Grazed from TheStreet.  Author: Chris Lau.

Consumers may be more familiar with cloud service offerings. This includes Google Drive, offered by Google (GOOG), SkyDrive by Microsoft (MSFT), Box.com, and DropBox.  Some of the other big players investors might want to start with are grouped below. 

Networking

1. Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO): The networking giant grew through acquisitions. The company is turning its focus on SDN. UBS argued that innovation in hardware will happen through SDN. Performance, latency, and resiliency are elements that will improve…

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Paul Kapustka.

It’s easy to forget that sometimes even in a highly specialized audience — like the one here following enterprise mobility — there are divisions in opinion and in how a common technology, like cloud computing, is viewed. At last week’s Cloud Connect event in Santa Clara, I heard several speakers call this divide out in compelling fashion, and it made me wonder if culture is part of the reason cloud computing still faces challenges in corporate deployments.

Mark Hinkle, senior director for Open Source Solutions at Citrix, called out one clear division in a panel on cloud deployments. When viewing cloud services, Hinkle said, end users will typically gravitate toward a solution that provides fast and easy results. But for enterprise IT, he noted, "the stakes are much higher" for cloud deployments. "There are more things that come into play."…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Editorial Staff.

Accenture has launched a new Accenture Cloud Platform and has pledged to invest more than $400 million in cloud capabilities to help clients implement digital technologies to drive greater flexibility, innovation and growth.

As more and more clients are going digital, the Accenture Cloud Platform provides services and solutions designed to help organizations integrate and manage the hybrid cloud environments that span across multiple vendor platforms and are critical to providing flexibility and supporting emerging technologies. Accenture officials said the move is to help clients get the most business value from cloud computing and is in anticipation of the shift in demand toward the public cloud…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

When it comes to cloud computing, security rises to the top of the worry list, but is worth the risk. A new survey shows that most IT decision makers believe both that the cloud is a proven technology and that security is a top challenge in implementing it correctly. Midsize firms understand the need for the best security when it comes to their own cloud deployments and they demand the best solutions to remain competitive.

Importance and Security

ComputerWeekly recently featured a report on a survey by managed services IT firm Claranet about cloud services which revealed that cloud security is an important consideration among CIOs in the UK. The survey, which took into consideration the opinions of 250 IT pros, showed that ninety percent of them believe the cloud is an important, proven technology that gives companies much growth potential. However, the IT pros had concerns about client and corporate information getting into the wrong hands. Almost half of those polled had concerns about security breaches…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

The Defense Information Systems Agency plans to award a $45 million cloud computing contract for an intelligence and surveillance information storage cloud that could eventually require four exabytes of storage, according to a procurement document posted online.

The document, a sole source justification, says that DISA will award the contract to systems integrator Alliance Technology Group, which claims expertise in federal government private cloud computing and has done business with NASA and the Navy, among other federal agencies. According to the document, Alliance will provide DISA’s Enterprise Services arm, which provides IT services to the rest of the military, with "state-of-the-art global storage capabilities."…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Robert Eve.

While Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offer applications and resources at an attractive, pay-as-you-go price, they also create silos of data that are difficult to access by your analytics and BI solutions. Likewise, Big Data offers new storage techniques, processing capabilities and analytic opportunities. But traditional analytics and BI solutions are typically built assuming relational, SQL-based sources. These often struggle when trying to deliver value from these new No-SQL sources.

Cloud and Big Data Silos Add Value to Analytics and BI
Analytics and BI opportunities today are abundant and can significantly add value to a business. According to the Professors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT: "Companies that inject big data and analytics into their operations show productivity rates and profitability that are 5% to 6% higher than those of their peers." Data is the critical success factor. Because without data, there can be no analysis. The more data the better, including data sourced from the cloud, Big Data and existing enterprise data warehouses…

Grazed from Apprenda. Author: PR Announcement.

Apprenda, the leader in enterprise private platform-as-a-service, today unveils a next generation PaaS user experience for its developers and an extensive library of add-on capabilities giving partners and customers a way to integrate enterprise application systems “as a service” with associated security, quota and other policy controls compliant with IT policies. The add-on system enables the Global 2000 to integrate with their existing internal systems, which are often custom designed and industry specific. Developers can access the service catalog to provision and incorporate these services into applications running on the Apprenda platform.

Apprenda’s updated user experience offers a more seamless way to scale massive application portfolios, integrate with all existing IT investments and provides an improved self-service approach to developers who launch new applications over the Apprenda platform, further removing the friction between developers and IT through single-click application deployment…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Editorial Staff.

China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, the world’s No.2 telecom equipment maker, said on Monday it expects a compound growth rate of 10 per cent in annual sales over the next five years, lifted by cloud computing and smartphone sales. Rotating Chief Executive Officer Guo Ping was speaking at the company’s headquarters in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen where he confirmed a 32 per cent rise in Huawei’s 2012 net profit to 15.4 billion yuan.

Revenue rose 8 per cent to 220.2 billion yuan. Unaudited figures were released in January. Huawei and its crosstown rival ZTE Corp have been expanding their footprint in the global telecom equipment and mobile phone sectors over the past few years…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Editorial Staff.

Huawei Technologies Co. said it doesn’t pose a U.S. security threat as China’s largest maker of telecommunications equipment defends itself against foreign governments’ concerns that it aids intelligence agencies.

The Shenzhen-based company “never sold key equipment into U.S. networks,” Deputy Chairman Guo Ping said today after the company released its annual report. Huawei became one “of the world’s top three smartphone makers” in the fourth quarter and expects the proportion of sales from networking equipment, the area that has drawn foreign scrutiny, will decline…

Grazed from WindowsITPro. Author: Michael Otay.

Back in November of 2012, I looked at some of the multiple hypervisor solutions that were available from Microsoft and VMware, as well as a few third party products. A lot has been happening in this area since then. More organizations are continuing to adopt multiple hypervisor platforms, plus there’s been continued uptake in cloud services, especially in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings like you see in Amazon’s EC2. A couple of notable new products in this space include VMware’s Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.0 for vSphere and HotLink’s Hybrid Express cloud and virtualization management product.

VMware Multi-Hypervisor Manager

VMware’s Multi-Hypervisor Manager is a part of vSphere 5.1 (and higher) Standard edition. Multi-Hypervisor Manager essentially replaces the older VMware vCenter XVP Manager and Converter. Multi-Hypervisor Manager enables the management of Windows Server 2008/2008 R2 Hyper-V from VMware’s Infrastructure Client. Notably, this first release doesn’t support the new vSphere Web Client, Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, or Citrix’s XenServer virtualization…