Category Archives: Cloud Computing

Oracle Corp, the worlds largest seller of enterprise software, may look to its partnership with Tencent Holdings to distribute its NetSuite portfolio of online business applications in mainland Chinas software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, an industry segment projected for total sales of up to US$1.6 billion this year.

That initiative, following Oracles US$9.3 billion acquisition of NetSuite last year, is part of the companys latest investment in the worlds second-largest economy, where it hasestablished operations since 1989, chief executive Mark Hurd recently toldthe South China Morning Post.

We have a development centre in Beijing that does a lot of localisation for our products, and weve doubled our sales force in China over the past year, Hurd said. So [with NetSuite now part of Oracle] we plan to continue investments in the country, which is not without a few challenges here and there.

Cloud computing enables companies to buy, sell, lease or distribute a range of software and other digital resources as an on-demand service over the internet, just like electricity from a power grid. These resources are managed inside data centres. Cloud refers to the internet as depicted in computer network diagrams.

SaaS is the third-biggest segment of the overall public cloud services market behind cloud advertising and infrastructure-as-a-service, according to research firm Gartner. SaaS is a delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and remotely managed by one or more providers.

Oracle, which has its own line of cloud products, acquired NetSuite to meet the global enterprise sectors huge shift from on-premise [software] to the cloud, Hurd said.

This trend is an irresistible force that will dominate the whole [information technology] market over the next decade, he said. There may be a 70 to 80 per cent shift from traditional on-premise to cloud.

Oracle, basedin California's Silicon Valley, has set its sights on generating US$10 billion in annual global revenue from SaaS and platform-as-a service, a category of cloud computing that provides an online environment for software developers to build business applications.

Founded in 1998, NetSuite has long been recognised as the worlds top provider of cloud-based financial management, enterprise resource planning and so-called omnichannel commerce applications for businesses of all sizes.

Mainland Chinas market for SaaS applications is forecast to reach US$4.2 billion by 2020, up from an estimated US$1.6 billion this year, according to data from Forrester Research.

Jim McGeever, the executive vice-president of the new Oracle NetSuite global business unit, said they have been given the budget and the green light to expand on the mainland as soon as possible by leveraging Oracles operations there.

Well open a direct office and a data centre, and build up our [software] localisation to a level that [mainland] Chinese companies require, McGeever said. Were going all in.

This expansion may benefit from Oracles 2016 cooperation agreementwith Tencent Cloud, the rapidly developing cloud-computing arm of Shenzhen-based Tencent.

Under that pact, Oracles range of cloud products will be offered to businesses on the mainland and jointly promoted through Tencent Cloud.

It is an arrangement that Oracle, with US$37 billion in sales during its last fiscal year to June, needed to grow its China business amid Beijings restrictions on foreign cloud operations.

That will now put Oracle and Tencent Cloud on a collision course with German enterprise software giant SAP and its mainland partner Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holdings. Alibaba is operator of the worlds largest online shopping platforms, and owner of the Post.

SAP, which had total revenue of 22 billion (US$24.6 billion) last year, has already launched its own set of cloud solutions on the mainland through Alibaba Cloud, the countrys largest cloud infrastructure services provider.

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Oracle set to expand cloud reach with Tencent alliance - South China Morning Post

Amazon.com Inc.s shares topped $1,000 for the first time, marking a new milestone for a company wooing investors by dominating online commerce and cloud computing.

Amazon shares hit $1,001.20 in New York Tuesday, up about 40 percent from a year ago and more than double the 15 percent gain of the S&P 500 Index in the same period. Investors are thinking about how much further Amazon can grow as it tries to replicate its U.S. success abroad.

The shares will likely push even higher since Amazon is growing so quickly inmassive global industries that show no signs of slowing, as shopping habits change and businesses rethink how they deploy technology, said John Blackledge, analyst at Cowen and Company LLC, who recently upped his Amazon price target to $1,125 a share.

"Theres a long runway there," he said. "The markets Amazon is playing in with global retail and cloud computing are just massive. Things continue to go well and investors are looking for more upside."

The Seattle companys $478 billion market value is double that of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. even though the worlds biggest retailer will have sales three times larger than Amazons this year. Investors put more value in Amazons web traffic and delivery network than they do in Wal-Marts vast store presence because online spending will grow more than four times faster than overall retail spending this year as shoppers continue to shift from stores to websites, according to EMarketer Inc.

The worlds largest online retailer is dominating e-commerce with its $99-a-year Amazon Prime subscription, which includes delivery discounts, music and video streaming and photo storage that keep shoppers engaged with the website. Seattle-based Amazon had 80 million Prime subscribers in the U.S. as of March 31, an increase of 38 percent from a year earlier, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Prime memberships help lock in loyalty, which is critical as competitors such as Wal-Mart enhance their e-commerce offerings to slow Amazons momentum.

Amazon has been tackling retail one category at a time, disrupting bookstores and electronics stores first and more recently pushing into apparel and groceries. Its rise has coincided with the decline of prominent retail chains such as Macys Inc. and Sears Holdings Corp., which have shuttered stores and laid off workers in response to declining sales. Shopping malls have resorted to hosting concerts and carnivals in empty parking lots to keep customers coming.

Another Amazon advantage is its profitable and fast-growing cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services, which maintains a global network of data centers and rents out storage space and computing functions to clients in a variety of industries, including Netflix Inc. and Airbnb Inc. as well as Capital One Financial Corp. and the federal government. Yelp runs many of its functions on AWS. This year, companies around the world will funnel $246.8 billion to Amazon and other cloud services providers, according to Gartner, up 18 percent from 2016.

Amazons rise has made its founding Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos the worlds second wealthiest person, behind only Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His ascendancy has won praise from fellow self-made billionaires Warren Buffett and Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and judge on the television show "Shark Tank."

Amazon is worth far more than $1,000 a share, said Cuban, an Amazon investor. Consumers always want things at lower prices delivered faster. Amazon uses data better than anyone to achieve those goals for everything it sells. They have a chance to be the most dominant company in the world.

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Amazon Shares Hit $1000, Showing Dominance of E-Commerce, Cloud - The VAR Guy

Microsoft isnt banking on snazzy marketing or technical chops alone to make its Azure service a winner in the critical cloud-computing market. Its also offering freebies, betting that discounts and free technical support today will produce paying customers down the line.

DefinedCrowd, a Seattle software startup, had a choice to make when it was developing its first product last year build on the cloud-computing foundation offered by the dominant Amazon.com, or Microsofts upstart competitor?

For founder Daniela Braga, the competing services seemed about even in terms of features. On price, Amazons tools were a bit cheaper than Microsofts. And more developers were comfortable working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud-computing pioneer and now the markets largest player.

But Microsoft held the trump card: an offer of $500,000 in credits to spend on Microsofts Azure cloud services over three years, a benefit DefinedCrowd had earned by participating in a Microsoft startup program. That kind of sum can pay for the entire technology-infrastructure cost of getting a software companys first products off the ground.

That was kind of hard to refuse, said Aya Zook, business-development manager with DefinedCrowd, which makes tools to train software how to recognize speech or images.

The startup would build its software on Microsofts Azure.

Microsoft has staked its future on the cloud, the range of on-demand computing power and software services bundled into Azure and other products.

But Microsoft isnt banking on snazzy marketing or technical chops alone to make Azure a winner. The technology giant is also offering bargains and freebies, including discounts to large businesses, free trial offers to all comers, and grants of cash for startups and nonprofits that try the service.

The programs are part of a broader, companywide effort to gain market share. The bet is that discounts and free technical support today will make paying customers down the line, ideally bringing thousands of dollars a year to Azure and boosting awareness of Microsofts offering in a highly competitive market.

Its an old tactic for a company that has long had plenty of cash to work with. Exactly where Microsoft has deployed that money to lure software developers offers a window into the companys shifting priorities over the years.

In the midst of its unsuccessful smartphone push a few years ago, Microsoft was shelling out a reported $100,000 (and up) to application makers who built tools for Windows Phone. Before that, Microsoft made similar deals to get developers and corporate partners interested in Bing, the fledgling search engine. And to a generation of technologists years ago, Microsoft offered ample support to get businesses to plug into the new Windows Server.

Those programs have yielded mixed results, said Michael Cherry, who worked at Microsoft in the late 1990s, and today tracks the company with analysis firm Directions on Microsoft.

Grants to use products dont tend to make a big difference on their own, he said. But when you can add feet on the ground to help a developer that had a problem? Theyll be loyal to you forever.

For Microsoft, the cloud is the priority today.

It was the focus of the companys recent Build developer show in Seattle, where the company kicked off the proceedings by staking out a virtual claim to the city, and the market.

A promotional video showed the Space Needle topped by a flag with the Microsoft logo on one side, and Cloud City on the other. Never mind that Amazon, with a much bigger cloud-market share than Redmond-based Microsoft, has its headquarters just a few blocks away from the landmark.

When choosing between Amazon and Microsoft, Braga concedes she had a soft spot for Microsoft. A linguist and speech-software expert originally from Portugal, she had spent seven years at the company. Zook, her colleague, is a fellow Microsoft alum.

Were ex-Microsoft people, she said. Its an environment that were comfortable with.

Still, she said, There are a lot of incentives, and pressure, to go on AWS.

Amazon, which pioneered the business of selling software and developer tools delivered over the internet, built its lead in that market, in part, by touting an easy-to-use product that offered room to experiment without paying. Adding to the appeal, technologists say, was the absence of complex, negotiated software-licensing deals of the sort Microsoft relies on.

A free tier of AWS services, introduced in 2010, can add up to thousands of dollars a year, a benefit available to all customers regardless of size. The company has bolstered that in recent years with credits aimed at researchers and educators, as well as standard startup grants ranging from $15,000 to $100,000.

The combination, on top of a technologically impressive set of products, has given AWS an enviable list of customers at the cutting edge of technology, including Netflix, Airbnb and Slack.

To counter AWS lead, No. 2 Microsoft has brought to bear what some see as its greatest asset: a giant base of corporate customers, and a sales force of tens of thousands built to sell to them.

In contract talks with corporate customers of Windows, Office and other software, Microsoft recently has been offering discounts on those products in exchange for a commitment to buy thousands of dollars worth of Azure cloud-computing services, according to consultants who advise those companies.

The company has also lent customers its own engineers.

Mojio, a Vancouver, B.C.-based software maker, participated in a Microsoft program called BizSpark, essentially a boot camp for technology startups eager for Microsofts counsel and connections. The program comes with complimentary Microsoft software, and, in the last two years, up to $120,000 in cash to use on Azure over two years (though some companies, including Mojio, have received larger grants).

Mojio, which builds software for connected cars, had just about run out of free Azure credits when it caught its big break: a deal with wireless carrier T-Mobile.

Mojio signed on to supply some of the technology behind the Bellevue companys new car-mounted Wi-Fi hot spot and diagnostic data gathering tool. The product went live the Friday before Thanksgiving.

By Monday, Mojio was in crisis mode.

The stream of data being thrown off by the hot spots and into Mojios systems built on Microsofts Azure pushed them to the breaking point. So many customers were using the tools that the software built to digest it slowed to a crawl.

It wasnt clear whether it was an architecture issue, whether it was a bug, said Mojio chief executive Kenny Hawk. The volume came faster than any of us had predicted.

Hawk, worried that he was watching his startup implode, called in a big favor.

A friend, a former Microsoft board member whom he declined to name, agreed to put in a call to Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella, asking for help on behalf of tiny Mojio, which then employed fewer than 15 people.

Literally within a couple hours there were (Microsoft) people working on it, Hawk said.

The next day, Microsoft engineers arrived in Vancouver. They would work side-by-side with Mojios staff for the next three days to retool the software to handle a larger workload.

Hawk is grateful for the help, but has no illusions: Microsoft isnt a charity.

The company, he says, is probably hopeful that Mojio, which outgrew its free allotment of Microsoft tools, would eventually become a major buyer of them.

It wasnt just that we were nice people, or that wed been a part of BizSpark, Hawk said. They see how big the connected car market will be. Having a core customer in that space is strategic.

Corey Sanders, who leads a Microsoft team building Azure infrastructure services that compete with Amazon, wasnt involved with the Mojio rescue and hadnt heard the story. Still, the scale of Microsofts response didnt surprise him.

In the competitive cloud market, every customer matters, he said. Every product is critical.

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Microsoft's weapon in high-stakes cloud-computing battle with Amazon? Freebies - The Seattle Times

Chinese internet giant Baidu says it plans to leverage advanced cloud-computing to analyse the online data of millions of its users to help companies improve their marketing campaigns.

The Chinese search engine giant, which has real-time search data on more than 700 million internet users, is able to analyse individual users through its cloud arms artificial intelligence (AI), big data and cloud computing technologies, Yin Shiming, vice president and general manager of Baidu Cloud Computing, said in Shenzhen.

AI is bringing in new ways of thinking for many traditional industries, said Yin, who cited the recent battle between AlphaGo and Chinese Go master Ke Jie as supporting his view that the development of AI technology has stepped up.

Our Marketing Cloud, backed by Baidu Clouds data and technology, is not just saving resources and costs, but making marketing easier,Yin said.

Despite challenges from other local search brands such as Sogou and Qihoo 360, Baidus dominance in online search has hardly swayed over the years, accounting for about 75 per cent of the search market.

Baidus mobile app is ranked as the seventh most popular in China, with 244.3 million active mobile users as of the end of March, according to Beijing-based research agency Analysys.

Currently over 70 per cent of newly emerged marketing strategies are AI-driven ones, according to Tang Jin, a deputy general manager of Baidu Cloud Computing. But tonness of data on the internet is ignored without being interpreted properly. To achieve precise marketing for commercial institutions, we need to understand user behaviour on the internet first, said Tang.

The scale of the cloud computing industry in the mainland is forecast to grow to 430 billion yuan (US$62.75 million) in 2019 from 150 billion yuan in 2015, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Baidu launched its AI platform for commercial users in Beijing in November. The system is powered by cloud computing technologies that include perception, machine learning and deep learning. More than 30,000 enterprises from various sectors are reportedly employing Baidus cloud services.

The company is actively pushing for a transition from the traditional search-engine business to an AI-led company to broaden its revenue channels after reported 10.6 per cent drop in net profit during the first quarter ended March 31.

Baidu aims to intensify efforts in applying AI technology to improve existing products and accelerate the development of AI-enabled new businesses for higher revenue growth in the coming quarters, vice president Lu Qi said after the quarterly results in late April.

Baidu in January appointed Lu a leading AI expert and former Microsoft Corp executive as its chief operating officer in a bid to bolster its efforts in AI.

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Baidu to leverage cloud computing, artificial intelligence, in effort to ramp up behavioural analysis - South China Morning Post

Start putting the puzzle pieces together and a clear picture emerges of hospitals implementing more and more cloud services in the immediate future.

The freshest of those pieces, IDCs Cloud in Healthcare 2.0, said that hospitals are acquiring a taste for buying IT via the pay-as-you-go model and its operational expenditure approach rather than purchasing technology the old-fashioned way, as a capital expenditure.

The use of cloud computing as an increasingly business-critical technology is quickly changing how healthcare organizations and payers evaluate, procure, and deploy IT assets, IDC analysts wrote.

[Also:Hospital datacenters: Extinct in 5 years?]

Earlier this month, HIMSS Analytics research director Brendan FitzGerald said that data-intensive trends such as precision medicine and population health will demand more robust infrastructure than what hospitals have in place to support EHRs today. Moving forward, then, more and more hospitals will turn to infrastructure-as-a-service offerings from Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft and others.

Smart CIOs should be thinking about the best ways to coordinate cloud vendors and infrastructure instead of applying an asset-centric view toward managing IT resources, IDC added, so they can ultimately deliver either cost-savings, innovation or both.

Hospitals should also be taking inventory of how many and exactly which cloud services various lines of business have tapped. While that may sound simple, the Internet Security Threat Report Symantec published late last month found that CIOs thought their users had about 30 or 40 cloud apps but, instead, enterprises have 928 already.

IDC said that cloud computing will become the main platform for analytics and big data, as well as mobile and internet of things tools. As those and other emerging technologies, such as cognitive computing, 3D printing and robotics spark digital transformation, CIOs and IT departments will have big opportunities to drive innovations in the cloud that they otherwise could not.

But the cloud model will also force them to evolve.

IT departments will operate in an environment that has a centralized operating model where they focus on service delivery and more predictable expenditures, the IDC analysts wrote. Cloud will enable an IT department to have a line of business point of focus because daily operations and services are acquired instead of managed internally.

Twitter:SullyHIT Email the writer: tom.sullivan@himssmedia.com

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Cloud computing will change the nature of hospital IT shops - Healthcare IT News

Cray is now offering its Urika-GX supercomputer for rent. One of the last HPC system vendors to give cloud computing a whirl, the companys initial foray into supercomputer-as-a-service will target life science customers looking for compute cycles on something more sophisticated than a traditional cluster.

To make its cloud business fly, Cray is partnering with Markley, a cloud infrastructure provider based in Boston, Massachusetts. Markley is a fairly typical cloud company, offering services like collocation, utility storage, disaster recovery, and so on. The company promises 100 percent uptime.

Crays entrance into the cloud came about as a result of a beta trial of the Urika-GX supercomputer by a research institute located outside of Boston. According to Ted Slater, who heads up the healthcare and life sciences unit at Cray, genomic researchers there were doing variant analysis, studying cell mutations associated with disease. Identifying those mutations can often lead to effective diagnosis and treatments.

Slater says the researchers were able to realize a five-fold speed-up on their variant analysis runs, compared to the HPC clusters they were using. That allowed them to analyze more data and ask more interesting questions. In fact, the faster turn-around time sped up the whole workflow, including software development of the genomic codes.

Its not too surprising that a Urika-GX could outrun a conventional HPC cluster, given its customized design, in particular, its use of the Aries interconnect to speed inter-node communications. Its also important to know that Urika-GX is an extremely flexible platform for analytics, says Slater.

The system comes with a complete software stack tuned for analytics applications, especially graph analytics. That includes the low-level Cray Graph Engine, a popular statistical programming languages in R, and distributed programming frameworks, like Hadoop and Spark. Application libraries can be added as needed.

Thanks to the five-fold performance improvement, the research institute was sold on the Urika-GX, but they preferred to rent rather than buy. After all, says Fred Kohout, Crays senior vice president of products and chief marketing officer, who wouldnt want to use a Cray?

Although the cloud offering will initially be confined to the Urika-GX system and life science types, Kohout says theyre already considering ways to expand the business. Were going to continue to look at other industries and other parts of the Cray portfolio as they make sense, says Kohout. And well roll those out in the months ahead.

If you happen to be attending the Bio-IT World Conference and Expo in Boston this week (May 23-25), Cray and Markley will be on hand to talk about their cloud computing venture. If you miss the event, the two companies will be conducting a live webinar on the new service on June 13th at 10:00 am PDT. You can register for it here.

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Cray Takes the Plunge into Cloud Computing - TOP500 News

BALTIMORE -- It will take no time for folks to belabor the point that Cloud Computing got an absolutely perfect trip in his upset victory in Saturday's Preakness Stakes at Pimlico. This already has happened on social media and will continue.

But while Cloud Computing did indeed benefit from a great setup, I hope people avoid the trap of denigrating this colt for it or painting him as some sort of lucky opportunist. Cloud Computing is a quality horse and, in fact, had a break owed to him.

Cloud Computing made his debut only last February on the now-defunct inner track at Aqueduct, and the Preakness was only his fourth start. When he was second in the Gotham Stakes in just the second start of his career and his first around two turns, he was much closer to a destructive early pace than the opponent who beat him that day.

When Cloud Computing finished third in the Wood Memorial in his start before the Preakness, he was the victim of a passive ride that found him much farther off the early pace than he should have been. And this approach in the Wood Memorial was egregiously ill-timed, because it occurred on a day when the main track at Aqueduct was profoundly biased toward speed horses. In other words, Cloud Computing's third-place finish in the Wood wasn't even close to a true representation of his ability. It was actually a good effort, considering how he was so up against the bias.

So, Cloud Computing isn't some sort of fluky clunk-up artist who had the moment of his life in the Preakness. Maybe the Preakness will be the high point of his career; we just don't know. But Cloud Computing is not a fluke. He is a lightly raced, talented horse who, after facing adverse circumstances in his first two stakes starts, was good enough to capitalize when he finally did get a favorable setup on Saturday. And let's not forget, dozens of horses get tremendous setups every day and don't win.

That said, you would have to be heartless not to feel bad for Classic Empire. He had a terrible trip in the Kentucky Derby, and when you also consider that the Arkansas Derby was his only representative outing in five months, his fourth-place Kentucky Derby finish was a terrific effort.

On Saturday, Classic Empire went after Kentucky Derby winner Always Dreaming from the start, hounded him and raced him into defeat on the far turn. Classic Empire turned for home with a clear lead and looked every bit the winner, but all that dirty work he did early had to take a toll, and he fell just a head shy of holding on. And let's not also forget the significant point that Classic Empire was running back in two weeks and making his third start in five weeks, while Cloud Computing was dead fresh and making his first start in six weeks.

I know it's small consolation to his connections, because the difference between winning and narrowly losing a Triple Crown race is enormous, but Classic Empire ran a winning race in defeat.

Of course, the big disappointment in the Preakness was Always Dreaming, who tired to finish eighth, beaten by 14 lengths. Given that Always Dreaming shook off major pace pressure in his decisive Kentucky Derby win, leaving the six opponents who were with him well up the track, and barring any injury or real excuse that might surface in the coming days, one can only speculate that there are but two explanations for Always Dreaming's dud on Saturday:

The first (and most likely to me) is that the Derby took much more out of Always Dreaming than anyone thought. In retrospect, it couldn't have been easy to beat the six involved in that strong Derby pace with him so soundly.

The other possible explanation is that running horses back on short rest, even Kentucky Derby winners, is just not something Todd Pletcher, the trainer of Always Dreaming, does often or especially well. I addressed this with detailed statistics in my pre-Preakness column, which can be found here.

I concluded in that column that I wasn't going to let a small sample size affect my handicapping judgment. That might have been a mistake. Small sample size or not, and as extraordinarily talented as he is in most other areas, I will be very leery of Pletcher-trained horses coming off short layoffs going forward.

One thing I still do not buy, and I say this emphatically, is that Always Dreaming benefited from a rail bias at Churchill Downs in the Kentucky Derby, as did Derby runner-up Lookin At Lee.

There was a big rail bias at Churchill the day before on Oaks Day. But too many horses won or ran well racing away from the rail on Derby Day for me to buy into a rail bias. As noted above, there are other, more tangible and far less subjective reasons for Always Dreaming's flop in the Preakness. And please don't use Lookin At Lee as some sort of barometer for track bias. Lookin At Lee had one of the greatest, ground-saving (not rail-biased) trips that a stretch runner could ever hope for in the Derby. He didn't get that same dream trip in the Preakness.

Trainer Todd Pletcher was searching for answers after his Kentucky Derby winner, Always Dreaming, dropped back around the far turn and faded to eighth in Saturday's Preakness Stakes.

We knew there would be disappointment and anguish if Always Dreaming failed to win the Preakness, and there was. We didn't count on the heartbreak being shared by late-fading Classic Empire -- at the expense of 13-1 long shot Cloud Computing.

The 149th running of the Belmont Stakes will continue a grand American sporting tradition on June 10. But does no Triple Crown possibility extinguish all the excitement for Belmont Park stakeholders and revelers?

2 Related

* Whitmore certainly emerged as a force once he was asked to do nothing more than sprint, with Saturday's Maryland Sprint being his fifth straight victory and third straight stakes score since he was cut back to shorter distances. (As an aside, I've always felt Whitmore could be a top-notch sprinter; check my comments on him in last year's Derby Watch.)

But if Whitmore were mine, I would wheel him back in the Met Mile on Belmont Stakes Day. I think Whitmore's success has as much, if not more, to do with him cutting back to one turn as it does cutting back to 6 or 6 1/2 furlongs. Besides, how many opportunities do one-turn horses have to go after a purse such as the Met Mile's $1.2 million?

* Count me among the many impressed with Yoshida's dominating win in Saturday's James W. Murphy Stakes. Yes, Yoshida had a good setup with an unsustainably fast early pace. But let's not forget that Yoshida got his maiden win last time out in his first start this year (and only second career start) on the front end. So, that he came from way out if it on Saturday with the flourish that he did, even if set up pace-wise, speaks to his quality.

* Recruiting Ready also was pretty darn good in one of the other Preakness undercard stakes for 3-year-olds, the Chick Lang. Recruiting Ready's connections deserve credit for keeping this colt sprinting, because that's what he does best, and he's getting better.

* Anyone with an appreciation of racing's history knows that the Pimlico Special has a storied one. Unfortunately, the race isn't what it used to be. And yet I can't help but think the Pimlico Special could be reborn with a new, carefully chosen spot on the calendar other than mid-May, even if it meant weakening the Black-Eyed Susan card. (And yes, I'm aware that it might be a little awkward running the Pimlico Special at, say, Laurel, but seeing a once-great race diminished is worse.)

But the Pimlico Special still has a name that carries some weight, and with a game victory in Friday's renewal, Shaman Ghost added that name to a career rsum that's really quite astounding. Think about some of the races Shaman Ghost has won. He took the Queen's Plate, the Brooklyn, the Woodward, the Santa Anita Handicap and now the Pimlico Special; and he's not done yet. Shaman Ghost isn't a Hall of Famer. He's a good, hard-knocking handicap horse who should only engender admiration. But there are some horses in the Hall of Fame who do not have the CV he does.

* Terra Promessa was supposed to win Friday's Allaire duPont Distaff off her sharp second to Stellar Wind in last month's Apple Blossom. But her overwhelming score in it not only showed how special Stellar Wind is, it also demonstrated how effective Terra Promessa can be when she gets away from her division's heavyweights. And the compelling thing about Terra Promessa's duPont Distaff performance is that while it looked like she was cruising on an easy early lead, she actually posted interior fractions that were substantially faster than the Pimlico Special run just two races later -- 47.13 seconds and 1:10.91 versus 47.92 and 1:12.41 in the Pimlico Special.

* Friday's Black-Eyed Susan didn't have nearly the star power that the Kentucky Oaks had two weeks ago. But it did resemble the Oaks in the respect that it featured a complete early-pace meltdown.

While it remains to be seen if anyone out of the Black-Eyed Susan goes on to make an impact at the top of the 3-year-old filly division, just know that even if she was the prime beneficiary of the pace collapse, Actress was better than her win margin of a head would suggest.

Actress, a maiden going in who ran well in her two starts at Gulfstream, was flying late on the far turn and in the midst of making a deft inside/out move. Then, for some reason, she was aimed at splitting the two leaders, instead of just going around them. This questionable move didn't work, and Actress was checked at a total loss of momentum. It is to her credit that she regrouped and successfully rallied again.

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Fans should appreciate Cloud Computing's Preakness win - ESPN

The oilfield has always been in a tech race, but the downturn helped light a fire under some feet. Among the new inventions and systems that surfaced as a result is one recently recognized by the American Petroleum Institute. It is a cloud computing system designed by AE2S that can help maximize the deluge of data produced by oilfield sites.

For now, the system is being used primarily on saltwater disposal sites, but it would be useful in the oil and gas sector as well, according to Instrumentation and Control Systems Division Manager for AE2S Jason G. Sanden.

The oil and gas sector is looking to become more active, but it faces a tight labor pool. Cloud computing could help them meet their obligations more efficiently and with fewer people, Sanden believes. Typically, Bakken oilfield companies have sent employees directly on site to take readings and check tank levels, but the AE2S cloud computing system can handle that remotely. Alarms can be set to go off when parameters fall outside the desired range, triggering automatic adjustments to prevent problems before they happen.

We took the power of the internet and put the information up in the cloud, so you can get the information wherever you are, Sanden said.

Larger oilfield operators may have something like this already, Sanden said, but many of the smaller operators do not. Since the system is cloud-based, there are no special computers, nor particular software programs, for companies to buy, which makes it more cost-effective. Data that the company is already generating with its own systems can be pushed to the cloud into a customized program for real-time monitoring and control.

The company can access the resulting reports and schematics through a secure webpage on a device of choice, whether mobile or desktop. Encryption ensures that the page is not accessible to anyone who isnt authorized.

While sending employees driving around to well sites has been typical in the Bakken, its not necessarily the most efficient way to do it.

If something is shut down for a day, and you didnt know about it until you came around, thats a lot of lost production, a lot of lost operation, Sanden said. With real-time monitoring and control, you can see those as they happen and even take action remotely to change a pump, reset a valve and things like that.

The programs can even tag a variety of data for the particular equipment in question, such as maintenance schedules, run times and the last calibration. Being able to link so much historical data is another feature that makes the AE2S system unique, Sanden said. Another is the customizability that the company offers.

We didnt develop the technology, but we adapted it for the industry and have made it economical for the smaller operators, Sanden said. One thing we do a bit differently is we really customize our system for the client. There are some satellite-based systems out there, but theyre not that customizable. They are pretty canned as far as the services offered.

The AE2S system can be laid out physically the same as the operation, so it is easier to follow from beginning to end.

Companies that did this while they were booming have been able to take advantage of it in the downturn, Sanden said.

The company is now working on a data management system for day to day operations of a facility. Its not specific to the oil and gas industry, but its definitely applicable, Sanden said.

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Cloud computing streamlines oil field monitoring - Williston Daily Herald

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Citrix put a lot of emphasis on monitoring, cloud computing and analytics at Synergy 2017, but...

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how do those priorities match up with IT's?

The company announced the new Citrix Analytics Service, a cloud offering that monitors devices, applications and networks and uses artificial intelligence to provide new insights into user activity. Synergy attendees also learned about improvements to Citrix Director, which is the core product for VDI monitoring, and a new workspace service for Citrix Cloud.

Here, consultant Theresa Miller, the founder and CEO of 24x7 IT Connection, shares her thoughts on Citrix's cloud computing and analytics push and what it means for XenDesktop and XenApp shops.

"The cloud-first strategy is interesting. It's also one that Microsoft used. A lot of times, people resist cloud-first -- like, 'What about my on-prem environment?' But as long as [Citrix doesn't] ignore the on-prem, which I don't think they will, I think it's the right thing to do. It's the right time for cloud.

We're coming up on an interesting time, because cloud is definitely part of everybody's conversations now. You have several key players in that space. We're all trying to figure out who the top two are going to be. You have your Microsoft. You have your Amazon. Google is even in there too. And then you have your Citrix and your VMware. While some might say, 'Well, Citrix and VMware are probably the two neck-in-neck competitors,' I don't discount the fact that the other cloud players can't still take a piece of the workstation community. In the end, it's probably a combination of any or all."

"Monitoring is a challenge for any company. Director has come a long way since it was first released. Anything that customers were feeling was missing is slowly getting added back into the stack, if it's not already.

I'm really excited to learn more about the analytics. It's one of those things that I think will really help customers. The monitoring is a tough area to get good information on.

And then to complement the analytics, there's also Smart Check. [Citrix is] doing a lot with Smart Check, making sure that it can analyze your environment and give you valuable information to act on instead of having just something that says, 'Oh, this is wrong. Now I have to call Citrix.' They're trying to make it so you have the answers right there."

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How will cloud computing and analytics affect Citrix shops? - TechTarget

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Red Hat to acquire cloud computing firm - Triangle Business Journal