This CSO quickly realized that the heart of business continuity is ensuring that the company can keep making money after a disaster. So he identified the functions critical to that ability and planned out how to keep them going after a spectrum of possible interruptions. Then he did something that many might envy: He handed off the business continuity function to a talented underling.

If you can’t do what he did–offload the task entirely–you can at least benefit from the lessons learned by those who’ve been in the BC trenches. Business continuity is a broad discipline, encompassing both disaster recovery for data and the activities that ensure business will carry on (or be restored quickly) in the case of an adverse or catastrophic event. Therefore, BC cuts across divisions and incorporates people, processes and technology.

Here are the top nine BC lessons from CSOs and experts:

Lesson 1: Business continuity is its own discipline; treat it that way.

Lesson 2: The process is collaborative, but ultimately the CEO owns it.

Lesson 3: Be thorough in your business impact analysis.

Lesson 4: Focus on business value, not assets or functions.

Lesson 5: Don’t go it alone.

Lesson 6: Beware the ROI trap.

Lesson 7: Build in some flexibility.

Lesson 8: Show clients your plans.

Lesson 9: Make sure everyone knows what to do.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://www.cso.com.au/article/424846/how_start_business_continuity_program/#closeme

Oracle has issued a one-two punch in the cloud and virtualization server space, paving the way for a spate of professional services with the launch of its Oracle RightNow CX Cloud service followed swiftly by the release of the latest version of its VM Server for x86 v. 3.1., which allows it to inch closer to biggest competitor VMware in the virtualization server market.

Oracle’s RightNow CX Cloud Service combined with Oracle Fusion Sales, aims to give channel partners a comprehensive view into the IT and sales environments of their customers–an added insight that could ultimately create pathways for the creation and expansion of assessment, monitoring, consulting and other professional services with the ability to spot inefficiencies and vulnerabilities and identify areas for increased productivity and sales opportunities.

In addition, the tool feasibly allows the channel to offer services that provide information sales reps resolving customer issues, providing purchase advice at the “right” time, reviewing service history prior to sales calls and enabling a way to assess customer value based on customers’ buying habits and current opportunities.

“Every interaction is a relationship opportunity to grow your business. When these interactions are relevant and add value for customers, customers are more likely to trust the relationship and seek purchase advice,” says David Vap, Oracle group vice president. “This customer trust provides an opportunity to increase customer product adoption and to reduce the cost of customer acquisition, thereby increasing company profitability.”

Meanwhile, Oracle aims to ease the way for virtualization partners and service providers with the latest release of its VM Server v3.1, designed to support rapid application deployment and simplify data management, making itself a little more viable in its competition with VMware for the virtualized server market.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://channelnomics.com/2012/05/18/oracle-releases-cloud-service-vm-server-3-1/

Nine Lives Media Inc, parent company of MSP Mentor and Talkin’ Cloud, released their list of the top 100 Cloud Service Providers (CSP) in the world. LevelCloud not only made the list but was one of the few companies mentioned that focuses on selling exclusevly through the MSP channel.

Corona, CA (PRWEB) May 17, 2012
In the short history of the CSP market, the world’s top 100 providers have emerged as leaders in providing a reliable platform and growth to the market overall. Combined revenues for these providers hit 2.3 billion dollars in 2011, with no signs of slowing in 2012. Among the list were the large names in our industry including Amazon Web Services, Cloud Sherpas, and MindShift who was recently purchased by Best Buy. Although a relatively young player to the market, LevelCloud made the list! Focusing solely on integrating the industry’s leading solutions (including Citrix, Vmware, OS33) and delivering them through the MSP channel, LevelCloud has gained traction quite rapidly. With a main stronghold in the Southwest, LevelCloud’s user base is quickly spreading throughout the rest of the nation.

“We have law firms, manufacturers, non-profits and many other verticals on our platform today. Providing a proven business-class total cloud solution across the nation is a rewarding feeling after years of building and crafting our business model”, said LevelCloud CEO Biren Shukla. “To be mentioned as one of the world’s top providers is an honor, especially to be on the same list as some of the giants in our industry”, mentioned Shukla.

LevelCloud’s engineering staff has been working diligently to integrate today’s leading solutions while continuously testing various solutions for what is coming tomorrow. “We feel very confident in our platform’s stability, performance, and redundancy. Our partners and clients depend on us to provide their network to them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year”, said LevelCLoud CTO Olivier Matime. “We are working harder than ever to continuously innovate and prepare for the computing market 5 years from now so that our partner base always have the leading solutions for their customers”, mentioned Matime.

Today LevelCloud has authorized approximately 20 partners across the US to provide services to end users. The plans are to have enough partners to deliver services to all areas of the country and then explore operations overseas. “I could not be more proud of our team and what we have achieved in only a couple of years, but we are nowhere near our internal goals and have a long way to go. Our plans for 2012 and 2013 put us on track to become the leader in providing turnkey cloud solution through MSP’s in the U.S.”, said Shukla.

ABOUT LEVELCLOUD
LevelCloud is a turnkey channel-only cloud computing solution that replaces the traditional onsite network. The entire business network (e-mail, apps, data) is delivered through a centralized platform powered by dedicated resources in state of the art datacenters. LevelCloud enables organizations to free themselves from the traditional constraints of IT, and empower their staff to work anytime, anywhere, on any device through a collaborative platform. The solution is provided solely through a channel of LevelCloud Authorized Partners throughout North America.

For many service providers, cloud computing seems to be disruptive for their business model. Especially in the outsourcing business, many service providers are reluctant to offer cloud-based services to their clients. There are two main reasons behind this skepticism:

• Cloud computing gives agility to the client to subscribe or unsubscribe to services quickly. Although this is a big advantage for the client, it brings challenges to the provider. Smaller service providers have difficulty estimating the required capacity correctly and they risk keeping expensive resources underutilized.
• Larger providers fear losing their clients once the clients have cloud services with more flexible, standardized contracts. In today’s outsourcing world, it is difficult for a client to switch providers.

The example of Kodak somehow shows what it means to answer a disruptive business change by just ignoring it. Kodak, inventor of modern photography and one of the market leaders in the early 1990s, decided not to move towards digital photography because this was considered disruptive for their photo development labs all over the world. When they finally accepted the industry trend, they had already lost ground against their competition — and you can read in the news what happened to them in 2012.

The point is, if you are not offering your clients what they want, someone else will.

So, there are good reasons not to ignore cloud to keep your current clients with you, but there are even better reason to think about cloud to win clients you have not thought about before.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://thoughtsoncloud.com/index.php/2012/05/why-service-providers-should-not-ignore-cloud/

Verdict deliberations in Oracle v. Google have been mixed up as the jury looks like it might be stuck on the question of infringement once again.

It’s not too late to sign up for Spousetivities at EMC World 2012! The conference is upon us next week, and if you have a spouse/partner/friend/family member traveling with you then you owe it to them to check out Spousetivities. More information on the activities, costs, and the ability to actually register for activities can be found on the registration page. Go sign up now!

Here’s a preview of what will be available next week:

• Welcome Breakfast on Monday
• Wine excursion
• Horseback riding in Red Rock Canyon
• Spa services through Canyon Ranch Spa at The Venetian

For more information on any of these activities, or to sign up, visit the registration page.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

It’s Not Too Late

• Spousetivities at EMC World 2012
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• Have You Registered Yet?

Birst Inc., the leading provider of agile business analytics, today announced the Birst FORWARD 2012 Annual User Conference will take place next week, May 21-23, at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. The education-focused event for all things Birst and Business Intelligence (BI) will provide participants with key tools and information to help users get the most out of their Birst solution.

Global investment in BI initiatives continue to grow and now represent the top strategic IT initiatives for CIOs. To meet this demand, Birst is focused on providing customers with an enterprise-ready solution that enables customers to more easily make sense of their growing data.

Birst customers and partners will gather at Birst FORWARD 2012 to find out how Birst will continue to set the industry standard for world-class, agile business analytics. In addition to distinct tracks for Birst administrators and business end users, the agenda is packed with workshops designed to prepare Birst customers to make smarter business decisions.

“As Birst continues to drive innovation, new features and capabilities set us apart from other solutions and underscores our value within our customer and partner communities. Birst FORWARD is designed to inform, encourage knowledge-sharing, and enable customers to leverage and maximize all aspects of the Birst solution,” said Brad Peters, CEO and Co-founder at Birst.

WHAT:     Birst FORWARD 2012 Annual User Conference
WHEN:     May 21-23, 2012
WHERE:     Hyatt at Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco, CA

Birst FORWARD 2012 sponsors include ParAccel, SnapLogic, Cervello, Host Analytics and TriCore Solutions. For more information about the event, please visit http://www.birst.com/forward2012.

About Birst
Birst™ is the leader in agile business analytics. It offers a single place to manage all of your organization’s business analytics and the agility to answer questions spanning departments, data sources, and deployments—across both public and private clouds. Birst gives users the fastest way to answer their most pressing business questions, and, the ones they didn’t know to ask. At one-third the cost, time, and staff of traditional big BI, Birst brings the benefits of analytics and fact-based decision-making to a much broader audience. For more information, visit http://www.birst.com.

Actuate Corporation recently announced a collaborative initiative with Hortonworks to enable Big Data visualization. The company is one of the leading open source Business Intelligence (BI) vendors and also the developer of Eclipse BIRT open source project.

Hortonworks, which is a commercial vendor of Apache Hadoop, has designed the Hortonworks Data Platform to deliver an open and reliable foundation for enterprises and to support the development and deployment of big data solutions.

In a release, John Kreisa, VP of Marketing at Hortonworks, said that, “We have dedicated significant resources to make Apache Hadoop more robust and easier to integrate, extend, deploy and use. Our partnership with open source BI leader Actuate enables more users to cost effectively analyze vast amounts of data stored in Hadoop using open source technologies.”

The ActuateOne integrated product suite, which is based on BIRT, employs native access Hive query to make use of MapReduce functions while extracting data from Hadoop; and for converting those data sets into creating customized BIRT-based dashboards and scorecards that support interactive visualization and analysis.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://it.tmcnet.com/topics/it/articles/2012/05/16/290661-actuate-hortonworks-announce-partnership-enable-big-data-visualization.htm

PALO ALTO, CA–(Marketwire – May 17, 2012) – Cloudera Inc, the leading provider of Apache Hadoop-based data management software, services and training, today announced that Hadoop managed services provider MetaScale has joined Cloudera’s rapidly growing partner ecosystem, Cloudera Connect. MetaScale specializes in solutions for traditional brick-and-mortar enterprises across all industry verticals looking to efficiently establish and grow their Big Data expertise, experience immediate tactical success and begin to build out their fundamental Big Data capability in an organized and precise fashion. As the only company able to provide a full spectrum of services focused on Big Data in the virtual private cloud, MetaScale is partnering with industry leader Cloudera to enable customers to take advantage of Hadoop without an upfront investment in skills and resources.

“As we’ve witnessed firsthand, traditional enterprises are faced with an overwhelming number of challenges when building Hadoop clusters, as well as a shortage of skilled Hadoop workers. The partnership between MetaScale and Cloudera solves these issues by combining Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), Cloudera Enterprise management software and Cloudera University training programs with MetaScale’s ability to host managed Hadoop clusters and associated data management technologies in the cloud,” said Krishna Nimmagadda, Head of Marketing and Business Development at MetaScale. “We’re empowering our customers to ask questions they couldn’t ask before and learn more from their data and their customers to potentially create new business models, increase revenues and reduce costs and complexities.”

MetaScale’s services include building and configuring Hadoop clusters; operating, managing and monitoring the cluster; integrating with other data management technologies; running data-cleansing and other data management projects; writing and developing MapReduce applications; and custom solution design and system integration. MetaScale, a subsidiary of Sears Holdings has deep expertise in providing data management services based on the Apache Hadoop framework. The company’s Hadoop Center of Excellence runs Cloudera’s Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and has worked closely with Cloudera in providing Hadoop support to Sears’ companies for many years.

“MetaScale is opening the door for large-scale traditional enterprises that haven’t taken advantage of or investigated the potential of Apache Hadoop to benefit immediately from Hadoop and Big Data analytics in the cloud with a minimum IT investment,” said Tim Stevens, Vice President of Business and Corporate Development at Cloudera. “We’re excited to be working closely with MetaScale and look forward to the benefits that our mutual customers can reap from this partnership.”

About MetaScale

MetaScale provides best-in-class, technology-managed services and solutions to enterprises that are looking to unlock the potential in their data without the time, cost and complexity associated with traditional big data initiatives. MetaScale delivers an end-to-end solution so time is better spent analyzing and driving business value from big data. MetaScale provides a full spectrum of services in a private cloud that leverages Hadoop, and helps businesses perform complex analytics and batch-production schedules not possible prior to Hadoop. Part of the Sears Holdings family of companies (Sears Holdings Corporation-NASDAQ SHLD), MetaScale offers a mix of speed, scale, skills, and end-to-end solutions unavailable anywhere else in the big data space. To learn more about MetaScale, visit www.metascale.com and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About Cloudera

Cloudera, the leader in Apache Hadoop-based software and services, enables data driven enterprises to easily derive business value from all their structured and unstructured data. Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH), available to download for free at www.cloudera.com/downloads, is the most comprehensive, tested, stable and widely deployed distribution of Hadoop in commercial and non-commercial environments. For the fastest path to reliably using this completely open source technology in production for Big Data analytics and answering previously un-addressable big questions, organizations can subscribe to Cloudera Enterprise, comprised of Cloudera Manager software and Cloudera Support. Cloudera also offers training and certification on Apache technologies, as well as consulting services. As the top contributor to the Apache open source community and with tens of thousands of nodes under management across customers in financial services, government, telecommunications, media, web, advertising, retail, energy, bioinformatics, pharma/healthcare, university research, oil and gas and gaming, Cloudera’s depth of experience and commitment to sharing expertise are unrivaled. www.cloudera.com

Connect with Cloudera

Read the blog: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/
Follow on Twitter: http://twitter.com/cloudera
Visit on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cloudera

Yahoo is famous for saying that Hadoop, the data-storage-and-processing platform it helped develop into a big data juggernaut, is “behind every click” on the site. But as the world once again starts analyzing Yahoo’s myriad woes after Sunday morning’s ouster of embattled CEO Scott Thompson, I’m left wondering if its investment in Hadoop didn’t aid in the company’s demise — even if it’s a way down the long list of Yahoo’s mistakes.

While Hadoop might have given Yahoo a competitive advantage early on by letting it better analyze user behavior, it also leveled the playing field over time. For years, Yahoo has used Hadoop to better personalize the content its visitors see, both ads and articles, and now so does everybody else. In the meantime, however, Yahoo failed to evolve its business at the same pace as it did its analytic capabilities.

Big data is great, but it’s not a business model in and of itself. Yahoo might as well have just told its competitors, “We still suck, but we spent a lot building a great technology to help you compete.”

But whatever benefits Hadoop brought to Yahoo in terms of letting it better targeting the right content to the right visitors, it also brought them to everyone else. If you talk to a company building an ad-targeting or web analytics technology, chances are Hadoop is somewhere in its technology stack. The aforementioned Hortonworks, which spun out of Yahoo last June, is now peddling Hadoop software and services to the world. A new startup called InsightsOne, also comprised of former Yahoo data experts, is selling a technology for helping marketers reach consumers wherever they happen to be on the web.

The big problem for Yahoo is that, increasingly, users and advertisers want to be everywhere on the web but at Yahoo. Maybe that’s because everyone else that’s benefiting from Hadoop, either directly or indirectly, is able to provide a better experience for consumers and advertisers alike. Facebook has been particularly adept at using and developing Hadoop to analyze behavior, and — despite potential privacy problems on the horizon — it’s eating Yahoo’s lunch in terms of attracting advertisers and eyeballs.

To read the entire article, please click on this link http://gigaom.com/cloud/did-yahoo-sow-the-seeds-of-its-own-demise-with-hadoop/

VMware, the leading virtualization company has acquired Cetas, an early stage startup focused on making access to big data analytics easier and cheaper. Terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed yet.  VMware competes with Microsoft, Oracle and Citrix in the virtualization space.