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…

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…