Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Aaron Ricadela and Dina Bass.

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT:US) unveiled price cuts for Web services, seeking to catch up to market-leader Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN:US) in cloud computing. Starting Nov. 1, Microsoft will offer discounts for its Windows Azure cloud service, as well as annual payment plans for customers signing long-term contracts, said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise chief who has been named as a possible replacement for retiring Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer.

The world’s largest software maker has pledged to match its rival’s prices for public-cloud products that let customers store and run applications via the Internet. Amazon, whose Web Services unit was the early entrant, is more than five times bigger than rival providers combined, when measured by cloud-computing capacity usage, according to researcher Gartner Inc…

Grazed from Replicon. Author: Vivek Gopalpuria.

SaaS is a modern business model for application software. A vendor who is invested in on-premise, hosted, and SaaS models cannot commit to providing all the benefits of a true SaaS model due to conflicting revenue models. Their resources are going to be spread thin supporting multiple versions rather than driving innovation.

Additionally, if the vendor makes the majority of their revenue selling on-premise software, it will be very difficult for them to fully commit to a true SaaS solution since the majority of their resources will be allocated to supporting the on-premise software. Even if they do support multi-tenancy, their SaaS customers may have to wait several years for a new version if the hosted solution is constrained by the release schedule of the vendor’s on-premise product…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe Weinman.

Cloud computing products and services from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Rackspace as well as companies ranging from AT&T to Zuora are clearly gaining traction, growing at a 36% CAGR, according to one recent forecast. As cloud computing becomes pervasive, customers will need to determine how various cloud components from various companies will work together to meet business objectives.

The IEEE—”the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology,” and the one that standardized Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) and Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11)—has brought together industry and academia to help develop Intercloud standards as part of its Cloud Computing Initiative and today announced an effort intended to test those standards under real-world conditions.(Disclosure: I am the chairman of the IEEE Intercloud Testbed executive committee)…

Grazed from NewsFactor. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

Redmond is going deeper into the enterprise cloud Relevant Products/Services. Microsoft Relevant Products/Services on Monday announced its next wave of enterprise products and services aimed at helping companies tap into cloud computing opportunities and overcome IT challenges.

Part of the company’s stated goal is to drive enterprise cloud adoption. The new products complement Office 365 and other Microsoft cloud services and include hybrid infrastructure Relevant Products/Services Relevant Products/Services and modern applications…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: John Rath.

Seeking to optimize for speed and performance, Verizon will use AMD SeaMicro SM15000 servers to link hundreds of cores together in a single system to power its new Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud platform and cloud-based object storage service. Verizon and AMD co-developed additional hardware and software technology on the SM15000 server that provides unprecedented performance and best-in-class reliability backed by enterprise-level service level agreements (SLAs).

“Verizon created the enterprise cloud, now we’re recreating it,” said John Stratton, president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “This is the revolution in cloud services that enterprises have been calling for. We took feedback from our enterprise clients across the globe and built a new cloud platform from the bottom up to deliver the attributes they require.”…

Grazed from HighCloud Security. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud Security, a leader in cloud encryption and key management software, today announced new capabilities that enable enterprises to securely migrate data to and from the public cloud. This technology also lets customers leverage public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in new ways, including secure cloud backup and disaster recovery for virtual machines (VMs).

IaaS offerings are built on highly virtualized server infrastructures, creating unique security challenges. VMs are highly dynamic, and can be moved, replicated or suspended by a service provider typically without the knowledge of the data owner. As cloud adoption grows, organizations struggle to ensure the privacy of sensitive or regulated data while it is in flight to the cloud, as well as at rest…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Rene Millman.

BlackBerry has previewed its new cloud-based service for managing multiple mobile devices, including Android, iOS and BlackBerry smartphones. The as-yet unnamed service was announced at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando. The enterprise mobility management SaaS product is undergoing closed beta testing, but should be generally available by the end of November on an ongoing monthly subscription.

It said the service would allow customers to secure and manage corporate and personal devices through the cloud, and offers mobile device management (MDM), mobile application management (MAM), security standards, and self-service capabilities for the end user…

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Microsoft will soon have a range of products to beef up its cloud computing business. According to the guy running the show, however, the most important thing is not what Microsoft is selling, but how it was made. “The big call we made was that my 10,000-person organization focused on one thing – building software that powers Windows Azure,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s executive vice president for cloud and enterprise. Azure is the name of Microsoft’s cloud. “The software for Azure runs on the server, not the other way around.”

That is actually a big deal for a company with a lot of legacy business. All too often, as when Microsoft went into phones and tablets with an approach that stressed its personal computer operating system, the pressure is to make the dominant existing technology the center of the new world, whether or not it belongs there…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Frank Konkel.

Amazon Web Services scored a major victory against IBM in the battle to build the cloud computing infrastructure for the CIA, NSA and the rest of the intelligence community. On Oct. 7, U.S. Court of Federal Claims Judge Thomas Wheeler ruled in favor of AWS, which had challenged the scope of and need for corrective action taken by the CIA in response to recommendations made by the Government Accountability office in June.

Wheeler’s ruling came just a few hours after the conclusion of oral arguments that were closed to the public. His legal opinion is not yet public record, but the ruling essentially overturns GAO’s sustainment of a bid protest filed by IBM after AWS was awarded a cloud computing contract worth up to $600 million…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Bright Computing, the leading, vendor-independent provider of management solutions for clusters and clouds, announced today general availability of enhanced support for NVIDIA® GPU accelerators in Bright Cluster Manager®. Enhancements include support for the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit version 5.5, the most-recently released version of the NVIDIA CUDA parallel programming platform.

Bright Computing customers can easily provision, monitor and manage systems with NVIDIA GPU accelerators within cluster-management hierarchies. The fully integrated and comprehensive support in Bright Cluster Manager for NVIDIA GPU accelerators includes:…