Achieve Success With AI

Daiwa Institute of Research Ltd. (DIR), Fujitsu Limited, and KDDI Corporation today announced that they have collaborated to build the Republic of the Union of Myanmar’s first cloud computing environment. Built for the Central Bank of Myanmar, the new cloud environment is designed to improve efficiency in the bank’s operations. It consists of a private cloud platform designed, constructed, and operated in compliance with the Alliance Cloud, a standardized cloud model certified by the DIR-led Global Alliance for User-driven Cloud Computing, as well as a desktop service that features security countermeasures. In advance of the fast-approaching economic integration of ASEAN nations scheduled for 2015, Myanmar, now rapidly implementing democratic reforms, has been actively seeking to modernize its financial sector by relaxing financial regulations, making preparations to establish a stock exchange [1] and taking other initiatives. Under these circumstances, operating stability at

The technology of cloud computing is really a significant leap in terms of the optimal use of resources, whether infrastructure or software platforms or for commercial activities. With high quality connectivity between sources and end-users of information and resources, it is likely for cloud computing services to contribute to the deployment of advanced automation systems for all kind of companies at with cost effective prices." "The technical world today is running at an accelerated pace, each day witnessing significant shifts and developments created by the people's need to communicate in social media.  Facebook , for example, recorded millions of users in a few years, this large turnout came from the desire inherent in humans to communicate, which wouldn't have succeeded without those needs."

Every once in a while, industries collide and create immense opportunity. It happened a few years ago with smartphones, when increasingly more powerful computing was enhanced by the explosive growth of the wireless industry. Desire2Learn Inc. says, is staring into a “perfect storm” of two industries converging: cloud computing and the enormous technological revolution taking place in the education sector. “We have a really hot market, at a time when it’s going to explode,”  D2L has become one of the largest global providers of advanced software and mobile applications for the education industry. The Kitchener, Ontario-based company reaches about eight million people around the world every day with programs that allow students to submit assignments online, mobile applications that enable them to stream lectures, and tools that make it possible for teachers to return assignments with audio criticisms attached to the electronic file. This feedback from teachers is often faster an

Practical Education Educators all over the world recommend that learner’s life at school must be linked to their life outside the school. In case of professional courses such as engineering or management, the outside life would invariably mean their professional, industrial or entrepreneurial or civilian life. Cloud computing and social media turn out to be a very resourceful in linking learner in the school to the “life outside the school”.  Here are some possible scenarios. At first level, simple steps such as having account in social media sites and using resources such as Wikipedia provide an initial experience of the environment where most of  institutions and companies participating in various activities to different degrees. For example a Facebook Page of a university where learner is planning her higher education or a marketing campaign of a well known company. At second level- cloud tools and using them helps learners to increase their

By 2020, Cloud is expected to be a $240B industry. It’s no wonder then that businesses are trying to figure out how to harness this power to achieve agility through IT Transformation.  In this “Cloud Economics” infographic, VMware outlines the types of clouds being deployed, adoption rate of leading countries, and forecasts on what virtualization means for jobs and market competition in the years to come. Here a detailed report from VmWare

Here is an interesting peep into 2013 by FirstPost IT companies seem to be ready for this new “normal” and are now embracing technologies like social media, cloud, analytics and mobility (SCAM) to optimise and ensure efficiency in business environment, all within flat or lower than usual IT budgets. While the global macroeconomic scenario remains uncertain in the coming years, the industry will continue to exhibit resilience and adaptability in continually reinventing itself to retain its appeal to clients, Nasscom said.                                                         Social Media and cloud computing  “The year 2012 has been a landmark year for the Indian IT industry… At such a large base, we expect the industry to clock double digit growth in FY 2013 which exhibits that despite global uncertainties, IT-BPM industry has moved from efficiency to effectiveness,” it added in an emailed response. 2012 was a mixed one for the top five IT services firms. While Tata Cons

This video discusses the benefits Wimbledon Club realized from utilizing a cloud infrastructure to meet the viewing demands of their global audience. Learn more about how leveraging the cloud allowed them to adjust system workloads over the course of the event to optimize IT efficiency     .

Here is an interesting report from Times of India and an opportunity in the domain of cloud computing in the days to come  While  cloud computing  is widely recognized as the next big opportunity to watch out for, it has already made significant inroads in the industry. However, the IT workforce may not keep pace with the developments. The industry ready workforce for new domains like cloud and mobility may be as less as 5.7% of the current IT workforce , said senior corporate vice president, Rajiv Sodhi, HCL Technologies ,. An internal HCL report on IT careers said that the traditional "IT industry career is in decline, threatening the careers of 10 million employees" . The global IT workforce is estimated to be around 20 million out of which around 3 million are in India. The Indian cloud market may grow by more than 70% in 2012 as per the Indian Cloud Market Overview 2011-2016 report by International Data Corporation (IDC). It stood at $535 million in 2011. The

Use of cloud services at home, in the workplace and in large enterprises has steadily and significantly increased. Now we are seeing a similar trend with mobile devices and cloud technology. Mobile devices are already accessing a number of cloud services, such as Dropbox, and more third-party applications utilize cloud computing technology. It is only a matter of time until the technology becomes the central force to mobile applications. Where will the future of the mobile cloud lie? Mobile platforms are already accessing the cloud for a lot of consumer-based services such as email, social media, online file storage and corporate communications tools. But so far, there are essentially only two players here ñ the individual or consumer, and the consumer cloud service,” said Dan Matthews, chief technology officer with   IFS North America . “One of the biggest changes I think we will see in the next year or two is the entry of a third player ñ the corporate back-end system (e.g.,

 Towards  Research as a Service”?  an interesting post by Microsoft  Over the past two years, we have seen growing interest from the scientific community in using public clouds for research. As part of the  original Cloud Research Engagement Initiative  in 2010, Microsoft partnered with funding agencies all over the world to award more than 75 research teams for projects using Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud. The research covers topics in computer science, biology, physics, chemistry, social science, geology, ecology, meteorology and drug discovery. More details about these projects can be found  here .                                                 Research as a Service From an informal survey of these projects, we learned researchers value the concept of using an on-demand, scalable compute resource over acquiring, deploying and managing a dedicated resource. Ninety percent of these researchers were pleased with their ROI using cloud services to build their application

To enable Google Docs for offline use, sign into your account and click the sprocket icon in the upper-right corner. Then select "set up docs offline." Google Docs will then launch a dialogue box asking you to confirm that you want to enable docs offline.                                         If already have Google Drive installed, you're finished with the set up. If you don't have Google Drive installed, you will be prompted to do so. If you need help setting up Google Drive on your Mac or on your PC, please see the directions that I have included in my guide to  Google Drive and Docs for Teachers   source : Free Technology for Teachers 

Technology investors are raising the tempo of investments in cloud computing startups buoyed by strong returns and growing customer demand for software as a service. This week, venture funds closed two more deals in the sector with Norwest Venture Partners putting in $6 million (about Rs 32.6 crore) in first-round funding for Attune Technologies. The Chennai-based startup uses cloud technology for scheduling, billing and management of patient data with a base of 2 million patient records. Source Economic Times

Frank Frankovsky worked as Dell's director of Data Center Solutions during the crucial period of 2006-2009, building up the hardware maker's ability to sell rack-mount servers to search engine and Web service companies seeking to build new, more efficient data centers. The unit's been a key, behind-the-scenes business that has kept Dell a leading player in server hardware. If Data Center Solutions had been broken out as a separate business, it would have been the number-three seller of servers in the U.S. in early 2010, Dell executives told InformationWeek during a visit to the Dell campus. In October 2009, Frankovsky become director of hardware design and supply chain at Facebook during a crucial period in its expansion.  While there, he advocated that cloud server design be based on publicly pooled intelligence, despite Google's insistence that its server and data center designs were a competitive advantage. In April 2011, Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebo

Urs Holzle The phrase, "the data center as the computer," comes so close to capturing what a cloud data center is about that a tip of the hat has to go to Urs Holzle. The senior VP for technical infrastructure at Google led the design and build-out of the search engine's supporting infrastructure and supplied a pattern for Amazon, Microsoft, GoGrid and others to follow. As one of Google's first 10 employees, Holzle refused to be caught in the limits of what was then available from technology providers. Servers hadn't been designed for the cloud data center, so Google manufactured its own, according to the tenets that Holzle laid down. A Google data center is designed to use about  half the power  of a conventional enterprise data center. In 2009, Holzle and fellow Google architect Luiz Andre Barroso captured in a Google whitepaper the concepts essential to building a worldwide string of search engine data centers. It was called " The Datacenter a

The hyperconnected world is today’s reality. No longer are we in a world  where consumers and employees “go online” to work, play, or purchase;  we are now in a world where everyone and everything simply is online,  whether at home, at school, at the office, or on-the-go. This new era brings with it an acceleration of innovation and disruption. It’s a world filled with  opportunity for those willing to embrace it and able to tame it. All around  us, across every industry, companies are discovering new audiences, creating new revenue streams, building new ecosystems, and inventing new business models – all online, all at an unprecedented pace. The Internet has evolved  from being a “nice-to-have” – an additional channel for growth – to  becoming the channel for growth and innovation.  Here is a white paper from Akamai

Marc Benioff Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, stands out as the pioneer and guerrilla marketer of software-as-a-service. He drew attention to the concept at a time when it was widely disregarded as an aberration of limited use by brazenly advancing the concept of cloud services as the "death of software." He meant that on-premises software, the systems that have been making enterprise data centers run since 1964, were going away, replaced by software running in a remote data center accessible over the Internet. Much has already been written about the successful establishment of Salesforce.com, which doesn't need repetition here. But for his role in winning respect for the concept of SaaS, no one matches the standing of Benioff. Source: information Week

Chris Kemp In the early days of cloud computing, NASA CTO Chris Kemp took several leading concepts of how to assemble a low cost, horizontally scalable data center and put them to work at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. One concept was placing banks of standard  x86 server racks in a shipping container  with one power supply and network hookup. The container was dropped off by supplier Verari, and hooked up and ready to start accepting workloads in a few days, compared to the long time it takes to construct a new, permanent data center. He also ensured a close tie-in to MAE-West, a major Internet access point, which NASA already had at Ames. Kemp initially created the Nebula cloud project to collect big data from NASA research projects, such as the Mars mapping project. But Kemp also conceived of a mobile cloud data center that could be transported to different locations to provide onsite compute power, no matter where a spacecraft was launched or

Rich Wolski Rich Wolski is the co-founder and CTO of Eucalyptus Systems who decided that Amazon's public cloud APIs were so important that they should have open source code counterparts -- even if Amazon Web Services was against it. He has been criticized on several fronts. One, his approach to cloud computing was too narrow -- it was based only on Amazon's example and initiative. Another: if Amazon wished to make its APIs open source, it could do so; if it didn't, it could make life difficult for an open source project that was doing so. Wolski ignored the critics and pushed ahead both with his open source code leadership and Eucalyptus Systems, which makes a stack of software for building private clouds with Amazon EC2 compatibility. Amazon executives, for years unresponsive to Eucalyptus' entreaties to join the open source project, announced in late May that Amazon would  partner with Eucalyptus Systems  as a provider of private cloud APIs. It was, fina

Cloud Computing Pioneers: Lew Tucker Lew Tucker Lew Tucker already had 20 years of software development and engineering under his belt when the cloud era rolled around. He was quick to recognize that his previous projects were pointing in the cloud's direction. He had been CTO and VP of engineering at Radar networks, producer of the Twine social network and VP of the AppExchange at Salesforce.com. His big-company experience brought a different voice to the debate over cloud, one of experienced and toughened engineering that said cloud not only could be, but also should be the next wave of computing. Tucker was CTO of cloud computing at Sun Microsystems in 2008-2010, a crucial period when Oracle acquired Sun, and where his depth of knowledge countered Oracle's fatuous putdowns of cloud computing. After the acquisition, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison interviewed Tucker; Tucker said it took only three minutes before both men had made up their minds. In that short time,

Jonathan Bryce liked working with computers as a youth and had an older brother who was one of Rackspace's first 12 employees. He urged Jonathan to work at Rackspace, and Bryce became familiar with many phases of the operation, from racking servers to customer service and technical support. He partnered with website designer and friend Todd Morey to host sites on their own rented servers in Rackspace. They left Rackspace in 2005 to branch out into their own website building and hosting business, Mosso Cloud, named for an Italian musical notation phrase that means "to play faster and with more passion." But Mosso still ran on servers in the Rackspace data center. Rackspace executives saw the relationship between its hosting-services business and emerging uses of cloud computing, so they asked Bryce to keep building out the Mosso Cloud. He had a system that could launch applications on a website and was thinking about a virtual machine launching system. Then Rac

Cloud based browser could allow mobile devices like smartphones with limited computing power to perform large scale computing tasks Researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Oregon have found a new way of performing large scale computing tasks through cloud based browsers.                                                           Figure: Cloud Browse. Picture credit The researchers claimed that the cloud based browser could allow mobile devices like smartphones with limited computing power to perform large scale computing tasks. Cloud browser can create a web interface in cloud though which computing tasks can be performed in the cloud instead of performing it on the devices. Complete story here 

Randy Bias Randy Bias, cofounder and CTO of CloudScaling, has been a specialist in IT infrastructure since 1990, which positioned him to think through and lead some of the leading cloud computing innovations. He was a pioneer implementer of infrastructure-as-a-service as VP of technology strategy at GoGrid, a division of hosting provider ServePath. GoGrid launched a public beta of its Grid infrastructure in March 2008. He pioneered one of the first multi-platform, multi-cloud management systems at CloudScale Networks and went on to found CloudScaling, where he was a successful implementer of large-scale clouds based on a young and unproven open source code software stack, OpenStack. Those large-scale clouds included KT, the largest cloud service in Korea (formerly known as Korea Telecom), and big data center services provider Internap. Part of the support OpenStack receives is based on these implementations, and Bias was elected as one of  eight gold-sponsor board members

Chris Pinkham Before Werner Vogels got a cloud infrastructure to evangelize at Amazon, there was Chris Pinkham, designer of Amazon Enterprise Compute Cloud (EC2). Actually, designing the Amazon infrastructure was one of those collaborative ventures, like Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google, where two heads are better than one. Pinkham was the project's managing director; Amazon software architect Christopher Brown was lead developer. Together they produced Amazon's first public cloud infrastructure. It was once thought Amazon Web Services must have sprung out of Amazon.com spare capacity. Not so. Initially they were two separate things, with the cloud merely the tail of the online-merchandising dog. Amazon.com IT operations manager Jesse Robbins has told the story of how he jealously guarded the retail operation's data centers and didn't let experimenters near them. Pinkham, who gained expertise by running the first Internet service provider in South

Consumers utilizing the cloud computing features for enhancing user experience is not a very new practice or concept. As early as in 1996, it all began with the launch of Hotmail   as one of the first web-based email services. It had all all the features that characterize a cloud service: accessible via Internet, cloud-based storage, 24/7 accessible and more. The Facebook   is also a cloud-based service with photo and media hosting capabilities and also offers online games. The list of cloud-enabled services  includes services such as Flickr. The bottom line of cloud computing is the enabling of the consumer to connect and access data when and where they need it. The other players are using cloud computing for enhancing their service portfolios to meet ever changing customer expectations. An illustration is the  Comcast Begins National Launch of X1: Next-Generation Cloud Enabled Television Platform and Introduces The X1 Remote Control App . The trend is towards cloud enab