Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Teyona Dame.

Cloud computing has made headlines ever since the concept evolved. A collective collaboration of software and hardware over a network, most often the internet, cloud computing is a service that allows you to control data even from remote locations. In a typical structure, a client may lease out databases and application oriented software and providers will manage and run these platforms for the client using cloud computing. The client will be able to access these applications through the internet, on a PC or through a handheld device.

The biggest advantage of cloud computing is ease and speed in setting up platforms and using them, better manageability and less upkeep and being able to keep up with a dynamic, constantly evolving business world, using IT and its resources…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Nearly 95 percent of Backupify’s business comes from corporate users and 75 percent of that revenue comes from companies with more than 100 employees. That’s why the cloud backup company is formalizing an enterprise support and service program.

Backupify, which started out as a consumer-oriented cloud backup service, is getting more serious — and formal — about being a business backup provider.

That’s why it’s launching an enterprise support program which boosts the daily automated backups from once to three times a day and enables one account to support multiple Google Apps subdomains. One reason is the traction it sees Google Apps getting in corporate accounts, said Backupify CEO Rob May. Backupify, as its name suggests, backs up data from Google Apps, Salesforce.com, and social networking sites. It competes with services like Cloud Ally and Spanning…

Grazed from FormTek. Author: Dick Weisinger.

Most medium to large size businesses run their organizations on numerous business and IT systems. The IT systems have very often been developed and grown over the years and consist of different technologies and provided by different vendors. It is the job of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) to tie together these systems so that they can productively work together.

Successful integration of systems with EAI is not an easy task, and it’s one that businesses have IT groups have been struggling with for a long time. And it’s a task that’s only now grown more complex and difficult with the popularity of SaaS solutions.

Ovum estimates that globally organizations will be spending $14.4 billion annually on EAI solutions by 2016, based on their estimated annual growth rate of 8.3 percent. Ovum also sees an ever greater percentage of integration dollars going towards integrating SaaS solutions…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Callidus Software Inc. (NASDAQ: CALD), the leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing, announced today that Citrix Systems, a recognized leader within the technology industry, has selected the CallidusCloud® Commissions solution to drive the performance of its sales organization, automating commissions and outsourcing its sales compensation operation processes. The agreement was signed in the third quarter of 2012.

"Using this solution from CallidusCloud to automate our sales commissions processes has greatly benefited our organization, enabling us to streamline compensation with consistently accurate and timely delivery of commission payments to our sales team," said David Egloff, Director of Worldwide Sales Compensation, Citrix Systems. "In addition to the benefits of the CallidusCloud Commissions solution, we’ve partnered with CallidusCloud to tactically outsource our sales operation processes, enabling our team to focus on core initiatives strategically aligned with our go-to-market plan."…

Grazed from InformationWorld. Author: Doug Henschen.

Salesforce.com now has six cloud-computing lines of business: sales force automation, customer service, marketing, collaboration, human capital management, and Salesforce.com development platforms (Force.com, Heroku, and Site.com). Sales force automation is already a $1 billion-plus business, and if predictions by CEO Marc Benioff hold true, the customer service, development platform, and marketing businesses will catch up soon.

Benioff made his predictions during a conference call with equity analysts on Thursday in which Salesforce.com detailed financial results for its second fiscal quarter ending July 31. Highlights included a 34% year-over-year increase in quarterly revenue to $732 million. Salesforce.com also raised its full-year financial guidance, forecasting revenue of about $3.03 billion to $3.04 billion, up from $2.99 billion to $3.03 billion. Earnings are expected to come in at $1.48 to $1.51 per share, up from $1.45 to $1.49 per share…

Grazed from BankInfoSecurity. Author: Eric Chabrow.

Ron Ross, the NIST IT security and risk guru, sees cloud computing as a vehicle to help organizations implement an information risk management framework.

Ross, senior computer scientist and fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, says in an interview that the costs of automated tools needed to implement the information risk management framework could be offset by savings realized by the use of cloud computing services.

The interview is part of an Information Security Media Group webinar by Ross entitled Risk Management Framework: Learn from NIST. An excerpt from that interview is presented here…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Gregory Musungu.

Cloud computing is a term we hear quite often, but there are very few people who understand what it’s all about. You would argue that whatever technology this is, it is probably out of your world or too complex. In reality, cloud computing is a simple technology that has been around for a while, and almost all of us have used it, without even knowing. In simple terms, cloud computing entails running computer/network applications that are on other people’s servers using a simple user interface or application format. It’s that simple.

If this language still sounds strange, going back to basics will tell you something about what cloud computing is all about. In the olden days of networking, way before Google or Yahoo was born, companies ran e-mail as an application whose data was stored in-house. As such, all the files, documents, messages, and other things you currently use in e-mail were stored in a safe, dark room on the company’s premises. These sounds familiar because you were probably banned from visiting that room due to security reasons…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

As VMware transitions from CEO Paul Maritz to CEO Pat Gelsinger and keeps pushing beyond its server virtualization roots, there are a lot of questions about where the company is headed. Here are 6 key issues the company should address at VMworld.

VMware’s annual VMworld shindig is next week, giving the company a golden opportunity to answer a lot of questions about its future and its future products. Here are five topics the company needs to address at the event where incoming CEO Pat Gelsinger, and out-going CEO Paul Maritz will both keynote…

Grazed from SiliconRepublic. Author: John Kennedy.

The global app development market will be worth US$9bn in 2012 and major shifts in the direction of mobile, agility, cloud computing and open source projects will transform the industry forever, a new report from Gartner claims.

Growth will be driven by evolving software delivery models, new development methodologies, emerging mobile application development (AD) and open source software.

“Application modernisation and increasing agility will continue to be a solid driver for AD spending, apart from other emerging dynamics of cloud, mobility and social computing,” said Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

If your organization has moved past all the excuses to use the public cloud, congratulations! But did you think through your data-integration strategy before deployment? If not, you’ll find it difficult to maintain your corporate data in a public cloud.

The best bang for the cloud computing buck comes from using public cloud resources, such as Amazon Web Services, Google, Rackspace, IBM, and Microsoft. But that means you have to move some of your corporate data to the public cloud to take advantage of its cheap storage and per-use rental of compute cycles.

When you move even a smidgen of data to a public cloud, you quickly understand the need for some sort of synchronization with on-premise enterprise systems. Otherwise, users will rekey data, overnight USB drives, and take other ugly approaches to data movement — it happens more often than most IT organizations realize…