Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Stephen J. Bigelow.

Few technologies have affected the IT industry as profoundly as cloud computing, which delivers computing as a service or utility. Part of cloud’s appeal is clearly financial; it allows organizations to shed at least some of their expensive IT infrastructure and shift computing costs to more manageable operational expenses.

The cloud also eases much of the technological burden involved with IT systems support and maintenance, helping companies focus on the productive business use of their workloads rather than on underlying systems and software. Regardless of the motivation, business owners and data center managers are increasingly turning to cloud for vital computing services. This report examines key findings of a recent TechTarget survey about cloud adoption and services…

Grazed from nVidia. Author: PR Announcement.

The VGX K2 will not be available until early 2013, but Nvidia released some initial specs of its first cloud computing GPU product.

ZoomThe K2 will be the flagship board to enable smartphones, tablets and PCs to access substantially more GPU performance over a cloud infrastructure and expand the processing horsepower of their own local devices. The K2 is essentially two merged Quadro K5000 workstation graphics cards. It integrates two GPUs with 2×1536 active processing cores and 2x4GB GDDR5 memory. The board is rated at a power consumption of 225 watts and receives a passive cooling solution…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Spencer Ante.

For International Business Machines IBM -1.10%, cloud computing is both an opportunity and a risk. And the risks of the cloud materialized in its most recent earnings announcement where IBM’s revenue fell short of analyst estimates.

The opportunity for IBM is in becoming a sort of arms provider for the cloud, selling customized hardware and software that helps governments, large and mid-size companies, or Web developers and hosting providers offer applications over the Web. In September, IBM ramped up its initiatives to sell cloud services to mid-size businesses in an effort to take on market leaders such as Amazon.com and Salesforce.com. In the third quarter, IBM said it achieved double digit growth in its cloud business, though it declined to detail the components of that revenue…

Grazed from Information Management. Author: Justin Kern.

Worldwide implementations of cloud computing standards might not yet be a reality, but industry groups are making progress in areas such as security, interoperability, interfaces and inter-cloud infrastructure, according to an expert panel discussion held Tuesday, entitled “The State of Global Cloud Standards.”

The panel was led by Winston Bumpus, chairman of the board of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and director of standards architecture at VMware. Additional panelists included Dr. Jieping Wang of the China Electronics Standardization Institute; Ryuichi Ogawa of Japan’s non-profit cloud standardization group GICTIF; and Monique Morrow of the International Telecommunications Union. The four organizations represented by these panelists have cooperative agreements on computing system standards and each group represents hundreds of vendors and businesses engaged in cloud deployments around the world…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

In a world awash in data, where complexity is on the rise and the pace of innovation has never been faster, the need to streamline new application development is driving demand for a relatively new form of cloud computing known as Platform as a Service (PaaS). This was the finding of a new study released today by the IBM (NYSE: IBM) Center for Applied Insights. In response, IBM is today announcing the general availability of a new PaaS offering for the fourth quarter to help organizations build and deploy their own software applications quickly and effectively by renting IBM’s PaaS cloud computing platform of integrated middleware, monitoring, networks, servers and storage.

IBM’s survey of more than 1,500 IT decision makers from 18 countries found that forward looking IT leaders are blazing the trail with early adoption of PaaS for business advantage – citing big data as the #1 reason among several strategic initiatives they were targeting. The study also showed that nearly 20 percent of respondents are currently using PaaS, although more than half recognize the opportunity…

Grazed from ScrippsNews. Author: Steve Alexander.

Cloud computing — using remote data centers over the Internet instead of buying computers — has been quietly creeping into companies under the noses of corporate executives. Departments are using it without permission by putting it on company charge cards, and employees widely use some common cloud applications such as Google Docs or Salesforce.com, said Bill Martorelli, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass.

"Corporations really need to reconcile themselves to cloud computing," said Martorelli. "But they also have to find the balance between empowerment of employees and corporate control."…