Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Tom Miller.

Cloud computing has been an important trend for several years now and that trend is continuing to gather weight with new and improved ERP software offerings for manufacturers. Like any ERP selection choice, the decision to move to the cloud has pros and cons compared to traditional on-premise ERP systems.

One of the biggest advantages, regardless of the vendor selected, is low cost of ownership. There is little up-front cost for cloud ERP software and often no additional hardware cost. One low subscription gets the software now and includes all aspects of ERP support. You don’t need a help desk and you don’t need people to maintain the servers required for an in-house ERP…

Grazed from BusinessCloud News. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

Despite the investments Intel has made in emerging datacentre technologies a research analyst with Macquarie Capital has lowered share price estimates ahead of its Q3 earnings report Tuesday, citing pressures in the PC market brought about in part by cloud computing.

A report penned by Deepon Nag, a research analyst with the financial advisory Macquarie Capital says that cloud computing will likely apply downward pressure to the global PC market, hindering Intel’s ability to grow in market segments that are traditionally strongholds for the chip manufacturer. The firm lowered its estimates from $25 to $22 per share and downgraded Intel from “Outperform” to “Neutral.”…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Joe Emison.

I’ve been frustrated by a lack of any comprehensive comparison benchmarks between Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers or even within individual IaaS providers. Every benchmark I’ve found tested a small number of available “instance types” (to use Amazon Web Services’ nomenclature) over a small number of regions and didn’t provide an easy way to match that to pricing data or particular types of application performance.

As an AWS customer, I know from my own experience that the c1.xlarge performs really well for many applications, but no one appears to have ever benchmarked that instance type against AWS competitors. I’m not an expert in selecting and running benchmarks, but given the massive hole in what’s available out there, I hope to add to our collective understanding of IaaS performance by running my own IaaS benchmark project…

Grazed from Scientific Computing. Author: Editorial Staff.

IBM inventors have developed a method for dynamically managing network bandwidth within a cloud, which could lead to significant improvements in overall system performance, efficiency and economy. The cloud computing invention — for which IBM received U.S. Patent #8,352,953: Dynamically Provisioning Virtual Machines — provides a method for automatically deciding the best way for users to access a cloud computing system based on availability of network bandwidth. This invention is ideal for applications such as online systems running within a cloud that experience dramatic or unexpected peaks and valleys in demand for services, such as:

• Online retailers and auction sites that endure spikes in activity at different times of the day, various days of the week, and during holiday seasons and special promotions;
• Search engines, which must respond to surges in activity on a multitude of topics at any time, driven by popular culture and current events;|
• Government and news media Web sites, where local, regional, national and international developments and crises ranging from elections, to conflicts, to natural disasters can drive traffic without warning; and
• Online sites for major sporting events that encounter unpredictable demand from fans for stats, videos and other content during live competition…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Perficient, Inc. (NASDAQ: PRFT), a leading information technology consulting firm serving Global 2000 and other large enterprise customers throughout North America, today announced it has acquired CoreMatrix Systems LLC ("CoreMatrix"), a $15 million annual services revenue consulting firm specializing in salesforce.com cloud computing services and solutions. Perficient’s current annualized revenues are now approaching $400 million, and the transaction is expected to be accretive to adjusted earnings per share immediately.

"We’re excited to add to our cloud computing expertise with another acquisition of a quickly-growing salesforce.com consulting firm," said Jeffrey Davis, Perficient’s chief executive officer and president. "CoreMatrix’s strong East Coast presence complements our acquisition earlier this year of West Coast-based, salesforce.com-focused Clear Task. We now have the comprehensive capacity to sell and deliver Salesforce solutions across the entire United States. Furthermore, we’re excited to add another high-growth and well-run firm with excellent operating metrics to Perficient."…

Grazed from NetworkAsia. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

The large majority of people working in IT procurement are "significantly dissatisfied" with the way SaaS (software as a service) vendors define contract language related to security, a feeling likely to persist through 2015, according to a Gartner report.

"Contractually, very little security language appears in the body of SaaS contracts," Gartner analysts Jay Heiser and Alexa Bona wrote in the report. "Typically the security section contains little more than platitudes, stating that the provider will use ‘commercially reasonable efforts to establish and maintain security safeguards.’ These are often declared to be ‘in line with industry standards,’ which are mostly never defined."…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Ted Navarro.

Modern multimedia production and delivery is heavily dependent on computational power and data storage. For media producers and post-production companies, whether they work with video, audio, or both, efficient workflows require massive amounts of processing power and the efficient storage, movement, and delivery of multi-terabyte files. Until the advent of cloud computing and Infrastructure as a Service, that meant there was a huge barrier to entry into the media production business. If a company wanted to compete with other production houses or agencies, they had to make huge investments in infrastructure. However, the days of the massively expensive server farm are rapidly approaching their end. Infrastructure as a Service solutions that are specifically tailored to the media creation industry are rapidly making the old approach obsolete.

Media production is more complex today than it has ever been, with media data increasing in complexity and size to a level that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. Traditional infrastructure provisioning strategies no longer provide sufficiently flexible and scalable solutions. The cloud is the solution and will help media producers create better content more quickly. A few examples of flexible and scalable ways to access the benefits that cloud computing brings to media production:…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Penny Jones.

Cloud computing and virtualization go hand in hand. Virtualization is cloud’s foundation and cloud computing software – such as OpenStack, for example – “is just the bit that sits on top of the house to manage this”, as Rackspace’s VP of technology and product, Nigel Beighton, will tell you.

But as the Cloud evolves, so too must virtualization to support more IO-intensive network and storage workloads, and to ensure that open standards being developed across the industry can also be applied to hypervisor designs. Beighton says most clouds today run on virtualization technology that is ten years old. But work is taking place behind the scenes to revolutionize the way virtualization is done…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Ian JA Ferguson.

Touted for its business and cost benefits, cloud computing has become a hot topic in Asia but enterprises and service providers alike have yet to fully understand the requirements and challenges of this delivery model. Over the last couple of weeks there have been several announcements relating to cloud computing that indicate a growing demand for cloud services, including in Asia.

There’s still a lack of clarity about regulations and business requirements in the delivery of cloud services. Last week it was reported that cloud computing investments in Malaysia will grow by more than 20 times over the next eight years to hit 2.8 billion ringgit (US$873 million), according to Forrester Research. Badlisham Ghazali, CEO of Multimedia Development Corporation (MDEC) said this area would continue to be a key area of development for the country’s ICT roadmap…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Depankar Neogi.

In 2010, Netflix made a very bold move. It decided to completely move all its Internet media streaming business to the cloud. The company would rather focus its engineering effort on solving challenging business problems rather than spending money on data centers. Besides, that lets someone else worry about being experts in a technology. Amazon’s Cloud Computing group actively is solving problems such as storage solutions, hardware failover, and networking infrastructure so that customers like Netflix don’t have to be superstars. Using the cloud’s elastic computing capability, Netflix’s business has grown and its traffic today comprises more than 30% of all North America’s peak Web traffic.

Yet, the decision to move to the Cloud was not easy for Netflix, and that is true for many other businesses. Here I explore some of the best practices around selecting the right type of cloud computing vendor, running your business processes on the cloud, what to run on the cloud, and how to know if you are doing it right…