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…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.

Organizations that have chosen true Platform as a Service have done so because it can deliver production applications for a small fraction of the cost and manpower of doing it themselves — on-premises or on IaaS, they say. But a PaaS cloud architecture is still encountering enterprise hesitance.

Choose Digital in Miami offers a digital marketplace platform that customers white-label as part of loyalty and affinity programs. When the company was founded three years ago, it evaluated some early PaaS options, and found that CloudBees integrated tightly with its continuous integration tools, including Jenkins test and the GitHub source repository, and enabled the firm to get its products up and running very quickly…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Charlie Osbourne.

The rise of mobile applications and BYOD schemes has caused a number of headaches for IT professionals in the corporate world. 10gen works with IBM to provide MongoDB cloud images for the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, an enterprise-ready infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The firms have announced a new collaboration to establish a standard for the Global 2000 to more easily embrace mobile computing.

There is a disconnect between rapid scalability of databases used to handle mobile data and the often rigid structures of legacy databases used within the enterprise — the gap that 10gen and IBM hope to bridge. If successful, then businesses will be able to harness new, mobile technology without negative impact on databases which already handle corporate data…