Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panetierri.

Oracle (ORCL), a Top 100 Cloud Services Provider in 2013, says cloud computing bookings grew 35 percent in Q2 2014. That sounds impressive but it’s unclear how much of that revenue involve channel partners and integrators driving customers toward Oracle’s cloud. New Oracle Channel Chief Rich Geraffo hasn’t said much to the media. But CEO Larry Ellison and President Mark Hurd both professed cloud success during an earnings call earlier today.

Hurd stated: "In Cloud, we had bookings growth of 35%, and saw excellent growth across all major product pillars. Fusion SaaS was even better with HCM, sales force automation and ERP, all up triple digits. We are adding customers at high growth rates, contract sizes are growing and hundreds of customers are now live Fusion SaaS."…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

It’s that time of year that everyone issues their predictions for the year ahead, and there certainly have been some good forecasts about impending or continuing developments in the cloud market. Louis Columbus, a fellow contributor here at Forbes, recently channeled a compelling list of cloud predictions from research firm IDC, and Suhas Sreedhar adds additional insights for the year ahead. In the spirit of prediction-making, I am offering my own. But rather than provide another list, I have just one prediction for the year ahead. That is, cloud computing is set to become mainstream computing, period.

We’ll continue to call it “cloud” for some time to come, and vendors will continue to pitch it as “cloud,” but it’s now the mainstream. We’ve seen this before. In the early 1990s, there was client/server computing, in which PCs were provided access to larger back-end systems. Then, it was Internet computing, in which applications and data were exposed through websites. We still have mobile computing, but the act of using smartphones to access back-end applications and data is simply being thought of as computing as well…

Grazed from CruxialCIO. Author: Brian T. Horowitz.

Amazon Web Services has signed an agreement to expand its ability to provide cloud computing services from data centers located inside China. The company announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Dec. 18 with the Beijing and Ningxia governments. Businesses such as Xiaomi Qihoo 360, TCL, Tiens, NQ Mobile, FunPlus Kingsoft, Mobotap and Papaya Mobile already work with AWS in China.

During a limited preview of its China Region, a select China-based and multinational companies will be able to use the AWS platforms to run their applications. Chinese providers ChinaNetCenter and SINNET will offer the infrastructure, bandwidth and network capabilities to allow AWS to operate in the country…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

In mid-November, Microsoft unveiled a facility on its Redmond, Wash., campus that had become the new home for its Digital Crimes Unit. It took the opportunity to offer up new details about the multi-agency initiative that disrupted the huge Citadel botnet earlier this year. What Microsoft hasn’t yet talked much about is the role the cloud played in the Citadel project and how the cloud enables the company to tackle cyber crime. I had a chance to hear more about it from Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, this week.

The Digital Crimes Unit has some dedicated hardware on-premises, although Boscovich revealed only a few specifics. “We do in fact use quite a lot of storage power, a lot of compute power,” he said. “We have a Hadoop cluster on SQL server and a parallel data warehouse right here on-premises. We’re talking terabytes of storage.”…

Grazed from Parallels. Author: PR Announcement.

Parallels, a leading hosting and cloud services enablement provider, is now a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation. By formalizing its support for the open source cloud computing platform, Parallels is aligning its open source strategy to support OpenStack. The overall goal of the Parallels OpenStack initiative is to enable service providers to easily deploy OpenStack as their cloud platform for delivering Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform that helps organizations manage compute, storage, and networking resources in private and public cloud environments. Service providers, enterprises, government agencies and academic institutions around the world use OpenStack to power demanding production workloads…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM and 21Vianet Group, Inc. VNET announced today that they have entered a definitive agreement to introduce IBM’s premier private cloud infrastructure service and accelerate high value managed private cloud services to China. This partnership brings IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+, a powerful, secure and scalable private cloud built on open standards, to China to keep up with the rising demand for managing more complex, mission-critical workloads and applications in the cloud for large enterprises throughout China. Pursuant to the agreement, IBM will provide the physical point of distribution (POD) and service while 21Vianet will host the POD facility at its data centers in Beijing.

Mr. Josh Chen, Chairman and CEO of 21Vianet, said, "IBM is a global leading enterprise-level cloud computing provider. What’s more, IBM is a sincere partner, not only sharing its own technologies and services, but also growing together with us in business insights, management experience, operation and marketing etc. Through this cooperation, 21Vianet Group, Inc has not only strengthened its ability to accelerate business growth, but also comprehensively enhanced the service capability of its cloud computing."…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Here’s a Christmas gift you don’t even need to pay for: Fedora Linux, the open source operating system supported by Red Hat (RHT), has introduced Fedora 20, the latest and greatest version of the platform. Code-named "Heisenbug" (yes, that’s a geek pun), the release brings updates for the open source cloud, virtualization and more.

Perhaps the biggest new feature in this release is official support for ARM as a primary architecture, which could help drive Fedora adoption not only on mobile but also in the emerging ARM server world. As Red Hat noted: "While x86/x86_64 serves as the default architecture for the majority of Fedora users, ARM is rapidly growing in stature and already dominates the mobile world. Beyond mobile and the maker movement, ARM shows great promise as a powerful and cost-effective technology for the server world."…

Grazed from Saba. Author: PR Announcement.

Saba (OTCPink: SABA), a global leader in next-generation cloud solutions for talent management, today announced that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). CSA is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing and to provide education on the uses of cloud computing to help secure all other forms of computing. Saba’s security team will share its experience in delivering secure cloud solutions to a global customer base of more than 11.1 million subscribers, and collaborate with members to advance and apply best practices.

"As a corporate member of the Cloud Security Alliance, Saba will have ongoing opportunities to exchange knowledge with others who also are committed to enhancing the security of cloud products and their customers’ environments," said Randy Barr, chief security officer of Saba. "Joining CSA, a well-respected industry organization, will allow Saba to contribute through its many committees and industry programs. The learnings and insights gathered through our CSA membership will help us continuously improve our own security and customer privacy programs."…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Eric Lundquist.

The National Security Agency’s hacks of top corporate networks and the broad adoption of cloud computing are among my picks for the top enterprise IT trends of 2013. What were the top 10 events, trends, and technologies that changed the enterprise in 2013? While there are lots of candidates, I picked the top one which I think had the greatest impact. Here are my first five trends. I’ll be adding the final five in a later blog and then sorting them out in a 1 to 10 ranking.

The NSA cyber-spying scandal: When the National Security Agency domestic cyber-spying scandal first started to unfold last June it was unclear that the snooping would reach out and touch the world’s top technology vendors. Rather it seemed at first as if the snooping was all about telecom intercepts…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Melissa Busch.

Conflicting international data protection laws may negatively affect the way in which organizations conduct business using the cloud.

For the Sake of the Cloud

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has requested that government officials around the world meet to discuss data protection laws. Variance in laws across geographical locations may stymie the growth of cloud computing, which in turn could have a negative economic influence. According to an article on InformationWeek, as IT managers begin to ease their data into the cloud, they are dealing with conflicting international laws that govern where certain types of data come from and where they are being stored…