Grazed from Marketwire. Author: PR Announcement.

SGI, the trusted leader in high performance computing and Big Data, and Cognilytics, a global provider of Big Data and Advanced Analytics solutions and the winner of the SAP North America Partner Excellence Award 2014 for Platform Solutions, announced a partnership to help enterprises monetize their data as a strategic asset.

Combining SGI’s breakthrough HPC technology for Big Data analytics, the recently announced plan to develop a SAP HANA in-memory computing appliance, and Cognilytics’ expertise in implementing technologies such as Hadoop and SAP Platform and Analytics solutions including SAP HANA and Predictive Analysis, the partnership enables the enterprise to closely align analytics initiatives with current business models to fully capitalize on results and achieve business objectives…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

How do many enterprise IT departments approach cloud computing? Their path mirrors that of a person going through the stages of grief: denial, anger, and acceptance.

Stage 1: Ignore the problem
When retail-oriented public cloud providers began to emerge several years ago, there were those in the enterprise who needed ways to share and collaborate with colleagues on documents and files. They picked up cloud services by Box, Dropbox, Google, Apple, and others. Enterprise IT responded by "allowing" the use of these clouds, as long as it didn’t know about it — tech’s version of "don’t ask, don’t tell."

Stage 2: Overreact to the problem
More recently, many IT organizations have cracked down on the use of personal clouds, by enacting policies that explicitly forbid it, by blocking access altogether, or by doing both. Users had to go back to implementing "sneakernets," emailing files, or adopting other less-than-productive approaches. In more enterprises than you’d suspect, users commonly bring in their own mobile hotspots to get around the corporate firewalls…

Grazed from WashingtonPost. Author: Mohanna Ravindranath.

In a presentation to a room full of investors in New York on Tuesday, software giant SAP revealed plans to transition more IT services to the Internet cloud. Co-chief executive Bill McDermott described how the company will move to grow revenue from cloud services through HANA, SAP’s computing platform. We are a formidable company in every capacity, but the cloud is where we’re taking the company,” McDermott said. “Why are we doing this? Because it offers instant consumption, instant innovation, and helps companies grow.”

The company plans to reduce its hardware use by moving more applications onto the HANA platform, McDermott explained. Integrating applications onto one cloud-based platform would simplify IT needs for customers, he said. “In the end, the suite always wins. Always has, always will.”…

Grazed from RedHat. Author: PR Announcement.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that British Airways, a global airline and market leader in the travel industry, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on its infrastructure. Through this Red Hat technology, British Airways is benefiting from a highly available and scalable IT architecture.

As the flag carrier airline of the United Kingdom (U.K.), British Airways has operated for more than 90 years, and today is the largest airline in the U.K. based on fleet size, international flights and international destinations, flying more than 40 million passengers to 177 destinations around the globe each year. In line with the company’s growth and additional business requirements for its production environment – and, in particular, to support the production environment for its external website, BA.com – British Airways needed to expand its IT infrastructure. As consumers have shifted their airline ticket buying patterns, British Airways supports on average in excess of 450,000 visitors to BA.com per day…

Grazed from AutomatedTrader. Author: Cecelia Taylor.

Cloud computing was developed specifically to overcome issues of localization and limitations of power and physical space. Yet many data center facilities are in danger of running out of power, cooling, or physical space. Mellanox offers an alternative and cost-efficient solution. Mellanox’s new MetroX® long-haul switch system makes it possible to move from the paradigm of multiple, disconnected data centers to a single multi-point meshed mega-cloud.

In other words, remote data center sites can now be localized through long-haul connectivity, providing benefits such as faster compute, higher volume data transfer, and improved business continuity. MetroX provides the ability for more applications and more cloud users, leading to faster product development, quicker backup, and more immediate disaster recovery…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Thomas O’Toole.

Bloomberg BNA asked leading attorneys, government officials, and online experts for their views on the most important legal developments in online law during 2013 and on what policy areas they believed would be the most important to their practices in 2014. We asked that the responses be short and to the point, similar to a “tweet” or status update.

The result is the collection of brief insights published below, many of which have been lightly edited and categorized by subject matter. The comments below–each attributed to the author, the author’s law firm or organization, website, Twitter username and blog–are published for informational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Ashar Baig.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a user-led as well as user-centric phenomenon that is being embraced by CIOs in droves. They understand the new workplace reality is that the knowledge worker is now mobile; therefore, CIOs are mandating IT to make information available on external mobile devices. According to research firm Gartner, in 2013 mobile phones overtook PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

As employees ever-more mobile, they increasingly are relying on their mobile devices to meet a wide spectrum of interests and needs. And their ability to utilize smartphones and tablets to do their jobs anywhere is resulting not just in increased employee productivity but also greater organizational agility…

Grazed from ScientficComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft has named Satya Nadella, head of its cloud computing business, as the company’s next CEO. He immediately replaces Steve Ballmer, who had announced in August 2013 that he would retire from the world’s biggest software company after more than 13 years at its helm. Here’s a look at key moments in Microsoft’s history.

• 1975: Microsoft is founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen.
• 1980: Ballmer joins the company.
• 1981: IBM ships first personal computers running MS-DOS operating system…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Jonathan Feldman.

After speaking last week on a webinar about government cloud computing and doing some thinking-out-loud with colleagues, I’ve come to the conclusion that infrastructure-as-a-service will get bypassed by platform-as-a-service at most enterprises — because infrastructure folks will continue to act as an impediment to progress.

The benefits of cloud computing are clear: Improved agility and efficiency through dynamic provisioning; and lower labor costs and more fault tolerance through automation. The private versus public cloud debate has been over for some time. There are use cases for each. But getting IaaS into your enterprise probably won’t happen soon…

Grazed from v3.co.uk. Author: Madeline Bennett.

The availability of cloud services, and pressure to abide by rules and laws, is having a knock-on effect on firms’ storage requirements and leading to more investment in IT storage, according to the results of recent V3 reader research. Forty-one percent of IT professionals taking part in the study said they plan to spend more or the same as last year on storage during 2014. Data growth, regulatory compliance and cloud computing were cited as key drivers for businesses’ storage budget plans.

However, the research revealed that 41 percent of IT professionals "see no need" to upgrade from their current storage approach to newer approaches like converged storage, to get better value from their investments. Converged storage, where storage components and compute hardware are combined into one piece of hardware, is intended to increase the speed of access to important business data, simplify IT administration and offer better value…