Grazed from Internet Evolution. Author: Mara Jander.

Now that the initial euphoria over the safe landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars has passed, it’s time to start asking some questions about the technology behind this amazing mission and what, if anything, it can contribute to the knowledge of enterprise IT pros.

Actually, IT pros may find they’re right in the swim with NASA (to use an Olympic metaphor), perhaps even pulling ahead of it, when it comes to cloud computing.

Case in point: Given the government’s verbal emphasis on cloud’s value (despite resistance from key agencies), cloud computing hasn’t factored very prominently in the Curiosity mission. Indeed, when I phoned Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL) yesterday, a spokesperson denied that any cloud services at all were used in the making of Curiosity…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Infochimps, the Austin, Texas-based startup that transitioned in February from a data marketplace into a big data platform, has stepped up its abilities to handle streaming data. On Tuesday, it unveiled the Infochimps Platform 1.1, which improves the platform’s real-time analytics engine and turns its Wukong command line interface into a tool for writing scripts that can process streaming data.

The company has described its platform, which is hosted on the Rackspace Cloud, as Heroku for Hadoop — although that characterization is becoming antiquated. While Hadoop is certainly an important part of the Infochimps stack, it’s actually not the focal point. “Usually, people come to us because they have a big data problem and heard they should look at Hadoop,” Infochimps CEO Joe Kelly told me, but they end up accomplishing a lot before they ever turn to Hadoop…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Steven Burke.

GreenPages Technology Solutions CEO Ron Dupler is upping the ante in the solution provider’s no-holds barred cloud-computing services offensive with a big application development bet.

Speaking at GreenPages’ 15th annual summit, billed as "Cloudscape 2," Dupler told about 100 customers that the Kittery, Maine-based company is making "aggressive bets and investments as we move forward around application modernization, big data and business intelligence."

“Applications that aren’t ready to operate in a cloud world is one of the big inhibitors in the shift to the cloud that is going on today,” said Dupler in a keynote address in Portsmouth, N.H. “That’s an area that we see as very important as we move ahead.”…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

The Gartner Gang reports that cloud computing represents the fastest-growing segment of the IT outsourcing market. While still a relatively small piece of this market, it points to a blurring between solutions. Are cloud providers — especially Infrastructure or Platform-as-a-Service vendors — IT outsourcers? Are IT outsourcers and systems integrators becoming cloud vendors? What’s the difference anymore?

Gartner just reported that worldwide spending for IT outsourcing services is on pace to reach $252 billion in 2012, a two-percent increase from 2011 spending of $247 billion. The fastest-growing segment within this market is cloud compute services, which is part of the cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) segment.

Cloud compute services are expected to grow 49% in 2012 to $5.0 billion, up from $3.4 billion in 2011, according to Gartner…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: John Koetsier.

The cloud will save money, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. At least, that’s what top financial experts believe, according to Google.

Google recently commissioned a study with 800 CFOs and other top financial executives at companies with 500 or more employees in the U.S. and Europe. The results are a little startling, given the typical reputation of finance wonks as perhaps just a little behind the times, technologically speaking.

According to the study, conducted by Vanson Bourne, 96 percent of chief financial officers believe that “cloud computing provides their business with quantifiable benefits.” A similar 94 percent said that the cloud will be important to the success of their companies, and just over half believed that cloud computing “offers better value” than traditional outsourcing…

Grazed from Virtual Bridges. Author: PR Announcement.

Virtual Bridges, Inc. today announced California’s Galt Joint Union High School District has deployed VERDE to address the organization’s most complex desktop management challenges, including Windows 7 migration, software deployment, computer maintenance and overall cost.

Galt selected VERDE over competitive offerings due to ease of use, simplicity to administer desktop images and a dependable support staff. The district is rolling out VERDE to multiple campuses, across departments. Prior to VERDE, each time a new software program was acquired, IT staff would have to visit dozens of classrooms at each school to install the program. With VERDE, they can install the program from a central server, improving efficiency and reducing costs…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Imogo Mobile Technologies Corp. (OTCBB:IMTC), a pioneer in cloud computing, announces it has tightened security to beyond military standards for accessing and securing data files of any kind.

With recent increased security cracks in public clouds and databases, like the kind recently suffered by both Apple’s ICloud and Dropbox, Imogo has responded with increased security features for its cloud solutions. The level of encryption offered by Imogo’s cloud service is now rated at 4096 bit, which is considered to be beyond military level security. Imogo is also Master Service Provider accredited, which means their system has been tested to have the highest level of security and has been "Tech Audited."

Imogo spent many millions of dollars to have IBM’s top engineers design and build the back end systems, which are considered to be "state of the art" in security. Very few companies can claim to have this level of investment and technology in their systems, which clearly puts Imogo ahead of the pack and in a class by itself. Data loss is virtually impossible with the use of Imogo’s systems and products…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Fujitsu is the latest vendor to offer a private cloud starter kit to help organisations get up and running with cloud computing, but has taken the concept to the next level by including VMware’s vCloud Director orchestration tool plus services and support.

Dubbed Fujitsu Dynamic Infrastructures for VMware vCloud, the service provides Fujitsu servers and storage hardware combined with Brocade network kit and VMware’s vSphere cloud computing stack.

This is all pre-configured and integrated into a 42U rack, with installation and support services provided by Fujitsu itself…

Grazed from PCAdvisor. Author: Bernard Golden.

It’s easy to understand why, too. AWS represents a disruptive innovation within IT, and it’s important to understand the basis of that disruption to understand what it means for IT going forward.

Clayton Christensen coined the term disruptive innovation in The Innovator’s Dilemma . It occurs when a new entrant into an established market significantly changes customer expectations by providing a new alternative to established solutions.

The most common type of disruptive innovation occurs when a new market entrant figures out how to offer a cheaper, easier-to-use solution-one that is sufficient for many customers in the existing market who are dissatisfied with the current solution’s complexity and cost. Christensen characterizes these dissatisfied customers as "overserved" by current solutions. In other words, these customers have simpler needs but can’t get them addressed by current vendors, as they deliver highly capable, highly complex, expensive solutions and have no interest in offering (what they view as) cheap, stripped-down products…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salaam.

When cloud computing was in its very early stages there were very mixed views as to what it would bring to the future of the IT industry. The industry was divided between the proponents of the positive and negative outcomes of cloud computing. This reaction was very much the same when open source was first introduced.

During the early 2000’s, during the great open source debate, many IT professionals put down open source in favor of proprietary software saying that something which does not undergo the rigorous testing and strict guidelines that proprietary software goes through is only good for the unimportant hobby systems; with the dangers of unaccountability and so on. Because of its lack of “professional ability” large companies still favored proprietary over open source. But we all know the outcome of this –open source won and almost every IT organization now uses open source material to a degree. Even a lot of proprietary software uses open source components…