Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

IBM is trying to block the massive 10-year, $600 million cloud computing deal Amazon won from the CIA in January. Big Blue had also bid on the CIA cloud but didn’t win. Now it has filed a protest, reports Federal Computer Week’s Frank Konkel.

It’s actually pretty common for the losing bidders to file protests when huge government contracts are at stake. For instance, last year IBM won a protest over a $543 million contract for wireless tracking sensors awarded to HP. But after a review of the bids, the government decided to stick with HP…

Grazed from IT Pro Portal. Author: Editorial Staff.

In today’s business environment, organisations of all sizes are struggling to maintain the advanced IT capabilities they need to be competitive while reining in cost and complexity. Shifting to off-premise hosted models, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) and business process outsourcing, is a common activity undertaken to manage costs.

One of the main challenges businesses face in adopting cloud and SaaS delivery models is the task of synchronising data and integrating the multitude of systems already in data centres with new cloud-based applications, not to mention within the cloud itself. Traditionally, this required organisations to leverage existing tools as well as custom development…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

It took Microsoft a while to launch its Azure infrastructure-as-a-service offering, but I’m seeing signs that it’s one to watch among enterprise service providers. Today Microsoft announced it is now offering per-minute billing. Most providers charge by the hour, although Google Compute Engine recently also began offering per-minute billing. Amazon is still offering billing by the hour. I’ve asked the company if it wants to comment on Azure’s move and will update this post if I hear a response.

In a blog post, Microsoft noted that 65 minutes of use could cost more than double on a competitive cloud service, now that it’s offering per-minute billing. It’s literally the difference of only pennies but “multiply that by the thousands of virtual machines that you may ultimately run, [and] the difference adds up quickly,” Scott Woodgate and Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Windows Azure product marketing, wrote in the blog post. “Suddenly you may find your cloud economics are not what you thought they would be.”…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Alex Williams.

ActiveState, a platform-as-a-service provider, has acquired New Zealand-based Appsecute, a company with social monitoring tools for developers and IT professionals to monitor cloud environments. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Appsecute’s three employees will join ActiveState, based in Vancouver, Canada. They will remain in New Zealand developing the service. The Appsecute technology will get integrated into Stackato, ActiveState’s private PaaS, used for internal developer environments.

Appsecute launched as a PaaS las year, offering a universal user interface for a variety of different vendor PaaS platforms. Earlier this year, the company decided to take a different tack by offering what it calls a “social timeline for DevOps.” It essentially allows developer and operations teams to get a real-time, “single-pane-of-glass” view across multiple application management services…

Grazed from New York Times. Author: Steve Lohr.

I.B.M. announced on Tuesday that it had agreed to buy SoftLayer Technologies, a cloud computing company, in an effort to strengthen I.B.M.’s position in the fast-growing market for computing sold to businesses as a service delivered over the Internet. The purchase price was not disclosed. But it was about $2 billion, according to a person told of the negotiations, who has asked not to be named because he had not been authorized to speak publicly about the terms.

SoftLayer, a private company based in Dallas, has a network of 13 data centers in the United States, Singapore and Amsterdam, and revenue of about $400 million a year. GI Partners, a private equity fund based in Menlo Park, Calif., is the majority owner of SoftLayer. The acquisition is the largest made under the leadership of Virginia M. Rometty, who became chief executive in January 2012. The move, analysts say, also gives I.B.M. a broader presence in the business of cloud computing services…

Grazed from Web Host Industry Review. Author: Stacy Griggs.

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) marketplace is rapidly evolving to be a clash of four titans plus a number of other companies trying to differentiate themselves based on price, service, compliance or sales models. Let’s take a quick look at the major competitors and some recent news they have announced.

• Amazon AWS – Recently passed $2 billion in revenue and Morgan Stanley is predicting that AWS will hit $24 billion in revenue in the next 10 years. With their dual devotion to engineering and price reductions, they are the most formidable (by far) competitor in the cloud…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Warwick Ashford.

Transparency is the biggest challenge in moving to cloud computing, not security, according to Gavan Egan, vice-president of sales at Verizon Terremark Europe. “Most big organisations do not see security as a challenge because serious cloud providers understand security and security infrastructure,” he told Computer Weekly. Verizon, which has a long-established security tradition, encrypts all data in its cloud environment and ensures that none of its employees have access to the data. All staff are also screened.

Egan, who formerly headed Verizon’s security services business in Europe, sees transparency as a far bigger issue for organisations making the transition to cloud. “IT departments not only have to ensure that cloud deployments comply with external and internal regulations, but they need to be able to prove that compliance to auditors and regulators,” he said…

Grazed from WallStreetCheatSheet. Author: Eric Schaal.

How far can Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) go in the cloud computing game? Though Amazon Web Services is already believed to be clocking around $2 billion a year, a report indicates that number could grow to an imposing $24 billion in the next decade, which would make Amazon a terror to all competitors and possibly give the tech giant a monopoly in the industry.

A report by Morgan Stanley analysts sees Amazon in the top five and gaining fast in cloud computing, which they believe will have a TAM of $152 billion ten years from now. As for the inevitability of a world turning entirely to cloud services by 2022, that’s considered a given, and bad news for companies like NetApp (NASDAQ:NTAP) and EMC (NYSE:EMC). Of course, someone will need to be the host, so the market for servers won’t entirely disappear, Morgan Stanley’s analysts noted…