Grazed from RealWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Flexiant has been awarded €950,000 from the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) for research and technological development. Flexiant is able to support technological research and development with Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator by working as part of the CELAR, PaaSaaS and MODAClouds consortiums, which includes enterprise and academic partners and research institutions.

Flexiant offers several solutions for each of the threeFP7 projects including providing the cloud platform for each project team to build and test open source tools and use case scenarios; providing each project with the necessary use case data for testing that is not manufactured; providing ‘real data’ sets from cloud provider activity; and supplying the mature and comprehensive API(s) necessary for each project…

Grazed from MondoVisione. Author: Editorial Staff.

Ovum has published three “Trends to watch reports” on Cloud computing and reveals that 2013 will see cloud computing continue to grow rapidly. 2013 Trends to Watch: Private and Public Clouds* report , drills downs into not only private and public cloud trends, but also infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) trends, meanwhile, 2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Services** report, looks at cloud computing from the point of view of IT service providers.

Finally, 2013 Trends to Watch: Cloud Computing*** report, looks at the way cloud service providers and consumers adapt to cloud computing both on their own and as part of increasingly sophisticated cloud ecosystems.

Grazed from NewEurope. Author: Karafillis Giannoulis.

On 16 January, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) announced that EU blueprint for cloud computing falls short. EESC reports that the Commission should widen its strategy and invest in the development of cloud computing software and infrastructure. According to Eric Pigla, EESC rapporteur, EU “should help businesses and public administrations to become ‘cloud active’ by offering cloud-based services and make Europe ‘cloud productive’ by providing cloud infrastructure.”

EESC believes that if EU accomplishes these objectives, then a “European digital energy production” will be established. Pigal underlines that a failure to do so will result in Europe’s growing dependence on foreign cloud computing providers. Pigal’s report stresses that “digital energy, like other energy sources such as oil or gas, is an economic and strategic challenge….[and] Under current market conditions, expanding the use of the cloud in Europe will inevitably strengthen non-European operators.”…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Within the virtualization world, VMware (NYSE: VMW) can hardly claim to be more friendly to open source than competing platforms such as KVM and Xen. Nonetheless, the company has signed on as a leading member of the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI), a trade organization dedicated to promoting open source solutions in government. Is this a sign of renewed commitment to open source by VMware, or a more mercenary move by the company to protect its slice of the open source market? Here are some thoughts.

VMware’s relationship with the open source community is a complex one. Most core commercial VMware products are not open source, but the company does maintain some open source tools. In addition, most of its virtualization solutions support Linux as well as proprietary operating systems. Still, now that open source virtualization platforms have matured to become as feature-rich and robust as many of VMware’s tools—and are also available for free—the company faces an increasingly difficult market within the open source space…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Christina Farr.

Cloud computing giant Rackspace has announced plans to partner up with the leading providers of open source data centers. As a founding member of the Open Compute Project, the company’s goal is to make it cheaper and more energy efficient to power the world’s Internet.

Facebook launched the initiative in April 2011 as a pledge to share custom data center designs, and scale computing infrastructure in the most efficient and economical way possible. At the fourth Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. today, executives at companies like Facebook, Intel, and Rackspace pooled together their knowledge and resources. They also announced hardware designs, new jobs, and upcoming partnerships…

Grazed from Knowledge@Wharton. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is a much hyped but often misunderstood technology that is gaining traction in different industries around the world. Businesses are integrating the cloud into countless systems, from HR to finance. Full adoption and acceptance of cloud computing, however, are still far away.

A recent global survey by Knowledge@Wharton and SAP’s Performance Benchmarking team reveals that while the hype and excitement surrounding cloud computing is reaching a fever pitch, many businesses are still expressing concerns over cloud security and IT integration issues. The survey also shows that while many people agree that the cloud is revolutionizing business, they still do not fully understand how it works…

Grazed from Investors Business Daily. Author: Donna Howell.

Cloud computing is a ticket to losing data for two in five companies, a new study finds. "It’s really kind of astounding," said Dave Elliott, a cloud marketing manager at storage and security company Symantec (SYMC). The company polled more than 3,200 organizations to gauge hidden costs of the cloud and ways to mitigate problems.

"Forty-three percent of respondents have lost data in the cloud and have had to recover from backups," Elliott said. And the recovery process has failed at least once for most. Internet cloud and cloud computing these days means most any services obtained over the Internet or obtained from potentially remote data centers, instead of the old-fashioned kind of on-premises computing where you knew exactly what machine your data were on…

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

Online learning company Lynda.com has gotten $103 million in funding from Accel Partners and equity investor Spectrum Equity. Meritech Capital Partners also participated. It’s the first money Lynda has taken from the outside and is meant to push the 17-year-old company into the international arena, which will mean localization, and add to its curriculum. It expects to scale its web and video platform.

Its video learning platform, available in monthly and annual subscriptions, teaches computer skills such as 3D and animation, audio, business, design, development, home computing, photography, video and web and interactive design to individuals as well as corporate, government, school and university accounts…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: James Carlini.

With more smartphones being utilized everywhere, should we be redefining cloud computing? If not redefining it, at least recalibrating it to encompass and fit new edge technology that is becoming the device of choice.

Many organizations that are looking at implementing cloud computing should also be looking at BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) concepts that focus on smartphones and tablets.
Why? More people are using smartphones and tablets than PCs today. They don’t want to be burdened with "computing," that sounds too technical. All they want to do is make a call and get things done…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Skytap, a provider of self-service cloud automation products, has unveiled pre-configured Cloudera Hadoop (CDH4) Enterprise templates that are now available as part of the Skytap Cloud public template library.

According to Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development at Skytap, the launch of Cloudera Hadoop for Enterprise Hybrid Clouds will make it easier for Skytap Cloud customers to quickly and easily configure and launch Hadoop instances for development and testing purposes. Goodwin told Talkin’ Cloud that a customer can use the service to get virtual Hadoop clusters up and running in less than 10 minutes…