Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Spandas Lui.

Like many large enterprises, Germany-based Siemens AG had been suffering from numerous complexities and inconsistencies with managing its gargantuan workforce across the world. Finally putting its German practicality to good use, the electronics engineering company decided to seek out a technological solution to its human resources (HR) management woes.

Siemens AG embarked on its HR software-as-a-service (SaaS) journey in 2008, and went hunting for a vendor to provide such an offering. The company’s head of employee development, Juergen Siebel, had avoided involving himself in HR IT for a long time, but went along with the plan, anyway. "After having gone into this, I’m quite grateful I was forced into it," Siebel said at the SAP Cloud SuccessConnect Event in Sydney…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: David Linthicum.

When people are planning a private cloud project, they remember the IaaS piece, but they forget to meet the expectations of developers. David Linthicum’s guest Diane Mueller, cloud ecosystem evangelist at Red Hat focusing on OpenShift, tells IT pros to "mind the gap" and remember to fill in any private cloud with a fully integrated platform solution, such as Platform as a Service (PaaS).

John Treadway, senior vice president at Cloud Technology partners, joins the Cloud Computing Weekly podcast to discuss the future of PaaS, and the guests debate what applications should not be deployed in private PaaS. The word of the day, according to Treadway, is convergence. Topics include:…

Grazed from Huddle. Author: PR Announcement.

Today, we launched our content collaboration SaaS offering for the US government with a very loud bang…or rather band. Yes, the Huddle marching band is finally back by popular demand! As you may already be aware, we certainly haven’t been shy about taking on the big boys and going head-to-head with SharePoint in the past. And this is exactly what we did when we took our Huddle marching band to the tech dinosaur’s conference in Anaheim.

This time, at FOSE 2013 in Washington DC, the Huddle team had plenty to make a song and dance about. And what better way to celebrate than with an 80-piece marching band? So what are we celebrating, exactly? Well, this year has proven to be a phenomenal year for cloud in the government, as the public sector finally seems to be accelerating its adoption, and, for Huddle, this financial year has proven to be full of milestones for our work in government:…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

LogMeIn has launched a preview of its AppGuru identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) offering that is intended to help IT professionals redefine their roles in a cloud-centric work environment by putting into place easy onboarding and offboarding of employees, as well as centralized user management.

Even more interesting with this announcement is that LogMeIn is trying to get ahead of the bring-your-own curve. AppGuru will give IT professionals the tools they need to securely manage employee-introduced cloud applications. Rogue cloud deployments (or shadow IT, if you prefer) have been a painful thorn in IT’s side ever since it became possible to subscribe to cloud services with a credit card, but as the business world prepares for an influx of untested apps thanks to the emerging bring-your-own-application (BYOA) trend, IT pros are bound to be looking for easy ways to manage and secure employees’ apps…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Theo Priestley.

I was recently with a client who is looking for a new BPM solution and they have a very positive outlook towards Cloud. They love it, so much so that they weren’t interested in on-premise solutions. This represents a real shift in attitude, and the company is no slouch or tadpole in size either. And this is where iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) is really coming into the fore and has to rule as a first-thought strategy when entering the cumulonimbus worlds of Cloud and SaaS.

In the last week both SoftwareAG (Integration LIVE) and TIBCO (Cloud Bus) have thrown down the gauntlet into the ring with IBM, Mulesoft and Informatica to name a scarce few who are already there. But why has it taken everyone so long ? iPaaS, without the vendor nonsense clouding the understanding (pun) is a solution provider’s service that allows cloud-cloud and cloud-premise integration for applications. It’s a step away from Cloud Brokerage which is essentially the development and maintenance of SaaS applications and their integration in the entirety. If iPaaS was a scarce offering Brokerage is even thinner on the ground (however take a look at Accenture’s play in this area recently announced in April…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Hold on to your seat, because the battle for cloud computing is just getting interesting. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) leadership is going to determine the winner of the battle for dominance in the cloud. Amazon, Google GOOG -0.37% and Microsoft MSFT -0.36% are all offering cloud platforms and vying for ownership in this space. Someone will become today’s cloud equivalent of what Windows was to desktops in the 1990s. However, it is as yet unclear who that leader will be.

What is clear is that whoever can win over the most developers for their cloud platforms will take home the trophy. More and more, developers are influencing how and where apps are built. They helped Microsoft win the desktop wars, and that developer-centric pattern is set to repeat in the cloud…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Looking through a computer parts catalog the other day as I contemplated building a new PC for myself, I was shocked by how affordable solid state drives (SSD) have become. The channel seems to be noticing, too, and not just in the DIY-PC market. SSD is also becoming increasingly popular in the cloud, and providers are working hard to pitch it to cloud users—as SolidFire, for instance, has started doing in discussions around Citrix (CTXS) CloudPlatform powered by Apache CloudStack.

When I last built a PC, just a couple of years ago, SSD disks large enough to store all of my data were just too pricey. As much as I would have liked the faster I/O, longer lifespan and lower energy use of SSD storage, I couldn’t fit it into my budget…

Grazed from PRNews Wire. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudJee, Inc. (www.cloudjee.com), a startup providing a world-class cloud development platform for building and running mission-critical Java applications on the cloud, launched its platform today. CloudJee is a spin-off from Pramati, a Java infrastructure company and technology incubator. CloudJee brings together a commercialized package of the same Java cloud platform that has been successfully used to launch multiple enterprise software companies, each offering multi-tenant applications for web, mobile and social environments to some of the world’s largest companies.

The CloudJee platform is built around Pramati’s world-class, cloud-optimized enterprise Java app server and load balancer that’s been proven over the last decade across large global customers. The platform also incorporates visual development and instant cloud deployment using WaveMaker technology, recently acquired from VMware, and supported by a 35,000 strong development community. Multi-cloud platform services, auto scaling, provisioning, monitoring, operations management, disaster protection and security are parts of the platform…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Ian Paul.

When Flickr announced its 1TB free storage giveaway on Monday, the company said it was offering you enough storage to "take a photo every hour for forty years" without filling up your allotment. Not content to wait four decades, hackers are already figuring out how to pack their Flickr storage with more than just photos and videos.

Two Github projects making the rounds on Hacker News Tuesday morning offer the ability to store any file type on Flick including documents, PDFs, and music files. Flickr currently allows only JPEG, GIF, and PNG uploads, as well as a variety of video formats including AVI, WMV, MPEG4, and OGG…

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

VMware has launched its long-anticipated public infrastructure as a service (IaaS), touting its virtual networking capabilities as a differentiator from other established hybrid cloud offerings. VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service will be based on the company’s vCloud architecture, allowing customers to shift their VMware encoded workloads between in-house and the VMware hosted service, a practice known as running a hybrid cloud.

“You can write an application and be safe in the knowledge it can be run anywhere,” said VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, in a Web conference announcing the new service, adding that much of the complexity enterprises experience in deploying their workloads in the cloud comes from preparing their in-house applications to run in a new environment…