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/

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Mike Wheatley.

Google Inc. on Thursday threw its weight behind the open-source Cloud Foundry Foundation, the organization that heads up development of the open source cloud platform Cloud Foundry. Google has signed on as a gold member of the foundation, joining companies such as EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co., IBM Corp., Pivotal Software Inc., SAP SE and VMware Inc.

Cloud Foundry is an open-source Platform as a Service that offers developers a choice of clouds, development frameworks, and application services for building and running apps at scale on public and private clouds. The platform bills itself as the industry-standard platform for developing cloud applications, and Google’s decision to back the project adds further weight to those claims...

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

Finding customer service help online can be a pain. Filtering through a knowledge base to find the right answer to your question can be an exercise in fighting with nested frequently asked questions documents. Microsoft is aiming to help by making it easier for companies to create intelligent bots that can answer common questions.

The QnA Maker, launched in beta on Tuesday, will let users train an automated conversation partner on existing frequently-asked-questions content. After that information is fed in, the service will create a bot that will respond to customer questions with the content from the knowledge base...

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: R.Danes.

With the dizzying array of technology products available to enterprises today, managers and CTOs may wonder where to start. Do they really need five clouds, a plethora of Software as a Service applications and an integration platform to do business in the Digital Age? We spoke to one engineer about how to get the most out of technology at the ready with culture, rigor and teamwork.

Shaheeda Nizar, senior director of engineering at GoDaddy Operating Company LLC, spoke at the CloudNOW 5th Annual “Top 10 Women in Cloud” Innovation Awards about her team-leading experience at GoDaddy. CloudNOW is a non-profit consortium of leading women in cloud computing and converging technologies...

Grazed from CNBC. Author: Ari Levy.

At Amazon.com's annual cloud computing gala last month called re:Invent, recruiters from on-demand learning company Pluralsight were on the hunt for experts to teach coding. Pluralsight offers a library of over 5,000 online courses for software developers and IT pros to gain new skills, ranging from learning popular open-source languages and big data tools on Amazon Web Services to mastering the latest in cybersecurity and designing mobile games.

The explosive growth of technology platforms like AWS has driven Pluralsight's expansion, enabling the 12-year-old company to reel in a recent round of $30 million at a valuation exceeding $1 billion, CEO Aaron Skonnard told CNBC.com in an exclusive interview. Pluralsight, based near Salt Lake City, is using the cash as part of its push beyond individual subscriptions and into big businesses, where a host of new web and infrastructure technologies as well as cyberthreats are forcing developers into a constant state of learning...

Grazed from EETimes. Author: Rick Merritt.

With a simple video, Amazon has set in motion a chain of forces that could drive RFID into the mainstream and help Amazon pull further ahead of Google. It’s just one move, and nothing may come of it, but it sends out many ripples. The video creates expectations among consumers that they should be able to avoid check-out lines. It puts big grocery chains on notice that they need to figure out how to use RFID tags to create such stores before their competitors do.

Grocery stories won’t want to make this move. It will cost a lot to get items tagged, buy scanners, and figure out how to deal with inevitable conflicts when customers complain that they were charged for the wrong items. But the ones that do it will have a significant competitive advantage. However the struggles come out for grocery stores, RFID wins. It moves from use in the industrial Internet of Things to the consumer world big time...

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Huawei and the Abu Dhabi Marine Operating Company (ADMA-OPCO), a major producer of oil and gas from the offshore areas of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, today jointly announced that ADMA-OPCO's Cloud Ready Data Center is now fully operational at the Huawei Global Energy Summit 2016 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The Cloud Ready Data Center is expected to help ADMA-OPCO address the needs of long-distance transmission and processing of a massive volume of data during offshore oil exploration and production. The Cloud Ready Data Center will also enhance the security of critical business data and applications for ADMA-OPCO...

Grazed from ChinaPost. Author: Editorial Staff.

US software giant Oracle said Saturday that it has sealed its $9.3 billion acquisition of cloud computing company NetSuite. Oracle said that a majority of shares -- 53 percent -- owned by eligible stockholders in the vote had been tendered. The acquisition is to be completed Monday, the company said in a statement.

The takeover agreement was announced in late July at a price of $109 per share, but it attracted criticism because Oracle executive chairman Larry Ellison and his family own a major stake in NetSuite of nearly 40 percent. Under conditions of the deal, the transaction had to be approved by a majority of small, independent NetSuite shareholders, which excluded Ellison...

Read more from the source @ http://www.chinapost.com.tw/business/company-focus/2016/11/07/483162/Oracle-seals.htm

Grazed from SeattleTimes. Author: Angel Gonzalez.

Amazon.com said Monday that it’s commissioning a new wind farm in Ohio to help offset the power needs of its cloud computing business. Amazon Web Services, as the tech giant’s cloud computing division is known, has vowed to fulfill at least half of the energy needs of its big data centers with renewable energy by 2017.

That’s up from 40 percent in 2016, a goal that Amazon says it is on track to meet or exceed. The data centers that house the computing power and storage that Amazon and other cloud giants rent out have been called out by environmentalists as a growing source of emissions. Amazon’s new wind farm will be in Hardin County, Ohio, 70 miles northwest of Columbus, and when it opens in December 2017 it will be its second such facility in the state...

Read more from the source @ http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-orders-new-wind-farm-in-ohio-to-help-power-cloud-business/

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

The third-quarter results are in and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a commanding lead in the worldwide public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market. "In many ways, public IaaS is the poster child of cloud computing and in that segment Amazon/AWS absolutely dominates the market, with a worldwide market share of 45 percent in Q3," said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research Group, in a research note sent to Datamation. It's an impressive feat, given how quickly rival cloud platforms are growing.

"That market share has been achieved despite Microsoft and Google both continuing to grow their cloud service revenues at well over 100 percent per year," continued Dinsdale. Nonetheless, Amazon is still more than twice as big as Salesforce, Microsoft and IBM combined...

Read more from the source @ http://www.datamation.com/cloud-computing/amazon-leads-in-public-iaas-ibm-has-the-private-cloud-edge.html