Dell today announced an expansion to its cloud client computing offerings with an array of enhanced end points, storage solutions and reference architectures validated by VMware, enabling more organizations to embrace the flexibility, productivity and cost advantages of desktop virtualization.

As organizations offer tailored work style options to enhance worker productivity, attract and retain employees, and increase competitiveness, they increasingly consider desktop virtualization to enable their mobile workforce and embrace social media and BYOD (bring your own device) programs. With Dell’s announcements today, the company extends its position in delivering end-to-end virtual solutions that drive increased flexibility and performance and support organizations’ high performance application environments.

Grazed from CRN. Author: Kevin McLaughlin.

VMware is discontinuing an unpopular server virtualization-licensing program and will focus on marketing vSphere and its other cloud computing products as a unified stack, CRN has learned.

In its upcoming release of vSphere 5.1, VMware is getting rid of vRAM entitlements, which debuted with vSphere 5 and determine how much memory customers are permitted to allocate to virtual machines on the host, according to sources familiar with VMware’s plans.

VMware will return to its previous CPU-based licensing model and will announce the move at VMworld when it unveils vSphere 5.1, sources told CRN…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Florence de Borja.

With OpenStack almost finished, Rackspace has taken its own initiative to rebrand itself in order to put emphasis on open cloud. Although it is keeping its Rackspace Hosting name, there’s going to be a new logo as it moves to offer open cloud computing. The announcement is made in time for the release of its 2nd quarter earnings. With the introduction of OpenStack, Rackspace is set to directly compete with Amazon together with its partners, VMware and Microsoft, which also have plans of providing cloud computing services. Internap and Hewlett-Packard are also part of the OpenStack administrators.

According to Rackspace’s CMO Suaad Sait, the rebranding move is just an extension of its “fanatical support” mantra. The company will continue to be committed in the provision of deployment choice like public, hybrid, private and on-premise cloud alternatives…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Rick Whiting.

Cloud computing, business analytics, social computing, mobility and "smarter planet" represent major growth opportunities for solution providers, IBM channel executive Bill Donohue told attendees at UBM Channel’s XChange 2012 conference in Dallas Monday. And, IBM is taking steps to help its channel partners transition to these new technology markets.

"This is a big, big, big opportunity in these new, higher-value solution areas," said Donohue, an IBM veteran who was named vice president of IBM North American business partner and mid-market sales several months ago. But, he noted the opportunities mean changes for many partners, in terms of both partner business models and the types of customers with which they engage.

Donohue opened by sharing the results of surveys IBM has conducted with both CEOs and CIOs. Most surprising from the CEO survey was the fact that more chief executives now identify evolving technologies as the most important external force impacting their organizations, ahead of other external market factors and macroeconomic trends…

Grazed from SecurityInfoWatch. Author: Steve Van Till.

The cloud computing market is exploding. According to technology research firm Gartner, the market was worth over $100 billion in 2012 and is expected to double within the next four years. With a growing range of "Security-as-a-Service" offerings from access control to video surveillance, recurring revenue business models have grown far beyond their origins in alarm monitoring and now pervade every aspect of our industry.

Vendors responded to this gold rush with product offerings designed to put integrators into the RMR business. They’re also offering to save end users big up-front expenses while reducing total cost of ownership…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Nari Kannan.

The Commonwealth Bank, one of Australia’s leading providers of integrated financial services, has set up a private cloud that runs internal applications as a service. These applications use more than 300 Oracle databases, all of which have been consolidated into on-demand Oracle instances that can be provisioned very quickly by application development teams within a browser interface. This has reduced the lead time for development teams at the Commonwealth Bank provisioning a production quality environment from three months to two minutes.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com R&D leverages cloud computing to vastly speed up release cycles. Major releases come every quarter, but incremental improvements are added in monthly, weekly and even daily builds. The company’s cloud infrastructure helps it maintain a single, unified code base that geographically distributed development teams can use. Those teams are successfully combining agile development and continuous integration/delivery with cloud computing…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Brian Proffitt.

Cloud computing, particularly public software as a service (SaaS), may have an unlooked-for advantage over "shrink-wrapped" software–freedom from the tax man. But that advantage may not last forever.

Many states in the US have particular rules about sales taxes that mostly revolve around the pre-Internet rule of thumb that runs along the lines of "if the business does not have a presence in the state, then they don’t need to pay sales taxes."

This is one of the reasons that (until recently) Amazon could get away with selling goods so cheaply: they didn’t have to pay sales tax because for the most part they weren’t a physical presence most states. As various state lawmakers clued into the fact that there was indeed a lot of untaxed commerce being done within their borders, they began to impose sales tax on Amazon’s sales…

Grazed from TechWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

The growth of diverse mobile devices in the enterprise is forcing IT managers to become more platform-agnostic in the way they manage their mobile applications and platforms, with web apps and cloud computing also driving this change.

This growth has major management implications, says Gartner analyst Phillip Redman. “As smartphones proliferate in the enterprise, companies are struggling to manage policy, security and support. However, enterprise mobile device management software is evolving to offer smartphone (and other device) support across a variety of platforms.”

He adds, “Although some of the vendors and products have been around for a long time, mobile device management (MDM) is a nascent market, and the vendors’ offerings have little consistency. Many come from mobile messaging and security to support MDM, and, worldwide, there are more than 60 companies in this space.”…