Posts tagged CEO
About Us
Aug 21st
When did CloudTweaks begin?
We have been established since 2009
Who we are?
CloudTweaks is an online News Media and Resource site which provides a variety of articles and resources from around the globe. We are made up by a team of contributors from around the world who are enthusiastic about cloud computing. Many of our contributors are CTO’s, CEO’s, Cloud Bloggers, Engineers and Technology Enthusiasts.
CloudTweaks Growing Popularity
We have had the good fortune of working alongside great people who want to see Cloudtweaks do well. When this happens, it places us in a good position where we can deliver excellent materials and promising resources which attract new and repeat visitors to our site. We continue to work toward adding exciting news and valuable resources.
What are the Future Plans of CloudTweaks?
We have a few ideas up our sleeve which we can’t discuss yet. One thing is for certain, we do intend on creating a more global community. Also, we plan on providing readers with new tutorials which will vary from Novice to Advanced in the coming months and much more…
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There are a number of ways you may do that. You may contact us if you’d like to become a cloud computing contributor you may also contact us regarding strategic partnership ideas as well as interview requests and PR submissions.
CloudTweaks Team
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Fujitsu sales suggest the market is turning
Jul 28th
News that Fujitsu UK & Ireland has signed £200m in new business with three large customers will be seen as welcome relief to Fujitsu shareholders, among others.
While it will disappoint the companies that lost to Fujitsu, they will nevertheless be encouraged that the private sector is once again spending money. After keeping their hands in their pockets for the past 30 months, customers now seem more open to suggestion.
Fujitsu UK CEO Roger Gilbert detects a new note in discussions these days. IT is a boardroom topic, especially when it comes to mergers and demergers, he says. And where the CEO has plans, IT is beginning to figure prominently in his or her calculations, he says.
Customers are coming back to the market to find a different set of conditions compared to when they last were here. Thirty months is almost two generations of silicon life, so, following Moore’s Law, they are getting about four times more processing power for the same pound.
They are also seeing a tectonic shift towards “cloud computing”, however that is defined. That is putting a greater emphasis on the capacity and reliability o of the networks to bring it all together.
While there are clearly growing capacity issues in the public networks, bandwidth, access and cost are all moving in favour of customers. Many customers think their own internal leased networks will make them immune from such considerations. They are wrong. The rise of social networks and growing willingness of consumers to use networks to interact with companies means that no company can afford to ignore the constraints imposed by congestion in the public networks.
Responsible companies should be adding their voices to the debate over Broadband Britain to ensure that their customers have fast, cheap reliable access to them, wherever they may be.
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CloudTweaks Media Partner For The Cloud Security Alliance Congress November 16-17
Jul 20th
CloudTweaks is pleased to be a Media Partner with the MIS Training Institute and The Cloud Security Alliance Congress.
Read more information on the Workshop Below.
Conference Overview Cloud Security Alliance Congress
November 16-17, 2010
Optional Workshops: November 15 & 18, 2010
Expo Dates: November 16 & 17, 2010
Hilton Disney World Resort
Orlando, FL
The Cloud Security Alliance, the world’s leading organization on cloud security and MIS Training Institute are assembling top experts and industry stakeholders to discuss the state of cloud security and best practice for cloud computing. This two day event will consist of four tracks consisting of Legal and Compliance Issues, Federal, Management and Security and Securing the Cloud.
Cloud computing represents the next major generation of computing, as information technology takes on the characteristics of an on-demand utility. The ability to innovate without the constraint of significant capital investments is unleashing a wave of new opportunities that promises to remake every business sector.
While the massive changes underway are unstoppable, our collective responsibility to good governance, compliance, managing risks and serving our customers must remain. Security is consistently cited as the biggest inhibitor to more aggressive cloud adoption. With this in mind, we have created our first annual Cloud Security Alliance Congress, the industry’s only conference devoted to the topic of cloud security. Our speakers’ roster and confirmed attendees represent the key thought leaders and stakeholders shaping the future of cloud security, which is the future of the cloud itself. On November 16-17, 2010, Orlando will be the epicenter of the movement to secure the cloud. Please join us.
Among the Topics to be Presented
+ Enabling Secure and Compliant Information Services in Hybrid Clouds
+ Audit Trail Protection: Preventing a False Sense of Security
+ Practical Ways to Measure Data Privacy in the Cloud
+ Bringing Cloud Operational Benefits to Security
+ Security in a Hybrid Environment
+ Top Threats and Risks to Cloud Computing
+ Disruptive Innovation and Cloud Computing Security
+ Latest CSA Research Findings
+ Cloud Identity and Access Management
+ Objectivity and Transparency in the Decision-Making Process
+ Security in a Hybrid Environment
+ Disruptive Innovation and Cloud Computing Security
+ Latest CSA Research Findings
+ Gain insight into how to streamline enterprise provisioning and access control
+ Find out how to use the CSA Controls Matrix to assess cloud security providers
+ Understand federal specific compliance requirements related to cloud computing
+ Learn from case studies detailing attacks against cloud computing infrastructures
+ Discover a framework for identifying customer governance and internal control requirements
Keynotes:
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Cloud services will create over 300,000 jobs in India by 2015 – Bangalore Cloud
May 27th
NIIT, leading Global Talent Development Corporation, will train over 100,000 students on Windows Azure over the next three years
The Zinnov study estimates the global cloud computing market to be over $ 70 billion by 2015. India, with its powerful ecosystem of over 1300 independent software vendors (ISVs), 1.4 million developers and more than 11000 system integrators (SIs and Custom software development organizations), is ideally poised to address this growing opportunity. As a result, an additional 300,000 jobs related to cloud services are estimated to be created in India over the next 5 years.
Speaking on the subject Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft Corporation said, “India will not only see a surge in consumption of cloud services, driving growth in domestic IT usage, but companies all over the world will look to India to support their transition to cloud computing. Microsoft is committed to helping businesses both in India and across the world maximize business value by leveraging the benefits that the cloud offers.” Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure supports over one billion customers and 20 million businesses globally, today.
Continue…Full Source: IndiaInfoline
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Digital Fuel Announces Out-of-the-Box Cloud Computing Solution
May 25th
Digital Fuel, a well-known provider of SaaS (News – Alert) IT Business Management solutions, recently announced the introduction of IT Cloud Cost Management.
This out-of-the-box solution is designed to help enterprises to make the most of the up-and-coming cloud computing technologies and services.
With the help of IT Cloud Cost Management, enterprises are able to compare the TCO, unit cost, and performance of IT services between various cloud and non-cloud alternatives and vendors.
“Today’s cloud computing landscape is changing the nature of IT by providing many more applicable delivery and pricing alternatives,” said Yisrael Dancziger, president and CEO of Digital Fuel. “These alternatives, however, require fast, ongoing business management of IT capabilities based on delivery levels and cost. Now there are clouds for applications, infrastructure, and business processes. The issue, as clouds become the de facto architecture, is how to track, analyze and assess TCO, unit cost, direct and indirect costs, demand and usage. Furthermore, IT organizations need to know how to allocate the costs of these services to the consumers within their companies.”
Read more… TMC.net
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Cloud computing for lean local governments – Cloud Economy
May 12th
Three years ago David Roberts glimpsed the future of leaner, more efficient local government, and saw it in the clouds.
The Vancouver entrepreneur and financier saw an opportunity for the bread and butter of local governments – permits, planning, enforcement, inspections and licences and the chores of citizenry – to be automated with less hassle and cost on either side.
At the time, Mr. Roberts owned Municipal Software, a Victoria, B.C., company that sells IT services and software to municipal governments the traditional way – by issuing a licence, installing it and training people on-site.
But cloud computing had caught his imagination, and Mr. Roberts realized that this method of selling software was too expensive and cumbersome for many small towns and cities.
“We decided to sell off the old business to focus on a new way of doing things,” said Mr. Roberts, president and CEO of the spinoff business, BasicGov Systems Inc. “It’s made us a lot more efficient as a supplier, and has worked really well for the customer.”
David Roberts, a Vancouver entrepreneur and financier, saw an opportunity for the bread and butter of local governments to be automated with less hassle and cost on either side.
BasicGov sells software as a service (SaaS) and manages the business of running a community by writing software that resides on the Internet. Today 33 communities – 31 in the United States and two in Canada, Dryden, Ont., and Red Deer, Alta. – have signed on.
Governments lease access to the servers and software – up to five modules covering permits, planning, enforcement, inspections and licences, and a public portal. One user with one module pays $119 per month. Bulk pricing is available for larger clients.
Cloud computing is the future, and everyone from Apple to Google to Microsoft is betting that mainframe servers and physical software will eventually become a thing of the past.
The cloud is the Internet and users can access software that is stored on remote servers around the world on demand. Gmail is a common form of cloud computing.
As it requires no capital investment, setup or in-house expertise, it’s a smart solution for companies looking to cut costs. BasicGov trains employees remotely and automatically pushes out updates.
“Software to run a city is not like you or I buying a copy of Microsoft Office,” Mr. Roberts says. “The cost would typically be a half-million to a million dollars up front. It works okay if you’re a fairly large city with a big population, a lot of expertise in-house and a significant budget. But we found a lot of smaller cities that couldn’t afford that kind of payment up front.”
To ensure a reliable platform, BasicGov partnered with Salesforce.com’s cloud computing platform, Force.com, which is regarded as the SaaS industry standard in cloud customer-relationship management products supporting about 77,000 organizations. It also allows BasicGov to easily take on much larger clients. The partnership promises top-notch security.
“It comes up in almost every initial discussion,” vice-president Michael Togyi says. “People are worried, but once we explain the technology that’s in place, they realize it’s often better than what they would have done themselves. We have armed guards, underground power supplies. Our data centres are more rock solid than some national security agencies in the U.S.” Continue..
Credit to Shawna Richer: TheGlobeandMail
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Before You Choose a Cloud Computing Vendor: 8 Questions
Apr 30th
Other vendors don’t offer the right kind of security — the kind a CIO gets from knowing that new cloud provider is a partner to be relied on, not one that will disappear or fail after the CIO talked a large portion of the company into relying on it.
Faced with a project list greater than his budget, MoMA’s Peltzman looked into various cloud services as ways to extend MoMA’s capacity in specific ways at specific times. Broad-spectrum IaaS services such as Amazon’s EC3 had plenty of capacity, but the startup took too long, he says. SaaS providers such as Salesforce.com’s online ERP were too function-specific, he adds. Instead, he picked a service from Cloudshare that allowed him to create virtual workgroup environments at will, on Cloudshare’s network.
How to Negotiate a Better Cloud Computing Contract
How do you find the right cloud provider? There’s not a consistent checklist either small or large companies can go through to make the selection, according to Bernard Golden, CEO of cloud consulting firm HyperStratus and CIO.com blogger.
“A manufacturing company isn’t going to have the same checklist as a service company or retailer,” Golden says. “They’re too different. But there is a consistent set of things to look at. Some of them are specific to cloud providers; a lot of them are the same kinds of things you had to look at in outsourcing or any other service provider contract.”
1. How responsive is the cloud company?
“How fast do they call you back?” asks James McKee, president of United Resource Systems, medical-debt collection company based in Lakewood, Colo. “It doesn’t tell you everything, but I like to know how important I am to them and how responsive they are. My clients demand that responsiveness from me; I demand it from my providers.”
Some providers may be more responsive at the beginning of a relationship than later, so checking with other customers on that point is important as well, Golden says.
CIO — There are few ways a CIO can look better than by walking in to the CEO’s office to offer a sophisticated technology service that answers a desperate business need without requiring large capital expenses or delays before implementation.
“Flip the switch and there’s the extra capacity. Pay for what you use and shut it off again,” says Steven Peltzman, CIO of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.
Not every cloud provider can do that, of course. Some don’t offer the right kind of service. Infrastructure as a service providers such as Amazon Web Services require too much work up front to suit a relatively small IT project.
2. How transparent is the cloud service?
“There’s a lot of mystery in clouds,” according to Chris Wolf, analyst with the Burton Group. There’s no need to understand the underlying infrastructure and the company’s plans to upgrade or reinforce it if you’re just using Google (GOOG) for Gmail. But any company hiring a provider for important business functions deserves to know what kind of technology — and secondary or tertiary service providers — actually makes up the cloud and how reliable it is.
3. How prepared is the cloud provider to answer due-diligence questions?
Some of the most critical questions are the most basic: what does the company do to ensure physical security; what servers and software does it run and what are its arrangements for disaster recovery; are its employees all well trained, background-checked, bonded and secured?
“All the basic stuff is pretty important, but you have to verify that,” Wolf says. “You have to know they’re relatively stable and reliable in hiring and you have to check on things like making sure they have redundant telecom arrangements and high availability/DR options so you don’t go down for three days when they have a power outage.”
4. How much access does the cloud provider offer?
“You should be able to go through your list of criteria with the vendor and get answers to your questions and have them revisit that periodically to demonstrate how they’re living up to your expectations,” Golden says. “If it’s a big contract, you’re going to want to do audits periodically to verify SLA and compliance and security issues.”
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Former MySQL CEO talks Eucalyptus and cloud computing
Mar 29th
Marten Mickos presided over the growth of MySQL from an open source project to a $1 billion business that was fundamental to growth of the commercial Web, and he’s now taken the reins at another open source project turned for-profit venture, Eucalyptus Systems. The startup develops software that turns commodity servers into cloud computing environments that act like Amazon Web Services. Eucalyptus powers the NASA Nebula project, one of the largest cloud environments in the federal government today, and some research and data crunching projects at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, among others. Mickos explains his return to business and why he chose cloud computing.
What prompted the move to Eucalyptus and what are the immediate plans for the business?
Marten Mickos: It’s a massive opportunity and a great team; I couldn’t resist it. In 2010, we are not changing any plans. We are ramping up the growth rate and investment, but it’s essentially the plan that the management detailed last year. Two key things this year are to get more releases out, to be very diligent with producing more code and release it with high quality, and the other thing is securing some key partnerships and customer relationships.
We already work closely with Canonical on the Ubuntu cloud edition, that’s one obvious thing; we’ll be working with other large manufacturers of hardware and software and even system integrators who are the one’s actually building the private clouds for large enterprises.
Does Eucalyptus have the same potential as MySQL?
MM: This might be an even bigger opportunity, business-wise. It’s so early in cloud computing to estimate how big it will be. It’s something that is needed all over the planet in most data centers, public or private, so I think it will be a massive opportunity. Of course, we don’t know whether we will win. We think we have a great start, we know how to go about it, but of course there are many question marks here. That’s the thrill of it.
This looks like a green field market? A new space for growth based on cloud?
MM: Well, if you listen to Goldman Sachs or Piper Jaffray or those guys, they say that this is the biggest thing in the coming ten years, and the biggest thing really means something massive. To be the biggest thing, it has to be a question of tens of billions of dollars in total. I’m not saying we can capture all of it, but I think Eucalyptus has a unique opportunity to be a very strategic player in that market. Of course, there are big players, vendors who will be strong players in cloud computing, there will be small and large ones. I know and I can sense it’s a huge opportunity compared to anything out there.
Is now the time that cloud is coming to fruition as a market?
MM: Well, I can’t say I’m super analytical about it. I’ve learnt a lot in the last 12 months, that’s obviously clear. I still think its early days, so if somebody joins cloud computing a year from now, it may not be too late. Even two years from now, there will be plenty of big new opportunities. So I’m joining early, but at the same time, I’m also seeing that there is real revenue to be had, right now.
What is so great about the cloud? We have outsourced and services delivered online already, and some say they’ve being doing it all along.
MM: Our view is that cloud computing is a new challenge and you need new software to solve it. You can’t solve new problems with old software. I think the world has shown that over and over again.
Sure, some vendors will still claim that some old software they have is capable of providing cloud computing services. Let’s be clear, the old guys do have functioning solutions. Oracle and IBM and Microsoft, they have great software stacks that work well and they may produce great computing or they may produce something else, Software as a Service (SaaS), that is getting close to cloud. They do not have Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), where you get complete elasticity with the services, and there are a number of new benefits you get with something like Eucalyptus that you cannot get with the old stuff. The old stuff works, it works very well, so you shouldn’t expect it to completely go away, but it doesn’t provide the same level of benefits.
Technological advances do provide new opportunities, and maybe they are not new under the sun, but they bring some distinctive benefit that wasn’t there before.
Where are the challenges for cloud computing?
MM: Well, there will be inertia among customers. Not all customers will be ready to jump on this bandwagon right away; some will. But I think we talk about the whole notion of elastic clouds and we forget that building elasticity is really, really, really difficult. Getting a cloud that can truly scale up and down seamlessly, that’s hard work. Doing it with low latency is even harder, and then adding on top of that the metering, the awareness of what resources are being used and where the bottlenecks are; in the aggregate, it means it’s a huge technical challenge.
Will cloud computing inevitably turn computing power into a uniform commodity, like corn?
MM: There will definitely be services like that, but we will always continue to have corporations and governments who cannot live in such an environment and need the security and the assurance and the uptime that you can only provide through a dedicated service. That’s what Eucalyptus is targeting, the private cloud where there are heightened requirements on exactly those areas.
But sure, there will probably be computing available from the 7-11 where everybody can buy a little bit of computing where they need it. And Amazon is showing that; it’s amazing what Amazon is doing with their cloud, we must not underestimate their meaning to the market. They’re showing you can run it with low margins, on a massive scale, for consumers and corporations, available for anybody. Cloud computing wouldn’t be in the state it’s in today if Amazon hadn’t shown the way.
And the future looks bright?
MM: I think it’s hard! It’s difficult. This is a difficult area, it’s not for the faint of heart, but there’s just a massive opportunity. The world will need this; there’s just a constant need for cloud computing solutions. It’s not like we’ll suddenly realize it’s just a fad and nobody really needed it. People will need it. The challenge will be in whether we can make it sufficiently efficient and functional and easy to use. Full Source
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Steve Ballmer on Microsoft’s Cloud Strategy – Thursday, March 4, at 1 p.m. EST/10 a.m. PST
Mar 3rd
Microsoft on Cloud Computing
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer discusses what’s ahead for computing, with a focus on how cloud computing will change the way people and businesses use technology. Watch the speech live Thursday, March 4, at 1 p.m. EST/10 a.m. PST, or return here to view the on-demand webcast and video highlights.
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Force.com – Huge 4Q profit on big sales jump
Feb 25th
SAN FRANCISCO — Salesforce.com on Wednesday posted a 48 percent jump in fiscal fourth-quarter profit, on strong sales growth for its online business software applications.
For the three months ended Jan. 31, Salesforce.com said profit jumped to $20.4 million, or 16 cents per share, compared with $13.8 million, or 11 cents per share, in last year’s fourth quarter.
Revenue shot up 22 percent to $354 million, from $289.6 million a year ago.
Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, on average, expected profit of 15 cents per share, on revenue of $342.3 million.
Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said the company is benefiting from the move to cloud computing.
Cloud computing lets companies collaborate online and store data on outside servers, lowering the cost of maintaining their own computer systems.
For the fiscal year, the company earned $80.7 million, or 63 cents per share, on revenue of $1.31 billion. That compares with profit of $43.4 million, or 35 cents per share, on revenue of $1.08 billion last year.
The company said it added more than 17,000 new customers during the fiscal year, to about 72,500.
For the fiscal first quarter, the company expects earnings between 12 and 13 cents per share, on revenue between $365 million and $367 million.
Analysts call for profit of 18 cents per share, on revenue of $354.7 million. The earnings per share numbers, however, may not be comparable because of unusual items.
For the full fiscal year, Salesforce.com forecast earnings between 58 cents and 60 cents per share. It raised its revenue guidance to growth between 16 percent and 17 percent, from 15 to 16 percent. That implies a revenue forecast between $1.51 billion and $1.53 billion.
Wall Street expects profit of 82 cents per share on revenue of $1.51 billion for the fiscal year.
Salesforce.com shares wobbled in aftermarket electronic trading, falling immediately after the release before gaining $1.28 to $70.90. The stock closed regular trading up $1.20 at $69.44.
