Grazed from CRN. Author: Joseph Kovar.

VMware is staying focused on a simple three-part message about the software-defined data center, hybrid cloud and end-user computing, and it is encouraging its solution providers to do the same if they want to successfully navigate the tremendous changes going on in the data center. That’s the word from VMware President and COO Carl Eschenbach during his closing keynote of this year’s VMware Partner Exchange conference, held this week in Las Vegas.

Eschenbach, speaking before a packed hall of solution providers and technology partners, said that VMware two weeks ago told its own team during the company’s 2013 internal global kickoff event that VMware is embarking on the next part of the journey to transform the IT industry as it moves toward adopting cloud infrastructures…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

Using analytics to better understand the cloud computing job market is fascinating. One of the most advanced companies in this area is Wanted Analytics, who aggregates job postings from over 500 job boards and maintains a database of over 600 million unique job listings. They specialize in business intelligence for the talent marketplace, providing insights into how one company’s salary range compares to competitors for the same position, also calculating the difficulty to hire a given type of candidate.

They’ve developed a unique Hiring Scale to accomplish this. I recently had a chance to test-drive their analytics applications. Using the parameters to analyze all cloud computing jobs that pay $100,000 a year or more for the analysis, I ran several queries. Key takeaways include the following:…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Mark Eisenberg.

The Gartner Hype Cycle is a powerful tool for understanding where new technologies are with regard to their acceptance in the mainstream. And Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2012 report raises some interesting — and often confusing — points for cloud computing adoption.

There is a big difference between the description of phases of the cycle on the curve, such as "Trough of Disillusionment," and the report’s table of contents, which labels sections by describing the transition between phases. The curve shows Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) on the upslope of the trough, yet Gartner places it in a section titled "Sliding in to the Trough." This creates two very different perceptions…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Euan Harris.

I watched with interest recently an interview with NetSuite CEO, Zach Nelson on Bloomberg TV. During the interview Nelson stated his belief that retail wasn’t dead and that Apple had shown the way to all retailers with regards customer experience. Nelson also stated that in his mind, retail would be the next industry to be “disrupted by the cloud”. In this blog I will examine some of the reasons why retailers might look to the cloud for business management systems that help to grow their business.

Customer Experience

Retailers are faced with a battle on two fronts, being squeezed by the need to cut costs at the same time as customers are demanding an increasingly better experience. They expect an ‘omnichannel’ shopping experience where they can interact with a brand through any channel and receive a consistent experience across the board. They want to be able to shop anywhere, on any device and be able to receive merchandise anywhere, hence the rise of offerings such as ‘click and collect’…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

It’s become a truism to say that data is the new gold –but that doesn’t mean there are easy answers about where to store this gold. For now, many corporate customers will hold back on full cloud computing adoption until they’re convinced that they can move their data off a given cloud as easily as they put it there in the first place. Face it: fear of vendor lock-in is not limited to the on-premises IT world and it’s time enlightened vendors get this problem in hand.

The advent of cloud computing should make it easy to mix and match services from multiple vendors within a cloud and to let data flow in and out of parts of the clouds as needed. But that’s not necessarily the reality now…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Microsoft will upgrade on Wednesday its existing Office 365 cloud email and collaboration suites for businesses, as well as introduce new bundles, growing even more the list of Office 365 editions, which some analysts and users had already termed somewhat confusing.

The components of the Office 365 suites for businesses, like the Web-hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, are getting upgraded to the latest 2013 code base of the products. In addition, Microsoft is introducing three new configurations of the suite. Office 365 ProPlus, which had been previously announced, includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, InfoPath, Access and Lync. Customers can download it from Microsoft data centers and install it on up to 5 Windows PCs or Macs. It costs $144 per user, per year if bought as a standalone suite…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Steve Rosenbush.

Good morning. For many CIOs, the main decision about moving at least some of their IT infrastructure to the cloud is no longer if, but how. We’re not talking about simply moving noncore business apps like email to the cloud. We’re talking about moving computing power and storage to the cloud. It may seem like the products in this quickly growing market are all the same, but they aren’t. That’s what CIO Journal’s Tom Loftus learned when he called three vendors–Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc.–and asked them to explain what they have to offer customers in the way of infrastructure and platform services.

Loftus’s main conclusion: “Amazon and, to a lesser extent, Microsoft provide customers with certain amenities that Google’s new offering, at the moment, does not.” Don’t miss his report–including the survey that clarifies how these three companies structure agreements with customers…