Grazed from Baseline Magazine.  Author: Bob Violino.

Business continuity has become a high priority for companies, and one of the most significant recent trends in BC planning and practices is the emergence of cloud computing as a key component.  "The cloud has fundamentally changed business continuity," says Rich Cocchiara, distinguished engineer and CTO for Business Continuity & Resilience Services at IBM. "Capabilities previously only available to larger companies, such as remote failover, are now within reach of many small and medium size businesses."

The on-demand nature and geographic diversity afforded by the cloud lets organizations put backup operations far away from their primary operations at an affordable price. "This affordability—combined with increased testing capabilities and future improvements in network bandwidth and server and storage  capacity—will force companies to re-evaluate the need for self-recovery," Cocchiara adds…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Alex Barrett.

Concerns surrounding security and governance are prompting some Platform as a Service players to offer their wares on private infrastructure, not just the public cloud.   "Whether it’s for data sovereignty or governance reasons, some of our customers tell us PaaS must be behind their firewall," said ActiveState’s Copeland. "They say, ‘There’s no way we’re putting our data on the public cloud,’" he said.

Implementing Platform as a Service (PaaS) in-house can also lay the groundwork for future use of public PaaS, he said. Hewlett-Packard used ActiveState Stackato in-house, and decided to license it as part of its HP Cloud Application Platform as a Service running on top of OpenStack, currently in beta. "That provides us with a common infrastructure stack that we can deploy on both public and private platforms," said Dan Baigent, HP Cloud Services senior director for business development…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Leena Rao.

Salesforce is on a bit of an acquisition spree this week. After purchasing marketing software company ExactTarget for $2.5 billion, the sales SaaS giant has announced the purchase of EdgeSpring, an enterprise business intelligence and analytics startup.

Though financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, this is likely a smaller acquisition for Salesforce. EdgeSpring just came out of stealth last month, raising $11 million in Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lightspeed Ventures. The EdgeSpring platform accelerates the building of analytics applications that parse business intelligence data like sales, financials and more…

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Saroj Kar.

Consumers are adopting technology faster than ever. We witnessed the rapid mainstreaming of devices such as Apple’s iOS devices, Microsoft Kinect, and Android devices etc. Wearable devices will be next, but right now they are far from the mainstream. Wearable devices or wearable computing have enormous potential for uses in social networking, commerce, health and fitness, navigation, entertainment and media.

Right now, the most desired in wearable computing is Google Glasses, a research project in a fairly advanced technology that incorporates augmented reality. But will Google become the undisputed leader in the wave of wearable technology or will it in serious competition with other players such as Apple? Rackspace Hosting announced the results of a comprehensive study on the use of ready-to-wear and its impact on consumers and technology companies…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

Slowly but surely, open source projects are gaining significant momentum in the world of cloud computing. While a proprietary cloud — Amazon Web Services — looms large as the universally acknowledged 800-pound gorilla in the cloud market, other big vendors are throwing their weight behind open source cloud orchestration tools like OpenStack and Citrix CloudPlatform, as well as open-source infrastructure automation tools that come in handy for clouds, such as Puppet and Chef.

Take, for example, Verizon Terremark’s April announcement that it will invest in the open source Xen Project for server virtualization and Apache CloudStack for cloud orchestration. Or Cisco’s founding of the Open Daylight Project, an open-source project based around software-defined networking…

Grazed from ITWire. Author: Sam Varghese.

Dell’s decision to back off from using OpenStack as the basis for its public cloud offering will not affect the company’s commitment to the open source cloud computing platform, according to Alan Clark, chairman of the OpenStack Foundation. "I talked to them, in fact they talked to me before they made that announcement, and wanted to assure us that that would not decrease their commitment to OpenStack," Clark (pictured) told iTWire on the sidelines of the Novell Brainshare Forum on Wednesday.

"Putting my SUSE hat on, they are a great partner to SUSE to deliver private cloud solutions. They are changing and modifying their business direction a little bit so that they are in a better position to compete in the public space but that’s not changing their commitment to OpenStack."…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: John Riberio.

Salesforce.com has hired a key former Oracle executive Keith Block as its president and vice chairman. He will lead the enterprise cloud computing company’s global sales, customer support, and consulting services businesses, and has also been appointed to the company’s board.

Block, who was executive vice president of Oracle’s North America sales and consulting, decided to quit the company to pursue other opportunities, Oracle said in a regulatory filing in June last year. There was speculation that he had been axed because of critical remarks he made about his superior, co-president Mark Hurd, and other aspects of Oracle’s business…

Grazed from ReadWriteCloud. Author: Seth Payne.

Big Data, just like Cloud Computing, has become a popular phrase to describe technology and practices that have been in use for many years. Ever-increasing storage capacity and falling storage costs – along with vast improvements in data analysis, however, have made Big Data available to a variety of new firms and industries. Scientific researchers, financial analysts and pharmaceutical firms have long used incredibly large datasets to answer incredibly complex questions. Large datasets, especially when analyzed in tandem with other information, can reveal patterns and relationships that would otherwise remain hidden.

Extracting Simplicity From The Complex

As a product manager within the Global Market Data group at NYSE Technologies, I was consistently impressed with the how customers and partners analyzed the vast sets of market trade, quote and order-book data produced each day…

Graze from ZDNet. Author: Mary Jo Foley.

Microsoft’s Windows Azure team has typically held its momentum and sales numbers fairly close to the vest. But this week at the TechEd conference, execs did share a couple of interesting data points. First things, first. There’s a new Windows Azure General Manager (GM) at Microsoft as of a couple of weeks ago. Steven Martin is the new GM on the business, Microsoft officials told me this week.

Bill Hilf, the former GM for Azure Product Management — who also served previously as the GM of Technical Computing, Windows Server and Open Source and Platform Strategy — left Microsoft rather abruptly to join HP’s Cloud Product Management Group, I’ve heard from several of my sources. Microsoft isn’t commenting about where Hilf went or reasons for his departure…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Ellen Nessmer.

IBM is conducting research that involves making use of the open Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in a cloud-based setting as a way to provide dynamic services, especially to mobile devices. If the research project works out, it might be considered “the operating system of the future for both embedded systems and the cloud,” said Jan Rellermeyer, IBM research staff member at IBM Research in Austin, Texas, who explained the intent behind the research at this week’s Design Automation Conference.

JVM is the well-known open software created at Sun that facilitates write-once, run-anywhere applications. The idea behind trying to establish JVM as a software stack in the cloud is to facilitate a “continuous platform experience” between JVM-based applications running in the cloud and mobile devices, Rellermeyer noted…