A recent article on CNET reported that SAP is trying to get ahead of the curve in environmental sustainability. An excerpt of it has been reproduced below.
What’s an enterprise software company doing getting into sustainability? After all, the environmental footprint from software production pales in comparison to resource-intensive industries such as power generation or even running data centers that deliver Web services such as search. (more…)
Over the past years, Telecom carriers and service providers have suffered economic pressures, competition, churn and declining revenue. As they grapple to find ways to improve their ARPU from their core services, many in the Telco industry are attempting to diversify into broader business and consumer value-added services, moving beyond the increasingly commoditized telephone and Internet access. Many of them are planning to or are already expanding aggressively into the “Cloud” space.
Larry Dignan wrote on his blog about Data Center design 101, but his knowledge about the data center essentially boils down to one word: Money. Larry attended two Gartner IT Symposium presentations to learn more about data center designs and shared his views about why companies are building new data centers and how the vendors are “killing each other to be the data center king“.
In his blog post, he shared what he had learned, which are: (more…)
Between June and September of 2009, SearchDataCenter.com conducted the Data Center Decisions 2009 Purchasing Intentions Survey. Subscribers were contacted by email and invited to participate. For this 2009 survey, they had a total of 920 respondents, identifying themselves as IT managers, IT administrators, data center facility managers and IT executives. Respondents were primarily U.S.-based (43%), but the survey also included participants from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. More than half of respondents’ organizations employ more than 1,000 workers, and more than 25% of the companies have more than 10,000 employees.
Compared with last summer, data center budget growth screeched to a halt this year. In 2008, 30% of IT shops said they were increasing budget 5% to 10%, and 26% said they planned to increase budget more than 10%. Less than 15% of respondents were decreasing budget at all.
I chanced upon this scene (below) on the way out for lunch over the weekend. While the bank branch was under renovation, they placed a few containers outside and created a make-shift containerized temporary banking center outside. Innovative use of containers.
Actually, there are many many ways to make use of containers. Currently, approximately 90% of all non-bulk cargo worldwide are moved by containers stacked on transport ships. Although ISO standardized containers into five common standard lengths, 20-ft (6.1 m), 40-ft (12.2 m), 45-ft (13.7 m), 48-ft (14.6 m), and 53-ft (16.2 m), we usually hear of just the 20-ft and 40-ft versions.
One of the many creative way of using a 20-ft standard sized container is to turn it into a compact data center facility. (more…)
McKinsey recently reported that there were at least 22 different cloud definitions in common use.
I believe Cloud Computing is probably the most hyped and misused term in this decade. The cause is mainly because many technology and service providers have hijacked the term and slapped it on their hardware boxes, or software, or services and claimed to be “cloud-enabled” or an “out-of-the-box-cloud” thingy…
In actual fact, Cloud Computing is not a technology revolution. It is not a mixture of server hardware, operating systems, virtualization technologies and application services, but rather a revolution in the way we conduct business and the way that Cloud Computing can allow a business to increase their IT capacity when required, on the fly, and pay for just what is being used.
I attended the CIO Forum Asia 2009 at the Grand Hyatt, Singapore, today. The recurring messages from the presenters were about emerging trends such as increasingly high adoption of mobility / mobile computing platform, increasingly high adoption of Internet computing, social networking/community, distributed co-creation, mashups, use of technologies to drive down costs (e.g. unified communications, collaboration, virtualization, optimized IT management, etc.), and use of CRM and Business Intelligence to drive profitability and provide better business insights. Nothing new.
But one interesting concept was of particular interest to me. That is prosumerism. Edward Tan (c/o McKinsey) have explained this as a way or process to empower your customers to get them involved in the innovation and communication around the products and services they used. Hence, the term prosumer = producer + consumer.
Financial Times – Asia Barrons Wallstreet Daily MarketWatch