this overcame human shortcomings and simplified the user experience, and I predict more such innovations over the next 12 months. Think of voice-command devices and the fact that modern smartphones can deliver communications, content and compute services in a single form-factor. This kind of human multitasking would not happen, but technology has innovated to such a degree that it is now second nature to even the most basic user. I expect more breakthrough advances this year. Read More Read More ...
L&T Infotech targets SMBs with App Shop Research firm, Zinnov, estimates that with over 50 million units, India has the largest number of SMBs across the world. While more than one-third of India’s GDP is attributed to the SMB sector, most SMBs are still struggling to compete with large players as most of them do not adequately leverage information technology. A large number of SMBs have still not looked at using IT as a catalyst for driving growth, as they have traditional challenges such as skill set availability and affordable and customized IT products. This market is up for grabs as ambitious SMBs who are increasingly getting connected to their global counterparts, are now looking at using technology to improve their efficiencies and productivity. Not surprisingly, a host of vendors, system integrators and pure play cloud startups have started tapping this attractive market by offering a host of customized solutions. The latest one to announce plans for tapping this huge market is L&T Infotech. L&T Infotech has ambitious plans for making a mark in this segment in the next one year, and has accordingly chalked out a detailed strategy. Explaining the positioning, Abhay Chitnis, VP & CTO, L&T Infotech, says, “Ours is a uniq
Google links Gmail to drive for huge attachments The first automatically encoded email attachment was sent over 20 years ago, on March 11, 1992, by then Bellcore researcher Nathaniel Borenstein, using what would become the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) protocol. It was 406 KB, or thereabouts, assuming the .wav file posted on Borenstein's website is unaltered. Since then, files have put on weight. Graphics files, music files and video files today are routinely measured in tens or hundreds of megabytes, even gigabytes. Internet users, however, still want to send files via email. ISPs, in an effort to prevent overloaded networks, tend to impose limits on email attachments. These limits vary, but tend to be in the 10-25 MB range, with a few services allowing larger files. Google however wants to appear more generous still: It is offering Gmail users a way to email files of up to 10 GB. "Have you ever tried to attach a file to an email only to find out it's too large to send?" wrote Google product manager Phil Sharp in a blog post. "Now with Drive, you can insert files up to 10 GB -- 400 times larger than what you can send as a traditional attachment." However, Google isn't actually changing the mechanics of email attachments. It is integrating Gmail and Google Drive so that the process of attaching a file using Gmail saves the file in the user's Drive storage space. So when the user sends the attached file, he or she ends up sending a pointer to where the file resides in Google's cloud, a URL. Message recipients can then access the file, using the emailed URL to download it from Google Drive or simply to view it in a browser. For Gmail users, the distinction between MIME attachments and Drive attachments isn't likely to matter. It would only come into play if, for example, if the recipient of an email with an attachment immediately went offline. A traditional attachment, within allowed size parameters, would be downloaded automatically by an appropriately configured mail client and would thereafter be available without an Internet connection. A Drive attachment, being just a link until accessed, would be inaccessible if the message recipient was offline. Google isn't doing anything particularly new here: Cloud storage services like Dropbox and Box handle file sharing in a similar way. But Google has made Gmail more useful as a business tool, given that email remains the preferred collaboration application for many people. It has made Gmail into an alternative interface for Drive. In so doing, Google may gain a competitive advantage over standalone cloud storage services -- the popularity of Gmail is likely to encourage more use of Drive, potentially at the expense of other cloud storage competitors. Read More Read More ...
Top 5 tech trends for 2013: Verizon The New Year will see greater adoption of advanced technology to meet changing demands of enterprises while increasing productivity and creating new experiences for customers, according to Verizon’s top business-tech trends for 2013. Verizon Enterprise Solutions has predicted top five business-tech trends and investment areas for enterprises, which include cloud, connected machines, mobility, intelligent networks and security. Here are the Verizon Enterprise Solutions five top business-tech trends: The Forecast Is Bright for Hybrid Clouds Distributed data centers and the intelligent wired and mobile networks that connect them now represent a viable alternative to traditional virtual private network (VPN) methods that long have formed the backbone of distributed enterprise communications for a generation. Next year, there will be a significant shift from VPNs to public, private and, importantly, hybrid clouds. “By 2013, more than 60 percent of all enterprises will have adopted some form of cloud computing,” according to a Gartner report. To keep up with the changing demands of today’s enterprise, the ideal platform needs to be secure and easy to use and configure,” said Small. “In 2013, if you can’t switch workloads between public and private clouds, you won’t be competitive. This next year will require a bold approach to embracing change and re-engineering networks in support of cloud-based applications.” Examples of recent cloud advancements include healthcare clouds that help the healthcare industry address the privacy requirements under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA); clouds that help retail and other business transactions comply with Payment Card Industry standards; and clouds that help the public sector comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act. The Mobile Majority Is Taking Charge According to Forrester, “A full 66 percent of employees now use two or more mobile devices for work”2 — and that has far-reaching implications. “Employees – and the customers they serve – have less and less separation between their work and private lives. Enterprises in 2013 must accommodate and prioritize this new demand for efficiency and productivity, and information technology departments will play a key role in meeting the growing appetite for professional mobility on a personal level,” Small said. As a result, companies will increasingly adopt cloud-based enterprise mobility strategies —creating “personal clouds” where employees can use enterprise applications to do their jobs more effectively. In addition, companies will be more proactive in tackling the challenges associated with dealing with the division of employees’ personal and professional lives, by using mobile-device management and private application storefronts to create a more secure, mobile work environment. Connected Machines Drive New Insights The “Internet of things” has arrived and it will continue to grow to meet specific industry requirements. According to a Gartner report, “In 2011, over 15 billion things on the Web with 50 billion+ intermittent connections will grow by 2020 to over 30 billion connected things, with over 200 billion with intermittent connections.” Machine-to-machine (M2M) connections now cover much more than smart energy delivery and smart cars. For example, elaborate networks of sensors with direct machine-to-machine connections now underpin connected health care and the first consumer-ready wave of automotive telematics. “Verizon’s acquisition of Hughes Telematics, Inc. will help fuel this evolution,” said Small. “In 2013, this dramatic growth will extend to retail, finance and manufacturing.” The ability to collect, store and analyze overwhelming volumes of data will define which enterprises extract the best insights and make the most agile decisions, to their competitive advantage. As a result, all enterprises – both business and government – will need to work with vendors having strong and global ecosystems. Networks will be smarter than you and invisible An intelligent fabric that connects everything and everyone will render underlying networks invisible to end users, even as overall IP traffic grows at a compound annual growth rate of 29 percent through 2016, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index. "Improvements in network reliability and resiliency, coupled with intelligent end points, serve as the foundation for connecting smart machines and smarter people,” Small said. “We will see a shift in 2013 to more dynamic networks, pervasive IP connections, and purpose-built networks that serve businesses, consumers and society. Security is the new arms race In 2013, security will move out of the specialist realm and become a mainstream IT must-have. Security breaches span access, infrastructure and apps. They happen on fixed and mobile networks. They impact physical, intellectual and financial capital. And the scope is global, according to the “Verizon 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report.” “We expect identity security to be a much more prevalent issue in 2013,” Small said. “Two-factor authentication is already gaining adherents, but it won’t be enough to counteract the increasing amount and intensity of criminal activity pursuing both intellectual property and financial gain.” Read More Read More ...
Worldwide PaaS revenue on pace to reach USD 1.2 billion in 2012, says Gartner Worldwide Platform as a Service (PaaS) revenue is on pace to reach USD 1.2 billion in 2012, up from USD 900 million in 2011, according to Gartner. The market will experience consistent growth with worldwide PaaS revenue totaling 1.5 billion in 2013, and growing to USD 2.9 billion in 2016. The category of PaaS includes suites of application infrastructure services, such as application platforms as a service (aPaaS) and integration platforms as a service (iPaaS); as well as specialist application infrastructure services, such as database platform as a service, business process management platform as a service, messaging as a service and other functional types of middleware offered as a cloud service. Users may subscribe to a cloud provider's PaaS or may buy a cloud-enabled application infrastructure product and build their own PaaS for private cloud (private PaaS) or public cloud consumption. "Of all the cloud technological aspects, infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) are the most mature and established from a competitive landscape perspective, while PaaS is the least evolved," said Fabrizio Biscotti, research director at Gartner. "For this reason, PaaS is where the battle between vendors and products is set to intensify the most. It comes as no surprise that the PaaS competitive landscape is still in flux, with traditional application infrastructure vendors facing competition from new large players moving into the market, and myriad specialized PaaS pure players cutting into their slice of profits." The largest segments within the PaaS market are cloud application platform services (aPaaS), accounting for 34.4 percent of total PaaS spending in 2012; cloud application life cycle management (ALM) services (almPaaS) at 12 percent; cloud BPM platform services (bpmPaaS) at 11.6 percent; and cloud integration services (iPaaS) at 11.4 percent. Gartner predicts that the potential spending in PaaS technologies is an average of USD 360 million per year from 2011 through 2016. More than 70 percent of PaaS functionality today can be referenced to an application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) capability, calling for AIM vendors to consider PaaS in their offerings or to have a strategy to address the needs of those clients looking at cloud for future deployments. Today, the largest AIM vendors have only marginal share of the PaaS market (lead by Microsoft and some IBM acquisitions), and this leaves the door open for more competitive landscape disruption over the next three years since many of the largest enterprise software vendors are on the cusp of entering the PaaS market with their own offerings. "The fundamental appeal of PaaS is the opportunity for ISVs (independent software vendors) and IT organizations to create new software solutions with minimal capital expense and without the hassle of provisioning and configuring the underlying infrastructure," said Yefim Natis, distinguished analyst at Gartner. "To many SMBs (small or midsize businesses), in addition, PaaS offers the chance to take advantage of some state of the art enabling technologies, they otherwise could not afford. Finally, the popularity of SaaS also drives adoption of PaaS for customization, extension and integration of the cloud-based applications." Despite ongoing economic uncertainties, mature economies, which are also the most mature IT markets, such as the U.S., Western Europe and Japan, are on the forefront of PaaS adoption. PaaS spending globally is relatively small, and it is almost entirely generated by the U.S., with 42 percent of the market, followed by Western Europe and Mature Asia/Pacific. All mature economies combined, account for almost 90 percent of worldwide PaaS spending. Emerging markets are currently only marginally investing in PaaS, but this trend is expected to change as PaaS matures as a technology and the vendor landscape consolidates around fewer mainstream players that have the capability to service wider geographies. "All software mega-vendors are strategically investing in the PaaS market despite the relatively modest projected market revenue," said Natis. "Application infrastructure, and in this case application infrastructure as a service (PaaS), has always played a central role in establishing the standards, architectures and best practices in enterprise software markets. The vendors expect their leadership in the PaaS market to translate to large and effective ecosystems of partners, developers and solutions. PaaS technologies are embedded in many other types of cloud services — all major opportunity channels. The direct revenue in the PaaS market grossly underestimates the importance of this part of the cloud architecture." Read More Read More ...
Worldwide enterprise IT spending forecast to grow 2.5 percent next year: Gartner Worldwide enterprise IT spending is forecast to total USD 2.679 trillion in 2013, a 2.5 percent increase of projected 2012 spending of USD 2.603 trillion, according to Gartner, Inc. Banking, communications, media and services (CMS) and manufacturing are expected to offer the largest volume of growth opportunities through 2016. "The global economic outlook has deteriorated in 2012, leading to scant overall growth in enterprise IT spending," said Kenneth Brant, Research Director at Gartner. "However, our third-quarter outlook points to more substantial growth in 2013, if significant fiscal crises are avoided in the U.S. and Europe, and in subsequent years. Most enterprises have already significantly cut discretionary IT spending growth over the past several years and, barring a global economic catastrophe and significant contraction of operations, they have little room to reduce IT spending further over the long run." Manufacturing and natural resources sector will lead the vertical markets with total spending expected to reach USD 478 billion in 2013, up 2.3 percent from USD 467 billion in 2012. Manufacturers typically plan and manage a significant portion of their IT costs in expectation of changes in their sales. Additionally, manufacturers worldwide have been steadily reducing their IT purchases as a percentage of their sales since the recession of 2008. The manufacturing industry's IT buying center has adopted tighter IT cost controls amid a myriad of mixed market signals. However, IT spending rates are expected will bottom out in 2013 and will be resilient over the long run, as business confidence is restored and the value proposition of a nexus of new technology forces — social, mobile, big data and cloud — is increasingly championed by senior leaders. The banking and securities sector will have strong growth in 2013 and is expected to reach USD 460 billion in 2013, up 3.5 percent from USD 445 billion in 2012. Banking and securities is an IT-intensive industry, spending approximately three times as much on IT as a percentage of revenue than the average of all industries. This trend is expected to continue due to a significant amount of IT required to run activities such as lending, payments, trading and risk management. The CMS sector is forecast to grow 3 percent in 2013 to USD 426 billion, up from USD 414 billion in 2012. Firms in the CMS sectors will typically spend approximately 5 percent of their revenue on IT on average over a five-year period, well above the median for all industries. "Several subsectors within CMS are heavily IT-intensive. Professional and IT services firms, communications service providers, software and Internet services, and media companies invest considerably in IT across hardware, software, IT services, internal services and telecommunications," Brant said. "With demands for a secure Internet connected backbone and faster wireless data services, coupled with the pervasiveness of social media and video, these industries will need to continue to invest in IT." In the short term, transportation and insurance will also be high-growth sectors with both reaching more than 4 percent growth in 2013. IT spending in the transportation sector is expected to total USD 126 billion in 2013, up from USD 121 billion in 2012. IT spending in insurance will reach USD 187 billion in 2013, up from USD 179 billion in 2012. In 2012, government IT spending is forecast to decline 2 percent and the decline is expected to continue through 2013. In 2013, government IT spending is forecast to total USD 445 billion, down from USD 447 billion in 2012. "Austerity measures and budgetary reductions have affected government spending worldwide as measured by the reconciliation of government budget proposals across the U.S. and Europe," said Brant. "However, in some respects, IT budgets are being "decoupled" from the overall operating pressures facing governments. At the same time, government organizations recognize that new technology investments may help reduce the cost of service delivery, improve operational efficiency or reduce future expenditure. Consequently, government IT spending intensity is beginning to diverge from traditional operational spending trends." Large industry market operating under fiscal pressure, such as government, can also provide market opportunities as IT departments must strive to modernize and increase service levels without increasing resources. The need for greater efficiency and productivity gains in industries operating under severe fiscal constraints can also create opportunities for disruptive IT innovation and for the displacement of incumbent IT market leaders. Read More Read More ...
It’s time to value information that’s driving thirst for data analytics, says EMC CTO EMC has chalked out its technology roadmap for 2013 with focus on cloud computing and big data analytics built on a pillar of trust. “All our product roadmap and innovation are targeted at these three pillars,” Jeff Nick, Senior VP and CTO, EMC told InformationWeek. Nick said that though cloud is over hyped, there is a fundamental disruption and shift occurring in the IT industry with the cloud. “It has taken a long time to get us here but it’s finally here and enterprises and public Internet companies today are adopting cloud capabilities ranging from private, public and hybrid cloud.” Given its huge benefit potential, EMC has also internally adopted cloud infrastructure and virtualization for hosting internal apps as well as outsourcing certain apps to public cloud providers. The company claims to have achieved USD 112 million and USD 66 million of CAPEX savings and OPEX savings respectively with their private cloud journey. Commenting on their second area of focus – big data – Nick said that while cloud is changing IT, big fast data is really changing the world. “It’s time to value information that is really driving the thirst for data analytics and the ultimate value proposition is to go for cloud data analytics. More and more data is being generated outside the data center firewall which is more complex.” Disruptive technologies like cloud and big data require constant innovation and EMC has been investing significantly on R&D to stay ahead of the curve. EMC has spent USD 10.5 billion on R&D between 2003 and 2010 and this figure should only rise over the next eight years, according to EMC Chairman and CEO Joe Tucci. EMC spends 12 percent of its revenue on R&D, which is significant in the IT industry. EMC has thousands of technical R&D employees around the globe and its India center of excellence (COE) is the largest R&D hub outside of its Boston headquarters. EMC India has over 3,500 employees most of which are involved in R&D related activities. “Almost every global product and service has contribution from India and it is what we call a microcosm of EMC global,” said Niranjan Thirumale, CTO, India COE. In tune with its focus on innovation and R&D, EMC recently concluded its sixth Innovation Conference aimed at promoting innovative thinking across EMC’s presence globally and incubating the top ideas to the next stage in the marketplace. Over 2,200 ideas were submitted into this year's Innovation Showcase from across 28 countries, of which, 401 ideas were contributed by EMC’s India COE. Read More Read More ...
Amazon Web Services now available from data centers in Australia Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, today announced the launch of its new Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region, the ninth Region in which the company has deployed its global cloud computing platform. Australia-based businesses and global companies with customers in Australia can now leverage the Amazon Web Services (AWS) technology infrastructure platform to build their businesses and run their applications in the Cloud. The newly launched Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region is the third Region in Asia Pacific for AWS (joining the Singapore and Tokyo Regions), and is now available for any business or software developer to get started using today at http://aws.amazon.com. This new Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region consists of two separate Availability Zones at launch. Availability Zones refer to data centers in separate distinct locations within a single Region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other Availability Zones, with independent power, cooling, physical security, and are connected via a low latency network. AWS customers focused on running high availability applications can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even higher fault-tolerance. Prior to the launch of AWS in early 2006, businesses were incurring massive capital expenses from building their own infrastructure or from contracting with a vendor for a fixed amount of data center capacity that they might or might not use. This choice meant either paying for wasted capacity or having to worry that the amount of capacity they forecasted was insufficient to keep pace with their growth. Many organizations spent time and money managing their own data center or a co-location facility, which meant time not spent on growing their actual business or differentiating their offering for customers. Over the past 6.5 years, AWS has changed the way organizations acquire technology infrastructure — incur no up-front expenses or long-term commitments, turn capital expense into variable operating expense, scale quickly and seamlessly by adding or shedding resources at any time, get to market much more quickly with new and critical ideas, and free up scarce engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy lifting of running backend infrastructure—all without sacrificing operational performance, reliability or security. “Over 10,000 customers in Australia and New Zealand are already using AWS, and this is before opening our new AWS Region in Australia today,” said Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, Amazon Web Services. “With the ability to achieve single-digit millisecond latency to end users in Sydney, store data locally in Australia, and get to market more quickly and inexpensively by using AWS’s unmatched infrastructure technology platform, we expect the launch of AWS’s Sydney Region to further increase the amount of Australian and New Zealand customers leveraging AWS.“ Among the more than 10,000 customers in Australia and New Zealand that are already using AWS include the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, City of Melbourne, REA Group Limited, MYOB, Hooroo, RedBalloon, Brandscreen, Viocorp, Think: Education Group, Halfbrick, Freelancer, 99designs, Domayne, Joyce Mayne, Cotton On, Snapper, PredictWind and Harvey Norman. In addition to a broad base of customers, AWS has a vibrant partner ecosystem in Australia and New Zealand that has built innovative solutions and services on AWS. Some of the local Systems Integrators include: ASG, Bulletproof Networks, Fronde, Industrie IT, The Frame Group, Melbourne IT, SMS IT and Sourced Group. Among the many local Independent Software Vendors are: Aviarc, Deputy.com, Objective Corporation, Sirca and Technology One. Together with other AWS Partner Network members such as Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte, ESRI, RightScale, Wipro and Cognizant, these companies have made or will soon be making their services available on AWS in the new Sydney Region, making it even easier for organizations to take full advantage of the AWS Cloud. For the full list of the members of the AWS Partner Network, please refer to: https://aws.amazon.com/solution-providers. Developers and businesses can access AWS services from the new Sydney Region beginning today, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon DynamoDB, AWS CloudFront, Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS Direct Connect, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Storage Gateway, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Route 53, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, VM Import and VM Export. More details on each of these services and specific pricing for each is available at http://aws.amazon.com/products/ Amazon has already established a subsidiary in Australia with offices across Sydney, Melbourne and Perth to support enterprises, government agencies, academic institutions, small-to-mid size companies, start-ups and developers on their use of AWS. Amazon will also be adding a local technical support operation in Australia early next year, as part of the AWS global network of support center operations that supports customers around the world. The Australian support operations will help customers of all sizes and technical abilities to successfully utilize the products and features provided by AWS. AWS Support is a one-on-one, fast-response support channel that is staffed 24x7x365 with experienced and technical support engineers. For more details on the multiple tiers of services within AWS Support, Read More Read More ...
EMC launches cloud computing and Big Data analytics courses in India EMC Corporation announced professional training and certification courses to help Indian businesses address skill transformation and the looming cloud computing and data science talent gap. EMC will offer cloud computing, data science and Big Data analytics training and certification programs with an "open" curriculum to help develop professionals who can extract more value and insight for competitive advantage from the new expanse of data that businesses create and capture. In addition, the company aims to train over 30,000 engineering students in the first year itself as part of its EAA program. The new data science and Big Data analytics training and certification would help build a foundation for data analytics with a focus on the opportunities and challenges presented by Big Data, as per the company’s media release. The new cloud infrastructure and services associate-level training and certification will provide a foundation of technical principles and concepts to enable all IT professionals who will be required to collaboratively make informed business and technical decisions on migration to the cloud. The expert-level Cloud Architect IT-as-a-Service training and certification will help IT professionals – cloud architects, designers and consultants – evolve virtualized infrastructures into cloud-based, IT-as-a-Service environments that fully realize the agility and cost efficiencies that cloud computing offers. According to Rajesh Janey, President, EMC India & SAARC “In the emerging digital era, individual need and sentiment has become more prevalent thanks to the proliferation of social and other online networks. Businesses and Government have the opportunity to understand this on a mass scale in real time and take necessary steps that will transform services and service delivery forever. While India has the necessary technical manpower, it is important to skill them in these new areas in order to leverage the power of analytics and deliver benefits. Our new courses will address that gap and provide industry certification and skills development in the areas of cloud computing and Big Data analytics.” In addition to customers and partners, EMC will offer these courses to their university partners through its EMC Academic Alliance (EAA) program, an EMC initiative that aims to collaborate with the leading educational institutions around the world to address the emerging knowledge gap in the areas of cloud computing and data science and Big Data analytics. EMC is offering flexible learning options by providing participants the choice to learn at their own pace via Video-instructor-led Training (VILT) or classroom instructor-led courses. Read More Read More ...
Big Data top reason to deploy PaaS: IBM study In a world awash in data, where complexity is on the rise and the pace of innovation has never been faster, the need to streamline new application development is driving demand for a relatively new form of cloud computing known as Platform as a Service (PaaS), according to a study by IBM Center for Applied Insights. Looking at opportunity, IBM has announced a PaaS offering to help organizations build and deploy their own software applications quickly and effectively by renting IBM's PaaS cloud computing platform of integrated middleware, monitoring, networks, servers and storage. IBM’s survey of more than 1,500 IT decision makers from 18 countries found that forward looking IT leaders are blazing the trail with early adoption of PaaS for business advantage – citing Big Data as the #1 reason amongst several strategic initiatives they were targeting. The study also showed that nearly 20 percent of respondents are currently using PaaS, although more than half recognize the opportunity. Business and technology leaders are beginning to seek out this new type of cloud computing to keep computing costs low and to expedite delivery of new products and services. Unlike other cloud computing services, such as Infrastructure as a Service and Software as a Service, PaaS uniquely offers a foundation of common application services, tools and templates for businesses to rent and build their own powerful software applications quickly and deploy them into an automated environment. “Just as auto makers have used common platforms or chassis to manufacture their lines of cars more efficiently, PaaS allows organizations to standardize their IT platform and quickly introduce new competitive offerings," said Erich Clementi, Senior Vice President of IBM Global Technology Services. The study found that 49 percent of IT decision-makers see the strategic importance of PaaS as a way to drive innovation and improve the whole application lifecycle across the enterprise. They are now contemplating using PaaS as a pragmatic approach to future expansion. The IT decision-makers believe PaaS can drive greater differentiation and strategic impact for a business, by standardizing efforts for development, deployment, production and maintenance. Client Pioneers for PaaS The study identified a group of early adopting PaaS “Pioneers” (comprised 16 percent of the survey respondents) who saw the strategic benefits of PaaS as a way to innovate. The research showed the more strategic the benefit, the greater separation between the Pioneers and the rest of the respondents.
- Among Pioneers, 52 percent are driving towards application integration and better data management.
- The current and planned usage rate for Pioneers is three times higher for analytics than other respondents.
- Pioneers were almost twice as likely to identify pattern-related qualities, such as portable, standardized, and repeatable, as highly valuable compared with the rest of the respondents.
How technology is transforming government services Not long ago, government services were synonymous with piles of files, long queues, tardy processes, and endless wait to avail services. However, the use of emerging technologies to deliver public services has changed the notion associated with services provided by the government agencies. Today, many government offices have not only made their internal processes digital and efficient, but have also started converting tedious manual citizen-facing public processes into simple electronic formats, wherein the citizens are not even required to physically step into the office to avail a particular service. The government is increasingly investing in technology solutions to improve public service delivery and ensure transparent, timely and hassle-free delivery of citizen services. And the investments are driven mainly by the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP), which aims to draw public services closer to the citizens and the Right to Information Act (RTI) 2005, which mandates digitization of files and records, and use of workflow solutions for processes and file movements by public authorities. “We hear from various research analysts that total IT spend, including hardware, software and services, for government in 2012 could be around USD 5,000 million, spread across enterprise applications, industry-specific solutions, software packaged applications, ERP, CRM and associated hardware,” says Sitaram Venkat, Director Enterprise Solutions Business, Dell India. Agrees Atul Khatavkar, VP, IT Governance Risk Compliance, AGC Networks, “The expenditure on IT has become triple-fold in the past four years and we forecast an exponential rise further. This rapid growth in the domestic market is most likely to be driven by government’s focus on creating applications and IT infrastructure that is transparent, secure, and scalable and can help citizens to avail government services.” Some transformational IT projects taken by the government that have drastically improved the quality of citizen services include online filing of income tax, passport e-seva, land records digitization, etc. With e-seva Passport service, citizens are no longer required to wait in long queues; the process can be done online, which has reduced the time for procuring a passport, from months to days.
Top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013: Gartner Gartner has highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2013. These technologies will impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives. David Cearley, Vice President, Gartner says, “Technologies are emerging amidst a nexus of converging forces - social, mobile, cloud and information. Although these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own, together they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders.” The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013 include: Mobile Device Battles By 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common web access device worldwide and that by 2015 over 80 percent of the handsets sold in mature markets will be smartphones, according to Gartner. However, only 20 percent of those handsets are likely to be Windows phones. By 2015 media tablet shipments will reach around 50 percent of laptop shipments and Windows 8 will likely be in third place behind Google’s Android and Apple iOS operating systems. Consumerization will mean enterprises won't be able to force users to give up their iPads or prevent the use of Windows 8 to the extent consumers adopt consumer targeted Windows 8 devices. Enterprises will need to support a greater variety of form factors reducing the ability to standardize PC and tablet hardware. The implications for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is just one of a variety of environments IT will need to support. Mobile Applications and HTML5 The market for tools to create consumer and enterprise facing apps is complex with well over 100 potential tools vendors. Currently, Gartner separates mobile development tools into several categories. For the next few years, no single tool will be optimal for all types of mobile application so expect to employ several. Six mobile architectures – native, special, hybrid, HTML 5, Message and No Client will remain popular. However, there will be a long term shift away from native apps to Web apps as HTML5 becomes more capable. Nevertheless, native apps won't disappear, and will always offer the best user experiences and most sophisticated features. Developers will also need to develop new design skills to deliver touch-optimized mobile applications that operate across a range of devices in a coordinated fashion. Personal Cloud The personal cloud will gradually replace the PC as the location where individuals keep their personal content, access their services and personal preferences and center their digital lives. It will be the glue that connects the web of devices they choose to use during different aspects of their daily lives. The personal cloud will entail the unique collection of services, Web destinations and connectivity that will become the home of their computing and communication activities. Users will see it as a portable, always-available place where they go for all their digital needs. In this world no one platform, form factor, technology or vendor will dominate and managed diversity and mobile device management will be an imperative. The personal cloud shifts the focus from the client device to cloud-based services delivered across devices. Enterprise App Stores Enterprises face a complex app store future as some vendors will limit their stores to specific devices and types of apps forcing the enterprise to deal with multiple stores, multiple payment processes and multiple sets of licensing terms. By 2014, many organizations will deliver mobile applications to workers through private application stores, says Gartner. With enterprise app stores the role of IT shifts from that of a centralized planner to a market manager providing governance and brokerage services to users and potentially an ecosystem to support apptrepreneurs. The Internet of Things The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that describes how the Internet will expand as physical items such as consumer devices and physical assets are connected to the Internet. Key elements of the IoT which are being embedded in a variety of mobile devices include embedded sensors, image recognition technologies and NFC payment. As a result, mobile no longer refers only to use of cellular handsets or tablets. Cellular technology is being embedded in many new types of devices including pharmaceutical containers and automobiles. Smartphones and other intelligent devices don't just use the cellular network, they communicate via NFC, Bluetooth, LE and Wi-Fi to a wide range of devices and peripherals, such as wristwatch displays, healthcare sensors, smart posters, and home entertainment systems. The IoT will enable a wide range of new applications and services while raising many new challenges. Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing As staffs have been asked to do more with less, IT departments must play multiple roles in coordinating IT-related activities, and cloud computing is now pushing that change to another level. A recently conducted Gartner IT services survey revealed that the internal cloud services brokerage (CSB) role is emerging as IT organizations realize that they have a responsibility to help improve the provisioning and consumption of inherently distributed, heterogeneous and often complex cloud services for their internal users and external business partners. The internal CSB role represents a means for the IT organization to retain and build influence inside its organization and to become a value center in the face of challenging new requirements relative to increasing adoption of cloud as an approach to IT consumption. Strategic Big Data Big Data is moving from a focus on individual projects to an influence on enterprises’ strategic information architecture. Dealing with data volume, variety, velocity and complexity is forcing changes to many traditional approaches. This realization is leading organizations to abandon the concept of a single enterprise data warehouse containing all information needed for decisions. Instead they are moving towards multiple systems, including content management, data warehouses, data marts and specialized file systems tied together with data services and metadata, which will become the "logical" enterprise data warehouse. Actionable Analytics Analytics is increasingly delivered to users at the point of action and in context. With the improvement of performance and costs, IT leaders can afford to perform analytics and simulation for every action taken in the business. The mobile client linked to cloud-based analytic engines and big data repositories potentially enables use of optimization and simulation everywhere and every time. This new step provides simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. In Memory Computing In memory computing (IMC) can also provide transformational opportunities. The execution of certain-types of hours-long batch processes can be squeezed into minutes or even seconds allowing these processes to be provided in the form of real-time or near real-time services that can be delivered to internal or external users in the form of cloud services. Millions of events can be scanned in a matter of a few tens of millisecond to detect correlations and patterns pointing at emerging opportunities and threats "as things happen." The possibility of concurrently running transactional and analytical applications against the same dataset opens unexplored possibilities for business innovation. Numerous vendors will deliver in-memory-based solutions over the next two years driving this approach into mainstream use. Integrated Ecosystems The market is undergoing a shift to more integrated systems and ecosystems and away from loosely coupled heterogeneous approaches. Driving this trend is the user desire for lower cost, simplicity, and more assured security. Driving the trend for vendors the ability to have more control of the solution stack and obtain greater margin in the sale as well as offer a complete solution stack in a controlled environment, but without the need to provide any actual hardware. The trend is manifested in three levels. Appliances combine hardware and software and software and services are packaged to address and infrastructure or application workload. Cloud-based marketplaces and brokerages facilitate purchase, consumption and/or use of capabilities from multiple vendors and may provide a foundation for ISV development and application runtime. In the mobile world, vendors including Apple, Google and Microsoft drive varying degrees of control across and end-to-end ecosystem extending the client through the apps. Read More Read More ...
Cisco, Citrix extend partnership into networking, cloud and mobility Cisco and Citrix announced a significant expansion of their desktop virtualization partnership into three strategic areas: cloud networking, cloud orchestration, and mobile workstyles. The two companies believe the IT industry is on the verge of the next major architectural transition: the mobile-cloud era. To help enterprise and service provider customers capture the market transition and transform their business models, Cisco and Citrix will collaborate to unify best-of-breed technologies into innovative solutions for the mobile-cloud era. The expanded partnership will include a significant investment in people and resources to drive technology innovation, solution integration and validation, customer support, and joint go-to-market investment on a global basis. As part of the strategy, Cisco and Citrix intend to jointly integrate the Citrix NetScaler application delivery controller (ADC) to seamlessly coexist with other Cisco network and security services, such as Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) and Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA). The companies also intend to integrate Cisco Nexus 1000V with Citrix XenServer to enable enterprise and service provider customers to build clouds based in part on key open source technology. As per the company’s media release, Cisco will continue to fully support existing customers of its Application Control Engine (ACE) product line and will recommend Citrix NetScaler as an alternative to customers who want to deploy a next-generation ADC. "The Nexus of converging forces of social, mobile, cloud and information is dramatically changing data center architectures and how services are delivered. The next generation network has to incorporate best-in-class application delivery controller (ADC) capabilities, integrated into a services architecture that is orchestrated at cloud-scale,” said Joe Skorupa, Vice President, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner. The two companies intend to develop an integrated cloud solution for enterprise and service provider deployments based on the companies' best-in-class portfolios. This will include the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), Cisco Nexus Series switching, and Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) components, as well as Citrix's cloud orchestration solution — Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack. Padmasree Warrior, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer, Cisco, said, "As IT enters the mobile-cloud era, IT providers need to be more innovative about addressing customers' fast changing needs. Over the past two years, Cisco and Citrix have collaborated to deliver significant innovation into the market. Now we are excited to accelerate our partnership into cloud, networking and mobility." The companies also intend to develop "mobile workstyle and BYOD" solutions that give mobile users a unified way to securely access business apps, data, voice and collaboration services from any device, anywhere. The joint solution, when developed, will link Cisco collaboration technology, including tighter integration of the Cisco Jabber client, with the Citrix Receiver self-service mobile access client and Citrix CloudGateway for enterprise mobility management. The joint solution will also include Citrix ShareFile for secure, cloud-based "follow-me data" services across any mix of user devices. To enable an optimized, monitored and managed rich-media experience for accessing virtual Windows apps and desktops from mobile devices, Citrix will incorporate Cisco MediaNet into Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp. To secure mobile workers, Cisco and Citrix will link Citrix Receiver, Citrix Access Gateway, and CloudGateway with the Cisco secure access portfolio including Cisco AnyConnect, Cisco ASA, and the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE). Read More Read More ...
SAP launches cloud platform built on Hana SAP jumped into the cloud platform-as-a-service market on Tuesday by launching the first in a series of planned cloud-based application services and database services. Announced at the vendor's annual TechEd conference in Las Vegas, the new services make SAP a more comprehensive cloud player and open up new points of competition with the likes of Oracle and Salesforce.com. Uniting both services is the fact that they run on the Hana in-memory database, creating what SAP chief technology officer Vishal Sikka described as a "RAM-optimized platform" that will set the SAP cloud apart from the competition. In the case of Oracle, Sikka said in-memory-based cloud services would enable companies to reimagine and transform cloud-based apps, not just speed them up--a reference to Oracle's recent Open World claims about performance gains with its latest engineered systems. With its announcements, SAP is now challenging Salesforce.com's Heroku unit with a new Java-based cloud development platform called SAP NetWeaver Cloud. The platform runs on Hana, and its in-memory performance ensures that it won't require the "resource governors" that Sikka said Salesforce.com routinely imposes on customers so it can keep up with cloud computing demands. SAP's new platform is called the SAP Hana Cloud, and it includes both AppServices and DBServices. On the database side the vendor introduced SAP Hana One, a new deployment option on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Hana One is aimed at companies that want to experiment with Hana, stage proof-of-concept projects, or put small-scale in-memory applications in the cloud. Hana One can handle up to 32 gigabytes of end-user data and costs 99 cents per hour for SAP's software and another USD 2.50 per hour for AWS EC2 compute capacity, for a total cost of USD 3.49 per hour. SAP had previously offered free Hana developer licenses of Hana on AWS, but data loads were limited to megabytes rather than gigabytes. "At that price point it's pretty hard not to be interested," said Hana customer Adam Recktenwald, enterprise architect at the University of Kentucky, in an interview with InformationWeek. "It would have made it easier to justify an on-premises deployment." The University of Kentucky completed a three-month on-premises deployment of Hana in March and then spent two months performing its first proof-of-concept (POC) project. Had Hana One been available at the time, the school could have saved weeks if not months on the POC effort. Looking beyond Hana One, SAP plans to provide more database-as-a-service options, but Sikka said those services won't be detailed until November. Leveraging the processing power of Hana's in-memory technology, SAP's planned database services will also include certain application-level services, Sikka said, including user management, session management, user authentication, http Web services, and language runtimes. "The separation of the application server and the database server into different tiers is a construct of inefficient [legacy] infrastructure," Sikka told InformationWeek in a one-on-one interview. That argument echoes what SAP has described as the "artificial" separation of today's analytical and transactional environments, and it's another example of the simplification SAP is promising by consolidating layers of obsolete infrastructure with Hana processing power. On the application services side, SAP announced the general availability of SAP NetWeaver Cloud, which is a Java-based development platform as a service for building, deploying, and managing applications in the cloud. Support for Eclipse and industry standard tools will also support the use of Ruby, PHP, and other programming models, according to SAP. More than just NetWeaver pushed into the cloud, the platform runs on Hana and is licensed on an open source model, SAP said. Given the familiarity of NetWeaver to SAP developers, applications built on NetWeaver Cloud are most likely to be integrated with SAP's on-premises or cloud-based applications, or used as extensions to them. But the platform is also suitable for building entirely new, stand-alone applications from scratch, according to SAP. NetWeaver cloud includes integration services, portal services, and mobile services, as well as federated ID management and single-sign-on capabilities. To make the platform more attractive to cloud developers, SAP has introduced free, unlimited developer licenses that eliminate 90-day usage restrictions. Customer adoption will obviously go a long way toward validating SAP's budding cloud platform. But what would also help would be adoption by third-party software vendors as well as systems integrators and resellers. That would prove the SAP Hana Cloud to be a more open universe than Oracle's go-it-alone, all-red-stack Oracle Cloud. It might also begin to challenge the strength of Salesforce.com's AppExchange and vast cloud community. What might make it harder for SAP to shine as a cloud platform provider (and as a database supplier) is the competitive stakes in applications, business intelligence, and analytics. But SAP executives say that shouldn't be an obstacle. "We're totally open to the ecosystem, and if somebody who might compete with us in other arenas wants to use our database or services, we would have no problem with that," said SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott during a brief question-and-answer session at TechEd. Indeed, an independent embrace of Hana would validate either customer demand or the superiority of SAP's in-memory technology, and that would bolster the company's database and cloud ambitions. Read More Read More ...
GAVS Technologies unifies collaboration in the cloud Microsoft recently announced that GAVS Technologies, unified its communication infrastructure and enhanced productivity by choosing Microsoft Office 365 post a comprehensive evaluation process including Open source & Google Apps. More than 700 users are now using Office 365, and the company is planning for a more extensive migration by increasing the number of users over time. Microsoft’s partner Veeras Infotek assisted the firm in the quick deployment. “The limited access to unified communication, lack of collaboration platform for sharing documents and previous versions of server platforms stood as major road-blocks in the path to bolster productivity, information-sharing and reduction of IT costs,” said Sumit Ganguli, President of GAVS Technologies. “Hence, to keep up with the rapid growth of our businesses and cater to the increasing demand from employees for communication access virtually anytime, anywhere, we sought a compelling cloud solution that would enable us to migrate to the cloud on our own terms.” GAVS Technologies with its global footprint in America, Europe, Middle and Far East has its employees in many different time zones. The company has expanded and diversified its business and such growth brings with it the challenge of ensuring reliable, efficient communication and collaboration among increasing numbers of employees in more dispersed locations. Office 365 has given GAVS Technologies a single unified platform for email, instant messaging, collaboration and unified communications. Employees can access virtually anytime, anywhere, and on almost any device, meeting the increased demand for speedier and tighter collaboration across geographies. “Overall, we are very satisfied with the stable performance of Office 365 and have been exploring a more extensive deployment of Office 365,” said Sumit. “We are leveraging productivity in the cloud through Office 365 to achieve new levels of collaboration both internally and externally.” “What’s inspiring about the plans GAVS Technologies has for Office 365 is it really illustrates the power of the cloud by giving its employees a collaborative environment, which would further help to build competitive advantages for the business. Microsoft has given enough reasons to GAVS Technologies to choose Office 365 over Google Apps, as Office 365 is a true productivity suite designed from the ground up to meet business requirements for security, privacy, reliability and manageability,” said Ramkumar Pichai, General Manager - Microsoft Office Division, Microsoft India. Read More Read More ...
Salesforce.com seeks foothold throughout the enterprise Salesforce.com is not trying to replace every application in the enterprise with one of its own. On the other hand, don't be surprised to one day find many enterprise applications turn to a Salesforce.com clearinghouse to get identity management, mobile, and social networking capabilities. What was clear at Dreamforce, the big Salesforce.com show in San Francisco this week, is that Salesforce, at least this year, will be satisfied if its core services and its Force.com platform achieve that much. Doing so would mean a Salesforce.com account would no longer be reserved for the representatives of marketing and sales departments at a company. Many employees, including users of SAP, Oracle PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, or E-Business applications, or even custom, in-house applications, would have their identity and access privileges granted by the Salesforce system. Salesforce might end up in that position because social networking is becoming a component that cuts across a broad swath of applications, from human resources to manufacturing to CRM, judging by Dreamforce guest speakers this week from GE, Wells Fargo, Rossignol, Kimberley-Clark, Comcast, Macy's, and Nissan. What's more, Salesforce co-founder and senior VP for technology Parker Harris demonstrated the new Identity service Thursday afternoon to an audience of 2,000 attending his Salesforce Platform keynote. Through Identity, end users may access a set of back office applications or mobile applications through a single sign-on into a Salesforce account. Identity is a major addition to Saleforce's core platform. Single sign-on is a longstanding but elusive goal at many companies, which end up with diverse applications, each requiring a separate login. If they can get single sign-on through the Salesforce cloud, it becomes a possible channel for adding users to the Salesforce application set. Salesforce's Identity service is a federated identity management system. It's capable of not simply contacting different identity management systems but uploading their contents on individuals into a single, central identity system. "We don't just use other directories. We build a new, central identity management directory," said Andrew Leigh, director of Salesforce Platform, in an interview following Harris' keynote. The Identity service imports identities from any LDAP directory, Microsoft Active Directory, or any other standards-based directory service and then serves as a central clearinghouse for a broad set of applications, he said. In addition, single sign-on that provides access to both back-office and mobile applications would appeal to many white-collar workers who change workspaces over the course of the day. While Salesforce has sought to expand its reach beyond salesforce automation to marketing and human resources, Identity gives IT managers a reason to adopt a Salesforce service as a solution to the single sign-on problem, and have many different types of white-collar workers use a Salesforce account to gain access to enterprise applications. The Identity service is based on SAML (security assertion markup language) 2.0, a language produced by the OASIS standards group. Another broadening role for Salesforce in the enterprise is through its previously announced Touch platform. Touch is aimed at providing user access to standard applications through mobile devices. It was demonstrated supplying Service Cloud customer relationship services to a Nissan support desk representative named Sam. David Mingle, senior director of customer loyalty at Nissan, illustrated during a keynote on the Service Cloud how Sam could learn from social media that a driver of a Nissan all-electric Leaf vehicle was looking for a way to repair a cracked windshield. Sam would identify a Nissan dealer in the driver's neighborhood, then contact the driver to ask if he can make an appointment for the repair. While doing so, he would note that the driver is due for a 10,000 mile tire rotation and, by the way, did she wish to renew her lease on the car, which expires in 62 days, while at the dealership? The scenario demonstrated future capabilities, because Touch doesn't yet connect Salesforce applications to the iPhone, cited in this case as the driver's handheld device. But it does work with the Apple iPad, and is slated to work with Android and iPhone in the near future. The Canvas, a new service of the Force.com development platform, lets enterprise developers take an existing Web application and make it available through the Salesforce user interface, where Salesforce CRM application data and other Force.com services can be accessed. Developers may also use Canvas in developing custom Java or Ruby applications that need to access Force.com services, such as the collaborative Chatter service. Identity management, cross application connections, mobile application access--"you don't have to worry about any of those things. They're all in the (Force.com) platform," Parker told the group. Source: InformationWeek USA Read More Read More ...
OpenStack poised for cloud leadership 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 USD 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. An early impetus behind 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 USD 1.26 billion acquisition of Nicira, a startup 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 Aug. 28. 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, in an interview with InformationWeek. "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. (Attachmate acquired Novell, owner of SUSE Linux, in November 2010.) 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 USD 10,000, while an established company pays USD 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. Source: InformationWeek USA Read More Read More ...
Microsoft launches Windows Server 2012 to power Cloud OS Microsoft recently announced the general availability of Windows Server 2012 where Satya Nadella, President of Microsoft Server and Tools Business described how Windows Server 2012 is a cornerstone of the Cloud OS that provides customers with a modern platform for the world’s applications. “The operating system has always been the heartbeat of IT and is now undergoing a renaissance in the new world of continuous cloud services, connected devices and big data,” Nadella said. “Microsoft’s unique legacy in the most widely used operating systems, applications and cloud services positions us to deliver the Cloud OS, based on Windows Server and Windows Azure, helping customers achieve a datacenter without boundaries.” Microsoft built Windows Server 2012 from the cloud up, applying its experience operating global datacenters that rely on hundreds of thousands of servers to deliver more than 200 cloud services. Windows Server 2012 expands the definition of a server operating system, incorporating traditionally separate technologies, such as advanced storage, networking, virtualization and automation capabilities. In combination with Windows Azure and System Center, Windows Server 2012 can empower customers to manage and deliver applications and services across private, hosted and public clouds. Customers can use their existing skills and investments in systems management, application development, database, identity and virtualization to take advantage of Windows Server 2012 and realize the promise of cloud computing. Many enterprise customers are already seeing tremendous value in early deployments. A survey of 70 early adopter customers from across the globe revealed that they expect, on average, 52 percent reduction in downtime, 41 percent reduction in workload deployment time, and 15 hours of productivity time saved per year, per employee. 91 percent of the companies surveyed expect a reduction in server administration labor, and 88 percent expect reduction in network administration labor. ISGN, a global end-to-end technology, analytics and services provider to more than 400 US mortgage lenders, including 7 of the top 10, is using Windows Server 2012 to build their private cloud infrastructure. “We chose Windows Server 2012 and System Center as it offered best-in-class virtualization and integrated management capabilities“, said Kumaran Mudaliar, VP Information Technology at ISGN. “Designed as a modern platform for world’s applications, Windows Server 2012 changes the IT economics of storage for high availability and continuous services. It further empowers IT to provide users with flexible access to data and applications anywhere on any device with simplified management, security and control” commented Srikanth Karnakota, Director Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft. Read More Read More ...
Unilog gains competitive advantage with Microsoft Office 365 Unilog Content Solutions, a company that specializes in Big Data Analytics and Product Data Management for eCommerce, recently deployed Microsoft Office 365 across its offices in Bangalore, Mysore, and Philadelphia. Unilog’s hosted mail service was the primary pain point as it outgrew its existing solutions, resulting in significant downtimes, loss of mission critical e-mails and difficulty in maintaining a higher mailbox quota. These problems were directly affecting business performance. Hence, to improve reliability and communications while reducing costs, Unilog evaluated hosted solutions from Google and Microsoft but finally adopted Office 365. The company deployed Office 365 due to its ability to maintain a hybrid cloud/on-premises deployment and it fits the varying needs of businesses, providing rich features and functionality. The entire transition to Office 365 was completed in three days with the support of Microsoft Partner – Acropetal Technologies. Suchit Bachalli, Executive Vice President, Unilog Content Solutions, said, “With Office 365, we have experienced significant improvement in the reliability of our messaging system, document sharing, and communication capabilities while reducing IT costs and administration. Also, by reducing the time to react to a situation and take appropriate decisions, we are seen as proactive by our customers. This is very positive for the business. Office 365 clearly delivers far greater value than Google Apps at any price point.” Unilog has seen significant benefits since the time it has moved to the cloud with Office 365 – employee productivity has improved by 12 percent through instant messages, audio/video calling between PCs and online document sharing. The transition has enabled the company to reduce administration, maintenance, IT, and up-gradation costs, thus resulting in lower total cost of ownership. The company has experienced zero downtime, which results in increased reliability. “In today’s hypercompetitive marketplace, it has become increasingly important to empower people and teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences, be more productive, and respond quickly to change and opportunities. Unilog’s decision to implement Office 365 over Google Apps validates our approach to a robust and familiar desktop, browser and mobile clients for access virtually anywhere delivering real value,” said Ramkumar Pichai, General Manager - Microsoft Office Division, Microsoft India. Read More Read More ...
Infinite Computer Solutions introduces cloud-based offering Infinite Computer Solutions, a global provider of application management, infrastructure management, product engineering and mobility &messaging products and solutions, has launched a new cloud-based offering, Infinite Tech-Support as a Service (iTaaS). iTaaS automates, standardizes, transforms and consolidates enterprise IT Infrastructure Management and Operations across the global enterprise in line with ITIL standards, according to the company’s media release. iTaaS caters towards the changes that have occurred in enterprises due to consumerization of IT and rising trend of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in companies. Doug Fallon, Senior Vice President & Business Head, Infrastructure Management Services, Infinite Computer Solutions (India) Limited said, “BYOD business environments are challenging where only 36 percent of all devices and 48 percent of selected devices are supported in the enterprise or virtually. iTaaS will enable optimization in service delivery processes while closely managing key components of client’s IT portfolio and allowing lower operating costs.” iTaaS is easily adaptable to integrate various devices on the go, and it ensures that standardized support is available to the end users across various channels and medium. It supports multiple channels including voice, text, web and chat. iTaaS also ensures round the clock, global support across the enterprise and virtual locations. Read More Read More ...
Wipro Technologies joins Google Cloud platform partner program Wipro Technologies recently announced that it has joined the Google Cloud platform partner program as a services partner. Recognizing that almost every product or IT service will be either cloud resident or cloud attached, Wipro’s Integrated Cloud Solutions and R&D Services team is eager to leverage Google’s Cloud Platform for Wipro’s IT and R&D customers worldwide. “The Google Cloud Platform partner program enables us to help our clients develop new cloud-based solutions that drive their success in the IT and Product R&D by building on the power of the Google Cloud Platform,” said Dr Anurag Srivastava, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Wipro Global IT Business. “The Google Cloud Platform offers a broad set of application development, cloud storage, large scale computing, and Big Data capabilities that enable us to deliver on our promise of serving our customers with desired business variability and excellent user experience.” Google’s Cloud Platform products will enable customers to implement cloud app solutions such as mobile apps, social apps, business process apps, and websites, using Google App Engine and Google Cloud SQL. Customers can also implement cloud storage solutions, such as high-end backup and recovery, active archiving, global file sharing/collaboration, and primary SAN/NAS, using Google Cloud Storage. Wipro is looking at providing its customers large-scale computing solutions, such as batch processing, data processing and high performance computing using Google Compute Engine. In addition, Wipro will also provide Big Data solutions, such as interactive tools, trend detection and BI dashboards, using Google BigQuery and Google Prediction API. Read More Read More ...
Tata AIA Life Insurance deploys VMware vSphere for building cloud infrastructure VMware recently announced that Tata AIA Life Insurance Company has selected VMware virtualization and cloud infrastructure technology to help the company reduce capital and operating costs, and accelerate their journey to the cloud. Tata AIA Life Insurance Company Limited is one of India’s leading life insurance companies with pan-India presence. Tata AIA Life Insurance Company Limited has deployed VMware vSphere to virtualize the company’s IT infrastructure. The VMware deployment has helped Tata AIA Insurance Company Limited consolidate its IT infrastructure from more than 90 servers to only 10 servers, helping the company save in capital and operational expenditure. Tata AIA Insurance Company Limited has also invested in a disaster recovery solution to protect its IT infrastructure and data with VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager. “As one of India’s leading life insurance companies, our priority is to optimize our IT support services and invest those savings back in the business to offer our customers a better experience. After evaluating options available, we were confident that VMware could help us achieve these goals,” said Samrat Das, Chief Information Officer, Tata AIA Life Insurance Company. Indian life insurance companies that seek solutions to optimize their IT agility can differentiate themselves in a highly competitive market with innovative products and customer-centric service offerings so that they can increase their share of the Indian insurance pie. “The highly competitive life insurance market in India requires players to be agile and to be able to quickly respond to changing market dynamics, while saving costs and meeting business objectives,” said T. Srinivasan, managing director, VMware India & SAARC. Read More Read More ...
Staying competitive means moving to the cloud In December 2011, market researcher International Data Corporation (IDC) noted that spending on the IT industry's next dominant platform, built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies, is growing at about 18 percent per year and is expected to account for at least 80 percent of IT spending growth through 2020. That's a lot of money. It's compelling evidence that we are in the midst of a fundamental transformation, where information is becoming the primary raw material in organizations large and small and maximizing the value created from that information is the increasingly strategic role of IT. This creates enormous opportunities for companies to find and exploit new market niches that may not have even existed a few years ago. In some respects this isn't news, even if the cutting edge aspects of mobility, cloud, social, and big data are. The companies that grew up on the web have had IT technology at their core. Nearly as well known are examples from companies that design and manufacture high technology components. Or financial services firms that depend on the latest and greatest hardware and software to rapidly price and execute trades. These types of businesses are cutting edge on the “3rd Platform,” as IDC calls it, too—but that's what we've come to expect in these industries. What's most different today is that the cutting-edge IT story doesn't begin and end with such companies. Rather, it's nearly pervasive. In part, this is because access to advanced IT is no longer limited to companies with the budgets to buy and operate rooms full of servers. Startups can now routinely rent computing power by the hour at public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is arguably even more democratic. SaaS—essentially, hosted applications delivered over the Internet—is primarily for fairly standardized applications that are useful to many different types of organizations rather than something unique and differentiating. Nonetheless, SaaS means that even small firms have access to what's often the exact same software used by huge enterprises; they just pay the same per-user charges. This is important when you consider that, historically, small businesses were often disadvantaged by limited IT resources and skills to handle basic keep-the-lights-on tasks. Now, running the same email or customer relationship management system as larger competitors is as close as an Internet connection and a credit card. However, cutting-edge IT is also far more widespread than in the past for another key reason: technology pervades anything. Media today is digital media. The vast server farms at animation studios such as DreamWorks Animation are perhaps the most obvious example. And their computing needs have only grown as animation has shifted to 3D. But essentially all content is digitized in various forms. For example, sports clips are catalogued and indexed so that they can be retrieved at a moment's notice—whether for a highlights reel or a premium mobile offering, a huge monetization opportunity in any case. How about laundry? Now, that's low tech. Yet Mac-Gray Corporation redefined laundry room management. It introduced LaundryView, which allows students/residents to monitor activity in their specific laundry rooms so they can see whether a machine is free or their laundry is done. It's been visited by 5 million people and the company has added on-line payment and service dispatch systems. Agriculture is an industry that suggests pastoral images of tractors and rows of crops. Yet, seed producer Monsanto holds more than 15,000 patents for genetically altered seeds and other inventions. I could continue to offer examples both familiar and less so. However, the basic point is straightforward. Increasingly, information technology isn't something that is primarily important to a few industries and uses. Rather it's permeating just about every place, whether it's about creating new types of services, better connecting to customers, increasing efficiency, delivering better market intelligence, or creating better consumer experiences. For organizations building their own IT infrastructures, building an open and hybrid cloud can break down IT infrastructure silos and gives their developers and other consumers of IT services faster access to resources. This in turn lets them develop and deploy new business services more quickly—contributing to shorter time to revenue and more competitive offerings. However, as we've seen, cloud computing also helps organizations that historically have had little access to cutting-edge technology and lack the skills and scale for building out in-house infrastructure. Whether Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), or SaaS, cloud providers offer these smaller organizations a wide array of options to enhance their business with whatever sort of IT is the best fit. Organizations can choose to leverage the power of cloud computing in order to move their business forward. Or they they can cede their market to more nimble competitors, many of whom will be new entrants leveraging new ways and approaches to doing business enabled by IT. - Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen is Vice President & GM Asia Pacific & Japan at Red Hat Read More Read More ...
Microsoft Office 2013 built for social sharing Install the preview of Office 15, and you'll know something radical has changed the first time you click "save" on a new document. In the next version of Microsoft Office aimed at home users, the default location for saving a document is the cloud--Microsoft's SkyDrive service. In the next version for business, the default will be to save to SharePoint. Or maybe SkyDrive Pro, a version of the cloud storage service featuring more enterprise controls. Of course, you can still store files to your local machine, or change the settings to make that the default--but Microsoft wants to make that the last choice on the list. SkyDrive, SharePoint, and other web locations for storing your document all come first, because when it's stored on the web or your business network, it's easier to share. At some point, Microsoft's USD1.2 acquisition of Yammer will also factor into this picture, but with the deal not yet closed Microsoft offered no specifics on how Yammer will fit. One SharePoint engineer told me they were still figuring out the possibilities. Cloud and social collaboration features were central themes of Monday's press event unveiling the Office preview release, the beginning of an open beta test phase expected to last several months. Microsoft is also touting the touch screen functionality and consumerized user interface of the new Office, which it hopes will align with the Metro user interface design of Windows 8 to make Microsoft a player in the world of tablets currently dominated by the Apple iPad. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said this version of Office was designed to be "fast and fluid and touchable," so that people will find it a pleasure to use. Meanwhile, after years of lagging in social software functionality, SharePoint is delivering what appears to be a competitive enterprise social networking experience. The new SharePoint news feed handles threaded discussions and all the social features you'd expect, such as the ability to "like" a post, mention another user by typing the '@' symbol and getting a popup listing of contacts, typing '#' for suggested hashmark tags, and so on. You develop your feeds by following people, topics, tags, documents, or groups. SharePoint is gaining group collaboration functionality, which it never really had before. Since some of the main things you share on SharePoint are Office documents, the news feed also makes it easy to preview those documents inline--paging through a presentation without the need to open it in PowerPoint, for example. Office 15 will eventually come to market as Office 2013, for those who install it as traditional software, or as an update to the Office 365 subscription service. Microsoft still isn't saying when the software will be commercially available or at what price. But it led by emphasizing the consumer experience it wants to deliver for Moms organizing a PTA event or using online collaboration, or students doing online research and collaborating with their classmates. For the first time, Microsoft will be introducing a consumer edition of Office 365, a product originally targeted at small to midsize businesses. Where the business editions employ SharePoint for file sharing, the consumer editions substitute SkyDrive. Where business users working in Outlook can see presence indicators that allow them to kick off Lync voice, video, or instant messaging sessions with other employees, consumer edition users will be able to do the same with Skype contacts. For good measure, Microsoft is promising to throw in 60 minutes per month of free international calling to landlines in 40 countries and cell phones in 7 countries. As noted by the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is paying more attention to the threat posed by Google Apps, which includes a suite of web-based office productivity apps, and is working hard to show the value of combining cloud services with its traditional desktop software. Office 365 includes web-based document viewers and editors, which work much like the document editors in Google Apps, but they're positioned as alternatives for quick access rather than the primary mode of interaction. "For us in the Office division, the cloud is not the browser," P.J. Hough, vice president of Office Program Manager, said in a presentation on Office for the Enterprise. "We're using the cloud to deliver new experiences." This model is similar to Adobe's Creative Cloud, which is primarily a subscription-based means of distributing updates to the Creative Suite design products to users on-demand, with some web-based services for designers as the icing on top of the cake. However, although the main deployment mode of the Office products is as installed applications, Microsoft uses an "application streaming" technique to speed downloads and allow you to start working with an application almost immediately, by delivering the most important parts of the code first. The Office product family is taking another cue from the worlds of mobile, social, and cloud by introducing an apps market for each of its products. Because these apps are based on web standards--HTML5, JavaScript, OAuth, and REST, together with Office-specific APIs--the same apps can work in both web and desktop contexts. For example, Hough showed the same Outlook extension--one that shows LinkedIn contact records for the people you're emailing with--running in both Outlook Web Access and the desktop version. {pagebreak} The Office 365 offering for home users will include subscription-based pricing for the traditional Microsoft Office desktop apps (which in the Home Premium Preview include Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Access, and Publisher) with software updates delivered as they become available. The cloud services that accompany the software allow users to sign into Office 365 from multiple devices and have their documents and settings follow them from one to the next. This same concept is available in business editions, although these include products like Lync and SharePoint as part of the cloud package. One nice touch: Office 365 will greet you with a "welcome back" message, inviting you to pick up where you left off working, and taking you right back to the section of the document you were working on when you last signed off. Microsoft sees this as a way of accommodating a variety of scenarios where you start a document at work, then finish it at home, or start it on your PC and finish it on your tablet. Collaboration also becomes a more integral part of working in Office. For example, if you've been collaborating on a document with several other employees, Word will display presence information for your collaborators, allowing you to see if one or both would be available to answer a question--and if so, allow you to launch a Lync chat or a PC-to-PC call. Multiple tools in the suite now include a common "people card" pop-up screen that shows profile, contact, and presence information. Even the process of marking up a document with comments has become more social, supporting threaded discussions that can be displayed in the margin. "The improvement in the integration is really the key there," said Bryan Garcia, chief technology officer of Equifax, one of the customers who was on hand for the launch event. Having synchronous communication capabilities available from within a document, rather than having to switch to the Lync app to see who is online, will make communication flow more smoothly, he said. Meanwhile, Equifax is just starting to plan the introduction of enterprise social networking based on the improved social functionality of SharePoint. As a credit reporting firm operating in a regulated industry, Equifax has resisted the bring your own device trend in the workplace, ruling out devices like the iPad, Garcia said. That's why he is pleased to see Microsoft introducing a compelling tablet experience that includes Office. "An iPad for a consumer may be attractive, but what this allows me to do is say we can give the user a great usability experience and all the security and monitoring and controls we need can be there, too," Garcia said. He has been working with one of a Samsung tablet running Windows 8 and Office, which he believes delivers "an experience equal to or better than the iPad." As popular as Apple's tablet is, in an enterprise setting "if an iPad can't have the full Office experience and can't have Lync, then it really is a hampered device," he said. Douglas Besse, CIO of Creation Technologies, had a similar take. The new Office offers "seamless integration, going from app to app" in a way that "promises to improve productivity," Besse said. "I think the seamless nature of the interface is going to help us with training and support." Creation Technologies is a contract electronics manufacturer with operations in 14 locations around the world, so collaboration features like being able to see who is available for a quick chat or to carry on running discussions over SharePoint are valuable, Besse said. "We lose so much productivity because of timezone issues" and other coordination challenges, he said. Besse also sees in the newly improved Windows phones and tablets an opportunity to solve some "cross platform" challenges--potentially by making sure that more of those platforms are running Windows and Office. Microsoft also had several consumer and small business testers of the product on hand to tell their stories. As head of a non-profit that teaches children healthy living skills, Sajai Foundation CEO Melissa Hanson said she had experimented with using SkyDrive in the past but found it awkward. "Now because it's by default, you always go there," she said. That came in handy the other day when she was traveling and trying to work remotely with an employee putting together the foundation's newsletter. Because the document she needed was in SkyDrive, she was able to retrieve it and share it easily. The only thing she hasn't been able to do while the new Office was under wraps (and she was the only one in her organization with access) is really use it for more active collaboration. While she only has three employees, she also has board members who are all over the country. "This can be a way to link us all virtually and avoid flying them in," Hanson said. Source: The BrainYard Read More Read More ...
How a startup is seeking to disrupt the recruitment industry by using the cloud As a late entrant, how do you compete in a market that is already dominated by giants? As a small player with limited ability to capital, how do you scale up without any limits? Startup WinHire Technologies was grappling with these questions, as it rapidly scouted for solutions that could help the firm take advantage of technology and level the playing field with the giants. WinHire Technologies had a radically different idea. Instead of text-based resumes, the firm wanted to use videos and the reach of the Internet to simplify and improve the process of recruitment. “We wanted to leverage the power of the Internet and the popularity of videos to create the world’s first video social recruitment and networking website,” says Giri Devanur, CEO, WinHire Technologies. On the portal, a job-aspirant can upload his or her video profile, and increase his or her chance of getting hired, as a video can even highlight personality attributes. While this concept is simple to understand, executing this business model was a huge challenge. As the firm wanted to leverage videos, WinHire needed to invest heavily in the support technologies and infrastructure. However, being an emerging enterprise, the firm did not want to invest heavily in capital expenditure upfront. After evaluating potential technology options, the firm realized that the cloud was perfectly suited to its needs. Cloud power WinHire selected IBM’s IaaS solution to develop and test its portal. The offering helped WinHire avoid upfront capital expenditure on computing infrastructure. Using the pay-as-you-go IaaS model, WinHire could globally deploy its application much faster via automation and rapid provisioning to create the required competitive edge. The IBM IaaS solution provided WinHire rapid access to multi-tenant shared cloud computing infrastructure that could be scaled to the needs of the business. “Using the cloud, we could put together a globally scalable infrastructure, with a significant cost benefit ratio of 1:80. More importantly, it has helped us in getting our infrastructure up and ready in just 15 days compared to the traditional timeframe of 6-8 months,” opines Devanur.
SAP prepares to tap SMAC opportunity IT vendors have been closely monitoring business models and processes, and the way executives capture, store, analyze and apply business data. Software products are designed accordingly, strategies are aligned, billions of dollars are spent to acquire companies, and there are heavy investments in R&D. SAP, a maker of enterprise applications, has moved cautiously along the years, making a late move into areas like cloud and mobility. Unlike its competitors, who have been acquiring numerous companies of all sizes, most of SAP’s acquisitions in the mobility and cloud space were made in the last four-five years. And SAP has been picky about the companies it acquires — the major ones being Sybase (mobility), Business Objects (BI), SuccessFactors, and Ariba (cloud). Apart from this, SAP has strategic alliances with large vendors like Microsoft and smaller ones like NetBase. Now in its 40th year of operations, SAP has a huge base of ERP customers (190,000 customers worldwide including 4,900 in India). It also has a base of 2 million developers. SAP wants to move its customers from a “system of record” to a “system of engagement” so that they can do “business in the moment.” And its strategy to integrate its social, mobility, analytics, and cloud offerings is the key to achieving this objective. SAP has a leadership position in ERP, with a 47.20 percent share of the Indian ERP market (IDC). So when competitors like Ramco Systems and Salesforce.com came along and started offering SaaS-based enterprise software, it started thinking about cloud, and eventually brought out its Business ByDesign (on-demand) portfolio. Today, SAP has solutions for on-premise, on-demand (cloud) and on-device (mobility). In fact, SAP’s business is built on five pillars: cloud, mobility, database & technology, analytics, and core business applications. In the first 30 years it focussed only on core business applications. So, it has achieved a lot in the last 10 years. For this story, we report on SAP’s cloud, mobility, and analytics strategy (SMAC). Analytics, HANA and ERP SAP believes the combination of mobility and analytics will be the next killer app in the enterprise. That’s why it spent USD 5.8 billion to acquire Sybase in 2010. Core to its analytics strategy is HANA, an in-memory database appliance that processes records at incredible speed.
Public cloud yet to hit inflection point in India: Zinnov Bangalore-based research firm, Zinnov, today said the public cloud market has rapidly evolved in the last two years in India. With the current market at USD 160-192 million in CY11, public cloud in India is at a very nascent state and may not have hit the inflection point yet but the market indicates a future potential of reaching USD 685 million by CY14. There has been significant traction across the three forms of cloud – SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. The released study titled, “Public Cloud Opportunity in India,” reveals that the overall Indian market for cloud (both public and private) has grown steadily to reach USD 860- 912 million in CY11. Of the total pie, the study highlighted that the public cloud market comprises of 20-22 percent of the share, while the remaining 78-80 percent is accounted by the private cloud. SaaS market in India -- largely dominated by e-mail, collaboration tools, and CRM/ ERP -- currently stands at USD 123-143 million for CY11. The market has grown at a CAGR of 46 percent from USD 56-67 million in CY09 until CY11. The PaaS and IaaS markets in India, on the other hand, are rapidly growing, though from a small base. The PaaS market in India stands at USD 1.5-2.5 million in CY11, which has grown at a CAGR of 75 percent from USD 0.5-1.5 million in CY09. IaaS market in India has shown promising growth with a CAGR of 84 percent, growing from a market share of USD 11-14 million in CY09 to USD 38-47 million in CY11. “Public cloud market is expected to grow at 55 percent CAGR in the near future and will become a default choice for new IT investments, especially in the SMB segment. We will not be surprised, if the cloud takes up more than 20 percent of the total Indian IT spend in the next couple of years. This would also mean that there will be a significant demand in the job market for cloud computing-related skills,” said Praveen Bhadada, Director-Market Expansion, Zinnov. The study also highlighted that a number of trends are emerging in the Indian public cloud market. Some of them include: price sensitivity of the market; business model around long-term contracts; acceptance of online payment options; focus on offline models; focus on SMBs, clusters and target verticals; channel focus to scale in the market; and increasing relevance for customers. Read More Read More ...
Towards the data center without walls The data center is changing - again. Enterprises are evolving their data centers through consolidation, virtualization, data protection, and into cloud services. A key business driver for enterprises is the need to manage growth with lower costs by being more efficient. Moving expenses from less flexible capital expenses to on-demand operating expenses is now a new option for data center infrastructure based services. The data center is also changing for carriers and data center service providers. Services are continuing to evolve from static physical capacity co-location, to managed services and now to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), turning computing and storage into on-demand, pay-as-you-go services. There are over 7 million data centers located worldwide in small and medium size companies, large enterprises and service providers, ranging from closet size, to huge 500,000 plus square foot uber-sized facilities. As businesses move some of their data processing to the cloud, it stabilizes enterprise data center capacity growth while adding to cloud provider data center demand. For example in 2008, Animoto was one of the initial success stories for Amazon Web Services. Their Facebook application experienced such viral growth that 750,000 users signed up in three days. There was no possible way a startup company could install the sufficient data processing capability to meet this instant demand, but Amazon was able to scale cloud-based server capacity to meet the business growth. Since then the cloud use cases have continued to expand from consumer driven demand to enterprise and government driven demand offering on-demand access to elastic pooled resources. The evolution of cloud toward expanded enterprise IT utility services, and the service provider’s need to efficiently deliver cloud infrastructure services, drives the creation of the virtual data center architecture inter-connected with a cloud backbone network. Multiple provider and enterprise customer data centers are connected to enable workload orchestration, traffic generation and flow. The physical walls of individual data centers effectively are broken down to create a virtual data center capacity encompassing multiple physical ones – a ‘Data Center Without Walls’. We use the term “Data Center Without Walls” (DCWoW) to describe an architecture that creates a multi-data center, hybrid cloud environment, able to function as one virtual data center to address any magnitude of workload demand. A 'Data Center Without Walls' benefits both the cloud service provider or carrier and enterprise IT customers by creating seamless workflow movement and greater resource efficiencies. 'Data Center Without Walls' enables effective asset pooling among data centers to deliver resource efficiencies up to 33 percent for service providers , as well as increased resiliency and performance gains over isolated provider data center architectures. This new hybrid cloud architecture delivers improvements in enterprise economics helping IT to achieve the 25 percent reduction in IT services and hardware expenses promised from cloud adoption. In order to benefit from this operational efficiencies, data center providers will need to pay particular attention to inter and intra data center connectivity needs specifically in support of new cloud applications that have dependencies on network bandwidth, scalability, latency and security. The traditional approach to addressing these network needs has been through bulk network capacity additions onto the network, but this leads to inefficient utilization and higher costs. A more strategic approach is required to dynamically and intelligently adapt to the rapidly changing needs of cloud-based infrastructure services. Approaches such as a flatter switching based architecture, dynamically scalable bandwidth that offers lowest latency when possible, and a network hypervisor-driven architecture that responds to application demands where the network resources ultimately behaves in much the same way cloud compute processing power, memory and storage, and can be billed as such. As the 'Data Center Without Walls' tools continue to mature for workload orchestration, the distinction between the enterprise and cloud data centers will continue to blur. The data center of the future will be federated and intimately inter-connected with an intelligent network operating as the Central-Offices of the future. - Anup Changaroth is Director -Portfolio Marketing, Asia Pacific, Ciena Corporation. Read More Read More ...
HCL Infosystems wins cloud engagement with Narayana Hrudayalaya HCL Infosystems has been chosen as a strategic technology partner by Narayana Hrudayalaya (NH) Hospitals. The tie up is the result of a rigorous evaluation and a painstaking proof of concept exercise which took almost a year to come to fruition. HCL blu Enterprise Cloud’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution is being deployed across 22 NH hospitals and has been already rolled out in Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Jamshedpur and Jaipur. The other centers are in the process of being hooked up to the central system. The partnership has been signed for a period of 5 years. This unique implementation by HCL Infosystems is also the first of its kind in India where the Hospital Information Systems (HIS) application for a hospital is completely deployed on the cloud. The solution would reduce capital and operational expenditures for Narayana Hrudayalaya and will enable the hospital to provide faster access to healthcare for its patients such as facilitating faster patient registrations. The implementation will also enable hospital staff to quickly complete their administrative tasks thereby freeing their time to provide healthcare.The HCL IaaS includes components from Cisco, EMC, NetApp and VMware. Elaborating on the deployment, Harsh Chitale, CEO, HCL Infosystems, “We would like to thank Narayana Hrudayalaya for deciding to partner with us in their transformational journey. Cloud computing has come to define the way businesses function today and keeping in line with the present times we are committed to providing the best in class Enterprise Cloud Services. Our cloud solutions are highly customized as per the needs of organizations and focuses on addressing business needs of clients." On the occasion Dr. Devi Shetty, Founder, Narayana Hrudayalaya said, “With this deployment we look to maximize our efficiency and scale up our services. We are sure that our HIS on cloud will be a path breaking initiative in the Indian Healthcare Industry” HCL Infosystem’s IaaS solution would allow NH to provide and manage the infrastructure required to support its systems in the most flexible manner. It would cater to needs like virtual servers, cloud storage network infrastructure components, Cloud security stack and configuration services and also provide 24X7 support and system monitoring. The Cloud Solution for NH will be scalable and will ensure business continuity. Some of the successful cloud deployments by the firm includes deployments for organizations like IIM Bangalore, Continental Engines, Healthsprint, Piaggio, Family Welfare Department, Government of Tamil Nadu, Thiess India and Shell Lubricants. Read More Read More ...
How to define your cloud strategy? Cloud has redefined the way solutions are built across all facets of IT. Other than improving the business process efficiency and flexibility, Cloud also brings in a huge benefit to the environment. In one of the recent Carbon Disclosure Project Study (https://www.cdproject.net/Documents/Cloud-Computing-The-IT-Solution-for-the-21st-Century.pdf) it was found that by 2020, large US companies that use cloud computing can achieve annual energy savings of USD 12.3 billion and annual carbon reductions equivalent to 200 million barrels of oil – enough to power 5.7 million cards for one year. One of Intel's report has predicted that in the next 10 years the number of files that enterprises deal with will grow by 75x3.Therefore, there are more than enough reasons why companies are seriously considering cloud strategy. As you may have seen, cloud adoption has been one of the most trending topics for everyone - right from Enterprises to ISV to Individual. The rate of changes/innovation happening on cloud has left many wondering with multiple options but very little insight on how to decide the correct option. There is one level of strategic decision to be made on what type of cloud to adopt – Private or Public or Community or Hybrid. Each of the models has their own advantage and disadvantages, and therefore, it requires one to carefully analyze what will suit their business model in terms of security/policy compliance, risk threshold, business growth, etc. On the other hand there is also a technical strategy decision to be made on the cloud computing models – IaaS, PaaS or SaaS. Typical solution stack contains a lot of components ranging from networking, hardware, OS and Application. Let's look at each model in detail: IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) - This cloud model targets to address the components that belong in the hardware level. This constitutes of Networking, Storage, Server and Virtualization. A typical IaaS vendor will provide these components and take complete responsibility of managing these components. The best thing is these components are provided "as a Service" and therefore, the consumer can use as much as they want and pay only for what they are using. PaaS (Platform as a Service) - This cloud model is an extension of IaaS model, where it additionally provides OS, middleware and Runtime for executing an application/software. As you can see, IaaS stops with the hardware level ownership where as PaaS goes beyond that and takes full responsibility to provide the hardware as well as the environment (Platform) to design, develop and deploy(run) applications. SaaS (Software as a Service) - This cloud model abstracts all the components from the Consumer there by allowing them to just use the Software without worrying about any of the underlying technical details. As in the above cases, this model is also subscription based which means the Consumer has to pay as they use the software. Infact, there are several innovative subscription models that are available today. - Janakiraman Jayachandran is Head - SaaS & Cloud Practice Management, Aspire Systems. To know more about the various cloud strategy options and the framework to decide your strategy, join Janakiraman Jayachandran’s session on “How to Define Your Cloud Strategy?” on 24th May at the Cloud Connect conference in Bangalore. To know more details about the conference, visit www.cloudconnectevent.in Read More Read More ...
Cloud-Oriented Architecture and the Internet of Things Quick quiz for all your Cloud aficionados out there: what’s missing from the NIST definition of Cloud Computing? To make this challenge easy for you, here’s the definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Give up? What’s missing is any mention of data centers. Sure, today’s Clouds typically consist of resources in data centers, running one way or another on racks full of physical servers. But there’s nothing in the definition of Cloud that specifies anything about the physical location of Cloud resources. Look at the NIST definition again. If you’ve seen this definition before, you may notice a new word that NIST presumably added after their now-seminal definition entered the blogosphere: ubiquitous. I don’t know what fevered discussion led to the late inclusion of this word, but its addition is telling. After all, it doesn’t matter how many data centers you have, they will never be ubiquitous. But NIST in their wisdom never intended the resources in the definition of Cloud to be limited to data centers, or for the list of Cloud resources to be exhaustive, for that matter. We could add, say, mobile phones, automobiles, factory equipment, and the proverbial fridge to the list, and as long as we have the convenient, on demand network access as well as the automated provisioning and deprovisioning, then this entire “Internet of Things” is part of the Cloud. This globally ubiquitous interpretation of Cloud Computing should be especially exciting to architects, since it falls to them to understand all the technology resources at the disposal of the organization and how to address business challenges with such resources. From ZapThink’s perspective, the Internet of Things provides a grand stage for our ZapThink 2020 vision to play out. There are fundamental differences, after all, between data centers and the Internet of Things, which means that fundamental Cloud architecture principles must also transform to support this new reality. This transformation promises to be truly disruptive—a true paradigm shift as we figure out what it means to implement what we call Cloud-Oriented Architecture. Understanding resources Since Cloud-Oriented Architecture (COA, natch) extends past the data center to the ubiquitous resources of the Internet of Things, we must expand our definition of resource beyond the list in the NIST definition of Cloud Computing. The obvious place to go for such a definition is the REST architectural style, which defines a resource as “an entity or capability on a network.” Note that resources in “traditional” (i.e., data center-based) Clouds are a subset of this broader definition of resource. In RESTful terms, Web pages, php scripts, and ASP/JSP pages, for example, can all be resources. We wouldn’t normally lump such resources in with servers, storage, networks, and the other Cloud resources we typically talk about in the Cloud context. But in COA, where we free the Cloud from the data center, anything we can give a Uniform Resource Indicator (URI) to can be a resource. And of course, with IPv6 we have plenty of IP addresses to go around, where anything might have one—and if a thing has an IP address, it can certainly have one (or more) URIs. So far, so good, but beware a pitfall in our path: Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA). ROA takes certain elements of REST and recasts traditional integration by leveraging RESTful APIs. ROA has its place to be sure, as it resolves some of the knottier problems of Web Services-based SOA, but ROA is decidedly not COA. In fact, they are at opposite ends of a philosophical spectrum that underscores the paradigm shift inherent in moving to the Cloud. ROA + HOA = COA In fact, COA is really more about Hypermedia-Oriented Architecture (HOA) than ROA. The point to assigning URIs to resources, after all, is to build distributed hypermedia applications, which are the point of REST. This is where you need to make a conceptual leap: while the traditional notion of a hypermedia app is a glorified Web site, with COA, applications consist of hyperlinked resources of any type, from mobile apps to traffic signals. We’ve been networking traffic signals for decades, of course, so what’s really new here? The answer: control. Traditional distributed applications have centralized control, while distributed hypermedia apps do not. In fact, this distribution of control is what we mean by the prefix “hyper,” and is what makes the Web what it is today. Remember the green screen menu-based interfaces from the 1960s and 1970s? You clicked on a menu item to load a different screen. But those links weren’t hyperlinks, because they couldn’t take you to a screen (or page) on a different system. The secret of hypertext (now hypermedia) is that it enables the Web to be worldwide, with no central point of control. Fast forward to the present, and today’s world of distributed computing has a schizophrenic nature: the world of enterprise IT with its inherently centralized control, and the world of the Web—horizontally scalable, partition tolerant, and lacking a single point of control. And now we have the Cloud, and COA bringing the two together. It’s time to bring enterprise IT into the 21st century, kicking and screaming. We managed to survive the rise of the Web itself, as IT managers begrudgingly provided Internet access to employees’ desktops. Now with the ubiquitous penetration of mobile technology (there’s the U word again!), those managers are once again struggling to maintain control, lest the enterprise rank and file download some malicious app or other malware that brings the organization to its knees. This situation is only going to get worse (or better, depending on your point of view). Mobile devices are only going to get more powerful. The Internet of Things will continue to grow past our smartphones as Cloud resources penetrate every aspect of our daily lives. The cybersecurity implications are profound, let alone the day-to-day issues of governance. Enterprises who don’t rise to the challenge and revamp their thinking about how technology contributes to the operations of the business are sticking their heads in the sand. We encouraged IT organizations to loosen the ties of control as far back as 2008, when we explained Why Today is a Perfect Time for No-ESB SOA. Move the control to the Service composition level, we argued, and free yourself from the limitations and inflexibility of a middleware-centric approach to integration. Four years later, this move to lightweight, decentralized Business Process Management (BPM) is still a work in progress, in part because the BPM tools on the market follow the old middleware-centric patterns, but also because the marketplace is not yet ready for the paradigm shift that we’re now in the midst of. Today’s question, therefore, is whether the market—that is, you—are ready for COA. Are you ready to free the Cloud from the data center? Are you ready to give up centralized security in favor of a lightweight, federated approach? Are you ready to discard the API-centric ROA in favor of the truly RESTful HOA? Perhaps. But such changes in thinking take time. But ready or not, change is afoot. Be an ostrich and continue to do things the old way at your peril. The ZapThink take ZapThink has been piecing this story together for years now, and we’ll pull all the threads together in our upcoming book, The Agile Architecture Revolution (John Wiley & Sons, 2013). As we move away from vertically scalable enterprise applications that require and promote central control to a Cloud of distributed resources that cross organizational boundaries, organizations will need to rethink—and in many cases, reinvent—their approach to governance, security, scalability, and change. In other words, a new way of looking at architecture. We don’t call this shift a revolution lightly. True revolutions require paradigm shifts: throwing out old ways of thinking and replacing them with entirely different approaches. As a result, paradigm shifts suggest some manner of disruption and discontinuity that in turn differentiates revolutionary change from evolutionary change. Furthermore, revolutionary change is difficult to identify while it’s happening. People usually aren’t sure they’ve been through a revolution until after the fact. Evolutionary change, on the other hand, is far easier to detect, and can move so fast that people confuse it with a true paradigm shift. We got it wrong in the dot.com era. The hype around the “New Economy” turned out to be just that—hype. The Web turned out to be more of a new marketing channel than a true paradigm shift. The Agile Architecture Revolution, however, is more subtle, because it involves so many different types of change across so many different areas of endeavor. We won’t be sure till we’re done, of course, but the disruption is already upon us. Don’t be an ostrich. - Jason Bloomberg is President at ZapThink. He is also a speaker at Cloud Connect Bengaluru, to be held on May 24 and 25 in Bengaluru, where he will be speaking on the topic, 'Architecting a RESTful cloud: The key to elasticity' To know more about the conference agenda, please visit, www.cloudconnectevent.in Read More Read More ...
Cloud Is Changing CIO Role - Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior The Internet economy is making IT departments more central than ever to business success, but it's also putting CIOs under pressure to deliver more with less. Those pressures will only increase as new technologies like cloud, collaboration, and mobility create a workforce that is connected to the enterprise 24/7, said Cisco chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior during a keynote presentation at the Interop IT Conference and Expo in Las Vegas. "CEOs now expect IT to provide profitable growth and business agility," said Warrior. "The role of the CIO is changing." Warrior said the convergence of the cloud and mobility will drive new, collaborative work styles that will combine conventional text and messaging tools with heavy doses of real-time video. "The number one priority for CIOs over the next few years will be video," said Warrior, adding that online video usage is expected to quadruple over the next two years. As cloud technologies progress, CIOs will have to focus on more than just keeping employees connected, they'll also have to ensure that their company's products and facilities can access real-time analytics and talk to each other--sending messages when inventories are low or leveraging data to predict malfunctions. "The Internet of things is already here," said Warrior. While facilitating new business models, and giving CIOs a louder voice in the executive suite, these trends will also add considerable pressure to traditional areas of IT responsibility such as the network and security. "This creates a foundational requirement for risk management," said Warrior. At the same time, she noted, CIOs are expected to facilitate these new paradigms, securely, in a cost-conscious environment. Warrior said overall IT spending is expected to remain flat or down for the next several years. Cisco is reacting to these new demands by rethinking its approach to the network. In an age of what Warrior called "immersive collaboration," networks need to have visibility, awareness, security, agility, and manageability. One approach Cisco is taking to ensure its products embody these attributes is its adoption of the Software Defined Network (SDN). "We want everyone to think more holistically about SDN," said Warrior. Cisco plans to incorporate the SDN concept into Cloud Connect, a new cloud networking platform it's rolling out this summer that's designed to more securely and efficiently link in-house data centers with cloud operations. Partners or in-house teams will be able to build third-party software applications that add custom or specialized capabilities to Cloud Connect. Tailored solutions are just one of four principles that Cisco is taking in its approach to next-generation networking technologies, said Warrior. Open ecosystems, partnering, and innovation define the rest. "The pace of change will continue to be exponential," said Warrior. Source: InformationWeek USA Read More Read More ...
CA Technologies Reaches VCE Product Certification Milestone 25 offerings now certified to run on Vblock infrastructure platforms Read More ...
Virtualization brings major benefits to Wonder Cement The company has achieved 98.5 percent business uptime and 60 percent power savings by implementing Citrix solutions for server, desktop and application virtualization Read More ...
Indian SMB space holds huge potential for server and desktop virtualization, says AMI With only a small percent of organizations in the SMB space opting for virtualization, the potential for adoption is huge Read More ...
Unified architecture helps KPIT Cummins improve data center efficiencies By choosing a unified architecture of networking, storage and computing, KPIT Cummins has significantly enhanced the efficiency of its IT infrastructure Read More ...
Enabling virtual machine security in unified cloud environments As virtual machines grow in number, the challenges to secure them will also increase at an exponential pace. Raghuveer Krishna, Technical Director, MindTree explains the key security concerns Read More ...
Security drives majority of desktop virtualization deployments 92 percent of the organizations are adopting desktop virtualization to improve information security, according to a global research commissioned by Citrix Read More ...
What will eat your IT job? HCL says virtualization and cloud technologies are automating the roles that it used to fill with lots of H-1B workers Read More ...
Virtualization helps K Raheja Corp cut energy costs, boost efficiencies By consolidating and virtualizing its servers, the firm has achieved a drastic reduction in power consumption, with added benefits of improvement in performance and manageability Read More ...
Citrix rides desktop virtualization wave by signing up 1 lakh seats in 10 months Major Indian clients who have adopted desktop virtualization solutions include Essar, Geometric and Perfetti Van Melle India Read More ...
Tiding over downtime challenges in a virtual environment Virtualization has the capability of radically transforming computing by reducing costs and increasing agility. However, an effective downtime management strategy is crucial to fully reap these benefits Read More ...
Will Dell lead the x86 data center market? Can Dell's vStart virtualized rack systems that integrate servers, switches, and storage lead a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars? Read More ...
Cisco, Citrix do video via virtual desktop Technology sends HD video point-to-point through a virtual desktop infrastructure, bypassing the data center and cutting CPU and network consumption Read More ...
VMware Project Octopus: Dropbox alternative VMware's enterprise-grade answer to Dropbox aims to balance effectiveness and IT control Read More ...
End of Microsoft XP support accelerating desktop virtualization With less than thousand days to go until Microsoft no longer supports Windows XP, organizations are migrating to Windows 7 and tying their Windows 7 upgrades with desktop virtualization initiatives Read More ...
The great myth of cloud computing The tools are viable and the payoff is real, but it’s not happening because hardly anyone has the time or money to do it Read More ...
How to maximize virtualization benefits with effective storage resources management By implementing appropriate storage resource management tools, enterprises can overcome new challenges that virtualization introduces in the storage realm Read More ...
A practical approach to virtualization In the drive towards virtualization, organizations must take the approach which gives unbiased opinion about their current infrastructure Read More ...
Majority of SMBs not protecting data on virtualized servers A Symantec survey has found out that many small businesses are neglecting to protect their virtual environments Read More ...
How to deploy end to end desktop virtualization within 60 minutes At INTEROP Mumbai 2011, join Raj Dhingra, Global CEO, NComputing, as he explains how an organization can deploy desktop virtualization within an hour Read More ...
4 ways to avoid desktop virtualization ROI traps As the number of viable virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) increase, enterprises must pay close attention to four key areas when making a decision Read More ...
Geometric virtualizes 250 desktops in desktop virtualization initiative The firm has announced a large scale desktop virtualization implementation based on the Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) architecture with Cisco, NetApp and Citrix Read More ...
VMware unveils vSphere 5 The virtualization specialist has also released a comprehensive suite of cloud infrastructure technologies Read More ...
Orbis Financial’s IT goes virtual With virtualization the company has saved USD 50,000 on physical hardware costs, USD 13,000 per annum on power and cooling and USD 15,000 per annum on maintenance and support Read More ...
Virtualization and cloud computing cannot be treated in isolation, says Symantec Symantec says that virtualization is the first step towards cloud Read More ...
Hexaware virtualizes its DC The consolidation initiative has enabled Hexaware to gain close to 25 percent reduction in upfront costs Read More ...
VMware introduces vFabric 5 vFabric 5 is an integrated application platform for virtual and cloud environments Read More ...
Euronet adopts open source virtualization The company implemented Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in a phased manner by initially moving less critical applications onto the solution Read More ...
Big technology vendors form open virtualization alliance Red Hat and IBM join with Intel, HP, BMC Software, Eucalyptus, and SUSE Linux to provide an alternative to VMware Read More ...
Virtualization leads to better CPU utilization Server CPU utilization level increased from 20 percent to 80 percent and savings of ` 30,00,000 by deploying virtual machines instead of physical servers Read More ...
Virtualization helps PVM improve hardware utilization by 70 percent Server virtualization freed server capacity to support long-term growth, minimized maintenance tasks and enabled resources to be allocated to applications as per requirement Read More ...
‘To capitalize on 3G, telcos need to efficiently handle data traffic’ Anil Pochiraju, Managing Director- India and SAARC at F5 Networks tells Vinita Gupta how Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) can help enterprises manage emerging information access demands thrown up due to technologies such as 3G Read More ...
2011 Outlook – Symantec The number of applications and amount of data in virtual environments will grow significantly in 2011, says Anand Naik Read More ...
Innovators will lead the market in 2011 In 2011, ICT would again gain prominence as a tool for economic productivity Read More ...
Max New York Life insures itself with server virtualization The virtualization initiative has helped in delivering a significant reduction in carbon emission — which is equivalent to the average emission of taking 64 cars off the road per year Read More ...
Desktop virtualization helps co-operative bank reduce TCO by 50 percent Using VMware View, the AP Mahesh Co-operative Urban Bank has lowered desktop maintenance costs by 75 percent Read More ...
LG and VMware join forces to accelerate enterprise adoption of employee owned smartphones Partnership targets new methods for businesses to manage employee owned mobile devices Read More ...
How to maximize your investments in virtualization What are the steps that a CIO can undertake to maximize investments made in virtualization? Read More ...
Credit card transactions likely in future public clouds The PCI Security Standards Council has recognized virtualization as a safe technology; can cloud computing be far behind Read More ...
You cannot virtualize in a vacuum Implementing virtualization without considering its impact on surrounding IT resources can lead to unexpected results Read More ...
Red Hat upskills IT professionals for cloud computing era Adoption in cloud computing and virtualization technologies across Asia Pacific drives demand for an additional certification Read More ...
Energy is 12 percent of data center costs, says Gartner Energy is rising faster than other category of data center expenses, and the rising population of servers is blamed. Can virtualization help? Read More ...
Citrix refreshes XenServer virtualization platform Storage efficiency and cloud integration features reduce desktop virtualization costs and complexity, according to Citrix Read More ...
‘Virtual computing will enable consumerization of IT’ Mark Templeton, President and CEO of Citrix speaks passionately about everything from tablets to virtualization, virtual computing data centers and the company's efforts in these areas Read More ...
'Organizations cannot run their IT infrastructure the same way for the next five years’ Steve Leonard, President, EMC Asia Pacific and Japan, shares his perspective on how organizations are making their journey to the cloud Read More ...
Virtualization leads server manufacturers to a new paradigm As the number of physical servers decline, server manufacturers are now focusing on revenue per server than on the number of units sold Read More ...
Virtual environments bring in real challenges While adoption of virtualization is growing at a fast clip, Indian enterprises are discovering new challenges in the virtual world Read More ...
Telecom operators defying DoT’s Green Telecom Directive: Greenpeace According to the organization, the telecom operators have failed to adhere to the deadline to publicly announce their carbon emissions as mandated in the Green Telecom Directive Read More ...
SAP’s journey to energy-efficient data centers Raghavendra Rao, Vice President – IT, SAP Labs, Bangalore, shares insights on the measures the company has taken to improve efficiency of its data centers Read More ...
ITC Infotech unveils sustainability management solution The product has been built with the aim of simplifying the process of sustainability management across the globe Read More ...
IT and environmental management Companies experience various problems when they try to implement an environmental program as adequate IT systems are not in place to collect the data Read More ...
Organizations going green mostly to save costs A survey by IDC and HP reveals that while most organizations have policies related to green printing and printers, few think green when it comes to procuring printing solutions. But the mindset is changing Read More ...
Gartner report recognizes Fujitsu’s green initiatives Fujitsu, the ICT-based business solutions provider, is one of the vendors driving initiatives to reduce Greenhouse Gases (GHG) of ICT, according to a report by research firm Gartner and WWF Read More ...
Infosys BPO’s Jaipur building earns LEED India ‘Platinum’ rating The first Platinum rated building for Infosys; will be the basis for all future Infosys buildings Read More ...
IBM, IIT Madras and IIT Kharagpur to jointly develop smarter power grids Researchers from the company along with students will develop network architectures to collect data as well as analytics tools to provide valuable information to the grid operators Read More ...
Busting the Green Myth Interop Mumbai 2010 got off to a 'energetic' start with a green session on Green IT Read More ...
Why IT is key to carbon reduction By using IT, organizations can identify inefficiencies and make fact-based decisions on the carbon cost of their business Read More ...
MAIT lauds government for making e-waste rules draft public The draft rules lay emphasis on producers to effectively manage and handle e-waste Read More ...
Ford saves more than one million dollars by switching off PCs at night Simple step of powering down laptops and desktop PCs will help Ford save USD 1.2 million and reduce its carbon footprint by 16,000 to 25,000 metric tons annually Read More ...
Why sustainable ICT is a vital element for business success Sustainable ICT solutions can not only save costs, but can also help in bringing about a transformation in business Read More ...
BT Offers Tool for Tracking Video Conferencing Travel and Carbon Savings Users document millions of dollars in annualized cost savings Read More ...
Zenith Infotech’s PROUD May Redefine Enterprise IT An ambitious Indian product company is attempting to break into the niche space of centralized computing. Zenith Infotech’s product has the potential to firmly etch India’s name on the global map Read More ...
Switching to Power Saving Mode Considering the inadequate power infrastructure in the country, a few solutions adopted at both the active and passive infrastructure levels can help organizations to actively address energy woes Read More ...
In Economic Cloud, Infosys Sees a Green Lining As the demand and costs for computing power soar, a core team at Infosys is undertaking a series of green IT initiatives that could help in raising the bar for Green IT practices in the country Read More ...
Hardware Vendors Pledge Support for VMware's DPM Solution Called Distributed Power Management (DPM), the solution is designed to lower power consumption in the datacenter by aggregating unused capacity and powering off unused servers without disrupting service levels Read More ...
Unique data center design manages space constraints With the company having launched a Direct Market Access web portal for its customers, there was a need to have a data center with high bandwidth infrastructure to provide the level of high availability that online stock trading portals demand. The company decided to deploy the data center within its premises, leveraging on the high speed LAN network. However, it was challenged to accommodate the data center within a height of 10 feet, while providing a full-fledged data center infrastructure Read More ...
Plugging into a green future Aiming to reduce its carbon footprint while reducing costs, improving productivity and overall efficiency, Applied Materials India launched ‘Operation Green.’ Read More ...
Mobile computing, virtualization and cloud driving data center complexity in Indian organizations: Symantec report 96 percent of organizations looking at information governance to address challenges Read More ...
VMware, EMC shakeup hints at data center's future VMware CEO Maritz moves up to EMC chief strategist role and Gelsinger becomes VMware CEO, as virtualization changes how data centers are run. Take a look at EMC's larger vision Read More ...
How to not plan a data center The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency built a bigger data center than it needed. Now the potential federal IT boondoggle is being turned into a storage center for data generated by remote sensors and cloud computing. Read More ...
A peek inside Wipro’s LEED GOLD Certified Data Center Kiran Desai, VP and Business Head, Managed Services Business, Wipro Infotech, talks about the power management and cooling technologies deployed within Wipro’s LEED GOLD-certified Data Center in Greater Noida Read More ...
Software-Defined data centers are future, says VMware CTO, Steve Herrod VMware CTO Steve Herrod predicts that all data center resources will be virtualized and governed by a unified console Read More ...
Netmagic and Spectranet enter into strategic partnership India's first multi-location commercial Datacenter-n-Datacenter worth Rs 200 crore to be set up in four cities as part of the partnership Read More ...
Acquisition by NTT Com will open up global market for Netmagic - Sharad Sanghi Calling the acquisition a huge win-win deal for both Netmagic and NTT Communications Corporation, Netmagic’s CEO, Sharad Sanghi, says that this deal will help his firm access global markets Read More ...
Andhra Pradesh Government launches State Data Centre Spread across 9000 square feet, the Data Centre has a storage capacity of 50 TB Read More ...
Data centers, DR, and private clouds now ‘on-demand’ Want a data center? A company is now offering it ‘on demand’ and claims you can have it in a few weeks. It claims you can save significantly with their on-demand private cloud and on-demand DR site; resources can be self-provisioned much faster Read More ...
Aircel reduces overall DC carbon footprint The data center has helped in establishing service oriented architecture (SOA) that, in turn, has enabled fast rollouts pan-India without compromising on the flexibility to adapt to business requirements Read More ...
'Cloud optimized networks can help organizations solve business challenges' At the Brocade Technology Day 2011 event at San Jose, Dave Stevens, CTO, Brocade spoke to Vinita Gupta about Brocade’s ways of extending data center-class capabilities to the network edge Read More ...
HP Networking becomes EAL 2 CC certified HP is the first company in India to have leveraged the CC certification process, having met the rigorous security standards established by the CC framework, to ensure IT security Read More ...
Cisco introduces portable data centers The containerized data centers house 16 racks and include chilled water cooling systems for enterprises that need a quick, flexible, and mobile computing power Read More ...
Smartlink Network Systems sells Digilink to Schneider Smartlink Network Systems Ltd (SNSL) today announced that it is selling its Digilink Business to Schneider Electric India (Schneider) for Rs 5,030 million, under Business Transfer Agreement (BTA). The transaction would primarily include the transfer of the “Digilink” brand and trademarks, part of the manufacturing facility at Goa, the distribution network and employees who served Digilink. The company has agreed to a non-compete condition for a period of 5 years for the passive networking business. Read More ...
Tech giants push smart networking standard Rivals Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, along with Cisco and IBM to name a few others, are overlooking their differences to promote programmable networking Read More ...
Juniper aims to flatten the network with QFabric QFabric is Juniper’s vision of a single fabric to reduce network latency Read More ...
Ethernet fabric switching solutions to ease data center bottlenecks Brocade introduces VCS technology and the VDX platform for virtualized data centers and cloud environments Read More ...
What will future data centers look like? With the ability to add multiple cores in a single server, combined with virtualization capabilities, data centers of the future might be a fraction of the size they are today Read More ...
Emerging data center designs aimed at deriving highest compute performance per kilowatt New data centers will be able to provide a 300 percent growth in capacity in 60 percent less space than existing data centers, according to Gartner Read More ...
Gartner survey shows data growth as the largest data center infrastructure challenge More than half of respondents plan to expand capacity at existing data center sites by end of 2011 Read More ...
“Dell will focus on standardization, simplification and automation of the environment” Dell announced its Efficient Enterprise strategy last year, which is aimed at helping businesses reduce spending on IT infrastructure maintenance. In an exclusive interview with InformationWeek India, Jim Merritt, President, Asia Pacific Japan, Large Enterprise, Dell gave Brian Pereira an update on Efficient Enterprise Read More ...
Linux replacing Windows in data centers A Linux Foundation survey found increasing preference for the open source operating system in new server deployments Read More ...
Trimax wins Managed IT services project from Rajasthan Govt As a part of the project, the company will manage end-to-end IT for various organizations of the State of Rajasthan Read More ...
Emerson Network Power launches new data center management tool The firm recently introduced Avocent Data Center Planner, a visual infrastructure planning and management software solution Read More ...
40 GbE will be an important technology for the data center Paul Hooper, Chief Marketing Officer, Extreme Networks shares his perspective on the evolution of the cloud and why 40GbE will prove to be a powerful solution in the data center Read More ...
SafeNet teams up with NetApp to provide storage security This collaboration will provide users with the ability to manage and protect on-premise, cloud-based and virtualized data storage Read More ...
Wipro launches data centers that can be set up in a week Wipro Infotech announced the launch of FluidState data centers, which can be launched almost ten times faster than a conventional data center Read More ...
Data center power can be reduced by 50 percent, says IIT Delhi professor Dr Preeti Ranjan Panda from IIT Delhi is working on a project to reduce power consumption in the data center by up to 50 percent Read More ...
IBM unveils Next-Generation mainframe Big Blue calls new zEnterprise server a "data center in a box" that will appeal as much to CFOs as CIOs Read More ...
HP delivers new collaboration and consolidation solutions for SMBs New offerings include server and storage solutions that HP claims will allow upto 56 percent reductions in total cost of ownership compared to traditional IT infrastructures Read More ...
10,000 cows can power 1 MW data center, says HP Labs Research from HP Labs shows how the manure output of cows and the heat output of data centers can be combined to create an economically and environmentally sustainable operation Read More ...
IBM bets on ex5 to propel x86 market share The firm’s eX5 architecture will allow enterprises to scale the memory in their data centers without having to buy new servers Read More ...
‘Systems are getting instrumented and increasingly interconnected’ If you were stumped by terms like ‘smart grids,’ ‘smarter planet’ and ‘dynamic infrastructure’ and wondered how all this would change the world, you’ve got to have a chat with Dr P (Gopal) Gopalakrishnan, VP, IBM India Software Lab. Dr Gopal has been tracking technology for years and contributes to several major products from IBM in the areas of software and systems. He told Brian Pereira about IBM’s Smarter Planet and Dynamic Infrastructure visions and how these will transform the data center Read More ...
‘Application owners want the infrastructure to be secure multi-tenant’ As data centers become increasingly virtualized there are a new set of challenges to be tackled. Brian Pereira caught up with Rajesh Janey, President – India and SAARC, NetApp, to discuss customer concerns, and how NetApp is addressing these issues through its storage efficiency drive and solutions Read More ...
Are you neglecting your WAN? Web apps and consolidated data centers are adding pressure, and video will bring more. It could be time to explore new options Read More ...
A new approach to IT Infrastructure When it comes to deploying IT infrastructure, organizations are moving from an application-centric approach to a service-centric approach. All eyes are on your data center, which is set to undergo an unprecedented transformation Read More ...
SUSE to join Dell emerging solutions ecosystem SUSE recently announced that the firm was selected to join Dell’s Emerging Solutions Ecosystem as an open source cloud solution provider Read More ...
Cloud, Mobility and Open Source will drive Indian application development market The Indian application development software market is expected to reach more than USD 227 million in 2012, says research firm, Gartner Read More ...
India plays key role in Red Hat’s global plans Besides playing a key role in the firm's R&D operations, Red Hat's entire product line is supported from India Read More ...
Amazon makes clever private cloud play Partnership with Eucalyptus, the open-source purveyor of Amazon APIs, guarantees ongoing compatibility between public EC2 and private cloud operations Read More ...
How to reduce your cost and improve time to market by using open source NextGen portals At INTEROP Mumbai 2011, Bharati Lele, Head - Innovation Labs, L&T Infotech, will deliver a session on why open source portals represent a great alternative to commercial portals Read More ...
Rains from private clouds percolate to SMBs In India, a couple of small firms are demonstrating the true value of private clouds Read More ...
No more technology lock-in As much as 90 percent reduction in connectivity, power and other recurring costs Read More ...
Adoption of open source infrastructure management tools on the rise A growing number of Indian CIOs are considering open source network management tools to manage their infrastructure Read More ...
Open source vulnerabilities paint a target on Android With smartphone exploits on the rise, an almost-successful attack against Android devices hints at future dangers Read More ...
Linux developers mull unified App Store Fedora, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and other distros are working on a framework for a universal application installer Read More ...
Indian CIOs open up to open source Indian CIOs are opening up towards adoption of open source but it will not be a ‘rip and replace’ technology and will co-exist along with proprietary software Read More ...
Open source project server hacked, software rigged with backdoor trojan ProFTPD File Transfer server software compromised by attackers; anyone who downloaded it between November 28 through December 2 most likely at risk Read More ...
Red Hat looks to strengthen its PaaS offerings with Makara acquisition By integrating the JBoss Enterprise Middleware infrastructure with Makara’s Cloud Application Platform, the company aims to offer a more comprehensive PaaS solution Read More ...
Microsoft supporting cloud open source code for Hyper-V The software giant says its customers don't necessarily want a single hypervisor cloud, so it's supporting OpenStack Read More ...
Actuate partners with Wipro to drive open source BIRT adoption in India Wipro Infotech will promote the use of Actuate products including Actuate BIRT among organizations in India Read More ...
Indian open standards policy for e-governance finalized India's Department of IT (DIT) has approved a far-reaching policy on open standards for e-Governance Read More ...
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst says software industry broken Jim Whitehurst believes all vendors, not just Linux distributors, need to embrace open source development methods to improve quality and reduce cycle times Read More ...
mCarbon selects Red Hat Enterprise Linux for new infrastructure platform Post implementation, mCarbon’s voicemail application has seen a steep increase in call attempts from 2 lakh to about 5 lakh in just two years without any drop in performance Read More ...
Go green with Open Source Industry is adopting Open Source because of its many benefits and going green is one of the major ones Read More ...
Informatica aids information management with Marketplace Informatica Marketplace provides a central location for the community members to contribute mappings, mapplets, connectors, templates, dictionaries, vertical solutions and more. Read More ...
Oracle releases 'Unbreakable' Linux kernel Competition with Red Hat heats up with a modified Linux that Oracle says is best for running its software on its hardware Read More ...
Microsoft goes 'open' with Windows Azure The company has announced the availability of a new set of developer tools and SDKs for open source developers to build applications for Windows Azure Read More ...
Symbian and Android to lead mobile OS market, says Gartner The two operating systems will account for close to 60 percent of mobile OS sales by 2014 Read More ...
Red Hat Linux helps NCDEX achieve 99.99 percent uptime With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, NCDEX has designed a high-performance and cost-effective IT infrastructure that has delivered 99.99 percent uptime for its business applications Read More ...
Ubuntu 10.10 Linux released to beta Distribution, codenamed Maverick Meerkat, speeds boot time, enhances cloud integration Read More ...
Red Hat leaps on to PaaS bandwagon A key component of Red Hat Cloud Foundations, Red Hat PaaS will leverage JBoss Enterprise Middleware for open choice in application development and deployment Read More ...
Novell introduces cloud security service The company is targeting more than 200 IaaS and 1300 SaaS and PaaS vendors with the service Read More ...
The idea of version 2.0 of any software will be dead - Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst In an exclusive interview with Srikanth RP and Harshal Kallyanpur, Red Hat CEO, Jim Whitehurst details why the cloud can be the mother of all lock-ins, why the idea of version 2.0 of any software will be dead, and why the new-world IT order will be led by a different set of leaders Read More ...
Red Hat joins hands with Wipro to deliver open source solutions Both organisations plan to collaborate in building integrated solutions on Red Hat technologies through joint investments in Wipro’s CoE Read More ...
Linux Foundation launches license compliance program The non-profit foundation is trying to remove barriers to open source code adoption by easing compliance issues including providing code scanning tools that identify if open source code is linked to commercial code Read More ...
Cloud APIs get open source treatment Red Hat, Rackspace, and others are taking an open approach Read More ...
How to build your own Linux cloud Ubuntu lets you create your own Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure on commodity servers, plus it's interface-compatible with Amazon's EC2 Read More ...
Red Hat integrates server and desktop virtualization Red Hat claims that Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 will provide a single infrastructure from which customers can manage their server and desktop virtualization deployments Read More ...
Open source security solutions: An attractive alternative Explore the pros and cons of adopting open source security solutions Read More ...
Rackspace announces open source cloud platform OpenStack counts Intel, AMD and NASA among participants in the cloud computing project that may boost competition for market leading Amazon Web Services EC2 Read More ...
SMBs lead Linux server OS adoption across India: Springboard Constrained by limited budgets, Linux is proving to be the right platform for SMBs Read More ...
Red Hat powers Just Dial’s IT infrastructure Just Dial currently has more than 200 servers with its mission-critical Intranet and extranet applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Read More ...
Nine ways to avoid open source pitfalls Follow these guidelines and avoid problems while still benefiting from what the open source software community has to offer Read More ...
Pentaho launches on demand open source BI Rapid-deployment option promises ready-to-run dashboards, metrics and reports within 72 hours Read More ...
New open source OS will feature 'disposable' virtual machines Invisible Things Lab building secure OS that better locks down the VM environment Read More ...
Open source databases pose unique security challenges Most open source database platforms aren't supported by third-party database activity monitoring and security policy tools Read More ...
Linux proving disruptive in smartphone market Android will run a third of the world's smartphones by 2015, and open source mobile operating systems from Intel, Nokia, and Samsung will also compete, says ABI Research Read More ...
DLP gets an open source boost A new agent-based DLP discovery tool has been released to Google Code called OpenDLP Read More ...
‘We positioned Ubuntu as a version of Linux that was personal and non-technical’ Mark Shuttleworth, Founder, Canonical and Ubuntu Linux on why he thinks Ubuntu will succeed on the desktop, where other equally famed competitors have failed Read More ...
eScan introduces antivirus protection for Linux based systems Called eScan for Linux version 3.0 the antivirus software is designed for both Linux desktops and file servers Read More ...
Inside Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 beta New features in the distro's latest version will make it possible to run heavy I/O servers, such as database servers, in a virtual machine under Linux, company says Read More ...
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