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Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Sarah Frier.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), the largest computer-services provider, said it will sell software over the Internet direct to corporate executives, going beyond the traditional model of doing business with chief information officers. IBM will market more than 100 cloud applications to heads of marketing, supply chain, human resources and others, changing the way it sells software as competition from Silicon Valley startups mounts.

It’s the company’s second big move into cloud delivery this month, following the purchase of SoftLayer Technologies Inc., a cloud-computing storage provider that will help it compete with Amazon.com Inc. Many of IBM’s customers are just starting to become interested in software delivered via the Internet, known as software-as-a-service or SaaS, said Marc Dietz, the director of SmartCloud solutions for IBM...

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

While much talk around information technology (IT) is around organizations and businesses in the private sector, the public sector—specifically governments—typically lags behind. So which areas of IT are government IT decision-makers focusing their efforts?

According to a recent study by IT research firm Gartner (IT), government IT spending will remain flat in 2013, projecting spending to total $449.5 billion—a slight decrease from 2012. Gartner indicated that mobile technologies, IT modernization and cloud computing are the top three focus areas for investment in 2013. The IT research firm also pointed to professional services and Big Data as areas of strong interest...

Grazed from Virtualization Practice. Author: Mike Kavis.

By now, enterprises understand the value of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), but there still is much confusion about Platform as a Service (PaaS). This confusion is one reason why enterprises have been slow to adopt PaaS. Why is there so much confusion? Because PaaS is still in its early days of maturity, but it is growing up really quickly right before our eyes.

In the early days, PaaS solutions were limited to running on a single stack and on the PaaS provider’s infrastructure. For example, Force.com required Apex, Google required Python (they have added other languages over the years), Heroku required Ruby, and Microsoft required .NET. Of the four, only Heroku did not require that customers run on their own infrastructure, but to use Heroku you had to run on AWS. Although many eager developers started building on top of PaaS, very few enterprises took the leap of faith because of the constraints...

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudBees, Inc., the Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) innovation leader, today announced that 18 new partners have joined the CloudBees Partner Ecosystem. New partners include Technology Partners, who provide add-on functionality for developers using the CloudBees Platform, and new Services Partners who provide expert professional services. Now over 60 partners strong, the CloudBees Ecosystem offers greater value across a wide array of service offerings for CloudBees customers.

The CloudBees Ecosystem gives development teams one-click access to a suite of build, test, deploy, monitor and management services. For Technology Partners, the CloudBees Ecosystem offers exposure to users of the fastest-growing Java PaaS solution on the market and the ability to easily extend their services to those users. For Services Partners, using the CloudBees Platform accelerates software delivery projects for clients, reduces the complexities of the development and deployment process and optimizes consultant productivity...

Grazed from HeraldOnline. Author: Editorial Staff.

PrivateCore, the private computing company, today announced the general availability of its PrivateCore vCage software beta release which protects data in use with full memory encryption. The beta release is designed to provide service providers (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS), government, financial trading and enterprises with early access to this unique technology that provides a new layer of security for achieving end-to-end data protection.

Service providers and enterprises face growing risks of physical access to sensitive data through the proliferation of outsourced IT infrastructures in untrusted environments including the cloud, co-location facilities and remote sites. Sensitive data in use is subject to compromise due to lawful requests, such as the recently disclosed NSA Prism program, as well as illegal compromise...

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.

OpenStack is a cloud computing infrastructure for building private clouds based on open-source software available for use under Apache open-source licensing terms. In the nearly three years since the OpenStack initiative was spun out from the confines of RackSpace and the NASA software development group, and in the eight months since the independent OpenStack Foundation was launched, the concept of users and developers reshaping how companies design, deploy and manage their infrastructure has grown from just that—a concept—to a fast-evolving model.

It's a model that is actually making deadlines and getting CIOs and IT execs to commit their companies' information technology structure to the model. The OpenStack project saw a lot of growth in 2012 from the new governance model, and the momentum is expected to continue this year and in the coming years...

Grazed from Forbes. Author: John Furrier.

The cloud industry of Abbott and Costello took place last week – Who’s on first..what’s on second and I don’t know who is on third? This was the cloud drama that happened last week in what is now a full blown fierce competitive marketplace for enteprise grade cloud industry. HP vs Amazon Web Services – folks the cloud wars are on. HP is taking the gloves off. Here is the story that unfolded this week and SiliconANGLE’s report. This is just the beginning of a hyper-competitive blood bath cloud market and the stakes are high. The battle for the enteprise

Amazon’s attack on the enterprise market has traditional infrastructure providers taking notice and in some cases making bold claims that some are saying may be dubious. Amazon is expected to generate more than $3B in AWS revenue this year, making it a large, and certainly one of the fastest growing infrastructure providers on the planet...

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

An IT organization of any size spends a lot of time looking at myriad dashboards tied to specific products and services in the hope that some larger truth will eventually make itself apparent. Of course, that rarely happens, which is why Datadog, a provider of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application for monitoring and analyzing IT infrastructure resources, has released Screenboards to unify the key performance indicators for IT organizations under a single set of dashboards.

According to Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel, the problem most organizations experience is that when it comes to managing IT, every new product added comes with a new set of tools for managing it. That creates not only a challenge in terms of all the people needed to manage all those different technologies, it requires IT organizations to dedicate IT infrastructure to run each of those tools...

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: David Linthicum.

The early cloud computing adopters, mostly website developers, made initial use of emerging public PaaS technology such as Heroku, Engine Yard, and Google App Engine. Driving this movement was the use of the instant sandbox, which allowed developers to begin writing their apps without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

However, enterprises practically ignored public PaaS for obvious reasons, such as security and governance. While enterprises have the desire to create a standard development and deployment platform for the enterprise, they cannot afford the risks of multitenant public cloud services. So how do you make PaaS work for your enterprise? The answer lies in understanding new models of delivery, such as private PaaS. Moreover, there are emerging patterns of use that provide more business agility...

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Crystal Bedell.

Running enterprise applications in a public cloud offers plenty of benefits. Chief among them: Renting infrastructure from an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider reduces capital expenditures and enables agility.

However, those benefits typically add a layer of complexity to application security. When running an application in-house, IT teams understand whether and how the infrastructure is secured. But the same can't always be said of IaaS environments...