Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Bob Lewis.

Imagine all technology, hardware and software, is free: routers, servers, operating systems, development environments, wide-area networks, firewalls, desktops, laptops, tablets, applications, lions, tigers, and bears — all of it. Now look at your company’s enterprise technical architecture and ask yourself what you’d do differently because of it. My bet: Not much. Sure, a fresh, dispassionate look at your enterprise technical architecture would probably lead you to regret decisions you’ve made or to make some changes now. What I’m saying is that you wouldn’t have those regrets or make those changes because you no longer have to pay for anything anymore.

That’s because looking back at how decisions were made about every component of every technology your company has deployed will show the issues that matter most: features and functionality, quality of construction, manageability, performance, scalability, the vendor’s reputation and reliability, the component’s marketplace viability, and concerns about restrictive license terms and conditions. Price? That’s something you negotiated afterward…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Jeff Vance.

When we requested suggestions for cloud startups to evaluate in order to come up with the CIO.com Top 10 list, we received more than 150 nominations. After reviewing the nominations and getting your input, we narrowed the list down to the 10 most promising.

The Top 10 mixes track record with potential. Some startups, such as Aryaka Networks and HyTrust, are more established and have long lists of customers wins. The list also includes more recent startups that are included more for their potential than their current status in the market. Several of these newer companies are helping determine just how the cloud computing market will evolve. They include dinCloud, Nebula and SaaS Markets…

Grazed from BCS. Author: Editorial Staff.

With IT interface and technology changing at breakneck speed, many business leaders are struggling to keep up with the latest developments and maintain their protection levels against cyber criminals who are now able to exploit an increasing number of avenues for attack.

It therefore comes as little surprise that digital security was listed as one of the top concerns for British business leaders in a recent study conducted by ACCA, the global body for professional accountants…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware has sold SlideRocket, fewer than two years after its acquisition, to ClearSlide, a San Francisco firm that provides a company’s sales force with a sales engagement platform.
SlideRocket’s online and interactive slide presentation service, a kind of PowerPoint on steroids, is expected to be used to augment the ClearSlide platform. The move marks the end of a brief era in which VMware spoke confidently of a future in which virtualized and online applications — some of which VMware planned to originate — displaced those of the personal computing era. Microsoft Office only grew more entrenched during the time.

Prior to offloading SlideRocket, Javier Soltero, VMware’s earliest and most outspoken spokesman for that short-lived era, had moved on to greener pastures. Soltero was CEO of the Hyperic cloud monitoring service, acquired by VMware with SpringSource, and is now entrepreneur in residence at Redpoint Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Maribel Lopez.

Cloud computing and mobile are two technology trends that are transforming how businesses operate and how consumers live. The first generation of cloud computing focused on cost optimization. Lopez Research believes the second wave of cloud computing will help businesses save money while operating more efficiently. Cloud computing will change where data and applications live and how they operate. To get a sense of the disruption and the opportunity that cloud computing provides, I interviewed John Considine, the Chief Technology Officer of Verizon’s Terremark division. Previously Considine worked for CloudSwitch that was acquired by Verizon.

Considine said cloud computing is disrupting the entire value chain from the technology to the types of buyers. “Cloud computing companies, such as CloudSwitch, started by simplifying the cloud for enterprises by focusing on cloud security, advanced computing and workload portability.” Workload portability is how an enterprise moves workloads to and from the cloud. He noted that in the early days, companies used cloud computing as a way to get services while bypassing IT…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

For enterprises, customer relationship management (CRM) is moving ahead of enterprise resource planning (ERP) as the main priority for application software investment. That was just one of the takeaways from Gartner’s latest report, “User Survey Analysis: Cloud and CRM Nexus Will Drive Enterprise Software Spending in 2013 and 2014”, published last month. Other key factors emerging from the report include the clear differences between emerging and emergent markets in terms of cloud models.

Mature regions are more likely to go public, accepting the security risks and reliability rewards of the public cloud. Emerging markets, by contrast, are more likely to use a private cloud. “This could be due in part to an immature telecommunications infrastructure in some emerging countries, while data security is a persistent concern related to public cloud services among our clients in developing-region countries,” said Hai Hong Swineheart, Gartner research analyst in a statement…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Amazon Web Services Monday reduced its prices on its lowest cost option, reserved instances, by "up to 27%." That means a reserved instance virtual server may cost 65% less than the comparable on-demand instance running on the AWS EC2 infrastructure at $0.06 per hour.

One effect of the move is to reinforce the perception that it’s much cheaper to run Linux than Windows on EC2. Amazon has been wary of Microsoft as a potent competitor with its Windows Server and Visual Studio tools in Windows Azure…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Editorial Staff.

According to analysts, your average low-end smartphone now has more than enough storage for most user. A study from IHS found that on average, customers who purchased a smartphone in 2012 only needed about 12.8GB of storage to meet their needs.

The report suggests that users are now making such heavy use of cloud-based services that local storage has become something of an afterthought. As a result, we have less data to store on our phones and the concept of regular storage increases is less of a selling point than it once was…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Walter Bailey.

The world of technology is doing wonders every now and then since many past decades –a few advancements here and a few there! So what does the year 2013 have in store for the world of technology? What are some Cloud computing changes that can be experienced in 2013? Who are the vendors that will be most sought after in 2013? And what technologies will be in vogue for the year 2013? Let’s see what some experts have to say about these significant changes and developments during the year.

Mark Eisenberg

This expert gentleman thinks that the Amazon Web Services (AWS) are off for a big win in 2013. He views Microsoft as the industry leader and talks about how it would continue its legacy in 2013. Also, he believes that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) will continue to dominate the industry. He feels the industry would do much better if companies start adopting rather than sitting on the sidelines discussing…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

AppZero, the fastest way to move enterprise server applications to the cloud, announced today that it has been named to CIO.com‘s “10 Hot Cloud Startups to Watch” compiled by Startup 50 writer Jeff Vance. The 10 companies making the list were selected from a “top 25” list that was nominated to the Startup 50 blog. Factors in moving onto the final list were: the company’s standings following a vote, viability of product, competitive advantages and management team’s pedigree.There will be a new round of voting to rank the companies on the top 10 list. Please vote for AppZero here.

According to Vance, AppZero made the list because, moving applications from traditional IT systems to the cloud isn’t easy. AppZero encapsulates an application and its dependencies in a "virtual application appliance," without a virtual machine (VM). The result is an application that is flexible, "hypervisor-agnostic, cloud independent, and fast."…