Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Salman UI Haq.

No one in the industry likes vendor lock-in but it is something which every enterprise has to live with, in fact, this is how the enterprise software and solutions market was originally designed to work. One of the promises of the Cloud was to break this vicious cycle of locking in with a vendor but with a plethora of Cloud offerings and service delivery models – SaaS, PaaS, IaaS etc. – and dearth of standards, there’s an acute need to federate the way in which different Cloud services talk to each other and learn to live within the same space.

Recent surveys have shown that enterprise – big and small – which have made their transition to the Cloud find it more appealing to maintain a portfolio of Cloud services from varied vendors instead of tying up with a single vendor. One reason of this trend may be the lack of turn-key solutions when it comes to SaaS offerings. For example, somewhere in the stack of a Cloud based ERP solution, you will find Amazon’s EC2 being utilized for compute but this is not the example of a hybrid Cloud deployment…

Grazed from Xtium. Author: Editorial Staff.

By now, every IT and business executive is probably aware of cloud computing’s array of potential benefits. They understand that the technology is cost-efficient and that IT management responsibilities would decline significantly, and "scalability" has almost become a household term. So has the cloud actually met those lofty goals?

A TechRepublic survey from March found that for 96 percent of organizations that are using Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) models, the cloud has done exactly what was expected of it, ZDNet reported. But even that statistic doesn’t do the cloud justice. Not only has the cloud accomplished its intended goals, but decision-makers are increasingly realizing that these solutions have more capabilities than they originally realized. According to a separate study from CA Technologies, companies with more cloud experience are expected to be among the heaviest spenders on the technology…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Stephanie Mann.

Today’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) market is a competitive landscape: Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. reports that there are more than 150 PaaS offerings to choose from. Older, more established PaaS vendors like IBM and Microsoft are vying against newer players such as Google and CloudBees. And as PaaS revenue fixes to reach $2.9 billion dollars in 2016, companies looking to invest in PaaS are faced with more choices than ever before. Choosing the right one requires a focus on cloud objectives and development team needs, experts say.

Unfortunately, many organizations shop the growing PaaS market with the wrong criteria in mind. Nearly half of respondents (49.6%) to the 2013 TechTarget Cloud Pulse Survey said they chose the PaaS they did because it was part of a cloud ecosystem they were already using. Similarly, 43% of respondents said they based their decision on how well the PaaS would integrate with existing architecture…

Grazed from Business Insider. Author: Julie Bort.

Numecent, a company that has a new kind of cloud computing technology with the power to change the software industry, has been making steady progress since it came out of stealth a little over a year ago. Today, it announced a $13.6 million investment from T-Venture, the VC arm of German Telecom giant Deutsche Telekom. The total raised to date is just under $27 million.

The company was cofounded by wealthy tech mogul Osman Kent, best known for his previous company, 3Dlabs which he sold to Creative Labs in 2002 for about $170 million. Kent had retired from tech and was kicking around as a music producer with his own record label (Songphonic Records) and living in an English mansion formerly owned by Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera, he previously told Business Insider…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Zvi Guterman.

Cloud computing has enabled companies to realize new levels of infrastructure scalability and efficiency. Beginning with Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), which provides access to generic components for complex infrastructures, cloud computing then graduated to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), which makes available pre-packaged environments for specific use cases that still require IT skill and expertise plus changes to internal processes.

These evolutionary steps in cloud computing have enabled an explosion of new use cases for the cloud throughout the enterprise. As more business users began tapping cloud-based resources for a wider range of use cases, however, demands on cloud computing have revealed a gap between the availability of these resources and the ability to manage them…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Jordan Novet.

Like other industries, call centers and their contact-center relatives have been looking more to cloud computing and relying less on on-premise gear. One of the beneficiaries of that trend is Five9, which makes software for call- and contact-center employees that runs on Five9 servers in colocation facilities.

Five9 was founded in 2001 “as a pure-play Software as a Service (SaaS) back in the ASP (application service provider) day,” said Mike Burkland, the president and CEO. Over the years, the San Ramon, Calif.-based company has moved from doing business mainly with small and medium-sized businesses to large companies, too. It claims more than 1,800 customers…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Jason Verge.

Cisco is acquiring JouleX, a provider of enterprise IT energy management for data center assets, for approximately $107 million. The acquisition enhances Cisco’s software-as-a-service offerings with energy management, fitting particularly well with Cisco EnergyWise. The acquisition is expected to be complete in the fourth quarter of this year.

Joulex developed an agentless system that detects devices on IP networks and tracks their power use. The combined solution will provide customers with a way to measure, monitor and manage energy usage for network and IT systems without the need for device side agents, hardware meters or network configurations. It uses capabilities of the network to gain visibility into and control of energy usage across global IT environments. JouleX previously raised $17 million back in 2011…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: James Sterling.

Business intelligence (BI) and analytics company Information Builders has launched a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering to help customers benefit from the flexibility of the cloud while using its products. Dubbed Cloud Hosting Services, the offering includes over 10 datacentres, which according to Information Builders span every geographic region.

The organisation claims it is tapping into enterprises’ desire to take advantage of the flexibility and cost efficiencies offered by cloud computing by enabling companies to use its information management system on a public or private cloud platform…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cloud software developers and ISVs look for ways to speed up their development and integration, and so the current trend is all about creating pre-built elements to accelerate that process. The latest entrant into this space is Cloud Elements, which is aiming to extend Cloud Foundry’s PaaS offering and help developers build apps on top of it.

The company’s pre-built "Elements" are intended to save developers and integrators hundreds of hours per engagement. They’re built as an extension to Cloud Foundry’s PaaS and enable developers to leverage the pre-built integrations to develop cloud apps faster. Cloud Elements offers a console developers can use to select, provision, monitor and maintain cloud service APIs integrations in much less time and with a much smaller budget, according to the company…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lyndsey LaManna.

While the benefits of cloud such as, improving data access, freeing up internal IT resources for more strategic tasks, cutting costs, and increasing flexibility, versatility, efficiency and economies of scale, are compelling – the risks make many businesses stray away from cloud computing. Perhaps the biggest concern with the cloud is the security of cloud infrastructure. Well naysayers, no need to fear, a reliable cloud security plan is here! NaviSite developed a tested and manageable process and checklist on how to develop a successful cloud computing security plan.

This plan is outlined in the whitepaper 7 Steps to Developing a Cloud Security Plan. According to Navisite, “In many cases the cloud provider can achieve better security results in a virtualized environment than enterprises can achieve internally.” However, even if you choose a cloud service provider with strong security capabilities, it’s important to take an active role in securing your data. Working together with the cloud provider is the best way to ensure the enterprise resources are protected and the cloud is being securely leveraged. So without further ado, here are 7 steps to a safer cloud:…