Yahoo! Partners with Four Top Universities to Advance Cloud Computing Systems and Applications Research
Yahoo!, Inc. has expanded its partnerships with top US universities to advance cloud computing research. The University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst will join Carnegie Mellon University in using Yahoo!’s cloud computing cluster to conduct large-scale systems software research and explore new applications that analyze Internet-scale data sets, ranging from voting records to online news sources.
To date, academic researchers have had limited access to Internet-scale supercomputers for conducting systems and applications research. To help alleviate this obstacle, Yahoo! is granting these four universities access to the Yahoo! cloud computing cluster. The Yahoo! cluster, also known as M45, has been operational since November 2007 and in use by Carnegie Mellon. The cluster has approximately 4,000 processor-cores and 1.5 petabytes of disks.
“We have been using the Yahoo! cluster for more than a year now and have made significant progress in a number of key research areas, resulting in the publication of more than two dozen academic papers,” said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. “Our researchers were able to extract and process documents from the Web in a way that was not possible before, changing the way we think about research problems. We were also able to conduct research over a corpus of 200 million Web pages, processing two orders of magnitude more data. We conducted systems software research, comparing, for example, the performance of the Hadoop file system and other parallel file systems. The simultaneous access to applications and systems software has been a real benefit and we look forward to our continued partnership with Yahoo! and joint contributions to the cloud computing community.”
Yahoo!’s M45 cluster runs Hadoop, an open source distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data. Apache Hadoop is an open source project of the Apache Software Foundation, to which Yahoo! engineers have been the primary contributors to date.
“Hadoop powers many of our most broadly used and complex systems at Yahoo!, from Web search to optimizing content for the home page,” said Shelton Shugar, senior vice president of cloud computing at Yahoo!. “Continuing to invest in the open source community and in technologies like Hadoop is an important element in our efforts to drive breakthroughs in Internet-scale computing and ultimately to continually improve the quality of the consumer experience of Yahoo!. By partnering with these top educational institutions to share our M45 cluster and our technical expertise, we hope to further key insights into the next generation of systems software research and development.”
“We are very excited about the new research partnership with Yahoo!,” said Shankar Sastry, dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “Access to the cluster is a first step in helping us analyze the vast amounts of societal-scale information available on the Web, such as voting records, online news sources and polling data. The Yahoo! cluster will also enable us to conduct computationally intensive econometrics research, combining economic theory with statistics to analyze and test large-scale economic relationships.”
“Our partnership with Yahoo! will enable us to attack problems ranging from wildlife preservation and biodiversity, to balancing socio-economic needs and the environment, to large-scale deployment and management of renewable energy sources,” said Bob Constable, dean of the faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University. “We recently established the Institute of Computational Sustainability at Cornell to focus on computational problems in these areas, and Yahoo!’s cluster will help us solve large scale optimization and machine learning problems to find better ways to manage our natural resources.”
“Our vision is to improve upon current technology through the processing of large data sets,” said Jim Kurose, dean of College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “Yahoo!’s supercomputing cluster will enable us to do data-intensive research on a large set of scanned books drawn from the Internet Archive’s million-book collection. The latter includes 8.5 terabytes of text and half a petabyte of scanned images. Research on such large datasets would not be possible without the use of clusters like the one Yahoo! is offering us access to.”
Partnership with these universities is the next step in expanding Yahoo!’s role in supporting cloud computing research. In July 2008, Yahoo! joined forces with HP, Intel, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) in Singapore, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to create Open Cirrus, a global, multi-data center, open source testbed for advancing cloud computing research and education. The partnership with Illinois also includes the National Science Foundation, creating a cloud computing cluster that is made available to the entire reach of the NSF academic community. The international partnership promotes open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing. As the Yahoo! M45 cluster is part of the Open Cirrus cloud computing testbed, the above universities will also gain access to and be part of the Open Cirrus community.
StorMagic Announces Channel Program for StorMagic and VMware Partners
StorMagic, a developer of iSCSI SAN management software for virtualized server environments, has released details of its enhanced channel partner program, which targets resellers and system integrators in the VMware community. Through this program, StorMagic channel partners get access to a unique promo key, which their customers can use to download a free copy of the StorMagic SvSAN with no expiration date and management of up to 2 TB of data. SvSAN is a storage virtual appliance that enables the deployment of a high-availability shared storage solution for VMware environments for less than $2,000.
“I am glad to be part of the StorMagic partner program, because a company with such a smart go-to-market strategy creates great new business opportunities for us,” said Gary Sharp, VP of sales for E-Safe Technologies. “With a unique partner code, our current and potential customers get access to free copies of SvSAN, and we get registered and qualified opportunities. SvSAN has all the features necessary to build a cost-effective virtual SAN in minutes. With the optional High Availability feature, users can take advantage of high-end features such as VMware VMotion without the need for an expensive external SAN. This approach also gives us the opportunity to sell additional licenses, consulting services, as well as VMware-related virtualization options in the near future.”
“This program provides our channel partners with disruptive technology solutions coupled with an attractive offer that immediately gives them ‘hot’ customers leads that they can follow on,” said Mike Stolz, vice president of marketing at StorMagic. “Once the customer downloads the free, full-feature base software, the reseller knows that there is a need for this software and a strong possibility for an upgrade path to additional features and services.”
PivotLink Helps Enterprises Break the Chains of Traditional Business Intelligence Software with PivotLink Gadget for Google
PivotLink a provider of business intelligence solutions delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS), has teamed with Google and released the PivotLink Gadget to bring business intelligence capabilities to the enterprise and beyond.
The PivotLink Gadget uses the Google Apps' developer tools to bring secure, collaborative BI analytics to the Google environment. The solution offers a customizable and cost-effective environment to engage employees, partners and key customers in collaborative analysis that improves performance profitability and customer service into today's extended enterprises.
PivotLink's technology allows Google Apps customers to configure custom business intelligence dashboards within Google pages that display all the contextual information needed for decisions. From real-time business data to breaking news, businesspeople now have the power to mash-up, publish and share business and market information on demand, while ensuring their IT department's stringent security controls and data management best practices.
For example, within Google Sites, authorized users access PivotLink to tap into business information, such as charts and graphs on their company's sales trends and inventory levels, and combine it with information in spreadsheets in Google Docs. For further personalization, users can drag and drop email and collaboration tools from Google Apps, plus maps, weather and other syndicated information.
"We understand the challenges customers face in finding BI solutions that are easy to deploy, simple to manage and require no capital expenditure investment," said Quentin Gallivan, CEO of PivotLink. "The PivotLink Gadget underscores how SaaS innovation is happening in our customer base today. When great partners in cloud computing join forces, customers win with unparalleled freedom, flexibility and cost effectiveness."
QlikTech Leverages Bluewolf's Agile Consulting Approach to Realign Its Sales and Marketing Processes with Cloud Computing Solution
QlikTech, a global Business Intelligence (BI) software company, completely overhauled its business processes by using Bluewolf's agile consulting and implementation services. QlikTech was able to quickly realign its changing business, and optimize its sales and marketing processes in an 80-day global CRM rollout, for its employees in 15 countries.
As part of the rollout, Bluewolf built a sustainable business process for QlikTech that focused on optimizing the sales lead to close process, by leveraging Cloud Computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) technologies such as Salesforce CRM and ExactTarget, an email marketing tool. Bluewolf helps enterprise organizations quickly evolve their businesses using its agile process to deepen customer relationships, and gain a competitive edge.
Growing by 50 percent in 2008 and with 10,500 customers in 92 countries, QlikTech needed a better way to manage and optimize its sales, marketing and channel management processes to scale with its growing business demands. The company looked to Bluewolf to unite QlikTech's global employees with a consistent process.
"With the speed of change in our fast-growing business, we needed a partner that moved at the same pace, making Bluewolf and its agile services model the perfect fit for us," said Joe Francis, VP, Global Sales Operations, QlikTech. "Bluewolf's expertise in business process management and implementation of Cloud Computing technologies, like Salesforce, enabled us to improve our customer life-cycle, applying an innovative approach to our business processes."
The results have been dramatic. With very high sales transaction volumes, QlikTech now has a sustainable business process that allows it to iteratively adjust its business and continually evolve, leveraging these new Cloud Computing technologies.
Salesforce.com Drives Enterprise Cloud Computing Adoption Across Europe, Middle East and Africa
Salesforce.com has announced that companies across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are adopting cloud computing from salesforce.com in record numbers. In its first fiscal quarter of 2010, salesforce.com approached 10,000 customers in EMEA - an increase of roughly 70 percent from the same period last year.
Salesforce.com's cloud computing model provides many benefits to enterprises globally requiring only moderate operating expense and offering a pay-as-you-go, elastic model that can scale with a business' changing needs. Based on salesforce.com's real-time, multi-tenant architecture, Salesforce CRM and the Force.com Cloud platform offer the fastest path to customer success in the cloud. Research firm IDC predicts spending on IT cloud services will grow almost threefold, reaching $42 billion by 2012. Recent customer wins finding success with cloud computing include industry leaders such as Easynet Connect, Morrison Utility Services, QlikTech, Speedy, and Veolia Environmental Services.
"Salesforce.com is making an impact on the global marketplace as companies realize the benefits of cloud computing in times like these," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "We are thrilled that the industry is embracing our vision for the End of Software and hope to continue to grow our community of customers experiencing success in the cloud."
The Sales Cloud delivers the next generation of collaboration between sales and marketing across the enterprise. When sales, marketing and partner organizations collaborate, everyone is connected to the best information, best content, best strategies and best practices across the entire enterprise, helping companies close more deals and grow their business. The Sales Cloud gives business users the ability to tightly manage their sales process and marketing spend.
The Service Cloud transforms customer service through the power of cloud computing. It brings together information from industry leading cloud computing services like Google, Facebook and Twitter to capture every conversation and leverage every community expert in the cloud. By capturing these conversations, the Service Cloud helps companies deliver the expertise of the community to customers, agents and partners regardless of location or device, ensuring that the quality of customer service is consistent across every channel. |
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