Grazed from ScientBlog.  Author: Editorial Staff.

A six-month study conducted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Northwestern University with funding from Google has found that moving common software applications used by 86 million U.S. workers to the cloud could save enough electricity annually to power Los Angeles for a year. The study is summarized in a report is isued today (June 11). The report looks at three common business applications — email, customer relationship management software, or CRM, and bundled productivity software (spreadsheets, file sharing, word processing, etc.).

Moving these software applications from local computer systems to centralized cloud services could cut information technology energy consumption by up to 87 percent — about 23 billion kilowatt-hours. This is roughly the amount of electricity used each year by all the homes, businesses and industry in Los Angeles. A primary goal of the project was to develop a state-of-the-art model that both researchers and the general public could use to analyze the energy and carbon impacts of cloud computing…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

EVERTEC Inc., the leader in electronic transaction processing in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced today that it was recognized by Cisco as the Cisco Cloud Partner of the Year for the CANSAC (Central America, North of South America and the Caribbean) region for its innovation, leadership and best practices in developing the market for cloud services in this region.

“We recognized the successes of our partners within its geographic region. Cisco is deeply committed to supporting our partners to build their business, and to recognize those that have demonstrated outstanding achievement, like EVERTEC, which has been instrumental in expanding the market for the VBlock™ Systems in the CANSAC region”, explained Alexis Cervoni, Partner Account Manager of Cisco for the Caribbean…

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

Marketing Software company Volacci has unveiled “Socialize”, a set of deep social media integrations for Automatr, their marketing automation SaaS program. The new features allow Automatr subscribers to post directly to Facebook or Twitter feeds from within the marketing automation software.

Socialize gives users the ability to post or tweet in real-time, or on a pre-determined schedule customizable by date and time. Organizational capabilities include a calendar view which allows a marketer to visually plan social campaigns. Automatr’s Socialize feature also includes its own search navigation bar allowing users quick access to scheduled posts…

Grazed from ITWorldCanada.  Author: Howard Solomon.

Two weeks ago we wrote about Google and Red Hat Inc. teaming up to create a new Java programming framework. A Gartner analyst thinks it could go far.  The industry needs a new programming model for clouds, Yefim Nais writes in a blog.  And Google, with its experience in cloud computing, and Red Hat, with its enterprise background, could be a dynamic duo.

Their project, dubbed CapeDwarf, is an implementation of Google’s AppEngine API which allows applications to be deployed on Red Hat’s JBoss Appliciation Servers without modification.  Ultimately all APIs of AppEngine would be implemented. A chart on the JBoss community page suggests that 12 of 18 APIs are done.  The question Nais asks is are the partners imaginative enough to grow the project to an industry standard.

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Brian Sommer.

In technology, everything evolves, mutates and, eventually, goes away after being replaced by something altogether better, newer, cooler and more powerful. Sometimes, even new technologies experience rapid evolution. Cloud computing is definitely in the mutating and evolving phase of its existence.  Let’s look at how cloud computing has changed in the application software space so far.

Early cloud pioneers, think salesforce.com and Plex, were launched in the late 1990s, offered a multi-tenant SaaS (software as a service) solution. Their chief selling points were economic in nature. There was no software to install, no on-site hardware required, etc. Many early cloud SaaS solutions even came priced on a monthly basis. These solutions could scale up or down based on business need…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author:  Archana Venkatraman.

First it was a money-haven, now Switzerland’s privacy laws and data protection regulations are turning it into a cloud-haven in the wake of US government surveillance revelations. That is the claim by Switzerland’s biggest offshore hosting company, Artmotion.

Recent leaks of the US National Security Agency’s (NSA) PRISM surveillance programme have sparked growing concern over data privacy, with implications for global corporations using US-controlled cloud services, such as AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Azure.   As a result, businesses are now turning to Switzerland for their data hosting needs.  Artmotion has witnessed a 45% growth in revenue amid this new demand for heightened privacy…

Grazed from CloudPro.  Author: James Stirling.

Sage One, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) accounting platform from Sage, now features an Add-On programme that the company claims reaffirms its commitment to SMBs.  The project brings together over 60 software services from 16 API partners and will build “an entire ecosystem of online services” that integrate with Sage One. These include CRM, credit control, business intelligence and e-commerce services from companies such as CustomerSure, ebizmarts and OneSaaS.

According to Sage, the Add-On programme’s launch reinforces its commitment to solving the challenges faced by SMBs.  Nick Goode, head of Sage One Europe, said: “We understand businesses want to reap the benefits of online management across all business tasks, and we are committed to helping business owners do this…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Salman Ul Haq.

Efficient Memory management is one of the hot topics these days in Cloud because of the augmenting need of integrated data handling and exigency of optimized memory management algorithms. The trending Application Service Provider (ASP) and Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) paradigms are in need of smart memory management protocols to be integrated in Cloud in order to get rid of the latency and load balancing issues.

On demand resource allocation is the key in optimizing the data efficiency of the Cloud. There is a huge drainage of resources across the Cloud platform if the resources are allocated and left idle. Continuous checks and monitoring is necessary to get hold of the idle resources. The best example in this domain is the Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which is one of the befitting examples of the practical implementations of the Cloud. EC2 Cloud only allocates the resources to the virtual or real entities on demand…

Grazed from Maximum PC.  Author: Pulkit Chandna.

Dell’s CEO Michael Dell is convinced that if the ailing PC giant is to embark on the long, hard road to recovery, it needs to go private and use the ensuing absence of market scrutiny to freely shift its focus to enterprise products, cloud computing and smart devices. While the fate of Michael Dell’s massive $24.4 billion proposed buyout offer still hangs in the balance, the likes of Sam Burd, Dell’s global vice-president of personal computing, are eagerly looking forward to the “transformation.”

Burd told the UK’s Guardian that the company is quite keen on venturing into the world of wearable computers, an incipient market that is currently headlined by Google’s Glass head-mounted system, which itself is a $1500 prototype. The wearable computer market is set to explode in the near future, with many big names likely to launch head-mounted displays and smart watches of their own…

Grazed from ITNews.  Author: Stephan Reid.

We are entering the second wave of cloud computing: The Public Cloud Economics.  Most enterprises understand cloud topologies (virtualisation) and privacy levels (private, virtual-private, and public), or simply the different resource types (IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS).

Some have even embraced pretty sophisticated technologies like cloud bursting – the dynamic relocation of workloads. However, compared to this sophisticated understanding of technology, understanding of the current or even future economic models of cloud computing lags behind…