Grazed from The Huffington Post. Author: Marcel Hildalgo.

The fundamental question that pushed Alan Turing, the pioneer of computer science, was can machines do what we can do? Turing was said to have come up with everything that computers do today. His concerns were not whether machines could think but if they had the intellectual capacities equal to a human mind. If he were here now how would he assess the advances in the development of computer technology, especially cloud computing? Would Turing think that machine intelligence has come pretty close to human intelligence? The idea is certainly entertaining. And people like Amy Poehler, in a recent Best Buy commercial, had us all laughing when she spiritedly asked the questions: "Where is the cloud?" and "Are we in the cloud now?" The average person cannot ignore that computers have become smarter in ways that continue to amaze us.

A different question is: are computers becoming independent of the user? In other words, will the virtual machine at some point in time completely control the user or even exempt the user? Perhaps a consoling thought articulated by Turing came when he said that an equation, which cannot be solved by a machine, proves the value for human thinking. But the need for smarter computing has opened a gateway to technology that can sometimes feel like the line between human thinking and machine thinking is remarkably thin…

CopperEgg, Corp., a leading cloud monitoring and analytics company, today announced new, breakthrough visibility and analytics to help customers for the first time see both deep and wide inside and across their hybrid infrastructure – including enterprises and public, hybrid, or private cloud environments. CopperEgg SaaS-based cloud monitoring now offers expanded cloud analytics and forensics that include Dynamic Cloud Heatmaps, Custom Power Dashboards, and Native Mobile Access across iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.

“Hybrid visibility and unified monitoring are critical to our day-to-day operations,” said Tim Meade, President and CEO of Millicorp. “CopperEgg allows us to ensure the quality and availability of our services and see across all of our hosted data centers and Amazon AWS systems in a single view. The custom dashboards and real-time heatmap help us track the health of our entire business at a single glance and have been essential in delivering the highest quality of service to our customers.”

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Cosentry, the region’s leading provider of secure cloud computing and data center services, has announced an industry first with the release of their new Ion Cloud Services. This industry breakaway technology allows clients to automatically provision enterprise class, secure virtual private data centers with Cosentry’s Vblock supported infrastructure.

“There are a number of industry offers that might appear similar at first glance” Said Dustin Trager, Director of Cloud Services for Cosentry. “But behind the flashy provisioning software, they don’t actually have a solid infrastructure or a true automatic zero-touch configuration. With Ion Cloud Services you get both, in addition to an orchestration layer that makes provisioning your Virtual Private Data Center take minutes, not hours. We know that this service is going to make waves in the industry, but it’s what our clients have been requesting.”…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Rackspace(R) Hosting RAX -2.51% is cementing its position as the open cloud company by working with Digital Realty Trust to bring a bigger UK datacentre facility online to serve an expanding European customer base. "We have hired an additional 300 UK ‘Rackers’ in 2012 and increased our total server count by more than 10,000 over that same past year period," said Taylor Rhodes, Managing Director, International at Rackspace. "Our customers are aligning their IT functions to take advantage of the open cloud and I am resolutely pleased to be able to move forward with an expanded datacentre. The age of the open cloud has arrived and our market success and subsequent expansion is testimony to that fact."

This energy-efficient datacentre expansion facilitates Rackspace Hosting’s leadership position as an open cloud company, delivering open technologies worldwide. January 2013 saw an agreement signed to build up to 10-megawatts of UK datacenter space with a strategic construction plan designed to bring a total of five "data halls" online in stages…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Emma Johnson.

The recent years where computers were on hype made way for faster and more productive operations; further when they became a household and a business necessity. They were a different kind of a giant leap for mankind indeed. Daily activities such as checking on your children to reviewing your business’ monthly sales were made convenient with the onset of software that are centralized on easing our most demanding tasks.

However, before you can marvel at their convenience, you first have to accomplish the overwhelming mission of handling the technical aspects of these devices that only experts can really manage. Realizing this hardship that users experience, innovations were pushed through, and the fruit was a breakthrough called Cloud computing…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

In enterprise computing, vendor lock-in is too often a fait accompli. Vendor lock-in happens when, for example, a particular company — such as IBM, Microsoft or Cisco Systems — becomes the dominant vendor behind a particular technology and develops products that capture the advance with proprietary elements. That prevents its customers from leaving and ensures that only proprietary vendors can continue to capitalize on the technology.

With IBM it was the mainframe. Microsoft for many years dominated end-user computing with its Windows operating system, and Cisco has become the dominant enterprise networking vendor in the Ethernet era. With the advent of cloud computing, however, customers can avoid lock-in by taking back some of that decision-making power. The cloud is a highly standardized environment, with new standards being added all the time — such as the DMTF’s Open Virtualization Format 2.0 (OVF) — allowing translation between the proprietary virtual machine formats…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: James Staten.

We all know the conventional wisdom about cloud computing: it’s cheap, fast and easy. But is it really that much cheaper? Or is it simply optics that make it appear cheaper? Optics can absolutely change your perception of the cost of something. Just think about your morning jolt of coffee. $3.50 for a no-foam, half-caf, sugar-free vanilla latte doesn’t seem that expensive. It’s a small daily expense when viewed by the drink. It appears even cheaper if you pay for it with a loyalty card where you don’t even have to fork over the dough and the vanilla shot is free. But what if you bought coffee like IT buys technology? You would pay for it on an annual basis.

That $3.50 latte would now be about $900/year. For coffee? How many of you would go for that deal? That’s optics and it plays right into the marketing hands of the public cloud services your business is consuming today. But optics aside, is that $99/month per user SaaS application just another $20,000 per year enterprise application? Is that $0.25 per hour virtual machine just another $85 per year hosted VM? No, it’s not the same. Because the pricing models are not just optics but an indication of the buying pattern that is possible. If you buy it the same way you do traditional IT, then yes, the math says, there’s little difference here…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

As public cloud computing gains greater adoption across enterprises, there’s an increased level of spending occurring on infrastructure-related services including Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS). Enterprises are prioritizing how to get cloud platforms integrated with legacy systems to make use of the years of data they have accumulated. From legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, integrating legacy systems of record to cloud-based platforms will accelerate through 2016.

I’ve seen this in conversations with resellers and enterprise customers, and this trend is also reflected in Gartner’s latest report on public cloud computing adoption, Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 4Q12 Update Published: 8 February 2013. Below are the key take-aways from the report:…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Omni Erel.

There are numerous startups of all varieties of purpose and goals. We have seen great successes and great failures. We have seen a lot of money being made on fabulous exits, but also seen a lot of money lost as well. Things are changing for startups, and in turn, they are changing for investors as well. What affects how startups must work affects how investors must forecast chances of success, and which ponies they want to back.

Of course, with progress, change is inevitable and ubiquitous, but the past couple of years have seen the steepest change in this industry’s history. What is this culprit? Cloud computing. To appreciate the change, and what aspects it is wrought upon, let’s first talk for a minute about the classic challenges faced by startups…