Grazed from Skytap.  Author: PR Announcement.

Skytap Inc., the leading provider of self-service application development environments in the cloud, today announced it was recognized by Seattle Business magazine as the cloud computing vendor in the 2013 Tech Impact Awards. The awards program recognizes Washington-based software, information technology and mobile-app companies that are making an impact on business operations across various industries, including mobile, cloud and analysis.

Skytap was honored at an awards ceremony on Thursday evening at the Renaissance Hotel in Seattle, and will be featured in the October issue of Seattle Business magazine. Other winning companies include PayScale, Simply Measured, Tableau Software, and Zillow…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Caitlin White and Michelle Boisvert.

Enterprises wary of moving mission-critical data off-premises to a public cloud provider such as Amazon may find an OpenStack private cloud fits the bill.  But private clouds can be costlier than public clouds, and relatively few IT employees have OpenStack skills.

"We had quite a bit of developer need for self-service; we were spending quite a bit of time on deploying images for developers and just needed to get out of that for my team," said Joe Specht, senior director of system infrastructure at Seattle-based Tableau Software.  Tableau adopted Metacloud’s "Private Cloud as a Service" product a little more than a year ago to help out…

Grazed from Security Sense.  Author: Chandan Bhattacharya.

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Aaron Ricadela.

Oracle Corp., the world’s largest database-software maker, will boost operating margins by shifting to services delivered via the Web from software installed on computers, Chief Financial Officer Safra Catz said.

Oracle will be more profitable as technology spending is directed toward cloud-computing tools, Catz, who is also co-president, said at a meeting with analysts in San Francisco yesterday. Analysts project on average that Oracle will reach an operating margin of 48 percent for the fiscal year through May, compared with 39 percent in the previous year …

Grazed from Xconomy.  Author: Benjamin Romano.

What’s the biggest thing stopping big companies from using cloud computing for their business? People with outdated skills.  So says Simon Crosby, co-founder and CTO of Bromium, a cloud security company, and a panelist at this week’s Washington Technology Industry Association TechNW: North to Innovation event on cloud computing and big data.

Crosby, who previously co-founded XenSource, maker of the Xen open-source hypervisor used by services including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, says public clouds are ready for enterprise IT use. But the people working in enterprise IT organizations came up in the world racking and stacking on-premises servers, and installing and managing Windows—”skills we don’t need anymore,” he says…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

BrightBox Solutions, the innovative technology company behind Help Desk Premier, is pleased to announce the upcoming availability of a private cloud version of the application. BrightBox Solutions is a leading provider of help desk software for the SMB market, and they recently received $500,000 in new investment. The investment is targeted at, among other things, strengthening their SaaS offering. The product, which has long been offered as an on-premise solution, will be offered as a hosted solution, and now as a private hosted solution.

BrightBox Solutions began beta testing the cloud-based version of the program on September 3, and along with that testing comes the announcement of the availability of a private cloud option. As with any cloud application, BrightBox Solutions will host the clients database, but instead of commingling the data with that of other companies, the customer will have a dedicated cloud instance that operates exclusively as a home for their data…

Grazed from ADTMag. Author: Jeffrey Swartz.

Red Hat this week announced an expansion to its OpenShift Platform as a Service (PaaS) portfolio. The tools are targeted at letting developers build modern, composite and mobile apps to public, private and hybrid cloud environments

The company outlined its new JBoss xPaaS services for OpenShift suite, based on its development environment for enterprise Java and middleware. In addition to providing new tooling for developers to build modern and mobile apps for PaaS clouds, Red Hat officials said the new suite will help developers connect existing legacy apps to cloud environments without recoding them…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Esmeralda Swartz.

Here at MetraTech we work hard to provide a billing and compensation platform that will help service providers monetize their services, whether those services are deployed in the cloud, across the Internet or other methods. However, we have learned that before proposing a billing solution, we first need to understand the full extent of the problems our customers face.

The cloud business model is already exciting enough, offering opportunities for a plethora of new services, delivering services in new and better ways and enabling collaborative business models that could be worth more than the sum of their parts. But, if all that isn’t enough, the cloud is now being infused with "magical" properties. This week I read several articles that introduced a new concept that takes the cloud one step further: the magic cloud. Here is just one example from Billing World:…

Grazed from I.T. Business Edge. Author: Loraine Lawson.

One of the main reasons cloud computing is taking off is that it’s just so darn easy. It’s cheap, it’s quick, and you don’t need to go through a lengthy battle to do it. You’ve heard it a hundred times — it only takes a credit card and you’re up and running.

But while that may be what makes cloud popular, it’s not the best way to leverage cloud computing’s real power, writes Rex Wang, vice president of Oracle’s Product Marketing, in a recent Forbes column. By taking a long-term, strategic approach to cloud computing, you can use cloud computing to drive transformational change, he writes…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Kathy Kim.

Potential NSA-related losses for the U.S. cloud industry could steepen following the recent disclosures about the government’s encryption cracking practices, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

Last month, the ITIF released a report that claimed the U.S. National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program, dubbed PRISM, could cost the U.S. cloud computing industry anywhere between $22 billion and $35 billion over the next three years. But recent revelations about NSA’s antiencryption program could have an even more detrimental impact to the industry if foreign customers choose to not store their data with U.S. companies…