Grazed from Compliance Week. Author: Bruce Carton.

The SEC brings dozens of financial fraud cases each year. Usually the cases involve companies that, in an effort to make the numbers expected of them by investors, violate GAAP in order to recognize more revenue, hide expenses, inflate assets, etc. In most cases, of course, there is an underlying business at these companies that management is trying to make look better than it really is through financial shenanigans. But not always!

Sometimes, as in the case the SEC filed last week against Subaye, Inc. and James T. Crane, the supposed business is simply non-existent. In a complaint filed May 8, 2013, the SEC alleges that although Subaye represented to investors, its auditors and the SEC that it was operating a cloud computing business with thousands of customers, over 1,400 sales and marketing employees and revenues of $39 million, an investigation found that this business was completely "imaginary."…

Grazed from BAI. Author: T. Lacoma.

According to reports from Bloomberg, CRN and other sources, computer group Lenovo is in talks to purchase the IBM server division. This would be the second major IBM purchase that Lenovo has made in the past several years as IBM focuses more on core competencies and Lenovo expands into tablets, smartphones and business storage equipment. While the first IBM deal gave Lenovo PC power and propelled the Chinese computer maker to the second-largest producer of personal computers in the world, acquiring the server division could concentrate the business on more corporate markets, especially markets interested in cloud computing investment.

Traditionally, the IBM server division has sold x86 processor servers, which are designed primarily for mid-sized to large companies looking for inexpensive data storage and network options. More cloud computing means more server storage, especially for major cloud computing companies like Amazon and Google. As a result, finding low-cost, low-energy servers is a key goal for such cloud providers, and the IBM servers aim to meet the demand…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Eric Eldon.

In the big new world of business intelligence, RJMetrics has found a market helping e-commerce companies easily analyze operations data and make smarter decisions as a result. Big startups have signed on, including Fab, Bonobos, Threadless and thousands of smaller businesses. Today, the momentum has landed the Philadelphia enterprise startup a $6.5 million first venture round led by Trinity Ventures.

SaaS BI, as online business analysis software is called within the industry, is full of competitors. Tableau Software, which is planning to IPO, along with GoodData, Domo and others have been successfully selling to big companies that need complex integrations to best analyze their own data. On the low end, Datahero and Chartio provide quick and inexpensive ways for a small business to get some quality integrations…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

Selling SaaS (software as a service) applications aimed at specific lines of business is one way that SAP has tried to stake a claim in the world of cloud computing and during the Sapphire conference it unveiled a broad series of updates to the portfolio.

For marketing purposes, SAP has oriented the line-of-business applications into four thematic areas: people, customer, money and suppliers. SuccessFactors falls into the first category with its HCM (human capital management) products, with SAP’s Cloud for Customer, Cloud for Financials and Ariba fitting in the other categories…

Grazed from LinuxInsider. Author: Jay Lyman.

Hybrid cloud technology is garnering much attention of late — whether for cutting-edge development and the continuous integration and release processes achieved through devops, or for traditional enterprise-proven approaches to infrastructure and applications.

There’s more to hybrid clouds than hype. The ability to effectively and efficiently manage different infrastructures and applications across a range of cloud computing environments allows organizations to align their many applications, initiatives and units with whichever cloud environments — public or private — make the most sense…

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Curt Finch.

Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, dismisses cloud computing as merely the latest fashion in the computer industry. I suppose he also dismisses that more than one in five IT decision makers have deployed over half of their total applications to the cloud, according to the Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey. Regardless of any debate, cloud computing adoption rates are on the rise. According CDW LLC’s 2013 State of the Cloud Report, 39% of organizations either already utilize cloud computing solutions or are currently implementing them. This number is up from 28% in 2011.

Maybe somewhat surprisingly, cloud computing is a very attractive option for business accounting software. Accounting software takes up a significant amount of hard drive space, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. Cloud computing solves this problem by putting the majority of files and data on a separate server. This frees up hard drive space for individual desktop computers and saves money that might have been spent on additional storage equipment…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Adam Selipsky, VP of marketing and product management at Amazon Web Services, is tired of seeing headlines that announce another competitor has emerged to challenge Amazon. Selipsky won’t name specific competitors, but in a recent interview with InformationWeek, he didn’t hesitate to lay down the gauntlet to them. "Many old guard companies" are now talking about cloud products and cloud services.

These are the same companies that are "threatened by the model we’ve brought to market" of low-cost compute cycles distributed from cloud data centers and charged for by the hour, he said. The old guard might be Oracle and IBM. It might also be Microsoft, which recently announced its Azure revenues had passed the $1 billion mark and said as it offered infrastructure as a service in March that it would match Amazon prices…

Grazed from Fox2Now. Author: Editorial Staff.

‘This is really one of the key components to our company,’ says Connectria CEO and founder Richard Waidmann. ‘It’s really the heart of our culture which is our no jerks allowed company policy.’
His company is called Connectria. It’s a high tech firm that manages hosting and cloud computing. ‘It’s a computer resource,’ says Waidmann. ‘It could be the computing, the memory, and the disk storage. We’re just running some sort of software for some computer somewhere else. It just happens to be connected to the internet and they call it the cloud.’

Waidmann’s golden rule has given Connectria the gold medal among U.S. based cloud providers. ‘We`re first in the United States, ahead of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, all of the major companies,’ says Waidmann. Instead of setting up shop in Silicon Valley, the company`s main servers are just steps from Busch Stadium…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

People often ask me where the smart money is in big data. I often tell them that’s a foolish question, because I’m not an investor — but if I were, I’d look to software as a service. There are two primary reasons why, the first of which is obvious: Companies are tired of managing applications and infrastructure, so something that optimizes a common task using techniques they don’t know on servers they don’t have to manage is probably compelling. It’s called cloud computing.

The other reason is that the big part of big data really is important if you want to get a really clear picture of what’s happening in any given space. While no single end-user company can (or likely would) address search-engine optimization, for example, by building a massive store comprised of data from hundreds or thousands of companies as well as the entire web, a cloud service dedicated to that specific task can…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

ExtraHop Networks, the provider of real-time IT operational intelligence from wire data, today announced that its ExtraHop for AWS solution won the Cloud Computing and Virtualization category of the 2013 Best of Interop awards; other finalists included entries from Brocade and Riverbed. ExtraHop’s flagship EH8000 appliance was also named a finalist in the Management and Monitoring category, distinguishing ExtraHop as the only company to be nominated in two Best of Interop categories.

Moving application workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduces yet another layer of abstraction that hinders visibility into the performance of business-critical applications. And while AWS provides basic availability and resource utilization metrics to customers, it still does not provide the critical insights needed to troubleshoot problems, answer important business questions, track security compliance, monitor end-user activity, or tune the infrastructure for performance and efficiency…