Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Three in five IT and business decision makers agree that owning and operating in-house IT infrastructure drives costs higher and wastes resources, according to an annual study from Savvis, a CenturyLink company (NYSE: CTL) and leader in global cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises.

This view marks a sharp increase from 2010, when just 38 percent of IT decision makers attributed IT ownership to waste in resources and higher costs, and comes as nearly 60 percent of respondents now believe organizations must place the priority on outsourced infrastructure over traditional in-house services…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Back in June, I walked you through the steps to define and design a cloud computing API or service. My goal was to get those who build private, public, and hybrid clouds to think a bit more around how these APIs are designed, developed, deployed, and managed.

The core problem is that APIs are services, which are typically used in the context of a service-oriented architecture, but SOA is not as cool as it was 10 years ago. To properly design services, you have to consider how resources should be used in service-oriented ways, including how well they work and play within infrastructure and application architecture…

Grazed from New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Autodesk just announced that it is selling design simulation software that works online, via servers in the company’s own data centers. This continues the design giant’s move into a lower-paying, hopefully higher-volume, world of mobile devices and cloud computing.

Just as important, it’s another sign that the cost of computing has fallen so far that it makes more sense to be wasteful with server power, and harvest the results, it than it is to plan everything carefully. It is a triumph of brute force and messes over carefully planned design…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Editorial Staff.

Dell announced its strategic alliance with Ramco Systems to deliver Ramco’s ERP-as-a-service on Cloud to help midmarket businesses execute cost and operational efficiencies and accelerate revenue growth. The new offering strengthens Dell’s growing portfolio of Software-as-a-Service (Saas) solutions that help organizations manage and grow their business.

Ramco’s ERP on Cloud supports businesses with wide functionalities across various industry segments, including production planning, asset management, and analytics along with regular corporate functionalities of HR, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and financial management…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

In his new book, Cloudonomics, Joe Weinman explores many of the areas being impacted by the cloud computing phenomenon, offering compelling value propositions. He spells out, extremely thoroughly, the business cases and cost justifications that go behind cloud computing efforts.

He also provides 28 business areas where cloud does and doesn’t make business and financial sense. (And, amazingly, manages to categorize all points in terms starting with the letter “C.)” A senior VP at Telx and formerly with A&T, Weinman is highly regarded as a thought leader on the emerging art and science of cloud economics…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Katie Fehrenbacher.

In the first announcement since SeaMicro was acquired by AMD, AMD has detailed its new server tech, which is optimized for big data and cloud computing. The new platform improves performance by moving storage closer to the computing center.
AMD.SeaMicro.servers

In the first announcement following AMD’s acquisition of low power server startup SeaMicro earlier this year, AMD on Monday announced a new server platform based on the SeaMicro tech that’s optimized for big data and cloud computing. The newly-announced “SM15000? server tech supports 5 petabytes of storage and brings storage closer to compute, making the system faster and more resilient…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

GoDaddy, the massive Web hosting company, went down for several hours on Monday, taking an untold number of websites with it.

A person affiliated with the hacking collective Anonymous — named @AnonymousOwn3r on Twitter — claimed responsibility for the outage.

"I’m taking godaddy down bacause (sic) well i’d like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now," that person wrote in response to questions from a technology reporter at tech blog Mashable…

Grazed from The Atlantic. Author: Raul F. Chong.

We are in an age when jobs like "data scientist" are not far from reality. The convergence of two key technological areas — cloud computing and big data — are having far reaching implications that indeed are changing the world.

It’s leading to the discovery of new drugs to cure diseases; predicting weather patterns more accurately (even predicting earthquakes?), finding better ways to use and save water, and so on. These are many of the ideas and projects that IBM has advanced with its Smarter Planet initiative, which has cloud computing and big data technologies at its core…

Grazed from ZDnet. Author: Gery Menegaz.

For all the enormous, color-coded, multi-tabbed spreadsheets, and the number crunching, and the analysis, it has been suggested that much of today’s strategic planning is contaminated by bias, judgement and opinion. And it most definitely is not scientific.

The authors, in the article Bringing Science to the Art of Strategy, suggest that there is a correlation between the size of the spreadsheet – with larger being better – and the comfort level that executives have in their process…

Citrix today announced that it has completed its acquisition of Beetil, a privately-held cloud-based service desk technology provider. Beetil helps technical support professionals provide exceptional customer assistance and streamline technology costs through the delivery of easy-to-use, yet powerful incident tracking, end user self-service, configuration, change management and release management functionality.

The acquisition enables Citrix to expand the capabilities of its market-leading, cloud-based support product line, Citrix GoToAssist, with the addition of an integrated IT service desk solution. As a result, Citrix has the ability to offer support professionals an essential set of cloud-based services from a single platform for remote support, monitoring and service desk management.