Sustaining applications in the most cost-effective and efficient fashion is the foundation to maximizing a return on data. But it is only the foundation. Organizations have to move beyond sustaining applications to driving innovation, and the first step in that progression is learning the best ways to enhance existing applications and implement new applications that will help modernize business processes and support business agility. The challenges around enhancing applications are well agreed upon. The top challenges include: Insufficient Data Quality - Data quality issues of one degree or another are pervasive in the majority of enterprises, leading users to distrust the data. This is a problem within applications and, even more so, across applications. Right-Time Access to Information - The pace of business continues to accelerate, and users can no longer wait we... (more)

Maximize Your Return on Data: The New Business Imperative

Application owners / senior-level IT allocate a certain percentage of their budget to sustaining, enhancing, and transforming their applications. In most organizations, the largest percentage of the IT spend is on sustaining the applications or basically "keep the lights on" type of activities, which leaves little money to enhance them to support business agility and new business requirements, or transform them to leap frog over the competition. Organizations that implement a solid data management strategy in support of their applications can maximize the return from their application investments. They can lower the cost of sustaining their applications, thus releasing budget to do what they should be doing, which is supporting the needs of the business. Innovative CIOs are actually rethinking their application environments, from just focusing on the application - t... (more)

Violin Gets $96 Million to Tide It Over Till IPO

Flash storage array start-up Violin Memory is storing up greenbacks. According to an amended SEC filing made late last week it's gotten $96.3 million out of what may become $130 million in new funding. All Things Digital reports hearing the financing was done at an implied valuation of $850 million to fund operations ahead of a delayed IPO that was supposed to come off late last year and is now supposedly targeted for early May. Granted that seems an awful lot of money for just a few months. Violin reportedly filed to go public under that newfangled Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act that lets companies keep their financials hush-hush until close to going public. As of last April Violin had raised $172 million, money that came from Juniper Networks, Toshiba, SAP Ventures, Highland Capital and GE Capital. The new money reportedly comes from a flock of 126 private inve... (more)

Cloud Expo 2011 East To Attract 10,000 Delegates and 200 Exhibitors

SYS-CON Events announced today that the 8th International Cloud Expo will take place June 6-9, 2011, in New York City. The International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the world's leading Cloud-focused event and is held three times a year, in New York, Silicon Valley and in Europe. Over 600 corporate sponsors and 10,000 industry professionals have participated in Cloud Computing Expo since its inception, more than all other Cloud-related events put together. Cloud Computing Expo 2011 East Call for Papers Deadline November 30, 2010 - SUBMIT YOUR SPEAKING PROPOSAL TODAY! The four-day event will offer a rich array of sessions led by exceptional speakers about the business and technical value of cloud computing with more than 150 sponsors and exhibitors and over 5,000 estimated delegates from well over 48 different countries. Explore Cloud Expo Sponsorship &... (more)

How to Sponsor @ThingsExpo | #DX #IoT #SmartCities #DigitalTransformation

Internet of @ThingsExpo, taking place October 31 - November 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, is co-located with 21st Cloud Expo and will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading industry players in the world. Download Show Prospectus ▸ Here The Internet of Things (IoT) is the most profound change in personal and enterprise IT since the creation of the Worldwide Web more than 20 years ago. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020. This number will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several decades. With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing IoT strategies, now is the perfect time to attend @ThingsExpo in Silicon Valley. Learn what is going on, contribute... (more)

SOA in the Cloud - Monitoring and Management for Reliability

The preeminence of Web services as a tool that can support a wide range of dynamic business processes has made it the SOA tool of choice. Web services are easy to build but difficult and expensive to maintain. Monitoring and management costs weigh heavily on the ROI calculator, and in order to maximize ROI enterprises need to keep a keen eye on the support and reliability meter. In the Web services world, an application is typically a chain of services, or "links," woven together in some sequence with a Web services front end. The chain itself is weaker than the weakest link in the chain. For example, if an application consists of three service calls, each with a reliability of 0.99, 0.96, 0.97 respectively, the overall application reliability according to the laws of probability and statistics is Application Reliability = 0.99*0.96*0.97=0.92 The multiplicative eff... (more)

Cloud Expo New York Call for Papers Now Open

Early Bird Savings Cloud Expo Cloud computing is a game changer. The cloud is disrupting traditional software and hardware business models by disrupting how IT service gets delivered. Entrepreneurial opportunities abound as this classic disruptive technology begins to proliferate, so it is no surprise that SYS-CON's industry-leading International Cloud Expo is going from strength to strength. The 5th International Cloud Expo, to be held April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York, NY, announces that its Call for Papers is fast approaching. Topics on which submission are welcome include all aspects of providing or using massively scalable IT-related capabilities as a service using Internet technologies (see suggested examples below). Help plant your flag in the fast-expanding business opportunity that is The Cloud: submit your speaking propos... (more)

Cloud Expo: Reaching China with Your Website & Cloud Application

Cloud Expo Silicon Valley $500 Savings here! Reaching customers and employees with cloud applications when they are located in emerging markets (such as Russia, Indonesia, Brazil and China) poses a major challenge. This is especially true for China, which has not only the largest Internet user base (twice that of the US and growing fast) but a lack of modern Internet infrastructure as well as licensing and regulatory hurdles, including the "Great Firewall." In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Jerry Miller, Vice President of Technology at CDNetworks, will discuss the various challenges to serving this market and how a CDN (Content Delivery Network) can help you not only deliver a fast download of your website and web applications even in China, but can also help you manage content and regulatory issues. You will hear how a major European-based financ... (more)

Cloud Computing Security Issues and Challenges By @GiladPN | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

The US Federal Communications Commission has recently reported that "theft of digital information has become the most commonly reported fraud, surpassing physical theft." Businesses can do a lot to protect themselves. The FCC issued a Tip Sheet for small businesses to promote employee security training, firewalls, securing of WiFis, and more. But for business operating in (or migrating to) cloud environments; data security, cloud computing security issues, and challenges take on  new meanings and require new strategies. Security in the Cloud: Unique Challenges In the cloud, data security poses new risks and challenges. We are no longer concerned just with burglars breaking into our offices to steal computers, but rather with the data belonging to complete systems deployed to the cloud. When using public cloud infrastructure like that of AWS, VMware, Microsoft Azure... (more)

[session] Extend User Experience of #WebRTC | @ThingsExpo #IoT #M2M #RTC

Extend User Experience of WebRTC with Unique Sensor Devices WebRTC is great technology to build your own communication tools. It will be even more exciting experience it with advanced devices, such as a 360 Camera, 360 microphone, and a depth sensor camera. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Masashi Ganeko, a manager at INFOCOM Corporation, will introduce two experimental projects from his team and what they learned from them. "Shotoku Tamago" uses the robot audition software HARK to track speakers in 360 video of a remote party. "Virtual Teleport" uses a multiple Intel RealSense Depth Camera to scan 3D and build 3D models in real-time, and display as hologram in front of remote participants. Speaker Bio After 20 years of experience for developing enterprise system and consumer web service, Masashi Ganeko is leading a technology research team of INFOCOM, the software co... (more)

[Flashback to 2008] Is Google the Elephant in the Cloud?

While cloud computing reporting has recently been focused on Microsoft's Azure announcement and Amazon's upgrade to EC2, there's an elephant in the cloud: Google. According to a well-researched article in Cloud Computing Journal, Google filed as long ago as February 2006 a provisional patent application with 91 different numbered claims that arguably makes it clear that Google has a multi-year lead in cloud computing. The article, written by Stephen T. Arnold, concludes that: "Google can, with the deployment of software, deliver global services that other companies cannot match in terms of speed of deployment, operation, and enhancement....[T]his patent document is an indication that Google can put its foot on the gas pedal at any time and operate in a dimension that other companies cannot." Stephen E. Arnold, who blogs at arnoldit.com, monitors search, content p... (more)