Sirin Labs recently raised $115M in an Initial Coin Offering to fund their new attempt at a secure blockchain smartphone, in a phase of downturn for ICOs, signing up soccer star Leo Messi as brand ambassador.
Though it was launched last March — with a huge marketing campaign with movie stars, including Leonardo di Caprio – by September their CEO admitted they had sales of "just under $10 million", which amounts to just about 700 units sold.
A total utter failure, which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the hundreds of thousands of top executives, and the rich and powerful of the World — with assets of trillions of dollars — did not even remotely trust their claims and approach. They sticked to their iPhone as the least-worse alternative, and just assumed all to be cracked or crackable by a large incalculable number of actors.
Nevertheless, Sirin Labs had by March had enough millions of dollars to decide to pivot/rebrand by "integrating" the blockchain to increase their security, positioning as crypto wallet an client, and committing to switch from obscure proprietary to an unspecified level of "open source". They previously raised equity for $25M in 2013 and another $75M in 2016 for their $15,000 Solarin smartphone, claiming to be the most secure phone in the World.
From this huge product failure and consequent huge fundraising success story we can learn a few lessons:
(A) Validates a huge demand for more secure client devices for communications (like the aforementioned blockhain phone), cryptocurrency wallet and general cloud computing – quantified in hundreds of billions from Snowden onwards – that are way more secure than current state-of-the-art. Continue reading The Secure Blockchain Smartphone Failure
Oracle SPARC SuperCluster: Cloud and Consolidation Capabilities
Oracle has introduced new software enhancements to the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster engineered system that enable customers to consolidate any combination of mission-critical enterprise databases, middleware, and applications on a single system and rapidly deploy secure, self-service cloud services. Oracle SPARC SuperCluster can deliver 10 times application consolidation rat ios, using new layered, zero-overhead virtualization combined with the database offload functions of Oracle Exadata storage servers and efficient networking. Compared to customer-integrated systems, Oracle SPARC SuperCluster delivers 5 times faster time to value, cutting time for installation to production from months to weeks. Continue reading Oracle SPARC SuperCluster: Cloud and Consolidation Capabilities
Oracle RightNow Cloud Service Integrates Chat
The latest release of Oracle RightNow Cloud Service, part of Oracle Cloud, integrates Oracle RightNow Chat Cloud Service with Oracle Engagement Engine Cloud Service.
This live chat software provides an easy and effective way for organizations to engage customers in the purchase process or when they need assistance resolving an issue.
Oracle RightNow Cloud Service
At the core of Oracle RightNow Web Self Service Cloud Service is Oracle RightNow Customer Portal Cloud Service, which delivers out­-of­-the­box best practices for Web selfservice. With Oracle RightNow Web Self Service Cloud Service, you start with a standard template and set of widgets and then use Oracle RightNow Customer Portal Cloud Service to apply your branding and custom elements. The result: a branded, highly interactive online experience for your customers.
Customers connecting to the Web via mobile devices can also take advantage of the template and knowledge foundation within Oracle RightNow Web Self Service Cloud Service. Leveraging the capabilities and interaction patterns (such as touchscreens) of the latest mobile devices, Oracle RightNow Web Self Service Cloud Service enables companies to streamline the delivery and maintenance of customer service sites across multiple device types
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Benefits of virtualization
In movies and television shows, information technology is often scaled down to fit the story. That magically computed result, that missing electronic file, and that unknown password that will stop something bad or start something good can go from nonexistent to resolved in one brief scene. And for historical reasons the significant computing power in most screen fiction seems to come from a vintage main-frame—rather than a modern supercomputer or engineered system and all the benefits of virtualization.
There aren't too many references to cloud computing in movies or on television, but those that exist seem limited to the idea that a treasured file or information the hero or villain may be looking for is safe from local mayhem because it is safely stored "in the cloud." Fortunately, the fact that a movie or television show delivers a very narrow definition of cloud computing as internet-located storage isn't likely to break the on-screen story or reduce the entertainment value of a production.
Continue reading Benefits of virtualization
Clear Reasons for Moving into the Cloud
Lojas Renner Business Case
One of the primary reasons companies implement the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is to focus on
their business rather than on their IT.
Or, as Lojas Renner CIO Leandro Balbinot says, "We'll leave the technology to our technology partners. "
In deciding to move to the cloud, Balbinot says, the critical time for Lojas Renner came at the very beginning, "when we were deciding about the tool and the model and choosing a partner. I was familiar with Oracle Hyperion Planning and knew how useful it could be for Lojas Renner. " So why use the cloud ?
Before a company decide moving into the cloud, it must map its business processes to the new software tools its IT partner will provide—a task Christopher Koch, associate vice president of research and thought leadership at IT Services Marketing Association, says can be "a nightmare".
"At any company, there are all sorts of different databases and applications hiding behind the walls. Cleaning it all up and integrating the SaaS application with the non-SaaS applications it needs to talk to are significant challenges." However, says Nicolas Simone, director of process and corporate projects at Lojas Renner, the company was not simply mapping its processes to enable the move to SaaS; the ultimate goal was to improve them. "We're collecting workflows in all the stores, " says Simone. "We're working in all areas of the company—the stores, the suppliers, logistics, internal support, IT—to improve our business. " Lojas Renner's main implementation challenge this year was to "review all the processes to enable us to use the Oracle Hyperion tool best, " says Balbinot. But the real difficulty, he says, came not with the tool but with change management. "You always have to deal with the Golden Age syndrome, " Balbinot says. "That's the idea that things were better before. But we brought examples of ROI (Return of Investment) from other companies to show how we could do better with the new model. It took some time, but in the end, most people supported what we implemented."
Now, says Balbinot, for the first time, a majority of Lojas Renner transactions are accomplished through company- issued credit cards, leveraging Brazil's transformation from a cash- to a credit- based economy and prompting the CIO to consider moving the company's database offshore. "We're looking to grow faster than we can with a local database. We ran some security tests, and we think our data could be safer in an Oracle center in the U.S. than in a dedicated center in Brazil. In practice, high service levels are achieved when you have the right experts and standard infrastructure when moving into the cloud."
Oracle Cloud Resource Model API
Oracle has released the Oracle Cloud Resource Model Application Programming Interface (Oracle Cloud API) for managing cloud computing infrastructures. Oracle has also contributed the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API, a subset of the Oracle Cloud API, to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) for consideration in DMTF's proposed infrastructure-as-a- service (IaaS) cloud API standard.
The Oracle Cloud API follows the representational state transfer (REST) architecture style and uses HTTP methods to interact with resources to achieve provisioning, associating, modifying, and retiring of entities. As a full resource model, the Oracle Cloud API also includes composite entities to facilitate system deployments and management, including assemblies, deployment, and seal- ability groups.
By leveraging virtualization, clustering, and dynamic provisioning across all layers of the stack, the Oracle Cloud API lets users easily and efficiently manage their cloud-based resources to deliver better business agility and flexibility, high utilization, and reduced costs.
The Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API encompasses the common elements that make up a cloud by specifying machines, storage volumes, and networks. The specification submitted to the DMTF describes how a machine can be provisioned from an image; how a volume can be attached to a machine; and how a machine can connect to a network.
"Enterprises are continuing to look to cloud computing to extend the value of their IT investments and better service users, " says the vice president of product strategy and business development at Oracle. "With the Oracle Cloud API, Oracle is further enabling customers and partners to build and manage cloud environments — based on an open, application-aware IaaS platform— to improve service levels and the overall end-user experience."
Continue reading Oracle Cloud Resource Model API
Oracle Hosting Services (Cloud API) for Cloud Computing
Oracle is strengthening its commitment to offering complete, open, and integrated hosting services cloud computing with the new Oracle Cloud Resource Model Application Programming Interface (Oracle Cloud API) for managing cloud computing infrastructures. It has also submitted the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API, a subset of the Oracle Cloud API, to the Distributed Management Task Force to be considered in a proposed infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud API standard and to help speed the development of cloud-related standards.
Oracle Hosting Services
The Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API targets machines, storage volumes, and networks, all common elements that make up a cloud hosting service. The API specifies how a machine can be provisioned from an image, how a volume can be linked to a machine, and how a machine can be connected to a network and will encourage open standardization in the industry.
Continue reading Oracle Hosting Services (Cloud API) for Cloud Computing
Oracle Solaris 11 Express
Oracle Solaris 11 Express delivers advanced Oracle Solaris features that have been in development over the past five years. Oracle Solaris 11 Express provides availability features that greatly reduce planned downtime by eliminating traditional patching- and maintenance- related reboots and vastly improving system boot time. It also adds network virtualization and resource management to the complete, built-in virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris, providing high-performance virtualization with low overhead.
Oracle Solaris 11 Express also powers Oracle's Exadata Database Machine X2-2 and Exadata Database Machine X2-8 and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud.
"We are excited to announce the release of Oracle Solaris 11 Express to enable our customers to deploy the new advanced features of Oracle Solaris 11 across a broad set of platforms and our engineered systems: Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud," says John F., executive vice president, Oracle Hardware. "Through the same engineering disciplines that achieved a legendary mission-critical reputation for Oracle Solaris, we are expecting Oracle Solaris 11 to further reduce any downtime by being quicker and easier to deploy, maintain, and update and to deliver a highly efficient virtualized operating system to meet the scale and performance requirements of immediate and future virtualization and cloud-based deployments."
Read more www.oracle.com/solaris
The creation of data has always been part of the impact of information and communications technology. As the amount of data available for analysis continues to grow, the challenge is for organizations to find the technology that would give them the ability to disseminate, understand and ultimately benefit from the increasing volumes of data. Oracle has recently announced the release of what they consider a viable solution to handle the challenge of Big data. The Oracle Big Data Appliance consists of optimized hardware and several software products from Oracle Corporation .The Oracle Big Data Appliance in union with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and the Oracle Exalytics Business Intelligence Machine (Oracle Exalogic) is used for obtaining, consolidating and loading unstructured data into the Oracle Database 11g. The solution consists of an open source distribution of Apache Hadoop, Oracle NoSQL Database, Oracle Data Integrator with Application Adapter for Hadoop, Oracle Loader for Hadoop, an open source distribution of R, Oracle Linux, and Oracle Java Hotspot Virtual Machine.
Oracle announced the Oracle Big Data Appliance Mon, October 3 at Oracle OpenWorld 2011.
Continue reading Oracle Big Data Appliance
Develop Your Strategy and Roadmap for Cloud Computing
The cost and speed advantages of cloud computing are clear and compelling. But how do you actually move to cloud computing? To discover practical approaches to building your cloud foundation, join us for our four-part webcast series.
Cloud experts will share real-world best practices, reference architectures, detailed customer case studies, and more. You will learn how to transform your IT into a superior service provider with a strategy and roadmap for building, deploying, and managing your enterprise cloud.
Attend the webcast series to learn how to:
Build a state-of-the-art cloud architecture
Leverage your existing IT investments
Optimize your IT management processes
Whether you are considering a move to cloud computing or have already adopted a cloud model, the cloud computing webcast series offers you the insights you need to take full advantage of cloud computing.
Continue reading Develop Your Strategy and Roadmap for Cloud Computing