Microsoft seems to be paying a lot to buy LinkedIn if you just look at the “P&L” side of the deal.
But if you examine the long term MSFT strategy of making Office 365 the pervasive business and social platform for documents, presentations and spreadsheets, then it makes the deal worth the investment cost.
In doing work for a local healthcare product venture, I was asked to look at the network and database requirements to support mixed content transactions, video streaming all while conforming to HIPAA compliance standards. As a part of this work, I developed a Web Services Cloud-based architecture that took into account, ERH, HL7, document management and provider notation.
This tasking led me to a deep dive on the data architecture and DB requirements analysis that was required to develop the architecture.
The question of utilizing standard RDBMS (SQL) VS NoSQL was an immediate consideration. My conclusion…. It depends on a large number of technical, business and regulatory factors to derive the appropriate architectural answers. For example, what other external systems are interfaced to the applications and how do they require interaction? In general with the prolific growth in web services, mobile and cloud computing today’s enterprise will require a polyglot data architecture to satisfy all stakeholders.
A look at Healcareinformatics provides an operational insight into some of the complexities.
“Healthonomics” can be the key driving factor to trigger enterprise decisions to support multiple types of DB solutions woven together in a heterogeneous way delivering a network of web services that affect healthcare outcomes.
A recent article of an interview with the Red Hat CEO touts the benefits of private cloud implementation. See it at HERE
Public
VS
Private
TCO???
This debate is usually short sited and doesn’t include all CAPEX & OPEX cost associated with the “Free OS” type of cloud operations. Also the reusable components from more sophisticated partner communities afford both AWS & AZURE much greater long term valuations when responsible Enterprise accounting methods are used to drive the cost benefits analyses. The proper engineering of a cloud infrastructure which includes smart VMs well orchestrated by business-demand-level-driven auto scaling will always push the TCO/ROI argument to a public solution for large scale systems.
Microsoft actually has a TCO tool that they can use to estimate TCO of on-premises vs. Azure. There are many considerations when comparing costs of running an on-premises datacenter with full infrastructure, servers, cooling, power etc to a cloud-based service like Azure where you pay a cost based on the services consumed such as storage, compute and network egress. It can be difficult to know exactly what typical costs are for your datacenter and what the costs would be for services running in Azure. Microsoft has a pricing calculator available at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/ which can help access costs for Azure services and a VM specific calculator at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/virtual-machines/.
When running on-premises, you own the servers. They are available all the time which means you typically leave workloads running constantly even though they may actually only be needed during the work week. There is really no additional cost to leave them running (apart from power, cooling etc). In the cloud you pay based on consumption which means organizations go through a paradigm shift. Rather than leaving VMs and services running all the time companies focus on running services when needed to optimize their public cloud spend. Some ways that can help optimize services running are:
Over the course of four days, 2-5 March 2015, Mobile World Capital Barcelona will host the world’s greatest mobile event: Mobile World Congress. See this website for more info: http://www.mobileworldcongress.com/
The mobile communications revolution is driving the world’s major technology breakthroughs. From wearable devices to connected cars and homes, mobile technology is at the heart of worldwide innovation. As an industry, we are connecting billions of people to the transformative power of the Internet and mobilising every device we use in our daily lives.
In short, the hole world is on The Edge of Innovation, and the possibilities are endless. The 2015 GSMA Mobile World Congress will convene industry leaders, visionaries and innovators to explore the trends that will shape mobile in the years ahead.
Here are the components that make up this industry-leading event:
I’ve been digesting and expanding on an interesting white paper authored by the Microsoft Azure Incubation team titled: Building the Internet of Things – Early learnings from architecting solutions focused on predictive maintenance. I agree with the premise tha ubiquity in connection technology will be the key enabler and that predictive maintenance will probably be required to instantiate a true global ubiquitous connection state. Recently MS is changing their terminology from Internet of Things to Internet of Everything (IoE). Here I use them interchangeably A key technical enabler of the Internet of Things (IoT) is ubiquitous connectivity. A week or so ago I blogged about a new technology called Active Steering(TM) which should be the winner in patented connectivity hardware/Software/Firmware for antenna products.
Just imagine that the antenna on your device was constantly sampling the wireless signals around your location and finding the strongest source and directing the focus of the antenna to that source. That is what an Active Steering antenna does on your phone, tablet or PC. By using this technique the system is also performing predictive maintenance on the connectivity configuration for your specific device and location. Let’s first look at the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. Even though the Internet model uses a simplified abstraction, the models in the previous figure and the associated well-known logical protocols are comparable. 
Application-layer protocols are not concerned with the lower-level layers in the stack other than being aware of the key attributes of those layers, such as IP addresses and ports. The right side of the figure shows the logical protocol breakdown transposed over the OSI model and the TCP/IP model.
Special-purpose devices differ not only in the depth of their relationship with back-end services, but in the interaction patterns of these services when compared to information-centric devices because of their role as peripherals. They are not the origin of command-and-control gestures; instead, they typically contribute information to decisions, and receive commands as a result of decisions. The decision-maker does not interface with them locally, and the device acts as an immediate proxy; the decision-maker is remotely connected and might be a machine. We usually classify interaction patterns for special-purpose devices into the four categories indicated in the following figure.
Co
nnectivity Types
As a member of the Windows Insider Program I have had a while now to install, investigate and update the Windows 10 Technical Preview. I took a 12 year old HP Windows 7 PC and upgraded it to Windows 10. All of my hardware & programs worked flawlessly. The new browser (code named “Project Spartan” ) is really a big step forward in performance and functionality. Key features are built-in natively to the browser and their major purpose is to make web-services content easier to read, share and comment on.
Other more important revelations have to do with the stated goals of Microsoft regarding their key technology – Windows. According to the new CEO Satya Nadella, “Windows 10 marks the beginning of the more personal computing era in the mobile-first, cloud-first world. Our ambition is for the 1.5 billion people who are using Windows today to fall in love with Windows 10 and for billions more to decide to make Windows home.” If you look at the new offerings superimposed on the backdrop of existing “must have” applications, Microsoft seems determined to make itself through Windows the big dog in the internet services arena. According to Terry Myerson, “We think of Windows as a Service – in fact, one could reasonably think of Windows in the next couple of years as one of the largest Internet services on the planet.”
He continued to state that, “Windows 10 is the first step to an era of more personal computing. This vision framed our work on Windows 10, where we are moving Windows from its heritage of enabling a single device – the PC – to a world that is more mobile, natural and grounded in trust. We believe your experiences should be mobile – not just your devices. Technology should be out of the way and your apps, services and content should move with you across devices, seamlessly and easily. In our connected and transparent world, we know that people care deeply about privacy – and so do we. That’s why everything we do puts you in control – because you are our customer, not our product. We also believe that interacting with technology should be as natural as interacting with people – using voice, pen, gestures and even gaze for the right interaction, in the right way, at the right time. These concepts led our development and you saw them come to life today. “
Look at their video on demand announcement here.
This will create many new opportunities for HW & SW engineers to make the continuum user experiences a reality and increase monetization of proving add-ons to the Windows 10 new functionalities.
My firm has been engaged by one of the world’s largest small appliance manufacturing PRC-based companies to architect and implement a cloud/mobile/appliance IoT offering. This new small wine appliance will be launched in Q4 of 2014.
In fact this is an exciting project where WilQuest is Partnering with Microsoft, interKnowlogy, Tridea Partners and others to create a “Cloud of Things” CoT infrastructre where a global software/hardware engineering team is developing products on Azure,Windows 8, Android, iPhone, iPad, Intel and ARM platforms to create a seamless web srevices orchestration of devices and applications that each perform a segment of a task that the end user request via gesture/mouse/keyboard action.
There’s a lot of buzz stating that Cloud Computing and Big Data are synonymous. See a Forbes article here stating that ”
“Big data is the new cloud computing.”
This sentiment was recently expressed in an interview with Motley Fool analyst Tim Beyers, who analyzed the zeitgeist coming out of the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) conference and observed that cloud computing and big data were now one in the same phenomena, converging on enterprises of all shapes and sizes.”
For those who don’t know what big data is, this Intel Video gives you a “Big Data 101” primer.
The Cloud definitely provides a cost effect and timely way to go after big data problems and then using the elasticity of the cloud’s IaaS foundation, dump the costly resources when you’ve finished or allow them to grow only when needed. But they are not one and the same. Big Data is just the current “Bell of the ball” for enterprise usage of the Cloud. See below Gartner’s Hype Cycle for emerging technologies 2012. This shows we are either in or approaching the “Trough of Disillusionment” regarding Reduce Map and the offerings of DBSaaS. I’m eager to apply some innovative ideas I have regarding the trip out of this trough on some upcoming projects.
With the resignation/retirement of long term Intel leaders and Microsoft’s announcement of a new CEO, the direction of the industry’s shift to non-X86 architecture 
products is forcing both of these giants to rethink their corporate leadership philosophies.
Satya Nadella becomes only the third CEO of Microsoft while CEO Brian Krzanich of Intel follows a similarly small group of predecessors. A good example is that Verizon and Intel in late January announced an agreement for Verizon to purchase from Intel the assets of Intel Media, a business division dedicated to the development of Cloud TV products and services.
The Future Work is an attempt to show how enterprises need to adapt to the changes in order to stay relevant in 2014 and beyond. Check out these links and judge for yourself if Intel and Microsoft are headed in the right directions.
As enterprises come to grips with Cloud Computing demands (both internal and external) the IT groups will soon realize that the Hybrid model is the “best fit” for the new Enterprise IT organization. This will also force a closer alignment with various business units and provoke a rethink of the costing models for IT. can IT really stay a coast center given the inevitable variable demand curve of Cloud Services? Enterprise IT shops will consider various vendors (E.G., Azure, HP, VMware, Amazon & others) in light of the matrix created by matching customers service type needs to flexibility of leveraging a vendors Cloud Service offerings to suit the enterprise’s complex business needs. the ease of entrance and exit will be the driving forces behind vendor selection not just cost but ease of achieving true operational excellence.
Finance, Corporate Strategy, Biz Units and IT will collaborate to determine which “flavor” of Cloud Services are needed. For example the SaaS, IaaS or PaaS models may all be needed in the view of the business objectives. The decision of what kind of service offerings to implement will drive IT’s customers to do a functional decomposition of existing applications and distil what services are used today. This will lead to an “applicability analysis” of which type of Cloud implementation makes good business sense. Some may choose from Cloud Platform as a Service, Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Cloud as a Software Service model. These may also include convent “off ramp & on ramp” strategies to allow customers to switch as circumstances dictate. An example of the choices is illustrated below:
