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How cloud computing can revolutionize manufacturing

Manufacturing in an earlier era led to management thinking and also automation of processes, courtesy the efforts of great management gurus like Alfred Sloan, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Michael Porter, Tom Peters, and Michael Hammer and C.K. Prahalad.  Manufacturing can benefit from Cloud Computing ! For the preceding decades, the financial markets sucked the best and the brightest minds to drive greed and make profits in investment banking and financial markets. This era fortunately is slowing down and the regulators and economists of the world have realized the futility of driving financial markets without underlying security provided by manufacturing. Engineers who were trained and equipped for manufacturing, migrated to a coveted MBA degree lured by the offer of huge starting salaries coupled with even bigger annual bonus. They drove an invisible economy driven by paper bonds and other instruments and created more complex instruments all based on an economy, which was...

Cloud Detractors Need to Keep Away from Cloud Computing Conferences

In a recent cloud conference they were two Senior Technology Professionals who spoke in the conference and the general consensus of the participants was all they did was to Rave, Rant and Spit Venom at Cloud Computing. People who attended their session were wondering how they had reached such Senior roles in Information Technology Leadership with so much bias and attitude against emerging technologies like cloud computing. Raise the Bar not degrade yourself and the cloud  These these two personalities were able to bring about a pall of gloom and disbelief  among the participants in this cloud conference. Many wondered if  they had such strong views against cloud computing why they were invited by the organizers ? Why did they take time off to use the forum at the conference to belittle the participants in the cloud conference and also show how petty minded they were.. Cloud Detractors Need to be Kept Away from Cloud Computing Conferences as speakers ! As a cloud...

Virtualization is not Cloud Computing

Recently Forrester stated that 70% of "private clouds" aren't really clouds at all http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/022613-forrester-private-clouds-267108.html Therein lies a tale of deceit, misinformation and false gratification of many organizations believing they have a cloud in place.  To get the facts right we need to revisit the definition of cloud computing as defined by NIST which in may opinion is the final authority on cloud computing standards and is followed by the industry and professionals.  http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, 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 is composed of five essential characte...

Why the cloud can come down to earth in India

This is the reproduction of an article published in Information Week today . http://www.informationweek.in/cloud_computing/13-07-02/why_the_cloud_can_come_down_to_earth_in_india.aspx The author illustrates how the network and infrastructure can be the differentiator between success and failure in deployment of real time technology solutions like exchanges and cloud computing applications In 1991, I was a key member of the team to build the first automated stock exchange in India known as the OTC Exchange of India on dial up telephone lines and subsequently an overlay network network on an Government built X.25 backbone with an X.28 dial up connectivity. The internet was unheard of those days, though a few Software Technology Parks (STPI) did have this connectivity and I remember the slow browser which connected me to the Harvard facility from the STPI in Hyderabad. We had limitations because we could operate only in 26 cities in India with dialup connections, because the rest ...

Cloud Computing for Business

Today's program on cloud computing for Business at Bangalore was well received and was attended by Senior Business Leaders. Some of the keen observations was the lack of adoption of cloud computing by business in India because of poor internet connectivity in smaller cities and rural areas. There were live examples of challenges in getting reliable internet access and bandwidth and more needs to be done to fix this problem to make cloud computing adoption a reality. The second takeaway was the large  technology  cost to support transactions in Banking sector, almost about Rs. 50 a transaction was the estimated cost. Cloud could substantially lower this technology cost by banks adopting cloud computing. Some banks are there in a nascent stage and some Banks offer their application as a SAAS based core banking solutions in a virtualized environment which is marketed as a cloud. More needs to be done in this area and one solution was to build a dedicated and secure cloud ...

Cloud Computing could be Superman for Business in an Economically Distressed World

There are strikes in Brazil, the Indian Rupee is shedding value faster than my weight gain, the world globally is grappling on how to keep recession at bay. The business climate is tough and Cloud Computing could be Superman for Business. When business want to cut costs they need tools to identify what they are doing, they need tighter monitoring and controls, they can find solutions for this in the various SAAS solutions available in the cloud. They just pay for what they use and get their business ship shape. Energy prices and managing data centers is expensive, cloud could offer a better and more cost effective solution. Reach for the Clouds when the Going it Tough Marketing budgets are tight, but without marketing how do you reach your customer, use the cloud computing social media tools to reach your customers. Sales people costs are high and customer support  is essential for survival use cloud hosted  sales and customer management tools. Logistics, distribut...