Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

The next two weeks of tech conferences can be boiled down to one phrase: Cloud computing. Another thread worth noting is whether CIOs and their departments will increasingly become irrelevant due to the cloud. Amazon Web Services will kick off its Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Last year’s AWS powwow was an inaugural voyage that highlighted a broad customer base and plenty of C-level types running around. This year’s AWS event will be much larger.

The general theme from Re:Invent will revolve around how maintaining a data center just doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore. Infrastructure as a service is the way to go and AWS is racking up case studies everywhere. Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference follows the AWS gathering a week later. Salesforce will talk social, cloud, mobile and being a customer-centric company…

Grazed from GreatResponder.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Object storage provider Cloudian announced its effort with two partners Penguin Computing and Intel to provide object storage product as a bundled solution for Cloud OpenStack users. They are now supporting S3 APIs, The product has great elasticity, and is well integrated with OpenStack’s Nova cloud computing, Penguin Computing that built Glance, Horizon, and Keystone now has a new scale-out and multi-datacenter for  low power consumption and bring a high storage density, This will enable the Intel® Atom™ 64-bit C2000 processor’s to work very efficient. This system will be provided to users by using Penguin’s global network. The software is also available for users to be used on their own hardware servers.

Michael Tso the founder and CEO of Cloudian said “We are excited to work with Penguin Computing and Intel to deliver our carrier grade storage on OpenStack, which precisely addresses the demands of our customers,” he also added “Penguin’s deep enterprise expertise coupled with Intel’s Atom C2000 processors offers industry leading efficiencies at a competitive price. The solution significantly eases the barriers for the adoption of OpenStack in the enterprise.”…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Historically, one of the major worries for enterprises considering cloud deployments has been vendor lock-in. If businesses entrust a significant part of their infrastructure and their data to third party organizations and then find that they are unable to transfer that investment to another vendor, it puts them in a difficult position. To avoid that risk, businesses often chose to invest in private cloud infrastructure rather than trusting in the public cloud.

The major advantage of virtualization technologies and the cloud platforms that are built on top of them is flexibility. Flexibility of infrastructure deployment accords well with modern business’s need for agility. When the conditions of business change, companies like to be certain that the platforms on which they rely can change with them. Openness is a crucial aspect of that flexibility…

Grazed from SeaCoastOnline.  Author: MJ Shoer.

Cloud and mobile computing represent two of the most significant technology developments of the last 50 years.  Dating to the 1960s, we have seen the introduction of the mainframe computer, mini-computers, the PC revolution of the 1980s, the onset of the Internet and now the mobilization of the Internet and global connectivity along with the Cloud. Nothing has seen more rapid growth than the Cloud and mobility. We now live in a world driven by "apps."

Think about the fact that of the 250 million people in the United States over the age of 14, it’s estimated that 235 million of them have a mobile device. That’s a staggering percentage and a technology adoption rate unlike anything we have seen before in human history….

Grazed from HispanicBusiness.com.  Author: Editorial Staff.

IBM inventors have patented a technique that enables cloud computing data center operators to dynamically redistribute workloads to lower-powered or underutilized systems, thereby minimizing the environmental footprint and impact of cloud services.

Business and government demand for cloud-based IT infrastructure services is growing rapidly. As a result, cloud data center power consumption is on the rise. Most commodity cloud providers follow one-size-fits-all approach to delivering services via power crunching servers — without taking into account the sustainability strategies of individual customers…

Grazed from Cloud Computing Intelligence.  Author:  Marcus Austin.

In a blog post on the Official Microsoft Blog “Microsoft and Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure, hello cloud!” Satya Nadella, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft announced that Cisco and Microsoft are planning a love-in together over cloud.

As Nadella explains the meeting of the two giants isn’t new, they already have years of collaborative form; “Microsoft and Cisco have a long history of collaborating to help customers address business and technology challenges. Together, we helped customers embrace IP-based client server computing and, most recently, with our pre-validated solutions, we’ve helped customers like ING Direct, nGenx, and the City of Barcelona embrace the private cloud.”…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Amazon Web Services’ second-annual re:Invent user conference kicks off on Tuesday, and the scale of the thing speaks volumes of just how pervasive cloud computing has become. I’ve been to dozens of user conferences in this city by companies such as IBM, HP, VMware, CA and Tableau, and re:Invent in its first year was seemed about as big as any of them. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in a few years, it’s one the biggest tech-company conferences anywhere.

AWS deserves a lot of credit for building a generally great computing platform, but its real success came via its ability to appeal to developers. It’s the platform that launched a thousand — nay, a million — applications and, perhaps more importantly, inspired an entirely new way of thinking about serviced-oriented architecture and composable applications. The next generation of applications will look very little like their predecessors, and it’s as much because of how they’ll be built as it is because of where they’ll be hosted…

Grazed from KissMetrics.  Author: Editorial Staff.

xpansion-stage SaaS companies have an overarching goal to grow very fast and achieve sustainable profitability. Understanding the operating metrics behind other expansion-stage SaaS companies can help them form an optimal economic model.

With that in mind, OpenView Venture Partners recently surveyed more than 160 senior executives and consultants at SaaS companies to create a report that is specifically focused on some of the growth and profitability metrics that are most relevant to SaaS companies at the expansion stage. Below are some of the report’s key findings.

To read more and view infographic, visit:  http://blog.kissmetrics.com/saas-operating-metrics/

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Last year some 6,000 attendees trekked out to Las Vegas for the first customer conference of what many consider to be the leading public IaaS cloud provider: Amazon Web Services. AWS re:Invent 2012 saw the launch of a new data analytics and warehousing product, price drops on its services, and lots of tips and tricks for how to use Amazon’s cloud. Here are five things to watch for next week’s second installment:

How big?

Last year, roaming the halls of AWS re:Invent, some of those in attendance spoke about how it was “the cloud show” of the year. Salesforce.com, VMware and die-hard OpenStack folks may take issue with that. Either way, it’s an important show for the cloud computing industry, and it will be interesting to see one year later what the buzz is after a rousing inaugural in 2012…