Kinesis is a service related to real-time processing of streaming data. It buffers data into a storage system with checkpoints to absorb the data into the Redshift cloud data warehouse. Users can store and process large datasets each hour from various sources like financial transactions, social media feeds, location-tracked events etc. With Kinesis, business customers can write applications, generate alerts, and make other decisions virtually apart from retrieving the stored data back instantly. According to Amazon, Kinesis can support applications and data streams of any size while replicating across multiple availability zones. Kinesis has been positioned as an answer to big data, with a “pay-as-you-go” pricing.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/kinesis-amazon-web-servicess-answer-to-big-data-7000023223/

During 2013 December, Amazon launched Kinesis. It is a service for real-time processing of streaming data. Kinesis is designed to capture small records, which in turn forms huge amount of backend data. Amazon wanted to be able to capture all of that data, aggregate it, and put it into its AWS cloud storage service (S3), so that they could look at it at a later stage. Waite, General Manager of Data Services, AWS, said “This enables us to scale the metering service to new limits and give alerts in real time”.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/03/20/why-amazon-created-aws-kinesis-its-live-data-processing-service/

According to a recent research report “Clicking Clean: How Companies are Creating the Green Internet” by Greenpeace, most of the enterprise cloud service providers are powering their services with renewable energy sources. However, the cloud giant AWS received lowest grades on energy transparency, renewable energy commitments, energy efficiency initiatives, deployment and advocacy in the report. AWS, which has more than 50 % of market share over the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market in North America and Europe, seems to be lagging behind other major cloud providers in terms of its use of green energy sources to power its data centres. According to the report, AWS “remains among the dirtiest and least transparent companies in the sector, far behind its major competitors, with zero reporting of its energy or environmental footprint to any source or stakeholder.”

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.businesscloudnews.com/2014/04/14/aws-increasingly-isolated-as-least-green-cloud/

A recent report by Rightscale revealed details about pricing changes by IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) vendors.Cloud Service Providers AWS, Rackspace, Google and Microsoft's Azure cut prices for computing services, storage solutions and networking 25 times in 2013, up from 22 times in 2012. According to Rightscale, cloud infrastructure prices continue to fall, especially for computing services and storage solutions. AWS leads the pack in price cuts and Microsoft's Azure is reacting most to these price cuts made by AWS.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/infrastructure-as-a-service-price-cuts-accelerate-7000027581/

During 2006, Amazon Web Services started operations with 24 separate divisions. Today it has 654 operating units! Such breakthrough growth comes with bigger issues to deal, bigger problems to face. But Amazon had all the answers to grow beyond imagination. Today, Amazon is looking beyond running processor intensive applications in the cloud. The focus is now on the desktop.  In March it unveiled “AmazonWorkSpace”, a fully managed desktop computing service in the cloud. It had been running “WorkSpace” as a Beta version with some customers since November last year. It can run in such a way that an employee or a customer can log in and out of a system and use it exactly as if it was one of the company's own systems without realizing that it is running in the Amazon cloud. From an organization’s point of view, outsourcing of their day-to-day system uptime issues to a third party is going to be a big advantage.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-web-services-eyes-the-desktop-next-7000027692/

Amazon Simple Email Service is a cost effective outbound email sending service built on the reliable and scalable infrastructure that Amazon.com has developed to serve its own customer base. With Amazon SES, it is possible to send transactional emails, marketing messages, or any other type of high-quality content. Amazon offers “pay as you go” plan flexibility. Along with high deliverability, Amazon SES provides easy, real-time access to statistics and built-in notifications for bounces and complaints to help fine-tuning email-sending strategy. Each AWS account is independent in its sending procedure and can be treated as a separate entity. SES is structured around this idea. But there can be situations compelling to send contents from multiple AWS accounts.

Sam Minter, Expert, AWS, speaks about how to send contents successfully with SES through multiple AWS accounts. To read more, visit:

https://sesblog.amazon.com/post/Tx1KQ7HH36OTFW7/Can-I-use-multiple-AWS-Accounts-with-SES

It is evident that Amazon Web Services trades at a discount relative to other cloud companies despite higher sales growth.Should infrastructure as a service (IaaS) players like AWS always opt for discounting option as like application-based peers?That argument was floated by Oppenheimer analyst Jason Helfstein, who raised his price target for Amazon shares based on a few moving parts.

To read more, visit Larry Dignan‘s article by clicking on the following link:

http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-web-services-whats-it-worth-7000027433/

The database market is in need of a big change" - Max Schireson, CEO, Mongo DB. The database layer which is being used, was designed in 1970 with a different set of requirements. Datasets in those days were smaller and more uniform, and development processes are more waterfall with requirements. As change was inevitable, Mongo DB has brought that change in database market and it will become much more functional, faster, robust and resilient in coming days. To know more about the change in the database market, go through the article of Toby Wolpe, senior reporter at ZDNet in London:

http://www.zdnet.com/mongodb-chief-why-the-clocks-ticking-for-relational-databases-7000026967/

Analyst, Gartner thinks that the growth in big data and its related technologies will increase the demand of Chief Data Officer (CDO) along with Chief Information Officer (CIO) by the end of the year 2014. 17% of organizations will hire CDO. Big data has made the role of CDO very significant and it is as important as the role of CIO. To know more on the importance of CDO in any organization, go through the following article written by Colin Barker, senior reporter at ZDNet in London:

http://www.zdnet.com/big-data-boom-leads-to-the-rise-of-the-chief-data-officer-7000025795/

Most companies are trying to figure out how to use big data more efficiently. They are also in search of the skills which can be helpful in extracting proper business insight from piles of data. A survey of senior managers revealed that along with technical skills, some other skills are also necessary. To know more about these skills, follow the article by Colin Barker, senior reporter at ZDNet in London:

http://www.zdnet.com/what-skills-do-companies-really-want-on-their-big-data-team-7000025945/

Amazon web services is designing tools to help users track cloud usage & spending pattern in a much easier way. Cloud tracking ability is the new front in the feature competition among cloud services. In addition to the just-launched Cost Explorer by Amazon Web Services, for example, Google unveiled a beta version of Cloud Pricing Calculator in February to estimate costs and needs for computing power, storage, memory or other resources. According to Parmita Mehta, technical program manager at AWS, there were several things the first release focused on. One is simplicity, so that sign-up can be accomplished with a single click, and the tool runs in the browser. She said, “Cost Explorer shows you your current month's spend and automatically pre-populates your last 4 months of AWS spend so you can visualize your AWS costs, and start analyzing trends and spending patterns”.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.toptechnews.com/story.xhtml?story_id=023002KGT582

Guy Cuthbert, managing director at visual analytics firm Atheon Analytics, says that many of the firms selectively choose data to back up currently held views, which is just opinion based decision-making. The firms usually prefer to take decisions using untested opinions rather than data science. By applying data science, firms can deliver insights which are intrinsically more valuable than what they have today.To know more on data science, go through the article of Toby Wolpe, senior reporter at ZDNet in London:

http://www.zdnet.com/big-data-what-to-trust-data-science-or-the-bosss-sixth-sense-7000026550/

Mongo DB announces its latest open source NoSQL database release 2.6. This release introduces greater automation features like incremental backup, point-in-time recovery, monitoring, visualization and alerts on more than 100 parameters in order to improve provisioning and management. Users can access network resources more efficiently along with an integrated text search in 15 languages with the help of Mongo DB query language. To know more about the features and efficiency of this release, follow the article of Toby Wolpe, senior reporter at ZDNet in London:

http://www.zdnet.com/mongodb-2-6-hits-general-availability-so-whats-in-it-7000028148/

ISO 9000 family addresses various aspects of quality management. It provides guidelines to organisations ensuring that their services and products consistently meet customer requirements. To know more about the latest version of ISO 9000 (ISO 9001: 2008), follow:

http://www.iso.org/iso/home/standards/management-standards/iso_9000.htm

Handling phone calls to serve your customers is definitely important for your company. But, have you ever calculated how much it costs you? A research by ContactBabel, shows that for making a live agent call, it costs you £ 3.87 in average!

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) can be effective in reducing this cost. According to the report, it can bring down your operational costs by 6 times. Also, with increasing usage of smartphones, a new type of IVR menus can be provided known as Visual IVR, where a caller can navigate a visual IVR menu between 4 and 5 times faster than a traditional audio IVR menu. The direct impact will be enhanced customer experience.

Read at http://www.callcentrehelper.com/ivr-self-service-costs-6-times-less-than-a-phone-call-59403.htm for more research findings on how IVR can help you reducing your costs.

An article by Zach Miners, news reporter of IDG news service, spoke about how the cloud storage and file sharing vendor, Dropbox, is expanding its scope beyond photo management and document collaboration. He also mentioned that when Dropbox users work together on a PowerPoint, Excel or Word file, Dropbox will display visual cues to alert them when someone else edits and then syncs the changes. Dropbox also incorporates a chat service in the Microsoft software's interface.

For more information visit http://www.itworld.com/internet/413888/dropbox-diversifies-beyond-storage-photos-collaboration-apps

Mark Russinovich, Member, Microsoft Azure team, said he sees PaaS as “writing code that is integrated with a runtime environment, as opposed to code that is dropped into a virtual machine that's sitting on a bare-metal server, a legacy kind of server. That is the key differentiator point. The software knows something about the environment it is running in”. In a panel on "The Future of PaaS in an IaaS World" at Cloud Connect Summit, with a high level of disagreements among panel members, much has been revealed about PaaS.

To read more, visit the following link:

http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/platform-as-a-service/what-is-platform-as-a-service-experts-disagree/d/d-id/1141665