Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Hewlett Packard charges Autonomy with accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures and is pushing US and UK authorities to pursue criminal action. The company said $5 billion of an $8.8 billion charge is related directly to Autonomy’s misbehavior.

Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman said “outright misrepresentations” about the state of Autonomy’s financial health led to HP overpaying for that company last year and Whitman is recommending civil and criminal investigations into that issue. HP took a loss of $6.85 billion ($3.49 per share) for the year ending Oct. 31, mostly related to a previously announced $8 billion charge related to the company’s Autonomy business…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Carl Flinders.

The number of global IT services deals with a cloud computing element have tripled since 2010, according to research from IT outsourcing consultancy Information Services Group (ISG). ISG used its TPI index to analyse IT outsourcing deals and found this year will see 300 IT contracts awarded which feature cloud computing services. This compares with 110 in 2010 and 220 in 2011.

Stanton Jones, emerging technology analyst at ISG, said the move to standardised platform-based services which are difficult to customise is a step-change for the IT services sector. “Cloud services, especially shared platforms, are a new terrain for providers and clients alike, as they are highly standardised and can’t be easily customised — the antithesis of traditional outsourcing,” said Jones…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

VMware’s Cloud Foundry and Microsoft Azure are two of the leading platform as a service (PaaS) offerings from two cloud heavyweights, but one consultant says both companies are largely ignoring the private cloud market, creating a glaring hole for customers. John Treadway, a VP at Boston-area consultancy Cloud Technology Partners, says VMware and Microsoft are holding back the entire PaaS industry by not offering commercial support for on-premise installations of the their platforms.

"I spend a lot of time with large enterprises, and we’re very big proponents of the PaaS opportunity," he says, but many customers are not willing to put resources in a public cloud, off their own premise, he says. Businesses and IT shops want to control these deployments behind their own firewall. "They want to run their own internal clouds," and VMware and Microsoft don’t have the tools to do that for Cloud Foundry and Azure, he says…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

UCSD’s Guardian magazine reports on an often overlooked aspect of cloud computing. According to the university’s researchers, "developing countries are utilizing the growing adoption of ‘cloud computing’ — the use of consumer devices to access remote computer and information resources — to expand their economic role in an increasingly global economy."

As the study illustrates, the cost efficiencies of cloud computing are the same in third-world countries as in the developed world, and up-and-coming nations can leverage data, applications, and infrastructure that were once cost prohibitive. In turn, this increases commerce by facilitating the countries’ entrance into the global markets…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

I find cloud computing conference chatter, concerns and presentations an interesting phenomenon. For the past five years, the No. 1 concern cited about cloud computing at conferences has been security—and it’s probably going to continue for the foreseeable future as the No. 1 concern. It is, as I noted to one colleague, like living through Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. Every conference features the same discussions, the same solutions, the same sage nodding about the need to "address this and make users more comfortable."

The recent Cloud Expo was no different. It seemed like every presentation, keynote and conversation paid deference to the issue of security. However, I took a different tack—focusing on the revolution in user (i.e., developer) expectations made possible by cloud computing with a presentation on The Democratization of IT (summarized in this blog post…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Dan Worth.

Tech chiefs from major cloud computing vendors including Amazon, Atos and SAP have met with leading European politicians to guide the creation of the European Commission’s (EC) cloud computing strategy. The EC wants to exploit the massive buying power of European nations, and ensure organisations can access cloud computing tools at low prices – a necessary step to improve services and reduce costs.

The meeting in Brussels on Monday, the first Steering Board meeting of the European Cloud Partnership (ECP), discussed their overall objectives for 2013-14, including raising public awareness of the benefits of cloud systems…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Some Apple iCloud services suffered outages and/or performance issues on Nov. 18. The impacted systems included iMessage and FaceTime. Apple Insider claims iCloud has suffered roughly four outages in the past three months — not exactly a stellar track record for Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), which focuses like a laser on end-user experience.

What’s the lesson here for IT service providers and computer consultants? Some cloud skeptics will start pounding the table again for on-premises servers. But it’s too late to put the cloud genie back in the bottle. Instead, IT consultants should look for ways to proactively warn their customers about potential cloud outages and emerging performance issues…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: David Meyer.

Top EU officials will meet with companies such as Amazon and Telefonica on Monday to discuss ways to set up a single European market for cloud services. The steering board meeting will be the first for the new European Cloud Partnership, which looks to take advantage of the public sector’s buying power to influence cloud computing provision in the region. To do this, the group will try to come up with common cloud procurement standards.

Digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes said in January that the European Commission will put €10m (£8m) into the partnership, in the hope of eventually pooling resources between member states…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

The PaaS (platform as a service) market will grow to $1.2 billion this year, up from last year’s $900 million take, as vendors and customers seek easier ways to create new applications and customize existing ones, according analyst firm Gartner. PaaS spending will rise to $1.5 billion in 2013, while reaching $2.9 billion by 2016, Gartner said Monday.

The firm includes both broader PaaS products such as Salesforce.com’s Force.com, as well as discrete application infrastructure components, such as databases, messaging and "other functional types of middleware offered as a cloud service," Gartner said…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Steve Gunderson.

It seems like every year some new technology explodes onto the IT scene with huge potential — and frequently even greater hype. But tackling every technology that comes along is usually both impractical and too expensive. So how do you choose the right ones and then integrate them successfully into your environment?

As we all know, one of today’s hottest IT topics is the cloud, and it’s more than likely on your priority list as well. But figuring out how to maximize the real potential of cloud computing while avoiding the trap of relying on it to solve problems it was never designed to solve is a script most IT executives are still trying to write…