Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

The Apache Software Foundation, where Oracle sent OpenOffice in June after it adjured the stuff, said Tuesday that it will put out OpenOffice 3.4 in the first quarter whose code will all be under the Apache license, resolving lingering incompatibility issues.

It used what was ostensibly an open letter to the Open Document Format community to distance itself from the new German Team OpenOffice.com fork and its fund-raising attempts and warn it about misusing its trademark including "OpenOffice.org and all related marks."

It also said that given OpenOffice’s large ecosystem it’s "impossible to agree upon a single vision" so it’s not going to try and says it doesn’t "seek to be the only player. Instead we seek to offer a neutral and powerful collaboration opportunity." It talked about rising "above political, social and commercial differences" and claimed "Apache OpenOffice offers much more potential for OpenOffice.org than ‘just’ an end-user Microsoft Office replacement" but it’s unclear where it’s going with this happy talk…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Workday, the six-year-old SaaS ERP start-up co-founded by David Duffield after a resistant PeopleSoft finally fell to Oracle, is planning to IPO in the second half of next year, according to two unidentified Bloomberg sources. It’s supposed to want to raise $200 million-$500 million.

Workday, a threat to Oracle and SAP, is credited in some quarters with provoking SAP to spend $3.4 billion on SuccessFactors, a direct competitor, a price that could tickle Workday’s valuation.

It has raised in the neighborhood of $190 million over repeated rounds, including an F round in October that reportedly included Michael Dell and Jeff Bezos. Duffield has also supplied millions of its bankroll…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

DataDirect Networks (DDN), the world’s largest privately held information storage company, today announced that the company has been named for the second year in a row as one of the 100 fastest-growing private companies in the Los Angeles area — the second largest metropolitan region in the United States — by the Los Angeles Business Journal. DDN was one of only 14 companies on the list with more than $150M in annual revenue.

"We are very pleased to again be recognized as one of the fastest-growing companies in greater Los Angeles," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and cofounder, DataDirect Networks. "In today’s era of Big Data and Cloud Computing, organizations are seeking to derive maximum value from the massive amount of information they have to process every day, and DDN delivers the products and technology to help them do just that. Around the world, our solutions are helping scientists achieve important discoveries, businesses bring best-selling products to market faster and more profitably, governments reduce crime, and consumers experience more fun and life-like entertainment. It is a very exciting time to be in the field of technology, and we are thrilled to be at the center of it."…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author:  Howard M. Cohen.

Misinformation and a lack of understanding have delayed some companies from obtaining the advantages of cloud computing.

With the explosion of information regarding cloud computing, a lot of people think that everybody knows more than they want to about the technology. Yet according to many IT solution providers who are working with customers to help them transition to the cloud, the biggest issue holding them back is a lack of understanding about what exactly is cloud computing.

“Not understanding the cloud is holding them back,” said Connie Arentson, president of Heartland Technology Solutions. “The fact is they’ve got their infrastructure in-house with all their data on it. There’s a security in knowing where it’s at and having it there.”…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

EMC is going to raise the price of hard disk drives 5%-15% starting the first of the year.

It said in an advisory to its channel that the price hikes will last for the duration of the crisis that has seen an estimated one-third of the world’s HDD supply effectively drown in the unforgiving Thai floods.  That probably works out to something like 50 million-70 million drives…

Grazed from Cloud Tweaks.  Author:  Jeff Norman.

Wars. Feuds between world leaders. The frozen-in-motion bull of Wall Street, and the solemn Washington Mall on Capitol Hill. Clouds from nature elegantly rise above it all. They’re too occupied with floating to tend to the political dramas taking place beneath them.

For better or worse, the cloud formed by gifted human ingenuity might be lassoed down to Earth’s governmental concerns sooner than we think.

The White House’s current Chief Information Officer, Steven VanRoekel, has spearheaded Washington’s move into the assets of cloud computing. On December 8, VanRoekel announced the Obama Administration’s plans to integrate substantially more cloud-computing services into standard governmental operations…

Grazed from PR.com.  Author: PR Announcement.

The time when IT was just a support function to a few businesses around the world is over. Global politics and the global economy are being shaped by IT. For the IT leader to survive and sustain in this environment they must lead by consistently changing the strategies and re-create IT. This new era brings with it urgent and compelling forces : the cloud, social, mobility and an explosion in information.

Fleming Gulf Conferences launches Cloud Computing Imperative 2012 to be held on 12-13 March followed by a cloud security workshop programme on 14 March in Dubai – UAE, which will set the stage for IT specialists from public, private and government entities to network with industry peers, share experiences and learn how to view and implement Cloud and its security…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

I’m often taken aback by businesses that are unaware of the influence of cloud computing when it’s about to hit them upside the head.

We saw this before, back in the early days of the Web. Some businesses got it and thrived. Others did not, and they had to play catch-up or shut their doors. Indeed, a great business skill is to understand when technology will require you to move in different directions, and cloud computing is another instance of that shift.

What are they missing? I have a few items for the list.

Reduction in IT overhead creates a price advantage. How can your competition sell its product at the price it does and still make money? Well, instead of putting $50 million a year into IT, the company has cut its costs in half through the use of cloud-based services. Or perhaps it avoided an investment in that new data center. Instead, thanks to the use of the cloud, your competitor passed that savings on as lower prices, which increased sales and led to higher profits…

Grazed from InfoBoom.  Author:  Douglas Bonderud.

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) often hear the refrain that cloud computing is an essential move if they want to cut costs and become more agile. Often lacking, however is training necessary for the deployment of new technology, leaving SMBs with fewer benefits than expected. Now, "cloud education" is becoming a priority for businesses of all types.

Training a New Breed of IT 

Businesses looking to operate in a cloud environment need two things–an effective provider and IT staff knowledgable about how the cloud operates. According to an article at Technocrati, the non-profit trade association for the IT industry CompTIA has now introduced a Cloud Essentials Program, which will provide IT professionals with the training necessary to manage cloud resources effectively. The move is a nod to the separate and distinct channel that cloud education occupies, that is, one that isn’t satisfied by knowledge of localized data best practices or those relating to legacy systems…

Grazed from GigaOm.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Google today announced that it is ending its Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, a joint program with IBM and the National Science Foundation that gave researchers access to a massive Hadoop cluster on which to run their data-intensive projects.

The project kicked off in 2007 via a partnership with a handful of major universities as a way to introduce students and researchers to webscale computing, and broadened its scope to the entire scientific community by getting on board with the NSF’s Cluster Exploratory program in 2008. However, what was once novel has become fairly commonplace, so Google is ending the ACCI altogether…