Grazed from Expert Review. Author: Gareth Halfacree.

Microsoft has promised that it will add cloud computing capabilities equivalent to three Xbox One systems for every single console sold, allowing developers to tap into remote servers and create more complex games. The Xbox One is built around a semi-custom AMD accelerated processing unit (APU,) a chip that combines graphics and general-purpose processing units. Using a different instruction set architecture – x86, the same as a standard desktop or laptop machine – than the PowerPC-based Xbox 360, it’s difficult to directly compare the relative performance of the two systems, with Microsoft stating the Xbox One will be roughly ten times as powerful as the Xbox 360.

Speaking to Official Xbox Magazine, Microsoft’s Jeff Henshaw has also suggested that each Xbox One console can tap into three times its local power by using an arm of Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform – creating a device potentially 40 times as powerful as its predecessor…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Many IT leaders are concerned about how they can compete with cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace. Often, cloud providers are able to offer capabilities such as storage at a much more favorable price point than internal IT can deliver.

As a result, says Bernard Golden, executive withe Dell’s cloud computing group, says it’s high time IT leaders stop trying to compete with the outside services. In a recent CIO post, he says "the rapid rise of cloud computing means corporate IT may no longer be the cheapest purveyor of application hosting, infrastructure, storage and other services." As he put it, the cloud challenge "threatens to topple [corporate IT’s] position as monopoly supplier of computing to the larger enterprise."…

Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Luke Burns.

Security and privacy are often mentioned in the same breath, but when it comes to cloud computing, security tends to be the dominant subject. But should it be? While there are seemingly endless security threats, cloud providers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable in addressing them. When it comes to privacy, though, cloud vendors have not made the same progress. In fact, it’s more than likely that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies breach the customer’s perception of data privacy regularly.

I’m not referring simply to consumer companies and their problems with privacy, e.g. Facebook sharing personal data with advertisers. Enterprise SaaS companies face their own unique challenges around customer data usage, even though those issues have not received the same level of scrutiny…

Grazed from FutureState. Author: Shannon Adkins.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is revolutionizing the software industry. Roughly a decade after the first SaaS suites emerged, even giants like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft are jumping on this new paradigm. SaaS is also changing the way software vendors interact with end users. When subscriptions are everything, success depends more on adoption and retention — and less on acquisition.

My colleagues and I work with both SaaS vendors and end users on a daily basis and can say from firsthand experience that inactive users quickly become lost customers. That’s a scary prospect, but it also represents the potential in the SaaS market that’s waiting to be unlocked. First, vendors will have to redefine implementation. The old “sell, train, support” model just isn’t working. What’s needed is a more proactive approach that treats clients like partners, focuses on adoption and includes them in the development process…

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Nestor E. Arellano.

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Howard Soloman.

The cloud is a place to store data, to buy processor power and to buy complete services.  Increasingly, it’s also a source of integration services that join the cloud and on-premise data and applications.  Tibco Software Inc. is the latest to join the movement by offering its Cloud Bus integration platform as a service (iPaas) for joining social media cloud applications – such as Salesforce – with data held behind the firewall.

“We recognize customers are not going to be 100 per cent in the cloud as there’s still a lot of on-premise data that is very interesting to them,” said Steve Lueng, Tibco’s director of product marketing for cloud computing.  “So to fulfill the need of integrating cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-on-premise we’ve released Cloud Bus.”…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Dan Brinkmann.

Desktop virtualization can be difficult to implement and does not always save money, so get to know some of the virtualization challenges you’re facing before you dive in. The fairly simple methods in place today for image-based OS deployment, patching and personalization using Windows local profiles are well-known and have been fairly static. Desktop virtualization, on the other hand, has increased the complexity of delivering Windows desktops and applications. Fortunately, some advancements in the virtualization industry, such a virtualized graphics processing units (GPUs) and workspace management, can help IT overcome some of these challenges.

Complexity
Moving to a nonpersistent delivery model to reduce total cost of ownership increases virtual desktop complexity. For desktop virtualization to perform as intended, many technology layers have to work in harmony. Plus, the use of application virtualization in an effort to simplify application delivery can create its own problems, ranging from slow performance and app crashes to communication problems between virtualized and nonvirtualized applications…

Grazed from Economic Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

If the Hatfields and McCoys lived in Silicon Valley, they’d be fighting with piles of cash and lines of software code instead of knives and shotguns. And the fight would be over who wins the most customers in the computer industry’s growing "cloud" of software services. That’s how it is for Aneel Bhusri and Zachary Nelson, whose companies are in contention over the next major shift in computing. In a way, the men are reliving history.

Two decades ago, their mentors feuded, and that time, too, the dispute took place against the backdrop of a major shift in corporate computing – when customers gave up their mainframes and moved to software that relied on personal computers closely connected to a server. Nelson, the chief executive of NetSuite, used to work for Lawrence J. Ellison, the billionaire chief executive of Oracle…

Grazed from YourIndustryNews.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

Canada-based infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) leader iWeb announces the launch of a fully-managed Cloud hosting service based on OpenStack®. The managed Cloud service is the first OpenStack public cloud deployment in Canada and the first in the industry to provide guaranteed disk speed as a standard, a key element of overall system performance. The other key components of this breakthrough service are worry-free system management, rapid deployment, Cloud elasticity, scalability and soon, a robust application-programming interface (API).

"This service would not have been technologically possible even 12 months ago," says Mike Gero, Director of Product Management. "When we looked at the market we couldn’t find a cloud that met all our customers’ needs. By engineering this cloud with the best vendors and technologies, we are delivering something I am sure customers will enjoy and competitors will envy. We truly believe this will meet our customer’s performance, availability and support requirements. Due to our use of SSD drives our standard disk performance is on average 2x that of other Cloud providers and the security of customer data is maintained with data replication and redundancy."…

Grazed from MuleSoft.  Author: Editorial Staff.

MuleSoft, provider of the world’s most widely used integration platform to connect the New Enterprise, found in a survey that 57 percent of enterprise IT professionals indicated the need to modernize legacy applications using APIs to make it easier for applications outside the firewall to access their data. While respondents agreed that mobile and SaaS are critical to their long term IT strategies, exposing their existing applications to be consumed by mobile and other external applications remains a primary obstacle.

"There is massive buzz around SaaS, mobile and Big Data, but the secret nobody talks about is that you can’t make it work without connectivity," said Ross Mason, founder and vice president of product strategy at MuleSoft. “This survey shows there is powerful market demand for integration solutions, driving a new era of hyperconnectivity. In 2012, 60 percent of MuleSoft’s new revenue involved SaaS and/or mobile integration – proof that we are making good on our mission to alleviate the $500 billion integration pain point.”…