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…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

As cloud computing sweeps through organizations, executives’ confidence that they can effectively deploy it and measure its results is waning. That’s the finding of a new survey conducted by The Open Group, an industry consortium. In 2011, the association reports, 55 percent of those surveyed felt that cloud return on investment (ROI) would be easy to evaluate and justify, although only 35 percent had mechanisms in place to do it. In the latest survey conducted at the end of 2012, the proportion that thought it would be easy had gone down to 44 percent, and only 20 percent had mechanisms in place.

Perhaps it’s a result of cloud becoming so tightly interwoven with the business that the potential results may be more far-reaching than a single process or two. Or, perhaps, cloud adoption and usage is expanding deeper into business operations at a faster pace than can be measured. In fact, the survey also finds that the types of metrics being employed are expanding beyond simple cost reductions. While cost continues to be the primary cloud ROI metric, there has been a surge in adoption of quality of delivered results and speed of operation, and utilization of resources as metrics as well…

Grazed from USAToday. Author: Mark Ververka.

Cloud computing is exploding and growing faster than a swirling funnel crossing the Oklahoma plains. The next generation of computing lowers information technology costs while increasing corporate profits at the same time. And what’s not to like about that? That one-two punch was revealed in a study obtained by USA TODAY conducted by England’s Manchester Business School. The study, which was commissioned by San Antonio-based hosting company Rackspace, is expected to be released Wednesday.

The Manchester study indicates that cloud computing allows U.S. businesses to slash their information technology costs by about 26%. What’s more, 62% of those same American companies say that deploying in the cloud improved their bottom lines. "The results are finally showing what we’ve known all along," says Rackspace Chief Technology Officer John Engates. "It’s not just about moving workloads from your data center to our data center."…

Attunity Ltd., a leading provider of information availability software solutions, announced today the imminent release of an optimized data loading solution for Amazon Redshift, AWS’s new data warehouse in the cloud. Attunity’s offering is being designed to provide a high-speed, scalable and fully-managed solution designed to move data from enterprise databases into Amazon Redshift quickly, easily and affordably. The new Attunity solution is expected to be available for customer preview in March 2013. Amazon Redshift customers can find more information and pre-register here.

Data warehousing has long been a critical enabler for business intelligence and growth, used by many enterprises to enable Big Data analytics. Amazon Redshift brings to market an innovative approach to data warehousing, leveraging cloud computing to enable significant reductions in the total costs of owning and operating a data warehouse. While organizations look to capitalize on these potential gains in agility and cost, they face the challenge of moving large amounts of information from their on-premises data centers into Amazon Redshift in the cloud. Attunity’s solution will be designed to simplify this process, leveraging high-performance database replication, ease of use, and high-speed data transfer technologies.

Grazed from MSN Money. Author: Jim J. Jubak.

I think Akamai’s (AKAM +1.64%) almost 18% plunge on Feb. 7 after what Wall Street decided was a disappointing fourth-quarter earnings report has taken some of the risk out of this stock. You may have to be patient, since the company is entering one of those capital-intensive periods that can cut margins, but for investors willing to hold past a quarter or two (or for investors who can time their entry point with more exactitude that I usually can), Akamai is one of the best ways to play the growth of cloud computing and what looks like a coming explosion in video on demand as Netflix (NFLX +1.13%), Amazon.com (AMZN -1.54%) and Google (GOOG +0.64%) gear up to go head-to-head-to-head? in that space.

On Feb. 6, Akamai announced fourth-quarter earnings of 54 cents a share, 5 cents a share above the Wall Street consensus, and revenue of $378 million. That represented revenue growth of 17% but fell slightly below the Wall Street consensus of $381 million for the quarter. Gross margins of 82% and operating margins of 33.2% were both ahead of the consensus of 81.1% and 32.3%, respectively…

Grazed from SiliconIndia. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing has a very rich and elegant history. Filled with intellectuals and pioneers, the cloud paradigm is simply an amazing piece of archetype. But it’s quite hard to pick out each and every cloud innovators since the list is neither exhaustive nor all inclusive. And we are sure the list will get bigger from time to time because there are quite new innovators out there whose names we’re just beginning to hear and whose accomplishments will be well-known in the coming years.

The interesting part of cloud computing is that it’s just a decade old, but the growth rate simply has been astonishing when compared to slow nurturers like personal computing and client-server technology. And then there are these pioneers. These guys grounded the seeds of cloud computing, watered them, waited for the exact time for the fruit to get ripe and then later on reaped the well-deserved benefits. From leaders like Amazon Web Services to Google’s Compute Engine and the recent Microsoft’s Azure, cloud computing has it all. So hold on to your seats, as its time that we delve into our list encompassing top 10 pioneers who are the forgers behind the incredible technology called Cloud Computing…

Grazed from TheAge. Author: Trevor Clark.

Data sovereignty and privacy concerns resulting from the extension of US-government mass-surveillance powers raised in an EU report publicised last week should not dissuade Australian businesses from actively considering and adopting cloud computing services, legal experts say. The reach of the US Patriot Act – which essentially compels US companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world – has been a major point of contention in debates over risk and the use of cloud computing services for some time.

So much so that vendors such as Rackspace and Google have publicly said they would fight any requests to hand over data – which is welcomed by those with data sovereignty concerns but of little practical effect in countering the risk posed by the law – and led others to invest heavily in data centre facilities or siting IT infrastructure in Australia…