Grazed from Virtualization Review. Author: Elias Khnaser.

Let’s continue the cloud conversaton that I brought up in last week’s blog, but this time on another topic that has garnered steam in the last few weeks among my customers: Desktop as a Service. Customers are now asking, why DaaS instead of VDI? I don’t want to turn this blog into a comparison between them and this fight has been discussed to death in other forums. Still, I’d like to highlight a few things that DaaS needs before it is a viable alternative to VDI. The biggest hurdle is Microsoft licensing. At the moment, the company doesn’t have a Service Provider License Agreement for its desktop operating system products and that means customers have to provide their own Microsoft licensing to their DaaS provider. I have a problem with that — without one, it gets very complicated, even more so than VDI Besides, it then is no longer provided in an "as a service" model.

Here’s another hurdle: DaaS providers are delivering Windows Remote Desktop Session Host desktops and accessorizing them with a Windows 7 theme, and that presents its own set of challenges with apps and other considerations. There is also the concern with data ownership and compliance. Most important, DaaS would be limited to SaaS applications or Windows applications that are self-sufficient, meaning they don’t need access to the corporate data or back-end databases. These are just very quick nuggets of some show-stoppers that I see at the moment…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Aaron Ricadela & Sarah Frier.

BMC Software Inc. (BMC) agreed to be taken private in a $6.9 billion deal by Bain Capital LLC and Golden Gate Capital after struggling to compete with newcomers better equipped to handle the shift toward cloud computing. The buyout group, which includes Singapore’s GIC Special Investments Pte Ltd. and Insight Venture Partners, is taking control of BMC in the third-largest private-equity deal of 2013. The investors said yesterday that they will pay $46.25 a share in cash, a 13 percent premium to the closing price on March 4, before Bloomberg reported that BMC had drawn renewed takeover interest after failing to find an acquirer last year.

BMC, a Houston-based provider of software that keeps corporate computer networks running smoothly, gets about 40 percent of its sales from the lucrative business of managing powerful mainframe computers from International Business Machines Corp. Yet it has had a harder time keeping up with rivals in the market for server software, which is expanding as companies rely more on programs delivered over the Web, fueling demand for data centers and the technology that runs them…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Matt Prigge.

When weighing whether to go to the cloud or which cloud service to use when you do, it’s a no-brainer to make sure the service’s reliability, cost effectiveness, and security track records match your requirements. However, many cloud buyers don’t carefully consider two other critically important characteristics of any cloud service: the degree to which you can control your services without intervention from your vendor and the degree to which you cede responsibility for day-to-day management tasks to your vendor.

When I think back to some of the more well-publicized failures of megascale cloud infrastructures (Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure), each has been followed by enraged forum posts from users who had incurred downtime, lost production data, or both. It’s entirely understandable for customers to be irate when a service they’re paying for fails. However, it’s also an excellent indication that these cloud users didn’t fully understand that they still bore a large responsibility for managing and protecting their systems…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Ellen Messmer.

Cloud computing services, both software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), are subject to taxes, whether your cloud provider tells you or not when you purchase them. Reid Okimoto, senior manager in the state and local tax practice at KPMG, shares tips to help you understand the real cost of cloud computing.

Q: What questions should companies buying cloud services be asking about state and local taxes?

A: One major question is, "Is it subject to sales tax?" If sales tax isn’t clearly charged by the cloud provider, the customer may still be subject to ‘use tax.’ IT-focused professionals and their enterprises are consuming and purchasing cloud services and they’re normally dealing with sellers and vendors of cloud services, not necessarily those familiar with the "taxability of services." Questions to ask the seller of the cloud services: "Are you charging sales tax or not?" If the answer is no, the next question is, "Why not?" It could be either that the provider does not have nexus or that the service is not taxable. This answer makes a difference to the consumer…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

At any given moment, Netflix Inc. is serving up thousands if not millions of videos online that are hosted in a big data center that the company’s 33 million subscribers couldn’t care less about as long as those shows run immediately on demand.

While Netflix may be the face for providing its subscribers access to movies such as “The Hunger Games” and TV shows like “Mad Men,” it’s Amazon.com Inc. AMZN -0.42% actually streaming that content to their screens. And the e-commerce giant has gone well beyond movie streaming, having used its massive technology backbone and expertise to solve the cloud computing needs of many large and small enterprises…

Grazed from The DataCenter Journal. Author: Richard Seroter.

On his classic 1950s TV show, the immortal Jack Benny once replied to a mugger—who said, “This is a stickup. Now come on. Your money or your life…”—by saying “I’m thinking it over!” Jack Benny would have been a great IT operations manager.

Another time, when told “You’re gonna give us $10,000, or we’re gonna break both your legs,” he replied, “Does it have to be both?” Faced with seeming life-or-death financial decisions, the seasoned IT manager knows that the correct answer is seldom the easy one. Some evolving practices in the cloud, however, are making it a bit easier to deliver outstanding cloud-based IT while managing costs. Below, we’ve listed five simple tactics to help IT shops achieve more from their cloud spend…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Zack Whittaker.

Dell announced on Monday it will acquire Enstratius, an enterprise cloud management software firm, for an undisclosed amount. Founded in 2008, Enstratius offers cloud management services to hybrid and single-cloud customers as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that sits either as a hosted service or within the network. By embracing a "cloud agnostic" platform, the technology works with both Dell and non-Dell customers, including OpenStack, Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon Web Services, VMware and Rackspace, just to name a few.

The firm’s software cloud management capabilities allow administrators and IT staff to quickly and easily deploy multi-component applications across one or multiple clouds. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Dell said it will retain Enstratius’ staff and continue to invest in its engineering and sales divisions to help grow the business…

Grazed from FierceTelecom. Author: Sean Buckley.

Sprint (NYSE: S) is taking its partnership with CSC to another level with the introduction of its new infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) service called CloudCompute. The new service, which couples CSC’s utility-based cloud computing solution with Sprint’s Global MPLS network, has been designed to provide its mid-sized domestic customers a path to cloud services.

A key point of Sprint’s new service is focused on helping its mid-sized customers that are considering a move to cloud reduce costs. According to a recent Ovum Business Trends Cloud Services Survey, reducing IT and business-related costs while improving business agility are the top priorities that businesses consider in adopting cloud services…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Steve Pate.

Is cloud security the chicken or the egg? Are CSOs playing the ‘it’s not secure’ card to avoid anything that, well, smells like work? Are IT pros rabidly defending their turf because they fear their jobs might also be outsourced, along with their data center? Surveys continually place concerns about data security as one of the top reasons preventing organizations from moving to the public cloud. Yet, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the fastest growing segment of the public cloud, with CAGR above 40% through 2016, according to Gartner’s Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 4Q12 Update.

How do these seemingly inconsistent statistics come together? Rather than discussing the negative points at play, let’s think about what factors are at work. I’ve been talking to a lot of organizations lately — both enterprises as well as cloud service providers (CSPs) — about their cloud migration perspectives, and here’s what I’m seeing…