Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

ComodIT, a startup in Liege, Belgium wants to take the IT management world by storm with its product that’s adapted for cloud computing as opposed to legacy IT. The startup, which is a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition is seeking a Series A round.

Instead of telling a server to take an action, what if instead you could just tell your infrastructure in which computing state you wanted it to arrive? That’s the goal of ComodIT, a Belgian startup that is a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition. The company’s cloud management software wants to take the scripting out of cloud management and let anyone –from IT to business employees be able to order up new instances and compute resources across clouds…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Brian Proffitt.

Despite all of the hype that cloud computing is getting, a recent survey shows that in terms of actual pace of deployment, three popular open source cloud computing platforms are not exactly seeing growth to match that hype. The results might be surprising for followers of cloud computing, but not to the company that conducted the annual "State of the Open Source Cloud" survey, Zenoss. This news is just confirming what they already knew: that cloud is a ways off from being a ready-to-use tool and customers know it.

Just ask Floyd Strimling, VP of Community at Zenoss. Actually, you probably won’t have to ask him – he’ll most likely tell you anyway. From Strimling’s point of view, cloud adoption is very much like the perceived U.S. political landscape, with a very loud one percent actually adopting and hyping the cloud, with the rest, "the 99-percenters," having little to no idea what to do with cloud computing…

Grazed from CropLife. Author: Matt Hopkins.

Are you a little unclear when it comes to understanding cloud computing? Partly cloudy on the cloud? You’re not alone. A Google search of "What is Cloud Computing?" returned 245 million results. People want to know about the cloud.

Cloud computing — or the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server — has been gaining serious momentum in the last year in many data-driven industries. And agriculture is taking notice…

Grazed from ITPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

Cloud service provider Rackspace has been cleared by an advertising standards regulator to continue using its "100% Uptime Guarantee" slogan in its marketing materials. A single complaint was made to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) by an unnamed party regarding the sponsored search advert, which described Rackspace as “The World Leader in Cloud Computing & Hosting" and promised a "100% Uptime Guarantee!”

The complainant claimed the advert was misleading, as they did not think it was possible to provide 100 per cent uptime for that kind of service. However, Rackspace successfully argued that consumers would understand the company was offering a guarantee of service and, if a customer did not receive 100 per cent uptime, they would be reimbursed…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Zyncro, your Enterprise Social Network, has been selected as Best European Startup by EuroCloud from among all the leading cloud-computing solution nominations in an evening ceremony held on October 8 in Luxembourg. EuroCloud is an independent non-profit European organization for SaaS and cloud-computing providers, with members in 27 countries and presence in 17 countries. Last night, it presented its European awards to this year’s best cloud-computing solutions, which included Zyncro as best European startup.

Zyncro, headquartered in Barcelona and present in 14 countries, has already more than 140,000 users. The key to its success lies in the creation of a cloud-based social software solution that adapts to the specific needs of each company. Enterprise Social Networks enable information exchange in an organized, secure and fluid manner, boosting internal collaboration and improving productivity…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Charlie Osborne.
 

The enterprise cloud infrastructure and IT solutions firm launched the Symphony Database project last year in North America. Now, the cloud-based database platform is available to European companies.

Savvis says that the platform brings cloud computing to Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server environments without the need for long-term licensing or server provisioning. The Savvis Symphony Database can be scaled up or down depending on the size and needs of a business without interrupting operations, and comes with a performance guarantee.

In addition, the firm says that the cloud-based database platform is less expensive than standard hosted database solutions…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

IO Data Centers has raised $90 million for its suite of offerings that rethink the way data centers are built and managed. Its IO.Anywhere units are fully contained data centers in a small package, and its OS software can manage a data center from a smartphone. Building 500-square-foot modules that act like fully functional data centers is capital-intensive work, so when a company like IO Data Centers raises money, it raises a lot. On Wednesday, the company announced a $90 million round led by New World Ventures that follows a $56 million round in 2008 and a $105 million round in 2011.

IO Founder and CEO George Slessman told me during a phone call on Tuesday that the company raised the latest money in order to capitalize on a huge opportunity. One industry group estimates that companies will spend $105 billion building and managing data centers in 2012, and Slessman thinks IO can address a significant portion of that spending, especially as it relates to costs around designing, building and generally operating facilities…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Durba Sengupta.

The year 2012 is close to an end, but the world is yet to find an answer to a question which has been there for last couple of years—Can cloud computing be regulated? The need of regulation—a much talked about but unsettled question—comes up whenever a new cloud service steps into the world.

In a stage when our lifestyle is becoming controlled by smart tools and technologies, we can hardly ignore the value of cloud computing. In fact, we find it tough to imagine our daily life without the cloud technology. This ever-growing acceptance and impact of cloud computing makes the Silicon Valley consider bringing regulations to cloud hosting services. In order to define the guidelines and to control who is not complying with the regulations, a global regulatory body for the cloud is needed. Recently, the European Union took the initiative to create a regulatory body to control cloud computing. But what are the pros and cons of cloud regulations?…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Warwick Ashford.

Microsoft has announced a free tool for organisations to assess their security readiness for cloud computing. A survey commissioned by the company revealed that the top barriers to cloud adoption are concerns about the ability to deal with industry standards (61%), transparency (59%) and security concerns (44%).

“This shows companies are more concerned than they should be,” Adrienne Hall, general manager of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft, told the RSA Conference Europe 2012 in London. On the flip side, the survey conducted in five regions revealed that companies that have adopted cloud are seeing security benefits, she said…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: James Dohnert.

The growth of cloud computing and other emerging technology trends are changing corporate business models, according to general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz Peter Levine.

Levine contends that the growing focus of software-based technology is changing the way companies plan for growth. Taking part in a panel at BoxWorks 2012 about the growing trends in Silicon Valley Levine said that he believes that better hardware no longer means better growth. "Microsoft needs a wake up call. Cisco needs a wake up call," Levine said during the panel discussion which featured a diverse group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists…