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Affichage des articles du mai, 2011

78 Agency Services Identified for Cloud Transition

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The Office of Management and Budget recently released a list of 78 projects slated for transition to cloud over the next year . The most common application, according to a FierceGovernmentIT, is email, with 14 agencies deciding to choose a cloud version. A close second is website hosting, with 10 agencies. The move is expected to esult in over $5B in budget savings.  Vivek Kundra discussed the transition last week during an appearance in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. GSA also recently released a request for proposal for SaaS email . The RFP appears to be looking to leverage the earlier GSA IaaS procurement winners.   ( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article , get free updates by email or RSS - KLJ )

Disruptive Cloud Start-Ups - Part 2: AppDirect

Check out the first post of this series on NimbusDB , if you haven't already seen it. This post is about AppDirect . I met with Nicolas Desmarais, a co-founder and the CEO of AppDirect and had a long discussion regarding their current solutions and future strategy. AppDirect is an app store for small businesses. The developers can integrate their applications with AppDirect and AppDirect manages the experience of selling, provisioning, and billing with a 70-30 revenue split with the developers. They also have a white label app store solution that they sell to large customers such as ISPs who can sell these same applications to their customers. Let's get the things out of the way that I didn't like about them. The downside: The target market that comprises of small businesses is extremely difficult to reach to and to market to. This gets even more difficult when the company trying to market is a young start-up and the customers are "S" in SMB. These customers have ...

NGA Sets GEOINT Strategic Direction with Earth Builder

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Last month Google and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency started sharing details about their "GEOINT on Demand" collaboration. The project, named Earth Builder, was built specifically to enable NGA to directly use Google’s cloud-based geospatial processing power.  this capability will enhance the agency's ability to provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence to the DoD, Intelligence Community and the entire National System for Geospatial Intelligence (NSG). For those not familiar, the NSG is a unified community of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) experts, producers and users organized around the goal of integrating technology, policies, capabilities and doctrine to produce GEOINT in a multi-intelligence environment. NGA is the Functional Manager for the NSG, providing strategic thinking, guidance and direction to the community concerning all aspects of GEOINT, from its acquisition to its utilization. This move is clearly in-line with the vision...

Disruptive Cloud Start-Ups - Part 1: NimbusDB

Being at Under The Radar (UTR), watching disruptive companies present and network with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and venture capitalists is an annual tradition that I don't miss. I have blogged about disruptive start-ups that I saw in the previous years. The biggest exit out of UTR, that I have witnessed so far, is Salesforce.com's $212 million acquisition of Heroku . This post is about one of the disruptive start-ups that I saw at UTR this year - NimbusDB . I met with Barry Morris, the CEO and Founder of NimbusDB at a reception the night before. I had long conversation with him around the issues with legacy databases, NoSQL, and of course NimbusDB. I must say that, after long time, I have seen a company applying all the right design principles to solve a chronic problem - how can you make SQL databases scale so that they don't suck. One of the main issues with the legacy relational databases is that they were never designed to scale out to begin with. A range of No...