Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) has invested in Parallels, which develops cloud and SaaS automation software for hosting providers. Financial terms were not disclosed. The Cisco-Parallels relationship will also include joint development, marketing and industry initiatives. But there’s a hidden wrinkle here. It involves distributors and other companies that host cloud services for VARs and MSPs.

If everything goes as planned, data center providers will leverage Cisco’s infrastrastructure and Parallels’ cloud service delivery products in tandem. And Parallels is calling on those data center providers to focus on SMB customers, which Executive Chairman Serguei Beloussov and CEO Birger Steen (pictured) consider to be an underserved market…

Grazed from AllThingsD. Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Word has just leaked out of Hewlett-Packard that Zorawar “Biri” Singh, senior vice president and general manager for Cloud Services, is leaving the company. Roger Levy, the group’s vice president for technology and customer relations, will replace him on an interim basis. I haven’t been able to find out if Singh is leaving for another job or if he’s just leaving.

The departure was confirmed by an HP spokesman moments ago, sending the following statement: “HP remains committed to our Converged Cloud portfolio. In particular, HP Cloud Services is critical to HP’s efforts to deliver superior public cloud infrastructure, services and solutions to our customers. Roger Levy, vice president, Technology and Customer Operations of HP Cloud Services, will serve as the interim leader for HP Cloud Services. The company thanks Zorawar ‘Biri’ Singh for his passion and commitment to drive our public cloud vision and wish him well.”…

Grazed from IDG News. Author: Brandon Butler.

Oracle’s latest advancement of its cloud computing strategy is being called out as a "faux cloud" by a consultant and author, and as the latest example of cloud-washing, or the practice of vendors misusing the ubiquitous technology term. This week Oracle announced the availability of a service it previewed last year at Oracle OpenWorld that allows customers to rent Oracle hardware equipment and store it on their own sites for a monthly fee. David Linthicum, CTO and co-founder of cloud and SOA consultancy Blue Mountain Labs, says that’s not cloud computing.

"Oracle labels (it) ‘infrastructure as a service’ but it is not actually a cloud IaaS offering — it’s the usual Oracle data center gear," Linthicum wrote in his blog at Network World sister-site InfoWorld. "Just as Oracle IaaS is not a true cloud offering, neither is Oracle’s new ‘Iaas On Demand’ selection of rental application servers."…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

AMD Monday charged four former managers from its Boxborough, Massachusetts facility including its erstwhile VP of strategic development Robert Feldstein with looting its files and taking more than 100,000 confidential documents with them to new jobs at graphics rival Nvidia last year. The suit, which does not name Nvidia, was filed in district court in Boston.

AMD said the contraband includes licenses with two enterprise customers, a document outlining proposed licensing strategies and plans for new technologies. It complained that if either of the first two fell into Nvidia’s hands Nvidia would have an "unfair advantage."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Microsoft upgraded its System Center suite Tuesday to make it a hybrid cloud manager and a more complete manager of the capabilities included in Windows Server 2012, launched last September.

As System Center 2012 and Windows Server 2012 mesh more tightly together, Microsoft has achieved what it refers to as its "Cloud Operating System," in the words of Michael Park, corporate VP for server and tools business marketing, in an interview. The term means mainly that System Center can now scale across many Windows Server 2012 servers, and link up operations that may be scattered across more than one data center. System Center 2012 was augmented Tuesday with Service Pack 1. It’s been extended so that a single instance of System Center’s Virtual Machine Manager module can handle up to 8,000 virtual machines on a cluster with 64 hosts. Add another Virtual Machine Manager instance and manage another 8,000 VMs…

Grazed from ComputerWorld UK. Author: Glyn Moody.

There are so many parts to the institutions running the European Union that it’s easy to lose sight of them all and their varied activities. For example, one of the lesser-known European Parliament bodies is the Directorate-General for Internal Policies. You might expect the studies that it commissions to be deadly dull, but some turn out to be not just highly interesting but hugely important.

One such is the new report "Fighting cyber crime and protecting privacy in the cloud" [.pdf]. Here’s the basic background:

While cloud computing is not a new technology per se and has been developed and marketed primarily for profit-driven purposes, the growing reliance on its infrastructures and services poses a series of challenges for EU strategies and policies. This study addresses these challenges, examining the current EU framework in the field and highlighting the legal aspects in relation to the right to data protection, the issue of jurisdiction, responsibility and the regulation of data transfers to third countries…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

For OpenStack to succeed, the open source cloud platform will need a big ecosystem of trained experts and channel partners. Enter Rackspace (NYSE: RAX) and MIT, which this week are training 20 students as part of a 12-hour introduction to OpenStack. Although that’s a small group, it’s the latest wakeup call for channel partners that are trying to get their arms around public and private cloud business opportunities.

During a recent Tech Data TDCloud conference near Tampa, Fla., very few VARs and MSPs were familiar with OpenStack and its channel implications. At that conference, Hewlett-Packard officials described how HP’s public cloud is built on the open source platform. And over time, it will become easier and easier to move workloads between corporate networks and the HP Cloud, the company asserted…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The importance of cloud computing in the overall tech sphere has again been emphasised in a Gartner report surveying over 2,000 CIOs on their technology priorities for 2013. Cloudy areas featured heavily in the top 10 priorities for CIOs, with cloud computing itself – alongside software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) ranked at number three.

Elsewhere, legacy modernisation – a big element of companies moving into cloud-hosted solutions – was ranked at five, with customer resource management (seven), virtualisation (eight) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) apps (10) also make the top 10. Yet the two priorities ahead of cloud computing in the pecking order, analytics and BI (business intelligence) and mobile technologies, make for interesting reading as of course the areas are all inextricably linked…

Grazed from The Washington Business Journal. Author: Heinan Landa.

Are you thinking about the cloud for your IT? How about just for your e-mails or files? Are you considering putting your entire network in the cloud? The demand for cloud computing is growing at an unprecedented rate. Gartner predicts the cloud market will be over the $148 Billion mark by 2014. Its economies of scale and ability to deliver large enterprise applications to medium and small businesses continue to generate new consumers across industries. However, cloud vendors often aren’t sharing the full story with prospects. Below are the top four myths of cloud computing.

Myth No. 1: “By putting all of my data and applications in the cloud, I no longer need to worry about IT.”…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud Awards, an international cloud computing awards program that recognizes industry leaders and pioneers, has just named Dermot Doherty as "Developer of the Year" for his creation of a cloud-based operating system called iSpaces.

“Compiling the shortlist was difficult. But trying to pick individual winners in any category was almost impossible,” said Cloud Awards organizer Larry Johnson. “We are extremely pleased to endorse iSpaces as a cloud services provider which solves real-world problems for its clients, knocking down the barriers inherent in older business models and showing them to be outmoded – truly leveraging cloud technologies to be the best of the best.”…