Month: November 2009

Not just a Cloud

While browsing the rather content heavy site of Oracle, I came across this interesting white paper on cloud computing.

Platform-as-a-Service Private Cloud with Oracle Fusion Middleware

at http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/036500.pdf

It basically says that Oracle has the following offerings for PaaS-

  • Application grid
  • Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Business Process Management Suite
  • Oracle WebCenter Suite
  • Oracle Identity Management

Here is why traditional software licensing model can be threatened by Cloud Computing. These are very basic and conservative costs. If you have a software budget you can run the numbers yourself.

Suppose you pay $10,000 for an annual license and say an extra $5,000 for hardware costs for it.Assume you are using in house resources (employees) which cost you another $50,000/year.

The per hour cost of this very basic resource is Total Cost/ Number of hours utilized.

Assuming a 100 % utilization at work hours ( which is not possible) but still .

That’s a 40 hour week * 48 weeks ( including holidays).

or 33.85 $ per hour.

That’s the cut off point for you deciding to offshore work to contractors or outsourcing.

Assuming say a more realistic 80% utilization the per hour cost is= $42.31/hour.

Now assume we cant outsource because of data hygiene or some reason- so we take the same people costs/ exclude them and calculate only the total cost of ownership ( software and hardware).

thats $15,000 per 0.8 per 40*48 hours.

That’s still an astonishing 9.76 $ per hour.

Compare this cost with the cost of running a virtual instance of R on an Amazon Ec2.

Eg. http://biocep-distrib.r-forge.r-project.org/

or using http://www.zementis.com (which is now introducing an Excel add in as well at http://www.zementis.com/Excel-Ai.htm)

The per hour costs are not going to be more than 3.5 $ per hour. Thats much much better than ANY stats software licensed today on ANY desktop /Server configuration.

See the math. Thats why cloud is much more than time sharing, Dr G 😉

First of all, I don’t see anything greatly new and wonderful and different about cloud computing. It was timesharing way back in ’60. It’s not a whole lot different. I certainly have issues asking a bank to send us all their data and we’re going to put it up on a cloud. They’re going to say, ‘What about security? How will I know who else is up there in that cloud?’ I don’t know, it’s just a cloud.-

Dr Jim Goodnight, SAS Institute.

 

Just the Facts: SAS Webinar

An interesting webinar by SAS in their business analytics series

called “Just the Facts”. Details at

http://www.sas.com/reg/gen/corp/623867

Wednesday, November 18 | 1 p.m. ET

Who should attend
Directors, line-of-business managers, front-line staff, business users, analysts, power users, quantitative modelers and decision makers who want to view, analyze and share or make evidence-based decisions.

Why you shouldn’t miss this Webinar

Most organizations continue to face challenging times. And in challenging times, you need to ensure that all of your employees are making strategic decisions based on solid, factual information.

Fortunately, the latest reporting enhancements make it easy to share key information with a far larger, more diverse set of decision makers across your organization. After all, one size doesn’t fit all in effective reporting.

Attend this Webinar and learn how to:

  • Create a culture of fact-based decision making.
  • Empower diverse users with different skills and requirements with common reporting.
  • Create reporting that takes into account multiple personas within your organization.
  • Share consistent, holistic views that will enhance decision-making abilities across the enterprise.

The big picture

Achieving accurate, easy-to-use reporting is a key component of the comprehensive, fully integrated platform for SAS® Business Analytics, which:

  • Meets the needs of all the diverse users in an organization.
  • Provides an effective infrastructure for managing the growing appetite for intelligence.
  • Helps you derive more value from existing technology and information assets.
  • Supports sustainable growth of your organization through innovative use of technology and information.

Screenshot Attribution-http://www.sas.com/reg/gen/corp/623867

Curt Monash on Analytics with MapReduce

mon1In AsterData’s continued webcast series on MapReduce enabled analytics, here is the next in line, Curt Monash on Analytics for Data with MapReduce.

http://www.asterdata.com/wc_091203_masteringmapreduce/

Yahoo Video and Ads

Yahoo Video in it’s beta launch has an impressive roster of music videos. I liked the ads even better- it is quite simple. You see an ad before the video plays- just as you would see it on MTV. Thats quite bearable.

The site is worthy a dekko at http://new.music.yahoo.com/

Also worthy notice is the FB app that allows you to dedicate music videos ( I dedicated u2-Mysterious Ways 15 times this morning)
and best of all pulls in existing information to line up your music videos

Like U2- New Years Day Below screenshot.

http://apps.facebook.com/yahoomusicvideos/?mode=edit&emode=newest&psize=large

Screenshot-2