networking-info

Recently Google slashed price for their cloud offering . Amazon, as expected, also announced their 42nd price reduction on their cloud offerings since its inception. Today, Microsoft also announced price reduction for their Azure offerings . Unlike many other people I don't necessarily see the price reduction by Amazon as waging a price war against the competition. Infrastructure as true commodity: IaaS is a very well understood category and Amazon, as a vendor, has strong desires to move up in the value chain. This can only happen if storage and computing become true commodity and customers value vendors based on what they can do on top of this commodity storage and computing. They become means to an end and not an end itself. Amazon is introducing many PaaS like services on top of EC2. For example, RedShift is the fastest growing service on EC2. These services create stickiness for customers to come back and try out and perhaps buy other services. These services also create a b

Congratulations to my NCOIC colleague and dear friend Melvin Greer on his impressive WashingtonExec interview. A senior fellow and chief strategist at Lockheed Martin, Mel has more than 29 years’ experience in systems and software engineering and is a recognized expert in Service Oriented Architecture, Cloud Computing and Predictive Analytics. His research fields include Nanotechnology, Synthetic Biology and Gamification. His new book, “21st Century Leadership: Harnessing Innovation, Accelerating Business Success”   is book centered on leadership and its relationship to business. Mel also leads The Greer Institute , a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank. The institute is organized for educational research and scientific application of Greer’s theories on leadership and innovation and addresses society’s related problems. In the interview, Mel explains the tight linkage between innovative leaders and the development of a strong workforce. He also addresses how future leaders ar

For an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) it is everyone's job to ensure customer success but it is no one person's job. This is changing. I see more and more companies realizing this challenge and want to do something about it. Sales is interested in maintaining relationship with customers for revenue purposes and support works with customers in case of product issues and escalations. Product teams behave more like silos when they approach their customers because of their restricted scope and vision. Most chief technology officers are fairly technical and internal facing. Most of them also lack the business context—empathy for true business challenges—of their customers. They are quite passionate about what they do but they invariably end up spending a lot of time in making key product and technical decisions for the company losing sight of much bigger issues that customers might be facing. Most chief strategy officers focus on company's vision as well as strategy across li

In response to growing demand for formal software risk and quality management tools, the nations’ most respected standards bodies and IT communities of practice have joined forces to advance the state of the practice in software quality management.   Hosted by the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ), and in cooperation with Object Management Group, Software Engineering Institute, Interoperability Clearinghouse, IT Acquisition Advisory Council, a leadership forum will be held on March 26th in Reston, Virginia. The goal of this intensive one day event is to provide both IT practitioners and leaders insights into emergent industry standards of practices and case studies needed to mitigate common software vulnerabilities and risk. Examples from both a development and acquisition management perspectives will be addressed. Selected topics will focus on emerging standards and best practices in measuring risk and quality in IT intensive programs from the standpoint of productivity, softw

Today PerspecSys announced the results of a survey conducted at the 2014 RSA Conference concerning the attitudes and policies of organizations towards cloud-based security. After polling 130 security professionals on the show floor of the RSA Conference , PerspecSys found that “an overwhelming 74 percent believe security for cloud-based data in 2014 will be a bigger concern than securing data on-premise. In fact, 66 percent of security pros still view the cloud as more difficult to secure than on-premise options.” The survey found the following opinions concerning cloud security:   66% felt that cloud-based data is much more difficult to secure than on the premises 18% felt that securing data on the cloud is no different than securing data on the premises 16% felt that cloud-based data is less difficult to secure than on the premises When asked if their organization has security protocols in place for cloud applications: 69% answered yes 31% answered no The survey asked if their org