Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Steve Phillips.

In the past, IT buying decisions were pretty straightforward. At least everyone understood the drill.

With the help of consultants, most companies selected technology under the premise that the system would be hosted internally. The thought was the IT department would eventually figure out how to install and support the new system. With the rise of cloud computing, including Software as a Service (SaaS), this philosophy is quickly becoming outdated. In some cases, cloud-based deployment and maintenance requires more analysis than the on-premises alternatives. That’s certainly the case with cloud procurement software…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today announced the recipients of the third annual EMC™ Journey to the Cloud Awards. These prestigious awards recognize two premier customers, a distinguished partner and an exceptional individual who are driving innovation, business value and performance through virtualization as the transformational pillar to their move to cloud computing.

The 2012 EMC Journey to the Cloud Award winners include the University of Florida, Williams & Fudge, Inc., Secure-24, Inc. and Todd Rorie with the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee…

Grazed from EventsNetwork. Author: PR Announcement.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced Dreamforce 2012, the world’s largest enterprise technology and cloud computing event ever. In its 10th year, Dreamforce expects to welcome more than 70,000 registered attendees to experience the social enterprise. Dreamforce 2012 will take place Sept. 18 – 21 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

"Our 10th annual Dreamforce will be the largest vendor-led enterprise technology event ever," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "Salesforce.com will unveil the latest innovations that will allow attendees to transform into social enterprises and connect with customers, partners and employees like never before to drive growth."…

Grazed from The New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Amazon.com does not talk much about what it does in operating the world’s largest publicly available computing cloud. But if you read between the lines you can get a sense of where it is going – global expansion, a new kind of Web browser, and spy work for the United States government.

In an article published Tuesday in The New York Times, I noted that Amazon Web Services currently lists 600 job openings. These are United States based, mostly in its Seattle headquarters. There are another 175 positions overseas, mostly in Japan and Singapore, both of which have several data centers. There were also a significant number in China and India.

The jobs are all listed, sometimes with reasonably thorough descriptions. There are lots of jobs you would expect, like software developers and financial analysts. Then there are some really intriguing opportunities…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

The ideal underlying the cloud computing approach is that end-users — and even IT professionals — can run computing jobs with no awareness of what servers or networks are making it all happen. So, it’s not surprising that a new survey shows there isn’t a lot of awareness of what, exactly, the cloud is all about.

While understanding cloud isn’t necessary, it’s advisable for career planning.

The survey of more than 1,000 American adults, conducted by Wakefield Research for Citrix, shows that few average Americans know what cloud computing is…

Grazed from FinancialWeek. Author: Mitchell Osak.

Many organizations are diving head first into the latest IT game changer, cloud computing (CC). While a comprehensive technical and financial analysis is usually undertaken, few companies thoroughly consider the organizational implications of this strategic move. They do this at their own peril. Cloud computing implementations can go astray when the wrong structures, processes and practices compromised the right technical solution. Managers would be wise to consider whether their organizations are cloud-supportive before redeveloping their infrastructures.

In a traditional IT model, technicians, hardware and software are tied to specific geographies, departments and business units. In most cases, this model fails to maximize operational flexibility and IT asset utilization. A CC architecture, on the other hand, centralizes and virtualizes IT resources, making them available to all users when needed as needed. The result is greater operational agility, lower costs and higher IT scalability…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Linux vendor SUSE has thrown its hat into the already crowded OpenStack distribution game.

Openstack is the open source cloud deployment model that in the two years since its founding has gained considerable attention from some of the biggest tech players in the industry. Companies like Rackspace, through its private cloud, already offer a free OpenStack distribution, while CloudScaling, Piston Cloud Computing Co., Red Hat and Ubuntu each have a distribution or are planning to release one soon.

Meanwhile, companies ranging from Rackspace to HP, Internap and Softlayer are already leveraging OpenStack as the foundation for their public clouds, giving users curious about trying OpenStack another option. "It’s definitely getting crowded," says Forrester researcher James Staten about the OpenStack distributions already emerging in the market…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Paul Krill.

Zend and VMware are announcing an integration between the Zend Server PHP application server and VMware’s vFabric Application Director tool for automating the provisioning of applications to clouds. The partnership allows enterprises to deploy PHP applications to private, public, or hybrid clouds via a drag-and-drop user interface.

To help with deployment, VMware and Zend developed portable deployment "blueprints," which feature a reference implementation to make it easier to provision PHP applications. "Customers can use blueprints to deploy a PHP cluster," said Ido Ben Moshe, vice president of global support and professional services at Zend, in an interview at the VMworld 2012 conference in San Francisco this week…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Microsoft is joining several startups in trying to entice developers to use its cloud as a specialized backend for their mobile applications. Microsoft’s Windows Azure Mobile Services joins offerings from Parse, Kinvey and Apigee in trying to establish a new infrastructure for the growing mobile ecosystem.

Microsoft just announced Windows Azure Mobile Services, a cloud offering that joins the ranks of Parse, Apigee and Kinvey in establishing a backend as a service designed for the mobile ecosystem. The goal of such a service is to provide a platform for mobile developers that will allow them to worry less about their infrastructure and only about their app…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Lucas Mearian.

Clustered storage vendor Scale Computing today upgraded its scale-out storage cluster to include compute resources dedicated to applications and a hypervisor component that allows storage and memory to be easily managed and allocated.

Scale Computing calls its new HC3 appliance "infrastructure-in-a-box," saying it eliminates the need to buy virtualization software, external servers and shared storage. That can mean significant reductions in both costs and complexity…