System iNetwork

October 2009

October 22, 2009 5:19 PM

COMMON Lures Early Registrants with Conference Discount

COMMON is proving it's never too early to think spring with a $200 early-bird registration discount for its 2010 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Orlando. The COMMON flagship conference will be held May 3-6 at the Hilton Orlando and marks the organization's 50th anniversary.

COMMON is offering the $200 early-bird discount through December 31. You can get the discount by using the DECO discount code during online registration at common.org/annualmeeting.

The Annual Meeting spans four days with more than 300 in-depth IBM i and AIX educational sessions, including pre-conference workshops, seminars, labs, and a variety of classes. The Expo features more than 80 exhibitors, including IBM.

--Rita-Lyn Sanders, Senior Industry Editor

Posted by rsanders on October 22, 2009 at 5:19 PM | Comments (0)

October 16, 2009 5:33 PM

IBM Finds Smart Business Offerings in the Cloud

IBM has been on a cloud roll of sorts, introducing service after service in a cloud computing frenzy. And with IBM itself admitting that it's shifting to become a high-margin services company, I doubt the cloud computing era is going to end (until, of course, the next "it" phrase comes along).

Even Joe Developer has given IBM the thumbs up signal in the cloud computing space. A survey conducted by Evans Data Corp on developers' perceptions of the major players in the cloud computing space revealed that IBM is the company that developers think of as having the best ability to execute in the private cloud setting, while Google is strongest for the public cloud.

The September survey measured 400 developers' perceptions of the leading vendors, including Amazon, Microsoft, AT&T, Rackspace, VMware, Sun, and HP, among others. The developers answered questions about adoption, adoption intentions, completeness of offering, and ability to execute along with capabilities such as security, scalability, low latency, reliability, no vendor lock-in, and cost-to-value ratio. Developers also positioned the vendors as better suited to either public or private cloud offerings.

IBM's Smart Business Cloud
To briefly summarize, here are a few of the cloud technologies IBM has announced are available:

• Perhaps the most interesting to me, because I used to cover Lotus technologies, is IBM's hosted email solution, LotusLive iNotes. The new email service delivers cloud computing technology with a focus on reliability, privacy, and security with a price tag starting at $3 per user, per month. The solution works with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange or can operate as a standalone program.
• IBM announced in August the Smart Business Desktop Cloud subscription service, which enables end users with network-attached PCs and certain other devices the ability to access applications and data through a centrally managed computing environment. The solution provides virtual desktop computing resources and a logical, rather than a physical, method of access to data, computing power, storage capacity, and other resources. This service requires no upfront capital or onetime expense and is designed to provide enhanced levels of security, resiliency, reliability, and quality for virtual desktops.
• Back in June IBM announced the Smart Business cloud portfolio, which automates technology and provides self-service to specific digital tasks like software development and testing, desktop and device management, and collaboration.
• Just last week IBM announced its intention to enter the cloud storage space with the Smart Business Storage Cloud, a private cloud offering that uses low-cost components in a true, scale-out clustered model not offered by its competition. Hallmarks of the solution include support for multiple petabytes of capacity, billions of files, and scale-out performance previously limited to the largest "high performance computing" systems, IBM says.

Who Benefits?
I mentioned the cloud computing hubbub to Chris Maxcer, and he suggested it's like leasing an automobile: Companies like IBM are looking for ways to continuously get money out of their customers. In the cloud computing method, a customer pays for continuous service or resources (such as data storage) that it doesn't outright own, and therefore must keep paying if it wants to continue to use those services. Sure, the company owns the data, but it doesn't own the infrastructure (which is in the cloud) and manpower that is supporting that data. And then there's always the question of security (which I've mentioned before).

Perhaps cloud computing is bad for the potential employee who doesn't have a job because his or her work has been "outsourced" to the cloud, but then, someone has to be working at the company providing the cloud services.

And for some companies, perhaps they don't have the resources to support a back-end infrastructure on their own. I have a friend in the Pacific Northwest (a single mom, no less) who just started her own vineyard and is crushing her first harvest as I write this. She doesn't have the resources to purchase the costly computing equipment that it might take to keep her compliant with the regulations of producing, marketing, and selling her Gamay Noir wine varieties. So a package of cloud-based business applications that she can use over the Internet and simply log in to would be a great option.

And then there are some shops that will likely maintain their data on IBM i, but perhaps go to the cloud for email or other business applications.

--Rita-Lyn Sanders, Senior Industry Editor

Posted by rsanders on October 16, 2009 at 5:33 PM | Comments (1)