Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

MIS Training Institute and the Cloud Security Alliance are pleased to announce additional speakers and sessions for this year’s EMEA Congress, to be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 25th – 26th September 2013. The Congress this year will cover the latest technological trends, changes in the European and Global policy landscape, cross-border security and cybercrime response, and case studies from some of the world’s largest corporations. Newly added sessions include:

• A panel on the NSA PRISM program and its repercussions for cloud providers
• A keynote overview of the current priorities and state of play on the European Commission’s Cloud Strategy, with Ken Ducatel (European Commission) and Tim Grance (National Institute of Standards and Technology)…

Grazed from FierceEnterprise Communications. Author: David Weldon.

If they haven’t already established a presence in the cloud, a vast majority of organizations are certainly considering it, according to new research from International Data Group (IDG). In its recently released report, "Cloud Computing: Key Trends and Future Effects," IDG found that 61 percent of enterprises have at least one application that is cloud-based in their organizations today. That number is up from 57 percent in 2012. Another 24 percent of enterprises plan to implement a cloud application within the next 12 months, and an additional 15 percent are planning to do so within one to three years.

The IDG report is significant for two reasons: its survey base (1,358 respondents, with 58 percent from the executive level); and the number of companion publications participating in the research: Computerworld, CIO, InfoWorld, ITworld, CSO and Network World. The survey was intended to investigate "how enterprises continue to struggle with security, integration and governance, while finding immediate value in collaboration and customer relationship management," according to the study report…

Grazed from Ostatic. Author: Sam Dean.

Red Hat has carved out a strong reputation for its profitable Linux-focused strategy and the top-notch support it provides for enterprise customers, but there is no question that the company is betting on future growth in the cloud computing space. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is positioned to serve as the foundation for OpenStack-powered cloud deployments.

Today Red Hat announced its new Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Infrastructure-as-a-Service and expanded training in support of its OpenStack technology. "Our goal is to bring our enterprise experience to the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market and provide an OpenStack platform that our customers can trust," Red Hat’s announcement stated…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Colin Steele and Alyssa Wood.

The theme of this year’s VMworld conference was "defy convention" and VMware did just that by not making a single end user computing roadmap statement during its keynote. The second day keynote is usually reserved for updates to the end user computing (EUC) suite of products that now comprise the Horizon Suite: View, Mirage, and Workspace. Last year, Horizon Mobile and SocialCast played a large role.

VMware Inc. had promised to dial back its forward-looking EUC announcements, but the user community here was surprised by the complete lack of updates. Many VMworld 2013 attendees were looking forward to hearing about what’s new or upcoming in the Horizon Suite, said Gunnar Berger, an analyst at Gartner, Inc., a research firm based in Stamford, Conn…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Tony Kontzer.

IBM unleashed its latest mainframe for the masses, the zBC12, last month. The new mainframe builds on IBM’s strategy of providing the technologies companies need to build their own clouds. A sleek beast that IBM says offers a faster 4.2 GHz processor and double the available memory of its two-year-old predecessor, the z114, the zBC12 starts at the same price as the z114: $75,000. For some perspective, IBM’s z990, aka the "T-Rex," started at $1 million when it came out in 2003.

Despite that price difference, mainframes figure to be an IBM staple for the foreseeable future. "There’s really too much at stake for IBM to let the mainframe die," said John Abbott, distinguished analyst at 451 Research, in an email interview. "It’s still at the core of IBM’s most profitable business, and still runs the most challenging enterprise workloads at the world’s largest companies."…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Rackspace (RAX), a Top 100 Cloud Services Provider for 2013, has expanded its Rackspace Hybrid Cloud to the Northern Virginia (IAD) region, bringing the total global region count to five: Dallas, Chicago, Northern Virginia, London and Sydney. In some ways, Rackspace is pushing into Amazon Web Services (AMZN) regions — perhaps trying to pull Amazon customers onto the Rackspace platform. According to a Rackspace blog post, the hybrid cloud computing company isn’t slowing down. In fact, Rackspace said it’s currently building out another region, but wouldn’t state the location.

The company said all Rackspace infrastructure cloud products will be available in this new region, as well as any of the company’s global products. Additionally, customers in Rackspace’s IAD2 and IAD3 data centers can also leverage the Rackspace Hybrid Cloud through RackConnect, which aims to connect dedicated environments to the cloud…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Generally speaking: Customer choice is good for businesses and MSPs. But the number of Dropbox and Box alernatives for business seems to be skyrocketing. File syncing and sharing is certainly a hot market. But is there enough business to keep all of these solutions afloat? That’s a critically important question as managed services providers (MSPs) seek recurring revenue in this market while making recommendations to end customers.

First, the big picture: Box and Dropbox are pushing beyond their consumer heritage and certainly have business momentum. As of October 2012 Box had more than 14 million users and was in 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies, the vendor claimed. Dropbox, meanwhile, as of December 2012 claimed to have more than 100 million users — including 95 percent of the Fortune 500…

Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications. Author: David Weldon.

Venture capitalists are apparently feeling all warm and fuzzy over the cloud these days, with large sums being invested in new cloud computing ventures. Two recent announcements demonstrating this trend caught our attention: one involving Birst, a San Francisco company that offers cloud-based business intelligence services; the second involving CloudPhysics in Mountain View, Calif., which is launching a new app store to help IT managers with problems in a VMware virtualization environment.

According to a report in Network World, Birst has received $38 million in venture capital investments from existing backer Sequoia Capital and newcomer Northgate Capital. With this latest round of funding, Birst has received $84 million to date. Last year the company received $26 in backer funding, also led by Sequoia…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.

VMware administrators that experimented with running big data workloads lived to tell about their experiences here this week, while vendors explained how big data principles could actually improve day-to-day IT operations. One organization that ran big data workloads in the cloud reported that it quickly becomes cost-prohibitive, and that it is much cheaper and easier to run it in-house on — guess what? –VMware Inc.’s platforms.

Identified Inc., a software firm that identifies recruiting candidates from social media sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, said the return on investment (ROI) of building its own Apache Hadoop cluster on VMware infrastructure was less than two months, compared with using Amazon Web Service (AWS) Elastic Map Reduce…

Grazed from MSPAlliance.  Author: Event Announcement.

MSPWorld® the World’s Premier Managed Services and Cloud Computing Event, is coming to San Jose, California! The event will take place October 6 – 8, 2013, at the San Jose Marriott in San Jose, CA. Since its inception, MSPWorld has been the only event with a single, vendor-agnostic focus of supporting Managed Service providers and their respective ecosystems.

MSPAlliance® has carefully structured MSPWorld 2013 to retain the best aspects of a users conference and expo, while eliminating the crowded, hectic, impersonal experience of an expo hall. Instead you will have access to technology enabling vendor exhibits in a low stress, easy to navigate environment conducive to high-level business discussions and networking…