June 4, 2014 Off

Has Cloud Computing Been a Failed Revolution?

By David

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

Speaking at a recent conference, Salesforce.com’s Peter Coffee put up a provocative slide: The number of Google searches for the term "cloud computing." It proves, he says, that people no longer find cloud computing compelling. You might be tempted to think that people aren’t interested in cloud computing because they’ve got it all figured out and have moved on to new challenges.

The reduced lack of interest in cloud computing notwithstanding, I certainly don’t think that cloud computing adoption is finished. Far from it. In fact, I’d say most IT organizations have barely started working with cloud computing, much less completed their journey.
Gartner’s Lydia Leong echoed this perspective in a couple funny tweets, plaintively noting that, far from being finished with cloud implementations, many IT personnel don’t even really understand cloud computing…

June 4, 2014 Off

SAP Speeds Finance Tools to Bolster Hana’s Appeal Against Oracle

By David

Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Aaron Ricadela.

SAP AG (SAP), the largest maker of business-management software, is speeding up its software to attract more customers to its Hana database, which competes against Oracle Corp. products. SAP introduced what it calls “simplified” financial applications to help businesses view cash positions, make forecasts and plan for events such as bad weather or closed shipping routes using the most current data.

SAP will initially target its Simple Finance software and Fiori user interface at large companies that want to use Hana to process more information in real time rather than overnight batches. “We want everyone to run a simple, gorgeous user experience for SAP,” Chief Executive Officer Bill McDermott said today at the company’s Sapphire customer conference in Orlando, Florida…

June 4, 2014 Off

10 hot cloud computing skills

By David

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Mary Pratt.

Joe Roberts has had his pick of jobs. And with his experience in cloud computing, he still does. Roberts had several job offers when he moved in November from his former position as a senior IT lead/systems engineer working on a SaaS product to his current job as a senior DevOps engineer at Bit9 in Waltham, Mass.

And Roberts, who has seven years of cloud experience on his resume, is still in demand: He says he averages about 20 inquiries from recruiters each week. "I’m constantly getting calls from people looking for someone who not only understands IT, but engineering practices, agile methodology, who can work with operating systems, security, networks, and can automate all of those things," he says, noting that colleagues with similar cloud experience report the same high interest from employers…

June 4, 2014 Off

Canonical, Mirantis Collaborate on OpenStack Cloud Support

By David

Grazed from TheVar Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Canonical, whose Ubuntu Linux is already the leading platform for OpenStack open source cloud deployments, has broadened its OpenStack portfolio yet further with the announcement of official support for Mirantis’s OpenStack distribution. Through an agreement between Canonical and Mirantis that the companies announced June 3, Canonical will support Ubuntu in Mirantis’s integrated OpenStack platform, while Mirantis "will offer enterprise customers a commercial bundle that will include subscription to Mirantis OpenStack with support for Ubuntu host and guest instances," Mirantis said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Canonical will also continue supporting the separate Ubuntu OpenStack distribution that it already offers. Mirantis touts itself as "the #1 Pure Play OpenStack Company" for its vendor-agnostic integrated OpenStack solutions, and the collaboration between Canonical and Mirantis creates another way for enterprises to deploy Ubuntu-based OpenStack clouds with official support from Canonical. The Ubuntu-Mirantis software and support bundle will allow enterprises to "benefit from having another proven, supported OpenStack cloud solution," the companies promise.

June 4, 2014 Off

The Federal Government Journey to Cloud Computing: Lessons Learned

By David

Grazed from SysConMedia. Author: Kevin Jackson.

In February 2011, Vivek Kundra announced the “Cloud First” policy across the US Government. The directive, issued through the Office of Management and Budget, required agencies to give cloud technology first priority in developing IT projects. He also described cloud computing as a “10 year journey”.

According to a Deltek report, federal agency spending on cloud computing will grow from $2.3 billion in fiscal 2013 to $6.1 billion by fiscal 2018. This forecast clearly raises the importance of understanding what has happened over the past few years. In my opinion, the Top 5 most important lessons learned are:…

June 4, 2014 Off

How Apple Sees the Cloud: Not Like You Do

By David

Grazed from Yahoo. Author: Rob Pegoraro.

The news from Apple at Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference left me with the same impression I’ve had about many presentations from the company: This looks neat, but at what point will I find my data or my apps on the wrong side of an elegantly designed, Apple-built wall?

iCloud still closed

For a worst-case example, see the new iCloud Drive online storage system. In a welcome and overdue fix, iCloud will now let you get at online files through the desktop Finder, not just in the Open and Save dialogs of particular apps. This desktop access will be reserved for the Finder in the upcoming OS X Yosemite (which will at least be free). Apple’s preview page, however, says Windows uploading will be limited to just Windows 8 — as in, the version that CEO Tim Cook mocked at the start of the WWDC keynote for running on a mere 14 percent of PCs…

June 4, 2014 Off

The Future of Cloud Is Hybrid… and Seamless

By David

Grazed from SysConMedia. Author: Lori MacVittie.

It’s probably no surprise that I have long advocated the position that hybrid cloud would eventually become "the standard" architecture with respect to, well, cloud computing. As the dev/ops crowd at Glue Con was recently reminded by the self-styled "most obnoxious man in cloud", Josh McKenty, you can only add to what exists in the data center. You can’t simply rip and replace, forklifts are not allowed, and allowances must be made for how to integrate with existing systems no matter how onerous that might be. The future is, as he put it, open and closed, traditional and modern, automated and human.

I would add to that, it is both public and private, with respect to cloud. Hybrid cloud models were inevitable for all these reasons and more. Suffice to say that there is unlikely to be a technology that will turn data centers into the green fields every starry-eyed young architect and engineer wishes they could be…

June 4, 2014 Off

Cloud Computing: Arista Networks IPO Targets Cisco In Data Networking

By David

Grazed from Investors. Author: Brian Deagon.

Cloud computing has fundamentally changed the way companies build data centers and deliver software applications. Arista Networks, a leading provider of cloud networking solutions, is tapping into this enthusiasm with an initial public offering scheduled to begin trading Friday.

Cloud-computing centers consist of thousands of servers and storage systems connected by optical-fiber lines, routers and switches that can rapidly distribute software apps and data across the Internet and wireless networks to smartphones, tablets, PCs and other systems.

Read More At Investor’s Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/business-new-issue-america/060314-703217-arista-networks-ipo-on-calendar.htm#ixzz33fyBtUGa

June 4, 2014 Off

In Big Companies, The Public Cloud Is Leaving The Private Cloud In The Dust

By David

Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Matt Asay.

For years we’ve been told that enterprises wouldn’t put their sensitive data into the public cloud, particularly Amazon Web Services. We’ve been reminded, over and over, that companies value control and security too much to entrust their applications to someone else’s public data center.

Then when it became clear that Amazon’s cloud business was exploding, we were told enterprises were only running dev and test workloads there. The good stuff was still running behind the firewall, and always would. Today, it’s clear that such reasoning is flawed and completely out-of-whack with actual enterprise computing trend, which heavily favor public cloud computing…

June 4, 2014 Off

How to build a cloud application

By David

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Guy Currier.

Cloud applications have moved beyond being virtual storage solutions and are starting to replace traditional software installed on local systems. The fundamental changes in software layer structures are understandably critical to developers, but go relatively unnoticed by the user.

Gigabytes worth of storage and bandwidth must be taken into consideration when developing a cloud application. In an interview by Search Cloud Computing, Gregg Arnette CTO and founder of Sonian, a software-as-a-service-based application, says you must process the most data against fewest hours to make the most of cloud computing…