Grazed from CRN. Author: Steven Burke.

Solution providers said the new NexGen Cloud Conference & Expo, to be held Dec. 3 to 5 in San Diego, fills a much-needed gap for vendor-neutral content in an increasingly partisan cloud-computing marketplace. The conference, the brainchild of CRN parent company, The Channel Company, is the first partner-centric, cloud-computing conference aimed at providing vendor-neutral content developed by and for the broad swath of solution providers delivering cloud migration strategies and services for customers.

NexGen Cloud is critical, solution providers said, because it provides an independent multivendor expo in a market filled with single-threaded, vendor-focused cloud conferences. The inaugural event with the theme “All Roads Lead To The Cloud,” will be held at the San Diego Convention Center…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

MemSQL, the leader in real-time and historical Big Data analytics based on a distributed in-memory database, today announced it has been included in the list of "Cool Vendors in In-Memory Computing Technologies, 2014"(1) report by Gartner, Inc. According to Gartner, "In-Memory Computing (IMC) technologies support the agility and large-scale, fast data processing needed to succeed in the digital era. Application architecture leaders should master IMC architectures and technologies, or run the risk of undermining their organizations’ ability to leverage digital business opportunities."

"IMC technology is increasingly emerging as a key enabler for the digital business by empowering the agility, Web-scale processing and fast decision making needed to respond to the business challenges of the digital era," states the Gartner report. In addition, Gartner recommends that enterprises, "Don’t just consider megavendors for your IMC initiatives; small, innovative pure players often provide more cost-effective and/or more technically valid alternatives to large vendors’ offerings."…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Nicholas Mukhar.

In its latest “Performance Management Study: Spotlight on Cloud and Mobile,” BPM Partners found further evidence that cloud-based software applications are “clearly the future” of the corporate performance management industry. What’s more, the leading independent authority on business performance management also found that cloud CPM is already in heavy use particularly among high-end midmarket companies worldwide. Below are some key takeaways from the report.

A Shift to the Cloud

More than 60% of the 300 survey responses from finance professionals, ranging from BPM Partners: Cloud is “Clearly the Future” of Performance Management image shift editsmall to enterprise businesses in a wide range of vertical industries worldwide, said they would consider cloud-based solutions when selecting performance management systems. BPM has asked this question through the history of the survey. According to the report, there has been a, “gradual shift toward cloud-based solutions…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

At the IBM Edge2014 conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM ) today released preliminary study findings of 750 global organizations revealing less than 10 percent are fully prepared to address the proliferation of cloud computing , analytics , mobile devices and social media . Addressing this challenge head-on, IBM is unveiling new systems, software and capabilities designed to help organizations create smarter infrastructures that yield faster access to Big Data insights through the cloud and improved business performance.

"Big Data is the transformative force driving every element of our clients’ computing infrastructure – starting with environments of traditional applications blended with the new requirements of social, mobile and analytic workloads that demand faster access at massive scale," said Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President of IBM Systems & Technology Group and IBM Integrated Supply Chain…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Spencer E. Ante.

Red Hat is facing scrutiny from the open-source software community over a policy that some rivals and partners say discourages customers from using competing products. On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Red Hat chose not to provide support for customers of its Linux operating system if they use rival versions of software called OpenStack, which is designed to run cloud-computing systems.

Red Hat says it would cost too much to support different versions of OpenStack, and that its cloud software needs to be tied tightly to its Linux distribution for technical reasons. The story inflamed some rivals, partners and customers at the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta, where nearly 5,000 technologists and developers gathered last week to discuss cloud computing and open source technology…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: David Weldon.

Nearly half of the world’s population will be using cloud computing services in some fashion by 2018, according to a new study by Juniper Research. In its report, Cloud Computing–Consumer Markets: Strategies and Forecasts 2014-2018, the research firm estimates that there are currently 2.4 billion people using cloud-based services in one form or another. But that number is expected to rise to 3.6 billion according to the study.

"The analysts said that advances in cloud storage, music and games would propel this figure over the next few years," says an article at Cloud Pro. "It is said that the bulk of revenues in consumer cloud services would be from streaming services, while cloud storage services find attracting paying subscribers a struggle."…

Grazed from NearShoreAmericas. Author: Silvia Rosa.

Cloud computing is one of IBM’s top priorities and Latin America has gained importance in this area of late. The tech giant recently signed an agreement with Finep, a Brazilian innovation agency linked to the Ministry of Science and Technology, to develop a platform as a service (PaaS) to manage cloud resources more efficiently and in real time.

The project was selected in the latest public announcement for the IT Maior program, which aims to promote the development of software and technology products in Brazil. Under the three-year contract IBM will receive 5.7 million Brazilian real (almost US$ 2.4 million) from Finep in return for development of the basic system, optimization and testing. IBM will also invest its own financial resources in this project…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

Microsoft and SAP’s long-standing partnership is being strengthened with the pending certification of SAP’s ERP (enterprise resource planning) and other software for deployment on the Azure cloud infrastructure service. By the end of the second quarter, SAP’s Business Suite, Business All-in-One, mobile platform, Adaptive Server Enterprise database, and the developer version of the Hana in-memory computing platform will be certified for Azure, the companies said Monday.

SAP’s Cloud Appliance Library will make it possible to launch preconfigured SAP software packages to Azure within just a few minutes, they added. Under the agreement, Microsoft will support customers if a problem crops up at the infrastructure level, while SAP would take over if the issue involves an application error, said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, head of business development and strategic ecosystem at SAP…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Joel Snyder.

Thin clients aren’t very exciting, and for a reason: they’re designed to allow remote access to servers, usually with a Citrix, Microsoft, or VMware client. The folks at Dell WYSE have spiced up the category by building a thin client on top of Android, and getting it down to a form factor only slightly larger than a USB memory stick.

The result is a cool combination of technologies with interesting potential — and a few important limitations. Network managers who have been unhappy with typical thin client solutions should consider the WYSE Cloud Connect, which brings the flexibility of Android and wireless connectivity into their cloud computing or VDI deployment…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Monish Darda.

In 1997, Prof Ramnath Chellappa at Emory University famously defined Cloud Computing as “"the computing paradigm where the boundaries of computing will be determined by economic rationale rather than technical limits alone”. The world has come full circle 17 years later – the economic rationale is already compelling, and the adoption of cloud computing is a “top down” mandate in almost every enterprise.

Closer to home, the Indian public cloud computing market is one of the fastest growing world-wide. According to Gartner, the Indian market is expected to grow to over half a billion dollars in 2014. Bottom line – the cloud is here to stay! We live in an exciting age – it is not enough to have a cloud computing wave going; there are other disruptions. SMAC – Social Media, Analytics and Cloud have become powerful tools of the modern business…