Grazed from TechRadar.  Author: Mark Say.

Citrix has appointed Arrow Electronics as the first pan-European distributor of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) portfolio.  The ArrowSphere cloud services platform will include Citrix SaaS products such as GoToMeeting, GoToWebcast, GoToTraining and GoToAssist. It will also include Podio, the cloud collaboration service for project management and team communications.

The agreement follows the launch of the Citrix SaaS Advisor programme in May, through which the company is using partners to deliver its applications as part of their broader solutions.  This marked a change in policy from focusing on selling directly to end users…

Grazed from CRN.  Author: Fleur Doidge.

Vendors are engaging in a range of marketing tricks and gimmicks, especially cloudwashing, and simply confusing potential customers thinking about integration PaaS (iPaaS) investments, according to market watcher Ovum.  Saurabh Sharma, senior analyst in the IT solutions team at Ovum and author of a new report looking at the problem, said the rise of SaaS has necessitated a shift away from traditional integration approaches – but vendors and pundits alike are muddying the waters with a range of claims and sales approaches.

"IPaaS is emerging as an alternative to traditional integration approaches, and several iPaaS solutions can now cater for the needs of SaaS, on-premise, and B2B integration, at least for integration projects with medium levels of complexity," Sharma said.  "However, organisations must understand that neither iPaaS nor traditional integration approaches is a silver bullet for integration."…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Srinivas Kulkarni.

"The idea to start up CipherGraph struck me at 4am," said Jitender Sharan, founder and CEO of CipherGraph, in a YouTube video on the YourStory Web site.  One of the most important revolutions in the last few years has certainly been cloud computing and services that revolve around them. Small businesses and startups depend mostly on affordable virtual private network (VPN) services that help their employees to work from remote locations at any given point in time.

Commonly VPN services are not enabled to help SMBs because of the challenges in setting up and their pricing. That’s where Bangalore-based CipherGraph offers a really helpful product and helps them out. It has a Cloud VPN service that allows companies to let people to work securely from anywhere, as if they are in their own office…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Colin Barker.

Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of that mainstay of computing, the mainframe.   Back in 1964, IBM rolled out the System/360, the first computer that was compatible and upgradable: in other words, while until then all computers were different, any System/360 would work with any other System/360.

The mainframe has stood the test of time – but in the age of cloud computing can the mainframe still be relevant?  Certainly SHARE, the IBM user group, remains firmly of the opinion that the mainframe has a future. According to SHARE member Janet Sun, writing in the user group magazine in May, this user group can claim a membership of 20,000 individuals from nearly 2,000 companies around the world and highlights a few mainframe stats:…

Grazed from Fujitsu.  Author: PR Announcement.

Fujitsu Laboratories Limited today announced that it has developed a platform technology for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for on-demand physical servers that are configured to a user’s needs and can be provided in ten minutes. This technology is the first of its kind in the world.

Currently, physical IaaS, or physical server-hosting services, which provides physical servers installed in a datacenter, requires that the service operator manually install and configure servers at the customer’s request, leading to a lag time of several days between the time when a customer orders new servers and when the servers actually go online. The new technology makes use of another Fujitsu Laboratories innovation, called "Resource Pool Architecture"⁽¹⁾, which makes it possible to configure physical servers on-demand and instantly respond to customer orders…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Carolyn Fitton.

The cloud is not a new concept for most businesses. Software companies big and small are leveraging cloud platforms to innovate and drive go-to-market activities. Mobile is also not a new concept, but it’s a popular area of focus for many companies and software vendors. Like the cloud, mobile is used by many to drive innovation and create new market opportunities.

What opportunities are created when these two innovative technologies are combined? SAP teamed up with Oxford Economics to answer this question. They collaborated on the research behind the report, ‘Unleashing the Cloud – Putting Mobility to Work.’ This report, the second in a series of papers that analyze the strategic adoption of cloud computing, is based upon a global survey of 200 senior business and IT executives, conducted in December 2012 and January 2013…

Grazed from Midsize Insider.  Author: Douglas Bonderud.

IT system security is about more than just walling out attackers and making sure employees use strong passwords. The fundamental nature of networks has changed from being fully entrenched at the local level to being a mixture of owned, rented, in-house, distributed technology. While this provides greater flexibility for admins and can help lower total spending, the advent of ubiquitous cloud computing also presents new security challenges for midsize IT pros.

Defending the Stack

To create a solid set of IT security practices, admins need two things: patience and paranoia. The cloud provides an excellent touchstone for patience because IT departments are often pressured by executives and employees familiar with the cloud to fast track its adoption. The claim here is that lowered costs and greater agility override potential security concerns – they do not…

Grazed from TheVarGuy.  Author: DH Kass.

Mike Clayville, VMware’s (VMW) former Cloud Infrastructure Product Marketing vice president, became the third exec to exit the virtualization kingpin in recent weeks, joining cloud computing giant and rival Amazon (AMZN) Web Services (AWS) as the company’s new Worldwide Commercial Sales vice president.

Clayville’s switch to AWS, which was first revealed in a NetworkWorld report, comes amid Amazon adding some 200 enterprise sales reps in the last two years. The company is gearing up perhaps to pursue bigger enterprise customers not just for its public cloud business but also with an eye to challenging VMware’s private cloud dominance, as speculated by Business Insider…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Abdul Salam.

Ethics and morality have always been dictated by culture and the times. It takes on different forms and their forms from different places and time periods often contradict each other, and what is considered ethical or moral in one era may not be in another. The World Wide Web, and now more recently the move to Cloud Computing and the social revolution is changing the norms of our world’s cultures and ethics and morality along with it.

Just a decade ago it was very unethical to read someone else’s letter, it still is, but the medium of transportation and consumption has changed so much that it has become a little hard to define. Before, it was only between you and the mailman, and he was bound by law to never touch the contents of what he delivers. But in today’s Cloud environments there are no such laws and standards so companies are free to make their own…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Chris Talbot.

Application performance monitoring has only becoming increasingly more important as more and more applications are migrated to the cloud. Plenty of vendors are talking about the importance of monitoring cloud services. Now Boundary is looking to help customers of Google Compute Engine monitor and receive visualizations of the apps they run on the Google (GOOG) cloud service.

A new member of the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program, Boundary has based its business on what it calls "the first central intelligence service for modern IT operations management." The cloud service analyzes and correlates per-second application traffic "chatter" with input from third-party management tools. The goal is to provide IT administration teams with an early warning system so they’re aware when cloud services and applications are facing a failure…