Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

EarthLink, Inc., a leading IT and communications provider, today announced that Ron Penna, one of EarthLink’s top Cloud thought leaders, will participate in ITEXPO Las Vegas, the world’s largest and best-attended communications and technology trade show. Penna will speak during two panel sessions, entitled "Do Your Customers Trust Your Cloud?" and "Business Value of Mobile Cloud." ITEXPO Las Vegas is held August 27-29 at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

"I am pleased to play a role in this year’s ITEXPO, joining other industry thought leaders who are helping to drive innovation in the communications and technology markets," said Ron Penna, EarthLink. "The event promises to stimulate discussions about issues of trust and security in the Cloud and how the integration of cloud-based collaborative technologies is driving today’s successful business operations, which hinges on mobility to decrease dependence on any physical location and support remote workers."…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: David Clements.

Enterprise adoption of cloud computing is at an interesting juncture.Egg-McMuffin On one hand, cloud computing has unleashed a new degree of innovation, enabling line-of-business users to become incredibly nimble. Gartner last year famously predicted that CMOs would spend more on IT than CIOs within the next five years. We see that happening already in organizations such as Vail Resorts, where the CIO and CMO are collaborating to make consumer-facing apps that drive their business forward.

On the other hand, central IT departments face growing pressures to manage costs, security, and other aspects of governance that are critical to the overall success of their organizations. Robert Grazioli, CIO of SAP Cloud, recently wrote a great primer on tackling cloud fears…

Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications. Author: David Weldon.

Avaya has launched two new cloud computing and unified communications consulting services, aimed at cloud service providers and enterprise customers. The first service is called Cloud Transformation Services and is a set of services to help customers transition their Avaya communications services to the cloud, according to a report on CRN.

With Cloud Transformation Services, Avaya is offering cloud service providers end-to-end guidance for deploying a hosting strategy, according to CRN. This ranges from architectural designs to the testing stage. For the enterprise, Avaya is offering a suite of services, including cost-benefit analysis of various cloud models, financial modeling, collaboration technology evaluation and architectural design for cloud-based communications…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Gary Mason.

When choosing a cloud-computing provider, the data center is one of the most important factors when making a decision. The data center in the place where your information will be stored, and the point from which it will be accessed in the future. It is imperative to research the data center used by your service provider. Below we have listed the most important things you should know about data centers.

Location

Is the data center close to your service provider? Are they able to freely access the building if a problem were to arise? Data centers need to be staffed at all times in order for constant monitoring and maintenance. Does the location of the site pose risks? Can it still function in extreme weather conditions such as snow and rain?…

Grazed from BitCloud. Author: PR Announcement.

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), a Government-funded high-end computing service hosted by The Australian National University, has added a cloud computing facility for researchers, supplied by Dell under a $2 million contract. However, this is no ordinary cloud. It’s quite different from the technologies that power commercial cloud computing services like those provided by BitCloud.

According to NCI Cloud Services Manager, Dr Joseph Antony, “The distinguishing and innovative characteristics of the NCI facility are the use of floating-point optimised Intel CPUs, high performance Intel SSDs for demanding high-IOPS science workloads and a fat-tree 56Gbps Mellanox Ethernet interconnect – all of which are not the main stay of commercial or academic cloud offerings.”…

Grazed from SBWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Verticomm.com offers secure and dexterous cloud-based workspace for businesses for better communication and effectiveness. With their efficient and Secure Cloud computing, everything is stored in the cloud and IT administrators just have to analyze and determine the average usage of their organization and acquire only the licenses, their business needs.

Verticomm.com is one proficient Cloud Computing Vendor for business of all sizes, whether there are just 10 employees or 1000 employees. Their Cisco cloud computing services can be adjusted as per the requirement and delivers unmatched customer service for better business efficiency and profitability…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Kevin McLaughlin.

Ravello Systems, a startup whose founders created the KVM open source hypervisor, launched a SaaS offering Wednesday that lets enterprises tap into the virtually unlimited capacity of the public cloud to test their on-premise apps. This is important because enterprises are under pressure to build apps faster to keep pace with business needs. Many are using Agile development methods, and they need to test their apps in a replica of their own environment to make sure bugs aren’t getting through to the final product.

But, testing apps requires a lot of free capacity, more than most enterprises have available in their data centers. Public clouds from Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) Web Services, Rackspace, HP (NYSE:HPQ) and others have plenty of capacity, but the public cloud is very different from the enterprise data center, which means apps have to undergo major changes in order to run on it…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: DH Kass.

Distributor Tech Data (TECD) last week added Ontario, Canada-based AirVM, a white-label infrastructure provider and VMware (VMW) cloud specialist, to its supplier lineup to help channel partners capitalize on cloud services sales without significant capital expenditure for infrastructure.

Under terms of the agreement, Tech Data’s channel partners will gain access through the TDCloud portal to AirVM’s Cloud Delivery and Commercialization Platform—built on VMware’s virtualization infrastructure—for services housed under the hosted AirSembly brand. The AirVM-backed AirSembly white-label infrastructure enables channel partners to brand, sell, and manage their own customized catalog of cloud services and hold down infrastructure-associated costs…

Grazed from Diginomica. Author: Phil Wainewright.

For all the talk of computing as a utility, it seems that the motto ‘You get what you pay for’ applies as much to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) as it does to any other commodity. The computing you get for Amazon’s low prices may not be as cost-effective as that of other providers, depending on what you’re using it for. That’s the message from a set of benchmark tests published last month by independent tester The Tolly Group, commissioned by IT and managed services provider Dimension Data.

As you’d expect from research it commissioned and promotes, Dimension Data’s cloud offering does well in the benchmarks. Let me disclose upfront too that Dimension Data’s cloud unit recently paid me for some speaking engagements; but the company arranged to brief me on these benchmarks through normal media/analyst channels. Some circumspection in interpreting the results is evidently advisable. Nevertheless, the factors that gave rise to the findings are worth digging into…

Grazed from ComputerResellers. Author: Nestor Arellano.

Avnet Technology Solutions’ reseller partners largely support the recommendation of the of global technology distributor for them to re-align their businesses towards selling more software and services, but they want the company to provide them with a viable payment scheme attuned to the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

A number of the value-added resellers that attended Avnet’s IBM Compass 2013 conference said it would not be “unsustainable” for them if customers paid them on a subscription basis, which has surfaced in recent years with the introduction of the “as-a-service” model of selling technology solutions, while VARs continue to pay upfront for products they purchase from distributors…