Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

Red Hat has been on an acquisition run with the aim of building an open source stack that leads the hybrid data center. The primary rival: VMware. How the Red Hat vs. VMware duel plays out remains to be seen, but Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, argued that open source will ultimately define the enterprise IT architectures of the future. I caught up with Whitehurst to talk cloud, open source and Red Hat's master plan. Here's a look at some of the key themes from my conversation with Whitehurst:

Recent acquisitions and the big picture. Red Hat recently acquired OpenStack integrator eNovance and Inktank, a software defined storage company known for Ceph, an enterprise platform. Whitehurst said that Red Hat "is looking to create an open source stack for infrastructure and platform as a service." Red Hat makes acquisitions not based on intellectual property as much as people and involvement with innovative open source projects like Ceph, an object and block storage platform...

Grazed from ARN. Author: Mike Gee.

The announcement, a year after the company globally launched the Fujitsu Cloud Initiative, is aimed at strengthening the company's commitment to unlocking the business innovation, cost efficiency and agility benefits of Cloud for its customers. Fujitsu said in a statement that it is well on its way to building a broad portfolio of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS); Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Integration Services. Having commited to a two-year investment of about $US2 billion in business innovation, social innovation and strengthening global delivery capabilities, the company has been bringing to market new offerings, deepening its deployments, and growing its customer base.

Fujitsu executive vice-president, solutions, global delivery, Cameron McNaught, said, ”Fujitsu has a vision of a Human Centric Intelligent Society, one where social and business innovation is driven by the intelligent use of information and communication technologies. "We see Cloud as the natural platform for delivering these new types of applications, which is reflected in both the increase we are seeing in cloud adoption and how it is becoming a standard part of IT service delivery models for many CIOs today...

Grazed from NewYork Times. Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle’s $5.3 billion deal for Micros Systems provides an uncertain forecast for shareholders in the database giant. Even if it’s the start of a new deal binge by Oracle’s chief, Lawrence J. Ellison, it’s not at a crazy valuation. But Mircos, a longtime partner, is more of an add-on than a way to supercharge Oracle’s effort in cloud computing.

Oracle is paying $68 a share in cash for the Micros, a maker of hotel and restaurant business technology systems. At a 24 percent premium to the undisturbed share price, it’s at about half the premium Priceline recently agreed to pay for the restaurant reservations site OpenTable, as one example...

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

John Finch, the CIO of the Bank of England, warned potential cloud users to be wary of financial promises made by cloud providers and urged them to worry about legal aspects, security, compliance, service level agreements (SLAs) and data scalability while planning out their cloud strategy.

“Do not, do not, do not let the bean counters determine your cloud strategy,” Finch warned delegates at Cloud World Forum in his keynote focusing on the practical realities of cloud computing. “I may sound like I'm in cloud-denial, but I am not. Cloud can deliver good value and I know of many use cases where cloud has been a real enabler,” Finch said...

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

This week, at its annual Discover user conference, Hewlett-Packard put cloud computing and big data on the top of the agenda, capitalizing on the heavy work it has been doing with these technologies. Recently, the company unified its cloud services under the Helion brand name, using the open-source OpenStack as a foundation.

The company continues to work on its software stack for big-data processing, called HAVEn (Hadoop, Autonomy, Vertica, enterprise security, apps). The company also plans to launch an online magazine, called Matter, designed to help top executives understand how best to drive business value through technology...

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Eric Lundquist.

Hewlett-Packard held press briefings on two new initiatives as the company's Discover conference drew toward a close this week. One briefing highlighted an HP Labs project aimed at reinventing enterprise computer architecture. The other briefing highlighted how HP is going "all in" on OpenStack. The OpenStack press briefing was the more important one.

OpenStack, a community-developed, open enterprise computing stack, represents a first chance for startups anxious to sell into the enterprise and a second chance for established vendors anxious to find their footing in an era when cloud computing is becoming the central computing engine for enterprises...

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Jeramiah Dooley.

It's hard to imagine a conversation that happens between C-Level enterprise executives without 'the cloud' coming up. While cloud computing is obviously nothing new, breaking through the noise and determining the best strategy is still a very real and difficult issue for CIOs. Everyone seems to be sharing a different opinion on the changing landscape of the cloud.

At the centre of the cloud debate we often have legacy hardware vendors trying to push their own agendas. They're doing everything they can to protect their market share by delaying the innovation of their customers. We know they're doing this because there are certain things surrounding cloud that are not being discussed...

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

A well-planned digital strategy is important for any firm looking to get ahead. There is ample opportunity for companies, especially midsize firms, to apply technologies such as cloud computing, social media, mobile and numerous other business analytics into their data infrastructures for long-term success. But are enough businesses thinking this way?

Understanding Convergence

An executive at Ovum recently suggested that firms do not sufficiently understand the importance of converged IT. This deficiency, reports TechDay, causes business leaders to make shortsighted decisions when planning their IT strategies, and ignore opportunities to improve the efficiency with which they manage and interpret information...

Grazed from IBTimes. Author: Jerin Mathew.

Reuters citing a source said the German company is planning to cut between 1,500 and 2,500 jobs. The company employs more than 66,500 people in more than 130 countries across the globe. The company on 14 May indicated that there would be target job cuts in the company, but it declined to say the exact number of redundancies.

"The number is not yet definite and there are still checks being made as to whether positions overlap or are unnecessary," the person with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. The source added that the cuts would affect all regions and areas. Nevertheless, SAP plans to create about 3,000 new jobs in 2014, leading to a net increase in the number of staff, according to the source...

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

IBM, after a sluggish start, is moving with real urgency in building up its cloud business, as I noted in a recent article. “IBM has made big moves and done some really good things,” said Daryl Plummer, an analyst at Gartner. “But the question now is, can it win business and make money in the cloud business?”

IBM is hardly alone in facing the economic challenge of cloud computing, in which companies buy computing delivered, remotely, as a service over the Internet. The more that computing shifts to the cloud, the less that corporate customers will buy conventional software and hardware for their own data centers...