Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Dan Woods.

Intel, has a new message for the industry: If you want to meet the challenges facing business to day, if you want to get the most business value out of the cloud, big data, the Internet of Things, and high performance computing, you need a sophisticated and optimized vision for your data center.

“Datacenters are entering a new era of rapid service delivery,” said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group at Intel. “Across network, storage, and compute we continue to see significant opportunities for growth for individual organizations and for the industry. But in most cases, it requires a new approach.”…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author Ilya Pozin

While the term “cloud computing” has become trendy and perhaps overused, what many people don’t realize is that it is because of cloud startups that our experience of data has become intuitive and effortless. Below are 10 startups which have had significant impact on the data landscape:

1) MetricaDB

MetricaDB provides an effective solution for analysts who are looking to analyze data from all cloud services in one place. After signing up for the service, you select the different SaaS programs you use. After extracting data from these services, MetricaDB presents everything in one easy to analyze excel sheet. MetricaDB simplifies the data analysis and collection process and offers a straightforward approach to handling data scattered across the cloud…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

AppScale Systems has announced the release of the App Inventor Cloud Appliance, which the company refers to as private cloud in a box. The makers of the AppScale Cloud Platform, an open source runtime system for web applications and mobile application back-ends, announced the appliance at the App Inventor Summit at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“App Inventoris designed to make Android app development accessible to everyone,” said Hal Abelson, professor of computer science at MIT and creator of the App Inventor Project at the MIT Center for Mobile Learning, in a statement. “Combined with the AppScale appliance, even those who do not have reliable access to the Internet can become mobile developers using state-of-the-art cloud technology.”…

Grazed from Enterprise Apps Today. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Tableau Software launched a new cloud-based business intelligence (BI) platform named, appropriately enough, Tabeau Online. Available as a software as a service (SaaS) offering or as a hosted version of the company’s Tableau Server product, the cloud BI software helps bring business analytics to organizations of all sizes and all levels of IT competency, according to the company. "Tableau Online will allow people to get their analytics up and running in minutes and add users in a few clicks," said Tableau’s co-founder and Chief Development Officer Chris Stolte, in company remarks.

"It’s completely scalable and secure and requires no infrastructure. It’s the fastest way to get everyone in your company using powerful analytics to make better decisions today," Stolte said. Tableau Online delivers the functionality of the company’s Tableau software platform, but in a manner that requires less investment in IT, promotes collaboration and better supports mobile workforces, asserts Ellie Fields, senior director of product marketing for the company, in a blog post…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mark Eisenberg.

During a recent cloud industry conference, Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft Corp.’s Server and Tools Business, referenced the perception that non-Microsoft technologies, while supported on Windows Azure, are considered "second-class citizens." This perception isn’t surprising when you consider how far Microsoft has strayed from its original vision for Windows Azure PaaS. Microsoft intended that Windows Azure’s two roles — Web and worker — would only be the beginning; there would be others.

The core of the Windows Azure PaaS includes the Web and worker compute roles. Though in a very general way, these are not dissimilar to the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon Machine Images and instances, the difference lies in the level of abstraction…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Salman Ul Haq.

Mobile based cloud computing has been getting a forward nudge in the market swiftly because of the increasing benefits related to data manageability and user experience. Probably the most alluring factor of mobile based cloud computing is introduction of Augmented reality(AR), a technology to virtualize the sensory perceptions of human beings into augmented computer generated form in order to give the look and feel of the real time environments.

Using and deploying remote resources for mobile based cloud architectures have become easy and more efficient amid the implementation of Cloud-Mobile Convergence (CMC) paradigms which argue the adaptation of remote resources for the allocation of resources pool for mobile based cloud models. CMC models have given rise to prodigious and state of the art AR based hardware equipped with optimized cloud computing capabilities, such as being offered by Google Glass. Google Glass uses the colossal AR based implementations to offer the enhanced user experience…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Local storage and the Google (GOOG) cloud have become one in the most recent offering from Egnyte, which has unveiled a platform for enterprises to offer users access to data of all types from a single location. Now, the question is whether it can steal market share from alternative storage services such as Dropbox.

Egnyte has been around since 2006, and it first began offering its namesake cloud file server product in 2008. With the latest release of the platform this week, however, Egnyte now offers Google Drive integration that it says "provides enterprise customers with the flexibility and security to use the collaboration, storage and sharing tools that best fit their needs."…

Grazed from InsuranceTech. Author: Kevin Mason.

Talking about cloud computing can bring on a serious case of déjà vu. The concept of consuming information technology as a utility sounds, on its surface, a lot like the application service provider (ASP) model of the 1990s that faded away by the early 2000s.

However, this time around the concept of consuming information technology as a service has manifested itself differently, and the widespread adoption of cloud computing in the insurance industry is inevitable. Interest in and usage of cloud is being driven by three key factors:..

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Phil Turner.

It’s important to examine the current ‘state of play’ for cloud delivered solutions based on a couple of key dimensions; what is being deployed in the cloud and who is providing the IT service from the cloud. The image conjured up by the term “cloud” is that of companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft delivering large-scale computing infrastructure that eliminate the need for on-premises IT equipment and software. Since these cloud providers build their own infrastructure rather than buying from product manufacturers, it could be argued they are shrinking the market share.

The Opportunity is Larger than the Threat

However, there are other categories of service providers that balance, more than offset the reduced spend and create an opportunity: Consumer SaaS providers aggregate consumer-spend into centralised shared enterprise infrastructure. Consumer applications that traditionally consumed end user equipment are moving to the cloud triggering a need for enterprise infrastructure. While some of these service providers build their own infrastructure others leverage product manufacturers…

Grazed from BSMInfo. Author: Jay McCall.

Most VARs and systems integrators make their foray into the cloud by offering data backup, hosted Exchange, and/or selling SaaS (software as a service) offerings. After gaining a comfort level with the cloud, some service providers take the next step, which is building solutions in the cloud, a service that’s known as PaaS (platform as a service).

PaaS is an outgrowth of SaaS and offers several advantages for developers and MSPs. With PaaS, operating system features can be changed and upgraded frequently, geographically distributed development teams can work together on software development projects, and services can be obtained from diverse sources that cross international boundaries. Additionally, initial and ongoing costs can be reduced by the use of infrastructure services from a single vendor rather than maintaining multiple hardware facilities that often perform duplicate functions or suffer from incompatibility problems…