Business Outcomes - driving Big Data & Analytics

At this year’s Powering the Cloud event we will be addressing, through our Spotlight Sessions, five of the most important issues for CIOs over the next few years. In doing so we will attempt to address more than just the technology issues, rather the broader business opportunities and challenges.

The first subject we will address is the much hyped ‘Big Data & Analytics’ where today there are lots of articles and discussions on the technology surrounding it, with little focus on the business opportunity and how deep analytics of big data should be used to increase customer care and product quality, delivering loyalty, reputation and higher profitability. Most importantly in this tough economic times giving the organisation a major Competitive Advantage.

And it is not just commercial businesses that aim to prosper from Big Data & Analytics as according to IDC in their ‘Government Insights’ report ‘Western European government executives will invest first in Big Data methodologies and technologies.’ Silvia Piai, research manager, IDC EMEA Government Insights commented that "Big Data represents a cultural shift in how government organizations operate."

Despite the optimism about the growth of government activity in this are the concern is that the report concludes that ‘government Big Data initiatives could fail to deliver adequate return on investment due to narrowly focused technical implementations that take into account only the volume aspect of Big Data and neglect variety and velocity’.

It is this issue of too narrow a focus on the technology that we plan to address during our Spotlight Session.

If you look at IDC’s figures in their ‘Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services 2012 – 2015 Forecast’ they show that organisations spend for 2011 showed that 41.5% went on services, 29.7% on software and 28.8% on servers, storage and networking.

Most observers believe that this percentage spent on services will rise quite substantially as organisations embrace the cloud to manage the scalability they will need to cope with the volumes of data and the different sources from which it is obtained.

During the session we will address the whole are of ‘Big Data and the Cloud’, and the practicality of running Big Data & Analytics within a cloud or hybrid environment. We plan to have case studies showing cloud deployments and the challenges and opportunities that represents and how organisations have prospered by such deployments.

One of the most important topics we will address is ‘Completing the Loop’. How Big Data & Analytics is not a snap shot process rather one of continually improving data, analytics, processes, procedures and results. This is really where the Business Outcome is the most important factor and where the organisation gets the pay back.

Just as important for all directors and managers of European businesses is the topic of ‘Big Data and the Law’, the legal implications of what is stored, where it is stored and the responsibilities of user and datacenter/cloud owner. There are new proposals from the European Union on data ownership, retention, usage and storage and we will look deeply into the implications of these proposals to business owners.

In taking this broad view of Big Data & Analytics we cannot ignore the implications on the technology within the data center. So we will be covering subjects such as designing Big Data storage infrastructures and how to address the processing and communications challenges posed by streaming data, social media data, multimedia content, M2M and mobile activity and events.

At a software strategic level topics like Business Database Management: Dealing with Big Data and when to use columnar data warehouses, analytic appliances, Hadoop, and MapReduce for complex, big data workloads will be explored.

The overall objective of this Spotlight Session is to familiarise delegates with all the business and technology issues around Big Data & Analytics. Show the opportunities that this opens up for all types of organisations and give enough detail so that delegates can go back to the office with a much deeper understanding and ready to start their Big Data & Analytics projects or take their existing ones on to the next level.

If you would like to join in the discussion then register to attend Powering the Cloud www.poweringthecloud.com/ , most presentations will include Q&A and panel sessions where you can give your views alongside your peers. I look forward to meeting you and exchanging ideas.

Powering the Cloud 2013 - ‘The Dawn of New Ages’

This is my first year as content director for Powering the Cloud and I am proud and slightly daunted to be taking over this role from Paul Trowbridge, who has led the event for many years. Paul will still be involved with Powering the Cloud but has passed over the mantle to me of steering the content.

Despite over 40 years in the IT industry I am still learning every day and welcome this new challenge. I also welcome your feedback and ideas as it will help me ensure that the content for the event is stimulating and relevant to you and your company.

Powering the Cloud 2013 is set against an economic backdrop of austerity but in Information Technology terms a period of rebirth, rebuilding and new opportunities. With this in mind I would like to open your thinking to embrace the idea of this period as ‘The Dawn of New Ages’.

While companies across Europe have been addressing challenging market conditions IT solutions have come to the fore as a tool for them to recreate their ‘go to market’ strategies, simplify and automate business processes and most importantly develop more agile, mobile, leaner and responsive organisations.

The role of Information Technology is no longer just as a support operation for the business. IT is now at the heart of how every organisation operates and is the catalyst for change and innovation.

Though tough economic times have made many organisations rethink their use of IT the real driving forces causing companies to embrace new IT technologies are far subtler and revolve around the new ‘Ages of the Customer, the Cloud and the Platform’.

The first of these ‘the Age of the Customer’ is completely changing business thinking and altering the way organisations view their internal and external customers and the way they should communicate, motivate and build relationships.

Technology over the last few years has changed forever the expectation of the customer. They now feel they should be able to buy or consume a service at the touch of a button. They expect technology to be intuitive and easy to use. They also want to access their company applications, local government services, entertainment, favourite applications and web sites on any device and from any location.

Most importantly they feel empowered to comment on their likes and dislikes and influence the quality, price and service of what they purchase. This extension of social networking into the heart of the marketing cycle is making organisations completely rethink their sales models and strategies.

Behind much of this change in user attitude is the influence of ‘the Cloud’ which has changed the traditional delivery mechanism of most industries, changed the economic models of organisations and removed the barrier for entry for new competitors with more agile and dynamic ways to address customer requirements.

‘The Cloud’ is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored and most importantly must be embraced.

The third major trend, which has been termed ‘The Age of the Platform’ by Phil Simon in his book of the same title, shows how Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google appear to have created a new business model that challenges traditional thinking and is making other major multinational organisations completely re-evaluate their go-to-market strategies.

By using new technologies and a deep understanding of how to build relationships with today’s customers these organisations have been able grow at phenomenal rates whilst ignoring traditional well established organisational models.

Powering the Cloud 2013 will address ‘the Dawn of New Ages’ phenomena by looking at the underlying technologies, solutions and thinking that is enabling organisations to meet the requirements of this new age with vigour and enthusiasm.

To this end we will build on the success of last year’s Spotlight sessions and enhance the format to combine ‘Thought Leadership’ presentations, technology insights, market leading case studies and perceptive panel sessions addressing the reality of implementing technologically advanced solutions.

There will be five main themes to these Spotlight sessions:

‘Business Outcomes - driving Big Data & Analytics’, ‘Securing your data’, ‘Enabling new & old world enterprise scale applications’, ‘All about the management’ and ‘Rethinking your datacenter architecture’.

Over the next few months I will explore all these five themes in this Blog to set the scene for this year and stimulate ideas and debate which will hopefully make the event in October more rewarding for everyone.

Powering the Cloud 2013 is your opportunity to explore what is possible in this new IT world, debate with your peers the issues you all face, listen to people and organisations who are successfully adopting change and most importantly absorb and embrace the opportunities this all represents to you and your organisation.

So I look forward to hearing your comments on this Blog and would also like to point out that we are now entering the period where we call for papers from those persons and organisations who feel they have a contribution to make to the event through thought leadership presentations and real life case studies. If you are interested in contributing then details can be found at http://poweringthecloud.com/speaker/information.

Look forward to meeting you in October.

John Chapman.

The Final Countdown

Hi and welcome to my last post prior to the opening of the three ‘Powering the Cloud’ conferences next week in Frankfurt . Strangely this week sees something of a ‘lull’ in proceedings as most of the work on the agenda is done and now it is just confirming speakers arrangements and getting our hands on the final versions of their materials so we can get everything pre-loaded over the weekend and on Monday so that we minimise al the last-minute changes that speakers today always seem to want to do - famous last words!

As part of my last blog I would like to talk a little bit more about our agenda this year where we have adopted a new format for part of our proceedings based on feedback received over the past two years for a more focussed examination of the top issues on the agenda of IT professionals like yourself.  We are calling these our ‘Spotlight sessions’ and there are nine of these running throughout the course of the conference program on the 30^th and 31^st October.  Each Spotlight session runs for a full half-day (morning sessions from 09:30 to 13:00) / afternoon sessions from 14:00 to 17:30) and is opened and chaired by a leading independent analyst/commentator from Europe or north America. Each topic features a number of short 20-minute presentations from a selection of our event sponsors, a 30-minute presentation from SNIA Europe and is wrapped up with a 30-minute panel discussion where you can get your questions answered or share your own views.  We are encouraging you to take in a full half-day session to get a broad view of the topic and participate in the discussions - you can chose from the following nine sessions over the two days.

Tuesday 30^th October: 09:30 - 13:00

·        Big Data & Analytics -Introduced & chaired by Matthew Aslett, Research Manager, Data Management & Analytics, 451 Research and featuring presentations from Amplidata, Oracle, Cloud Circle, LSI and the SNIA

·        Next Generation Data Protection - Introduced & chaired by George Crump, President and Founder of Storage Switzerland and featuring presentations from Quantum, Spectra Logic, Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Oracle and SNIA

·        Data Center Networking -  Introduced & chaired by Benjamin Woo, MD, Neuralytix and featuring presentations from Intel, Emulex, Brocade, Xsigo, Dell and the FCIA        

Tuesday 30^th October: 14:00 - 17:30

·        The Infrastructure Impact of Virtualization - Introduced & chaired by Leah Schoeb, Senior Partner, Evaluator Group and featuring presentations from DataCore Software, VMware, Riverbed, SolarWinds and SNIA

·        Disaster Recovery Techniques: How to protect your data - Introduced & chaired by Josh Krischer, Founder & Principal Analyst, Krischer & Associates and featuring presentations from citeq, Hitachi Data Systems, Nimble Storage and SNIA

·        Cloud Storage and Storage as a Service - Introduced & chaired by Simon Robinson, Research Vice President – Storage, 451 Research and featuring presentations from Scality, Actifio, Seagate, Synology and SNIA

Wednesday 31^st October: 09:30 - 13:00

·        Solid State Storage and its Impact on the IT Environment - Introduced & chaired by Randy Kerns, Senior Strategist,  Evaluator Group and featuring presentations from X-IO, Avere Systems, STEC, Viking Technology and SNIA

·        The Big Squeeze – the new wave of systems convergence - Introduced & chaired by John Abbott, Founder & Chief Analyst, 451 Research and featuring presentations from NetApp, Methode, Virtual Instruments, Dell and SNIA

·        Securing the Cloud - Introduced & chaired by Bernd Becker, Chairman of EuroCloud Deutschland_eco e.V. and Vice President EuroCloud Europe and featuring presentations from Microsoft, Trend Micro, SafeNet and SNIA

Please note that in the Spotlight sessions there are no breaks in between presentations so if you do not wish to attend for the full half-day you may miss the beginning or end of a particular presentation.  The other four or five parallel tracks do have 5 or 10-minutes gaps between presentations to give you time to move between rooms.  As usual at our events we will be doing our best to make sure the presentations (and presenters) keep to time to allow you to make the most of your time with us.

What else should you watch out for?

We have a full program of Keynote Presentations from our key sponsors all of who will have senior executive speakers sharing their latest views of the market and the way forward as they currently see it plus a sp[ecial closing keynote on the afternoon of the 31^st from Microsoft.

As always you will find a full-day track dedicated to your peers presenting case-studies and sharing their experiences  in deploying cloud, virtualization and storage solutions from a variety of suppliers.  The majority of these are from the German market and will be presenting in local language (denoted by the ‘(D)’ on the agenda) so please make sure you check the language that the presenter will be using if you wish to attend any of these sessions.

We have some interesting panel discussions on the afternoon of the 30^th October in the Keynote Theatre chaired by George Crump of Storage Switzerland and our new partners ExecEvent.  The first is entitled ‘Hot Technologies in Data Storage’ and the second ‘Tape Technology and Trends’, while on the 31^st October at 11:20 we have a great debate lined up entitled ‘Object Storage for Big Data’. This session will be chaired by Robin Harri,s aka ‘StorageMojo,’ and will feature speakers from Amplidata, Aspera, Intel and Quantum. Expect some lively debate among the participants in all these panel debates and the audience, so if you have any burning issues or questions you need answering then get along and get them answered.

On the morning of Wednesday 31^st October in the Show-floor theatre you can meet members of the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) for an hour-long set of presentations entitled ‘Industry leading vendors talk about latest Data Center advancements’. Along with the FCIA there will be presentations from member companies Amphenol, Emulex, NetApp and QLogic.

We are pleased to welcome our regular partners SANBoard and Guide Share Europe (GSE) who are hosting an 80-minute workshop on Tuesday 30^th October at 14:00 on ‘Performance Management von Storage Area Networks’ plus BITKOM, who once again are hosting their ‘Anwenderforum’ as an integral part of the program.  Taking place in the conference room Spektrum 1 on Wednesday 31^st October the full title this year is BITKOM-Anwenderforum IT-Infrastruktur. 'IT Appliances – Konzepte und Anwendungen' (please note that all these sessions will also be hosted in German language).

So I hope you can find something here and in the full agenda (check it out online at http://poweringthecloud.com/full-agenda ) or download a set of PDF versions at http://poweringthecloud.com/visitor/agenda).

Safe travel to Frankfurt and we look forward to seeing you there.

Agenda in detail and farewell to friends

As usual at the start of September our agenda finally starts to take shape as our sponsors and speakers return from vacation and get back up to speed in their professional environments. It can be a little frustrating at times having to chase these companies who are spending money in sponsoring the events for their inputs but with this being a very busy time of year in terms of the number of key events out there we can understand to some degree :-)

The good news is that the agenda is almost complete and you can view the online version at this address: http://poweringthecloud.com/full-agenda.

We continue to welcome new sponsors to the event and the support of those that have been with us for many years.

New faces in the expo area this year will include Actifio, InkTank, Kaspersky Lab (GOLD), LG, Nexenta, OCZ, Progress DataDirect, Rosenberger OSO, SafeNet, Seagate, SMART Storage, Solar Winds, Synology, Whiptail, Xsigo.

We are most indebted to our top-level Platinum and Gold sponsors: DataCore, Fujitsu, Dell, Oracle, and VMware plus Brocade, Emulex, Hitachi Data Systems, Kaspersky Lab, NetApp and Quantum who’s contribution ensures the viability of the conferences and the services we are able to offer our delegates.

Sad farewells:

I regret to say that we have lost two staunch supporters of the events in the last few weeks.

Claus Egge, formerly of IDC Europe and most recently with Rainmaker Files has passed away in London. Only last year Claus presented one of our keynote sessions on behalf of sponsors DataCore and he was a regular visitor and contributor to the events in Frankfurt over the years.

We were also saddened to hear that Howard Goldstein of training specialists HGA in the USA also left us suddenly. Howard had first participated at SNW Europe in 2012 and was returning this year with an increased involvement. He has been a strong supporter of SNIA and its education programs over the years delivering high-quality training sessions at the Tech Centre in Colorado.

Both Claus and Howard will be greatly missed and all of us on the organising team send our condolences to their families and friends.

Agenda starts to take shape

I have the first news of the 2012 agenda format for our collocated conferences SNW Europe, Datacenter Technologies and Virtualization World running under the theme ‘Powering the Cloud’ for a second year on the 30th and 31st October 2012.

We are excited to be working with a number of leading analyst houses and independent commentators giving the 2012 program a new look with a series of half-day mini-tracks addressing the key issues and topics affecting most organisations’ IT strategies and needs.

Each of these mini-tracks will focus on a particular subject and be hosted by an analyst representative and feature a mix of vendor, end-user and where relevant SNIA and/or other association content. Each mini-track will close with an open Q&A session for the audience and speakers to exchange views and get questions answered.

Already confirmed are the following analyst sessions:

1 - Big Data and Analytics chaired by Matthew Aslett, Research Manager, Data Management & Analytics, The 451 Group

2 - Cloud Storage and SaaS chaired by Simon Robinson, Research Vice President – Storage, The 451 Group

3 - Converged Infrastructures chaired by John Abbott, Founder & Chief Analyst, The 451 Group

4 - Disaster Recovery Techniques chaired by Josh Krischer, Founder & Principal Analyst, Krischer Associates

5 - Solid State Storage and its Impact of the IT Environments chaired by Randy Kerns, Senior Strategist, Evaluator Group

6 - The impact of Virtualization (VDI & server) on Storage Infrastructure chaired by Leah Schoeb, Senior Partner, Evaluator Group


In addition there will be tracks addressing Next Generation Data Protection, Data Security, and Datacentre Networking – the analysts for these sessions will be announced shortly.

The list of confirmed sponsors for the events continues to grow and includes
Platinum: DataCore
Gold: Brocade, Emulex, Kaspersky, Hitachi Data Systems, Quantum
Silver+: Avere, F5, Fast LTA, Intel, QLogic, LSI, Methode, Riverbed, Rosenberger OSI, Scality, Solarwinds, Veeam, Viking, Virtual Instruments, Xsigo
Silver: Novastor, QNAP, PoINT, qSkils, SmartOptics, Texas Memory Systems

Blog soon.

2012 Call-for-papers

Hi and welcome to my first blog of 2012 and the announcement of our 'call-for-papers' for this year's editions of our well established and successful conferences- SNW Europe, Virtualization World and Datacenter Technologies - being held this year on the 30th and 31st October at Congress Frankfurt.

Our call for papers is aimed primarily at independent speakers from pprivate and/or public organisations reliant on IT to support their activities or speakers from independent analyst/consultant organisations involved in the specification and provision of advice on IT products and services.

Representatives of IT hardware/software/service vendors are welcome to submit papers, but only those that can be guaranteed to be wholly educational and informative for conference delegates - and not a veiled corporate/product presentation - will be considered. Vendors can of course secure guaranteed presentation slots through event sponsorships.

Under the overall umbrella theme of 'Powering the Cloud' we will be focusing on several key areas of IT infrastructure, including the following:

· Cloud Security

· BIG DATA

· Desktop/client Virtualisation

· Converged Infrastructures

· Net Generation Data Protection

· Solid State Storage

· Public/Private Cloud storage solutions

· Outsourcing, Hosting and co-location

· The delivery of managed services

· Data centre networking

So if you would like to share your experiences with a broad European audience and/or put across your point of view on a key industry trend or standard then please submit your ideas at http://poweringthecloud.com/call-for-papers today.

Crazy time!!

Four weeks out from the conferences is what I have come to refer to as the 'crazy time' - it is the period when speakers and sponsors wake up to the fact that their session is looming fast and that they have deadlines to meet (set by we heartless conference organisers).

While each individual looks at their one (or in some cases two or three) pieces we have to look at around some 130 conference sessions crammed into two days and if all our speakers wanted to make changes up to the last minute we would never produce a coherent online agenda let alone meet our print deadlines for the conference guide and other materials......

Rant over.

The agenda is - I believe - pretty much complete - aside form awaiting inputs from two sponsors for their sessions (no names no pack drill) - take a look and see for yourself at http://poweringthecloud.com/full-agenda.

As it is late on a Friday I am keeping this blog short and sharp and will simply add here the choice of SNIA presentations (tutorials) available to you this year.

- Interoperable Cloud Storage with the CDMI Standard

- Deploying Public, Private & Hybrid Storage Clouds

- Enterprise Architecture and the Cloud

- The Business Case for the Cloud

- Cloud Storage Security

- Virtualization - Who, What Why, When?

- The Effective use of Virtualization

- Storage Optimization for Virtual Desktops

- Innovative Application Recovery

- Storage Considerations for Virtual Servers

- Introduction to Data Protection: Backup to Tape, Disk and Beyond

- Advanced Deduplication Concepts

- PCIe SSD Storage Solution

- The File Systems Evolution

- Storage Performance Management

- Benefits of Solid State in Enterprise Storage Systems

- pnFS & NFSv4.2: A File system for Grid, Virtualization & Database

- What are the storage security best practices that will help you with compliance with regulations like PCI-DSS and the EU Privacy Directive?

- Data Center Evolution and Network Convergence

- Fibre Channel Driving Storage Innovation, Speed and Convergence

- Solving the I/O Bottlenecks in NextGen Data Centers & Cloud Computing

- Five Ways to Lower Datacenter Carbon Footprint

- The Confusion Arising from Converged Multi Hop Topologies etc

- The Role of WAN Optimisation in Cloud Infrastructures

Speak soon.