Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Microsoft (MSFT) is adding another licensing option for Azure, the tech giant’s cloud computing platform for channel partners. Microsoft this week announced in a blog post that it will make an additional Azure option available to the channel on August 1, 2014 through its Open Licensing program, to assist partners with transitioning to the cloud.

Partners can take advantage of Microsoft Volume Licensing, flexible monetary payments and additional opportunities through this new option, the company said. Josh Waldo, senior director of cloud partner strategy at Microsoft, wrote in the blog post, "With Azure, partners are able to help customers embrace the speed, scale and economics of cloud through an open and flexible platform that provides all the building blocks to quickly build, deploy, and manage cloud-based solutions."…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/052214/microsoft-welcomes-azure-open-licensing-program

Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Peter Burrows.

After co-founding Salesforce.com (CRM) in 1999, Marc Benioff spent years preaching the gospel of its radical new business model, cloud computing. The days of the hard sell are long gone, Benioff says. Just this month, the Salesforce chief executive officer played host to News Corp. (NWSA) Chairman Rupert Murdoch and Wal-Mart Stores (WMT) CEO Doug McMillon, who’d traveled to Silicon Valley to hear how Salesforce could help them cut costs and increase sales.

Murdoch and McMillon didn’t come just to hear about the customer-relationship-management software that’s Salesforce’s bread and butter. According to Benioff, they wanted to learn more about Salesforce’s cloud “platform,” a mélange of programming tools, data centers, and partnerships that let companies quickly and cheaply create cloud services of their own. “The world’s most important CEOs realize that their companies also need to become cloud platforms, and that’s why they’ve become so interested in our services,” says Benioff…

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Fred O’Conner.

A printer that connects to the Web may pose as great a risk to enterprise security as an OS vulnerability, but yet companies worry about the latter and too often ignore the former, said a CTO during a discussion at MIT. With more devices gaining Web connectivity as part of the Internet of Things movement, hackers have greater opportunities to exploit weaknesses, said Patrick Gilmore, CTO of data-center and telecommunications service provider the Markley Group.

The people who write software for printers may not be worried about security, he said. “No one talks about what if your printer is hacked and every document your CEO printed is posted to a blog,” he said. The session, part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan CIO Symposium Wednesday, covered a range of security issues, including cloud computing, emerging threats and data security…

Grazed from StratNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

In the field of cloud computing, much has changed in recent years. Our ability to process large quantities of data and apply high-octane computing to various problems continues to grow at a fantastic rate. While there are many security issues that remain relevant in cloud computing, a recent FiRe panel featuring Dave Campbell, CTO of Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft, Mathew Lodge, VP Cloud Services VMware, David Nelson, Chief Strategist, Cloud Computing, Boeing, and Michael Liebow, Global Managing Director, Accenture Cloud Platform agreed that at this point, there is no getting out of the cloud.

When questioned by Greg Ness, VP of WorldWide Marketing at CloudVelocity and SNS’ Ambassador for Cloud Computing, the panel agreed that the cloud is so efficient as to have become absolutely necessary to firms looking to remain competitive. While security issues remain, panelists noted that despite the “four walls and a ceiling” nature of traditional data centers (which come with a sense of security one panelist termed “the Hogwarts illusion”) the risks involved in using the cloud are not in actuality much higher…

Grazed from Blouinnews. Author: Juliana Kenny.

It has been tough for some enterprises to adjust to the changing information technology landscape; virtual technologies have begun to revolutionize the way IT is structured for businesses, especially with the introduction of cloud-based services. By now, businesses are aware of the benefits of cloud computing versus the complications it brings, but according to new research from IBM, the awareness does not correspond with the enterprises’ willingness to jump aboard the cloud bandwagon.

The mobile and social media bandwagons present challenges as well, although different ones. IBM’s full research will be available in July, but the preliminary findings show that only 10% of businesses are ready for the “new IT”, or the pending incorporation of cloud, mobile, social, and big data…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

In contrast to SAP ’s cautionary tale including the abrupt departures of Vishal Sikka, Shaun Price and continued attempts to recapture their customers’ cadence, Salesforce shows how powerful galvanizing customer-facing systems are in redefining manufacturing today. The revolution that manufacturers want starts in their front offices, focusing on making every relationship count. Trust, not transactions, matter most in manufacturing today. Defining a mobile-first application development strategy that includes deep contextual customer intelligence, Salesforce shows potential to lead a revolution in manufacturing with its Salesforce1 platform.

The recent Salesforce announcement that they are focusing on a delivering solutions that solve specific industries’ issues is noteworthy. It provides a blueprint for helping manufacturers navigate away from an inward-centric, myopic transaction mindset to one that embraces customer’s rapidly changing needs…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

Nvidia, aiming to put more graphic processors in data centers, launched a test drive program for its GRID technology to highlight virtual workstation capabilities via cloud computing. The company’s GRID technology enables graphics-heavy applications such as Autodesk AutoCAD to run in the cloud to any device. Nvidia partners include HP, Dell, Citrix, VMware and Microsoft.

According to Milan Diebel, senior product manager with Nvidia GRID, said that the test drive is a way to allow potential customers and interested parties to try the technology without a pilot. "The biggest pain point for VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) is that it takes a lot of time and money to demo this internally," said Diebel…

Grazed from ProphetStor. Author: PR Announcement.

ProphetStor Data Services, Inc., a leader in Software-Defined Storage (SDS), today announced the general availability of DR Prophet 3.0, now with enhanced data protection for Windows, Windows snapshots, and Oracle databases on AIX. DR Prophet has also been integrated with the Federator SDS storage hypervisor, Flexvisor, bringing seamless data protection and recovery to SDS for Cloud Computing, Big Data Analytics, HPC, and OpenStack.

DR Prophet offers the much needed intelligence to automate the configuration and centralized management for data protection on AIX and Windows application servers to minimize human intervention, based on pre-defined policies and system performance requirements. Version 3.0 now supports Windows 2003 SP2 and above, Oracle v10 and v11, and AIX v5.3 and above…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

As IT organizations are coming to terms with the fact that they will need to manage multiple cloud computing platforms, HP is looking to shift the conversation toward how IT is going to be managed in the age of the cloud. HP this week unveiled its Orchestrated Datacenter management software designed to enable IT organizations to leverage orchestration software to manage physical and virtual IT systems and the applications that run on them regardless of whether they reside in a public or private cloud.

Manoj Raisinghani, senior director of global product marketing for automation and cloud management at HP Software, says that the enterprise IT reality is that they need a simpler way to automate the management of multiple stacks of computing services. Raisinghani says HP Orchestrated Software was intended to complement the HP Helion cloud initiative based on OpenStack and it does not require IT organizations to replace any of the IT systems management tools they currently use…

Grazed from VirtusStream. Author: Editorial Staff.

We’re excited to debut the first illustration in a five-part cartoon series by Tom Fishburne, “The Marketoonist.” With some techie humor and a touch of irreverence, our “Misadventures of Cloud Computing” series sheds light on the day-to-day challenges facing CIOs and IT leadership teams as they navigate the complex enterprise cloud landscape.

We’ll be unveiling a new cartoon every Wednesday for the next five weeks that puts a comical spin on what really matters when selecting an enterprise cloud solution – security, reliability and performance. We hope you check back in regularly for a midday chuckle and we encourage you to share your perspective and experiences on each cartoon’s theme…