Personal cloud will replace PC at centre of users' digital lives by 2014: Gartner

The reign of the personal computer as the sole corporate access device is coming to a close, and by 2014, the personal cloud will replace the personal computer at the centre of users' digital lives, according to technology researcher Gartner, Inc.

Gartner analysts said the personal cloud will begin a new era that will provide users with a new level of flexibility with the devices they use for daily activities, while leveraging the strengths of each device, ultimately enabling new levels of user satisfaction and productivity.

However, it will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver applications and services to users, a Gartner statement said.

"Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices," said Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner."Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life."

The past two years have been a whirlwind in the client computing space, leaving many enterprises asking what comes next and what the environment will look like in five years, it said.

"Many call this era the post-PC era, but it isn't really about being 'after' the PC, but rather about a new style of personal computing that frees individuals to use computing in fundamentally new ways to improve multiple aspects of their work and personal lives," Kleynhans said.

Several driving forces are combining to create this new era. These megatrends have roots that extend back through the past decade but are aligning in a new way, Gartner added.

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HP to launch Amazon's cloud computing competitor soon

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is reportedly all set to come up with its cloud computing service in next two months, which is said to be similar to Amazon Web services that delivers a set of services, which together form a computing platform "in the cloud".

According to a report from The New York Times, the cloud computing service that HP is planning to roll out will have more business-oriented features.

The report quoted Zorawar "Biri" Singh, senior VP and general manager of HP's cloud services as saying, "We're not just building a cloud for infrastructure," adding "Amazon has the lead there. We have to build a platform layer, with a lot of third-party services."

However, there are no reports as to how much the computing services would cost, but he opined "we are not coming at this at 8 cents a virtual computing hour, going to 5 cents."
HP's alternative to Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been afoot for over a year.

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Amazon Web services into the era of 'utility supercomputing'

Cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services is heralding the era of utility supercomputing, whereby massive computational resources and storage requirements can be accessed on demand.

Speaking at the launch of Intel's Xeon E5 processor family in London this week, AWS technology evangelist in residence, Dr. Matt Wood, said that cloud computing was a utility service like electricity and gas, in that it allows consumers and businesses to pay for consumption of a service on demand.

The cloud's capacity for storing and processing Big Data is only limited by the infrastructure it sits on, explained Wood. While the technology can act as "friction", extending the time it takes to move from an idea to a result, more powerful processors are helping to reduce this lag time, opening up new opportunities for a whole range of industries.

In particular, scientific and financial organisations with massive computational demands will be able to rent resources from the cloud to be able to do their work - whether it happens to be product modelling, simulation or informatics - without having to invest in huge infrastructure.

"We are entering the era of utility supercomputing where anybody can dial up computational resources and massive storage requirements on the fly," said Wood. "Traditionally these organisations would have to provision for 10-15% over the peaks in demand, but the cloud allows for bursty scalability, lowering the barriers to entry and allowing them to spend at least 70% of their time on differentiated work, rather than keeping the light on."

Wood's assertion builds on the ideas of Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing, who first proposed the concept of utility supercomputing in October 2011. Cycle Computing helps researchers and businesses run supercomputing applications on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure.

"The problem is, today, researchers are in the long-term habit of sizing their questions to the compute cluster they have, rather than the other way around. This isn't the way we should work. We should provision compute at the scale the questions need," said Stowe in October.

"We're talking about taking questions that require a million hours of computation, and answering them in a day. Securely. At reasonable cost.

"Scratch the surface of this idea, and you'll see a world of research the way I see it. No more waiting. No more R&D folks task-switching for days or weeks while compute is run. Only answers at the speed of thought, at the speed of invention, at the scale of the question."

Amazon in November launched a public beta of Cluster Compute Eight Extra Large (CC2), its most powerful cloud service yet. Every CC2 instance has two Intel Xeon E5 processors, each with eight hardware cores, as well as 60.5GB of RAM and 3.37TB of storage. It communicates with other instances - or virtual servers - in a cluster using 10 gigabit ethernet.

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Mumbai's D-Link launches personal cloud service

Network solutions provider D-Link India today introduced its `personal cloud' networking solution comprising routers, cameras and storage solutions.

The cloud routers are priced at around Rs 2,900, while its cloud cameras are priced at around Rs 5,499 and cloud storage solution is priced at Rs 14,000, the company said.

"Going forward, most of D-Link products will come under the umbrella of MyDlink cloud services," D-Link India chief executive Tushar Sighat said.

All D-Link cloud products can be managed through a website created specifically for the purpose, he said.

The company has also introduced an application for iOS and Android mobile devices, which will allow consumers to control, view and share through any computer or portable device like an iPad or smartphone from anywhere, at anytime.

Its routers allow users to remotely control their domestic network in real time, no matter where they are. Working parents may keep a check on what their child is browsing from anywhere or glance through the browsing history anytime, the company statement said.

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Videocon, AEC Partners to invest $21 m in cloud computing start-up Nivio

Videocon and AEC Partners, a US-based private equity firm that specialises in technology investments, will invest $21 million in the seven-year-old Nivio.

The cloud computing company has been valued at $100 million.

Nivio plans to use the money to expand its engineering centre in Palo Alto, California and hire fresh talent. The firm was founded by two friends Sachin Dev Duggal and Saurabh P Dhoot, who is Videocon chairman Venugopal Dhoot's nephew, when they were both engineering students at Imperial College, London.

"We are very proud that Nivio has successfully delivered seven-fold returns to some of the angel investors," said Duggal.

Duggal who took a sabbatical from Deutsche Bank in 2004 raised seed money from two of his bosses who put in $100,000.

"It was inherently a blank cheque," said Duggal whose firm has raised angel investment of $9 million until this present round of funding. The start-up, that has offices in New Delhi and Switzerland, offers customers access to a hosted version of a personal Windows desktop from any device connected to the Internet.

"We are very excited about this space, especially as there is a sea-change happening in this industry from consumer electronics to computing, Nivio saw this vision well" said Venugopal Dhoot, Chairman Videocon.

Nivio offers customers the ability to rent original updated software on a rental basis coupled with free synchronised storage that is given to the user for life.

Dhoot added that they are excited about the future opportunities for globalisation that its investment in Nivio presents to Videocon and the strategic benefit to their existing products and services.

This is the first of its kind investment for the $5-billion durables-to-oil Videocon Group in a start-up company.

The partnership will allow Nivio to access over 1,000 Videocon stores and thousands of resellers in India and provide bundled services.

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Mahindra Satyam launches Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS)

Mahindra Satyam, a leading global consulting and IT services provider, today announced the launch of Workspace-as-a-Service (WaaS), leveraging technology from Citrix Systems, Microsoft and Liquidware Labs.


WaaS is a hosted managed new world workspace solution that offered a unique opportunity for customers to embark on the virtual desktop computing journey. It allowed the flexibility of dedicated, pooled or shared virtual desktops or applications that can be accessed any time, from anywhere, using any device.

Mahindra Satyam in a release here said WaaS provides innovative user profiling and assessment methodology for analysing the various roles within an organisation and their suitability to adopt workspace virtualisation.

WaaS provided services such as on-demand application delivery, automated workflow-based provisioning, usage-based metering and charge back, along with the freedom to choose your own workspace from a service catalog. The entire service enables freedom from desktop management overhead while ensuring the boundaries of data securitym, the release said.

It said WaaS could be provided as a hosted on-premise solution within the customer datacenter or on a dedicated infrastructure at a Mahindra Satyam-hosted data centre. Mahindra Satyam also offered a flexible financial model, including per desktop, usage-based pricing to alleviate the financial burden on the customer.

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Cisco says Global cloud data traffic growing rapidly

Network equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc said global cloud data traffic will grow at a compound annual rate of 66 per cent between 2010 and 2015, as consumers and businesses seek untethered access to content and applications.

By mid-decade more than a third of all data center traffic will be based in the cloud, which allows data to be stored and accessed remotely, Cisco said in its first annual Global Cloud Index published on Tuesday.

Gobal data center traffic overall will increase four-fold, a 33 per cent compound annual growth rate between 2010 and 2015, according to Cisco.

That translates into data traffic of 4.8 zettabytes per year by 2015 or every man, woman and child watching a full length movie once a day for one year.

"What was surprising is how much data is actually being moved, we started off with a zettabyte," said Suraj Shetty, vice president of product and solutions marketing, referring to 2010 when annual data traffic worldwide was at 1.1 zettabyte, which equals a trillion gigabytes.

"The evolution of cloud services is driven in large part by users' expectations to access applications and content anytime, from anywhere, over any network and with any device," Cisco said.

Economic considerations were also a significant factor, Shetty said, because cloud-based data centers could support more virtual machines and workloads than traditional data centers making remote storage more cost-efficient.

Cisco, which offers technology to build, deploy and use cloud services, expects that, by 2014, more than 50 per cent of all workloads will be processed in the cloud.

IT research firm Forrester has forecast the global cloud computing market will grow to $241 billion in 2020 from $41 billion this year.

However, it will still take some time and investments in network expansion until networks around the world are ready to handle advanced cloud services.

All regions can currently support some level of cloud services based on average download and upload speeds and the time it takes for information to pass through the network for business and consumer connections, Cisco said.

"However, few regions' average network characteristics are currently able to support the high-end advanced cloud apps," Cisco added.

Basic cloud applications include email, Web browsing or social networking, while advanced cloud services, which have higher network requirements, include advanced gaming and high definition video conferencing.

For the forecast Cisco collected network data from 10 enterprise and Internet data centers for 12 months.

More info : VentureBeat

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