Grazed from InformationWeek. Authr: Charles Babcock.

eMeter is a 200-employee unit of Siemens that produces software for electric, natural gas and water utility management systems. Its EnergyIP platform is meant to allow a utility to combine information from smart meters with information on the grid’s operation to better serve customers. With part of its development in India and part in Redwood City, Calif., eMeter turned to Bluelock cloud data centers in Indianapolis and Las Vegas to store the recovery copies of its systems.

Under a Bluelock service launched in early May, virtualized copies of first-tier production systems were created and stored in a Bluelock data center, with a constant data feed from production systems linked to the same data center. In the event of a disaster, the sleeping virtual machines would be woken up and data fed into them reflecting the last known point of data integrity…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Brandon Butler.

As if GE doesn’t already have enough on its plate, the company entered the cloud computing marketing this week, announcing plans to provide cloud-based analytics services for its industrial customers. The move reinforces a couple of major themes across the industry, including a growing trend by both providers and end users to capture and actually get some value from the massive amount of data generated by their companies, machines and other sources.

It also shows how providers are increasingly offering services tailored specifically for certain vertical markets, in this case industry and manufacturing. And finally, in announcing the product in conjunction with partners Amazon Web Services and new analytics firm Pivotal, GE is showing how it can use technologies from others and package them as a service. Welcome to the world of cloud computing…

Grazed from Apica. Author: PR Announcement.

Apica, a leading performance testing and monitoring provider for cloud, web, and mobile applications, today launched Apica LoadTest 2.0, a new, highly scalable, user-friendly load testing platform. Apica LoadTest is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) that provides massive scalability testing for web, cloud, and mobile applications. With instant capacity of up to 200,000 virtual users of mobile and enterprise applications, the service provides fast and repeatable load tests without the need for dedicated customer infrastructure and license costs.

“Apica’s premium test network provides customers with comparable results over time due to our highly controlled data centers,” said Peter Tollgard, COO of Apica Inc. “The same user simulations can be repeatedly run from several of our datacenter locations giving credible load test results over time.”…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Alex Williams.

ThousandEyes has raised $5..5 million from Sequoia Capital and angel investors for a service that pinpoints application issues between the enterprise and cloud services. The service provides a view for how apps are delivered, and determines if the problem is the SaaS provider, the enterprise environment or the Internet. It can look across the network and determine where there may be packets dropping, high latency, bandwidth issues or other problems.

This removes the guesswork that comes when cloud or enterprise parties are trying to determine how to respond to problems. A dashboard environment allows for SaaS and enterprise customers to communicate about problems and what actions need to be taken…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

In a move to make sharing files via the cloud as simple as it is on the desktop, Infinitely Virtual, a leading provider of Cloud Server computing services, today introduced InfiniteVault™, the first cloud-based file sharing application designed expressly for small and midsize businesses. “For small and midsize businesses, there’s no simpler or more powerful way to access organizational data – and share it with authorized users – wherever they may be”.

InfiniteVault enables users to share files safely and easily, providing secure, seamless access to an organization’s data from anywhere in the world. Users can cloud-enable a desktop or a server in a matter of minutes, regardless of how many users, locations or servers are involved. System administrators have complete control over what is shared and with whom, and can manage all tasks through a simple web interface. Flexible multi-organization support enables companies to designate sub-organizations with individual storage quotas and even add custom branding…

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

For all the money it has spent, you don’t hear about I.B.M. as a powerhouse of cloud computing-based services. Cloud computing is still a tiny fraction of the company’s $106 billion in annual revenue. Still, I.B.M. has spent more than $4 billion acquiring cloud computing-based services in the last few years, and recently bought a big public cloud. I.B.M. apparently feels that attention must be paid.

The company is certainly gearing up for a much bigger push in cloud-delivered software. The first step is packaging the products in new ways, to address a much bigger customer base that’s a little lower on the corporate pyramid…

Grazed from The Huffington Post. Author: Gabriel Shaoolian.

Cloud computing is here to stay and your business should be taking advantage of it now. It is that simple. Here’s why:  1. The benefits will make your business more profitable because Cloud computing translates into:

• Lower overhead costs — and better competitive advantage in terms of chasing revenue without being saddled with traditional IT costs.
• Increased efficiency
• Greater employee mobility with anytime, anywhere access
• Improved ability to innovate with sharing and collaboration made easy…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Sarah Frier.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), the largest computer-services provider, said it will sell software over the Internet direct to corporate executives, going beyond the traditional model of doing business with chief information officers. IBM will market more than 100 cloud applications to heads of marketing, supply chain, human resources and others, changing the way it sells software as competition from Silicon Valley startups mounts.

It’s the company’s second big move into cloud delivery this month, following the purchase of SoftLayer Technologies Inc., a cloud-computing storage provider that will help it compete with Amazon.com Inc. Many of IBM’s customers are just starting to become interested in software delivered via the Internet, known as software-as-a-service or SaaS, said Marc Dietz, the director of SmartCloud solutions for IBM…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

While much talk around information technology (IT) is around organizations and businesses in the private sector, the public sector—specifically governments—typically lags behind. So which areas of IT are government IT decision-makers focusing their efforts?

According to a recent study by IT research firm Gartner (IT), government IT spending will remain flat in 2013, projecting spending to total $449.5 billion—a slight decrease from 2012. Gartner indicated that mobile technologies, IT modernization and cloud computing are the top three focus areas for investment in 2013. The IT research firm also pointed to professional services and Big Data as areas of strong interest…

Grazed from Virtualization Practice. Author: Mike Kavis.

By now, enterprises understand the value of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), but there still is much confusion about Platform as a Service (PaaS). This confusion is one reason why enterprises have been slow to adopt PaaS. Why is there so much confusion? Because PaaS is still in its early days of maturity, but it is growing up really quickly right before our eyes.

In the early days, PaaS solutions were limited to running on a single stack and on the PaaS provider’s infrastructure. For example, Force.com required Apex, Google required Python (they have added other languages over the years), Heroku required Ruby, and Microsoft required .NET. Of the four, only Heroku did not require that customers run on their own infrastructure, but to use Heroku you had to run on AWS. Although many eager developers started building on top of PaaS, very few enterprises took the leap of faith because of the constraints…