Grazed from InfoQ. Author: Grischa Ekart.

CloudMunch Inc last month officially announced the launch of its freemium full-stack DevOps platform – a dashboard of pre-integrated tools for version control, build management, validation, automated testing, deployment and cloud connectors. The software is hosted and managed as a service (SaaS) eliminating the need for developers to setup their own set of tools.

Starting at $100 a month for private and free for open source projects, the product includes a wide range of features covering DevOps and Continuous Delivery from development to production. CloudMunch claims its platform significantly simplifies deployment of applications and infrastructure. The ambitious feature set includes:

• GitHub integration with intuitive project import into CloudMunch
• Java, JavaScript, php, .NET, Ruby projects are supported
• Simplified Jenkins for Continuous Integration
• Developer tools integration such as most version control systems, Jira, Bugzilla…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Paul Venezia.

From the mainframe days to the client-server model to VoIP phone systems to mobile devices and BYOD, IT has grown to accommodate the needs of the organization. As the workplace became more computerized, IT grew to encompass and manage those new frontiers. Year after year, IT saw nothing but increase in scope.

But today, with the percolation of SaaS vendors, IT is seeing business units heading outside of the IT organization for solutions, for better or for worse. For the very first time, IT is seeing its footprint reduced. On the face of it, this should make IT’s job easier. Rather than meeting with IT to define the hardware and software requirements to implement a new solution for a business unit, the business manager — or any employee — can drop a credit card number into a SaaS portal and start using a hosted service immediately. IT doesn’t even need to know this is happening…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Marten Mickos.

Why is it that open source wins in infrastructure software? Why do websites run on Cassandra and MongoDB? Why are the biggest clouds in the world built on Linux and open source hypervisors? How come the leading cloud management platforms are open source?

The answer is surprisingly simple. The solution has emerged over the past two decades thanks to Apache, Linux, MySQL and other enormously popular software technologies. When you provide software to people who can and want to develop or maintain software themselves, the code needs to be open. If you provide software to a consumer or to a business, it’s about the service and the business benefits, not about openness per se…

Grazed from InternetEvolution. Author: Charlotte Erdmann.

Despite growing cloud adoption in some public and private sectors, overall, cloud computing is receiving a lukewarm reception in Germany. According to the Global Cloud Computing Scorecard compiled by the BSA Group, last year, Germany lagged behind in terms of cloud readiness. Ranked third in 2012, Germany now has to content itself with fourth place after the United States topped Germany, despite an economic crisis and infrastructure problems. Down just one place? That may not sound too bad at first. But the news isn’t good for German businesses and government agencies.

BSA — an advocacy group for the global software industry — generates its scorecard based on factors such as security; cybercrime incidents; data protection; freedom of trade; support for international trading standards; copyright; and the expansion of broadband networks. It’s this last point where Germany’s being left behind, having been eclipsed by Japan, Australia, US, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and Korea. And compared to Germany, Both Canada and Poland have made strong strides forward…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

EMC today announced new transformational solutions and services that are intended to help customers move workloads of SAP® solutions to next-generation private cloud infrastructures. To help build a foundation for private cloud computing, EMC® is also deepening its relationship with SAP and VMware® by integrating their respective services capabilities and helping customers accelerate full-lifecycle transformation of SAP applications to virtualized x86 environments.

These new additions are expected to help and revolutionize IT organizations and operations by simplifying the design, planning and operation of on-premise cloud computing infrastructures that take advantage of the latest EMC, SAP and VMware technologies. Through a combination of services and solutions EMC, together with SAP and VMware, intends to enable customers running SAP solutions to simplify IT management and focus on innovation and competitive advantage while reducing costs…

Grazed from Huffinton Post.  Author: Vala Afshar.

In a recently Harvard Business Review blog, a two-year research study with the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, Corporate Executive Board, Intel and others suggested that CIOs are not in sync with what the CEO and the other line-of-business executives need from IT. One out of two CEOs said that IT should be commodity service purchased as needed and only a quarter of executives felt that the CIO is performing above their peers. The research clearly pointed to the failure of IT to deliver value to the business in terms of accelerating growth, reducing customer acquisition costs and improving customer retention.

I also recently spoke with MIT Sloan Management Review about the emergence of the chief digital officer in the enterprise. I noted that digital technologies — cloud, mobile, social, applications, big data — in the enterprise is shifting some of the technology procurement, development and implementation responsibilities away from the CIO, and to new positions within the enterprise including: the chief digital officer, chief data officer, or into marketing with oversight from the chief marketing officer. Gartner is predicting that by 2015, 25% of the enterprise will appoint a chief digital officer…

Grazed from IT News.  Author: Juha Saarinen.

Amazon Web Services customers will now have further options of connecting directly to the cloud computing provider’s data centres via its Direct Connect service, instead of going over the public internet.  Direct Connect is now available at the Seattle Equinix data centre, and also to the AWS GovCloud in the US, which is a region designed for specific regulatory and compliance requirements of controlled, unclassified information.

The main benefit of using a private network connection to the AWS is lower cost, Amazon claims, as well as improved bandwidth and more consistent experience and performance. Direct Connection doesn’t however provide onward connectivity to the public internet…

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Netflix is arguably one of the world’s biggest users of cloud computing, renting all its computing power from Amazon Web Services, the cloud division of Amazon.com, which runs its own video-streaming service that competes with Netflix. Ashlee Vance from Bloomberg reports:

"Netflix has more than 36 million subscribers. They watch about 4 billion hours of programs every quarter on more than 1,000 different devices. To meet this demand, the company uses specialized video servers scattered around the world. When a subscriber clicks on a movie to stream, Netflix determines within a split second which server containing that movie is closest to the user, then picks from dozens of versions of the video file, depending on the device the viewer is using. At company headquarters in Los Gatos, Calif., teams of mathematicians and designers study what people watch and build algorithms and interfaces to present them with the collection of videos that will keep them watching…

Grazed from QRCodePress.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The landscape of the web is endless, which is one of the amazing things about the new age we live in. New technologies are regularly being introduced and just as people begin using them in their everyday lives, something else is invented that trumps them. One of the newest trends to sweep the web and the business that’s done on it is cloud computing.

This technology allows companies to transfer and save large files in a cloud, or a third-party server that they rent for a set amount of time per month or year. They can also transfer data through this cloud from one company to another, which previously was much more difficult and required a hard drive or a special connection between the two businesses. However, BitTorrent, developer of a popular online file-sharing tool, has just come up with a new way to transfer these massive files directly from computer to computer without having to rely on these third-party cloud systems…

Grazed from PeakColo.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Enterprise-class cloud computing offers many benefits to its adopters, and its overall value rests in its ability to offer innovative solutions to myriad business issues. One of a company’s primary concerns is its security, but there are many ways in which enterprise clouds provide overarching solutions to potential security vulnerabilities. Inherent in the design of enterprise IaaS clouds is a prominent focus on maintaining a protected infrastructure. This is an especially salient concern of many IT professionals and CIOs, who still debate the merits and hindrances of security in the cloud, wrote Computerworld’s Steve Pate. In addressing cloud security, Pate considered the perspectives of businesses and cloud service providers.

Pate wrote that the security concerns of smaller organizations in particular  frequently stem from their lack of an in-house security team, and so they often have the most to gain by investing in the services of an IaaS cloud provider…