Grazed from eWeek. Author: Robert J. Mullins.

Competitors like SAP and Oracle used to scoff at the business model of Salesforce.com with its software as a service delivered in the cloud. Now they are emulating Salesforce’s model and they, along with Microsoft, are trying to apply more competitive pressure on the cloud enterprise application company.

Salesforce upped its game Aug. 14 with the introduction of Salesforce Communities, which is built on its Chatter enterprise social media platform and is designed to better integrate social media with a company’s actual business processes…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Klint Finley.

Back in 2006, cloud computing company Joyent offered a lifetime subscription to bundle of hosting services for a one time fee of $500. Now, according to an e-mail sent to customers, Joyent is pulling the plug on those lifetime accounts. Customers are predictably upset, but not for the reasons you might expect.

Here’s what’s going on: Joyent acquired a web hosting company called TextDrive back in 2005. TextDrive was founded in 2004 by Dean Allen, creator of the content management systems Textile and TextPattern, and Jason Hoffman, who also co-founded Joyent. As Watts Martin explains, TextDrive sold lifetime subscriptions to customers to fund the company rather than raise venture capital. Customers felt like investors in the company. Drew McLellan wrote on Hacker News:…

Grazed from TheHuffington Post. Author: Robert Holleyman.

When Congress created the Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) in 2008, cloud computing was unfamiliar to most people outside of the IT industry. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing segments of the information economy. In the interim, recognizing the potential to capitalize on efficiencies of scale and capture maximum benefit from federal IT spending, the Administration has been implementing a “Cloud First” policy to guide its procurement. Now, as IPEC gears up to issue its second Joint Strategic Plan on IP Enforcement, there is an opportunity — indeed, a necessity — to ensure we are guarding against misappropriation or infringement of IP rights in the cloud.

In its first Joint Strategic Plan, the Administration made substantial progress in marshaling the combined resources of the federal government to enforce the IP protections that have long encouraged US technology innovation. Among other noteworthy accomplishments, US officials raised end-user software piracy as a top-tier international trade issue, developed guidance on technology neutrality in federal software procurement, worked with other countries on Special 301 lists to develop concrete action plans for reducing piracy, launched US Embassy IP interagency teams for 17 countries, and worked with payment processors and advertisers to stop doing business with pirates and counterfeiters…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

IBM is buying Texas Memory Systems, a privately held flash memory maker. Houston-based TMS is known for its RamSan rack-mount flash storage line.. IBM already offered SSD from third parties in some of its storage systems and servers, although a spokesman said TMS was not one of those sources.

There is no doubt that flash or solid-state memory is a hot commodity with industry giants like IBM and EMC buying up expertise. EMC purchased XTremeIO last spring for a reported $430 million…

Grazed from PCMag. Author: John C. Dvorak.

Anyone who reads me regularly knows that I am not a huge fan of cloud computing and its implications. I’m even less enamored by the idea of paying a monthly fee to use my word processor.

That said, I must admit that Adobe may have found the sweet spot. I actually like what the company is doing with its new Creative Cloud. Less cloud computing than other architectures, it’s designed to fast-track people into the newest products rather than having them spend about the same amount of money to ride the Adobe roller coaster.

Ride the Adobe roller coaster? It’s when you buy Adobe Creative Suite 2, skip CS3, and get CS4. Or, skip CS4 also and spring for CS5. Now, you have so many new features that you wind up behind the curve. With Creative Cloud, for $49.99 a month, you’re always up-to-date. The system was unveiled in April and since then, new components have been added. Everything is included in the $2,599 master collection, plus free websites and other cloud-only services including Muse, a fascinating Web development tool…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Mike Fratto.

Rackspace has released its Private Cloud software distribution as a free, installable ISO file. Enterprises can sign up for commercial support for a starting fee of $2,500 and a monthly charge of $100 per node. Private Cloud includes Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server operating system; a KVM hypervisor; Opscode Chef, which automates the installation; and OpenStack Essex’s Compute, Image Service, Identity Service and Dashboard modules. The only thing missing is OpenStack Storage, which Rackspace says will be available in the next release.

Private Cloud is the same software configuration that Rackspace runs in its Open Cloud service, which we analyzed in "Rackspace Open Cloud Takes on Amazon AWS." While installing Linux and OpenStack isn’t difficult–there’s a complete set of instructions on OpenStack.org–Rackspace Private Cloud simplifies installation by pre-configuring most common options, reducing some 2,000 variables to 10 installation steps for the controller node and seven steps for the compute node. This allows a company to launch OpenStack faster, and also means Rackspace has a known configuration, which simplifies its commercial support…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Pure Storage netted $40 million in Series D funding and will use it to build out European operations and staff up its sales, marketing and engineering teams. The new round, led by Index Ventures with contributions from current backers Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures, brings total capital raised to a healthy $95 million.

Mountain View, CA.-based Pure Storage is one of a handful of companies evangelizing use of solid state storage — which is faster but more expensive than disk storage — nearly everywhere. Many companies, including storage leader EMC, preach a tiered approach, using flash where it makes sense but disks and even tape where that is the more appropriate and cost-effective choice. (EMC itself may be wobbling on this stance, given that it spent a reported $400 million on Israeli flash storage player EXtremeIO.)…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Callidus Software Inc. (NASDAQ: CALD), the leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing, announced today that it won three Stevie® awards in the 2012 International Business Awards (IBAs). CallidusCloud® was awarded Gold in the ‘Computer Software’ category, Silver in the ‘Company of the Year — Computer Software’ category and another Gold for its Sales Effectiveness Suite in the ‘Best New Product or Service of the Year’ category.

"CallidusCloud is thrilled to be named the winner of three Stevie Awards in the International Business Awards," said Leslie Stretch, President and CEO, CallidusCloud. "We are honored to have our suite recognized as the best new product. We are seeing unprecedented momentum with customers of all sizes around the world adopting our technology. The combination of rapid time-to-value, ease of use and a robust, multitenant SaaS infrastructure is extremely compelling. CallidusCloud has a relentless focus on delivering value to our customers, and we will continue to innovate with respect to our state-of-the-art cloud. These awards are a glowing testament to the talent and dedication of our world-class team at a time when our business is growing like never before."…

Grazed from AllAfrica. Author: Editorial Staff.

Vox Telecom’s Cloud Server Dashboard public cloud service has achieved VMware vCloud Powered status, a move that will allow the company’s customers to enjoy all the advantages of third party cloud services, while maintaining full control over their IT environments.

"Our cloud services are underpinned by VMware’s leading virtualisation and cloud tools, vSphere and vCloud Director," says hosting manager Justin Elms. "Cloud Server Dashboard provides a set of cloud computing services across a common platform, supporting the largest set of existing applications and offering application mobility that only VMware can provide…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Fresh on the heels of a $10.7 million venture capital round, startup PLUMgrid is staffing up, naming a long-time networking technologist Lele Nardin as VP of engineering. Nardin most recently was SVP of engineering at Ericsson Silicon Valley and before that spent 15 years at Cisco where, at various times, he led development of Cisco’s popular 7200 router and the Cisco PXF and Quantum Flow processors. Most recently he headed the company’s IOS software organization.

“We’ve completed nearly two years of development and are moving to the next phase — going to market and supporting customers, we’re fortunate to have Lele,” PLUMgrid CEO Awais Nemat, another Cisco veteran, said in an interview Wednesday. He still isn’t talking — much — about PLUMgrid’s product, which Nemat said is already running at select, undisclosed beta customer sites. Very generally, he said PLUMgrid’s software runs on standard hardware moving packets around and will attack what he sees is a $40 billion market opportunity…