Posts tagged cloud technology
2010: The Year of the Cloud Platform
Mar 9th
For the 3rd installment of our webinar recap series, we dive into what the future holds for cloud computing. In particular, will look at the role of platform-as-a-service in the broader cloud ecosystem. In particular, will 2010 be “the year of PaaS?” Read on for more about why platform-level services will be hot in 2010, and who we felt would be the big winners this year as the focus shifts from the infrastructure to the platform
2010: The Year of Platform as a Service
Michael: 2010 is going to be the year of the platform layer. If we look back at the predictions in 2008 going into 2009, people were getting excited about cloud. People were talking very much about virtualization. People were talking very much about renting resources and tying them all together.
That was great, and we saw that come together in 2009, a lot of excitement out of Amazon and VMware with their various solutions for public and private clouds. A lot of users are coming. When we talk to our customers and various users around the country, I hear a lot of application developers come and say, “But wait how do I tie all of this together? What tools are there for me to take advantage of this new paradigm?” That’s really the core of this prediction.
The platform tools are there. We have our platform tools that assist developers to put together these large applications so they can focus on their value add. There are frameworks such as Hadoop where with just writing a couple of functions of code, you get this massive platform for churning through terabytes or petabytes of data across your infrastructure.
These are the tools. This is the next tier up on the cloud technology stack. This is what people are going to be looking for. I think it’s interesting that if you look back in 2009, you see this come. I see two big points that really drive this.
First of all, there was the VMware acquisition of SpringSource. VMware is still all about the private clouds for tying together your resources and being able to control them dynamically, but you could tell they saw that, to them, the VM is still just a black box that they manage.
They really don’t have the insight into what the application is doing, and they needed those tools to go one tier up. So, here they look at SpringSource. They have more control on runtimes. They have the Hyperic monitoring system to see what’s going on inside the VM, and they can control it at a tighter level.
We talked about standards for 2009. Here at the end of 2009, I’ve seen the first talk about not standards at the infrastructure layer, but standards at the platform layer, about how to try to keep these tools together. So it’s time. People need to move up that stack.
The masses of developers don’t want to be distributed computing experts. They want a tool set to assist them on top of this tremendous infrastructure we’ve built, and I really see it all coming together with another round of great tools for application developers to build upon.
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Cloud Computing News – Apple looks to move movies to the cloud…
Mar 3rd
Apple’s plans for cloud computing go beyond music.
The company’s representatives have recently spoken with some of the major film studios about enabling iTunes users to store their content on the company’s servers, two people familiar with the discussions told CNET. That’s in addition to streaming television shows and music.
The news comes a month after Apple spoke to the major record companies about a similar plan involving music. Apple’s vision is to build proverbial digital shelves where iTunes users store their media, one of the sources said. “Basically, they want to eliminate the hard drive,” the source said.
By cramming digital songs, videos, and all manner of software applications on computers and handheld devices, there’s some indication that consumers are maxing out hard drives, particularly on smaller mobile devices. That has led to speculation among Apple watchers that some consumers might slow their purchasing of new content, if they have nowhere to easily put it.
It’s a bit of leap to reach that conclusion, certainly when a stagnant economy might be hampering sales, but there are some worrisome signs. The NPD Group reported last week that the number of people who legally downloaded songs dropped by nearly a million, from 35.2 million in 2008 to 34.6 million last year. Screen Digest, a research firm that focuses on the entertainment industry, on Monday said growth in movie downloads slowed dramatically in 2009, following sharp increases in the two prior years. Screen Digest had projected that total U.S. online movie sales for 2009 would come in at about $360 million, but the total reached only $291 million, the company said.
Before iTunes users can store their movies and TV shows in Apple’s cloud, the company must get the studios to sign on. This may not be easy. The studios want to make sure that Apple’s plans play nice with non-Apple devices and services.
Hollywood isn’t interested in any walled gardens, said James McQuivey, a media analyst at Forrester Research.
“The studios are very concerned that they’re going to get roped into somebody’s proprietary platform,” McQuivey said. “They want a world where consumers have a relationship with the content, and not with the device or the service. They are in a position to force Apple to go along and make sure that content bought [via] iTunes will play on a Nokia phone. That is very un-Apple-like.”
The upper hand in Hollywood
“Apple would prefer not to do this,” McQuivey continued. “But it just doesn’t have the leverage it once did. Apple can’t dictate terms or position itself as a digital savior.”
The reason that Apple doesn’t wield the same power over the film and TV industries that it did with music is that more players are willing to give the studios what they want.
The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, or DECE, is a consortium of heavy-hitting media stakeholders lining up to create standards for file formats, digital rights management, and authentication technologies. The group includes Adobe Systems, Best Buy, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Lions Gate Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Microsoft, Netflix, Panasonic, the four largest recording companies (Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI Group, and Warner Music Group), Samsung, Sony, and Warner Bros. Entertainment.
DECE’s goal is to make sure that a movie or TV show bought from Comcast’s video service will play on Samsung devices or on Netflix’s service.
Not all the studios have joined. Walt Disney has create a DECE-like service called KeyChest, which is supposed to be DECE-compatible.
Applying more pressure on Apple is Google, one of its main rivals. Google, obviously, has YouTube. It’s also eyeing some start-ups with cloud technology to beef up its streaming services.
Two weeks ago, sources told CNET that Google had informal acquisition talks with Catch Media, a Los Angeles company that wants to become a clearinghouse of sorts, in which consumers move media around the Web, and Catch handles the permissions and licensing.
So what’s Apple’s answer to the Google threat? Apple is building a new data center in North Carolina that, according to reports, will be the backbone of its streaming offerings. In December, Apple bought Lala, a struggling music service with an expertise in cloud computing. Google was also trying to acquire the company, but Apple outbid Google.
The one thing that could help Apple pull away from Google, giving it more clout with the studios and TV networks, is if iPad catches on with consumers.
The Web-enabled computer tablet, which is due to hit store shelves later this month, features a 9.7-inch display screen and can play back video at up to 720p resolution, the sources said. If consumers start buying video to watch on the iPad, Hollywood could soften its stance on standards. But McQuivey says Apple can’t create any proprietary formats, at this point.
“Apple can’t suddenly make the iPad a closed environment,” he said. “Apple is not any position to refuse to limit its customers’ choices. By pioneering (the apps), Apple is stuck doing what’s right for consumers.”
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The Cloud – Cloud Recruitment Jumps by 233% in 2010
Feb 16th
New figures released today show that the demand for Cloud Computing specialists jumped by 233% in the first month of 2010.
Resource On Demand, a Cloud recruitment firm, has logged a record number of enquiries for salesforce.com and SaaS (Software as a Service) Specialists, jumping from 3 to 10 enquires per week. This is consistent with anecdotal evidence that shows increasing numbers of organisations placing their reliance in the Cloud, fuelling demand for Cloud specialists.
Lee Durrant, MD of Resource On Demand, believes that demand for Cloud Computing countered the downturn and gave way to a boom in cloud recruiting:
“Cloud computing is now more than a buzz word, organisations are seeing both economic and sound operational reasons to use Cloud technology. This appealed to organisations during the recession, due to value for money paired with an increased level of performance, and continues to appeal to them in the post-recession market place.”
Resource on Demand are aiding this rapid-growth market by offering a ‘pay as you go’ recruitment fee, which works hand in hand with SaaS models who also offer low monthly subscription fees.
Lee added: “With Resource On Demand, you pay a fixed, low monthly subscription fee, which starts when we find someone to fill the position and continues for the first 12 months in this position. If they leave, for whatever reason during the first 12 months, you simply stop paying the monthly fee. This means your costs remain unchanged and you can grow your business in this difficult environment.”
Resource on Demand began to see green shoots of recovery in the final quarter of 2009 and is now expanding to cope with the demand that they are facing.
END OF PRESS RELEASE
Lee Durrant is available for further comment through Blue Cherry PR.
Please contact Mark Crosby to arrange a face-to-face interview or ‘phone call with Lee Durrant.
mark@blue-cherry.co.uk
07800 829 141.
PHOTO
A photo of Resource on Demand MD, Lee Durrant, is available to download from: www.blue-cherry.co.uk/clients/rod/lee.jpg
NOTES FOR EDITORS on Resource On Demand:
Resource On Demand offers recruitment services in the salesforce.com ecosystem on a subscription basis. This service is specifically designed for the Cloud Computing / SaaS industry.
By fully embracing the SaaS spirit of low cost and low risk, it allows Salesforce.com partners and consulting firms to scale up and down effectively. Built on a SaaS model, it offers the same benefits of scalability, flexibility and low risk, all delivered for a low monthly fee.
The salesforce.com industry is one of the fastest growing industries on the planet. Resource On Demand (ROD) was founded in Feb 2009 to assist the growth of this industry and the companies within it.
Having spent 20 years in the IT recruitment industry, our Founders have gained a solid reputation for honesty, openness and getting the job done in a notoriously fast-moving industry.
Resource On Demand is a natural progression for recruitment within the salesforce.com industry. We understand the salesforce.com industry because we’re part of it (we’re already wondering how we managed our CRM, database and accounting without it). More importantly, though, we understand how to get the right salesforce.com people into the right jobs.
With conventional recruitment, you generally pay 15-20% of the person’s base salary when they start working for you. This can be quite a large lump sum and makes the cost of recruitment difficult especially for SMEs looking to grow quickly. Often, there is no insurance against this fee either – meaning that if your new recruit doesn’t survive their probation period the fee can be lost and, worse still, a new fee required to fill the position again.
With Resource On Demand, you pay a fixed, low monthly subscription fee, which starts when we find someone to fill your position and continues for the first 12 months of their career with you. If they leave, for whatever reason during the first 12 months, you simply stop paying the monthly fee. This means your costs remain unchanged even if, as can often happen in a growing industry, you end up going through half a dozen people in a year.
What you have, in effect, is ‘pay-as-you-go’ recruitment: instead of a single up-front fee, which can vary according to the salary you’re offering and the percentage your recruiter charges, you make fixed, monthly payments for as long as the position exists. This gives you complete control over your budget and the flexibility you need to scale up or down as your business evolves.
What’s more, a large up-front placement fee means it usually takes some time for a new employee to generate enough revenue to cover their recruitment costs. With Resource On Demand, a single day’s consultancy fee will easily cover your monthly subscription, so your new hire is profitable virtually straight away.
The benefits at a glance:
• Save Money – Focus Budgets on Competitive Advantage rather than Recruitment
• Low risk – Able to recruit whole teams of salesforce.com people without huge costs
• Pay as you go, predictable costs
• Flexibility and Scalability
Lee Durrant, Director of Resource On Demand says: “We felt that the salesforce.com market in the UK would explode in 2010, and that the Consulting companies within this space would need to grow quickly to meet the demands of their customers. By using our subscription recruitment model they are able to spread the cost of recruiting for the country’s top salesforce.com talent.”
