Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

Oh, what a difference a few years can make. I remember almost fondly the days of Microsoft MSFT +0.55% posturing over the validity of cloud computing and now, if a report by Bloomberg proves to be correct, the head of Microsoft’s cloud division, Satya Nadella, looks set to be its next CEO.

This really is an immense turnaround. Microsoft has truly delivered on its “all in” message re the cloud. We’ve seen compelling offerings for developers and enteprise IT by way of the Azure family of products and we’ve seen the emergence of a compelling proposition around office productivity. While some might argue that Microsoft Office is bloatware, Office 365 is a pretty good balance between the aims to deliver a fully functional desktop product while still allowing for collaboration and remote access…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Howard Baldwin.

There has been a whole lotta brouhaha recently about public clouds – that is, the cloud services provided by such tech heavyweights as Amazon, Google GOOG +2.55%, IBM IBM +0.54%, Hewlett-Packard HPQ +0.79%, Microsoft MSFT +0.55%, Oracle ORCL +1.16%, and Rackspace.

They theoretically represent a less-expensive way for enterprises to provide computing infrastructure without actually spending on hardware and management. They are not to be confused with SaaS applications, which theoretically represent a less-expensive way for enterprises to provide computing infrastructure without actually spending on software and management…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

After trotting out some impressive enterprise users at its conference in Portland, Oregon, early last year, OpenStack hasn’t been able to showcase many additional big names. Supporters tried to address "the debate about the opportunity for OpenStack in the enterprise" at a half-day conference yesterday that was held at the Computer History Museum and webcast.

The speakers ended up highlighting a few of the challenges holding back OpenStack deployments. Many businesses are looking for the kind of enterprise technology product that they’re used to seeing, and that’s not what OpenStack looks like yet, said Ken Pepple, CTO and founder of Solinea, a consulting company that helps businesses implement OpenStack clouds…

Grazed from TechNet. Author: Brad Anderson.

In the Day 1 keynote at the recent re:Invent conference, there was an interesting point made about the virtuous cycle that can occur for the cloud vendor and for customers. As I listened to the keynote, I kept thinking: “They are missing the biggest benefit for the entire industry; if the public cloud vendor has the right strategy and is thinking about how to benefit the largest population possible, then they are completely missing how this virtuous cycle can grow to benefit every organization in the world – even if they are not using the public cloud.”

Let me explain a bit more about what I mean. (And, before I get too much farther along, I want to note that this post ties into the cool news yesterday about our work with the Open Compute Project.). The virtuous cycle of a public cloud looks a lot like the image below. As the usage of the public cloud grows, you need more hardware to meet demand – and for sustained growth you will need a lot of hardware…

Grazed from TechNet. Author: Editorial Staff.

After the delivery of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and Office 2013, Microsoft “ramped-up our energy and sharpened our focus on the opportunities of cloud computing,” writes Quentin Clark in a post on the SQL Server Blog. “These opportunities stem from technical innovation, the nature of cloud computing, and from an understanding of our customers.”

Clark, who leads the team responsible for the engineering direction of the company’s data platform technologies, writes about how Microsoft’s applications and the information they generate and manage is changing its vision of the data platform. For example, he says, relevant data “is not just from inside the enterprise…

Grazed from DatacenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Cloud computing, end-user mobility technologies, and new delivery models have all directly impacted the modern data center infrastructure. In fact, enterprise IT departments are under constant pressure to meet user and application demands, aware that cloud deployments offer an easier and faster alternative but often pinned down by legacy deployment models. The problem stems from the inability of those legacy models to adapt to meet expectations for rapid provisioning, continuous delivery, and consistent performance across multiple environments.

Current data center platforms now span many logical nodes where resources, data, and users are shared between infrastructures. When it comes to delivering applications, the challenges of performance, security, and reliability have not changed. What have changed are the environments and conditions under which those challenges must be addressed…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Dan Kusnetzky.

I recently reviewed a slide deck IBM shared concerning cloud security and the mid-market. The deck offered a number of recommendations that were designed to help mid-market decision makers think about and implement processes that would help make their uses of cloud computing services safer. All-in-all I thought the suggestions were useful.

IBM’s four recommendations
What was most interesting to me was that IBM was able to boil down the complex industry discussion about cloud security into four simple recommendations. Here they are:

• Determine what you want to put in the cloud
• Spend wisely
• Accept that security is about risk management
• Make the concept of security understandable…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Noel Randewich.

Oracle Corp CEO Larry Ellison played down concerns on Wednesday about possible government snooping in his business customers’ private data. At an industry conference in San Francisco, an audience member asked the Oracle co-founder what to tell potential Oracle cloud-computing clients who worry that the National Security Agency could access their information.

"To the best of our knowledge, an Oracle database hasn’t been broken into for a couple of decades by anybody," Ellison replied. "It’s so secure, there are people that complain," he added. Oracle, Salesforce.com and other major Silicon Valley companies are increasingly offering Internet-based business services for things like human resources, accounting and sales management, in a trend known as cloud computing…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.

Amazon Web Services users today got a new reporting tool for the EC2 cloud computing platform. This will make it quite a bit easier to track how they are using their regular and reserved instances and what it costs them. Amazon used to do very little to hide the power of its cloud computing platform behind pretty, New Relic-like graphs and usage reports.

Lately, however, it seems the company has been listening to its users. Earlier this month, the company launched a new Billing Console that gives users a dashboard with colorful, very un-AWS-like graphs to keep track of their cloud computing cost across Amazon’s services…

Grazed from ServerWatch. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

VMware, more than perhaps any other vendor, has helped enterprises around the world embrace server virtualization. In 2013, VMware’s efforts paid off as the company reported strong revenues as it gears up for the cloud-computing future. VMware reported fourth quarter fiscal 2013 revenue of $1.48 billion, which is a 15 percent year-over-year gain. Cloud Computing and VMwareNet income for the quarter was reported at $335 million. For the full fiscal 2013 year, VMware revenue came in at $5.21 billion, for a 13 percent gain over 2012, with net income reported at $1.01 billion.

Looking forward, VMware provided first quarter fiscal 2014 guidance for revenue in the range of $1.33 billion and $1.37 billion, representing a gain of 12 to 15 percent year-over-year. For the the full fiscal 2014 year, VMware’s guidance is for revenue in the range of $5.94 billion and $6.1 billion, for a gain of 14 to 17 percent year over year…