Grazed from CIO. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

"There aren’t just skill gaps among technologists," Tom Clancy, vice president of EMC Education Services at EMC, says. "They also exist at the business leader and manager level." "Implementing transformational IT strategies, such as cloud and [IT as a Service] ITaaS, or data science and big data analytics, isn’t just about the technology," he adds. "At EMC, we say ‘transformation transcends IT,’ because transformation requires new business models, new roles, new skills, new organizational alignment and, most importantly, a new mindset."

Business transformation often requires executives or business leaders with vision who are prepared to force the business to break down organizational and information silos and turn corporate culture on its ear. That vision requires understanding of the concepts, skills and strategies associated with big data and cloud technologies, and many executives lack the fundamental understanding they need, according to Clancy…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

CoreMatrix(R), a leading cloud computing consulting company, today announced that the healthcare industry is increasingly adopting cloud solutions to help meet many of the new IT challenges it faces in an era of healthcare transformation.

Government incentives and mandates are driving every healthcare provider organization — from the smallest medical practices to the largest healthcare systems — to use electronic health records (EHRs). This has created an urgent need for healthcare organizations to manage volumes of data and have at their disposal IT expertise. Both capabilities are signature attributes of cloud solutions…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Taulia Inc., the market-leading SaaS platform for dynamic discounting, announced the addition of one of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers to their rapidly growing client portfolio. Taulia will provide its entire Business Exchange Suite to the auto, motorcycle and power-equipment manufacturer, which will include its innovative dynamic discounting and supplier self-services solution.

Taulia’s cloud-based platform will allow the manufacturer the ability to eliminate supplier invoice inquiry calls, reduce operating expenses and save millions annually by capitalizing on early payment discounts. For the automaker’s supplier-base, the switch to Taulia’s platform will provide a host of benefits, including:…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Jane McCallion.

Salesforce.com, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider best known for its CRM platform, has unveiled what it is terming the third pillar of its Marketing Cloud offering, Social.com. The new service, which joins Radian6 and Buddy Media to make up Marketing Cloud, will allow brands and advertising agencies to build social ad campaigns for Facebook and Twitter that are both proactive and reactive, the company claims.

Gordon Evans, global senior director of product marketing at Salesforce, told Cloud Pro: “We believe this is the first truly social marketing platform. As well as offering campaign creation, optimisation and automation, Social.com also has two features we believe are unique: listening integration and CRM integration.”…

Grazed from The Wall Street Journal. Author: PR Announcement.

CA Technologies today announced CA Clarity Playbook, an innovative mobile application that uniquely empowers CXOs to strategically manage their organization’s technology investments in the context of their high-level business goals and objectives–right from their iPads.

Delivered via a SaaS model, CA Clarity Playbook also makes it easy for CXOs to quickly collaborate with key process stakeholders and respond more quickly to changing business needs anywhere, any time. "IT and the business have to work hand-in-hand to create new revenue streams and deliver a differentiated brand experience–even in the face of finite structural and human resources," said Lokesh Jindal, general manager, Service and Portfolio Management, CA Technologies. "CA Clarity Playbook enables this critical coordination by giving executives the ability to nimbly adapt plans, activities and priorities."…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

WSO2 today announced that two of the company’s executives will discuss cloud implementation trends and best practices at the Computerworld Open Business Conference (Computerworld OSBC). WSO2 Vice President of Technology Evangelism Chris Haddad will present, “A New IT Plan: Enterprise DevOps PaaS, APIs, and Ecosystems.” WSO2 Vice President of Product Marketing John Mathon will join other product marketing leaders in a panel discussion on the factors driving and inhibiting cloud adoption. WSO2 is a Platinum Sponsor of Computerworld OSBC, which will run April 29-30, 2013 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco in San Francisco, CA.

Presentation: A New IT Plan: Enterprise DevOps PaaS, APIs, and Ecosystems

Today, organizations are implementing open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, APIs, and open ecosystems to accelerate agility and empower developers to enable innovative business strategies. This session will explore how enterprise DevOps PaaS technologies can increase developer velocity and reduce iteration times, focusing on how open APIs are delivering significant business building blocks…

Grazed from Globe Newswire. Author: PR Announcement.

Today, CipherCloud, the leader in cloud information protection, announced Cloud Data Discovery, an important new addition to its cloud information protection platform, which enables organizations to rapidly adopt SaaS and cloud applications while ensuring that their compliance policies are fully met and their sensitive information is always protected.

With the addition of Cloud Data Discovery to the CipherCloud platform, organizations can now discover and gain full granular visibility into all of the information their users are sharing across all of their cloud applications. An organization’s data loss prevention and compliance policies can be effectively applied to all discovered information delivering full visibility to an organization’s content in the cloud. Easy to read and insightful dashboards deliver detailed visibility to all of the information that is going into an organization’s cloud applications, including Salesforce.com and Box…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Software as a Service (SaaS) applications have to track the needs of the workers they support, but they don’t always do that successfully. According to enterprises, mobile SaaS applications change for one of the following reasons, in increasing order of likelihood: changes to regulations governing the application, changes in mobile device policy, changes in worker activities and changes in mobile OS features. There is no perfect strategy for making mobile SaaS apps Agile with so many drivers of change, but picking the right SaaS provider, customizing the SaaS service for mobile use or even creating your own SaaS can help.

Evaluating SaaS agility

Whatever forces drive mobile application users and their SaaS providers in different directions, the ability of a SaaS provider to respond to regulatory changes that impact an application is a key indicator of their determination to track the market. One of the questions every SaaS evaluator needs to ask is how rapidly the application has accommodated changes driven by regulations. A response measured in months will almost certainly create issues with regulators, and it also suggests that the provider isn’t able to change the application quickly. That same inertia will likely impact the SaaS provider’s response to other demands for change, so it may be wise to pick a different provider…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Steve Pate.

It’s 10:00 PM. Do you know where your data is? Is it nestled securely within the firewalls of your data center, or is it more adventurous, spanning the boundaries of various public clouds? Cloud adoption continues to grow at unprecedented rates, raising concerns about data privacy and also about data residency, especially for organizations considering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in a public cloud.

I recently attended a presentation by a large cloud service provider (CSP), who proudly explained that they immediately make three copies of customer data, placing them in disparate data centers to ensure availability and disaster recovery. Because he was speaking to a room full of security people, it’s safe to say the audience quickly became more concerned than comforted…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

Translating time into dollars matters far more to many CEOs I’ve spoken with versus what platform their applications are running on. What matters most is getting all they can out of every hour their business is operating. They are all focused on getting beyond the constraints that held their growth back in the past – everyone wants a growth accelerator today.

For manufacturers especially, this includes applications with depth of functionality that can be quickly deployed regionally, and in more cases than ever, globally as well. Line-of-business leaders want applications that make an immediate impact on their entire value chain…