Enterprise mobility, BYOD reach tipping point, says Yankee Group

Apple's iOS, Google's Android are headed for a mobile duopoly in the enterprise

Enterprise mobility and BYOD are reaching a tipping point in 2012, according to Yankee Group principal analyst Chris Marsh.

For the first time, a majority of employees want to use consumer applications for work purposes and a majority of IT departments are allowing them to do it, according to an annual Yankee Group enterprise survey.

"Comparing our enterprise survey data from the past year shows just how much the enterprise mobility market has shifted in 2012. Companies are taking a much more permissive and realistic view toward the imperative of supporting mobility and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environments," Marsh noted.

Twenty percent more employees are using tablets for work this year over last year, but laptops and smartphones still are used the most for the majority of work tasks, he noted.

The Yankee Group predicts that the mobile ecosystem--mobile broadband, mobile devices, mobile apps, cloud services and mobile money--will exceed $2 trillion in revenues within three years.

Companies are on the precipice of a mobile applications gold rush, Marsh said. They are looking increasingly at software-as-a-service as a way to better provision apps to their mobile workforce.

At the same time, an increasing number of companies are having difficulty with mobility management tasks such as distributing applications to devices and upgrading mobile device software, he noted.

Two companies that are not benefiting from mobile boom in the enterprise are Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), according to Marsh. For example, the proportion of companies preferring RIM as their smartphone platform has halved during the past year, and now only 8 percent believe it will be their preferred platform two years from now, according to the Yankee Group analyst.

"If fortunes for either Microsoft or RIM don't change, [Google's] Android and [Apple's] iOS are heading for a duopoly in the enterprise in the near future," Marsh judged.

Read more: Enterprise mobility, BYOD reach tipping point, says Yankee Group - FierceMobileIT http://www.fiercemobileit.com/story/enterprise-mobility-byod-reach-tipping-point-says-yankee-group/2012-10-18?goback=%2Egde_2735943_member_179739980

Smart Clouds For Smart Devices

A nice article that depicts the how smart cloud for smart devices can be the future of cloud computing not just limited for mobiles and tablets but beyond that with electronics appliances and TV's. 

“Cloud and Mobile”: What is the future of this relationship?

Cloud computing, mobile devices drive innovation, flexibility

Who is dating who is always interesting for people, especially when it is regarding celebrities and popular folks. Well here we are about to discuss one of the rapidly flourishing association in technology industry and yes both parties are super popular i.e. cloud computing and mobile. Coming to the point businesses and users are looking for availability of data, email and applications anytime and from any location whether they are at home, on-premise or on move. Marketplace is highly competitive, there are lots of big players, startups and midsize companies competing to capture the market and hence businesses wants employees to be connected irrespective of their location and devices they are using.

Anytime availability and unlimited storage is critical for businesses and hence use of mobile devices and Smartphones has tremendously increased in past few years. Almost 70% of workforce in North America relies on mobile devices. With the cloud computing technologies delivery of mobile apps and access of data with mobile platforms is much more feasible and easy. The motive to use mobile devices in business is to achieve work flexibility and anytime data access. How cloud computing helps in this? It’s very simple actually. You can use your light and smart devices for accessing applications and data, communication with peers but obviously you cannot store data in these consumer centric devices.  In actual we don’t do computation on these devices but these devices consume applications and we do computation with them.  The actual data could be hosted over the cloud and hence available anytime from anywhere. Cloud computing makes employees to access their business email anywhere with SaaS services like Exchange 2010 hosting and enables efficient collaboration and sharing with services likeSharePoint 2010 hosting. Apart from SaaS services Cloud servers’ i.e Virtual Private Server provides flexible yet secure option for storage as compared to traditional servers. These cloud services provides cost effectiveness and with some configuration could be easily accessed with various types of mobile devices.

In Consumer electronics sector it’s clearly evident from market trends that demand of desktops is decreasing and on the other hand sale of Smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices is skyrocketing. Statistically number of Personal Computers is increasing at the rate of 10% every year and surprisingly number of new mobile devices is crossing the rate of 100%. Businesses have realized that the traditional method of working is no more beneficial. So association of Cloud and mobile seems a promising one. This relationship has grown strong in past few years with more companies adopting hosted solutions over cloud.

The growth of mobile devices is impacting the cloud computing too. Combination of cloud  and mobile technology delivers the unique combination of cost advantages, flexibility and scalability. Another great spark in this relationship is potential for solving specific IT problems if used strategically. One direct application could be Blackberry hosting. Blackberry Enterprise Server or BES Hosting combined with hosted Exchange gives company the power to accommodate the demands of mobile users using a variety of BlackBerry and other smart devices, while having good control over corporate IT polices, security, reliability, and customization. So while mobile devices help connectivity, hosted BES enables employees to be connected regardless of their physical location.

http://www.enterprisecioforum.com/en/blogs/richa-pokhriyal/%E2%80%9Ccloud-and-mobile%E2%80%9D-what-future-relations

Gartner: Mobile device management tech set to take off

Proliferation of smart devices and the data they will have access to could force IT's hand 

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/102612-mobile-device-management-gartner-263724.html?goback=%2Egde_2735943_member_179356880

Gartner: 10 Critical Tech Trends For The Next Five Years

At a Gartner Symposium IT Expo session this morning, analyst David Cappuccio laid out 10 “critical”  trends and technologies impacting IT for the next five years. (David Letterman apparently was not available; at least they found another Dave to do the honors.)

Before revealing the list, Cappucio provides a little context: In the last minute, there were 204 million emails sent, 61,000 hours of music listened to on Pandora, 20 million photo views and 3 million uploads to Flickr, 100,000 tweets, 6 million view and 277,000 Facebook logins and 2 million plus Googlesearches.

He repeats a theme that is going to come up a lot at this event: the “nexus” of cloud, big data, social and mobile.

• Organizational entrenchment and disruption
• Software-defined networks
• Bigger data and storage
• Hybrid cloud services
• Client and server architectures
• Internet of things
• IT appliance madness
• Operational complexity
• Virtual data centers
• IT demand

Digging in...more...:

Big Data and NoSQL: Five Key Insights

If you’re running a web site with a large number of customers, you’ve experienced the dreaded Big Data Performance Paradox.

Just when you need your site to respond quickly to a successful marketing campaign, it slows down. 

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others have wrestled with this problem for years as they’ve grown from thousands to millions and now hundreds of millions of users.

Inundated by huge amounts of user data, they took advantage of data store technologies like Memcached and Redis to make their sites run fast. But for sites without the engineering resources of companies like Facebook, adopting these technologies has been challenging.

Big Data company Garantia Data addresses that issue. Garantia Data’s cloud-based, in-memory NoSQL solutions make your web site run faster. That’s why a number of companies are beta testing Garantia Data’s offering.

Demystifying The BuzzwordsBefore we dive in further, let’s demystify a few of the key terms around this rapidly evolving space:

NoSQL is often used for storing Big Data. This is a new type of database which is becoming more and more popular among web companies today. Proponents of NoSQL solutions state that they provide simpler scalability and improved performance relative to traditional relational databases. These products excel at storing “unstructured data,” and the category includes open source products such as Cassandra, MongoDB, and Redis.

In-memory means data is stored in computer memory to make access to it faster. Garantia Data deals with some of the fastest data stores available today – Redis and Memcached, both NoSQL databases, entirely served from memory. These products excel at storing “unstructured data,” and the category includes open source products such as Cassandra, MongoDB, and Redis.

Cloud computing means computing resources that are delivered as a service, typically over the Internet. For example, Garantia Data’s solution runs on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS) today. The solution will run on top of other platforms such as Rackspace in the future. That means if you have a web application running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), taking advantage of Garantia Data’s solution is easy.

Proven Product BuildersGarantia Data was founded by Ofer Bengal and Yiftach Shoolman. Bengal previously founded RIT Technologies, which went public in 1997, and MobileEconomy, which was acquired in 2003. Co-founder Yiftach Shoolman was the founder of application acceleration company Crescendo Networks, which was acquired by networking company F5.

The two wanted to apply their common background in high-speed networking and application acceleration to a technical problem that would be sufficiently challenging while providing ground-breaking value to a large number of customers.

The in memory NoSQL database space provided just that challenge. Such Big Data systems handle hundreds of thousands of transactions per second at sub-millisecond latencies.

The Open Source ChallengeBoth Memcached, which accelerates existing relational databases like MySQL, and Redis, which is a complete, stand-alone database and acceleration solution, are open source technologies.

While these technologies provide immense capabilities, they also suffer from some key challenges in the areas of reliability, scalability, and manageability. The same limitations apply to commercial solutions such as the native Amazon ElastiCache service for Memcached.

Garantia Data’s solutions, called “Redis Cloud” and “Memcached Cloud” overcome these limitations, by adding to standard Redis and Memcached a breakthrough technological layer called “dynamic clustering.” The technology fully automates all operational processes associated with managing these ultra-fast databases, while enabling infinite scalability with zero data loss reliability.

What further distinguishes the solution is the company’s approach to real-time compression for unstructured data. This approach allows Garantia Data to support a price point comparable to Amazon’s ElastiCache, while maintaining strong margins.

Put simply, you can continue to serve more customers without compromising on speed or having to re-architect. Once you adopt Garantia Data’s solution, there’s nothing more you need to do; it scales automatically.

Accelerating Big Data: Five Key InsightsGiven Bengal and Shoolman’s years of experience with application acceleration and high-speed networking, they have a unique set of insights into what you should look for when evaluating in-memory NoSQL solutions:

• Automated scalability. The solution should be infinitely scalable in a fully-automated manner. This means you should not deal with nodes, clusters and scaling operations. All that should be automatically done for you.
• No data loss. Memory nodes often crash and when this happens you lose all data stored on them. Your solution must include persistent storage, auto-failover and backup capabilities. Moreover, these processes must be fully automated and guarantee data continuity on failure and zero data loss.
• Uncompromising performance. In some solutions performance is poor when your dataset is small. Make sure your solution uses the strongest servers and preferably processes your data using multiple servers (cores).
• Zero management. Besides creating your database, all other operations tasks (software upgrades, clustering, failure recovery) should be fully-automated and not require any action on your part.
• Pay-as you go model. Look for a solution that charges according to the actual GB/h used by your dataset. Many solutions charge by the number of cloud servers, which means you end up paying for more than you need.

ConclusionThere are a few in-memory NoSQL solutions out there. Garantia Data’s Redis Cloud and Memcached Cloud offerings, which address many of the key insights above, combined with its unique approach to real-time compression make the company one to watch.

Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2013

Today, Gartner took a look at a little closer in, providing a list of the “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013". You can see the list in the box at right. Here are a few of their notes on each of the 10 trends, as laid out in the Gartner slides for the presentation: 

• Mobile device battles: Mobile experiences eclipse the desktop experience. Consumerization drives tablets into the enterprise. Cloud and mobile are mutually reinforcing trends. Bring your own device trend accelerates. In 2013, mobile devices will pass PCs to be most common Web access tools. By 2015, over 80% of handsets in mature markets will be smart phones. 20% of those will be Windows phones. By 2015, tablet shipments will be 50% of laptop shipments, with Windows 8 in third place behindApple and Android. Microsoft‘s share of overall client platform will fall to 60%, and could drop below 50%. In smartphones, Windows could pass RIM to be #3 player, and could be same size as Apple in units by 2015. Windows 8 will be “relatively niche,” with mostly appealing to enterprise buyers.
• Mobile applications & HTML 5: Through 2014, JavaScript performance will push HTML5 and the browser as a mainstream application developer environment. There will be long shift to HTML5 from native apps as HTML5 becomes more capable. But native apps won’t disappear, and will always offer best experiences.
• Personal Cloud: Cloud will be center of digital lives, for apps, content and preferences. Sync across devices. Services become more important; devices become less important.
• Internet of Things: Internet of things is already here. Over 50% of Internet connections are things. In 2011,  over 15 billion things on the Web, with 50 billion+ intermittent connections. By 2020, over 30 billion connected things, with over 200 billion with intermittent connections. Key technologies here include embedded sensors, image recognition and NFC. By 2015, in more than 70% of enterprises, a single exec will oversee all Internet connected things. Becomes the Internet of Everything.
• Hybrid IT and Cloud Computing: Changes role of IT.  IT departments must play more roles in coordinating IT related activities.
• Strategic Big Data: Organizations need to focus on non-traditional data types and externa data sources. Hadoop and NoSQL gain momentum. Big data will meet social. Five richest big data sources on the Web include social graph, intent graph, consumption graph, interest graph and mobile graph. Concept of single corporate data warehouse is dead. Multiple systems need to be tied together.
• Actionable Analytics: Cloud, packaged analytics and big data accelerates in 2013, 2014. Can now perform analytics and simulation on every action taken in business. Mobile devices will have access to the data, supporting business decision making.
• Mainstream In-Memory Computing: Changes expectations, designs and architectures. Can boost performance and response times. Enables real-time self service business intelligence. SAP and others will accelerate delivery of applications in 2012/2013 to leverage in memory capability.
• Integrated Ecosystems: More packaging of software and services to address infrastructure or application workload. There will be more shipment of “appliances,” with software delivered as hardware. New trend: virtual appliances, which Gartner sees gaining in popularity over the next five years.
• Enterprise App Stores: By 2014, there will be more than 70 billion mobile app downloads from app stores every year. Also by 2014, most organizations will deliver mobile apps to workers via private application stores.

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