Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

Avnet Technology Solutions has expanded its long-standing distribution relationship with IBM to include services from cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer. Avnet (AVT) says the new distribution agreement for North American channel partners will allow it to help resellers develop their cloud portfolios with a new range of IBM middleware and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions.

"Avnet and IBM share a common passion for investing in market opportunities, such as the cloud, that will help business partners and their customers evolve to better meet the needs of an ever-changing world," said Fred Cuen, senior vice president, general manager, Avnet Technology Solutions, Americas, IBM Solutions group, in a prepared statement…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada. Author: Don Sheppard.

For some organizations, start-ups in particular, cloud computing will be the only IT game in town. Given the choice between acquiring, installing and operating a data centre full of equipment and buying public services on a consumption basis, the choice would be very clear. This choice, however, is not as obvious for larger, well-established enterprises that have already invested in numerous “legacy” systems.

For some leaders, a major commitment to cloud computing could be a very difficult and potentially risky decision. How about a simple thought experiment? Let’s imagine what the cloud computing end game is – what it means for an enterprise to go “all in” with cloud computing…

Grazed from ComputerSupport. Author: Kirill Bensonoff.

A new infographic released by ComputerSupport.com shows that cloud adoption rates are on the rise, echoing predictions throughout the technology and business sectors over the past couple of years. The infographic, which is available below, demonstrates that not only is the presence of cloud hosting increasing, but many people are enthusiastic enough about the cloud to recommend it to their peers.

Current Adoption

The infographic is based on a Microsoft study, which gauged cloud adoption rates among a wide range of organizations, found that the vast majority of organizations of all sizes use both Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and hosted infrastructure services. Both SaaS and hosted infrastructure services are currently being used most by organizations with less than 100 employees…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Earth Day (April 22) has emerged as an opportunity for tech companies to voice their support for clean energy, low-waste IT operations and environmentally-friendly policies. This year, Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, has joined the chorus. Amid the backdrop of the eco-themed day’s festivities, Nadella touted his company’s efforts in steering the tech industry toward greener IT pastures.

In a letter to the Business Roundtable, an association of U.S. CEOs, Nadella outlined how the software giant is addressing environmental concerns and taking steps to eliminate its carbon footprint. "Through Microsoft Research, we have teams of computer scientists who are using the power of big data to understand complex environmental challenges in ways they never have before," he wrote…

Grazed from TheWrap. Author: Ira Telnowitz.

Several of the Supreme Court justices who heard arguments in the broadcast networks’ case against the online TV site Aereo criticized the company’s business model but worried about passing down a ruling that could affect other technology. Broadcasters contend that Aereo — a New York based company with less than a million subscribers — is stealing their signals.

The company uses millions of small antenna to relay broadcast signals to subscribers’ laptops, tablets and other devices, collecting a small fee. While the justices expressed skepticism that Aereo’s technology violates copyrights, they also questioned whether the company was trying to take advantage of legal loopholes…

Grazed from PCMag. Author: Michael J. Miller.

Competition is a wonderful thing. And the increased competition in cloud services – especially the intense battle among Amazon, Google, and Microsoft – is resulting in services and pricing that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. Over the past month, all three of the big players, plus a variety of smaller ones, have introduced new products and services for the cloud.

About a month ago, Google started this round of price cutting at its Cloud Platform Live event, where it cut prices on most of its services, some rather dramatically. Compute fees dropped by 32 percent, and standard storage prices went down to 2.6 cents per gigabyte per month. A similar drop in prices for its consumer product, Google Drive, gives you 1TB of storage for about $10 a month. That’s quite compelling…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Sean M. Kerner.

The OpenStack Foundation officially debuted its Icehouse release on April 17 providing enterprises, service providers and end-users with new and enhanced cloud computing features. OpenStack is an open-source effort that got its start in July 2010 as a joint project supported by Rackspace and NASA.

The Icehouse release is the ninth release of OpenStack since the project officially debuted and enjoys the support of many of the world’s leading tech vendors, including IBM, HP, Dell, Cisco, AT&T, Intel, VMware and many others. With the Icehouse release, in addition to more features, there was more development activity across multiple metrics…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Linthicum.

You can’t go more than a few weeks without hearing about new features from larger cloud providers such as AWS, Google or Microsoft. They constantly add database services, new provisioning features, new management capabilities, new types of storage and many other services. A case can be made for a minimalist approach to cloud; one that takes advantage of public cloud services that don’t have all of the bells and whistles.

Late March price cuts across the board for cloud services from these providers made it clear that the public cloud wars were on. It was the functional equivalent of carnival barkers, all trying to attract your business at the same time. Once you’re in their tent, it’s very hard to leave…

Grazed from HuffingtonPost. Author: Edward J. Black.

TV watchers and anyone who cares about cloud computing as a proven engine for economic progress should be paying close attention to the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday. It is considering what may be its most important intellectual property case this year: a dispute between ABC and other broadcasters against New York-based tech startup, Aereo. Aereo allows users to "watch live TV online… no cable required." But innovative Aereo has seen plenty of legal strings attached since its February 2012 launch in New York City.

Traditional broadcasters have fought unsuccessfully to put Aereo out of the business of enabling the public to more easily access what’s broadcast on the public’s airwaves. The resolution of this plot in the Supreme Court this month matters immediately to millions of TV viewers, but it will also foreshadow the future of access to legal content stored on the Internet…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Dedicated cloud instances are something of an oxymoron. The traditional understanding of cloud computing is that it runs stuff from many users runs on shared infrastructure. Dedicated instances, by definition, aren’t shared and thus could appeal to a class of users who worry about the drag that neighboring workloads can have on their jobs — the so-called “noisy neighbor” problem. They also may suit those who see shared infrastructure as not compliant to various industry regulations.

There are enough companies worried about such things that Amazon Web Services launched dedicated instances in March 2011 and significantly cut prices on them in July. Since that price cut — which amounted to nearly 80 percent in some cases — the use of AWS dedicated instances has risen significantly, according to Cloudyn, which monitors AWS and Google cloud usage for customers…