The South African IT Race Is On

The managed services industry is growing rapidly across the globe, everywhere we are finding phenomenal numbers. If you look at revenue breakdowns for public companies in this space, you can clearly see why there’s lots of excitement.

We’d like to bring your attention to South African technology firm EOH, a company with no debt and 212M in cash reserves, who in the last year experienced 20% gains in their Managed Services business. You can find the details in the presentation below, note the segmental reporting on page 7. Over half of EOH’s business is managed services, and the numbers they’re reporting match the trending we found in India last week.
EOH_Bk_T2IB02469~2

MidMarket IT Leaders See Growing Data Management Challenge

It’s the weekend, but no time to let up. Factoring a strategy for SMB isn’t easy; you need numbers, research, optimization, messaging, models, analysis, contingency plans, pivots, anything to find the market edge. One of the most important data sets you can find is Executive Sentiment; that’s why we are excited to bring you an excellent presentation from IT Pro Mike Vizard, over at CTOEdge.com. The name of the slide is Mid-Market CIO Priorities for 2010, take a look and see what you can find.

MidMarket CIO Forum Presentation – MidMarket IT Leaders See Growing Data Management Challenge

The Economist: Big Data On Its Way

We mentioned “Big Data” in a blog post a few days ago, so we would like to point you in the direction of an Economist piece entitled Data, data everywhere. It’s a great run through of the trend, and you walk away with a few solid numbers. What’s the takeaway? Data is a new economic input, on par with labor and capital. New forms of businesses will rise up in the next decade, and their models will rely on information generated by not just desktop computers, but cloud computing platforms, mobile phones, gps sensors, and enumerable other devices that will come to market. We appear to be in the beginning stages, so stay on the lookout.

Special report

A special report on managing information

Data, data everywhere

Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also big headaches

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

… Continue Reading

Pictures and Videos from the Datacenter

We were at the facility this week installing servers, switches, and routers; so we decided to take a few pictures and videos. Here’s a look:

Router lights from XZ Backup on Vimeo.

Datacenter from XZ Backup on Vimeo.