Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

GreenButton(TM), the leading provider of compute intensive and integrated on-demand cloud solutions, today announced a partnership with NVIDIA, which complements the company’s existing offerings in the Digital Media and Entertainment industry, and provides a more complete service for both studios and freelance artists. The Academy Award(R) winning mental ray(R) is the most widely available production rendering solution in the world, and the native renderer within the Autodesk(R) Maya(R), 3ds Max(R), and Softimage(R) product suites. By enabling mental ray in the cloud through GreenButton, users of Maya, 3ds Max and Softimage will now have the ability to access massive computing resources on-demand at an extremely affordable cost.

"NVIDIA is very pleased to make mental ray available in the Cloud with GreenButton," said Phillip Miller, director of NVIDIA Advanced Rendering Products. "As the rendering quality of productions continually rises there’s an ever growing need for more processing power to satisfy it. GreenButton now enables mental ray artists to have the rendering power of a major studio to ensure their creative vision isn’t constrained by local resources."…

Grazed from CloudComputingExpo. Author: Paul Miller.

The ‘platform’ tier in the middle of cloud computing’s architecture is being squeezed, folded and reshaped beyond recognition. Even with continued investment, can it survive the transformative pressures forcing down upon it from the software/application layer above, or the apparently inexorable upward movement from the infrastructure layer upon which it rests?

To look at recent investments and enthusiastic headlines, it would be easy to assume that Platform as a Service (or PaaS) is on the up. RedHat recently trumpeted the launch of OpenShift Enterprise – a ‘private PaaS,’ whatever that might be. Eagerly tracked super-startup Pivotal pushed PivotalOne out to the world, strengthening the position of the Cloud Foundry PaaS offering upon which it sits. Apprenda, a PaaS that almost predates wider recognition of the term, secured an additional $16 million to continue expanding. And, more tightly integrated into Salesforce’s latest vision for world domination, Heroku continues to attract enthusiasts…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: David Weldon.

By all accounts, activity in the cloud will continue at a thunderous pace in 2014, and the SaaS and IaaS markets are expected to be especially strong. A recent study by GigaOM Research finds that the cloud computing market is on pace to grow by 126 percent in 2014, Business 2 Community has reported. That includes a growth in the software-as-a-services market of 119 percent, and growth in the infrastructure-as-a-service market of 122 percent.

The news isn’t all good in the IaaS space for vendors, however, as Gartner recently predicted that one-in-four IaaS vendors will disappear by the end of the year, due to feverish competition. Another major trend: "as the cloud matures, larger established businesses and enterprises have started to get on board public and private cloud platforms," the article notes…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

One of the awesome things about cloud computing, especially when it comes to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), is that customers don’t have to even think what sort of hardware is used to run their virtual machines. The rise of the cloud has mirrored the rise of low cost, commodity hardware and the move away from IT caring about what brands sit in their data centers. You’d have thought then that cloud would pose a real threat to vendors whose widgets tend to be differentiated by brand – in a nameless, faceless world, what do they have left to go with?

Which is why it is so perplexing from the outside, an an undeniable coup from the inside, that Intel INTC has managed to take its "Intel inside" brand and make it relevant in the cloud world. Even more perplexing when we first saw it, late last year, was that it wasn’t a second rate underdog using the branding – that would have made sense as a kind of a point of differentiation against the incumbent…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Sam Charrington.

Launched in 1991, Intel’s "Intel Inside" marketing slogan and accompanying advertising campaign has been famously successful. The campaign, launched two years after the introduction of the company’s 486 processor, made the company – once known only to engineers and scientists – a household name and, in the process, helped stave off commoditization by rival chipmakers, namely AMD.

This morning Intel revealed its "Intel Inside" for the cloud computing era, a new "Powered by Intel Cloud Technology" badge and the associated Intel Cloud Technology Program, designed for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). The company also announced the initial crop of 16 CSPs to participate in the program and the Intel Cloud Finder, a portal targeted at helping end-users find cloud services built on Intel technologies…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

General Dynamics Information Technology, a business unit of General Dynamics (NYSE: GD), has been selected as a cloud services broker by the state of Texas Department of Information Resources. General Dynamics’ CloudBroker portal is now available to all state and local agencies and public education institutions — in Texas and other states — that are seeking a single point of contact to procure, manage and integrate public, private and hybrid cloud services and resources.

"Texas is paving the way for all state agencies to benefit from the flexibility and cost savings of cloud computing," said Charlie Plummer, vice president and general manager of General Dynamics Information Technology’s IT Solutions sector. "We have the right experience to help state agencies reduce cloud acquisition and contracting costs as well as save valuable time in procurement."…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Those who register now for Rock Stars of Mobile Cloud, the premier mobile cloud event of the year scheduled for May 6 in Boston, will receive a free annual subscription to IEEE Cloud Computing, IEEE’s newest cloud computing magazine. IEEE Computer Society’s Rock Stars of Mobile Cloud, a high-level, one-day summit aimed at business and technology leaders, will empower attendees to understand what’s next for the mobile cloud.

The first 100 people who register for Rock Stars of Mobile Cloud will be among the first to receive a digital edition of IEEE Cloud Computing magazine, launching this spring. IEEE Cloud Computing will include articles about data privacy and integrity, rapid scaling of cloud computing systems, preparing to shift to cloud-based systems, mitigating vulnerabilities in cloud-based systems, securing cloud systems, and more…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Reuven Cohen.

There’s been a renewed debate recently over the various layers of cloud computing stacks. At stake is a fight for cloud computing market share and mind share — and possibly, the future of cloud platforms. Beyond a small group of technologists, cloud computing remains largely a mystery for most people. Ironically, I believe that’s the point of the cloud: To act as an abstraction of the complexity found in more traditional data centers and application hosting infrastructures.

At the center of the cloud platform debate is a new reality: Cloud consumers no longer need to manage or worry about the underlying infrastructure. The question of platform occurs only when you ask who or what controls operating systems, storage, deployed applications, and networking components…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Corent Technology today announced that SurPaaS®, its disruptive technology that transforms software applications into robust, fully instrumented multi-tenant SaaS, is now being used to rapidly deploy .NET software applications on the Windows Azure cloud from Microsoft Corp. in a highly scalable SaaS model.

"We are excited to announce our work with Windows Azure, as well as support of .NET applications," said Feyzi Fatehi, CEO, Corent Technology. "There is tremendous demand for proven software applications to be delivered ‘as a service’ in an efficient and cost effective manner. With SurPaaS, software vendors can stay focused on their core product, and yet reach a much larger customer base by transforming their software applications to robust SaaS quickly and cost effectively without having to perform a heart surgery on their application," he added…

Grazed from TechRadar. Author: Owen Rogers.

IT vendors had a golden age before the invention of the cloud. It was essentially a risk-free delivery. Customers required a product, sales would propose a solution to which the customer would sign and commit, the customer would pay upfront, the vendor would start manufacturing (if required), and eventually the solution would be delivered to the customer.

At every step of this journey the vendor took steps to prevent its risk. The contract was negotiated per customer, thereby ensuring the deal was profitable. The customer paid upfront so the vendor didn’t need to borrow money or risk the customer defaulting on a debt.
The contract commitment was made beforehand, so the customer took the risk that the solution might not be used. And finally, the customer was told when delivery would be made, so the vendor could optimize its stock levels…