Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

It’s not exactly shocking that Amazon cloud competitors are polishing up their PR talking points about the benefits of hybrid cloud. And turning up the volume on their pitches.

Here’s why: As Amazon Web Services keeps churning out services, support offerings and certifications to appeal to corporate and government users (the latest being FedRAMP accreditation), other cloud vendors need to show that they offer value above and beyond AWS. Hybrid cloud, which pairs local processing power with outside cloud resources as needed, is one area that they see as a weakness for Amazon…

Grazed from TechWorld.  Author:  Sophie Curtis.

Amid a slew of product announcements designed to enable “mobile workstyles,” Citrix is already looking ahead to the next phase of enterprise innovation, with a focus on cloud computing as a platform for new mobile services.  Speaking to Techworld at the Citrix Synergy conference in Los Angeles, Martin Duursma, VP of Citrix Labs and CTO Office Chair, described a project called “Crystal Palace,” which aims to break down barriers between operating systems that prevent devices from interacting in a seamless fashion.

Crystal Palace is a cloud service that all of the user’s devices are registered to – say for example an Android smartphone, an Apple iPad and a Windows laptop. An agent runs on each device, and can send instructions to the agents on the other devices via the cloud service…

Grazed from Technorati.  Author: Mary Dumon.

San Francisco-based Boundary is the first cloud-based IT operations management system and the company is leading the way in an evolving field.  This past week, Boundary CEO Gary Read discussed his company’s cloud-based innovation with San Francisco Business Times.  Read believes that his ops management software is on the cusp of a major disruption in the systems management market. 

Boundary is a unique SaaS offering that collects and analyzes data center monitoring information from a variety of data center environments.  The company’s analytics consolidates data from a number of “new stack” leaders including AppDynamics, Joyent, New Relic, Opscode, Plexxi, Puppet labs, Splunk, and others and processes this data in real time and delivers information in a single dashboard…

Grazed from Datamation.  Author: Jeffrey Kaplan.

Even as enterprise adoption of cloud-based alternatives accelerates, IT and business executives are learning that fully capitalizing on these new ‘on-demand’ resources entails extensive systems integration, staff training and process reengineering.  Despite these obstacles, my travels have confirmed that enterprises of all sizes across nearly every industry are moving quickly to take advantage of cloud services to achieve their corporate objectives.

In fact, in most cases they are not expecting to reduce their operating costs by adopting cloud services. They are hoping instead to improve the responsiveness of their business operations, so they can be more agile and competitive. They remain committed to their ‘cloud first’ initiatives because they are convinced that the end results justify a long, multi-stage migration process…

Grazed from TechRadar. Author: Mark Say.

Dell is tying its fortunes in the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) market to Citrix with initiatives to support the latter’s XenDesktop 7 under the DVS Enterprise banner. It is launching three deployments to tie in its hardware with the management platform, saying that they can support mobile working and the use of cloud computing.

XenDesktop 7 provides a management platform for desktop PCs, hosted VDI and applications, and supports virtualised workloads based on Windows 8 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012.
Dell has built on its converged infrastructure platform – that combines servers, storage, networking, endpoint devices and management software – to automate the deployment of XenDesktop 7 though its Active System 800 infrastructure system…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Evolve IP, The Cloud Services Company, today announced that it has been listed on the Cloud Security Alliance’s (CSA) Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR). As an official STAR member, Evolve IP customers will know that in addition to receiving high availability, mission critical cloud computing services on an award-winning, unified platform they will also gain the highest levels of transparency and controls regarding data security, confidentiality, and integrity available.

An Inc. 500 company, Evolve IP provides organizations with a unified option for cloud services. Today, tens of thousands of users primarily in the US and globally depend daily on Evolve IP for cloud services like virtual servers, virtual desktops, disaster recovery, unified communications, contact centers, and more…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Joyent president CEO Henry Wasik keeps a recent news story on the wall of his office "to remind the staff of what we’re up against." The headline reads, "Amazon to Cloud Rivals: Try To Catch Us." Joyent is determined to catch Amazon. Wasik said the Joyent cloud was initially equipped with a basic set of 10 virtual server selections. On Thursday, the company introduced 13 instance types that closely align with Amazon’s most popular virtual server types, from AWS Micro up to Standard Extra Large and Quadruple I/O Extra Large.

"As people move off of Amazon [Web Services], we want them to be able to slide over to the equivalent instance" in Joyent, said Wasik. Joyent is actually increasing its virtual server selection with additional choices, 71 in all, to make its cloud service more attractive to customers. That means Joyent now has a match for AWS Store Eight Extra Large and AWS High-CPU Extra Large, along with many other options…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alyssa Wood.

Citrix VDI administrators will finally get the unified XenDesktop and XenApp management and deployment model that they have expected for years. Details of XenDesktop 7, previously codenamed Excalibur, were released here at the Citrix Synergy 2013 conference. It is the first release of Project Avalon.

Bringing virtual desktops and apps under the same umbrella, this release unifies XenDesktop and XenApp management and deployment under the FlexCast Management Architecture. XenApp previously ran on the Independent Management Architecture. "The days of having to deploy extra agents, extra consoles, extra databases — gone," said Simon Plant, a director of product management at Citrix Systems Inc…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Barracuda Networks is continuing the expansion of its cloud data storage initiatives. This time, the company has acquired mobile signing and document storage platform provider SignNow, which recently grew to more than 1 million users and represents more than 100,000 small businesses and half of the Fortune 500. It’s an interesting acquisition, as there’s a bit of a niche here. It may very well be a big niche, but it’s far from a traditional cloud storage offering. According to Barracuda, this acquisition brings significant expansion and expertise that the security and storage vendor will use to boost its own cloud data storage growth.

"The SignNow acquisition strengthens our offering in cloud data storage and continues our focus on providing simple, yet powerful and affordable IT solutions," said BJ Jenkins, CEO of Barracuda Networks, in a prepared statement. "SignNow has experienced phenomenal growth, and we are looking forward to bringing it into our fully integrated suite of cloud and on-premise security and storage solutions."…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Michelle Boisvert.

Mention the words "open source" to IT pros interested in adopting cloud computing, and their ears likely will perk up. Open source software offers a solution to the vendor lock-in concerns many enterprises have with committing to a cloud platform. And cloud platforms like the OpenStack Foundation, which fosters ‘coopitition’ among seeming competitors in the hot cloud computing market, give companies the option to build interoperable open source clouds. But what options do enterprises have when seeking open source PaaS?

SearchCloudComputing spoke with Cédric Thomas, chief executive officer of OW2, a Paris-based, independent community focused on creating a code base of open source software for cloud computing. Similar to Apache and the OpenStack Foundation, OW2 concentrates on infrastructure software as well as the tools to develop, deploy and manage applications for approximately 100 projects over a 60-member community that’s 22,000 developers strong…