Author: GigaOM

OpenStack, the fast-growing IaaS platform, is taking root across the industry, promising an open cloud computing platform that enables portability, security and trust in the cloud. OpenStack distributions continue to come to market, and customers are testing the platform as an adjunct to public clouds or their own private infrastructure. How many customers are using OpenStack in production today, and is the platform living up to its promise of openness and security, beyond what’s available from other cloud providers?

Key topics of discussion:

• Who is using OpenStack today?
• What underlying infrastructure and technologies provide the foundation for OpenStack clouds today and into the future?
• Are open APIs enough or is there a further level of interoperability that must occur in order for true portability of workloads across clouds?
• How does OpenStack enable trusted compute pools at the hardware level?
• What are the challenges with ensuring authenticity at the infrastructure layer?

Our panel of experts includes:

• Jo Maitland, research director, Cloud, GigaOM Research
• Dana Gardner, president, Interarbor Solutions, LLC
• Jason Bloomberg, president, ZapThink
• Das Kamhout, IT cloud computing, IT principal pngineer, Intel

Register here to join GigaOM Research and our sponsor Intel for “OpenStack: Building portability, security and trust in the cloud,” a free webinar on Wednesday, March 27, 2013, at 10 a.m. PT.

The world’s smartest headset interacts seamlessly with all of the devices, technology and people in your life. Combining triple-mic audio precision with voice commands and Smart Sensor™ technology, the Voyager Legend understands how and when you want to talk. The sensors react when you put the headset on, letting you instantly take calls without a click. If you’re already wearing it, the Voyager Legend headset announces callers by name, allowing you to answer or ignore a call with a voice command. Voice commands also let you check the remaining battery level, connection status and more.

The Voyager Legend headset can connect to your smartphone and tablet while the Smart Sensor technology will recognize which device you prefer to use. Plus, the free Find MyHeadset™ smartphone app for Android helps you locate your headset when it’s buried in a laptop bag or left behind at a restaurant.

The Plantronics Voyager Legend headset, delivering unsurpassed audio clarity and all-day comfort, is now available from AT&T. Get yours at att.com/legend.

Mobile content is a great example of the U.K.’s growing international reputation for high-tech innovation. The overall U.K. mobile content market is worth some $1.6 billion each year. This is an irresistible draw for overseas investors.

Lucrative opportunities exist across the board. The U.K. app market, for example, is currently valued at $720 million, while the number of smartphones in the U.K. is expected to double to around 64 million by 2015. Mobile advertising is growing by over 200 percent, while the U.K. mobile internet services market, worth $620 million, is expected to rise to over $1.5 billion by 2015. Furthermore, the rollout of 4G across the U.K.’s main cities will complement our already expansive Wi-Fi network.

To succeed in the mobile content market, companies are realizing that they require experienced content developers, with tested design and interaction skills, as well as good partnerships across traditional and new media sectors. Home to all the world’s largest media platform and content players, the U.K. is uniquely positioned to take the lead in this area.

Supported by world-class high-tech talent and an early-adopter consumer market, innovation is at the heart of the U.K.’s fast-growing mobile content industry. Our ambitious companies, many of which are still small and in the early stages of growth, realize that creative forward thinking is an essential ingredient of commercial success. It’s a vibrant and dynamic community, and one that offers great inward investment potential.

–Tony Hughes, business sector specialist, UK Trade & Investment

To find out more visit here.

With such a rich heritage and strengths across all aspects of the entertainment and technology industries, the U.K. is in a unique position to grow a global games business. Not only do we have the early-adopter consumer market to trial new games — there are over 34 million active gamers in the U.K. — but we are also home to all the major companies that are driving the market worldwide.

In fact, the U.K. has the largest games development community in Europe, with over 250 development studios and hundreds more small development teams and freelancers. Together they helped to generate total U.K. games revenue of $6.4 billion in 2012, with the mobile, app and MMO segments of the market enjoying particularly rapid growth.

The U.K. government is planning additional tax credits for the games sector, providing a significant boost to games companies developing core software and content in the U.K. Incentives such as these will help ensure the U.K. continues to blaze a trail in one of the world’s most dynamic industries.

Microsoft has officially opened a new games studio in London. Lift London wall will act as an incubator for other studios and focus largely on games for the European market. “We very much believe that Europe is a great opportunity for us” said Phil Harrison, the corporate VP at Microsoft EMEA.

–Simon Sprince, business sector specialist, U.K. Trade & Investment

Find out how U.K. Trade & Investment can help you grow your business in the U.K. by visiting the UKTI website.

When flash memory hit the consumer market, it transformed the user experience in ways no one could have anticipated. The new experience completely transformed the HDD-based mobile consumer device market. When flash memory floods the enterprise storage market in 2013, it will have similar effects, though the situation for enterprise will be much more complex.

Looking at data center architecture, for example, cloud-based storage is bulldozing convention in the design of data centers. Further, the emergence of “software-defined storage” platforms is making the decision-making process for designing IT infrastructure nothing short of perplexing.

New and accelerated deployments of VDI, big data, server virtualization and performance-hungry databases will place growing pressure on enterprise infrastructure. The need for better storage will produce innovation opportunities in the data center. Some organizations will certainly face pitfalls in architectural decision making.

Key topics of discussion:

• How IT infrastructure is impacted by major shifts in storage technology in 2013
• What happens when cloud architecture and flash memory collide
• When and where to apply flash memory and software-defined storage architectures
• The emerging role of software-defined storage architectures
• How an organization can capitalize — or falter — on decisions this year
• How to use storage as a strategic differentiator for your organization

Speakers include:

• Barb Goldworm, president and chief analyst, FOCUS, LLC

• David Linthicum, CTO and founder, Blue Mountain Labs

• Mike Karp, analyst, GigaOM Research

• Scott Dietzen, CEO, Pure Storage

For a thorough discussion of these issues, please join GigaOM Research and our sponsor Pure Storage for “Flash memory, the cloud and software-defined storage in 2013,” a free analyst webinar on Monday, March 18, 2013, at 10 a.m. PT.  Register today.

High-tech industries of all shapes and sizes are flourishing in the U.K. It is the most important market in Europe for mobile content, with a higher percentage of smartphones than any other nation. The U.K. is also the largest market for ecommerce and m-commerce in Europe.

Small wonder then that the U.K. is the No. 1 spot for international technology companies coming into the European Union (EU). It is home to all the major firms driving the technology industry worldwide, as well as an ever-increasing number of startups, supported by the U.K.’s generous tax breaks for R&D and innovation.

Whether multinational or SME, these firms have a world-class talent pool on which to draw. The U.K. has three of the top five technology universities in the EU, and it attracts top industry talent from across the globe thanks to its status as the best place in Europe to start a business.

The U.K. also has lots to offer from a cultural point of view, with a vibrant and stimulating multicultural environment and an ethnically diverse, forward-thinking population that is keen to embrace the latest technologies. Nowhere better epitomizes this than London, one of the world’s most important creative and technology hubs and home to Tech City, the fastest-growing cluster of technology startups in the EU. It really is an amazing and inspirational place to be.

–Tony Hughes, U.K. Trade & Investment’s business sector specialist

Find out how UK Trade & Investment can help you grow your business.

I am still homeless (most of the time), and living on @Airbnb. Permanent residences are for families.

AirBnB CEO & co-founder Brian Chesky via Twitter

A video conversation with Brian Chesky from our archives:

If you’re in a sophisticated IT shop, you’re already familiar with IT outsourcing. Your knowledge of this market gives you a leg up when you’re shopping for a service provider. You already have a bank of the right questions to ask.

But what happens when you’re moving an application to a cloud environment? The fact that a shared, multitenant environment will host your application introduces a whole different set of questions to ask. As part of the due diligence process, you’ve got to identify a wide range of capabilities you require from your cloud service provider.

How do you do this? Look to the online Intel Cloud Finder tool. This tool incorporates knowledge we’ve gained from working with Intel IT and our service provider partners to identify best practices in cloud environments and the characteristics of enterprise-grade cloud solutions.

When you visit this site you are first asked questions to define your required and desired features for your Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution. You don’t have to come up with a list of questions. We’ve done that for you.

When you complete the search process, the tool compares your responses to the services available from a select number of reputable IaaS providers worldwide and returns matching results. With the click of a mouse, you can learn more about the providers and reach out to them to take the next step.

Billy Cox is the general manager of a new, emerging software business at Intel.

According to Strategy Analytics, more than a sixth of the people in the world have a smartphone. Today’s consumer expects nothing less than flawless performance in tapping bandwidth-intensive activities such as gaming and HD video conferencing on his phones and tablets. No buffering, no spinning wheel of death, no nonsense. To meet this need, high-speed LTE networks have become the norm.

But migrating to an LTE network can raise a host of challenges, especially as mobile operators strive to deliver uninterrupted service amid the transition. Juniper Networks’ rich customer experience with LTE migration has shown that there are three considerations service providers need to bear in mind as they make the leap to LTE:

1. Rethink security. The all-IP nature of LTE opens up security threats not present in 3G networks and requires new measures to protect private data. Juniper’s new SRX line cards fortify network entry points to protect data packets without requiring network downtime.

2. LTE needs to scale on a dime to meet data demands. Juniper allows network elements to scale independently, growing proportionally to the number of new devices accessing the network. This approach gives carriers the flexibility to adjust when, for instance, the latest viral video hits.

3. Invest for the future, not to keep up. Monetization opportunities, such as Juniper’s JunosVApp Engine, have shown through customer use cases it’s easier to deliver new revenue-generating services, from parental controls to on-demand video streaming.

For more information on Juniper’s latest LTE solutions click here.

There is an interesting clash of perspectives occurring in the enterprise market between the Hadoop newcomers and the old-school data-warehousing providers. The latter are attempting to paint Hadoop into a corner, narrowing its usefulness to a limited set of functionality, while at the other end, the Hadoop providers are expanding the functionality of Hadoop to broaden its applicability and usefulness. In the middle are enterprises that are trying to figure out how Hadoop fits into their existing environment alongside data warehouses and other legacy systems. They are typically conservative and pragmatic and are primarily interested in reducing the cost of their environment while squeezing more value out of their data.

In fact, many organizations have found that by using Hadoop to complement their data warehouses, they can improve performance, reduce costs and accelerate new insights.

Our panel of experts will discuss these topics:

• Understanding Hadoop’s role with respect to the data warehouse
• Economic considerations for Hadoop
• How customers can prepare for SDN, given that the technology and marketplace is rapidly evolving
• The key industry standards efforts and how they differ (IETF, ONF, NFV)

Our speakers include:

• Jo Maitland, research director, Cloud, GigaOM Research

• Richard Winter, president, WinterCorp

• Dr. Amr Awadallah, CTO, Cloudera

Register here to join GigaOM Research and our sponsor Cloudera for “Hadoop vs. EDWs: trends in enterprise adoption,” a free analyst webinar on Wednesday, March 13, 2013, at 10 a.m. PT.

When we commissioned the Ponemon Institute to examine the efficacy of emerging security technologies, it was on more than just a hunch that reality falls short of promised protections. As a longtime security vendor and purveyor of next-generation firewalls and intrusion prevention systems that make up the emerging security technology sector, we at Juniper wanted to understand how efficient these defenses have been against threats this past year.

It came as no surprise to us that over 4,700 global participating IT professionals and security practitioners told the Ponemon Institute despite current security investments, their cybersecurity posture is at a 4.7 on a scale where 10 is most secure. Further, 60 percent of organizations reported having one or more breaches in the last year.

Addressing cyber-attacks has become the stuff of Presidential State of the Union Addresses and World Economic Forum charters. Today’s hackers are organized, motivated and thanks to cloud and SDN, have virtually unlimited compute and attack surfaces with which to work.

When asked about their biggest security concern, 56 percent of firms identified the need to secure web traffic as top of list. When asked about the top three most serious attacks faced by organizations, respondents reiterated their concerns with outside-in attacks on web applications and data centers:

• 62 percent expressed concerns about web-based attacks
• 60 percent expressed concerns about distributed denial of service attacks as a top concern
• 47 percent specifically calling out SQL injection attempts

Read full story here.

When the mission holds lives in the balance, the network is Brocade.

Brocade networks enable health care organizations to deliver reliable and accessible care to their patients while increasing operational efficiency and reducing costs.

Delivering the highest level of reliability and availability is critical for the “always on” communications infrastructures of today. Health care networks must support wired and wireless devices to deliver seamless patient care. Additionally, strong network security is critical for protecting patient records and preventing unauthorized access to data.

As a result, one of the key challenges for health care organizations is scaling their network infrastructures without increasing management complexity and cost.

Brocade network solutions are designed to handle massive surges in data growth — in both wired and wireless networks, from core data centers to remote branch offices. These solutions are purpose-built to support today’s requirements and provide a strong foundation for continued growth.

Software-defined networking has finally evolved to address key gaps plaguing businesses trying to capitalize on emerging cloud-enabled architectures. It offers a level of operational efficiency, interoperability and scale thus far impossible in traditional network infrastructure. Innovations in pervasively networked software are enabling key innovations in virtualization, automation and context-aware service delivery.

Our panel of experts will address these questions:

• What are the major market drivers for SDN?
• How are carriers and enterprises implementing SDN to enable distributed applications and cloud infrastructures?
• How can customers prepare for SDN, given the technology and marketplace is rapidly evolving?
• What are the key industry standards efforts and how do they differ? (IETF, ONF, NFV)

Speakers include:

• Jo Maitland, research director, Cloud, GigaOM Research

• Lee Doyle, principal analyst, Doyle Research

• Matt Sarrel, executive director, Sarrel Group

• Jennifer Lin, VP, Product Marketing, Juniper Networks

For a detailed discussion that answers these questions, join GigaOM Research and our sponsor Juniper Networks for “Evolving SDN: tackling strategic, technology and operational challenges for web-scale deployments,” a free analyst webinar on Tuesday, March 5, 2013, at 10:00 a.m. PT.

Claim your spot here.

We have all hit play to watch an internet video, only to be met with that annoying buffering wheel. You begin to debate how much longer you will wait. “Just one more second,” you tell yourself, until finally you close the window and move on to something else.

Knowing this scenario is a frequent occurrence from personal experience is one thing, but understanding how widespread this is and how it impacts millions of viewers and a content owner’s revenue is entirely something else. Last week, Conviva released its Viewer Experience Report detailing exactly what viewers are experiencing and how it impacts their behavior.

According to Conviva data, not only are viewers impatient when it comes to poor quality (Slow-starting video that buffers or is low-resolution), but they are becoming increasing less tolerant. In 2011, increasing the time a viewer’s content buffered by just 1 percent usually led to 3 minutes less of viewing time. Now that same 1 percent increase in buffering leads to 8 minutes less of playtime. Viewers expect high quality, smooth playback — regardless of delivery channel.

The report shows more people than you might think (60 percent of viewers) experience some kind of degradation and that these viewers watch significantly less video after having a bad experience.

In the end though, it isn’t viewers that miss out — it’s the content providers. Conviva estimates that if quality remains the same, content providers will miss out on $20 billion total over the next five years. Download the full report here.

As organizations of all sizes make their move to the cloud, they are looking for ways to gain control over the chaos of ad hoc, unplanned and unmanaged adoption of cloud services. No single path is right for every company, and thus a growing assortment of services is emerging to suit every use case. These range from direct peering to one-stop shops that offer it all (which is great as long as you like their flavor) to cloud services brokerages offering migration to specific cloud apps to colo and hosting providers creating cloud exchanges or marketplaces where users can connect directly to best-of-breed cloud services all within the same data center.

Join GigaOM Research and our sponsor CoreSite for “What’s your best route to the cloud,” a free analyst roundtable webinar on Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013.

Key topics of discussion:

• Understanding your requirements and matching these to the different routes to cloud
• Trade-offs among the different approaches
• Building a cloud strategy for the long term
• Economic considerations

Speakers include:

• Paul Miller, founder, The Cloud of Data

• David Linthicum, CTO and founder, Blue Mountain Labs

• Gerry Fassig, VP of Sales, CoreSite

Don’t miss out, register here.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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Large enterprises are using a combination of the resource flexibility of the public cloud and the security of their internal private cloud environments. Cloud provisioning platforms such as Cloudstack provided the interface needed by enterprises and MSPs to seamlessly deploy their distributed applications across a hybrid cloud infrastructure.

However, deploying an application service across a hybrid cloud infrastructures has its share of management challenges. A user might log into a webserver farm on a public cloud, but the authentication server and databases for this service might be on an internal cloud platform. Trying to isolate the performance issues in this distributed application service would require unified correlated monitoring of the distributed components.

The only way to reduce the time to resolution for such distributed application services running on a hybrid cloud is to get a unified monitoring platform, which can correlate the performance across all these components and highlight potential issues in this application’s performance.

Zyrion Traverse is one such solution that was designed for distributed application monitoring using its unique Service Container technology. Not only does it provide correlation and analysis across the distributed components of a hybrid cloud environment but it also has a behavior learning analytical engine and integrated Netflow, which allows instant drill down into packet data for fault analysis.

Enterprises and service providers need a monitoring platform, which can provide a service-centric view of their infrastructure. Zyrion is one of the few vendors addressing this need today and help in reducing operational expenses.

You’ve probably seen the news. With over the top (OTT) voice and SMS, telecom is not just for dial tone providers anymore.

OTT refers to services being carried “over the top” of another carrier’s network through the use of APIs, SDKs and other online tools. The openness and availability of the internet and its increasing bandwidth for fixed and mobile users have made OTT possible, creating new, disruptive markets where application developers can compete.

But how can you bring new two-way communications capabilities that integrate into the nation’s public switched telephone network (PSTN) into your application? Bandwidth, the wholesale telecom company that thinks like a software developer and powers leading OTT providers, has prepared a new ebook to help you get started.

Download this ebook to learn:

Examples of OTT services currently available
The regulatory landscape
What to look for in an OTT voice and SMS provider

Building on the well-received analysts’ roundtable “Open hybrid cloud: when open really means open,” GigaOM Research and Red Hat continue the discussion with a deeper investigation into the benefits of an open cloud. Focusing on business cases, the conversation will center on hybrid clouds and why a company would want to maintain the flexibility to run its enterprise using both public and dedicated resources. Panelists will discuss the importance of scalability, portability, choice and other attributes that are must-have checklist items an organization should look for and expect in an open hybrid cloud.

In this webinar, we’ll discuss:

• The importance of the right storage architecture in a hybrid environment
• How open APIs can help users move across various cloud environments
• How companies can leverage their existing IT and avoid creating new silos
• Why community-driven innovation has become so important to cloud computing
• Why maintaining choice by avoiding vendor-in is key to success, both today and in the future

Our panel of experts includes:

• David Linthicum, CTO and founder, Blue Mountain Labs

• Mike Kavis, chief technologist, Kavis Technology Consulting

• Joe McKendrick, president and principal analyst, McKendrick & Associates

• Gordon Haff, senior cloud strategy marketing and evangelism manager, Red Hat

Register here to join GigaOM Research and our sponsor Red Hat for “Open hybrid cloud: Have you thought of everything?” a free analyst roundtable webinar on Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2013, at 10 a.m. PT.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

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Texas-based cloud services company SuccessBricks, Inc. wants you to stay connected to your MySQL database, no matter what. The company’s flagship product ClearDB is the technology that powers MySQL services in Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud, and it’s also available at the enterprise level in clouds like Amazon EC2 and Rackspace.

ClearDB is a powerful database as a service that takes a unique multiregional approach to maintaining data availability, even during failure events. The results are promising; ClearDB is helping companies focus on their applications and customers, not their database.

“The cloud has a lot of advantages, but it can also force you to maintain a 24 hour operations team just for your database,” says Cashton Coleman, the company CEO. “Our approach with ClearDB is to remove this requirement for our customers, which saves them money and keeps their teams focused on development and customer experience.”

In the cloud downtime can occur from a variety of factors, from simple hardware failure to widespread regional outages.

“If a severe weather event takes an entire region offline, will you stay connected to your data?” asks Coleman. “ClearDB technology replicates data in real-time between multiple masters in multiple regions.”

ClearDB uses native MySQL, so it’s made to work with existing code. With 24/7 support included in all enterprise level services, plus a 100 percent SLA-backed uptime guarantee, ClearDB helps companies keep resources focused where they need them most, not on IT-level database administration.

One thing is certain: While traditional security products remain central to protection, by themselves they are not nimble enough to keep up with cybercriminals and hackers. By the time those products analyze events, the damage has been done. By one statistic, 85 percent of the time, hackers only need up to half an hour to get into an organization, either creating damage or stealing. But the damage isn’t usually discovered for weeks and months.

The situation is not hopeless, however. Real-time Security Analytics — big data analysis brought to the security space — can analyze events as they happen and identify a dangerous actor in the network who has just tripped a number of wires (that often go unnoticed) and is intent on inflicting damage.

For more on this emerging technology, join GigaOM Research and our sponsor Click Security for “Real-time security analytics: catching cybercriminals before it’s too late,” a free analyst roundtable webinar on Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2013, at 10 a.m. PT.

Our panel of experts will discuss these topics:

• How do you look at a set of factors and realize that something is going to occur before it happens?
• How do you gain visibility to a hacker’s “kill chain” before a damaging event happens?
• How have virtualization, consumerization, cloud computing, social media and enterprise mobility increased security risk?

Speakers include:

• Davi Ottenheimer, president, flyingpenguin
• Derrick Harris, senior writer, GigaOM
• Bob Gourley, editor, CTOvision.com
• Brian Smith, CTO and founder, Click Security

Register here for this free analyst webinar.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud
• How direct-access solutions can speed up cloud adoption
• The role of converged infrastructure in the data center