Grazed from The Drum. Author: Steven Lepitak.

“The Cloud is here to stay” proclaims Phil Worms, director of marketing at hosting company iomart Group when talking about data connectivity following the launch of 4G in the UK. “I’ve seen so many terms for the internet over the years, such as The net, Web 2.0 and so forth,” he states when asked what the future holds for the internet and mobile communications.

The Drum is speaking to iomart, the headline sponsor of this year’s Social Buzz Awards, to ascertain the company’s views on how the way that we access; share and store data is impacting on marketing services…

Grazed from The Asahi Shimbun.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. released a midterm management plan that focuses heavily on expanding its cloud computing services abroad while cutting hundreds of billions of yen in costs.

According to the plan released on Nov. 8, the telecommunications giant expects overseas sales to reach $20 billion (1.6 trillion yen) in fiscal 2016, nearly double the $11.6 billion reported for the year through March 2012. The company said it will target prospective growth segments in emerging economies to make up for its sluggish domestic performance, particularly in fiber-optic businesses…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Kevin Kwang.

The telecoms industry will continue to be shaken up by cloud computing in terms of the need to offer relevant software and build up a strong independent software vendor (ISV) ecosystem–both of which traditionally are not telcos’ strong suit.

In addition, these market players will have to enhance their channel partner networks to scale their operations and reach out to more customers. These were just some of the 10 predictions made by IDC Asia-Pacific for the telecoms sector between 2013 and 2016…

Grazed from ARN. Author: Rimin Dutt.

Dell has launched an expanded Cloud client computing portfolio in Australia. The new desktop virtualisation and Cloud client solutions enable workers to use any app on any device, according to the company. Dell’s Desktop Virtualisation Solutions in Australia will address the cost and complexity challenges of virtual desktop adoption.

DVS Simplified and Dell Wyse endpoints are available in Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam. Dell has also announced new support for Citrix HDX 3D technology for thin and zero clients, enabling organisations to virtualise and centrally deliver 3D graphics-intensive applications like CAD/CAM, 3D solids modelling, and HD multimedia…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

The latest round of cloud computing and enterprise software forecasts reflect the growing influence of analytics, legacy systems integration, mobility and security on IT buyer’s decisions. Bain & Company and Gartner have moved beyond aggregate forecasts, and are beginning to forecast by cloud and SaaS adoption stage. SAP is using the Bain adoption model in their vertical market presentations today.

Despite the predictions of the demise of enterprise software, forecasts and sales cycles I’ve been involved with indicate market growth. Mobility and cloud computing are the catalysts of rejuvenation in many enterprise application areas, and are accelerating sales cycles…

Grazed from Network Computing. Author: Brandon Butler.

Joyent may be the biggest cloud provider you haven’t heard of. According to the pure-play infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider — which was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in San Francisco — it is a top 5 vendor of cloud-based virtual machines in the world, a stat that’s backed up by Gartner. That means it’s rubbing elbows with the big names of cloud computing — Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, Microsoft and Google.

"They’re the most interesting cloud company that few people talk about," says George Reese, CTO of enStratus, a company that consults with enterprises on cloud strategies and helps business deploy applications to the cloud. "When we talk to people we get questions about AWS, Rackspace, HP, and when we mention Joyent, they’re like, ‘Who?’"…

Grazed from InfoSecurity. Author: Editorial Staff.

As more companies turn to the cloud to provide redundancy and back-up services for mission-critical business functions, connectivity and applications, new research has revealed that a full 70% of cloud backup providers do not inform customers of where the data is being physically kept.

According to a report from Icomm Technologies, 70% of data storage/data center providers do not reveal which country, general locality or legal jurisdiction customer data is stored within. It’s an issue that becomes particularly apropos in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which saw a number of critical data centers in the New York City area go down, darkening websites across the US. However, for UK businesses, the issue becomes broader…

Grazed from PCMag. Author: Damon Poeter.

Intel on Thursday unveiled a new generation of Itanium processors for mission-critical data center installations alongside partners like Hewlett-Packard, NEC, Hitachi, France-based Bull, and China’s Inspur, which are already building systems based on the new Itanium 9500 series chips.

Formerly codenamed Poulson, Intel’s latest Itanium series succeeds the "Tukwila" generation of Itanium processors. It is being billed as a platform tailor-made for consolidating legacy RISC and mainframe infrastructure and computing in a dedicated system capable of handling mission-critical computing in increasingly cloud-centric data centers…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Does your data center compost? This question may become more relevant if an Open Compute Foundation project that’s sponsored by Facebook ends up a success. The goal is to build a biodegradable server chassis to replace existing steel enclosures.

Facebook is sponsoring an Open Compute Foundation contest with Purdue to develop a more sustainable server chassis. The goal of the contest is to build a biodegradable box — instead of steel casing — to hold the innards of a server. Since most companies replace their servers every two to three years (the Purdue contest site says four), why not make the case out of something that doesn’t need to be recycled at the end of its rather short life?…