Grazed from Forbes. Author: Bryron Deeter.

Today “the cloud” surrounds us, literally and figuratively. IBM and Microsoft are running enterprise-oriented ads about cloud computing, Apple features iCloud and Siri (running in the cloud) prominently in marketing messages, and while Amazon.com remains most famous for e-commerce, its Amazon Web Service unit is the cloud infrastructure running popular websites from Netflix to Pinterest.

Underneath these friendly marketing campaigns and infrastructure offerings rages an early battle for the future of the software industry, with tens of billions of dollars at stake. For years, the entrenched software giants have spent most of their energies selling against the cloud computing trend and the startup companies that were leading this revolution: see Oracle/Ellison vs. Salesforce/Benioff. But the fight has largely proven futile, and the big guys have switched to playing catch up by building, buying and partnering their way to relevance…

Grazed from DailyFinance. Author: Tim Brugger.

Last month’s announcement of the strategic partnership between Cisco (NAS: CSCO) and cloud technology provider VMware (NYS: VMW) was the latest confirmation of Cisco’s shift in business philosophy. CEO John Chambers’ objective to become a leader in the exploding cloud marketplace should be sweet music to Cisco shareholders’ ears. The 6% jump in share price year to date, along with the recent dividend payment, sounds pretty good, too.

Cloud technology concerns
The newest additions to Cisco’s existing cloud solutions — SecureX, data loss prevention, and secure mobile services — addresses areas of concern for many businesses slow to embrace cloud computing…

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Editorial Staff.

Federal managers believe they can save more than $16 billion annually by moving critical technology infrastructure to cloud computing, a survey released Wednesday shows. That’s more than three times the highest figure to come from the Office of Management and Budget.

In May 2011, then-federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told a Senate panel that moving computer storage and services to the cloud would save the government a minimum of $5 billion annually…

Grazed from NASDAQ. Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon ( AMZN ) is widely believed to be the market leader in cloud computing market and competes directly with Google ( GOOG ), Microsoft ( MSFT ), IBM ( IBM ) and HP ( HPQ ). Amazon’s pricing model of charging by the hour has been challenged by a new service ProfitBricks, which bills by the minute. The per minute service would be particularly attractive to companies or applications with constantly fluctuating computing/traffic requirements. Recently, the company announced an online marketplace where users of its cloud computing services can sell their reserved server instances to other companies. We expect the marketplace to help the company somewhat offset the threat posed by the bill by minute model.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers its users reserved instances, which allow them to lower their cloud costs by making a one-time payment to reserve computing capacity for a specified time period and receive a discount on the hourly rates. The online marketplace would allow users to move their instances across AWS Regions, change it to a new type or sell capacity for projects that ended before the completion of their term. The AWS management console will be the gateway for these transactions…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Before there was cloud computing, there was service oriented architecture (SOA). While cloud encompasses implementation and application delivery options, SOA is concerned with the foundation underneath that makes it all possible.

Fittingly, next week’s 5th International SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium, being held in London, will host a program that represents the natural evolution between the two disciplines — and “service technology” is an apt term that describes both. Originally, the conference was called the International SOA Symposium. (Disclosure: I serve on the planning committee for the conference.)…

VMTurbo, the leading provider of intelligent workload management software for cloud and virtualized environments, today announced that CSC, a market leading cloud service provider, selected VMTurbo as an operations management solution for its public, private and hybrid cloud offerings. CSC is utilizing VMTurbo Operations Manager to automate intelligent resource allocation and workload placement decisions – ensuring service availability, operational efficiency, and optimal utilization for commercial and government enterprise cloud customers.

“Service level assurance is at the heart of CSC’s value proposition to enterprise cloud customers and VMTurbo’s intelligent placement of workloads and ability to allocate resources based on application performance and business priorities enables us to provide reliable commercial and government cloud services,” said Eli Almog, chief technology officer for CSC Cloud Services. “CSC BizCloud and CSC CloudCompute, both VMware vCloud Datacenter Services, provide infrastructure as a service for doing real business on the cloud. We did a thorough competitive analysis and determined that VMTurbo’s sophisticated analytics engine and its API integration to vCloud Director and Cisco UCS made it the right choice for CSC’s enterprise cloud.”

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Mike Fratto.

At the InformationWeek 500 conference, editor at large Charlie Babcock and I held a workshop on private cloud. We learned as much from the audience members as they did from us. One of the more interesting discussions centered on the challenges organizations face in implementing private clouds. For almost all in the room, it wasn’t a matter of technical as much as organizational: How do you overcome employee resistance and get them to embrace cloud?

Prior to the event, I was talking to a longtime friend who’s a software architect and is now heading up his company’s private cloud initiative. The problem he’s facing isn’t making the business case–he has a budget and a directive. He’s not troubled by the technology–the company will train and outsource for the expertise it needs. The No. 1 problem is staff resistance. As a software architect, Bob (not his real name) is an outsider to IT operations, but he’s comfortable with automation and software-driven IT. Unfortunately, the IT department isn’t…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Ashlee Vance.

The transition to cloud computing has not been all that kind to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ). Over the years, HP has unfurled one cloud service and then another, only to rescind the services a short while later after a lack of interest from consumers. Such is life when you’re a company used to selling computing infrastructure goods that arrive via forklift rather than URL.

HP does have a secret weapon in the cloud, though, and that’s its line of online publishing services, which happen to be very good and often quite novel. The lead service—outside of Snapfish, which HP got through an acquisition—is MagCloud. It lets you create a magazine or a brochure and sell it on demand to the public for a price of your choosing. A DIY rocket enthusiast, for example, could craft a magazine dedicated to the goings-on in his local rocket building scene and then sell it to the club members. You can find some real examples of the magazines here…