Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

A week after VMware launched its much anticipated vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) at its annual VMworld conference, experts have now had time to reflect on the company’s cloud strategy and now have some questions. Perhaps the biggest is: Does the offering pack enough punch to take on the heavyweights in the industry, most notably Amazon Web Services? Some believe that VMware doesn’t need to take on AWS.

“Today vCHS and AWS are addressing different types of applications and different types of customers. Instead of being an offensive move against Amazon, vCHS is first a defensive move,” wrote Jerry Chen, a partner at venture firm Greylock Partners in an article titled, “VMware: Too big to fail? Or too big to succeed?” With VMware facing increased pressure in its core virtualization market from Microsoft, this new hybrid cloud offering gives customers a way to “extend” their data centers in the cloud…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudPhysics, who provides intelligent operations management for virtualized workloads, today announced that it won the VMworld Best of Breed Cloud Management Award presented by Virtualization Review magazine: http://virtualizationreview.com/articles/2013/08/28/best-of-breed-2013.aspx. CloudPhysics was also named a finalist in TechTarget SearchServerVirtualization’s Best of VMworld Awards in the Virtualization Management category: http://www.techtarget.com/html/pr/pr-08282013.html.

This is the second consecutive year CloudPhysics has won a VMworld Best of Breed Award. The company received the Best Innovation Award at VMworld 2012, when it first exhibited at VMworld: http://virtualizationreview.com/blogs/the-hoard-facts/2012/08/vmworld-best-breed-awards.aspx…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Born in the Cloud on February 2012, Cloudamour has become one of the fastest growing Microsoft Cloud Partners in the UK, with an ambition to transform the view of office technology and educate SMEs about the benefits of the Cloud.

Cloudamour has now achieved Microsoft Partner Gold status, which elevates it to the top 2% of Service Providers in the UK, with verified skills and competencies that set it apart from its competition. To help inform and educate SMEs about the Cloud, Cloudamour has developed a short film to unravel the mystery of Cloud Computing. Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5V-dssXUVM …

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

Chip-maker Intel has launched a second-generation family of system-on-chip (SOC) for micro-servers, a silicon suited for software-defined networking, and a rack designed for telecommunications and cloud service providers to build datacentres of the future. The portfolio of datacentre technologies will help cloud service providers drive efficiency and flexibility into their infrastructure to support growing demand for new services, according to Intel.

As server, network and storage infrastructure technologies evolve to better suit an increasingly diverse set of lightweight workloads, they create a need for micro-server, cold storage and entry networking products. By optimising technologies for specific workloads, the new products will help cloud providers increase utilisation and drive down costs, the company said…

Grazed from The Guardian. Author: Editorial Staff.

OK, I admit it. I wasn’t always watching my kids demonstrate their athletic prowess on the field. Sometimes I had my laptop out and was working. Sometimes I was just watching the clouds go by. One observation about those clouds – they were constantly morphing. They had no fixed edge as they billowed and blew across the sky.

That lack of an edge that clearly defines the cloud environment your organisation may be considering sending your data to can make it seemingly difficult to protect. In fact, security is cited in numerous studies as the number one inhibitor to cloud adoption. Think about possible points of entry for an attacker in a cloud environment. A customer uses an insecure mobile phone to access your network … you can be attacked…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

Microsoft has taken the wraps off updates for two of its customer-facing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products: Outlook Web App and Skype for Windows Phone 8. Outlook Web App, the enterprise-focused version of its Outlook.com cloud email service, now sports a delegate access configuration feature. Even though you’re off having a good time, it’s still business as usual in the office. The feature allows users to give permission for others to check their inbox and manage their calendar while they are away.

In a blog post introducing the delegate access feature for Outlook Web App, three members of the Office 365 team wrote: “Let’s say you’re about to go on vacation and … you’ve decided to turn work email off on your phone and leave your laptop at home for this trip…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Doug Henschen.

Cloud computing heavyweights Salesforce.com and Workday both reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue increases last week, keeping up their impressive growth track records. It’s fresh evidence that enterprise applications are moving into the cloud, with new InformationWeek research showing that the trend is not limited to small- and midsize-businesses or to lightweight "edge" applications like travel and expense management.

Salesforce.com’s latest quarter ended July 31 was highlighted by a 31% year-over-year increase in revenue to $957 million — well ahead of the $941 million revenue mark expected by analysts at Wells Fargo Securities. The increase was fueled in part by the company’s $2.5 billion acquisition of cloud-based marketing firm ExactTarget. But the bigger story is Salesforce.com’s effort to target "the largest and most important companies in the world," as Benioff put it during last week’s conference call with analysts…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

With 90 percent of companies claiming some form of cloud usage, many organizations have moved to the next step, leveraging multiple cloud models in different combinations to optimize benefits and efficiencies, according to new research from CompTIA, the non-profit association for the information technology (IT) industry.

As cloud computing becomes a default part of the IT landscape, more companies are relying on cloud computing for business processes such as storage (59 percent), business continuity and disaster recovery (48 percent) and security (44 percent), CompTIA’s Fourth Annual Trends in Cloud Computing study reveals…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

IBM is just starting to see hints of the new breed of apps that will become possible as more businesses start adopting cloud computing. I had a chat last week with Ric Telford, vice president of IBM Cloud Services. I tossed a range of questions at him about the demands IBM is getting from customers. But the conversation seemed to keep coming back to apps.

Telford has a vision of a new breed of apps that are “born-on-the-cloud apps as opposed to born-on-the-enterprise,” he said. “We’re entering the next generation of enterprise apps where it’s basically going to follow the models you see on the consumer side,” he said…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

Private clouds are all the buzz these days, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that everybody’s doing it. But in fact, fewer companies than you might think have deployed ‘true’ private clouds. Forrester found in a recent survey of 2,330 people that 26% of IT executives say they have a private cloud. But among those who claimed they have a private cloud, only 13% implemented the technologies that Forrester says truly define a private cloud, like self-service and automated provisioning, among other features. Instead, they built private environments that have some but not all the features of a private cloud.

Further, some businesses that are building private clouds would really be better off with a standard virtualized data center or with a public cloud, experts say. Around half the time, businesses build private clouds for the wrong reasons and should be doing something else instead, estimates David Linthicum, a consultant at Cloud Technology Partners…