Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Challenging Microsoft’s Windows Azure on its own turf, Red Hat is ramping up services that would offer Microsoft .NET and SQL Server capabilities on its OpenShift platform as a service (PaaS). Code to enable the Microsoft services is being provided by Uhuru Software, a company started by a number of former Microsoft executives and engineers that specializes in rendering Microsoft software as cloud services.

The Microsoft services will not be available immediately, and Red Hat has not set a date for when the capabilities will be ready, either on OpenShift itself, or as part of OpenShift Enterprise, a package for running OpenShift services within an enterprise, said Joe Fernandes, who leads product management for OpenShift…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: William Jackson.

Microsoft has begun giving a select group of federal customers the chance to put Microsoft’s new government-only cloud service through a series of private tests. "The processes, people, technology, and infrastructure are all in place. We want real-world test loads," for a shakedown cruise, said Greg Myers, VP of federal sales, in announcing the news Tuesday at Microsoft’s US Public Sector Federal Executive Forum in Washington.

Although Microsoft’s commercial Azure cloud offering has received authority to operate under the FedRAMP program for cloud services, the new government platform — announced last fall and called Azure for Government — has not yet been certified. The government-only offering is housed in two specially constructed datacenters located in the United States and isolated physically and logically from the public cloud…

Grazed from Bizjournals. Author: Richard Pinson.

Although it has been around for some time, cloud computing has gained popularity over the past few years, and the business world is embracing it. One of the fastest areas of the shift to the cloud is with email. The demand for remote access from a variety of devices — tablets, smartphones and laptops — has contributed to this trend, as has widespread usage of cloud-based email solutions such as Gmail.

There are numerous benefits to moving to cloud-based email services. Maintaining in-house email servers require higher expertise and security knowledge that ultimately becomes prohibitively expensive. Moving away from an in-house solution allows IT staff more time to focus on other initiatives. The cloud service provider that handles email is responsible for the ongoing hardware and storage maintenance, administration and security requirements…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

SAP is introducing a set of new subscription pricing options for its Hana in-memory cloud computing platform, in a move that falls in step with the pay-as-you-go model common in the cloud computing industry. Customers were already able to bring their existing on-premises Hana in-memory database licenses to SAP’s infrastructure service.

Now it’s possible to buy Hana software via subscription there as well, SAP said Wednesday. A third cloud subscription option adds a series of development tools and services to the infrastructure and Hana software components. Cloud computing has dramatically changed the way enterprise software can be obtained, SAP executive board member and technology chief Vishal Sikka said Wednesday during a press conference, which was webcast…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Bill Kleyman.

The mist still settles from the burst of cloud computing. New marketing terms, new technologies, new infrastructure optimizations, and entirely new cloud delivery models could fill a dictionary with new acronyms. Infrastructure has evolved, giving us more physical resources to utilize, but a big part of advancements are due to breakthroughs at the logical, or virtual, layer.

This has led to software-defined technologiesof every shape and form. Some deserve an acronym, and some are jumping on the bandwagon. The challenge is to understand the different components that make up the SDX revolution, and how they fit together. You’ll also need to know how these technologies relate to the public and private cloud. Most of all, how do they affect your own datacenter environment, applications, and job?…

Grazed from TheStreet. Author: Adrea Tse.

Salesforce.com CFO Graham Smith couldn’t have picked a better time to leave the cloud computing giant, retiring at a time when a change of face at the CFO level probably wouldn’t make a major difference to investors. In its latest reported quarter, Adobe produced a large display of above-target financial numbers, demonstrated "stickiness" with all-time low attrition rates and soaring large enterprise deals, and continued to stoke interest in its new sales leadership and strategies with the recently-introduced Salesforce1 platform. Shares quickly rebounded from news of Smith’s retirement coupled with a wider GAAP loss.

The details of the earnings call last week once again underscored that it’s essentially been smooth sailing for Salesforce’s customer relationship management solutions business or sales cloud, by far the largest piece of its cloud solution. This business has basically been left unchallenged by competitors such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, with the first two still unable to catch up to Salesforce after their delayed entry into the sales cloud…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Ashar Baig.

Parallels is a vendor of hosting and cloud services enablement and cross-platform solutions for service providers. Established 14 years ago, Parallels offers a well-regarded software platform for its large service provider ecosystem and prides itself on its industry knowledge through Parallels Cloud University and consulting. The company’s annual Parallels Summit recently took place in New Orleans, ushering in the Mardi Gras season. No beads were thrown, but attendees were treated to a number of key messages. Here are some of the ones that stuck with me:

• Cloud is growing at a feverish pace. Until now, the SMBs have contributed to the cloud adoption. Going forward, larger organizations will adopt the cloud, further fueling the cloud adoption.
• Parallels CEO Birger Steen: “Main Street is adopting cloud.”…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CipherPoint, the leader in data security solutions for structured and unstructured content in file sharing and collaboration platforms like Microsoft SharePoint Server, Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft SharePoint Online, today announced its selection as the Most Innovative Cloud Security Solution of 2014 in Cyber Defense Magazine’s inaugural New InfoSec Technologies Awards.

“With the ongoing boom in both unstructured data and the use of cloud platforms, organizations need to adopt solutions that are innovative and agile enough to respond to the changing data security landscape,” said Mike Fleck, CEO of CipherPoint. “With CipherPoint Eclipse, organizations are able to protect sensitive and regulated data both on-premises and in the cloud. This award from Cyber Defense Magazine highlights our continuous efforts to develop technology that helps customers overcome their data security and encryption challenges.”…