Grazed from ECManaged. Author: PR Announcement.

ECmanaged, the multi-Cloud and IT management tool, is proud to announce it has been shortlisted in the 2013-2014 Cloud Awards Program in the category “Best Software as a Service”. Juan Carlos Moreno, Co-Founder and CTO at ECmanaged said “We have developed an online IT management tool that brings Cloud and physical IT platforms to the next level. This award is an acknowledgement for the innovative character of ECmanaged and Europe.”

Over 200 organizations entered the Cloud Awards contest, with entries coming from across the globe, including Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and the Middle East. ECmanaged will compete with BeGlobal – SDL (UK), HRBoss (Singapore), Xero (US) and Workshare (UK)…

Grazed from ControlCircle. Author: PR Announcement.

MaxCloud provides a complete view of corporate Amazon Web Services and IT infrastructure for monitoring and optimisation Corporate users of Amazon Web Services (AWS) can now have complete visibility of their cloud computing operations with the launch of MaxCloud, a new monitoring service from ControlCircle.

Research from the Cloud Industry Forum highlights that 79 per cent of CIOs want a single monitoring solution to oversee all IT operations but only 30 per cent of CIOs perceive that they have this capability today. In response, MaxCloud provides IT management with a holistic and unified view of their estate, bringing transparency to the infrastructure. This ensures that organisations can maintain control of quality, governance and expenditure, enabling them to correlate IT spend and value…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Dreamhost has emerged in recent years to become one of the world’s most popular shared hosting providers. The company is now expanding its lineup with new cloud compute and storage services, leveraging the open-source OpenStack platform serving as the foundation. Helping to fuel Dreamhost’s expansion is a new $30 million round of financing. In a video interview with eWEEK, Dreamhost CEO Simon Anderson discussed his company’s OpenStack efforts and where the cloud is head in the next year.

Dreamhost’s DreamObjects service is an OpenStack Swift Storage compatible cloud object storage service that launched in 2012 and is continuing to grow in 2013. The DreamObjects platform leverages the Ceph open-source storage file system at its base.  Dreamhost’s other big cloud effort is the DreamCompute cloud platform, which is currently in beta, and is rapidly nearing wider availability. DreamCompute is Dreamhost’s cloud computing platform and is based on OpenStack, as well…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Editorial Staff.

SaaS makes it incredibly easy to replace on-premises software with cloud services. The problem: Most corporate data still resides in-house. Think of trying to use Salesforce.com without access to customer contact info or sales records. See the problem?

To view the infographic and read more from the source, visit http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/software-as-a-service/its-all-about-the-data/d/d-id/1113123?f_src=informationweek_gnews

Grazed from ChannelNomics. Author: Chris Gonsalves.

There’s no denying that cloud computing and mobility have changed the way organizations do business, mostly for the better. But the productivity and cost benefits of cloud and ubiquitous mobile access are balanced by commensurate increase in risks to security and regulatory compliance, a new study shows.

Identity and access management provider SailPoint Technologies Inc. last week released new research that shows the rush to adopt cutting-edge technologies like cloud and BYOD has not been met with a corresponding lift in appropriate IT controls to properly manage them. That’s put many organizations at increased risk of fraud, theft, and privacy breaches, SailPoint concludes…

Grazed from EINPressWire. Author: PR Announcement.

ComputeNext Inc. today announced that it has been named winner of the 2013 UP-START Cloud Award for the category “Best Cloud Broker Solution.” The company was recognized for its flagship Global Cloud Marketplace (GCM) solution, an e-commerce platform for the discovery, procurement, provisioning and use of on-demand software, cloud store and infrastructure which is used by 100s of IT professionals and organization to deploy and manage IaaS.

The UP-START Awards are part of the UP Cloud Computing Conference and honor disruptive, next-generation cloud computing companies who are defining key elements of cloud technology. The Cloud Awards are established in the cloud community as a completely community driven recognition platform to cultivate the understanding, appreciation and advancement of the contribution of cloud computing to the business and technology community by giving cloud consumers the power to vote for the solutions which impact their business. ComputeNext was selected via Borda count from a pool of eight competing companies and chosen by cloud computing thought leaders as an outstanding solution for cloud services brokerage…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Editorial Staff.

Dell and Red Hat Inc., provider of open source solutions, today announced the companies will jointly engineer enterprise-grade, private cloud solutions based on OpenStack to help customers move to and deploy highly-scalable cloud computing models. As part of the expanded relationship, Dell becomes the first company to OEM v. The co-engineered solution will be built on Dell infrastructure and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

The solution will be delivered by a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform practice within Dell Cloud Services. With today’s announcement, Dell and Red Hat are strengthening their longstanding collaboration and commitment to help businesses confidently embrace open source-based cloud computing models, said a press release…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Cloud computing is a game-changing technology that is making a difference in most industries, including the media industry. In a recent article, the CTO of Amazon.com pointed out that the cloud has changed the way in which firms are approaching media production, enabling them to innovate in new and creative ways. The promise of the cloud in the media industry parallels the experiences of growing firms today when considering the cloud to help them to become more productive and competitive.

Cloud and Media Production

In a recent post on CloudAve, writer Ted Navarro highlighted thoughts about the evolution of cloud technology from Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon.com. Vogels pointed out that the cloud will help to develop greater innovations in mobile and analytics. He also called out the effect that cloud computing has had on media and even on midsize firms. Midsize firms at one point, he said, could not produce what they wanted due to the expense associated with hardware and third-party production houses. Now, with the cloud, the creation of rich media has lowered in price as various audio and video tools have become more commoditized…

Grazed from ChicagoTribune. Author: Editorial Staff.

Hostway Corp., which hosts and builds web pages for small and mid-sized companies, has been bought by private-equity fund Littlejohn & Co. Details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the price is thought to be at least $200 million, based on recent multiples for acquisitions.

Hostway, launched in 1998, is the latest Chicago tech company to be acquired in what’s become a heady market for deals, especially in hot niches such as big data and cloud computing. In recent months, Deerfield-based BigMachines Inc. was bought for $400 million, and mobile-commerce software provider Braintree Inc. was bought by eBay Inc. for $800 million…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

"Cloud adopters face serious risk in the next two years because of the strong possibility that their provider will be acquired or forced out of business, according to Gartner," says this Computerworld story. Gartner is calling for major consolidation in the cloud computing space, saying that about 25 percent of the top 100 IT-oriented IaaS providers won’t even be around in 2015. Some will get acquired, but some will simply go out of business, as we’ve seen happen already this year.

Calling for consolidation in the cloud computing space is like calling for the sunrise tomorrow morning: It’s going to happen, and it’s a natural progression of any technology wave. Companies innovate, grow the market, and the market consolidates — now repeat with something else…