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Lock the stable door, the cloud is coming to the farm!

Rural wisdom has long proclaimed that successful farming has more to do with hard work, cooperation, frugality and common sense than science and technology. But a farm management software startup company called FarmLogs wants to modernize the industry by bringing critical farm data online. It replaces paper record keeping with software that is accessible via cloud computing on smartphones and web browsers.

An exciting venture, for sure.

But there’s another notable development in the story of FarmLogs, which recently received $1 million in seed funding to expand its mobile applications in time for the 2013 planting season: The tech company – which was incubated in Silicon Valley – has set its roots in Michigan.

Twenty-something co-founders Jesse Vollmar and Brad Koch grew up in the rural Thumb area of mitten-shaped Michigan. They headed off to Silicon Valley to develop their vision after receiving seed funding from Y Combinator.

Their next move? Leave the world’s largest conglomeration of technology corporations and start-ups and return to Michigan. They’ve set up their growing shop in Online Tech’s hometown of Ann Arbor.

“We decided the right move for us was to move back to Michigan, right here in Ann Arbor,” Vollmar told Concentrate Media. “Ann Arbor has a better start-up culture and vibe that we thought would be better for attracting talent.” >>Read more

Source: OnlineTech

Recently, I predicted that in 2013, cloud computing will provide the biggest disruption information technology has experienced in 25 years. These impacts extend to the $128 billion data center industry, which will never be the same as the traditional business model is disrupted, and new rules for success are written.

The data center market traditionally has been composed of five types of facilities, ranging from small to mega. This market has bifurcated into “Category One” – server rooms to enterprise facilities – and “Category Two” – large- to mega-sized facilities.

In Category One, hardware costs predominate. These facilities operate at an overall higher cost and provide customized services. In Category Two, software costs predominate. Focus is on a high-volume, low-margin business model. Due to the massive costs required to build and manage, the market for Category One is growing at a slower rate than that for Category Two. Category One also is undergoing unprecedented consolidation and virtualization. Category Two is evolving, in part, to the cloud services provider model, which offers highly secure, scalable and on-demand IT solutions. Fierce competition in Category Two is fueling a “survival-of-the-fittest” scenario – those that realize the importance of the disruptive cloud computing model, and adapt, will emerge as winners. >>Read more

Source: SC Magazine

I’ll state the obvious:  The last five years have seen incredible changes in IT, including the rise of new cloud operating models and the spread of virtualization into production data centers. A new generation of upstarts has captured the imagination of the IT industry by unleashing new software and service-centric solutions, including private and public clouds, new devices and operating systems, all leading to a larger and grander software-defined IT era.

Now the not so obvious: Software-defined IT is only a stepping stone to a much larger, service-defined IT era, enabled by the rise of hybrid cloud automation.

We are not there yet when it comes to hybrid cloud, despite the plethora of hybrid cloud announcements based on, of all things, virtualization lock-in.  Why?  The notion of migrating a virtual app and its critical services from a rack of x86 servers only to be stranded within yet another set of racks in a public cloud is not a hybrid cloud operating model.  It is simply an early form of cloud migration.

Cloud migration will ultimately evolve into hybrid cloud integration within a true hybrid cloud operating environment.  It isn’t the ability to move a virtual app once from one environment to another that is hybrid cloud, but rather the ability to move physical and virtual apps and services on demand, as needed between environments. Hybrid cloud is all about control for both the enterprise and the service provider.

Migrating VMs from cloud to cloud is a tactical payoff; integrating existing and virtual apps with clouds is a strategic game changer: control with agility.

First Gen Cloud Drawbacks

Virtually all of the cloud operating models in use today involve significant tradeoffs, often with control and security or unplanned downtime risks. >>Read more

Source: http://gregness.wordpress.com/

As 2013 begins, it's a natural time to explore where cloud brokering is headed

Hopefully you watched Forrester's Stefan Ried present his webinar on cloud brokering and the many opportunities for different kinds of companies to exploit this technology. Part of Stefan's conversation included an explanation of the evolution to a unified cloud broker. If you missed it, you can catch up with it here. As 2013 begins, it's a natural time to explore where cloud brokering is headed. A cloud broker is the intersection of infrastructure, software and consultancy. Naturally, technology is a key enabler for a service provider adopting the broker role but it also impacts business models and consultancy. This diagram summarizes concept into the high-level architecture discussed above:

In the blue is a proposed "Unified Cloud Broker Platform." This shows how a cloud broker can take existing applications, SaaS and IaaS, and create customer value and a new cloud portfolio from them. This isn't necessarily a single product but shows the elements needed to offer the component parts that a cloud broker would need in their "stack" to offer compelling cloud offerings to ISVs, SMEs, enterprises and cloud ecosystem partners: >>Read more

Source: Cloud Computing Journal

At the end of 2012, Forrester Research’s James Staten summarized Forrester’s vision for how they see cloud computing affecting enterprises in 2013.  The top ten trends for the enterprise cloud include:

- Understanding of the cloud will lead to better IT architectural decisions.  IT finally has a firm grasp on the scenarios which benefit most by applying cloud technologies.
- Cloud technology will continue to be complemented by mobile.  Glenn O’Donnell, Forrester analyst, says that cloud plus mobile is “more than the sum of its parts.”
- Non-critical apps in the cloud will mean that high SLAs become less important. James Staten, Forrester analyst, wrote that “What’s the value of having your sourcing and vendor management team negotiate a high and tight SLA from the cloud vendor when only 10% of the applications deployed there need that level of protection?” >>Read more

Source: Formtek Blog