Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: David Grimes.

In so many industries, the pace of business and the intensity of competition translate into a new mandate: be agile. More than ever before, companies need the ability to retool on the fly, respond to competitive threats, pounce on market opportunities, and support shorter product development lifecycles. In most cases these needs can only be met by a correspondingly agile supporting IT infrastructure.

With its self-service, on-demand provisioning of services, pay-as-you-go pricing, and world-class management capabilities, cloud computing can provide the agility that so many businesses require. However, many businesses have concerns. Their data is often – rightfully – regarded as the critical asset to be highly protected, which can create an “anti-cloud” mindset…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: RJ Burgess.

Traditionally, companies have had to buy, build, and maintain their IT infrastructure in an expensive and complicated process. SaaS ERP provides businesses with an alternative where they can subscribe to services on a shared infrastructure via the Internet. Given the many advantages of the SaaS model over on-premise, businesses of all types and sizes are flocking to the cloud. The main reasons for the popularity of SaaS ERP, according to a study by ERP analytics firm Mint Jutras, have much to do with the three “Cs” – cost, customization, and control.

Cost
Costs are reduced in various ways when using SaaS ERP instead of on-premise software. The first is through lower IT overhead, as much of the spending required for implementing conventional enterprise software (purchasing and maintaining software, servers, their secure location, installation, maintenance, patching and service contracts) is eliminated. In fact, Phil Wainewright, analyst with Summit Strategies, calculates the cost of traditional enterprise software implementation to be 4-to-5 times the cost of the original license…

Jez Humble, principal consultant at ThoughtWorks Studios, will be speaking at the upcoming PuppetConf (expected to have 1,600 attendees this year) about how organizations can deliver valuable, high-quality software frequently and reliably through implementing effective engineering practices.  To find out more about his plans at PuppetConf and to learn more about DevOps, ThoughtWorks Studios and Puppet, we reached out to Jez for more information.

Q:  What can attendees expect to learn about devops from your presentation at PuppetConf?

Jez Humble:  Although people often focus on tools and automation, DevOps is really about a mindset. In this talk I’ll say what I think that entails, and discuss the characteristics of organizations in which it can exist. Most organizations don’t support a DevOps mindset, so I’ll also talk about what you can do to change your organizational culture.

Q:  How has DevOps helped expand virtualization and cloud computing?

Grazed from NBCNews.  Author: Editorial Staff.

France has its "Sovereign Cloud" project while across the Rhine data firms have created the label "Cloud Services: Made in Germany", all trying to reassure big companies that their information is stored away from the prying eyes of U.S. spies.  European firms believe revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has secretly gathered user data from nine big U.S. Internet companies, including Microsoft and Google, will hand them a competitive advantage as they play catch-up with the dominant American players in "cloud computing".

Yet companies and individuals may have to accept that while storing and processing their most sensitive information on servers owned by Europeans and located in Europe could keep it from the NSA’s eyes, intelligence agencies closer to home may be looking anyway…

Grazed from BusinessInsider.  Author: Julie Bort.

Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle.  Year, after year, decade after decade, Ellison’s power grows along with Oracle’s. He has crafted his most ambitious plan yet for the software giant: to turn it into a hardware and data center giant.  Although Oracle hasn’t hit its stride with these new plans yet, it’s hard to doubt the man. He’s been successful at almost everything he’s done, including winning the most prestigious sailing race ever: The America’s Cup. He brought the 2013 race to his home base in San Francisco this summer to try and win again.

Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft.  Ballmer has given Microsoft a no-holds-barred makeover, including getting into the PC business with Surface, launching a radically different version of Windows, and revamping its software for the cloud.   While some of these plans have been off to a rocky start, particularly Windows 8 and Surface, Ballmer’s got his eye on Microsoft’s long-term future. Enterprises are still likely to slowly buy into his vision…

Grazed from WatchListNews.  Author: PR Announcement.

Emerging markets are no longer just about natural resources, cheaper labour and low-cost manufacturing according to Martin Bishop, Telstra Global Head of Hosting Services, who says the trend of increased investment is driving the reality of a new breed of borderless cloud services.

Speaking at the Cloud World Forum in London in front of a packed auditorium of industry delegates, Bishop said ICT is widely regarded as one of the key fuels that will drive the success of rapidly expanding businesses in the Asia Pacific and other emerging regions…

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Engine Yard, the leading Platform as a Service (PaaS), today announced that it is further enhancing its multi-cloud capabilities with support for Windows Azure. With this new offering, Engine Yard continues to drive innovation in cloud application development by providing a flexible and modular architecture, with greater choice of infrastructure. Through their strategic alliance, Engine Yard and Microsoft are delivering a commercial grade, open source based platform on top of on-demand infrastructure that is ideal for developers and IT professionals at start-ups, small and mid-sized businesses, and large, global enterprises.

"Engine Yard continues to be on the leading edge of cloud innovation, fundamentally changing the way companies plan, build, deploy and manage apps," said Bill Platt, senior vice president of operations at Engine Yard. "We look forward to working with Windows Azure to deliver a joint cloud solution that empowers developers to more easily and quickly deliver modern apps using open source technologies on enterprise-ready infrastructure."…

Grazed from Trefis.  Author: Editorial Staff.

VMware, which is already grappling with slowing growth due to a number of reasons, has one more reason to worry. This week, one of its major rivals, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has announced a collaboration with Oracle.  As per the terms of the deal, Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud-computing service and Hyper-V virtualization software will be supported by Oracle’s Java, Database, Linux and WebLogic Server.

The move will improve Microsoft’s public and private cloud offerings vis-a-vis VMware and could present new challenges for the latter.  The business environment has weakened in the U.S. in the last couple of months due to budget sequestration even as persistent weakness in the European markets has been weighing on the growth. Dell recently announced that it would cease its VMware-powered public cloud service…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Thomas Erl, Ricardo Puttini, Zaigham Mahmood.

"The sample chapter below is from the book, ‘Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture’ authored by Thomas Erl with Zaigham Mahmood and Ricardo Puttini, published by Pearson/Prentice Hall Professional, May 2013, ISBN 0133387526, Copyright 2013 Arcitura Education Inc. For more info please visit: http://www.informit.com/store/cloud-computing-concepts-technology-architecture-9780133387520"

This chapter introduces and describes several of the more common foundational cloud architectural models, each exemplifying a common usage and characteristic of contemporary cloud-based environments. The involvement and importance of different combinations of cloud computing mechanisms in relation to these architectures are explored…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Larry Carvalho.

In a recent presentation to Managed Service Providers (MSPs), I stressed that embracing standards had to be on their list of strategic priorities. Cloud solution success is based on a successful assembly of services from multiple providers for which standards play a key role. Included on that list should be OpenStack, the hottest open source project in cloud computing that has drawn the investment and attention of leading IT vendors like AT&T, Dell, IBM, HP and RedHat. So, should you care about OpenStack?

Cloud-based disruptions in the IT industry began when Amazon started offering computing resources via its Amazon Web Service (AWS) around 2005. Citrix’s CloudPlatform (based on Apache CloudStack) had an early start in infrastructure standards but does not have a growth that OpenStack is enjoying. For virtualization, VMware is the gold standard for customers who wish to automate their datacenters and are actively attempting to complete the transformation to private clouds using their Software Defined DataCenter approach…