Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

AppNeta, which offers a cloud-based IT performance management platform, has raised $16 million in Series C funding. The company’s core goal under CEO Jim Melvin: Empowering partners and customers to monitor end-user experience, network performance and application performance.

AppNeta’s revenues have grown 150 percent in the past year — though the company has not disclosed actual figures. AppNeta’s channel program now includes 400 partners that support cloud services for end-customers. The company claims its cloud platform supports:…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Do you want to get more visibility into how your customers’ end-users are interacting with Salesforce Cloud? A new tool from Knoa Software might be able to help with that. The company launched Knoa Experience and Performance Management (EPM) for Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Services Cloud, bringing its network, hardware and infrastructure performance management product to the Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) realm.

According to Knoa, EPM provides "a clear view of how users actually interact with the Salesforce Cloud applications," which should provide some insight into how they’re using Salesforce and perhaps give IT administrators or channel partners some idea of how to fine-tune apps or tweak environments to improve performance and apps usage…

Grazed from Foreign Policy. Author: John Reed.

Web commerce giant Amazon is apparently building a cloud-computing network for the CIA. Trade publication Federal Computer Week has reported that the agency will pay the online retail pioneer up to $600 million to develop its own private cloud over the next decade.

This would make plenty of sense. Amazon is well-known for providing cloud-computing services to the private sector, and government agencies dealing with classified information are pushing to adopt cloud services as a way of consolidating thousands of network "enclaves" that are hard to defend. The Pentagon, for example, is building what it says will be a defendable, upgradable network, known as the Joint Information Environment…

Grazed from MarketResearch.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

MarketResearch.com announces publication of "Global Infrastructure: Cloud Computing Insights," a whitepaper that takes a dive deep inside the ever-changing world of the cloud computing industry. "Global Infrastructure: Cloud Computing Insights" is a unique addition to contemporary business How-To literature. In clear, engaging detail, it explores the breadth of capabilities inherent in cloud computing and how a company can integrate them into their business strategy and infrastructure.

With the increase in the number of SmartCloud solutions, the trend is moving toward pay-per-use content delivery. Companies are now in a better position for mining Big Data analytics from electronic devices. From cloud-gaming to mobile platforms, the landscape is wide open and full of growth potential. This whitepaper will provide perspective on the enormous growth potential made possible through cloud computing…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Jeremy Geelan.

Saas, IaaS, PaaS. Cloud computing is growing at a breathtaking speed and is the fastest-growing means by which technology companies offer their products today. Regardless of the industry, cloud computing is revolutionizing the way companies manage their applications and data processing, while simultaneously being one of the least understood.

However, before companies go flying in the clouds, they need to be aware of the significant legal risks and implications associated with cloud computing. The upcoming session by Dan Pepper at 12th Cloud Expo | Cloud Expo New York [June 10-13, 2013], "Managing Legal Risks in Cloud Computing", will examine how cloud computing can be adopted and the dangers avoided on a practical level…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Microsoft has released a number of enhancements to Windows Azure that will make it easier to deploy and manage Hadoop clusters and integrate more mobile apps with the cloud platform. To simplify the roll out of big data applications, Microsoft is offering a public preview of the new HDInsight service for Windows Azure, according to Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in Microsoft’s Server and Tools Business. HDInsight lets users deploy, manage and use Hadoop clusters running on Windows Azure, he saidin a blog post.

Users with a Windows Azure account can request access to the preview and once that has been granted create a cluster from within the Windows Azure Management Portal. A storage account is also required and in the current version of the preview it must reside in the East U.S. region, according to Guthrie. A new installation will take a few minutes to create and as part of the process users need to configure the necessary virtual machines that will make up their Hadoop cluster, Guthrie said…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Cloud computing is barely old enough to separate out a few pioneers who have made outstanding contributions to it. InformationWeek made its first attempt to do so Nov. 26, 2012, pulling 10 names off a long list of potential cloud leaders and explaining why they made the select group. Now we’re calling out another group of people whose contributions have frequently matched those of the first 10, but who have tended to labor a step back from the limelight or sometimes even in the shadows.

They include an open-source programmer, an industry consultant, entrepreneurs, authors, public speakers and software strategists. For the most part they are individuals, but we wanted to start off by looking at a team of pioneers: the Rackspace OpenStack team. No single individual at Rackspace is responsible for the company deciding to launch the OpenStack open source project — several individuals played important roles…

Grazed from The Guardian. Author: Emily Wight.

Here on the Small Business Network a range of experts have been keen to point out the benefits of cloud computing to small business owners. For a start, our bloggers have written about the numerous benefits of this technology, such as how it allows staff to work remotely and more flexibly. Andrew Brewerton from EVault explained how the cloud allows users to back up and synchronise their data, ensuring whoever accesses it is viewing the most up-to-date information. Elance Europe’s Kjetil Olsen highlighted the range of web tools that help make paperless collaborative working the norm.

Chris Harding from The Open Group also explained how outsourcing IT to the cloud reduces the need for specialist skills and frees managers to concentrate on the core business. An increasing number of companies and individuals are taking note of these benefits. Cloud computing is on the rise, with estimates that the industry is headed for 30% annual growth worldwide. This is why we thought it would be useful to find out more about this trend in a live Q&A session. We have asked a panel of experts to join our discussion to offer their insight and opinions on what cloud computing can offer SME owners…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

InfoWorld’s Eric Knorr made a good call last week, stating, "IBM would take the helm as the corporate steward of OpenStack, surpassing in importance even Rackspace — which along with NASA gave birth to OpenStack three years ago."

Although IBM won’t provide its own OpenStack-based product, it will offer piece-parts based on OpenStack. IBM’s sheer size and influence will make it one of the biggest drivers of OpenStack, passing up Hewlett-Packard, Rackspace, and dozens of other smaller OpenStack upstarts. Remember how IBM was a major force in mainstreaming Linux and open source a decade ago? It has the same potential with OpenStack…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Ryan Turner.

Based on information provided by Amazon, you can see they revolutionized EC2 cloud computing. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) “is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.” While Amazon may be one of the most well known companies competing in this marketplace, host to major clients like Instagram, there are other small-scale companies that offer bigger benefits. For one, smaller companies can customize their cloud computing and web hosting to each client, tailoring their services to the needs of the client.

Second, Small-scale companies offer service oriented details and telephone support around the clock to help expert web developers overcome issues, as well as assisting novice web developers to achieve completion and finish projects in a timely manner. Third, The cloud computing and web hosting services offered by Amazon are stable, but have had the tendency for down-time. This typically doesn’t happen with locally-based, service-oriented companies like Cervalis, who hasn’t experienced down-time or outages in their 12 years of servicing customers in this capacity…