Grazed from eWeek.  Author:  Darryl K. Taft.

Oracle announced a new version of its Java application server, Oracle WebLogic Server, 12c, which enables enterprises to better integrate cloud computing into their IT mix.

As the center piece of Oracle’s Cloud Application Foundation, and a core part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family, Oracle WebLogic Server continues to deliver innovative capabilities for building, deploying and running Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications. It also features enhancements to help customers and partners lower their total cost of ownership and derive more value from their current application infrastructure, while accelerating the development cycle and reducing time to market for their applications…

 

Grazed from Reuters.  Author:  Michael Shields.

Germany’s SAP announced a $3.4 billion cash deal to buy U.S. web-based software company SuccessFactors, joining the scramble among technology firms to offer cloud-computing services to businesses.

SAP said on Saturday it would pay $40 per share for SuccessFactors, a premium of 52 percent over both its Friday closing price and the one-month volume-weighted average price, making it expensive for any rival bidder that might want to put in a counter bid.

SuccessFactors, which first went public at $10 a share four years ago, makes human resources software used by companies to review employee performance, It competes with Taleo Corp and Kenexa Corp…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Brady Reiter.

With cloud computing adoption and growth well established, more cloud vendors are entering the market and differentiating themselves by providing specialized services that focus on specific customers, geographies, applications or service models. Cloud services focused on optimizing business-critical applications make sense for enterprise customers looking for high-performance, highly available infrastructures.

But as a cloud customer, how do you know if your managed cloud provider truly has a specialized touch when it comes to optimizing, for example, BI applications from Oracle or ERP solutions from Microsoft?

Generic cloud infrastructure is insufficient for the demands of business-critical applications. IT executives seeking the efficiencies of cloud computing for critical enterprise applications need to evaluate the overall application expertise of their cloud infrastructure providers and assess their application expertise and their ability and flexibility to optimize their cloud infrastructure for business-critical applications. Application optimization needs to be addressed across the entire technology stack, from the physical hardware to the service delivery architecture to the application…

Grazed from USNews and World Report.  Author: Michael Morella.

With the launch of Apple’s iCloud system in October, many consumers got their first clear glimpse of the future of computing. Giving users the ability to store their music, photos, and data online and call it up on any of their computers or mobile devices, iCloud has all the benefits of a hard drive without any of the bulk. In recent years, more and more businesses have been embracing so-called cloud computing, and many market analysts and technophiles forecast that the concept will revolutionize the way companies and consumers use technology (and make a lot of money for some firms and investors along the way).

In essence, cloud computing means doing business over the Web rather than keeping it on location. That might mean that one company pays another for use of its servers, or to store digital information at an off-site data center, or to control and maintain its software instead of having the expense of an in-house IT department. The idea is that computing "be made available to people anywhere, anytime, like electricity or utilities," says Venky Ganesan, managing director of Globespan Capital Partners, a venture capital firm that invests in a range of technologies…

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

Back in the olden days, when cloud was still a young thing and not everybody’s middle name, back before the Apotheker distractions and false trails, and before HP, in catch-up mode, started indiscriminately trying to be all things cloud to everybody, it simply wanted to sell its widgetry into the cloud.

That still seemed to be the key takeaway from the jumble of programs and widgetry it announced in Vienna on Wednesday where at least part of its message was a come-on to service providers and resellers.

It wants service providers using its stuff in public, private and hybrid deployments and is willing to educate third parties, even college kids, to help. Only the message gets watered down because HP talks in the same breath about enterprises and government like maybe they’re direct accounts and although it seemed to want to focus on hybrid clouds it couldn’t help throwing in public and private clouds too to make sure it’s touched all the bases…

Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Liana B. Baker.

Zynga Inc, which plans to go public in two weeks, on Friday slashed its value by more than 30 percent to $9 billion, hoping to avoid the fate of other recent Internet IPOs that have disappointed after stock market debuts.

The pricing values the maker of Facebook games as high as $9.04 billion, whereas just two weeks ago a filing listed its value, based on a third party assessment, at $14.05 billion.

"Given what’s transpired in the markets over the several months and overall macro uncertainly, it seems like Zynga is trying to take a practical and prudent approach to the deal to make it seem more appetizing to investors," said Robert W. Baird & Co analyst Colin Sebastian…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

According to a recent Cisco report, annual global data center IP traffic will reach 4.8 zettabytes (that’s 4.8 million petabytes) by 2016. In 2015, global data center IP traffic will reach 402 exabytes (that’s 402,000 petabytes) per month. What’s more, global data center IP traffic will increase fourfold over the next five years. Overall data center IP traffic will grow 33 percent per year from 2010 to 2015.

Cloud computing is driving much of this growth, both from business and consumer usage. "The evolution of cloud services is driven in large part by users’ expectations to access applications and content anytime, from anywhere, over any network, and with any device," the Cisco report says. Indeed, by 2014, more than 50 percent of all workloads will be processed in the cloud…

Grazed from Information Week.  Author: Doug Henschen.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff loves to map out the arc of enterprise IT history during his keynotes, narrating the evolution from mainframe to client-server to the rise of the Internet and on to today. He did it again this week at the company’s packed, 10,000-attendee-strong Cloudforce event in New York. And as he’s been doing all year, he presented social networking and cloud computing as inevitable next steps for IT.

Benioff has adroitly positioned Salesforce.com at the center of both of these trends, but the social part is actually a fairly recent development. The company spent 12 out of its 13 years in business leading the no-software, software-as-a-service movement. Subscriptions for SaaS-based CRM are still the core business, but between last year’s launch of the Twitter-like Chatter service and this year’s acquisition of social media monitoring company Radian6, Salesforce is trying to cast itself as the innovator to turn to transition to a socially connected business approach…

While giving away your software for free may not sound like the best strategy, Rackspace (RAX) believes it will help accelerate the industry in the long run. The company also believes its dedication to customer support — not pure technology — is what gives it an edge over the growing pool of much-larger rivals, which include giants Amazon (AMZN) and Verizon (VZ).

I recently caught up with Graham Weston, chairman and co-founder of Rackspace, to find out how the web-hosting provider has made customer support a core part of its business. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation, which took place at the company’s new office in San Francisco:…

Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: Jennifer Baker.

A recent survey indicated that 70 percent of Europeans have concerns about their online data and how well companies secure it and now two Swedish companies, Severalnines and City Network, have begun promoting their newly merged service as "a safe haven from the reaches of the U.S. Patriot Act." Under the U.S. Patriot Act, data from European users of U.S.-based cloud services can secretly be seized by U.S. law enforcement agencies.

"We believe that a service owned and operated locally in the E.U., and fully compliant with E.U. data protection laws, will be very attractive for European companies. U.S. companies with European operations will also benefit from the lower latency of a locally hosted solution," said City Network chairman Johan Christenson.

This gap in the market is also being exploited by other firms such as DNS Europe, Colt and MESH. The latter strongly promotes its location in Germany and "data separation in strict compliance with German data protection laws."…