Grazed from AME. Author: Editorial Staff.

Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management, announced it has registered stable growth of 4% over the last quarter, as well as nine percent in the first nine months of 2012 for the Rest of the World reporting region that includes the Middle East. A particularly strong momentum was registered by the infrastructure, buildings, power, and IT business units.

The company stated the worldwide datacentre market has witnessed a growth of 22% in 2012, to $105bn from $86bn in 2011. The Middle East is the fastest growing sector in this category. The company also reported robust global growth in sales for the first three quarters of 2012, recording a rise of 14.9% for infrastructure and 18% for IT business…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

As cloud computing evolves, one particular use for it is beginning to stand out: big data. What exactly big data means and how it fits into the cloud conversation, however, are questions not easily answered. Medio Systems Inc., founded in 2004 as an application service provider (ASP), has recently reinvented itself as a cloud-hosted provider of big data analytics, with a focus on mobile platforms. The company is also marketing its inGenius Software as a Service, traditionally aimed at enterprise customers such as T-Mobile, Verizon, Disney and CBS, at small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs).

Brian Lent, co-founder and chief technology officer of Medio, and Ivan Sucharski, Medio’s data strategist, spoke about big data, the evolution of cloud computing and how the two trends affect each other…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Lockheed Martin UK has expanded its offering of cloud computing services available to the UK government after recently being selected to provide G-Cloud 2 IT support. This new contract succeeds the previous G-Cloud 1 program and will run for 12 months, allowing Lockheed Martin UK to provide an even wider range of services that includes infrastructure, software and specialist cloud capabilities.

Under the G-Cloud 2 framework agreement, better known as CloudStore, Lockheed Martin will now offer support such as computing and storage, e-mail and collaboration, cloud strategy and integration; cloud security; mission centric activities; green IT and energy optimization; cloud brokering; virtualization consulting; assessment for Oracle virtualization; and virtual desktop as a service assessment…

Grazed from The Washington Post. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cisco Systems Inc., the world’s largest maker of computer networking gear, said Sunday it is buying Meraki for $1.2 billion to expand its ability to let customers compute in the cloud. Cloud computing refers to the increasingly popular practice of storing software applications in remote data centers that are accessed over the Internet instead of installing programs on individual machines.

Meraki Inc. is based in San Francisco and also has offices in New York, London and Mexico. The privately held company was founded in 2006 by members of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. Meraki technology offers customers Wi-Fi, switching, security and mobile device management centrally managed from the cloud…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cloud computing is pitched as a great solution for applications that are temporary or run on bursty workloads. What could be more temporary and bursty than a political campaign? Amazon’s Jeff Barr just revealed that President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign’s technology was running on the cloud — Amazon Web Services’ cloud, to be exact.

“The campaign’s technology team built, deployed, ran, and scaled up their applications on AWS,” Barr reports at the AWS blogsite. “The campaign used AWS to avoid an IT investment that would have run into the tens of millions of dollars.”…

Graze from GigaOM. Author: Mark Thiele.

There’s a common assumption that the Cloud’s destiny is to be a public utility. Mark Thiele, of data center operator Switch, argues that would kill competition and innovation, and that IT can be a better option. One of the prevailing assumptions around the cloud computing market is that it will drive towards an über-simplified delivery model that is similar to a utility. Further, this utility model will largely remove the potential for differentiation by most vendors and will lead to a race to the bottom from a pricing perspective.

There is ample evidence commoditization is occurring, and we could point to almost any area of IT to see it, from servers, PCs, virtualization, storage, networking, and so on. However, what is often lost in the obvious is that it’s not that simple…