Grazed from WSJ. Author: Rachael King.

Companies are turning increasingly to IT outsourcing as a means of supplementing and, in some cases, replacing internal hires. That’s especially true of application hosting. About 35% of companies say they’ll outsource more in this area during the next year to 18 months, according to a new report from global consulting firm Bluewolf. Cloud computing is partially driving this growth, as more companies use applications from the likes of Salesforce, Google and Workday.

Companies spend nearly half of their outsourcing budgets on application services including development, hosting and maintenance. Bluewolf predicts that as more companies rely on cloud providers, the outsourcing of applications will grow, whether it’s to providers who offer niche services or larger companies like Google or Microsoft…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Sullivan.

Most public cloud announcements focus on reduced rates for machine instances, new persistent storage options or the introduction of new services, while news about cloud development tools seems to get the short shrift. Still, Amazon and Microsoft offer many new tools that make it easier for developers to build, test and deploy instances in the cloud.

Developers looking for language-specific cloud tools to help streamline some of the more tedious cloud-instance and storage tasks have several options. Let’s take a look at what cloud development tools Microsoft and Amazon have to offer…

Grazed from Linux.com. Author: Jennifer Cloer.

Two weeks from today The Linux Foundation will debut CloudOpen. This is a really exciting time in cloud computing, a time when developers and open source projects are clearly leading the way in technology innovation. The building blocks are in place thanks to decades of open source software development, and everybody is looking for their edge.

CloudOpen will provide a vendor- and project-neutral venue for collaboration and advancing key technologies. CloudStack, Eucalyptus Systems, OpenStack, Gluster, oVirt, Chef, Puppet, Xen, KVM, OpenShift, Ceph and more will al be there, as will the vendors and users who want to understand how best to work with these projects…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Florence De Borja.

Because cloud computing is still in its early state, we can expect a few organizations taking advantage of being the first ones to take advantage of it. However, it is expected that by 2020 a lot of organizations are already in the clouds. Since is just around the corner, Forrester, an analyst group, says that the cloud computing industry will be worth around $150 billion by 2020, up by $115 billion from 2011. There will also be a great demand from business organizations as well as an increase in technology developments which will support cloud computing.

Processing power will also experience a rapid increase which will eventually reduce the price of cloud computing projects. It is also expected that supercomputing will experience a big boom by 2020. On the organization level, a new breed of Chief Information Officers will emerge as they will take charge of cloud computing directions on an enterprise scale…

Grazed from Equities.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

Wave Systems Corp. (NASDAQ: WAVX) today launched Wave Cloud, a cloud-based service for enterprise-wide management of self-encrypting drives (SEDs). The company’s new subscription-based service introduces a game-changing platform for enterprises that wish to rapidly deploy centrally-managed hardware-based data encryption on laptops — all without the complexity and cost associated with maintaining on-premise servers.

SEDs provide one of the best defenses against data breach. Based on the Opal specification published by the Trusted Computing Group, the drives are available from leading storage vendors at little to no incremental cost from a wide range of PC suppliers, including Dell, HP, Lenovo and others. Solid-state versions of SEDs are also available. Advantages over software encryption include better performance (because encryption happens on a chip, it doesn’t compete for processing cycles); faster deployment (unlike software, SEDs don’t require an initial encryption cycle); and enhanced security (encryption cannot be turned off or otherwise compromised by the end user)…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Karen Goulart.

For CIO George Reed, having the right enterprise cloud computing skills in his data center is a matter of life and death. No, really.

Reed is the CIO of Seven Corners Inc., a privately held global travel insurance provider in Carmel, Ind. Each day any number of the company’s 220,000 policy holders around the world could be calling on Seven Corners through its Web portals for help in a crisis.

That’s in addition to the 15,000 medical providers and eight insurance carriers who knock at the insurance provider’s portal doors. All of them have to be able to securely access what they need, anytime from anywhere…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Ilesfay Technology Group LLC (Ilesfay), a global leader in data replication solutions, announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued the company patent No 8,244,831 titled, "Method for the Preemptive Creation of Binary Delta Information within a Computer Network."

The technology, dubbed MatchMaking®, enables customers "to collaborate and share information in a way that was just not possible before," said Ilesfay CEO Chris McLennan. "Our unique approach allows Ilesfay to provide our customers with the highest-performing data-replication methods on the planet."…

CA Technologies and Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider, today announced that the companies are extending their strategic relationship in the U.S. to offer customers greater flexibility and choice for their enterprise-class cloud computing strategies.

Logicalis, a long-time CA Technologies customer, relies on several CA Technologies solutions to support its own cloud infrastructure, and as a Premier Service Provider partner, it offers a range of CA Technologies products to its end customers, including Nimsoft to deliver monitoring-as-a-service to its managed services customers. With the extension of this partnership, Logicalis’ customers can now select CA Automation Suite for Clouds from Logicalis’ cloud aggregation toolbox.

Today, Rackspace Hosting, the open cloud company, announced the release of Rackspace Private Cloud Software, powered by OpenStack – making it simple and easy for companies to install, test and run a multi-node OpenStack based private cloud environment. The software, code named “Alamo,” uses the same OpenStack compute platform, Nova, used to run Rackspace clouds and is available as a free download from the Rackspace website. This software is based upon Rackspace’s experience in deploying and operating OpenStack-based public and private clouds in a variety of environments including in Rackspace’s own datacenters as well as in external datacenters. The Rackspace Private Cloud is backed by an optional support offering.

The Rackspace Private Cloud Software combines the capabilities of public cloud with the customization, reliability and control advantages of a dedicated environment. Customers now have a simple way to install an OpenStack-based private cloud in their own datacenter, at Rackspace, or in a colocation facility.

Grazed from SocialPandas.  Author: PR Announcement

SocialPandas (www.socialpandas.com), a startup provider of social selling applications, today announced that it has closed a $1.5 million round of seed funding led by True Ventures, a premier early-stage investment firm. The oversubscribed round also includes prominent angel investments from former Salesforce.com, VMware, and Apple executives as well as the Alchemist Accelerator. The company will use the funds to fuel product development for a launch in 2013.

“Social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn represent enormous opportunities for new revenue streams for business-to-business (B2B) companies,” said Mark Trang, CEO & Co-Founder of SocialPandas. “Enterprises can track vanity metrics like Fans and Followers. However, no comprehensive tools exist for sales teams to discover new leads, engage top prospects, or optimize deal pipelines across social channels. Sales professionals are stuck using pre-social CRM tools, email, and phones while their customers are spending more time on social networks. We’re excited to bridge this gap with a platform built from ground-up that lets sales teams finally ‘speak social’ and compete in the social era.”