Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Oracle executives on Tuesday revealed the results of years’ worth of engineering and development efforts on its IaaS public cloud and announced a new bare metal cloud database service and an international geographic expansion. Oracle is typically not considered one of the top IaaS public cloud leaders, but the company has hopes of competing in the market by combining its infrastructure services – which focus on its core database services – with a suite of application development and software as a service offerings.

At its Cloud World event in New York, company executives laid out their vision of how they will take on competitors such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce.com. Oracle founder and now CTO Larry Ellison once famously denounced the cloud, questioning whether the technology was just hype...

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Google has announced the launch of Cloud Key Management Service (KMS), which enables admins to manage their encryption keys in Google Cloud Platform without maintaining an on-premise management system. The news marks Google’s entry into this particular security arena, following Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft who launched such initiatives as far back as 2014 and 2015 respectively.

“Customers in regulated industries, such as financial services and healthcare, value hosted key management services for the ease of use and peace of mind that they provide,” wrote Maya Kaczorowski, Google Cloud Platform product manager in a blog post. “Cloud KMS offers a cloud-based root of trust that you can monitor and audit...

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Chris Burt.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) acquired San Diego-based cybersecurity firm harvest.ai for a reported $19 million sometime in early 2016, investor Fred Wang has confirmed. Wang, a general partner with harvest.ai investor Trinity Ventures, declined to confirm the terms of the deal, but told GeekWire “it was a good win for the investors and for the management team.”

“The company works in an area called data-leakage prevention,” Wang said. “At one time a lot of companies got into it, but most of them didn’t get much traction. Harvest.ai automated looking at file-access patterns to detect which are normal and which are not.” It does this by using neural nets, natural-language processing, and other AI algorithms, and tracking data storage and access, and components, applications, and users on the network...

Grazed from ChannelInsider. Author: Mike Vizard.

With Amazon Web Services now several times larger than rival cloud service providers combined, the presence of AWS across the channel is ubiquitous. In fact, at the recent AWS re:invent 2016 conference, the company revealed that in the last year, it has added more than 10,000 partners. Competition between partners across the AWS cloud ecosystem is already fierce.

AWS is also starting to extend its influence beyond the public cloud, and a new AWS Lambda service can run compute functions locally. At the same time, AWS is recruiting partners interested in moving workloads that previously ran VMware in a local data center environment into AWS. In addition, AWS is targeting workloads running on Oracle databases that can now run on a new Postgres database service that's compatible with existing Oracle applications...

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.

New-generation companies aren't the only ones bringing IT innovation into the marketplace. IBM, the granddaddy of all IT companies that has been in business since before World War I (1911), continues to be quietly inventive and probably doesn't get enough credit for its own innovations.

Big Blue revealed Jan. 9 that it broke the U.S. corporate patent record in 2016 with 8,088 patents granted to its inventors in a single calendar year. This marks the first time any company or organization has earned more than 8,000 patents in one year, and it is the 24th consecutive year that IBM has been No. 1 on the list...

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Brandon Bulter.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) recently announced a new Managed Services product for its public cloud that aims to ease migration of legacy enterprise applications. AWS Managed Services is a series of infrastructure operations management tools meant to provide ongoing management, support, monitoring, and security of an AWS cloud environment.

It’s delivered jointly by AWS employees and certified AWS partners and is meant to serve AWS’s largest clients who are planning to migrate workloads to Amazon’s public cloud. Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Lydia Leong says most workloads can be broken down into two categories:...

Grazed from StarOnline. Author: Matt Day.

In a Seattle-area conference room earlier this year, Washington state's two largest employers started sketching out the future. In a daylong series of meetings at Microsoft's campus, engineers from the software company knocked heads and keyboards with their counterparts at Boeing. The goal: tapping in to Microsoft's Azure, the software maker's network of on-demand computing power, to build a new generation of software.

Boeing for years has made tools, from paper navigational aids to maintenance software, that help its aerospace customers fly and take care of their planes. An engineer with a record book and a manual knows roughly when to replace a part. But an engineer equipped with software that can help make sense of decades of maintenance data could do a more precise job, the thinking goes, improving aircraft maintenance and fuel consumption. Boeing is hoping to build web-based variants of its aviation analytics tools on Microsoft's Azure...

Grazed from DailyO. Author: Javed Anwer.

Adobe is a world leader in imaging software, with photographers and designers using its products. The more professional ones, with deep pockets, use Photoshop. The hobbyists opt for Lightroom — a standalone program you can buy for your computer and then use. But, like all other software companies, Adobe too is interested in cloud computing.

It doesn’t want people to buy its software. It wants them to subscribe to it, which is a more lucrative business. The subscription means a steady sum of revenue every month. Also, the entry cost is low. The Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) — that gives users both Photoshop and Lightroom — costs around Rs 500 per month in India. Almost all software worth their salt are moving to the subscription model. They call it SaaS — software as a service...

Read more from the source @ http://www.dailyo.in/technology/adobe-photoshop-lightroom-cloud-computing-apple-netflix-subscription-apps/story/1/14773.html

Grazed from CIO. Author: Editorial Staff.

Wondering what to have for Christmas dinner? AllRecipes.com will be a popular site to check this holiday season … and this year it’s using Microsoft Azure’s cloud. AllRecipes, founded in 1997 and owned by Meredith Corp., has undertaken a two-year migration to Azure, the IaaS public cloud. AllRecipes services 1.5 billion visitors each year who view an average of 95 recipes per second, 66% of which are done on mobile devices.

The company’s load is cyclical: On a Sunday afternoon there is 60% more traffic on the website compared to a Monday morning. Just like a retailer, the holiday season is AllRecipe’s crunch time. Eight weeks in November and December including five days in particular – Christmas, Thanksgiving, the day before each and the Super Bowl – create the largest surge in traffic...

Grazed from WinBuzzer. Author: Sead Fadilpasic.

The predictions are courtesy of Rob Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist at Microsoft. He believes that the energy sector will be a primary benefactor of green tech, relying more and more on renewable sources. According to Bernard, the world will continue the struggle with water shortages in 2017, raising awareness on the issue. Furthermore, we will increasingly use data to make sense of natural developments while leveraging cloud-based technologies in the process.

IoT and Cloud Computing will begin to transform utility energy management

Bernard first prediction is about energy management. He states that the existing infrastructures will need to cope with the increasing amount of energy produced. As a result, IoT and cloud computing will be in the forefront, helping manage energy collection and distribution. “2017 will see an increased investment by utilities in technology to leverage data, through IoT solutions and cloud computing, to make energy management more predictable, flexible and efficient.”...

Read more from the source @ http://winbuzzer.com/2016/12/19/microsoft-predicts-four-green-tech-developments-in-2017-xcxwbn/