Structure News: It's almost show time!

Where It's Structure Time November 13th, 2015 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about a cool tech conference happening next week, and some other stuff that's almost as important. STRUCTURE NEWS A LOOK BACK AT THE STATE OF THE CLOUD, AND A FEW NEW PREDICTIONS FOR 2015 It's finally here! Next week we'll put on Structure 2015 for the first time under our new company, and it's looking like a great show. Thanks to everybody who has already purchased a ticket, and if you haven't, I know a place you can. This week we invited Adrian Cockcroft of Battery Ventures to write a guest post previewing his now-annual "State of the Cloud" presentation (which he'll present Wednesday morning) and revisiting some of his predictions from last year. As might be expected, he did pretty well: but in a fast-moving industry such as this one, we'll have to come back again next year and see how his 2015 predictions work out. Structure 2015 takes place November 18th and 19th in San Francisco. Buy your tickets here. INDUSTRY NEWS BLUE COAT ACQUIRES CLOUD SECURITY STARTUP ELASTICA FOR $280M As more and more businesses wade into cloud computing services, technologies and companies that can help save them from themselves will only grow in value. Venturebeat reports that Blue Coat, a maker of hardware that helps companies understand what's running on their networks, will play $280 million for San Jose-based Elastica, which extends that visibility to cloud services. RACKSPACE ANNOUNCES BETTER THAN EXPECTED Q3 RESULTS, INCLUDING REVENUE OF $509M, PLANS $350M DEBT OFFERING For a while there, it looked like Rackspace was going to be in serious trouble, but it delivered some good news this week with its third-quarter earnings. As Techcrunch notes, initial reaction was mixed to Rackspace's better-than-expected earnings but hefty debt offering, perhaps because its growth rate continues to decline while Amazon Web Service's revenue skyrockets. WHAT DOES CISCO GAIN BY PARTNERING WITH ERICSSON? Cisco's announcement that it plans to hook up with Ericsson on a technology and services-sharing deal is just the latest in a series of partnerships the venerable networking company has struck this year in hopes of staying current as the shift to cloud computing changes demand for on-premises networking equipment. Fortune reports that Cisco is interested in Ericsson's mobile networking smarts and army of consultants, although I'm a little confused about what Ericsson is getting in return. FIERCE 15: DEL MONTE FOODS SET UP A BRAND-NEW, CLOUD-ONLY INFRASTRUCTURE IN LESS THAN A YEAR Sometimes being forced to start from scratch is the best opportunity you can have. Del Monte Foods had to scramble to implement its own infrastructure following a corporate split, and chose to migrate a to of on-premises software to an all-cloud infrastructure, as Fierce CIO shows in this case study. DELL'S EMC DEAL COULD FALL APART ON TAX RULE Believe it or not, the largest proposed corporate merger in tech history is a complicated matter. Recode reports that Dell insiders are concerned about what the IRS thinks about certain provisions of the deal, which could throw a wrench into the proceedings by making the deal significantly more expensive for Dell. HOW INSTAGRAM SOLVED ITS JUSTIN BIEBER PROBLEM Oh, the Belibers, capable of bringing even the most thoughtful startups to their knees. Wired revisits a fun story from Instagram's past about how fans of singer Justin Bieber would overwhelm its infrastructure with millions of likes. The solution, which we'll try to get Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger to expand on next week at Structure? "Denormalized counters."     BIG PICTURE When we set out to build this company five months ago, we weren't entirely sure what to expect. Sure, we knew that Structure was a well-known event that has been around basically since the beginning of the cloud-computing era, but as most of you know, any new venture requires you to accept a certain amount of risk. That's why it's so gratifying to see how the cloud community has responded to Structure 2015, with former big-name speakers like Google's Urs Hölzle, Facebook's Jay Parikh, and Intel's Diane Bryant enthusiastically signing up once they heard the event was coming back and press coverage planned from our official media partner, Fortune, as well as The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and TechCrunch. There are not very many cloud computing conferences organized by companies that aren't trying to sell you their cloud services, and we think that's an important function to provide to this community. That role becomes even more important as more and more businesses outside of Silicon Valley realize what cloud computing can do for their companies and a new generation of tech power brokers attempts to part those outsiders from their money in creative ways. Next week is going to be a great showcase of some of the best and brightest minds this world has yet produced, and we also hope you'll learn something about where this still amazingly new industry is headed. Thanks for your support of Structure, and we hope to see you in downtown San Francisco next week.       DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2015 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.