Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

As it rolled out tools and features for coders at its Build developer conference Thursday, Microsoft showed that it is ready to embrace technologies and platforms not invented within its walls. Rather than relying solely on internal tools, the Azure cloud services platform has incorporated a number of non-Microsoft technologies, including popular open source tools such as the Chef and Puppet configuration management software, the OAuth authorization standard, and the Hadoop data processing platform.

The company has also taken steps to incorporate open source into its product roadmaps, by releasing the code for its new compiler and setting up a foundation for managing open source .Net projects. "Clearly Microsoft’s message is its support of multi-platform. It will take any part of your stack, it doesn’t have to be just Microsoft software," said Al Hilwa, IDC research program director for software development. "This is good for Microsoft and good for the ecosystem."…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

The cloud computing boom is fueling an unprecedented level of interest in DevOps — to the point that close to two-thirds of organizations have now adopted this practice. That’s the word from RightScale, Inc. which just released a survey of 1,068 IT managers and professionals, exploring the impact of cloud computing on IT operations and practices. Along with greater adoption of DevOps, there’s a parallel movement to self-service IT, that long-sought-after holy grail of user-centric computing.

Overall, the survey found that when it comes to cloud, everybody’s doing it. Ninety-four percent, in fact say their organizations surveyed are running applications or experimenting with infrastructure-as-a-service, and 87 percent of organizations are using public cloud. These numbers are much higher than most I’ve seen (typically in the 30 percent to 50 percent range), and may incorporate those people running pilots or merely noodling around with cloud services at this point…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Don Simpson.

Last month, I wrote about this concept, framed by the assertion that users must actually adopt a product in order to realize its true value. This month, I want to look at the other side of this problem, specifically from a cloud computing perspective. How can professional services firms help government customers achieve adoption of cloud products and services?

The inspiration for this blog came from a recent article that I read from the Technology Services Industry Associated (TSIA) by Bo DiMuccio, PhD, entitled The State of Professional Services: 2014 (login required). In general, traditional professional services companies are experienced at delivering product-attached, deployment-oriented services. The kind that greatly helps with realizing product value such as installation, configuration, training, health checks, and support. The problem, as I see it, is that this puts the product on a pedestal without focusing on whether or not the pedestal is in the right location. For us propeller-head engineers, this is like building the best widget in the world only to realize through unit and system testing that it does not actually do what is necessary to achieve the business value … a “forest for the trees problem.”…

Grazed from Virtual.com. Author: Dustin Smith.

While cloud computing solutions continue to grow in popularity, many companies are still asking, “Is a public or private cloud the right option for me?” According to Cloud Tech News, the cloud market is expected to grow to $121 billion by 2015, which suggests a 26 percent annual growth rate.

A good chunk of this growth is expected to be in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service sector (IaaS), where businesses host their own SaaS environment and other critical infrastructure or application environments. This private cloud computing option has many advantages over public cloud computing, especially for larger companies who can afford the expense. With public cloud computing, you’ll need to worry about…

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Maria Deutscher.

Andy Jassy, Amazon’s vice president of cloud computing, dedicated his entire keynote address at last week’s AWS Summit to the needs of corporate customers and his firm’s efforts to address them. That speaks to how far the online retailer has come in its public cloud journey, which started in 2006 with the launch of what was then a bare-bone infrastructure-as-a-service platform aimed primarily at developers.

Today, AWS has over five times more compute capacity deployed than the 14 nearest competitors combined, Jassy highlighted after stepping up to the podium. A sizable portion of that is in use by enterprise users who are growing increasingly frustrated with traditional on-premise approaches to provisioning IT resources, the first of the four factors Amazon views as the key drivers of cloud adoption…

Grazed from DemacMedia. Author: Editorial Staff.

“The Cloud” has become a mainstream term used to associate a virtual place where data and information is stored. But did you know, there are 50,000,000 physical servers around the world? “The Cloud” actually refers to large data centres situated around the globe with primary locations in the United States and Europe. See why 60% of CIO’s state that cloud computing is their #1 priority.

View the infographic and read more from the source @ http://www.demacmedia.com/infographic/cloud-computing-demystified/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cloud-computing-demystified

Subscribe to the CloudCow bi-monthly newsletter @ http://eepurl.com/smZeb

Grazed from Kotaku. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft’s talked about how their next-gen cloud infrastructure is going to change things for video games. Today, they finally showed what that looks like. Back when Microsoft was revving up to launch the Xbox One last year, cloud computing access was one of the features they trumpeted as a big differentiator for their console.

The basic idea was that game developers would be able to offload processing chores for things like AI behavior to remote servers, letting the local hardware focus on different tasks like rendering an environment. Representatives from Microsoft showed it to the press at E3 last year and we described what it looked like. But now you can finally get a look at this important feature in action…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Angel Diaz.

Raise your hand if you remember the 1990s. I’m not talking about plaid flannels or the Spice Girls. I’m referring to the digital revolution that took place. Companies built applications for everything from HR tools to enterprise resource planning supply chain management to you name it. What the industry didn’t have was a way to bring it all together. It was a rarity if those applications could actually talk to each other without modifications. Companies spent thousands on applications and millions to integrate them so that actually provided value.

So we spent the next 10 years trying to fix it. Instead of critical data being locked in silos, we created environments where information could be easily shared. What’s amazing to me is how quickly companies are moving to the next great technology frontier: cloud computing. Organizations have quickly learned that the cloud presents a cost-effective, reliable and just a plain old smart way of delivering value…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

There’s a lot of talk about the cloud, but how are businesses really using it? This week at Interop, Boeing’s chief cloud strategist, David Nelson, outlined a couple of ways the aircraft manufacturer is not only using the public cloud, but combining that that with on-premises virtualized workloads to create a hybrid environment. The results are applications that Nelson says run more efficiently, are less expensive and serve the needs of Boeing better than if the company had done it all in-house.

Nelson first described an application the company has developed that tracks all of the flight paths that planes take around the world. Boeing’s sales staff uses it to help sell aircraft showing how a newer, faster one could improve operations. The app incorporates both historical and real-time data, which means there are some heavy workloads…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Dan Kobialka.

Unisys, a global information technology company, reported today that more senior-level IT executives are moving their organizational information into the cloud. In a survey conducted by Unisys and IDG Research throughout 2013, more than 50 percent of senior-level IT leaders at organizations with over 1,000 employees indicated that they have at least one application or a portion of their organization’s IT infrastructure in the cloud.

These executives also noted that about 26 percent of their enterprise information currently resides in a private cloud, and, despite their security concerns, they expect that percentage to grow to about 32 percent in the next 18 months. Colin Lacey, Unisys’ VP of Data Center and Cloud Transformation Solutions and Services, said that many CIOs and senior-level IT executives are using private cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery models to lower their operating costs and ensure secure, consistent delivery of IT services to their employees and customers…