Cloud Storm Chasers : AppLogic

CA World Preview: Session on High Availability Grids Running SAP Environments

Bert Armijo — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:32:00 GMT

We have a number of interesting sessions planned for CA World. At a session on Wednesday, April 24, at 10:00 am, Miguel Allen Lima, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Oni Group companies Hubgrade and Knewon, will discuss how Oni, a leading Portuguese service provider and telco, and Roff, a European leading SAP system integrator, have joined forces to deliver SAP as a service in the cloud for customers around the world. Their model uses CA AppLogic® as its core infrastructure to provide high availability grids running SAP environments.

Prior to joining Oni in 1999, Miguel was Project Manager at Fujitsu-ICL, Head of IS in Labelec SA - EDP and lecturer and researcher at the Institute for Systems and Robotics of the Instituto Superior Técnico in the areas of genetic algorithms and biomedical systems.

We had a chance to catch up with Miguel over email to get a preview of his session.

Tell us about your upcoming session at CA World 2013.

It's time to evolve as an industry, and I’ll cover that in the session. IT is still a young industry compared, for example, to the auto industry. We still have to procure the parts and do the assembly. It's very fragmented especially in the corporate segment.

Our session will focus on how cloud can be a game-changer in the way we look at the IT business. We will address how to simplify the delivery of IT solutions by merging infrastructure, applications and operations in a cloud service. This is the logical next step in the industry. And we'll show how it can be done with partnerships and cloud technology in a positive scenario for all parts.

What are the top 3 things you want attendees to learn from your session?

We’d like attendees to learn:

How cloud will change the way companies interact with IT
The importance of partnerships on the cloud space to fully address corporate market
The benefit equation (win-win-win) that can be achieved

We anticipate that there will be an interesting exchange of ideas and that this will be a very interesting and informative session. It should prove to be a very interesting session.

What is the top driver for your customers to choose cloud-based services from Oni?

The main driver is the turnkey solution that allows an easy path from business needs to service delivery. No infrastructure issues, no operation issues, just business processes and service levels.

What do you hope to take away from CA World this year?

The same things I took away in years past: See the IT trends, get new ideas for improving my business, and enlarge my network. But, above all, I’ll have the chance to again meet again a bunch of very skilled professionals and friends, and that’s invaluable.

Are All Apps Created Equal for the Cloud?

Denise Dubie — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 09:23:00 GMT

GigaSpaces exec explains how to put a middleman between your apps and the cloud.

Think you don't have the appropriate applications to make a significant move to the cloud? Think again.

It's been widely reported that cloud computing isn't a fit for all types of applications, or at the very least, that many companies do not feel comfortable moving mission-critical applications and the data they hold to the cloud. Typically uses for the cloud range from file storage to backup to hosting and e-mail, but mission-critical, transactional applications - such as those used by financial services companies - aren't often the ideal use-case presented by cloud providers.

That is, until GigaSpaces partnered with CA Technologies to deliver the GigaSpaces XAP AppLogic appliance, which Amnon Raviv, Head of the Executive Sales team covering Business Development and Strategic Alliances for GigaSpaces, says provides the elasticity needed for cloud environments to any application.

"The appliance is particularly relevant for customers in financial services, telco, e-commerce, specifically for mission-critical applications. [These apps] require extreme levels of performance, low latency and high availability, for example, applications in the financial services space, like reconciliation applications, fraud detection, risk analysis, risk portfolio analysis," says Raviv in a CA Technologies Cloud Luminary video. "In telco, OMS type applications on the management systems; the same as in e-commerce and retail, so highly transactional, complex applications."

The appliance and the technology it hosts acts as a middleman between the application and the environment in which it will reside, whether it be a private data center, a private cloud, a public cloud or a combination of them all. It makes sense that GigaSpaces, a middleware provider since 2000, would be poised and ready to apply its technology to cloud computing when it emerged and gained popularity later in the decade.

"Our middleware lent itself very well to cloud environments, highly virtualization, highly distributed environments," Raviv says. "Because of our ability to decouple, to abstract the application from the underlying topology of that environment, it is a lot easier for enterprises to move their application from one cloud environment to another. ... Otherwise you would have to rewrite the application and adapt, make it run well on Cloud A and then makes all these changes for its to run on Cloud B and then on Cloud C. It's pretty complex and expensive to do."

What applications do you send to the cloud? What hesitation do you have about using cloud with other applications? Please leave a comment here, let me know your thoughts via Twitter @DDubie or e-mail me directly at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.

Watch a short video about GigaSpaces here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M-gmHFCh2s

Cloud Providers Must Commit to Innovation

Denise Dubie — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 14:38:00 GMT

CIOs and IT leaders across the board have been handed a challenge this year: to transform traditional IT organizations focused on maintaining operations into agile, incubators for innovation.

The evolution from focusing on ‘keeping the lights on' to enabling more innovative approaches for solving new and existing problems won't be easy, but IT leaders are not alone. According to industry watchers, the push toward innovation will also fall into the laps of cloud providers that will need an innovative edge to compete for IT budget dollars. While IT works to become the center of innovation within their organization - perhaps choosing cloud as part of a broader strategy - cloud providers should be demonstrating how they intend to stay ahead of competitors and customer demands with innovative approaches to delivering the best technology, says Sean Hackett, research director covering cloud computing at 451 Research, in a recent CA Technologies Cloud Luminaries video.

"The most compelling attributes for companies to look at when choosing a cloud platform is the company's commitment to innovation. We're still a ways away from a fully integrated, hybrid cloud platform so the commitment to innovation and the commitment to adding the right functionality and the right tool sets that will enable this fully-blown, multi-sourced environment to happen and the best execution-workload environment to happen is still a ways away," Hackett says. "So it's incumbent on users to link up with a company that they feel has a vested interest in the platform and will continue to innovate."

Despite what it may seem like considering its current popularity, Hackett says it is still a young market for cloud computing and while companies today commit to a cloud provider, the cloud provider must in turn commit to innovation. And while internal IT shops are striving to enable innovation, offloading some work to cloud providers could provide respite from day-to-day activities consuming too many valuable resources that would be better spent on innovative new projects. According to Hackett, the drivers for cloud adoption among customers and clients he encounters aren't always cost-related.

"Cost reduction is becoming less and less of an issue, although affordability is still an important factor in driving cloud adoption," Hackett says. "But I think it's the flexibility, the adaptability, the ability to meet the demands of the business, the ability to scale up or to scale down is becoming increasingly - at least we see in our interactions with enterprise customers - seems to be becoming more and more weighted in terms of importance."

Cloud providers must commit to this level of innovation to keep customers happy while they demonstrate their own level of commitment to innovation within their organizations. The demand on cloud providers make sense when you consider the demand on IT and the business it supports. The question is, "How can cloud vendors prove their commitment to innovation?"

Do you consider a commitment to innovation a critical factor when choosing a cloud vendor? Why should innovation become a standard requirement for cloud providers? Please leave a comment here, let me know via Twitter @DDubie or e-mail me directly at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.

Are You Master of Your Cloud Domain?

Denise Dubie — Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:00:00 GMT

Public cloud adoption gets mixed reviews. Some report enterprise IT as being hesitant to put their mission-critical applications - and data - in a public cloud environment, and others say the prospect of fast, easy services managed by a provider is appealing to many.

For instance, a recent article "Is the cloud really ready for prime time?" cited Gartner as saying the public cloud is used primarily for development and testing functions for about half of clients, while the other half uses it for miscellaneous applications. A separate article quotes recent research from IDC and points to firms in Singapore and their preference for public over private cloud. And Andi Mann, vice president of Strategic Solutions at CA Technologies, penned an entire blog on the reasons the public cloud to date is a failure.

"Large enterprises continue to embrace private clouds. IT organizations increasingly understand the risks, opportunities, roles and potential benefits of public and private cloud computing. And they're largely putting their chips on the private cloud card," Mann's blog reads.

While private cloud offers the security many in enterprise IT want, the prospect of creating the private cloud environment from scratch might be overwhelming to already resource-constrained IT shops. And while public cloud provides immediate access to services and resources, the lack of control some platforms offer lessens the appeal for enterprise IT. It would appear that enterprise IT would like the ease of the public cloud with the security and reliability of a private cloud environment.

Striking this balance is what cloud services provider DNSEurope wants to do for its clients. The company allows customers to "get their feet wet" with their public cloud offerings and experience the potential benefits the cloud can offer their businesses. If the customer wants to migrate its public cloud environment into a private cloud, DNSEurope can also help with that.

"If you look at a public cloud service provider like Amazon, they have a wonderful infrastructure and control with APIs that allow what you can do on their platform. But ultimately they are a public cloud service provider," says Stephen Hurford, Cloud Services Director at DNSEurope in a recent CA Technologies Cloud Luminaries video. "They don't have an upsell into private clouds. So, it's a little of a developmental dead-end if you go to a public cloud service provider like that."

DNSEurope uses the CA AppLogic platform and can transition customers from the managed offering to an in-house environment with the same technology. Hurford says he understands customers' desire to manage their own cloud environments as well as their hesitancy to go all-in without some proven results.

"They're testing that platform on a managed public environment with us, and then when they gain confidence or when their business scales to a certain level, we can easily, literally with a one-line command, migrate them from a public cloud to their own private cloud. And then they have control of the infrastructure," Hurford explains. "For us, that's more about being master of your own domain rather than living with the API capabilities of another public cloud service provider."

What type of cloud best suits your business needs? Does a migration from a public cloud environment to your own private cloud make sense to you? Please leave a comment here, let me know via Twitter @DDubie or e-mail me directly at Denise.Dubie@ca.com.

CA AppLogic r3 Certifications Now Available

Christine Needles — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17:25:00 GMT

Do you consider yourself a CA AppLogic® cloud platform "power user"? Wish you could prove your expertise and knowledge around effectively administering, managing and implementing CA AppLogic r3? Now you can! CA Education has recently released its latest role-based certification exams for CA AppLogic r3, giving our partners, customers and employees an opportunity to showcase their expertise with the platform.

We announced the role-based certification program last summer, offering a rigorous third-party validated approach for measuring skill and expertise in managing, administering, installing, configuring and implementing select CA Technologies solutions on an individual level.

Offered for two sets of roles, the CA AppLogic r3 certification exams are designed to objectively validate an individual's knowledge and competencies with the platform:

CA AppLogic r3 Professional - Designed for system architects, IT operations professionals, application developers, systems engineers, and automation engineers, to validate expertise around architectural concepts, deploying, operating, managing applications in the cloud, best practices for security and testing applications, and architecting for business continuity.

CA AppLogic r3 Administrator - Designed for IT administrators, data center staff, system administrators, systems integrators, with the intent to validate your ability to get started quickly in providing cloud computing in a public, private, or hybrid environment using the CA AppLogic platform.

All exams are administered through our third-party proctor, Prometric. You can register for all of the available CA Technologies certification exams, including CA AppLogic r3 certifications here.

We've also put together a set of materials to help candidates prepare for the exam, which you can access here.

To learn more about Certifications from CA Technologies visit http://www.ca.com/us/certifications, and follow @CA_Education on Twitter to get the latest on new courses and certifications as they become available.