Grazed from dZone. Author: Omri Erel.

I talk a lot about various business aspects of SaaS, and I talk about marketing and I even recommend SaaS solutions on a regular basis. But, I think it’s about time I tap my inner software guy, and talk about SaaS optimization today. Unlike some of these articles, this is intended more for SaaS creators than consumers, and the purpose here is to recommend some basic design practices that make it more efficient, expedient and all around more effective.

SaaS optimization is important, and it sounds like something that’d be very complicated. Well, it doesn’t need to be. I will assume you know what a few terms are, going into this, so for my non-designer readers, I apologize for the small amount of jargon contained herein…

Grazed from RedHat. Author: Ashesh Badani.

About a decade ago, my wife and I moved from Philadelphia to San Francisco. We had both finished with graduate school in the Northeast and we decided it was time to strike out west. In retrospect, showing up in the the Bay Area in 2001 may not have been well-timed…but what did we know! The folly of youth. In any case, it was still hard to find an apartment though I am guessing a lot easier than right now. We found Noe Valley to be a great neighborhood and moved in fast. And it was especially quick given all we seemed to have brought from our university 1 BR apartment was a 4 person scratched-up round table, an old TV, and a couple of mattresses.

So, we figured we needed a couch at the very least. We went to a furniture store and found one that we really liked. And then the sales person said we had a choice. We could buy the really nice, handcrafted, leather sofa from Italy at about $5000. It would be customized so we could pick the color and grade of leather, and it would show up in about a couple of months according to our specs…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Shamus McGillicuddy.

French cloud network management and orchestration vendor Lyatiss is offering a free tool that discovers and maps IaaS resources that an enterprise has in Amazon Web Services. CloudWeaver Discovery is the first product available from Lyatiss’s suite of CloudWeaver tools, which will include analysis and orchestration modules in future releases. "There’s always been a concern about Amazon sprawl," said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group.

"Instead of going to the finance department to figure out who’s got instances up on Amazon, with this you are able to take a more holistic and corporate-wide view and understand who’s using it and how they are using it." CloudWeaver Discovery finds Amazon resources and provides a topology map for IT administrators. The Web-based product delivers real-time, graphical flow maps and reports for virtual machines and network services such as load balancers…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

The third platform, which includes social media, cloud computing, mobility and analytics, will play a key role in expanding information and communication technology (ICT). A new report by International Data Corporation found these new technologies will drive ICT growth to new levels.

New Game in Town

Social media, cloud computing, mobility, and analytics are all becoming necessary for firms, especially midsize firms, to remain competitive and realize the growth they seek. IDC’s latest report, recently featured on ITP.net, found that because of the proliferation of these technologies, information and communication tech spending will skyrocket 75 percent from 3.7 trillion USD to more than 5 trillion USD over the next decade…

Grazed from ComputerDealer News. Author: Jeff Jedras.

As cloud computing begins to move from hype to reality, IT service automation platform vendor N-able says it sees managed service providers (MSP) becoming the gatekeepers to the cloud for their clients in the small and medium-sized business space.

Speaking with CDN at Autotask’s annual Community Live conference, Derik Belair, vice-president of marketing and business development with Ottawa-based N-able, said a lot of the MSPs they work with are looking to develop their cloud strategies. They’re looking at cloud providers, seeing how cloud services can fit in with the services they already provide their customer, and particularly looking at the cloud and mobility…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Chandni Doulatramani.

Network equipment maker Ciena Corp said it expects strong growth in cloud computing and higher use of smartphones, and forecast stronger-than-expected revenue for the current quarter. Ciena shares jumped as much as 15.5 percent on the Nasdaq on Thursday morning. Shares of rival Finisar Corp were up 5 percent while those of Juniper Networks Inc were up about 1 percent.

Ciena, which makes switches to route internet traffic and broadband access products, said it expects to grow faster than the overall market helped by a "fundamental shift in network architecture." "Mobile data volumes are expected to continue to increase dramatically in the very near term. And machine-to-machine connections are forecast to reach 24 billion over the next several years," Chief Executive Gary Smith said on a conference call with analysts…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

he dynamic nature of cloud computing has pushed data center workload, server, and even hardware automation to whole new levels. Now, any data center provider looking to get into cloud computing must look at some form of automation to help them be as agile as possible in the cloud world.

New technologies are forcing data center providers to adopt new methods to increase efficiency, scalability and redundancy. Let’s face facts; there are numerous big trends which have emphasized the increased use of data center facilities. These trends include:..

Grazed from Yahoo. Author: Lindsey LaManna.

The cloud, cloud computing, SaaS…like it or not, we hear these terms mentioned incessantly in the technology and business world. And for a good reason – the benefits of cloud computing are vast. The fact is that the role of the CIO has shifted in a way that makes cloud very difficult to ignore. The CIOs of today’s organizations are no longer solely responsible for the management of IT, but now for supporting business growth by reducing costs and driving innovation in effort to build a strategic advantage.

Driving innovation AND lowering costs? That’s a lot of pressure. The solution is the cloud. By adopting cloud solutions, businesses can lower total costs and transition from a fixed cost structure to a variable one while freeing up critical IT resources for strategic initiatives and innovation…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Paul Williams.

IBM’s SmartCloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) product is ramping up its speed to allow the capability for real-time business analytics. Some time during the second half of 2013, SmartCloud will implement the latest version of IBM’s DB2 as its database layer. This version of DB2 includes a new technology called BLU Acceleration, which speeds up data analysis routines by a factor of 25, according to IBM.

SmartCloud now offering faster business analytics makes the IaaS offering more attractive to midsize business, allowing them to gain a competitive advantage by working more smartly and efficiently. News about this new speed enhancement to SmartCloud appeared in late May at Computerworld…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

After three and a half years in operation, Amazon Web Services’ RDS is finally generally available, and users can also get a service-level agreement if they choose to run the database in multiple places. The combination of customer adoption, numerous new features and a lot of operational experience has taken RDS (Relational Database Service) to a level where Amazon thinks its mature enough to be made generally available. Until now, users could gain access to it under a beta testing program.

Just like Amazon’s other services, the hosted database service includes set-up, operations and scaling. For example, the service automatically patches the database software and backs up data. Code, applications, and tools that IT staff already use with their existing on-premise databases can also be used with RDS, according to Amazon…