Grazed from FierceEnterpriseCommunications. Author: Fred Donovan.

Chief information officers (CIOs) are expected to cut spending on computer and communications equipment while increasing investment in software, especially for software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, analytics and mobile apps, Forrester Research is predicting.

Enterprise spending on telecom services is predicted to grow more slowly than the tech market overall, which Forrester predicts will increase 6.2 percent this year and 6.8 percent next year, according to a blog by Andrew Bartels, vice president and principal analyst serving CIOs at Forrester…

Grazed fron InfoWorld. AuthorL Eric Knorr.

When I interviewed Paul Maritz near the end of his term as CEO of VMware, he offered this frank assessment of the company: "Unless we think ahead, we will be seen as the closing chapter of the client-server generation instead of the opening chapter of the next generation." That "opening chapter," or at least one version of it, was introduced last week with the official launch of Pivotal, a new venture led by Maritz, spun out of EMC/VMware, and boosted by a $105 million investment from GE.

Pivotal is a funny kind of startup, with 1,250 employees hailing from a grab bag of EMC and VMware acquisitions, including Cetas, Cloud Foundry, GemFire, GreenPlum, and SpringSource, as well as Pivotal Labs, a high-end Web and mobile development house. In "less than six months," that motley crew is scheduled to release Pivotal One, an enterprise PaaS (platform as a service) providing big data analytics — and eventually hooked up to "the Internet of things."…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Antony Savvas.

Telefónica Digital and Push Technology are to offer fast and scalable mobile and web data distribution from the cloud to any device through a strategic partnership. Push Technology’s smart data distribution technology Diffusion, combined with Telefónica Digital’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering, allows customers to "address the challenges of bandwidth, infrastructure and redundant data to reduce costs and increase revenue", said the partners.

Sean Bowen, CEO of Push Technology, said: “Cloud service providers are operating a utility model to promote the benefits of lower CAPEX and scale. The problem is these cloud service providers are not addressing the challenges of the internet – bandwidth and network availability – so regardless of the services in-house, the delivery can become a quality of service nightmare."…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Secure-24, a leading provider of cloud computing, application outsourcing and enterprise hosting services, now offers a new Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution for enterprises that need reliable, secure ITIL based data protection processes for their environments.

A team of experts will present Secure-24’s backup-as-a-service in booth 759 during EMC World 2013 on May 6-9 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Secure-24’s Storage and Backup Services Manager Keith Bankston will be available to answer questions. Bankston will also be speaking in the Partner Buzz Theater on May 8th at 2:00 for a session titled: Leveraging Backup-as-a-Service for Your Business: How to Avoid Costly Information Loss…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

According to Nancy Gohring at IT World, the OpenStack Foundation is starting to call out incompatible clouds. "Get ready for the OpenStack Foundation to start cracking down on service providers that call their clouds OpenStack but aren’t actually interoperable," she wrote, "The first companies that may be in the foundation’s crosshairs: HP and Rackspace."

Rackspace is an early innovator with OpenStack, and Hewlett-Packard could be the largest OpenStack provider by the end of the year. It’s interesting they’re the first to be accused of compatibility issues. HP and Rackspace have both fired back with responses to the compatibility allegations:…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author Pete Mastin.

In our Internet-driven world, both organizations and consumers have come to expect fast, always-on data access from any device. As a result, content providers are tasked with delivering massive files and streaming media to tablets and smartphones while simultaneously ensuring superior website performance. To meet the challenges of this digital data deluge, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are often used to efficiently distribute large amounts of content to online users.

The emergence of cloud computing has allowed companies to embrace new, cost-effective approaches to building out their IT infrastructure. The challenge of scaling is no longer prohibitively expensive, and the ability to do so in near-real time allows small and medium-sized businesses to more effectively compete with larger enterprises for market share…

Grazed from OpTier.  Author: PR Announcement.

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Beth Pariseau.

Configuration automation tools like Opscode Chef aren’t just for DevOps anymore.  They also come in handy for provisioning resources at the speed of cloud, according to attendees at ChefConf 2013 here this week.   "Half the time, our developers don’t know where CloudStack ends and Chef begins," said Joshua Miller, Linux administrator for Edmunds.com, a publisher of automotive information websites based in Santa Monica, Calif. Edmunds uses a plug-in for Chef’s knife tool as a command-line interface for developers to provision resources in CloudStack.

"Developers are spinning up and blowing away systems at a rate of dozens a week and hundreds per month," Miller said. "If the operations team had to handle all that, we couldn’t deliver on it."  Instead, the ops team focuses on improving the integration between Opscode Chef and CloudStack, and other higher-level duties than provisioning and configuring servers, Miller said…

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Is cloud computing really catching on in the enterprise? Well, that depends on who you talk to, recent surveys have found.  RightScale, a company that acts a broker between end users and public cloud service providers, released the most recent results of its annual State of the Cloud report and found that about 75% of respondents surveyed were using the cloud in some capacity.

CEO Michael Crandell says his company’s evidence shows the users are becoming more comfortable using the cloud. About a year and a half ago pundits spoke about the technology being in an adolescent stage, he says: "We’re getting to see what the cloud looks like when it grows up now and becomes a young adult."…

Grazed from Quartz.  Author: Christopher Mims.

Amazon is famously reticent about sales figures, dribbling out clues without revealing actual numbers. But it appears the company has left enough hints to, finally, discern how much revenue it makes on its cloud computing business, known as Amazon Web Services, which provides the backbone for a growing portion of the internet: about $2.4 billion a year.

In the slides accompanying Amazon’s latest  earnings report, one chart indicates that revenue from “Amazon Web Services, Advertising Services, and Co-branded Credit Cards” totaled $750 million in the first three months of 2013. Let’s unpack that…