Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Virtustream, Inc., a leading cloud solutions provider, today announced that it will open an office in San Francisco. The new space is in response to increased interest in the company and its offerings from potential customers and partners, an indication of Virtustream’s success selling enterprise cloud computing solutions that combine superior private cloud performance guarantees with the economics and elasticity of a public cloud…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud computing will be a key driver of net new IT spending over the next five years as public cloud service providers and the adopters of private cloud environments invest in the supporting infrastructure. According to a new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC), overall spending by public cloud service providers on storage hardware, software, and professional services will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.6% from 2010 to 2015, while enterprise spending on storage for the private cloud will experience a CAGR of 28.9%. By 2015, combined spending for public and private cloud storage will be $22.6 billion worldwide…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author:  PR Announcement.

Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, along with Accelera Solutions, Inc., an IT solutions provider specializing in virtualization solutions, today announced that it has been awarded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Server Hosted Virtual Desktops and Applications (SHVDA) indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract. The contract, which has a potential five-year performance period with a total estimated value of $25 million at $5 million per year, began this year…

Grazed from Government Technology.  Author:  Sarah Rich.

Two emerging technology trends in the public sector — social networking and cloud computing — have now been combined in IBM’s recently released SmartCloud Social Collaboration for Government, a private cloud computing service for government agencies.

The service, officially introduced last week, is Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) compliant and designed to keep data in a private or community cloud, meaning that no one outside the government agency using the service would have access to the data, said Chip Emmet, manager of social collaboration for IBM government and public sector…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author:  Laurie McVittie.

IT professionals, in general, appear to consider themselves well along the path toward IT as a Service with a significant plurality of them engaged in implementing many of the building blocks necessary to support the effort. IaaS, PaaS, and hybrid cloud computing models are essential for IT to realize an environment in which (manageable) IT as a Service can become reality…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Paul Krill.

Security, cited as an issue with cloud computing when the concept began to take hold several years ago, remains a pivotal concern for developers, an IBM official stressed on Wednesday afternoon…

Grazed from ServerWatch.  Author:  Paul Rubens.

Some say idle hands do the devil’s work, but there’s no need to worry about VMware or HP. These two companies have been busy as bees working on cloud computing products, many of which they announced this week.

First up is virtualization technology specialist VMware (NYSE: VMW), with three bits of news to share with the world from VMworld 2011 in Copenhagen, Denmark: an update to vCenter Operations Manager, and new vFabric Application Management and IT Business Management suites. "Management is changing in the cloud era, and traditional management approaches are buckling under pressure from the way things work in the cloud," said Rob Smoot, a director of product marketing at VMware. "For IT to remain competitive with external providers there needs to be a change in management techniques, so we are embedding management into vSphere and vFabric."…

Grazed from CenterBeam.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A deal between Google and the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Police to provide cloud-based email and other apps has gone sour. Los Angeles CTO Randi Levin wrote a letter to Google’s contractor for cloud computing, Computer Sciences Corporation, saying the city will not pay Google due to the internet giant’s inability to provide secure email and collaboration…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

There’s a long-running debate in the cloud computing world about whether standard Infrastructure-as-a-Service resources have become true commodities, but it doesn’t look like they’re there yet. Even as prices drop ever closer to zero across the cloud-provider landscape, there are still plenty of points of differentiation…