Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Loek Essers.

Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange plans to launch an open-source, browser-based productivity suite called OX Documents. The first application for the suite is OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool with editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx files and OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice .odt files, the Nuremberg, Germany, company announced on Wednesday.

OX Text doesn’t mess up the formatting of documents loaded into the application, said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. XML-based documents can be read, edited and saved back to their original format at a level of quality and fidelity previously unavailable with browser-based text editors, according to the company…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

Kirill Tatarinov’s keynote this morning at Microsoft’s Convergence 2013 marks a subtle, yet very significant shift in how this technology leader is marketing itself to partners and the outside world. They are humanizing their marketing, messaging and products.

Gone is the Spock-like precision of presentations packed with roadmaps, mind-numbing metrics and intricate feature analysis. The Nick Brophy Band made the keynote complete by delivering excellent sets. Microsoft is learning that telling a good story trumps terabytes of metrics…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

IBM’s endorsement of OpenStack is both insignificant and more significant than it might have seemed on its March 4 announcement. IBM was already behind OpenStack. It joined the project in March 2012, taking a $500,000 seat on the board of directors in November. So wasn’t too surprising when IBM ‘fessed up earlier this month and said, "Hey, we like OpenStack."

But as Jim Curry, the early organizer of the OpenStack project at Rackspace, said, IBM’s endorsement "is exactly what we wanted to happen — build an open cloud platform for the world." As a matter of fact, he says, "I would have liked it if IBM had gotten on the list sooner rather than later." But IBM, like many companies, was concerned about the future of a cloud project that was under the initial control of one company, San Antonio-based managed hosting and public infrastructure provider Rackspace. Rackspace hadn’t sought to end up as sole proprietor, but its founding partner, NASA, fell away from the initial July 2010 launch during the recession…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Bernard Golden.

As VMware gears up to compete in an increasingly cloud-led IT world, the company wants its customers standardizing on VMware hosting technologies. In the data center virtualization battle, the company was very successful in homogenizing a customer’s software setup. Cloud computing, however, is a very different beast. VMware users are very unlikely to standardize on a VMware-only software stack to host clouds, due to other viable cloud orchestrator providers and the lure of public cloud computing.

Tools from several established cloud orchestration software providers can ride atop VMware’s hypervisor. For VMware cloud computing to attract users away from these companies, it must offer functionally superior and economically competitive products…

Grazed from CMSWire.  Author: Marisa Peacock.

We may as well admit it, cloud computing has been changing our lives for some time now. When was the last time you didn’t save something to iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive or Box? Most, if not all of your information lives somewhere in the ether. Hard drives may come and go, but thanks to the cloud, your life can go on, practically unscathed.

However, if you’re thinking that the cloud is a relatively new phenomenon, think again. Recently, Symantec released an interactive timeline that illustrates the history of cloud computing — highlighting just how far we’ve come…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Roger A. Grimes.

Whether or not you liked former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, you had to chuckle over his famous "unknown unknowns" quote: There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. Although Rumsfeld was ridiculed for that statement, it was a case of a politician accidentally telling the truth, and I think anyone in computer security quickly understood what he was talking about.

We are constantly faced with all three types of risks: known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. One of the biggest impediments to public cloud computing adoption is the calculation of additional risk from all the unknowns, known and otherwise. I’ve spent the last few years contemplating these issues as both a public cloud provider and user. Here’s a list of five risks any business faces as a customer of a public cloud service…

Grazed from Scoop.nz. Author: PR Announcement.

The recent releases of the Privacy Commissioner’s cloud computing guide and the New Zealand cloud code are welcome additions to assist businesses to navigate their way through a landscape many are still unfamiliar with. Cloud computing is a burgeoning industry and where in only the recent past this technology might have been viewed as niche or risky, it is now forming an integral part of daily business operations.

Just last month, a recent Gartner survey of 2000 CIOs globally ranked cloud computing as third on their top 10 technology priorities (http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2304615). Bruce Aylward, CEO of leading edge Cloud software provider Psoda, says the reasons for the explosion in Cloud computing businesses and software worldwide come back to the basic issues of transparency, efficiency and cost…

Based on its recent analysis of the cloud monitoring solutions market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes CopperEgg Corporation with the 2013 North America Frost & Sullivan Award for New Product Innovation. Unlike competing solutions that mainly focus on monitoring a particular domain, CopperEgg’s advanced comprehensive monitoring solution is unified across servers, applications and websites on a single SaaS platform, creating a huge draw among consumers. CopperEgg’s monitoring solution’s three main modules, server monitoring, website monitoring, and application metric monitoring, can be used in combination for a complete monitoring solution as well as in isolation for specific services.

CopperEgg server monitoring and website application monitoring track performance from inside the server and outside from the end user’s perspective. CopperEgg also monitors custom metrics from Web servers, databases, and the client’s own application performance metrics and displays the data in custom dashboards using a broad array of widgets delivered with the monitoring solution.

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

AVG CloudCare, an antivirus and security management console for SMBs, continues to expand its portfolio of services for VARs and MSPs. The latest offering features a commercial edition of AVG Remote IT and AVG Email Security Services. AVG CloudCare is the free cloud-based administration platform with "pay-as-you-go" services for channel partners and their end customers. More than 1,000 partners use the platform, which launched in October 2012.

In some ways, the AVG strategy resembles that of GFI Software, which develops the GFI Max cloud portfolio for MSPs. Admittedly, the market for cloud-based security services is saturated with rival offerings. But AVG has been busy extending and expanding its own suite of cloud services for partners. The AVG suite now supports:…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lyndsey Nelson.

It’s not just about cutting costs, cloud computing can also help your employee’s productivity and collaboration levels, even if they’re in pajamas. Now I know we all heard about Marissa Mayer’s recent ban on Yahoo employees working from home, but she had the data to support her choice. Please don’t take my comment as accordance with her decision, I firmly believe providing employees the opportunity to work at home is an essential policy companies should have.

However, if you’re concerned about eventually experiencing Yahoo’s low productivity levels, don’t fret too much. If you invest in cloud computing platform for your business and equip your employees with the right applications, you will never encounter the mess Mayer had to clean up. So What Is Cloud Computing Collaboration? Before I launch into the benefits, some of the ways you can use cloud computing for collaboration identified by BizAnytime.com are:…