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…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: PR Announcement.

Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and Orange Business Services, a major communications service provider that offers cloud infrastructure services, have formed an alliance to support large enterprises with their cloud strategy and the transformation of their infrastructure and applications to cloud-based models. This alliance will begin by targeting French businesses before approaching companies in other European countries where Accenture does not have existing alliances with other providers.

The alliance was formed to provide large enterprises with end-to-end cloud services that will help them to simplify the management of their IT infrastructure and increase their market flexibility, while keeping development costs under control. Under the alliance, Accenture and Orange Business Services will collaborate to support their clients by helping large enterprises to:…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Dennis Junk.

Whether it’s big government or big corporations you fear may be encroaching on our right to privacy, you should have no trouble these days finding news to fuel your suspicions. If, on the other hand, you happen to run a business, you probably find clear-eyed assessments of the risks and benefits of things like cloud computing, Big Data, and the various emerging business intelligence technologies are really hard to come by.

Is the data you store in the cloud secure? The honest answer is that no data is ever perfectly secure—look what happened to Target. Any data connected to the internet is hackable, so unless you’re going to try to conduct business completely offline you just have to accept some degree of risk. Some tech experts even insist that the cloud is more secure than on-premises databases for many of the same reasons that money in the bank is more secure than cash in the mattress. Still, we’re just beginning to appreciate the possibilities of cloud computing, and the unfamiliarity is enough to make a lot of us uneasy…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey LaManna.

By now, we’ve all heard about the cloud and the numerous benefits of cloud computing, but how are companies really using the cloud? Working with SAP, Oxford Economics surveyed 200 senior business and IT executives to find out. Respondents to the survey were highly diversified, representing various industry segments including banking, capital markets, consumer products, retail and telecommunications, as well as multiple countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UK and US.

What they found is that companies are investing heavily in the cloud, with 95% using cloud technology. Companies are moving more and more business functions into the cloud, and making the cloud into a truly strategic option. As more and more functions (HR, finance, etc.) adopt cloud technologies, the barriers between executives disappear—clouds of information merge…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Potentially helping developers more quickly build cross-platform applications, Microsoft is releasing as open source its WinJS JavaScript library for building Windows-styled controls. Now that the library is open source, developers can use it to build and design Windows-like Web applications for other browsers and platforms, including Chrome, Firefox, Android, and iOS.

Such cross-platform capability could save developers time by eliminating the need to code the same app multiple times for non-Windows platforms and browsers other than Internet Explorer, according to the company. While the name "WinJS" may imply that it is a Microsoft version of JavaScript, it is in fact a collection of JavaScript tools for enabling advanced components and user interface controls, which minimize the changes developers have to make for using these features across different devices…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Eric Lundquist.

Interop is one of the last independent technology trade shows since many of the current crop of IT conferences has fallen into the morass of self-congratulatory vendor specific events. The conference piece of the exhibition has morphed along with the tech industry itself as cloud computing, mobility and big data have reshaped the corporate IT.

This year’s event reflected those changes and highlighted some of the big trends continuing to sweep through the networking segment, which after all, was the show’s original focus. Here are some of the top trends. Everyone loves software-defined networking—whatever that is. Swearing fealty to software defined networking is now an essential part of every vendor’s pitch…

Grazed from TechDirt. Author: Editorial Staff.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about how the Aereo case, which will be heard by the Supreme Court in a few weeks, is likely to have a huge impact on the future of cloud computing, and went into detail to explain why. The primary issue is that, under copyright law, what Aereo is doing is effectively indistinguishable from what most cloud computing services do. However, a number of folks who really seem to dislike Aereo continually insist that the case will have no impact whatsoever on cloud computing. Variety’s Todd Spangler recently wrote a typical version of this argument, basically waving off the issue based on the idea that Aereo more or less feels different from Dropbox. But that fundamentally ignores the actual copyright issues at stake.

Matt Schruers has a blog post up at the Project Disco blog pointing out why this "cloud denialism" by the anti-Aereo crowd is both dangerous and misleading. It includes the money line that a bunch of folks have been quoting: "The only unifying characteristic I’ve discerned among the deniers is that none of them are actually in the business of providing cloud services."…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

Novell has put the finishing touches on its GroupWise 2014 collaboration platform, with the latest version of the company’s legacy software touting several new features that cater to mobile workforces and more web-based management and productivity tools. The technology, which has been in beta for the past 10 months, is scheduled to release this week.

The newest version includes Active Directory support to address evolving customer infrastructures, the company noted, as well as a new web-based administration console. According to Novell, GroupWise 2014’s ability to handle multiple administrators and advanced querying help separate it from competitors such as Microsoft’s (MSFT) Exchange and Outlook or Google Gmail…