Given the soaring growth of cloud computing it is no wonder that businesses of all sizes hope to seize the opportunities afforded by cloud services—whether public, private or hybrid. Despite the opportunities, enterprises still face considerable barriers to adoption. IT and network leaders struggle with how best to leverage the power of the cloud amidst the challenges of security, the need to optimize network resources, and new network technologies such as Software Defined Networks (SDNs). The integration of private data networking technologies with cloud computing platforms can overcome these hurdles to adoption, if enterprises know the critical steps for a successful implementation.

A webcast, co-sponsored by XO Communications and 451 Research, will provide a roadmap and best practices for integrating private data networking technologies with cloud computing resources. Plus, submit your own questions when you register and we will address the top ten questions during the event.

Register now for this free webcast to learn how to maximize the benefits of cloud computing for your enterprise and for your bottom line.

Date: Tuesday, May 14, 2013  |  Time: 10:00 am PT/1:00 pm ET  |  Duration: 60 minutes

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Presenters:

Eric Hanselman – Chief Analyst, 451 Research

Tom Schlatter – Executive Director of Network Engineering, XO Communications

Moderator:

Steve Wylie – General Manager, Cloud Connect

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If you are an expert in your field and would like the opportunity to share your knowledge with other technology professionals from around the world – we need you! As both a conference and an expo, Cloud Connect continues to be the leading vendor-neutral cloud computing event. Our key role is to provide a platform for application developers and managers, senior IT professionals, infrastructure and service providers to network and gain deep cloud insights. Help us share those insights!

Please find information below to guide you through the submission process. Deadline is April 29, 2013 Continue Reading »

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We’ve organized a VIP tour of the new San Francisco 49ers football stadium that is being constructed next to the Santa Clara Convention Center on April 3rd at 3:30 PM. Invite a colleague to Cloud Connect and you’ll both be entered to win spots on the tour!

Here are four easy steps on how to enter:

Step 1: Send this blog post to your friends to get them excited.

Step 2: Highly encourage them to register for any Cloud Connect pass with priority code “49ers” by April 1, 2013

Step 3: Start tossing the football around and pretend you are Colin Kaepernick.

Step 4: Attend Cloud Connect next week, learn about cloud computing and wait to be notified if you won.

Good luck

Continue Reading »

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• John Boyd – Boyd was an instructor at the USAF Fighter Weapons school. He had some of the best natural instincts of any fighter pilot anywhere, and found that he was extremely effective in the air. He spent the rest of his life trying to understand the general principles that underpinned that effectiveness, and in the process he developed revolutionary frameworks to reason about adversarial contests, whether war or business competition. I have covered some of Boyd’s thinking about business agility before at Leverhawk.
• Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek — Mises and Hayek were economists from the Austrian school of economics. Hayek, Mises’s student, is probably most famous for his book, The Road to Serfdom (a must-read when you get the chance). Both worked on something called the “Economic Calculation Problem.” In brief, the Economic Calculation Problem is one of the fundamental reasons that socialism (and communism) fail — economies are too complex to plan centrally. I’ll be writing more about Mises and Hayek in future Leverhawk articles.
• William Stanley Jevons — Jevons was an economist working in Britain in the mid-1800s. He noticed an odd relationship between the efficiency of coal burning machines and the aggregate coal usage across the British Empire. As individual machines got more efficient, aggregate coal usage increased. This phenomenon has been named the Jevons Paradox. I wrote an article about the Jevons Paradox a while ago at GigaOm.

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Andrew Wild has more than 20 years of experience leading teams to design, implement and operate secure networks and computer systems. As Qualys’ chief security officer, Andrew oversees the security, risk management and compliance of its enterprise and SaaS environments. Prior to joining Qualys, he managed a team of information security engineers responsible for the design, implementation and operation of security solutions for EMC’s SaaS offerings, with heavy emphasis on cloud and virtualization technologies. Prior to EMC, he was the chief security officer at Transaction Network Services. He has also held a variety of network engineering leadership roles with large network service providers including BT and Sprint. Andrew has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from George Washington University and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the United States Military Academy. He is a veteran of the United States Army and served in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Here is an inside peek at his sessions at Cloud Connect:

• An Opportunity for Continuous Security with Cloud Computing
  • It is clear that companies need to re-evaluate their security strategy with cyber attacks on the rise – even against large corporations with advanced IT security programs in place. Network perimeters are changing all the time with mobile devices and cloud services, and the problem grows more complex. The goal we all must strive for is to effectively protect information at the data level itself and streamline patching and mitigation processes. With cloud computing, we have an opportunity to automate key processes and provide continuous, better and invisible protection, while reducing the cost of securing such an infrastructure and applications as the costs can be distributed across thousands, even millions, of users. This session will discuss ways to proactively protect against cyberthreats leveraging a newer, more scalable security model that builds security into the fabric of cloud computing, while providing a continuous view of the security and compliance posture of current infrastructures and applications.

Register with priority code SMCCBlog and save up to $300* on your Cloud Connect All Access or Conference Pass.

*Discount calculated based on the on-site price and not combinable with other offers. Offer good on new registrations only. Prices after discount applied: All Access: $2,099.00 Conference: $1,699.00, Workshop: 799.00, Expo Plus: $150.00, Expo Only: Free

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A post by Eric Hanselman, WAN and Cloud Networking Track Track Chair.

With all of the enthusiasm for the compute and storage aspects of cloud capabilities, it’s easy to take the networks that bind them together for granted.  Networks haven’t been a very visible part of early cloud computing deployments, but they’re critical to effectively leveraging cloud’s advantages and ensuring success in implementations. Networks take on new forms and characteristics in cloudy deployments, too. There’s increased flexibility, but also a dependence on the cloud provider’s network designs. That dependence can make a transition from typical enterprise network architectures a challenge.  Understanding the differences can help smooth the way to being able to take advantage of the many benefits of cloudy worlds. Continue Reading »

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A blog post by Infrastructure Track Chair, Bernard Golden, Vice President, Enterprise Solutions, enStratus Networks.

The concept of cloud computing is simple: computing resources offered across the network via self-service, providing elastic capacity from a resource pool carrying no long-term commitment and paid for on a per-use basis.

As the old saying goes: simple, but not easy. Providing cloud computing services requires a transformation in both infrastructure and operations processes, and this transformation is affecting all parts of the traditional computing infrastructure. Continue Reading »

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I’m not sure what the answer to that question is, but that’s why I’ll be at Cloud Connect to find out.  I plan to attend the panel discussion from the keynote stage covering the hot topic of open source, which will be moderated by the highly acclaimed venture capitalist, Ann Winblad, Co-founder and Managing Director of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.  Ann most recently was quoted in Wall Street Journal’s All Things D around IBM’s announcement that all of its cloud services and software will be based on an open cloud architecture. Good news for IBM customers, bad news for VMware’s vCloud or Citrix’s CloudStack, and representative that OpenStack is a key component to the software-defined data center.  As such, it only makes sense to bring an expert to the stage, from a firm that has had a long-term investment interest in open source software and open standards, to further discuss.  Ann will be joined by panelists from Citrix, CloudOps and Red Hat on Thursday, April 4 during the event.  Join me and we can find out together if clouds are indeed, the gateway drug.

But we can’t stop there because besides the excitement of welcoming Ann Winblad to the main stage, Cloud Connect also just announced their expanded keynote line-up, which includes the likes of Margaret Dawson of HP Cloud Services, Jim Davies of Mitel, Kit Colbert of VMWare and more. An impressive line-up of industry visionaries helping shape the cloud computing industry today.  And with a finger on the pulse of all key cloud computing trends – like big data, open source and PaaS – Cloud Connect has a new addition to the program: DEPLOYCON 2013, produced by Rishidot Research LLC, will be a one-day workshop on Tuesday covering all things PaaS.  DEPLOYCON is intended to bring together CIOs, enterprise managers, IT and developers to discuss how organizations can better leverage Platform Services to enable IT transformation to agile IT.

It’s a chocked-full line-up and will most likely make for a jam-packed schedule.  Cloud Connect is just over two weeks out, happening the first week of April, and with so much happening in the industry, you don’t want to miss it.  Time to start building your schedule now!

Joylyn Tanner
Senior Communications Manager
UBM Tech

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Jared Wray is founder and CTO of Tier 3. Jared founded Tier 3 in 2006 and today is the visionary architect of the company’s enterprise-class cloud management platform. To enable customers moving to IT as a Service, Jared has architected Tier 3’s cloud with advanced automation, orchestration, and fabric services. As the originator of the Iron Foundry open source PaaS project, Wray is a thought leader in the evolution of enterprise cloud services. A serial entrepreneur, Wray previously founded Dual, an interactive development firm with clients such as Microsoft and Nintendo.

Here is an inside peek at his sessions at Cloud Connect:

• New Tools and Techniques for Managing Hybrid Cloud Environments
  • Adopting public and private cloud resources is becoming imperative for enterprises across nearly every industry in order to keep pace with escalating customer and end-user demands and intensifying competition. However, adding these Cloud resources to existing systems and software compounds the challenge of managing these complex operations and optimizing their performance while controlling their costs. This session will examine these challenges and discuss exciting new technologies and management best practices that can help IT professionals overcome these challenges.
• Hybrid Cloud – Can You Get the Best of Both Cloud Worlds
  • There are strong pros and cons to both Public and Private Clouds. Many enterprises like the idea of either one or both, but the realities have not lived up to the ideal. This session will explore the pros and cons of private and public clouds, including the best use cases and scenarios for private, public and hybrid cloud initiatives, the financial implications, and whether/how hybrid clouds might give the best of both clouds.

Register with priority code SMCCBlog and save up to $300* on your Cloud Connect All Access or Conference Pass.

*Discount calculated based on the on-site price and not combinable with other offers. Offer good on new registrations only. Prices after discount applied: All Access: $2,099.00 Conference: $1,699.00, Workshop: 799.00, Expo Plus: $150.00,
Expo Only: Free

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cloud cloud adoption cloud computing cloud connect CTO hybrid clouds private clouds Tier 3

Matt Quinn has been with TIBCO for 14 years. During this time he has had several worldwide roles. As CTO, Quinn works with all product groups to create a common, corporate-wide vision for all of TIBCO’s products and technologies; ensures interoperability between TIBCO’s various products families, as well as consistent architectural approaches across all groups; and provides overall leadership and coordination of TIBCO’s product plans and technology direction. Up until his new role as CTO, Quinn has been responsible for the Composite Application Group (CAG). This group encompasses TIBCO’s SOA, BPM, Infrastructure, Monitoring and Management, Governance and User Experience technologies. This group is responsible end-to-end for the engineering, quality, delivery of product, product vision, and customer enablement. Earlier in his TIBCO career, Quinn was a global architect, responsible for the delivery of some of TIBCO’s largest implementations in diverse areas such as transportation and logistics, energy and finance. This was a hands-on role, building real systems architecture for production customers.

Here is an inside peek at his session at Cloud Connect – Creating Self-Service, Actionable Context in a World of Massive Unstructured Data Sources

• With the rise of social and more recently, the Internet of Things, the opportunity to take advantage of unstructured and imperfect data has never been greater…or more challenging. Adding to the mix, the need to allow business to self-serve their data needs is key to keeping the enterprise agile and efficient. We’ll look at how self-service, actionable context, understanding and action can be achieved in today’s environment of unthinkably large, diverse and often messy data.

Register with priority code SMCCBlog and save up to $300* on your Cloud Connect All Access or Conference Pass.

*Discount calculated based on the on-site price and not combinable with other offers. Offer good on new registrations only. Prices after discount applied: All Access: $2,099.00 Conference: $1,699.00, Workshop: 799.00, Expo Plus: $150.00, Expo Only: Free

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big data cloud cloud computing cloud connect Tibco