Grazed from eWeek. Author: Eric Lundquist.

The major innovation Microsoft has brought to the technology business is the ability to play a good game of catch-up ball. From graphic interfaces to email to Web browsers to the entire Internet, the company too often sits out the first innings of big technology shifts, sputters about in the middle innings and finally, finally gets its act together before game’s end.

While late-innings closers are much valued in baseball and sales, being known as the catch-up king has never won plaudits in the tech space, where being first is valued more than being right. The TechEd event here showed Microsoft at its best in finally aligning the big trends in cloud computing with the needs of its existing customers and coming up with a package of products and services for the cloud computing era. I’ll run through some of the main product introductions, but first to the big vision…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

SAP has confirmed it is to bolster its cloud offering by acquiring Swiss e-commerce software provider hybris software, with completion expected in the third quarter of 2013. hybris, which was founded in 1997, offers an enterprise commerce suite for both business and consumer facing sales that incorporates web, mobile, call centre and in-store functionality.

Its products, which are delivered either in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model or on premise, help businesses of all sizes increase sales across all vectors irrespective of location, the company claims. According to Forbes, the deal follows years of speculation that SAP would buy hybris, although there had been recent anticipation of a hybris IPO in 2014…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Salam Ul Haq.

Ever since cloud computing has seen mainstream adoption, the ability to migrate data between public or private clouds is becoming a key concern, especially due to the large size and the cost involved in the switch. The first question that comes to mind when discussing cloud migration is if there are any cloud standards that will ensure interoperability? This is because in the absence of such frameworks, the effort of translation or manual data transfer operations might exceed budgets, especially for large public clouds.

Hence it is essential to understand if there are any interoperability standards that may help in the migration. Another key point is to understand the reasons behind a cloud migration whose assessment will justify such a shift.We can say that cloud interoperability is still a topic under discussion by various cloud providers including HP, Red Hat, Rackspace, Citrix etc. The forum known as ‘OpenStack’ is promoting to build an open platform with open standards that various cloud providers can integrate in their systems making them more interoperable…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Andy Patrizio.

After two months of rumor, SoftLayer Technologies found a suitor in the form of IBM. The two firms announced Big Blue would purchase the privately-held cloud services provider, ending months of speculation over what suitor might win the hand of the firm.

Not only was IBM interested, EMC and AT&T had previously checked out the company at one point, according to a Reuters report from earlier this year but bowed out, clearing the way for IBM. It shows how hot the cloud services market is because with SoftLayer comes a very large infrastructure that would take years to build. Terms of the deal were not disclosed since SoftLayer is privately-held, but the company has disclosed that 2011 revenues in the range of $335 million and was very profitable, so IBM probably paid a significant multiple on the firm…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Virtela, the world’s largest independent managed network, security and cloud services company, today announced that it has been selected by AlwaysOn as a 2013 OnDemand Top 100 winner in the ‘Cloud-Infrastructure’ category. Virtela’s inclusion in the OnDemand 100 signifies leadership amongst its peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players.

Virtela was selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts around the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz. "The cloud infrastructure companies that can provide the most robust, always-on performance are the ones that are propelling us into a completely new digital age," says Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Bob Brown.

A small team of ex-Symantec security experts has formed a stealthy Silicon Valley start-up called CirroScope that’s focused on shielding enterprises from threats stemming from their use of SaaS applications such Box, Salesforce.com and Google Apps. CirroScope is keeping things pretty quiet on its website, only explaining that the company “is building a next generation security product to help businesses adopt and use popular cloud applications with confidence and ease!“ You can request a product evaluation, and will be asked, among other things, about how many cloud apps your organization is using.

CirroScope is looking to address the threat posed to enterprises’ data by breaches involving cloud apps, whether self inflicted or not. It points to events such as breaches of Evernote and Dropbox. But it also wants to help monitor your data, via a service, to eliminate the inadvertent release of private information by enterprises into the public cloud, as has been documented on Amazon Web Services and other offerings…

Grazed from Xconomy. Author: Matt Fates.

There are a lot of “new rules” in enterprise software sales. We discussed many of them in depth at a recent industry forum: it’s now a buying process and not a selling process, the steak dinner and golf game are out, the length of the sales cycle has shortened, and so on. Many of the new rules can be traced to the shift to the cloud. With much quicker proofs of concept and shorter implementation times, enterprises can realize software’s value (or lack thereof) much faster and with less pain.

Even Microsoft, provider of the most widely used on-premise software suite, has made a huge push in recent years around cloud-based Office 365. Senior sales folks at Microsoft tell me that 75 percent of their accounts are now buying varying amounts of their cloud services. Like other vendors, Microsoft realized that the IT managers of today and tomorrow are increasingly partial to implementing SaaS-based (Software as a Service) resources, rather than installing and maintaining on-premise applications…

Grazed from Gravitant. Author: Samantha Jackson.

Sequestration burst out of obscurity and entered our household vocabulary in 2013. It got our attention because the impact of it is $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts from the Federal budget over the next ten years. About $85B of these cuts will occur by September of 2013 — and these cuts are being disproportionately applied: Once you exempt the sacred programs, what’s less sacred (like Federal IT spending) is going to get hit hard. Forrester Research analyst Andrew Bartels expects that the Federal budget cuts will shave at least $12B out of 2013 U.S. tech spending.

So what’s to be done? Computerworld points out that “Dale Luddeke, chair of the Industry Advisory Council (IAC), an IT industry group expects to see a shift in government to things with cost savings attributes, such as open source, and agile development and cloud technology.”…

Grazed from GigaOm. Author: Derrick Harris.

Heroku has rolled out a new feature in its Heroku Postgres service that lets the database act a lot more like NoSQL fave MongoDB. It’s probably good news for Heroku’s revenues and database customers, although possibly less so for the MongoDB-based services that the platform-as-a-service provider also supports.

In a nutshell, the new feature, called PL/V8 is Google’s V8 engine for running JavaScript, but turned into a procedural language within the Postgres database. V8 already runs within MongoDB and is part of what makes that database so adept at handling the JSON data type that is common among web applications. Because they are schemaless, JSON files let developers and applications work with different data types that might not fit within the rigid structure required by relational databases…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Akamai Technologies, Inc. the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere, is showcasing its cloud delivery and optimization expertise at Cloud Expo NY 2013 which will be held at New York’s Javit’s Center, June 10-13, 2013. Through a combination of keynote, general and technical sessions, as well as booth demonstrations (Booth 418) of the company’s Terra Alta solutions, Akamai will show attendees how they can maximize the results of their cloud computing strategies.

Terra Alta is a cloud-based application delivery platform designed to improve enterprise agility and collaboration by offering the power to instantly configure and deliver all web-based applications, to any users, anywhere in the world. The solution also can help overcome the inherent challenges related to performance, availability, scalability and security, which cannot be accomplished by deploying specialized hardware within the data center…