Smart phone shipments top PCs for the first time ever

We have reached a very interesting inflection point: more smartphones are shipped every day than PCs. This is radically changing the way applications should be designed, distributed and consumed. Developers are already designing their applications with a mobile interface first. With the back-end moving to the cloud and the front-end to mobile devices, we are at a very important junction in the world of IT. On a less serious note, there are now more Apple iPhones sold per second than there are babies born in the world.

Big five IT trends

Very good article here. Not that the author is a visionary (he would have been if the article had been published 3 years ago), but he did good job articulating the major IT trends.

If you don't have time here are the big five IT trends:

• Smart Devices and Tablets
• Social Media
• Consumerization of IT
• Cloud Computing
• Big Data

The 8 most important types of collaboration apps for smart phones

According to this article which covers a recent Forrester report, the following applications will matter the most on smart phones and tablets:

• E-mail and calendars
• Document-based collaboration
• Web conferencing
• Activity streams
• Presence and chat
• Social collaboration
• Expertise location
• Videoconferencing

No real surprise, this was the kind of list that was circulated around 10 years ago except for the social collaboration and activity streams.

I found the following figure quite valuable as we always discuss the value of rich vs thin vs native type of mobile application. Clearly, the back-end is moving to the cloud while the front-end is mobile or better: multi-channels.

EMC to acquire data warehouse vendor Greenplum

Another sign that Big Data is top of mind for IT vendors. The acquisition is showing the importance of getting business value out of the data generated by applications (business or monitoring), sensors, users and customers. Read the article here. There's something very interesting about the combination of data analytics and cloud/virtualization. This is what Omnitrol has delivered in our solutions: analytics-as-a-service.

What is cloud computing?

There is so much chatter about cloud computing these days that it is really hard to get people to agree on a common definition not only for cloud computing but also for SaaS and other acronyms. Fnally, I found a presentation from the NIST that is probably the best overview of cloud computing , its economics, standards and case studies. I can't recommend these slides enough to anyone involved with cloud computing.

A quick summary of this great material:

"Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction."

This cloud model promotes availability and is composed of

Five essential characteristics:

1. On-demand self-service
2. Broad network access
3. Resource pooling and Location independence
4. Rapid elasticity
5. Measured service

Three service models:

1. Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS): Use provider’s applications over a network
2. Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS): Deploy customer-created applications to a cloud
3. Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Rent processing, storage, network capacity, and other fundamental computing resources

Four deployment models:

1. Private cloud: enterprise owned or leased
2. Community cloud: shared infrastructure for specific community
3. Public cloud: Sold to the public, mega-scale infrastructure
4. Hybrid cloud: composition of two or more clouds

Cloud computing often leverages:

• Massive scale
• Homogeneity
• Virtualization
• Resilient computing
• Low cost software
• Geographic distribution
• Service orientation
• Advanced security technologies

It looks like we have now a common ground to discuss cloud computing!

HP to Acquire 3Com

HP is buying its way into the edge by acquiring 3Com. The acquisition makes sense in order to offer a complete edge-to-the-data-center solution. HP and Cisco have been on a collision course for some time now and this purchase is accelerating things. Read this blog entry from Cisco.
What it means for the other network equipment providers? Nokia Siemens, Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent. Is there room for independent network equipment providers to the enterprise market. Let's watch IBM and Oracle's next move.

It seems to me that the network and the applications will meet somewhere in the cloud and IT giants are positioning themselves accordingly. I need to draw another triangle that would show the infrastructure supporting my first triangle. The developer community should be the focus for all these IT companies to develop a vibrant, interoperable ecosystem. Google and Apple are doing exactly see with their platforms. Equipment providers

Omnitrol Networks releases Retail Shop-Floor Inventory Tracking Solution for Apparel

Another great example of collaboration, we are now ready to release this solution to our partners and channels. Large retail companies can offer wide selections of clothing and have advantages in purchasing, distribution, and marketing while smaller stores can compete by offering unique merchandise, targeting a specific demographic, providing superior customer service, or serving a local market. All retail stores across the industry share a similar and very labor-intensive model when it comes to inventory tracking and inventory replenishment. New competition in recent years has come from discounters and from catalog and Internet retailers. Cost reduction is a key goal for apparel retailers.

Until now, solutions were "tailored" solutions. Thanks to our partner, we have been able to bring up an easy-to-install solution that can provide immediate visibility on apparel item movement and address the out-of-stock problem. Out of stock situations cost the industry nearly $90 billion every year.

Omnitrol Networks enters relationship with BT Global Services to Deliver Real-Time Supply-Chain Visibility Solutions

We built our software with telco scale, performance and reliability in mind, it's only natural to see telco operators joining forces with us to deploy network-based solutions. But what's more exciting is to work with a leading technology integrator such as BT who has so much experience in the supply chain IT services area. You can read more here, but here's a short excerpt:

"We were previously developing customized solutions to address customer needs in the RFID market, which was quite costly and time consuming," Keith Sherry of BT Supply Chain Solutions told RFID Update. "Omnitrol gives us an appliance that can accept multiple sensor input and a platform for processing the data, which is enabling us to create solutions where we wouldn't otherwise be able to show a strong ROI."

Evolution of the Data Center

As I am looking at the triangle to explain the transformations happening around content, networks, and devices I can't help thinking about the other changes happening in the IT industry. Is one driving or enabling the other?

In the past, I talked about utility or cloud computing and it seems that cloud computing is becoming the new buzz word. It is true that content providers, service providers and network infrastructure manufacturers believe in the same shared network service architecture. Cloud computing meets all the scalability, reliability, flexibility and performance (one could argue with this last one :-) required to deliver these services over the web.

Big players like Sun, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle and Amazon are already offering cloud computing services to other companies to run their software. Like email and web hosting in the past, this is not for everyone. Large companies still see their data centers as a competitive weapon and won't let anyone running it outside their four walls. They are using the same convergent infrastructure (server, storage, software) to make their own data centers much more flexible but it will be a while before they transition. This explains the success of VMware ($700M of revenue can't lie).

In the meantime, more cash-sensitive companies will buy computing resources on the web to run some of their software (or buy the service outright from salesforce.com). The data center is evolving to better server the business model outlined in the triangle.

Amazon and Utility Computing

Fascinating article here about Amazon's new bet on utility computing. Jeff Bezos is now going to sell computing power and storage to companies looking to access these resources over the web. Utility computing (or Cloud computing) is nothing new. Sun Microsystems launched its own hosted services based on N1, nearly 3 years ago. What is interesting in this announcement, is that Amazon has been able to integrate computing power, storage, network and provisioning software and offer it as a service while other companies are only starting to implement or talk about convergent IT infrastructure. I'm not sure if this is going to skip one adoption cycle but if Amazon (and other large companies or service providers) is going to be successful, this is going to upend the IT industry in a very significant way. I'm always wary of believing in quick adoption rates and this is going to take time. The route to utility and cloud computing will need more salesforce.com companies first before a move to a hosted converged infrastructure. As any platforms, you need developers to make it meaningful.