Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM announced it has been awarded a 10-year $123 million contract by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to replace the agency’s 50-year-old legacy human resources application with a new system delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

IBM will deliver what it refers to as a first-of-its-kind private-sector HR technology solution for the U.S. federal government. IBM has been selected as the HR Line of Business (LOB) Shared Services Center (SSC) provider for the VA and will build, operate and maintain a new HR system to be deployed across the enterprise to deliver a standardized and interoperable human resources experience.

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Opsview, a leading IT monitoring vendor, has released new research indicating that 64% percent of those questioned identified virtualization as the primary focus for investment in 2013. The Opsview study also identified IT monitoring (55%) and private clouds (46%) as among their top initiatives for 2013.

The key trends from the study include:

• VMware continues to dominate the virtualization space with over 54% of respondents choosing them as their preferred vendor. However, Microsoft’s market share is growing steadily with over 18%.
• Almost a quarter of respondents claimed that more than 75% of their entire IT infrastructure is now virtualized.
• Only 12% of those surveyed admitted to using Xen and KVM…

Grazed from ITBusiness. Author: Francis Moran.

Adobe Systems Inc. is going all-in on a software as a service (SaaS) business model for its suite of heavy-lifting creative tools, announcing today at its Max conference in Los Angeles that it is replacing its nearly 10-year-old Creative Suite with a greatly expanded version of Creative Cloud, the subscription product it first unveiled about a year ago.

The updated Creative Cloud offering amalgamates Adobe’s full collection of more than 30 tools and services, including the company’s flagship products Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver, making them all available through a small-business-friendly monthly subscription starting at about $50, with individual apps available for as little as about $20 per month…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Jim Shepherd.

When people think of cloud computing, two benefits usually spring to mind: an end to burdensome onsite system maintenance and the beginning of real-time, Web-based data access. But there’s a third set of advantages offered by today’s cloud innovators. Through a new “living” approach to product development, system enhancements are developed in response to customer needs on an ongoing basis and offered to all users as they become available. That means users get new features faster, and those features are more closely aligned with their actual business needs.

This approach is quickly replacing old-school product development methods, where providers come up with enhancements and then push them out to users in the form of large packaged updates or versions…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Rackspace is connecting the dots between Microsoft.NET and OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform. The move could simplify Web and mobile application development for the Microsoft .NET community. As one of the most popular programming platforms around today, the .NET framework already receives a great deal of support from Microsoft and partners across the IT channel. Programming tools catering to .NET develolpers proliferate, and Microsoft’s Visual Studio helps to streamline the development of .NET applications.

Still, as a software framework that Microsoft unveiled more than a decade ago, .NET is not exactly what one could call "cloud native" (not that many programming frameworks, even at this point in the game, are). But Rackspace is working to make it easier to leverage .NET expertise for the cloud via a couple key initiatives that more seamlessly integrate .NET into Rackspace’s OpenStack-based cloud platform…

Grazed from Gravitant. Author: PR Announcement.

Gravitant, the leader in cloud services brokerage and management, has been named a finalist in the Cloud Computing/SaaS category for the 2013 TechAmerica Foundation American Technology Awards (ATAs). The ATAs cross the technology industry recognizing products and services like cloudMatrix.

“Each year, the caliber of nominations for the American Technology Awards increases. This is a true testament to the technology industry and our power for transforming the world around us,” said Shawn Osborne, the TechAmerica Foundation Chairman. “We congratulate Gravitant for their outstanding work and thank them for their contribution to the growth and innovation of our vibrant industry.” The awards are awarded on the basis of a thorough evaluation by industry experts and technology leaders…

Grazed from New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

SAP, the German software giant, is making one of the largest pushes into cloud computing yet seen from a large incumbent company. It may even be destroying its own business, in order to build for a new one.

SAP is famous for developing enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software. ERP is used to control complex manufacturing, run corporate functions like financials, or manage a company’s systems of supply. A few years ago SAP introduced HANA, a product that combines fast computing and data retrieval to better analyze how well a company is working. The product has been a big hit, and SAP has been proclaiming it the company’s future…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Martyn Williams.

SearchYourCloud, which provides a single search interface to find documents stored on a desktop or several cloud-based services, expanded on Tuesday to include Box. Access to Box is being included in a new version of the SearchYourCloud client software that is being launched the same day for Windows, iPhone and iPad platforms. The software, from U.K.-based Simplexo, already works with DropBox, Exchange, Outlook.com and SharePoint documents.

"It’s a one-stop shop to find the document you need," said Michael Judd, vice president of product development, in an interview. The software works by accessing a user’s cloud storage accounts and indexing the contents. Local files on a hard disk are also indexed, providing a single interface from which to search both offline and online files…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Corent Technology, the first IBM Technology Provider Partner certified as "Ready for IBM SmartCloud," today released SurPaaS™, the first ever SaaS-Enablement Software Platform. Known as the "PaaS for SaaS," SurPaaS was announced in conjunction with the Software and Information Industry Association’s annual "All About the Cloud" conference in San Francisco.

SurPaaS disrupts the existing, inefficient, costly and time consuming methods used to transform software to SaaS (Software as a Service). Corent’s SurPaaS recently was awarded a powerful patent with twenty claims for transforming software to efficient multi-tenant SaaS without the time and expense of having to alter the code of the software application…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Rick Blaisdell.

I’ve recently read an article on the importance and utility of cloud in several industries: education, marketing companies, online entertainment, healthcare, information technology, finance and banking, telecommunication, hospitality, start-ups and security. I have no doubt that cloud computing apps and services can be of use in every single domain and business. In fact, cloud computing is widespread in many industries and in older articles I have touched on the benefits for some of them such as: travel and accomodation, healthcare, energy and utility. But the list of industries that stand to gain from adopting cloud computing is much longer – and today I will discuss how public safety can benefit from cloud computing.

Here are some examples of the types of documents that Public Safety could benefit by using the cloud:

• audio/ video recordings
• health records
• management system records
• sharing documents
• sensor data…