Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

InfoWorld’s own Paul Krill has the skinny around a recent Evans Data survey that found developers are split on the benefits of building in the cloud. This is an important data point: One of the true "killer" use cases for cloud computing is app dev and test. The payback from using public cloud-based assets to build, test, and deploy applications is already compelling, but it will become immense in the near future.

The results of the Evans Data Cloud Development Survey, conducted in December and released this month, found that cloud platforms reduce overall development time by an average of 11.6 percent. This is largely due to the cloud platform’s ability to streamline the development process, including the ability to quickly get the development assets online. Moreover, cloud platforms provide the ability to collaborate on development efforts, which is also a benefit…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Virtustream, the leading provider of enterprise class cloud software and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), has partnered with Etihad Etisalat (Mobily), the leading telecommunications company in Saudi Arabia, to provide enterprise cloud services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The public and hybrid cloud services will be jointly provided by Mobily and Virtustream and will offer world-class cloud services to enterprises and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). Mobily has selected Virtustream’s xStream cloud management software to run its public and hybrid clouds.

KSA businesses are now able to move mission-critical applications, both legacy and webscale, to the Mobily/Virtustream cloud, including applications like SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and hundreds of existing applications, without needing to rewrite the software to gain the cloud benefits of dynamic, multi-tenant efficiency, massively scalable and on demand IT…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

Organizations of all sizes benefit when they can run their computing and application development in the cloud. From CRM to ERP applications, your enterprise may be like many others that have struggled with the expenses of implementing and managing applications and computing infrastructure. The expansion of cloud computing in the enterprise market has yielded yet another service offering to address this issue. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) supports a faster way of creating applications with less financial overhead.

The Benefits of PaaS

The management of storage systems, servers, and the multitude of network components in a complete internal infrastructure model is extremely costly. Financing the acquisition, staffing, and energy demands of such a system drains enterprise funds, manpower, and other resources. With PaaS, the majority of the infrastructure is managed by the service provider which is often in the form of a consolidated database…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: Anthony Myers.

IDC consulting has produced a cloud-based worker study for Microsoft, and the focus is on how new skill sets are still not prevalent enough in the workforce. More cloud-ready, if you will, workers are needed to fill many positions as businesses continue to shift to the cloud.

Job Growth

A similar study was conducted last year by IDC, also for Microsoft, on how many jobs the cloud will help produce. The numbers are impressive, but now that we know there is a huge demand for cloud-based workers, it seems those fully trained people are in short supply…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

A new survey from Brocade has revealed the extent of the changing CIO role in enterprise – and put cloud adoption as a major driver of it. The research, which asked 100 CIOs from the EMEA sector (Europe, Middle East, Africa) found the following top-line takeaways:

• 50% of the CIOs polled expect that cloud adoption will result in their jobs involving less time fretting over the company IT infrastructure
• One third of CIOs confirmed that cloud services had been deployed by their business without involving the IT department
• Two in three envisage that by 2020, this trend will continue with business units procuring cloud services much more frequently
• There were other interesting results, with 75% of respondents unsure whether their company’s SLAs (service level agreements) will meet minimum requirements, which may come as a surprise.

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has completed the acquisition of ManageIQ it announced back in December, intended to add to Red Hat’s growing portfolio of open hybrid cloud products. In particular, Red Hat seemed mostly interested in ManageIQ’s Hybrid Cloud Operations Management Tools.

The open source company announced the acquisition closed in late December—a fairly quick turnaround from definitive agreement to completed acquisition. Now Red Hat can get busy bringing ManageIQ and its people into the fold and preparing to integrate its enterprise cloud management and automation technologies into Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey Nelson.

Cloud computing is a catalyst for faster development, delivery of information, and pretty soon it will become a standard rather than a breakthrough technology. I’ve written frequently on how cloud is a disruptive technology, but now let’s talk about how it’s altering your business.

Now I know what you’re thinking, this doesn’t or won’t ever affect me. In reality, cloud computing isn’t just changing the role of developers; it is changing the role of your marketers, your sales force. And in the coming years, even the roles that having seemingly nothing to do with cloud will be affected. There are of course the skeptics, but here are a few ways it’ll transform the business…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Two years ago, VMware made a small, tentative investment in OpenStack collaborator Puppet Labs, as one of six investors providing the firm with $8.5 million. Wednesday, VMware extended its support with another $30 million investment in Puppet, and there is a string attached.

VMware will appoint one of its executives to the Puppet Labs board, as happens frequently in cases of major venture capital investments. VMware was not prepared Wednesday to name who will fill the seat. But the increased funding from the virtualization market leader clearly shows it has a more direct interest in the open source code firm’s work this time around; it’s seeking a closer alignment of their respective product lines, not to mention a rapprochement with the open source community…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Matthew Ramsey.

Unless your enterprise is just becoming aware of cloud computing, you have probably heard much about Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) vendors. The IaaS model is an evolving one. As the applications and benefits of implementing one continue to mount, the number of vendors providing cloud services on this scale continues to grow.

The benefits of shifting to an IaaS model are as follows:

• IT can focus more on contributing to the corporate brand and the innovations that go along with producing successful product lines.
• Computing infrastructure, software applications, and supporting elements such as heating and cooling systems are not needed in-house, at least on the same scale as before. This contributes to a reduction of expenses, energy consumed, and Total Cost of Ownership.
• Hardware, servers, and storage are managed as separate services. You can either pay for what you plan to use or pay as you go, depending on the service provider. Based on what is actually needed, the services can be scaled up and down per demand.
• Provisioned users can access enterprise infrastructure from anywhere, supporting company wide efforts to include mobile devices in the network…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

In 2013, IT buyers will be looking for increased stability and better ways to prepare for the next five years in their business cycle, according the the latest market study by Ovum. "The fact that we live in very uncertain times makes investment decision-making even more difficult. With continuing instability across the global markets and even in locations with historically robust growth – such as China and India – the outlook for IT services in 2013 is unpredictable," said Jens Butler, principal analyst, IT Services at Ovum.

Ovum believes that business leaders will be looking for greater reliability in their IT usage and – as a consequence – seeking stability, capability and accessibility among their external service providers…