Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Zach Miners.

Google has introduced a cheaper rival product to the Apple TV set-top box with Chromecast, a small portable device that streams video and music from people’s computers and mobile devices to their televisions. The product, which will retail for US$35, will be available in the U.S. now from Amazon, BestBuy.com and Google’s Play Store. It will also be available from brick-and-mortar Best Buy stores starting Sunday, Google executives announced Wednesday during a meeting with the media in San Francisco. Google is working to bring the device to other countries as quickly as possible, executives said.

More than 200 billion videos are watched online each month globally, said Sundar Pichai, head of Android, Chrome and apps at Google, who hosted the event. But it is difficult to watch those videos on a television, Pichai said, adding, "we want to make this better."…

Support for the open source distributed storage technology will allow Flexiant’s customers to store their customer data including disks and images on the Ceph distributed storage system. The benefits include reduced hardware costs and increased scalability by eliminating centralized storage.

Grazed from SBWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Reportstack, provider of premium market research reports announces the addition of Global SaaS-based Enterprise Resource Planning Software Market 2012-2016 market report to its offering Analysts forecast the Global Software-as-a-Service based Enterprise Resource Planning (SaaS-based ERP) Software market to grow at a CAGR of 13.93 percent over the period 20122016. One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the increasing demand from SMEs. The market has also been witnessing increased influence from social media and mobile apps. However, data security issues and the lack of confidence of consumers could pose a challenge to the growth of this market.

Global SaaS-based ERP Market 20122016, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market in the Americas, the EMEA, and the APAC regions; it also covers the Global SaaS-based ERP Software market landscape and its growth prospects in the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Frank Konkel.

Amazon Web Services has filed a complaint against the federal government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, challenging the need for and scope of corrective action taken by the Central Intelligence Agency in following recommendations made by the Government Accountability Office. GAO made the recommendations to the CIA in June in sustaining a bid protest filed in February by IBM after the CIA awarded AWS a contract worth up to $600 million over four years to build a private cloud for the entire intelligence community.

Taking the issue to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims – the final destination for some of the most contentious procurement cases – could help AWS avoid another bid protest from IBM if the CIA were to again award AWS the cloud contract, potentially expediting a resolution…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Increasingly, enterprises are adopting private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility inherent in cloud environments while avoiding the security and latency issues associated with publicly hosted settings. As a result, organizations are also reevaluating how to optimize their future application delivery models. To help facilitate this effort, WSO2 and SUSE will jointly present a webinar on how IT professionals can efficiently address modern enterprise challenges and changing business demands using SUSE Cloud, the first enterprise OpenStack distribution, and WSO2 Stratos, the most complete open platform as a service (PaaS).

The one-hour technical session, “SUSE Cloud and WSO2 Stratos – Bridging OpenStack and PaaS to Deliver the Service-Oriented Data Center,” is being held twice on Wednesday, July 31: 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. PDT for the Americas and 1:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. GMT for Europe and Asia-Pacific. For more information, visit http://wso2.com/library/webinars/2013/07/suse-cloud-and-wso2-stratos-bridging-openstack-and-paas-to-deliver-the-service-oriented-data-center…

Grazed from TheHostingNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

According to Gartner, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market will reach sales of $22.1 billion in 2015. This number reflects the growing adoption of cloud-computing applications in business operations. It also illustrates the expansion of SaaS providers into the market.

Not all SaaS providers are created equal. That’s why it’s important that large companies conduct due diligence when selecting one for their operational needs. “Depending on the role they will play within your enterprise, a SaaS application could be a critical component in your business processes,” said Stephen Booze, CIO of Appointment-Plus enterprise scheduling software. “Selecting an inadequate service could have dire circumstances, internally and externally, as well as financially. “It’s imperative for enterprises to research SaaS providers before making their selection.” Here are four things to look for when choosing an enterprise SaaS provider:…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

Many enterprises are now planning to move a significant portion of their infrastructure to the cloud, says Dave LeClair, senior director of strategy at Stratus Technologies, a specialist in high availability solutions. A recently released survey conducted by Stratus, North Bridge Venture Partners and GigaOM Research found that 75 percent of firms are now reporting the use of some sort of cloud platform, and the worldwide addressable market for cloud computing will reach $158.8 billion by 2013, an increase of 126.5 percent from 2011.

"Enthusiasm for the cloud continues to grow, moving beyond historical concerns such as security," LeClair says. "But, what is also clear from this year’s results is for cloud adoption to continue accelerating beyond its current pace, companies are going to be looking to vendors to enable always-on infrastructures that support their more critical business applications in this new environment…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

Practically since OpenStack was started there has been discussion about whether it should fully support Amazon Web Services’ APIs. Doing so would make it easy to port applications between an OpenStack cloud and AWS. It would also let businesses easily build hybrid apps that run internally on an OpenStack cloud and on AWS.

Cloudscaling’s Randy Bias has been vocal about his support of fidelity with AWS. But in a blog post this morning he contends that given the continued strong growth of AWS, the need is now urgent. He basically argues that there’s no hope for OpenStack in the public cloud market so it would do well to support interoperability with AWS and Google Compute Engine if it wants to hold on to the private cloud market…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Emergent, LLC, an award-winning small business and IT solutions provider, today announced its focus on enabling the use of Red Hat’s OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution for the Intelligence Community (IC). Utilizing Red Hat’s PaaS offering, Emergent delivered a streamlined solution focused on application delivery, scalability and control of the infrastructure.

OpenShift’s automated provisioning and systems management allows for growing load demands to be met and scaled quickly, and Emergent’s partnership with Red Hat has enabled the IC to adopt OpenShift PaaS on both a private cloud and a FedRAMP certified cloud for mission focused applications, therefore allowing for higher performance and lower cost of operations…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Anthony Savvas.

The networking impact of cloud computing is potentially critical to any organisation, with staff accessing databases, applications and other material over the internet from a corporate network or from other alternative remote locations. Whilst the cloud can be used to store company data and deliver applications without the overheads of dedicated in-house servers and other hardware, the third party hosting the data or applications is not usually responsible for the network links from the customer to its facilities.

Companies therefore have to plan how they connect their corporate networks to third party cloud providers to ensure they have enough affordable and reliable bandwidth to serve their users’ needs. They must consider cost, service level agreements, security, network back up/failover to the cloud provider, network management, and any specialist "network to the cloud" service offerings on the market…