Grazed from Smart Data Collective. Author: Paul Barsch.

As more companies turn to cloud computing, social media and online selling platforms to avoid spending budgets on infrastructure, it is also likely that they are sharing a key business enabler—behavioral data. So what happens when your cloud-based provider shifts from providing infrastructure or a platform for your business to actually competing with you?

Online business Zynga understands while they develop games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars and others that run on Facebook’s platform, it’s also not far-fetched that Facebook could get into the profitable business of gaming. In fact, Zynga is turning away (though not completely) from Facebook to also support games for Google plus and other social/mobile platforms…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

On Tuesday, Netflix put source code for its Eureka mid-tier load balancing technology onto Github so that other Amazon Web Services users can tweak it for their own use. This isn’t the first time Netflix has filled voids in the AWS stack.

Pretty soon we’re going to need a score card to track the increasingly complex Amazon-Netflix relationship. As Amazon dives deeper into streamed video on its own, Netflix, which runs its video streaming business on Amazon Web Services, is getting more proficient at plugging gaps in Amazon’s cloud platform…

Grazed from CircleID. Author: Paul Budde.

There have been some interesting developments in cloud computing over the last year.

For over five years our position has been that we acknowledge the enormous economic advantages that cloud computing has to offer, but at the same time recognise that the risk of losing control over data and IT systems is, at this stage, too great for most companies and governments to start utilising the cloud advantages in a serious way.

Traditionally cloud computing has been more successful in the consumer market — companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook and many others have basically moved all of their IT activities into the internet cloud. The economic advantages are very clear as most of these services are free for the users; obviously they would not have been developed if they involved the use of the expensive traditional IT structures. ‘Free’ is a magic password for the consumer market and literally billions of people are using these companies via cloud-based services…

Grazed from Secure Business Insight. Author: David Grimes.

The easiest way in IT to stop a new technology or solution from being implemented is to play the security card.

As soon as someone mentions concerns around a new IT solution not being ‘secure’, the project will immediately come to a halt. Since cloud infrastructure and cloud computing first entered conversations within the enterprise sector, concerns about the security of cloud quickly became the biggest barrier to adoption.

As with security for any other technology solution– past, present or future – creating a security strategy and plan must be one of the first considerations for enterprise organisations. While choosing a service provider that can enforce strong security procedures and measures in the cloud is an important step, enterprises need to continue to take an active role in their own security and risk management…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Adaptivity, a leading provider of Software Accelerating IT Transformation, announced today the release of its Blueprint4Cloud™ platform, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application that assists users in making the right cloud computing planning and design decisions. This new platform will allow customers considering cloud services to rapidly quantify the demands of their business applications and select the right cloud infrastructure solutions to support them.

"Today is a major milestone for Adaptivity" said Matt Barrington, President and COO of Adaptivity. "Our methodologies and software platforms have been providing immense value to our large enterprise partners and clients for years. With today’s launch of our Blueprint4Cloud platform we are now able to deliver our fact-based cloud decisoning analytic capabilities to a much broader audience at a very affordable price point. This software will allow companies of any size to successfully plan their transition to the cloud."…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Chrissie Klinger.

A lot of businesses are using cloud services in an effort to save money. Some businesses, though, are starting to realize how much money cloud computing could cost them if the government started taxing everything they were doing in the cloud. WBUR reported that Massachusetts’ top tax official, Amy Pitter, stated the ‘cloud’ is an "evolving area of the law." A recent public letter signed by Pitter described the state’s policies on which cloud services are taxable and which are not. Fortunately for businesses, storing data in the cloud on services like iCloud and Google Docs, is currently not considered taxable in Massachusetts, but what about other states?

Last year at this time only a handful of states were even looking at taxing any cloud related product or service, now more than half of the 50 U.S. states are exploring how to tax cloud services, including SaaS. At this time, the U.S. government expects cloud services to fall under current tax laws, allowing each state to determine tax implications and guidelines. Unfortunately, as states start to develop guidelines they are beginning to realize this might lead to new federal laws and regulations due to the complexity of cloud computing…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jamie Yap.

The increasing adoption of cloud computing, which has led to the growing deluge of data, devices and apps, calls for a new server operating system (OS) that is designed for the cloud in order for companies to realize the true benefits of scalability, agility and availability, said Microsoft executives.

Michael Park, corporate vice president for Windows Server and Microsoft’s management marketing group, told ZDNet Asia in an interview Tuesday that the role of the sever OS is expanding, driven by the exponential growth of data, devices and apps as well as cloud computing…

Grazed from CallidusCloud. Author: PR Announcement.

CallidusCloud® (www.calliduscloud.com) today announced that it will be a Gold sponsor of salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2012 conference (www.dreamforce.com). The conference will be held September 18-21, 2012, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

CallidusCloud is the leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing, providing companies with a suite of SaaS solutions to help improve performance at every stage of the sales cycle from hiring the right talent, motivating and coaching the right behaviors, enabling sales with simple learning and sales tools, automating quote generation and providing lead management. With CallidusCloud, companies of all sizes enjoy larger deal sizes, shorter sales cycles and higher win rates. CallidusCloud will be in booth 1412 in the Cloud Expo…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) and EMC (NYSE: EMC) have aligned their channel incentives in their “three paths to the cloud” strategy. The goal? To help partners increase their profitability no matter how they decide to play in the cloud computing space — as cloud services providers, cloud aggregators or cloud integrators.

As part of the announcement made at VMworld 2012 in San Francisco, the two companies unveiled new joint reference architectures and integrated customer support, as well as new offerings to support the VCE Vblock appliance. For customers, it means more flexibility and choice, the companies stated, but for partners, it hopefully means some more ease in providing cloud computing infrastructures and services — and, of course, better margins…