Answer My Query

I have been in technology marketing since my career began, and there is one word that I have come to loathe because of its misuse by marketing and business leaders in technology – enterprise, (or enterprise-class). I’m guilty of using it – it’s my job to ensure prospects know that we offer the best technologies available to handle complex workloads and applications. But what is the definition of enterprise, really? A quick Bing search produces three definitions – commercial business, business activities directed at profit, and a daring new project. A quick search of the Gartner IT Glossary tells me the definition of enterprise-class is “a term referring to the ability of a given tool or product to handle complex processes or services.”

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The two primary commercial providers that signed on for the proprietary files systems – IBM and EMC (via partnership with MapR) – have retrenched. As we’ve noted previously, the measure of success of an open source stack is the degree to which the target remains intact. That either comes as part of a captive open source project, where a vendor unilaterally open sources their code (typically hosting the project) to promote adoption, or a community model where a neutral industry body hosts the project and gains support from a diverse cross section of vendors and advanced developers. In that case, the goal is getting the formal standard to also become the de facto standard. The most successful open source projects are those that represent commodity software – otherwise, why would vendors choose not to compete with software that anybody can freely license or consume? That’s been the secret behind the success of Linux, where there has been general agreement on where the kernel ends, and as a result, a healthy market of products that run atop (and license) Linux. For community open source projects, vendors obviously have to agree on where the line between commodity and unique value-add begins.

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“While there is still a lot of interest in Big Data Analytics, we see an increasing focus on Big Unstructured Data,” observed Tom Leyden, Director of Alliances and Marketing at Amplidata, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. And, Leyden continued, “Object storage is the new paradigm to store those massive amounts of Big Unstructured Data.” Agree or disagree? – "While the IT savings aspect is compelling, the strongest benefit of cloud computing is how it enhances business agility."

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Policies and procedures for Cloud solutions and services should be established as part of Enterprise Cloud Giovernance. Plug and Play for Cloud Services is not enough! Enterprise Cloud Governance is the specification of policies and procedures for Cloud solutions and services for the organization. Many organizations struggle with having silos of Clouds without a coherent approach for Governance. It is very tempting for departments or groups to go and buy new services and try to plug them and then play to see how they works. If specific services have their own individual policies and procedures, this can lead to problems due to lack of centralized management. Without proper alignment with Enterprise Architecture and Security, this can lead to a spaghetti-like conglomeration of Cloud services without proper attention to interoperability and service management. With Enterprise level solutions that leverage hybrid services, the situation can quickly spin out of control. It is extremely important to have a strategy and vision in place to address important elements such as policy management, service management, interactions between applications and data, availability, performance and control related to services.

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