Grazed from DubaiChronicle. Author: Editorial Staff.

Even though Microsoft released its Windows 8.1 Preview nearly a month ago, the company has already launched an entire array of updates for it. The improvements on the upgraded version of Windows 8 vary from interface deign to security bugs and even brand new features. You may become one of the first users by downloading Windows 8.1. Preview here right now.

One of the latest updates released for the OS concerns Microsoft’s cloud service SkyDrive. With it, the technology giant takes cloud computing one step further by allowing offline access to files and by greatly decreasing the size of SkyDrive files stored on physical devices. Actually, the latest Windows 8.1 update includes three main changes to the platform and the way it is used. Now SkyDrive is more deeply integrated into Microsoft’s latest operating system. However, that does not ruin the general experience on Windows 8.1 devices. Quite the opposite, it makes it better…

Grazed from InternetRetailer. Author: Amy Dusto.

IBM Corp. is forging ahead with its “cloud-based,” or Internet-hosted, e-commerce technology strategy as it faces growing competition from technology rivals. Last year IBM began offering software-as-a-service e-commerce technologies, rather than only licensed software that clients maintain on their own premises, in its Smarter Commerce suite.

With the latest Smarter Commerce applications that it released last month, including a tool to parse through the tomes of consumer sentiment data on social networks to help marketers track how consumers view their brands, the company says it now offers more than 100 cloud-based tools to retailers…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Business Intelligence (BI) is getting a market push thanks to Software as a Service (SaaS). A new report by Gartner found certain services, like SaaS, are helping to move the business intelligence market ahead. Midsize firms are part of this market growth because they often consider and implement SaaS, which has become a popular entry point for various BI solutions.

What’s Pushing the Market

The report, covered by Information Management found that besides SaaS, data discovery also helped support the business intelligence market. Gartner found that business intelligence, CPM, and analytic software revenue topped more than $13 billion last year. However, the research firm also found that overall spending went down approximately $700 million due to the economic climate, although it remains one of the largest IT segments. Earlier in the year, Gartner had predicted the market would grow by almost 25 percent up until 2017 to reach more than $17 billion…

Grazed from WebRoot. Author: Tracy Mardigian-Kiles.

More and more SMBs have their heads in the clouds and for good reason. Cloud computing is changing how computer needs are fulfilled. With the onset of the cloud, essential aspects of every business like data management, content, and collaboration tools are delivered from the Internet rather than supported by locally installed software and servers.

A Match Made in SMB Heaven
For SMBs there are many compelling reasons to migrate to cloud-based applications, like the following:

• Outsourcing the expensive burden of maintaining your own servers and software
• Accessing data from anywhere and from any device
• Replacing heavy IT expenditures with predictable operational expenditures…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

ResearchAndMarkets has announced the addition of the "Beyond Cloud Computing: Mobile Communications, Applications, Content, and Commerce in the Cloud" report to their offering. Cloud computing is one of the hottest segments in information technology today along with mobile and wireless. Today, the number of smartphones in the US exceeds the number of laptops, tablets are enjoying significant growth, and just about every employee has one, two or even three mobile devices.

Enterprise IT now has to deal with the additional responsibility of serving customers who use their mobile products to interact with the organization. Cloud is moving beyond computing and storage and into an entirely new realm of communications, applications, content and applications. Evidence of this evolution ranges from common examples, such as Google Voice for Cloud-based communications, to less common examples such as Cloud-based payments solutions within the mobile commerce arena…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Editorial Staff.

Google Cloud Platform allows the end users to build their website and applications, analyze and store data on the infrastructure powered by Google. Google Cloud Platform provides various resources that can be used for specialized purposes. One such resource offered by Google Cloud Platform is Google Compute Engine (GCE) which is an IAAS product. GCE was announced at Google IO by Google in June, 2012.

Google Compute Engine enables any developer or business to use the infrastructure of Google for their applications. GCE possesses several capabilities which make it more economical and easier to use for a wider set of applications. It provides flexible and scalable virtual machine computing capabilities in cloud. GCE provide you the capability of solving large scale analytic and processing problems on Google’s networking, storage or computing platform. It certainly is a powerful yet cost effective solution focused on workload processing on cloud…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing can be simply understood as a model that enables on demand and convenient access to a shared & collective pool of configurable computing resources like servers, storage, services, applications networks etc. which can be rapidly released and provisioned with service provider interaction or management effort.

Since cloud involves service provides, it becomes quite clear that there will always be partners in reference to cloud services where one would be involved in providing the clod based services to the other. Whenever there is such relationship between two enterprises where one is providing certain services to the other in return for the financial gain then the relationship must be channelized through a standard agreement which can define the roles and responsibilities of both the parties in order to execute a smooth relationship…

Grazed from BroadWay World. Author: Editorial Staff.

SwiftStack today announced the general availability of its private cloud storage offering. The SwiftStack solution, powered by the OpenStack Swift object storage system, was developed to provide the integration and control needed to serve the growing data demands of today’s data-intensive applications. It enables organizations to rapidly deploy private cloud storage that offers application users the same experience and scale they have when accessing data on the public cloud. The SwiftStack system has a software-defined storage architecture that runs on commodity hardware, offering flexibility, significantly lower costs, and more control in comparison to legacy storage systems.

"Private cloud storage is an increasingly popular model among enterprises that prefer to have the control associated with keeping their information stored within their own data centers but the flexibility and speed of a cloud service model. This approach is becoming more common as the trend of BYOD and use of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) creates increased pressure on IT to speed time to provision and scale the infrastructure," said Terri McClure, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)…

Grazed from BroadWay World. Author: Editorial Staff.

Leveraging its deep expertise in identity and access management (IAM), SailPoint today announced the industry’s first IAM-as-a-service (IDaaS) that delivers enterprise-grade identity governance, provisioning and access management in a single, unified solution. Based on more than two years of dedicated R&D, SailPoint IdentityNow provides all the benefits of software-as-a-service (SaaS) – including faster time to value, ease of use, and lower operational and upgrade costs – combined with the security, scalability, and enterprise integration capabilities that global organizations require.

To date, enterprises have been slow to adopt IDaaS because of data security concerns, cross-domain integration challenges, and the limited capabilities of existing IDaaS offerings, which focus primarily on single sign-on (SSO) capabilities. With more than a decade of history and experience delivering IAM to the world’s largest organizations, the SailPoint team is uniquely qualified to deliver a comprehensive IDaaS suite that meets the most stringent security, availability, scalability, and performance requirements…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

RiverMeadow Software(TM) Inc., developer of the world’s only automated server migration solution developed specifically for carrier and service provider clouds, today announced that RiverMeadow Cloud Migration SaaS is available through the ArrowSphere cloud services platform. Under terms of the agreement, Arrow will integrate RiverMeadow’s Cloud Migration SaaS into the ArrowSphere cloud services portfolio and resell RiverMeadow to its Cloud Service Provider channel as a standalone service or bundled with other cloud services.

"RiverMeadow’s Cloud Migration SaaS provides an easy and cost-effective cloud migration solution," said Jim Livingston, vice president of services for Arrow’s enterprise computing solutions business in North America. "Adding RiverMeadow to our solutions portfolio strengthens our leading position in the cloud market and provides our solution provider community with a tool to automate the migration of applications into the cloud."…