Harness Big Data with Google BigQuery

Google’s service called BigQuery allows you to run SQL-like queries against large datasets on a subscription basis.


These days, even the smallest of enterprises have amassed terabytes-if not petabytes-of data storage. Additionally, services like YouTube and Twitter are said to surpass terabytes of data daily. There is no doubt about it; we are in the age of “big data”. So the question arises, how are we to scan these vast heaps of information without experiencing the performance degradation noticed with relational database servers (mostly due to their propensity to preserve a relational structure, or attain what is known as normalization)?

Google BigQuery is essentially an on-demand big data storage and querying service. One can store as much data as he/she feels necessary, and only have to pay for what he/she uses (to the extent of certain storage limits). Furthermore, one can scale his/her data to the amount of hundreds of terabytes of data, with no additional management needed. Users manage their data stores through a web-based interface, or alternatively through a HTTP REST API or by way of command-line. This includes the running of SQL-like queries that not only allows one to query columnar data structures, but also join related tables, just as one might do with a traditional SQL database engine. More details here 

Online Engagement: Promising Practices

The fact that Internet is one of the most powerful organizing tools in human history is both thrilling and vexing to audience engagement practitioners - public, students or any other. Creating an effective conditions for bringing audience and holding them in fruitful participation is a challenge. 

In this Promising Practices in Online Engagement some of the issues are discussed and insights are provided. A recommended reading for any one interested in online audiences. 

Outsourcing to India Creates Jobs in US

So the next time you hear someone discoursing on the horrors of outsourcing it may be a good idea to dig just a little deeper than sound bites on the evening news to find out exactly what is going on. Here is the evidence 

Infosys  a datacenter operator and service provider based in India, is the recipient of an IT outsourcing deal with American icon Harley-Davidson, which will result in the loss of125 jobs, including 83 jobs at Harley’s Wisconsin headquarters. To some this will make it yet another story of American jobs lost to offshore outsourcing.  But like many things that seem obvious, the issue isn’t that simple.

Though an Indian company, Infosys is committed to the US market and has a large presence in the US. They have 16 existing US facilities and, in 2012, hired over 1200 people to staff those facilities here (and have stated that they expect to expand to 2000 by the end of the year). The contract with Harley requires that they open a facility in Milwaukee, which will increase the size of Infosys’ US presence and will open up 125 jobs, equal to the number of jobs being lost at Harley-Davidson.  And before you jump to the conclusion that the Harley IT employees are being left in the cold, there are two additional points that you need to consider.

The first is that of the 125 jobs being created, Infosys says that 70 will be directly on the Harley project. Harley will be encouraging employees whose jobs have been outsourced to apply for these jobs, and will keep their base pay and years of service credit that they acquired while working at Harley-Davidson. Complete story here 

Woman of Substance: Marissa Mayer Joins Yahoo as Leader

Google's first female engineer, Marissa Mayer, has made a career out of bucking expectations -- and she did so once again on Monday by announcing she will leave Google to be the new CEO of Yahoo, the struggling company that once was Google's main competitor.

Mayer, sometimes referred to as the "Googirl," certainly has charted her own course, often weaving seemingly disparate worlds and interests together. At Google, Mayer was responsible for overseeing the launch of some of the company's most iconic products, including Gmail, Google Maps and iGoogle.


She earned a degree in computer science. In 1999, during her interview for a job at the company, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin reportedly asked her: "How would you write a spell-check program when you have a vocabulary so big it won't fit in a computer?" She became a product manager at the young start-up after turning down a teaching job at Carnegie Mellon University. More on this here 

Be discrete on networks for a lamhe's (moment) lapse may cost you entire life's goal

Use discretion in everything you do on the internet for a lamhe's (moment) lapse may cost you entire life's goal

Temptation to tweet has attracted a ban on Greek athlete costing her life long dream of winning a medal in Olympics. Voula Papachristou's tweet mocking immigrant population in her country has made authorities to ban her from the game thus denied a possible " 15 seconds" of fame.

So ensure that while on the net , u exercise adequate caution on what you post and what u paste

Networked Society is a new social order and demands new standards of social engagement

This is part of my professional mission "making my students web-savvy" 

Networks represent a new world order. As indicated else where my professional mission is "making my students web-savvy"- meaning preparing them for successful and thoughtful self-conducting on cyberspace which will be home of profession and more. 

To be successful or even to survive on the network we must cultivate certain ways of conducting ourselves.  we must remember that We are human, so netiquette is human. The human condition is positive, caring, and thoughtful. People are good. Positive comments and heart warming stories are part of the human condition. Knowing how to criticize someone in cyberspace without hurting their feelings shows you care. Helping others on the internet is thoughtful. The rules of netiquette come from the human condition because internet users are humans. The Rules of Netiquette are the common conventions of internet communication. Proper internet etiquette requires the highest ethical standards. Here is one such source 

The Pros And Cons Of Cloud Computing For Film Professionals

For filmmakers piracy will always happen. Security of your content will be higher in a cloud than it is in the hands of people.

Cloud computing is big and here to stay. In fact it is hard to think why it took cloud computing so long to become prominent. The pros come thick and fast: convenience, low cost, a back up of your data online. But not everyone loves technology. For those waiting to join the cloud movement some questions remain. So, let’s break it down and make it easy for you because cloud computing is becoming a significant platform and you will be left behind. The first question people usually ask is ‘What if I get hacked?’ Well, it is always possible. Here is the complete story 

Developer's Dilemma: To cloud or not to cloud: Here are reason why Developers Should go For Cloud Computing

Here is are tips from an expert 

" The most common question that I get to hear from developers is "  says Janakiram MSV "  – how do I get started with Cloud Computing? Many developers believe that targeting a Platform as a Service (PaaS) is all it takes to get onto the Cloud bandwagon. While PaaS abstracts the nuts and bolts of the Cloud infrastructure to ease the life of developers, many applications run on raw VMs deployed to run on Infrastructure as a Service. So, it pays to understand the behind the scenes architecture when developing Cloud ready applications. Though .NET and J2EE abstracted the underlying implementation, developers with the thorough platform 

Here are professional tips for developers.

Informatica Joins Google Cloud Platform Partner Program

Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA), the world's number one independent provider of data integration software, today announced it has joined the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program as a Technology Partner, making it easy for Google developers and users to access the latest integration services and solutions. 

Extending its award-winning Informatica Cloud integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS), enterprises of all sizes can now securely move data to and from their on-premise and cloud IT systems and Google Cloud services such as Google Cloud Storage and Google BigQuery with Informatica Cloud Connector for Google Cloud.

Appsense University of Birmingham adopts User Virtualization Platform from AppSense

In order to transform the way it manages its desktop estate and enable a wide scale Windows 7 migration, the University of Birmingham is deploying AppSense’s User Virtualization Platform (UVP) across 5,400 staff and over 35,000 student users. The phased deployment of the AppSense UVP will provide a consistent yet flexible experience across the wide and varied user base as well as enhanced security throughout and beyond the migration.

As an education provider it is vital for the University of Birmingham to provide its staff and students with secure, high quality, consistent, access to the applications they need at any time.  By using the AppSense platform to underpin migration of user profiles and data from the University’s current legacy systems to the new locked down Windows 7 platform, the downtime and inconsistent user experiences usually associated with moving users to a new platform will be avoided.

Operating on disparate systems while the migration to Windows 7 is underway makes this increasingly complicated as the IT department has to manage multiple end-user profiles while moving between systems. By separating the user from the system and providing persistent personalisation with the AppSense UVP, the IT department can resolve this issue seamlessly, while increasing security through proper management of services and user rights. Once migration is complete the AppSense Management Suite will be used to manage application policy and user profiles of both staff and students, providing sufficient flexibility to deliver customised environments where required, irrespective of their location. More details here

Indian Cloud Computing Industry: Projections, Predictions

The cloud computing market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 54.5 percent over the period 2011-2015. One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the growing need to reduce capital and operational expenditure.

Indian cloud computing industry has also been witnessing growing adoption of handheld devices. However, lack of data security and privacy could pose a challenge to the growth of this market.

The report examines the cloud computing industry in India from various perspectives – it covers an insightful data analysis on the market size and value, the demand and supply issues, future and the ongoing industry trends and opportunities, market vendors and the overall competitive analysis. The discussion of the market threats, weaknesses and strength is also included along with analytical market forecasts.

More details here 

The Cloud Reaches Hollywood: Ticketmaster Partners With Cisco

Live Nation Entertainment, which is currently operating online ticket seller Ticketmaster along with 3 other entertainment businesses, is migrating its entire network operation, including Ticketmaster itself, into a private cloud.

It is expected that the migration will be a massive undertaking since Live Nation currently has seven thousand employees housed in 153 offices spread out across 18 different countries. The revenue of Live Nation in 2011 alone was $5.4 billion, which includes Ticketmaster’s $1.56 billion, with the other Live Nation operations earning the remaining $3.8 billion.  More details here

CSC unveils BizCloud for Government

The new release will provide the federal agencies with the privacy, security and control of a private cloud with the convenience and elasticity of a public cloud

Technology-enabled business applications and services provider CSC has launched its BizCloud for Government, an on-premise private cloud that is billed as a service and could be ready for appliation workloads within 10 weeks.

The new release will provide government agencies with the privacy, security and control of a private cloud with the agility, convenience and elasticity of a public cloud.

BizCloud for Government is based on a converged infrastructure, the Vblock System from VCE.  More details here.

Grid Computing gets "God Particle'"

The isolation of the particle, the Higgs boson, also known as "God Particle"  not only represents a great advancement in particle physics, but also reflects the impressive capabilities and unlimited possibilities of cloud computing. Why? Because the scientists that performed the research on the Higgs boson made heavy use of the same kind of information technologies as onthenetOffice and other commercial clouds.

CERN’s Grid has three distinct levels or Tiers. At Tier 0 inside the CERN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, 50,000 computing cores receive and sift through the information that comes directly from the LHC detectors. Via 10 GB/s dedicated networks Tier 0 routes data to specific Tier 1 sites. There are 11 Tier 1 facilities: 6 in Western Europe, 3 in North America, 1 in Scandinavia, and 1 in Southeast Asia (Taiwan). Each Tier 1 center contains comprehensive and accessible electronic records of a distinct experiment associated with the LHC. Tier 1 sites also possess surplus computing power to assist with the most complex analyses. Finally, Tier 2 sites (140 locations in universities and research labs) provide end-user access to researchers around the world. Tier 2 centers mainly permit scientists to access the data and computing power of the Tier 1 centers. Tier 1 sites also retrieve the computations from the Tier 2 sites for permanent storage.

Despite its unorthodox structure, the Grid possesses several characteristics that allow it to be classified as a cloud, including:

-Multi-tenancy

-Virtualization

-Scalability

-Mobility

More details here

Cloud Summit 2012- India stresses importance of Cloud Computing for SMEs

Cloud computing is the way forward if both the government and the private sector are to achieve increased economies of scale, ensure that technology becomes a key enabler in fuelling growth and leads to improved literacy and healthcare access in the country.

Emphasising that 'cloud first' should become part of the official discourse, CEOs taking part in the Cloud Summit 2012, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) recently, said that the challenge was in realising what cloud computing could do to ensuring more effective governance and improving business practices. Conceding that issues of data security, cost benefits and business risks needed to be addressed, the industry leaders were, however, clear that the way forward lay in speedily laying out a roadmap in this regard.

 More details here

Citrix expands R&D presence in India

Desktop virtualization company Citrix expanded its presence in the country with a new office in its Bangalore campus and an R&D centre in Hyderabad.The two centres, a part of Citrix’s globally integrated R&D network located in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the UK and the USA, will deliver online collaboration, data sharing, virtual desktops, cloud networking and cloud platform solutions.

The company's global R&D investment in 2011 amounted to approximately $350 million, more than 15 per cent of its net revenues. More details here

Cyber Security Research Directions

In today's digital age, cyber security is as crucial, if not more so, as actual security guarding a real piece of company property. However they may differ, they both have safeguard strategies that need to be carried out to the letter to be effective.  

There is a critical need to securely store, manage, share and analyze massive amounts of complex (e.g., semi-structured and unstructured) data to determine patterns and trends in order to improve the quality of healthcare, better safeguard the nation and explore alternative energy. The emerging cloud computing model attempts to handle massive amounts of data. Google has now introduced the MapReduce framework for processing large amounts of data on commodity hardware. Apache’s Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) is emerging as a superior software component for cloud computing combined with integrated parts such as MapReduce. However, state of the art cloud computing systems are not sufficient due to the fact that (i) they do not provide adequate security mechanisms to protect sensitive data and (ii) they do not have the capability to process massive amounts of semantic web and geospatial data. Here is an interesting and useful resource on Cyber Security research

Education institutions may get access to super computing research

A key government tech research body plans to give access to super computing research across 200 educational institutes in the country. 

Garuda, an initiative by Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) along with National Informatics Centre (NIC) plans to extend their ‘grid computing initiative’ from the existing 65 institutes to 200 in the next couple of years.

C-DAC’s grid computing initiative is a collection of high performance computing resources that are spread across different cities and allows access to super computing research.

Grid computing played a big role in the recent discovery of the ‘God particle’ as scientists across the world collaborated with each other. 

Access to resources such as storage, IT networking and high end servers that can compute in excess of a trillion calculations per second, used in areas such as numerical weather simulations or drug discovery are provided by C-DAC. Due to high costs and maintenance of hardware and software, educational institutes could not afford to undertake research.   More details here

Cloud computing reduces software piracy

Technology democratises the access to the computing resources by giving equal opportunities to all the potential users as the Cloud Technology obviates the need for owning the infrastructure, observed the speakers at a national workshop on ‘Cloud Computing and Security Issues’, organised by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Osmania University College of Engineering in collaboration with CipherCloud India Pvt. Ltd. 

 However, the biggest challenge was the data security which needs to be addressed so that even the large enterprises opt for the technology. Various sessions at the workshop covered the important aspects of cloud computing that include use-case studies, security and performance monitoring. Understanding the usage of cloud in Indian scenario and the challenges that need to be adressed were also discussed. The complete story from Hindu

Cloud Computing comes to Health care Rescue

It is a lively time for healthcare practice management to say the least. Key clinical, administrative and financial workflows need to be updated in order to accommodate new standards such as ICD-10 for coding and HIPAA 5010 for electronic transmission of healthcare transactions. New care delivery models such as Accountable Care Organizations (ACO’s) require further changes to enable collaboration, or team-based care, across providers and agencies. This rapidly changing environment is putting a strain on Health-IT departments. How can IT enable clinical end-users to do their jobs efficiently, enable collaboration across organizations and comply with an ever growing set of standards and regulations?

New case study on cloud helping to solve the looming health IT crisis

Some healthcare organizations are turning to the cloud, specifically software-as-a-service (SaaS), to enable key components of the overall solution. Software companies with expertise in healthcare can build support for standards and regulations right into their applications, reducing the compliance burden required of a dedicated IT staff. Updates to SaaS applications generally are less intrusive to end-users as they are centrally hosted and managed. Furthermore, such applications can be accessed from a multitude of locations and client devices, providing the basis for the type of collaboration and information sharing that will be required as ACO’s and other collaborative care models become more commonplace. More details here

Cloud Computing is emphasised in Office 2013

Microsoft has unveiled the customer preview of its latest software Office 2013.

Changes in the new software reflect updated web technology, with an emphasis placed on Cloud computing, access across multiple devices and social networking.

The company has also incorporated the square, bright-colored style of its Windows Phone 7 into Office 2013, The Los Angeles Times reports.

Office 2013, as expected, is built to work on multiple types of devices, and as a result, the software has been crafted to work via touch, a stylus, mouse or keyboard. A preview video that you can watch here shows the programs running on computers, a phone and a tablet. For more details view here

Inauguration: Two day National Faculty Development program on Cloud Computing, Srinivas Institute of Technology. Managlore, 12-13 July, 2012

Inauguration
Two day National Faculty Development program  on Cloud Computing, Srinivas Institute of Technology. Mangalore, 12-13 July, 2012

Why Cloud Computing didn't make it to London Olympic, 2012?

Using cloud computing ought to make sense for an event like the Olympics, but the technology isn’t ready, according to the CIO of the London 2012 Games

As an event that happens only once every four years, in a different location every time, which needs a huge computing infrastructure and generates a huge peaks of data, the Olympic Games would seem to be a perfect fit for cloud computing. And in future it might be — just not yet.

While cloud computing will not be used as part of the IT infrastructure in London, the CIO of the London Games expects it will in the future.

Here is a detailed story on why cloud computing didn't make it to olypmics

Cloud In Action: Transforming Industry

Can a new computing model improve a business model? That was the question a team at the University of Bari set out to answer. Using an IBM SmartCloud, they built a solution that allows the local fishermen to work in a new way. By using the cloud to sell before they come to shore, the fishermen are able to adjust their inventory in real-time to keep 

pace with demand. As a result, they're selling more fish at better prices with less waste. 

For the fishermen, income is up 25 percent and time to market is down 70 percent. Today, the Univers ity of Bari is using the same technology to improve the winemaking and transportation industries. What could a cloud do for your business?

Here is the complete Story

The Cloud: Opportunities and Challenges for SMEs

Each decade, since the 1970s, has seen the evolution of IT into a whole new 'avatar'. Mainframes (1970s), Rise of the Personal Computer (1980s), Client Server Architecture (1990s), are a few well known avatars. Meanwhile, what helped the adoption of these advances in IT was that each new avatar was preceded by a recessionary phase. Recessions brought about a greater need for businesses to improve efficiency levels and increase profitability. As a result, businesses and individual users rapidly adopted the modern avatars of IT with the objective of realizing their benefits. The double dip recession, in the early part of the 1980s, was almost immediately followed by the Rise of the Personal Computer (PC). 

The number of PCs installed grew from less than 1 million in 1980 to over 100 million by the end of the decade. Similarly, the recession due to debt, rising inflation, etc. in the first half of the 1990s was followed by the growth of the Client Server Architecture and the internet. There were only a few thousand users of the internet at the start of the decade which ended with over 300 million users. Recently the world has gone through an economic downturn and there is an even stronger need for organizations to improve efficiencies by using collaborative solutions and real time information exchange. The Cloud could therefore be the next big thing with it gaining prominence during the recent credit crisis.  For complete story see an article here from India Infoline.

Cloud-Hype needs to be dialed down

Definitions of what constitutes a private Cloud are suspect; meanwhile public Cloud adoption though slow is picking up pace

When is a Cloud not a Cloud? Well, when you are talking about private Clouds, many experts feel that the deployment of private Clouds in India isn't all that it is cracked up to be. Basically, server virtualization has picked up in many pockets but a virtualized setup isn't a private Cloud unless and until you add orchestration and self-provisioning. Then there's the question of exactly how much control Indian CIOs and IT managers are willing to relinquish and the bigger question of if the business users really want that control.

Self-provisioning, from the vendor side, is being sold as the answer all of a business' woes. If the business unit heads are IT-savvy, then yes, it could be a powerful enabler but if they aren't, then it could be disastrous. Moreover, who will ensure that self-provisioned resources aren't wasted. The more I think about this, the more I feel that a strictly defined private Cloud makes sense mostly in a test & dev environment where developers need to provision and release resources rapidly. In a conventional business unit, IT provisioning probably doesn't need to be quite as rapid. More details here

Government’s mulling policy framework on cloud computing; What does it mean for SMEs?

The Indian government is looking to script a new policy framework for Cloud computing to address apprehensions over security and to drive adoption of the platform in the country. The move will expand market opportunity for Cloud services start-ups, while reducing cost of IT operations for SMEs across sectors.

Minister for Communications and IT, Kapil Sibal, said the government would collaborate with the industry and academia to develop a secure and progressive ecosystem for the Cloud.

The government expects the new policy to specially benefit SMEs in reducing their IT infrastructure costs to a large extent. “The focus could be on SMEs and the starting point and vision,” said Sibal without giving any details of the proposed norms. He was speaking at a conference organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry. more details here

Indian Cloud Market Grows in nearly $1 bn

The overall Indian market for cloud,both public & private has grown steadily to reach $860 to $912 million in calendar year 2011, according to market advisory firm Zinnov Management Consulting. The 'Public Cloud Opportunity in India' study released today highlighted that the public cloud market comprises 20-22 percent of the share, while the remaining 78-80 percent is accounted for by private cloud. The public cloud market has rapidly evolved in the last two years in India with significant traction across SaaS, PaaS & IaaS (software as a service, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service), the study said.

 With the current market of $160-192 million in 2011, public cloud in India is at a very nascent state of the market and may not have hit the inflection point yet, indicating significant future potential. More details from here

Yahoo! India R&D sets up lab at IIT Madras

Yahoo! India Research and Development has entered into an agreement with Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, to support its faculty and students in cloud computing research.

Yahoo has set up a grid computing lab here on IIT campus, consisting of a cluster of high-end servers running its open source Hadoop software, which will provide the infrastructure necessary to conduct research on big data and cloud computing systems.

“This partnership is beneficial to both of us. Our Indian product offerings generate over 200 terabytes of data every week. The big data research that will be performed at this lab can help us in analysing this data, which in turn, can be used to improve our various products – such as Yahoo front page,” said Hari Vasudev, Vice-President, Yahoo! Inc. For complete story read here

Concept of Offshore/Onshore Model: Origins

In 1978 TCS had begun doing some work for the Institutional group Information Corporation ( IGIC). TCS supplied about 1/3 of the software conversion team effort which took two years. At one point TCS had over fifty technicians helping IGIC with conversion with included writing conversion filters and some new code skills TCS was able to put to use elsewhere later.

 It was during that period that TCS introduced the concept of Offshore/OnShore working. TCS realised that time difference between Bombay and Newyork could be used as advantage, so it was suggested to IGIC that TCS engineers in India work on the software code while the US was asleep and then send the results over to New York, so it was ready first thing in the morning New York Time. Effectively IGIC ended up with a twenty-four hour-a day operation.  At that time, no one else was using this model- from TCS Story and Beyond, S Ramadorai

'The Indian Cloud Revolution: Cloud Computing an important Government Agenda: Kapil Sibal

The Government is evolving a policy framework for cloud computing to address concerns as well as drive the cloud revolution. The Minister of Communications & IT, Mr Kapil Sibal, described cloud computing as "a fine economic solution in a complex knowledge economy" while inaugurating the2012 Cloud Summit organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here today.

The Minister suggested that the focus could be on SMEs and the starting point could be clusters, which have commonality of purpose and vision. Stressing on the need to build confidence among users, he highlighted the need for outlining technical and other parameters for cloud providers, standardization of contracts, privacy and security conditions.

On the occasion, Mr Sibal also released the CII White Paper on 'The Indian Cloud Revolution', saying that "India was still in the process of evolving appropriate architecture to take advantage of the possible revolution." The following are two detailed reports

Report 1

Report 2

Public Cloud : Slowly but surely Growing

Unlike the private Cloud where adoption is picking up, particularly in the large enterprise segment, the public Cloud is yet to take off in a big way in the country although SaaS-based offerings have proved popular with small manufacturers. By Heena Jhingan

Despite the capability to deliver higher RoI and faster time to market, the multi-tenanted character of a public Cloud has led to it being perceived as a setup that is vulnerable to breaches. Then there's the fact that the IT heads of most Indian enterprises, particularly the larger entities, are worried about losing control of the IT apparatus. There are exceptions to this rule, obviously, particularly with small scale manufacturers who have gone in for public Cloud-based CRM and SFA as well as organizations that have adopted the Cloud—Microsoft's and Google's—for messaging. Here is complete story from Express Computers

Airtel, HP to provide cloud services for small enterprises

 

Bharti Airtel on Monday said the company is launching customised cloud computing services for small and medium business enterprises.

The company is partnering Hewlett Packard (HP) for the new offerings. Airtel had earlier announced partnerships with VMware for virtualisation and Savvis for hosted managed services to ramp up its cloud computing services. 

Three areas

The new partnership with HP would provide infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service to small businesses of sizes as low as five employees in a company to 500 people.

“We have three focused areas – global, enterprise and government, and SMBs – to provide them solutions. Through different suites, we become their chief information officers on cloud to collaborate,” Mr Najib Khan, chief marketing officer – Airtel business, told Business Line. Complete details are here

Cloud Computing Updates from CloudTimes

Learn How to Make Rain - and Profits - from Growth in the Cloud Few innovations have captured the attention of the technology industry or the imagination of the broader business community faster than Cloud Computing. Despite its confusing nature, Cloud Computing has quickly evolved from a murky concept to the platform of choice for many businesses in the span of a couple of years. THINKstrategies watched the forces which have shaped the evolution of Cloud Computing for the past decade and is convinced that this is not just another overhyped technology fad doomed to failure. Instead, early adopters of this new generation of web based, on-demand services have reaped rapid and measurable benefits from today's Cloud services. DOWNLOAD THIS WHITE PAPER FOR FREE

Amazon Web Services vs OpenStack: We Need Choice
01 Jul 2012

Rackspace’s President, Lew Moorman, has recently made a statement regarding the cloud market, basically stating that the industry needs to have an open source alternative to the current leader in public cloud infrastructure, Amazon Web Services. According to the Rackspace executi[etc]view more ››

Assessing The Costs of Cloud Outages
01 Jul 2012

According to the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR), the total downtime of 13 well-known cloud services since 2007 amounts to 568 hours, which has an economic impact of around $71.7 million dollars. In IWGCR’s research, they have stated that the 7.5[etc]view more ››

Cisco Extends Social Collaboration to Cloud, Mobile Devices
29 Jun 2012

In order to help workers to collaborate anytime, anywhere, Cisco has announced significant new capabilities that extend the social partnership to mobile devices and cloud applications. The developments are part of what is now known as Cisco WebEx Social (formerly Cisco Quad) and[etc]view more ››

10 Enterprise Applications That Are Public Cloud Ready
29 Jun 2012

Casa Video and Netflix are examples of organizations that use the public cloud for core operations, with Casa Video using Amazon Web Services to run their entire operations, from computing to storage and running multiple instances with load balancing. Netflix, on the other hand,[etc]view more ››

Google Taking on AWS, Launching Further Cloud Services at Developer Conference
28 Jun 2012

There’s a talk around town. Google is allegedly set to launch a cloud service at its I/O conference, finally marking Google’s foray into the cloud computing industry, and putting them in direct competition with current market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS). Google’s offering wi[etc]view more ››

Red Hat Introduces JBoss Enterprise Platforms for Fast Cloud App Deployment
28 Jun 2012

More than two months after publishing its beta, Enterprise open source software vendor Red Hat has officially launched on the market JBoss Data Grid 6, a NoSQL in-memory database logically designed to trendy world of Big Data for its JBoss management platform. Today, the main cha[etc]view more ››

Cloud Security: McAfee Intends to Tame the Cloud
26 Jun 2012

McAfee, the Intel security firm, introduced new enhancements to its platform in the cloud during the Cloud Expo 2012 held in New York. McAfee Cloud Security Platform will provide options to ensure the three main channels of traffic information – email, web and identity, in order[etc]view more ››

CliQr Technologies Cloud-Application Platform Moves Enterprise Applications to the Cloud
26 Jun 2012

CliQr Technologies launches today with a new cloud platform that empowers existing applications to move to the Cloud. CliQr has been emerging from over one and a half years spent refining its revolutionary cloud application management platform and monitoring the success of early[etc]view more ››

9 Open Source Big Data Technologies Set to Change the Web
25 Jun 2012

Big Data is booming these days, as more and more companies realize the benefit of storing data and leveraging it for useful insights. At the forefront of this Big Data revolution is Open Source technology, since majority of Big Data companies prefer it over closed source technolo[etc]view more ››

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Red Hat OpenShift PaaS to offer support for developers

Open source solutions provider Red Hat has announced the business model and pricing plans for its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. The company in a release said it will provide support to companies in application development and deployment. 

OpenShift PaaS, which has been available as a free service since May 2011, delivers a cloud application platform to developers. Developers get a choice of programming languages, frameworks and application lifecycle tools to build their applications, said the company.   Here is the complete story from Hindu.