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How India shops on mobile (Infographic) - courtesy #inmobi

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Microsoft is bringing SQL Server to Linux  

http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/07/microsoft-is-bringing-sql-server-to-linux/

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Price war and Price drop in Azure Cloud over the years

Azure, AWS and all the other major cloud providers are in a massive price war which is the key factor why prices are going down. 

If you had purchased basic cloud storage in 2012, you would have paid $0.14 per GB.  In 2013, that price was $0.07 per GB.  At the end of 2014, it’s went down to $0.03 per GB and 2015 we saw it hitting $0.02.   Similarly, an A3 VM would have cost $0.48 per hour in 2012, to reach $0.34 and is now running at $0.29 per hour.

I expect the price drops to continue in 2016 as Microsoft competes with Amazon and others for market share and the economies of hardware, storage, etc. continue to improve over time.

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What does the colour of your logo tell about your company?

Loved reading this infographic from colourfast.

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Over 1,500 developers packed the main hall of Build 2014 for a chance to see Xamarin CTO and cofounder Miguel de Icaza talk about the transformation of mobil...

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Open Source Core .NET framework & .NET core for Linux/OSX

After hearing lot about the Microsoft's new Visual Studio 2015 lately and in the last weeks TechEd 2014 in Bangalore. There was a general buzz around the Open source initiatives Microsoft is driving around and how as an organisation there is a wider transformation in OSS acceptance was taking place.

Its indeed a great strategy that Microsoft has adopted by making the .NET framework Open source and also by making it available for the Linux and OSX communities. I am not surprised on the larger objective of taking Microsoft solutions to the people who uses it and make them feel comfortable about it.

 With the .NET Foundation – which is an independent organisation designed to foster the development and collaboration of open source technologies for .NET.  Microsoft has now open sourced ASP.NET, EF, Web API, NuGet and the "Roslyn" C# and VB compilers under it.

Now what does this latest announcement means; Microsoft is open sourcing the .NET Core Runtime, which means everything needed to execute .NET code – including the CLR, Just-In-Time Compiler (JIT), Garbage Collector (GC), and core .NET base class libraries. The beauty is all these will be fully supported by Microsoft, unlike many of the other OSS platforms.

The best part for the developers is the availability of a free version of Visual Studio tool, known as the VS Community Edition. So its time to cheer, we have more open source in Microsoft than just the Azure.

Read more on Visual Studio 2015 at http://www.visualstudio.com/

More on .NET from Scots blog at https://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/announcing-open-source-of-net-core-framework-net-core-distribution-for-linux-osx-and-free-visual-studio-community-edition

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Microsoft introduces on-premise system designed to sync up with its Azure public cloud computing services to form hybrid clouds. This Azure cloud-in-a-box offering, available next month, uses the same software that powers Microsoft’s Azure public cloud - the HyperV hypervisor, Windows Systems Center and Azure Pack - and runs on hardware supplied by Dell. 

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Microsoft Azure introduces StorSimple virtual appliance on the cloud, this is a revolutionary technology and brings a new dimension to enterprise storage needs.

StorSimple is a physical storage appliance available for customers to deploy a storage hardware on their premise. This appliance can work on-premise and provide an extended unlimited storage capacity along with cloud. 

New StorSimple appliance 8000 series and the virtual appliance can work seamlessly and can act as an Instant recovery option.

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform offerings include private cloud and virtualization technologies, as well as Windows Server operating system, System Center IT management, and Forefront security products

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Sysfore in the Top 20 Most Promising Cloud Computing Companies

Sysfore has been closely watched by lot of cloud analyst, CIO's, Technocrats on its continuous and committed focus on cloud focus. Today Sysfore is considered as one of the best cloud partners in India. Since the launch of Azure globally, Sysfore has been betting big on Microsofts strong focus on Azure services. 

From a Platform As A Service(PaaS) to a strong player in the Infrastructure As A service(IaaS), windows azure today has already reached the No. 2 cloud services in the world within a short span.

Our azure partnership with Microsoft goes back to the time it was launched in India. With Sysfore's decade old expertise on building enterprise web applications capability, re-engineering or migrating a business to cloud is the much wanted service by most of the partners.

Read more about Sysfore being ranked in the Top 20 Cloud Computing companies in India http://t.co/VfLFA6I6Lq

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Sudhakar Singh:Sysfore Technologies: Enabling a Smooth Transit to the Azure Platform :The cloud computing market in India is expected to see a ten-fold increase by 2015, from today’s estimated market size.

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A cappella by Penn Masala - Evolution of Bollywood Music

I stumbled upon this wonderful South Asian a cappella group called Penn Masala. Gr8! Indian fusion.

Being a great fan of Alaa Wardi, I was glad to see and hear more talents in this unique front.

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How to find and use your Windows Azure cloud trial pass code?

Microsoft has been giving away trial passes to developers & students. I have been receiving queries from lot of people on how to find and consume the trial pass code.

For those who attended the largest Azure cloud conference in India last week 20th-21st March in Bangalore, the below screenshot shows how to find the pass code from the USB drive they received at the conference. 

Once you open the file, you get the pass code like in the below screenshot.

With the pass code go to http://www.windowsazurepass.com/ website. Give your country code and pass code. Once the pass code is validated, then it will ask you to login using the Microsoft account.

If the user doesn't have a Microsoft Account, sign-up for a new Microsoft Account ( aka. Windows Live ID )  https://signup.live.com/signup.aspx?lic=1

Once you are logged in, then  it will ask you to provide your First Name, Last Name and the user will have to agree to the Azure terms and conditions. 

If this step is successful, then it will show a welcome note with Congrats!. Below screenshot for reference.

Once the above step is completed, then the user will need to login to the Azure Management portal with the same user credentials given.

https://manage.windowsazure.com/

Now you can enjoy the power of cloud by creating your VM's and scale them.

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Google cloud and the open price war with the new Sustained use model - "Reduce..."

On March 25th Google announced its one of the biggest price reduction on the various cloud offerings. If you look into detail the prices got reduced as below;

Compute (32% less)

Storage (68% less)

BigQuery (85% less)

Google announced new sustained-use pricing for compute services that will offer a simpler and more flexible approach as against the reserved instance pricing from AWS. Sustained-use pricing will discount the on-demand baseline hourly rate automatically as a particular instance is used for a larger percentage of the month — tiering the hourly rate down as you hit 25%, 50%, and 75% of time in a month. At 100% usage, customers will save 30% on Google baseline rates. See below picture for an example*

Sustained use pricing still look attractive, even if you compare it against a 1year reserved instance. 

*Picture courtesy Rightscale

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SAP HANA – Production Ready on AWS With up to 244 GB of RAM

A fully-supported version of the SAP HANA environment is now available on the AWS cloud. SAP has certified this version for production workloads in a single-node setup and you can count on it for all of your HANA-backed SAP Business Warehouse (BW) and OLAP scenarios.

Launch these instances from; http://marketplace.saphana.com/New/SAP-HANA-%3A-infrastructure-subscription-by-AWS/p/1871

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WhatsApp reach in geographies! - Comparison of social applications reach in geographies

Today Whatsapp is 450 Million and signing up a Million every day. The below infographic is an year old at 419 Million. The reason why Facebook had to acquire Whatsapp is the reach which, it will get automatically by the acquisition.

WhatsApp was much more popular than Facebook in several large developing markets. In India, Brazil, and Mexico WhatsApp is their most used messaging app, compared to Facebook. Those are big countries with tons of users that Facebook needs.

Courtesy - Jana mobile, Onavo.

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A great read on the indian e-commerce space. I am glad to see the number were 30% new customers has been added to the e-shoppers list. People still look for quality product and not just the deals. Footwear, Apparels seems to be big hit, consumer durables still a thumbs down. As always mobile phones are the biggest sellers.