Grazed from MuscatDaily. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing in business transactions can help reduce corruption, according to Gergi Abboud, managing director of the Gulf region at SAP. He was speaking at the SAP Forum Oman 2014, which was held on Monday at InterContinental Muscat. The event was attended by local and regional experts from SAP. Transparency is one of the factors that cloud computing ensures, said Abboud. “Business transactions using cloud computing are more transparent as the whole process is automated and can limit corruption attempts,” he said.

In 2013, the demand for cloud computing from companies in the Middle East saw a growth of 300 per cent. According to a press release from SAP, a forecast by Business Monitor International stated that Oman’s IT market is likely to be worth RO174mn in 2014, up from an estimated RO164mn in 2013. Deniz Kilyar, director, line of business, cloud and mobility, SAP, said that predictability of budgets for businesses is one of the very important services that SAP cloud computing provides. “It later enables the possibility of support and upgrading.”…

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Box, an online storage service that aims to become an essential part of the cloud computing-based business, on Monday released financial data before a public offering. Many more cloud businesses, for both business and consumers, are expected to follow this year.

Box, based in Los Altos, Calif., said in an S1 document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it planned to raise up to $250 million in its initial public offering. In a recent round of private funding, Box was valued at $2 billion, but would most likely be worth several times that after the I.P.O…

Grazed from OpenSource. Author: Gordon Haff.

It seems like it was only yesterday that the OpenStack community found itself gathering in Hong Kong to set the design goals for the Icehouse release. As we entered March development was still progressing at a fever pitch in the lead up to the feature freeze for the release but now the dust has started to settle and we are able to start getting a real feel for what OpenStack users and operators can look forward to in the Icehouse release.

Today I’ll be giving a sneak peek to just some of the changes made in one of the two projects that made up the original OpenStack release and today is still one of the largest—showing no signs of the innovation slowing down—OpenStack Compute (Nova). OpenStack Compute is a cloud computing fabric controller, a central component of an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) system. It is responsible for managing the hypervisors on which virtual machine instances will ultimately run and managing the lifecycle of those virtual machine instances. This list is by no means exhaustive but highlights some key features and the rapid advances made by the contributors that make up the OpenStack community in a six month release cycle…

Grazed from AssociationsNow. Author: Ernie Smith.

The stars appear to be aligning for cloud computing. The price wars are starting to heat up, and the potential savings for businesses could be significant. According to a new 451 Research study sponsored by Microsoft, cloud service is becoming the norm in the business world—though that doesn’t mean businesses are likely to put all of their data in one basket.

The study surveyed more than 2,000 information technology professionals from 11 countries on six continents, though it’s heavily weighted toward the United States, which represents 35 percent of the respondents involved. The study focuses on the concerns and thought processes for IT staffs regarding their cloud computing needs. Some highlights from the study:…

Grazed from BusinessLine. Author: Venkatesh Ganesh.

Satya Nadella has fired his first shot to take on competitors like Amazon, Google and SAP by wooing Indian businesses with its Azure technology. The newly appointed boss of the world’s largest software maker has outlined his vision for taking on competition by getting Indian enterprises and small businesses to adopt cloud computing through its Azure technology platform.

In line with this, the company announced its hardware trade-in scheme for SMBs in India through which these businesses can sell their old hardware for monthly credits that can be redeemed for using Windows Azure software. “We are at a pivotal time in our industry and users are relying on cloud and mobile computing technologies,” said Nadella, addressing more than 500 delegates through a video message at the Windows Azure conference recently…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

The average consumer knows many things about Amazon.com Inc., including its almost endless list of products that can be purchased, its two-day Prime delivery option and its video-streaming service with more than 150,000 movies and TV episodes. But for the average consumer, there is a part of Amazon’s AMZN -2.40% business that they may know little, if anything about, yet has the potential to become one of the company’s biggest sources of revenue and profit margins: Amazon Web Services.\

AWS, as it is commonly called, is a group of remote computing services that Amazon has put together to create a cloud-based platform of computing, networking, content delivery and other services designed for business usage. The company, and AWS senior vice president Andy Jassy, will be in San Francisco on Wednesday to meet with developers, engineers and customers at its one-day AWS Summit…

Grazed from Cisco. Author: PR Announcement.

Networking company Cisco is commencing a program to enter the cloud computing industry. The giant has announced plans to launch Cisco Cloud Services, a program similar to Amazon’s distributed offering, with a capital expenditure of $1 billion over the next two years.

The effort is said to give the company a toe-hold in the market trend towards out-sourcing computing problems that require an intensive computer processing effort. The service will be delivered through partners including Ingram Micro, Australian provider Telstra, and Wipro. The announcement has not had the effect that the company may have wanted on share price. In a market that has not seen much gain or loss on the day, shares are down to $21.52 per share from an opening of $21.68.

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Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Sue Poremba.

Adopting cloud technologies has been a boon for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), according to a new report from Techaisle discussed in a Channel Partners article. "Eighty percent of SMBs in the U.S. say cloud computing contributes to business growth," the article states; "More than 40 percent of SMBs said that business agility and new capabilities are driving SMB cloud adoption," the article added.

This is a change from the past, when SMBs turned to cloud adoption primarily as a way to cut costs. IT-related costs are still helping to lead SMBs toward the cloud, especially in the case of smaller businesses that have moved applications to the cloud because of the opportunity to acquire technologies and applications that would otherwise have been too costly or would have required too much IT staffing. Lower costs, however, are no longer the predominant reason for SMBs turning to cloud computing…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

As software has grown in importance, overshadowing the once-riveting details of chips and hardware, a new language has crept into computing’s vernacular. Where once we talked in silicon yields and gigahertz speeds, we now speak of scrums and sprints, DevOps and Continuous Delivery, and most of all, workload deployments to the elastic cloud’s infrastructure. The genie in the bottle is no longer the secrets in the hardware; it’s the invisible functions of the software.

Even the terminology of software has changed. In the past, we might have declared new development had nothing to do with maintenance of the datacenter’s legacy systems. Development was novel and exciting, a thing apart. Nor did development methodologies have anything to do with production deployments. And certainly an enterprise software project could proceed and have nothing to do with the cloud…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Dimension Data, the $5.8 billion global ICT solutions and services provider, today announced that it will offer Cloud Private Network Connection (CPNC) as an add-on service for its enterprise-class Public, Private and Managed Hosting cloud offerings. CPNC services allow clients to establish a dedicated network connection between their own network and Dimension Data’s Managed Cloud Platform™ (MCP) locations to provide greater control and security over their data in the cloud.

In addition to enterprises, CPNC services are ideally suited to healthcare, retail, finance and government industries looking to seamlessly and securely connect to Dimension Data cloud services without using public Internet as well as achieving greater throughput and an overall better network experience. Dimension Data offers two options for clients wanting a global, high-performance and secure method to access their Dimension Data cloud and managed hosting environments without traversing the public Internet:…