Grazed from Heirloom Computing. Author: PR Announcement.

Heirloom Computing Inc. today announced a new partnership with Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider CloudBees to speed the transition of mainframe workloads to the CloudBees PaaS. With the partnership, Heirloom will help IT managers lower costs and modernize their COBOL-based mainframe workloads by deploying them to the cloud, utilizing Heirloom Elastic COBOL and the CloudBees Platform. Deploying Heirloom’s Elastic COBOL on CloudBees is simple – watch this short video for a demo: http://youtu.be/4QmKvt0L9zo

Heirloom Computing is on a mission to efficiently modernize the world’s business-critical enterprise software applications. Heirloom seamlessly migrates legacy systems to private and public cloud computing infrastructures, enabling IT departments to reap the cost benefits of cloud computing and satisfy user demands for applications accessible via web browsers and mobile devices…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

CIOs considering moving mission-critical applications to the cloud must fully understand the inherent differences between cloud services created for consumer use and those designed to serve the more demanding needs of enterprise businesses. Well-publicized outages point out the need for enterprise-ready cloud services designed from the ground up with the enterprise in mind.

These disruptions draw attention to the need for enterprise IT pros to make important decisions about where to locate cloud-based mission-critical infrastructure based on a thorough understanding of the associated selection criteria. To help, Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (http://www.us.logicalis.com), has created a list of five important best practices IT pros should employ when choosing a cloud provider to serve their enterprise business needs…

Grazed from Public Service Europe. Author: Carsten Bruhn.

New research reveals a worrying picture of a European public sector equipped with the latest technologies but unable to effectively use them, writes IT expert. The European public sector has a great opportunity right now. Against the backdrop of the eurozone crisis and pressure to reduce operational budgets, cloud computing could well be the solution to the monumental challenge of delivering more with less. In fact, the public sector has already embraced the cloud to some extent, with recent research showing 47 per cent of employees in the public sector are using the cloud to share critical documents – more than any other sector surveyed – and 71 per cent are using it to enable mobile access to documents.

Its adoption could be down to an increased expectation by citizens to access information online and a commitment from governments across Europe to adopt more e-government services. As well as playing a central role in the migration of paper to digital documents, through the cloud information can flow more freely with workers able to gain mobile access to critical information on the move. This means staff can continue working from anywhere, without being hindered by traditional information technology constraints…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Intacct, a leader in cloud financial management and accounting software, today announced record results for calendar year 2012. Over the past twelve months, Intacct increased new customer bookings by more than 47 percent over 2011. In the company’s second fiscal quarter, ended December 31, Intacct rode strong momentum from companies outgrowing QuickBooks and those looking to switch from outdated midmarket on-premises software to secure a record number of new customer additions. All of this points to increasing momentum in the cloud financials market as gains in other business application areas, such as customer relationship management and human resources, are now reaching core financials.

To meet increasing demand, Intacct continues to attract a growing number of CPA firms and the top Microsoft and Sage partners to its channel program, adding several key new partners in 2012. The Intacct Business Partner Program added three new Accounting Today Top 100 resellers during the year: SVA Consulting (#48), e2b teknologies (#74), and InterDyn CFO Consulting (#97 and now part of InterDyn BMI) – bringing the program’s overall count to 21 of the Top 100 firms. Meanwhile, Intacct’s partnerships with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and CPA2Biz, the technology subsidiary of the AICPA, have helped to strengthen the Intacct Accountants Program. In 2012, the program added more than 75 new firms and now boasts 22 of the Top 100 accounting firms…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

IBM has established a global network of eight data centers to supply infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and is now offering SmartCloud Enterprise+ for running production workloads, including SAP applications. Unlike Amazon.com or Rackspace IaaS, IBM customers will find System Z mainframes and System P servers running AIX in the IBM cloud. That makes SmartCloud more compatible with the workloads of IBM customers. Most services are based strictly on standard Intel or AMD x86 servers, and it remains difficult to migrate Z series or P series workloads to x86 servers.

IBM’s IaaS data centers are located in Boulder, Colo.; Raleigh, N. C., Montpellier, France; Ehningen, Germany; Sydney, Australia; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Tokyo; and Toronto. It will add a ninth at mid- year in Barcelona, Spain. The company has previously offered IaaS in the U.S. and Europe. Offering greater geographic coverage often helps companies find a site in which to store their data. France, Germany and Canada all have regulations on what data may leave the country and what may not…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

There has been no shortage of assumptions made and confusion about cloud computing, along with boatloads of conventional wisdom. But the rise of cloud brings with it some so far unanswerable questions. Here are just seven of the great unsolved mysteries that are accompanying the great cloud computing migration of the 2010s:

1) Who really pays for cloud? This is a tangle in and of itself. In surveys I have seen and conducted, it’s all over the place. IT departments pay for a lot of it, and a lot of it is put on corporate credit cards. As a result, the costs get hidden or buried within corporate budgets. Another issue — when the holder of the corporate credit card tied to a cloud account leaves the company, guess what? The subscription is jeopardized…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Cloud service provider Interoute has announced the launch of CloudStore, an enterprise app store which doubles up as a compute and storage facility, hosting OS and databases, as well as business apps. Interoute, known for its virtual data centre and owning Europe’s largest cloud platform, is further focusing its efforts on the enterprise – understandable, given that’s where most of its client base lies – but featuring a much more rounded product than just hosting apps.

Counting Microsoft, RedHat and Ubuntu among its cast list, the Interoute CloudStore integrates several assets, with its integrated network, compute storage platform underneath a layer of appliances, from which secure platforms can be built. The store also comes with an online knowledge centre, designed to help enterprises choose a bespoke model to suit their business needs…

Grazed from CNN Fortune. Author: Shelley DuBois.

Remember the Titan? No, not the comeback football team. The supercomputer that generated headlines last November for ranking as the world’s fastest. Titan can crunch so many calculations, it has the equivalent processing power of 500,000 laptops.

All that computing might is for naught without software capable of managing it. Software is a major—if often unsung—factor in the future of high-power computing. It will matter increasingly to businesses of all kinds as more and more products and services move into the cloud. "The line between high performance computing and cloud is blurring," says Rob Clyde, CEO of Adaptive Computing, a company that builds software to increase efficiency in supercomputers and cloud-based servers. Today, Adaptive revealed it developed the software that boosted Titan’s efficiency from 70% to about 95%. The software used to make Titan tick is similar, Clyde says, to software that optimizes the cloud…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware will soon eliminate 900 jobs among the 13,800 employees with which it ended 2012. But the layoffs will not amount to a reduction in force; it will also add a total of 1,000 more employees this year, as it brings its workforce in closer alignment with its key business objectives.

VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, COO Carl Eschenbach and CFO Jonathan Chadwick didn’t specify where the layoffs would occur, other than to single out VMware’s SlideRocket division, an application unit whose software allows Web-based presentations to be updated in real time. Dazzling in its potential, it nevertheless left some VMware watchers scratching their heads as to how it would be used as part of a virtualization specialist’s repertoire. VMware has made six acquisitions over the past three years — iTHC, Wanova, Pattern Insights, Cetas, DynamicOps and Nicira — and added 6,700 employees…

Grazed from TechWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Amazon Web Services has launched a beta of a new Web service that can execute in the cloud the heavy data-crunching job of transcoding video. The Amazon Elastic Transcoder converts high-fidelity video files into smaller-size formats more suitable for viewing on the Web and mobile phones. The process of transcribing video can be an ornery task, AWS explained in an introductory Web page to the service. Transcoding software can be cumbersome to deploy and configure, and it is difficult to scale.

Users also have to provision servers to transcode the video. Transcoding can be computationally intensive. The process usually involves copying the video into an uncompressed raw format and then copying it again into the new format…