Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

The government of Catalonia, Spain, has signed a $67 million contract with HP to transform the government’s data centers to a cloud-based infrastructure in order to operate its compute services more efficiently. The agreement runs for 10 years.

HP will be charged with moving Catalonia’s infrastructure from government-owned data centers to secure, HP-managed cloud infrastructure run by HP Spain in Barcelona, capital of the Spanish state. The 7.5 million Catalans are a recognized nationality within Spain, and will hold a vote in 2014 on whether they wish to be independent of Spain. The state is Spain’s easternmost, bordering both the Mediterranean and France…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge.  Author: Jason Verge.

RackWare, a company that integrates data center and cloud resources into one scalable managed computing environment, has raised $3 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Kickstart Seed Fund and Osage Partners. The money will go towards beefing up RackWare’s sales and marketing organizations.

“We’re in a unique position for a Series A company in that we already have customers and revenue,” said Sash Sunkara, CEO of RackWare. “We’ll use this funding to grow our sales and marketing teams so we can attack the market with our production-ready Generation 2 product.”…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Abdul Salam.

Cloud computing with its dynamic scaling feature which allows one to scale, that is to increase or decrease, the amount of resources depending on the demand has become a great boon for IT professionals everywhere. This is especially true for environments with very unpredictable traffic flow, like the whole internet for instance. With traditional servers that were preconfigured to handle a certain amount of load, a website might go down especially when traffic has suddenly surged to levels above the capacity of the server.

This happens when some sort of news or event leads people to a specific web location. The solution in a Cloud context is to allocate more resources, and in this case allocate more server instances. But do the costs of the additional resources merit the possible profits generated by the increased traffic? Or will they actually be enough to accommodate all of the traffic, and even has a margin for more?…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Expedient announced that they have collaborated with industry leader, Intel, on a new cloud computing resource center called "The Cloud Calculator": www.thecloudcalculator.com.  The resource center aids IT professionals by providing research and tools for ensuring the right solution from the cloud and its related infrastructure technologies.  Using industry best practices, the site helps the user design a cloud computing environment and forecasts the total cost of ownership ("TCO").

To help IT professionals determine TCO, the site includes a variety of cloud calculators that span from "building a cloud environment versus buying services" to determining how much storage will be consumed for backups based on your retention policies. There is also an expansive Cloud Computing research library filled with whitepapers, videos and case studies…

Grazed from ChannelPro.  Author: Edward Jones.

Heroku, a salesforce.com company and industry pioneer in cloud application development, today announced that Tod Nielsen has joined the company as chief executive officer. Nielsen comes to Heroku from VMware where he served in a variety of roles over his tenure including chief operating officer, co-president running the application platform group, and most recently as part of Pivotal Labs, the venture created from EMC and VMware.

With more than 25 years of experience in leading and growing developer-facing businesses, Nielsen has held several key executive roles at some of the world’s most successful developer-facing software companies including BEA, Microsoft, and Oracle.

Grazed from CRN.  Author: Editorial Staff.

In this new category introduced this year, Microsoft claimed the top spot with its aggressive focus on Office 365 cloud offerings.  TCS which has a comprehensive cloud offering in form of iON for SMBs, came second.   Google did not get enough votes to qualify.

Microsoft with its wide range of cloud offerings including different flavors of Office 365, Online CRM, and its platform-as-a-service offering Azure, was very aggressive in its channel-led GTM.   Many partners informed that Microsoft was so aggressive in pushing the Office 365 platform that they were told not to sell licenses of the software and instead sign customers for Office 365…

Grazed from Experts-Exchange.  Author: Jenn Prentice.

While it once looked like a promising way to save Barnes and Noble’s struggling brick and mortar stores, the company’s Nook tablet division suffered a nearly 35% loss last quarter and looks to be dying out. Rather than do away with the hardware altogether, however, Barnes and Noble is looking to sell its Nook tablet division–and rumor has it Microsoft is first in line to buy.

On this week’s podcast, Gary and Jenn talk with Experts Exchange senior site administrator Jason Levine about what a Nook buyout might mean for both Barnes and Noble and Microsoft and what the struggling bookstore can do–if anything–to stay in business.  Also on this week’s podcast, Gary interviews RightScale CEO Michael Crandell about how the future of cloud computing and how cloud management services are revolutionizing our world…

Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Noel Randewich.

Software companies Oracle and NetSuite announced an alliance to deliver cloud-based services to mid-size business customers, the third tie-up unveiled this week by Oracle as it pushes further into services delivered over the Internet.

The agreement will focus on integrating Oracle’s software for human resources with NetSuite’s services for enterprise resource planning and will be aimed at mid-size companies, Oracle and NetSuite said.  "You shouldn’t think of this as a date. You should think of this as us continuing to integrate our products closer and closer together," Oracle President Mark Hurd told analysts and reporters on a conference call. "Think of this almost as rolling thunder as opposed to an event."…