WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, March 25, 2011

Another week in the Cloud and WOLF brings to you some more highlights. From the EU putting Standardization at forefront of Cloud Computing to the supply chain link of SaaS, the cloud has become cloudier.

 

The head of the European Commission's digital agenda has put interoperability and standards at the forefront of the cloud computing agenda. With migration being a big obstacle in cloud computing, besides security, the very flexibility of cloud is undermined. Commissioner Neelie Kroes said at the launch of Microsoft's cloud computing center in Brussels on Tuesday that he wants users to change cloud providers like the way they change mobile phone providers, thereby visioning a partnership between industry, government and EU. More

Here are some of the tops picks of the week relating to the Cloud:

SaaS links supply chain growth in Asia Pacific

SaaS is growing rapidly in the Asia Pacific with increased awareness and proliferation of new SaaS applications. With the gap created by the traditional software providers such as ERP vendors, an array of small supply chain vendors have jumped in with their high quality SaaS solutions.

Cloud CIO: 3 Private Cloud Use Case Scenarios

Scenario One: Agile Development, Static Operations: After using a private cloud for development purposes the production deployment is operated according to existing processes, creating a mismatch between the future of applications and the operational assumptions of this scenario.

Scenario Two: Agile Development, Semi-Agile Operations: In this scenario, new applications are placed into production in an operations infrastructure that can support elasticity, complex topologies, and automated administration, while the existing applications continue to operate in the older, static operations environment.

Scenario Three: Agile Development, Bypassed Operations: I n this scenario, developers quite happily begin to use the private cloud, but, when confronted with unwillingness on the part of operations to support self-service, application elasticity, etc., become dissatisfied with the offering and choose to either: (1) deploy the application outside of the internal data center; or (2) more worryingly, turn their back on the private cloud and choose to develop and deploy in a public cloud environment.

Oracle gets juice from Software-as-a-Service

With Oracle’s Exadata line of servers entering into the picture, Oracle becomes the indirect beneficiary of SaaS applications market growth since these applications require database and middleware software to be deployed on servers. Notably, Oracle is already the dominant player in the database software market with a share of around 50%.

The Clear ROI of SaaS

The ROI of SaaS is really around the ability to understand the differences between leveraging a single traditional in-the-datacenter application, versus leveraging a similar or same application on-demand. The two significant things we need to think about here: 1) the amount of money saved in avoiding capital and operational costs; 2) the value of agility.

Cloud Computing is ever evolving. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on Cloud Computing in the forthcoming weeks.

Appreciate if you can add more to this list and help our readers to keep in touch with the Cloud...


Santanu Das
Marketing Evangelist, WOLF Frameworks

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD. MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up, March 18, 2011

The cloud is evolving real fast, and we are witnessing key changes in the world of cloud computing. This week the WOLF weekly cloud sum-up highlights the Cloud Vision of Hewlett Packard and the Gartner’s predictions of the battle for leadership in PaaS in 2011

HP’s Cloud Vision laid out by its CEO Leo Apotheker brings another player into the Cloud. In a nutshell, Apotheker talked about a future where HP customers can use their HP devices (tablets, PCs and servers) to access a wide suite of HP cloud services built on top of HP’s own cloud infrastructure. Even though HP has minimal track record of dealing with Cloud Computing, for businesses, this means everything from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS. All this began with the acquisition of Vertica, a company dealing with data warehousing and analytics platforms. As Apotheker provided a clear picture of the recent market trends in the Cloud Business, HP has to move fast till its vision is fresh and build on it so that it is flexible to evolve. More

Here are some of the tops picks of the week relating to the Cloud:

Gartner says: 2011 will be the year of Platform-as-a-Service

Gartner believes 2011 is going to be the year of Platform-as-a-Service. Leading vendors will deliver new or strongly expanded PaaS service offerings and cloud-enabled application infrastructure products. The cloud era has just begun and there would be a rapid growth through technological and business innovation. During the next two years the fragmented PaaS offerings will start consolidating and in the next five years most of the enterprises will have their line of business applications running in the cloud.










The Collaboration Imperative for SMBs

With the large number of choices opened by Cloud Computing, the Small and Medium Businesses have to understand their unique business infrastructure needs. Successful collaboration and information-sharing strategy varies from one business to another but now SMBs will have more IT resources than earlier as they consider whether collaboration is a priority.

There is no security standard for cloud; move forward anyway

Considering cloud computing a key to the future of the IT industry, Microsoft has started to design behavioral and technical specifications to set standards for security in the cloud. Microsoft's plan is a set of processes called the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL), which is designed to create documented, auditable, traceable processes to help service providers or end-user companies to develop secure software for any environment.

Gaming as a Service – The Future of Cloud Gaming

The Gaming industry is a big business. Social gaming portals have brought cloud computing into the picture today. If MMORPG doesn’t mean anything to you, it stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, one of the most successful human collaborations of all time. Since today’s gaming market involves a very high end PC, it leaves behind the less powerful machine users out of the market. OnLive, gaming company, based out of Palo Alto seeks to provide a new service called GaaS or Gaming-as-a-Service. The company seeks to reshape “the way we think about and use digital media – The shift to cloud computing, displacing the limitations, cost and complexity of local computing”, thereby offering the ability to play games through a subscription service without having to download software or worry about hardware requirements.

Stay tuned for more sum-ups on Cloud Computing in the forthcoming weeks. Appreciate if you can add more to this list and help our readers to keep in touch with the Cloud...

Santanu Das
Marketing Evangelist, WOLF Frameworks

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD. MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

WOLF Weekly Cloud Sum-up

With more and more vendors and customers harnessing the cloud, it is pretty overwhelming to catch up with all the happenings around. That being said, here are this week’s key cloud trends:

The week started with the Clouds hovering around the CERA’s annual energy conference in Houston. Steve Ballmer, who has been pacing the stage at the CERA’s annual energy conference, touted cloud computing as the wave of the future. Ballmer demonstrated how the game console Xbox Connect and Cloud Computing can connect people from around the world and show their movements in a virtual reality, adding that these same technologies can greatly improve energy exploration and production. The energy companies can use the cloud technology to store expensive and high amount of data and use the same real-time data to manage energy flow more effectively. More

Cloud Computing is greener

IT has been one of the fastest growing energy hogs, consuming around 2 percent of the global energy. Shown in the diagram above are the statistics from IBM, illustrating that less than 4 percent of the energy going into a data center is used to process something. According to a Microsoft report, cloud computing drives energy reductions in four related ways, which boil down to a few key leverage points:

• Reducing excess capacity 
• Flattening peak loads 
• Employing large-scale "virtualization" software 
• Improving data center design. 

Using the cloud addresses all three of the major energy-loss areas in the IBM chart: data center design tackles room and server cooling, while the other scale benefits mainly address the absurd waste, in percentage terms, from server underutilization (the far right bar).

A Muddled Look at Today's Cloud Computing Landscape [Infographic]

Today’s Cloud Computing Landscape breaks the cloud into three categories: private/Enterprise cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud. The categorization of the companies in this landscape has been done pretty well but the grouping has not been clearly able to show the broader context of the cloud.

The SaaS list: A look at current on-demand favorites

ZDNet publishes a comprehensive list of the all the SaaS companies which can be handy sometimes. It lays a landscape of all the SaaS companies which are notable to keep a track of.

Cloud Computing is currently evolving. Stay tuned for more sum-ups on Cloud Computing in the forthcoming weeks.

Appreciate if you can add more to this list and help our readers to keep in touch with the Cloud...

Santanu Das
Marketing Evangelist, WOLF Frameworks

NOTE: The views expressed above are purely personal and for informational purposes only. WOLF FRAMEWORKS INDIA PVT. LTD. MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.