Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

In times gone by, people and organizations paid IT vendors for something tangible — be it server boxes or software on a disk. Now with the cloud, IT is no longer a product, it is a service. And as with any kind of service, software has become an intangible that requires ongoing payments. There are a bunch of ways to pay for cloud or Software as a Service — and the industry seems to still be in search of the best formula for attracting and keeping customers.

But for now, cloud and SaaS vendors have settled on four basic models. Byron Deeter, partner with the venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, recently co-authored a paper that reviewed the top pricing models, exploring how each model has evolved, and what’s in it for the customer:…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview.  Author: Jeffrey Schwartz.

Workday, one of the fastest-growing Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, this week launched a big data analytics module to add to its portfolio of human resources and financial applications.  Delivered at the company’s seventh annual Workday Rising conference in San Francisco, the new Workday Big Data Analytics is a key component of the company’s latest update to its SaaS offerings called Workday 20. Workday Big Data Analytics gathers data from its portfolio as well as other data sources to help individuals develop specialized reports and benchmarks.

"For our customers, big data is about opening up the Workday cloud to import non-Workday data to more readily make business decisions," wrote Dan Beck, the company’s vice president of product management…

Grazed from Cloudify.  Author: Editorial Staff.

For many companies, cloud computing might seem like a daunting prospect, the sort of revolutionary technology that only global leaders need to invest in. But in fact the opposite is true; the time, money and energy that can be saved through cloud computing is something that everyone should be taking advantage of.  Cloud computing is a virtual platform which allows companies to access their data: anytime, anywhere, period. Safely stored in the Cloud, company data is accessible for employees, enabling flexible working, enhancing efficiency and reducing costs.

At the same time, data is highly secure, protected from any virtual or physical attacks. To make it a hat trick of benefits, Cloud computing connects colleagues globally ensuring uniformity.  The best part is that cloud services don’t even require users to understand what “saving” is. There’s no longer a need to understand file systems, ushering in a level of simplicity computer engineers have been searching for since the personal computer was invented…

Grazed from TheWhir.  Author: Nicole Henderson.

Cloud provider Virtustream announced this week that it has closed a $40 million Series D investment round led by enterprise software provider giant SAP.  The investment will be used to grow capacity of IaaS growth, and be put into further developing of its xStream cloud management software for enterprise and service provider network. In 2012, Virtustream raised $15 million to help grow xStream and expand into more markets.

The investment comes after a long-standing partnership between the two companies, where SAP was both a strategic partner and customer of Virtustream.  Virtustream’s cloud software and IaaS offerings were built to serve the requirements of enterprise applications, including security, compliance, and SLAs. Its platform was one of the first to be certified to deploy the full line of SAP business applications in 2010…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

PrivateCore, the private computing company, today announced that it was selected from hundreds applicants and bested four finalists to win the CloudBeat2013 Innovation Showdown competition. PrivateCore was chosen by a panel of judges from leading venture capital firms including General Catalyst, Norwest Venture Partners, Data Collective, SAP Ventures, Foley & Lardner LLP and Alchemist Accelerator for its groundbreaking full memory encryption technology which secures any application, any data, anywhere on standard x86 servers.

“You could imagine someone from a government security agency going into a data center and putting a snooping device on a server and intercepting all of the communications happening within a server,” said VentureBeat’s Meghan Kelly and Dean Takahashi. “PrivateCore creates a software layer known as a Hypervisor that fits inside the memory of a central processing unit and encrypts the data in the memory. By encrypting memory, PrivateCore vCage makes it safe to run any application in outsourced, hosted, or cloud environments.”…

Grazed from BusinessCloud News. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

Global insurance IT budgets are projected to grow at a 6.5 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) with total IT spend reaching $109bn by 2017. Moreover a growing portion of the investment will be going towards cloud computing technologies among others according to research and analysis firm Ovum.

Charles Juniper, senior insurance analyst, financial services technology at Ovum, believes insurers are beginning to prioritise IT investment once again following a lull in spending brought on by the global economic slowdown, with many firms targeting legacy systems modernisation, online channels, and fraud detection systems as key spending areas…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Agam Shah and Chris Kanaracus.

Shareholders have voted to approve a $24.9 billion buyout of the company by founder and CEO Michael Dell and investment firm Silver Lake Partners. They will be paid $13.75 per share, an increase from the original offer, as well as an additional cash dividend of $0.13 per share, for a total of $13.88 per share, according to Thursday’s announcement.

The transaction was approved by those holding a majority of Dell’s outstanding shares, the company said. An exact tally wasn’t immediately available. For Michael Dell, the vote marks a victory in a long and grueling fight to take the company private. "I am pleased with this outcome and am energized to continue building Dell into the industry’s leading provider of scalable, end-to-end technology solutions," he said in a statement…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Public cloud computing is gaining steam, according to a new study by IDC. Midsize firms today are more seriously considering public clouds on account of their proven economy and speed. As vendors take a closer look at security concerns, growing firms will certainly contribute to greater growth in the public cloud market.

Public Boom

According to IDC’s latest look at the public cloud market, services will add up to $47.4 billion this year and will more than double within the next five years to more than $107 billion. It is a significant increase, says the IT research firm, because the public cloud market’s compound annual growth rate (CAGR) adds up to more than 23 percent. That is five times faster than the growth rate of the IT industry as a whole…

Grazed from DefenseSystems. AuthorL George Leopold.

As data centers are consolidated as a way to save money and improve network access, vendors that provide much of the plumbing for cloud computing and big data projects are emphasizing that plain vanilla storage technologies are growing in importance. As requirements grow exponentially, “where it gets a little cloudy is managing the storage” and accessing all that data on virtual and other networks in the cloud, said Mike Tanner, president and CEO of Hitachi Data Systems Federal Corp. in Reston, Va…

The new Hitachi unit spun off as subsidiary in April 2013 is promoting an array of storage virtualization and cloud approaches to speed initiatives like data center consolidation. Tanner said in an interview that storage virtualization approaches are one way to “take all that [stored data] and put it in one pool.”…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Intralinks Holdings Inc. a leading, global SaaS provider of inter-enterprise content management and collaboration solutions, today announced the latest release of Intralinks VIATM, its secure and scalable enterprise collaboration solution that helps organizations take lifetime control of their most important information and frees employees to reach new levels of productivity. The new release provides even greater visibility, governance and control over how an organization’s information is shared, while providing an easy-to-use experience that encourages collaborative working.

This latest release brings expanded capabilities for Intralinks VIA administrators, allowing them to gain control and manage policies that guide how users and business groups share and use information, all while providing complete visibility into their Intralinks VIA environment. For example, administrators can mandate the level of security that users must apply to their collaboration projects or can prevent certain users from syncing content with their personal devices…