July 17, 2012 Off

How a startup is seeking to disrupt the recruitment industry by using the cloud

By David

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Srikanth RP.

WinHire Technologies is seeking to disrupt the recruitment market by building the world’s first video social recruitment portal By Srikanth RP, InformationWeek, July 17, 2012

As a late entrant, how do you compete in a market that is already dominated by giants? As a small player with limited ability to capital, how do you scale up without any limits? Startup WinHire Technologies was grappling with these questions, as it rapidly scouted for solutions that could help the firm take advantage of technology and level the playing field with the giants.

WinHire Technologies had a radically different idea. Instead of text-based resumes, the firm wanted to use videos and the reach of the Internet to simplify and improve the process of recruitment. “We wanted to leverage the power of the Internet and the popularity of videos to create the world’s first video social recruitment and networking website,” says Giri Devanur, CEO, WinHire Technologies. On the portal, a job-aspirant can upload his or her video profile, and increase his or her chance of getting hired, as a video can even highlight personality attributes…

July 17, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: VMware shakeup – Maritz is reportedly out

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

A tech trade publication is reporting that VMware CEO Paul Maritz is being pushed out and will be replaced by Pat Gelsinger, the current COO of EMC. EMC owns roughly 80 percent of VMware, the market leader in server virtualization. It’s a rumor we’ve been hearing since June, and on Monday night, CRN published a report that says it has confirmed those rumors, citing “multiple sources familiar with the situation.”

Other rumors circulating say that Maritz has been offered the role of chairman, but not the CEO, of the spin out of the CloudFoundry, Rubicon and Greenplum assets that we reported on this afternoon…

July 17, 2012 Off

The Cloud & the Supply Chain: A Match Made in Heaven

By David

Grazed from EBN. Author: Nicole Lewis.

The demands of extended global supply chains, along with the addition of new suppliers, have placed a greater burden on high-tech electronics manufacturers to collaborate with their partners as they use cloud computing technology to manage inventory, improve forecasts, and sharpen their competitive edge.

Many electronics companies have successfully designed a network that connects their partners and digitizes data that captures every aspect of a product lifecycle — from design, to the procurement of parts, to the manufacturing and distribution of the product. But a more pressing issue arises when high-tech companies seek to leverage their supply chain’s financial and operational data and create new business processes among partners to drive efficiencies and reduce costs…

July 17, 2012 Off

To Operate Smoothly, Businesses Need Clouds

By David

Grazed from The Moscow Times. Author: Editorial Staff.

It is a myth that there is no room for innovation during a period of economic instability. History proves the opposite. Even in the midst of the Great Depression, approximately 70 new research laboratories were established annually in the United States. Furthermore, such high-tech companies as Hewlett Packard were founded during that period. Currently, we are witnessing increasing interest in innovation as well. Intensive discussion about cloud computing started in 2008, when the U.S. recession ceased to be just a pessimistic forecast and became reality.

Why are innovations so important for overcoming the consequences of the crisis? I shall try to explain using clouds as an example.

Cloud computing is an evolution of corporate IT systems that helps to achieve two objectives: first, get rid of the "burden" by transferring capital expenditures into operational ones and, second, improve flexibility and business responsiveness to market challenges. Public and private clouds are the best models to fulfill these two tasks…

July 17, 2012 Off

Is VMware’s brain drain a sign of its influence, or of its demise?

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

The big news out of VMware is that it’s likely spinning out a cloud computing business, but the company also has had a fair share of significant personnel departures over the past year. A talent exodus as VMware ware tries to compete with Microsoft, Google and Amazon to be the big name in cloud computing may indicate that all is not well in Palo Alto.

But this news isn’t all bad. The number of principal engineers and other technical leaders leaving the company and trying to have big impacts elsewhere suggests VMware might achieve mafia status a la Sun Microsystems, Facebook Google or PayPal. Its employees appear to have the vision, skills and reputations that transcend their work at VMware…

July 17, 2012 Off

Venture Capital Good With Cloud, Software, Social

By David

Grazed from InvestorsDaily. Author: Brian Deagon.

Venture capital firms feel positive about investing in cloud computing, software, and social networking, but have the least confidence in the chips and telecom sector, according to a new survey.

The 2012 Global Venture Capital Confidence Survey from Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association also showed venture capital firms are more confident about investing in the U.S. than offshore. The exceptions to that are Brazil, Germany and Israel. The lowest confidence levels were for investing in the U.K., Taiwan and Japan.

On a 1-to-5 scale, with 5 being most confident, investor confidence in the U.S. was 3.26, compared with 2.72 internationally, the survey said. The poll had more than 440 respondents among venture capital and private equity groups in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific and Israel…

July 17, 2012 Off

The IaaS Rush

By David
Contributed Article.  Author: Giridhar L V, Head – VMUnify, MindTree Ltd
CloudCow Contributed Article
 

The IaaS Rush

 

Why is everybody getting into the IaaS business? For a long time, it was only Amazon, then Rackspace, Savvis etc followed but there were no new significant players for a long time. However, most recently, IaaS has been really hot; the new entrants into this space are Google, Microsoft and HP. While Amazon, Rackspace, Savvis have predominantly been operating in the IaaS space, Google was more of a PaaS and SaaS player. It did a little bit on the IaaS side with Google drive but nothing to the extent of Amazon S3. Microsoft was also a platform player with Azure, but recently introduced an IaaS offering into Azure. For HP, it was a brand new entry into the Cloud Space. While I am not sure about what technology Google is using to power its IaaS (should most probably be something based on Xen or KVM), HP’s IaaS management layer is run on OpenStack with probably Xen as the Virtualization layer.

July 17, 2012 Off

New Microsoft Office ropes in Skype, Yammer, SkyDrive

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and company showed off the latest version of Office Monday, they hit all the right marks — a touch interface, cloud storage, VoIP integration and social networking tie-ins.

The new Office (now in customer preview) will be both “ink-” and “touch-” enabled. It will store user documents to Microsoft’s SkyDrive by default. (Microsoft already said it was tying SkyDrive cloud storage closely into its upcoming Windows 8 operating system.) And the new Office Home and Student 2013 RT versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote will ship with Microsoft’s promised ARM-based Windows 8 machines including Surface…

July 16, 2012 Off

Making a Fuss About the Mobile Cloud

By David

Grazed from InternetEvolution. Author: Kim Davies.

What are we to make of the "mobile cloud," and is it something midmarket enterprises should be focused on?

It’s self-evident, I suppose, that mobile cloud computing implies a cloud architecture geared to serving mobile connections. Let’s take a look at an academic definition:

MCC is an amalgam of three foundations, namely cloud computing, mobile computing, and networking. The most promising and intriguing characteristics of MCC paradigm are mobility and rich functionality. We define mobile cloud computing as "a rich mobile computing technology that leverages unified elastic resources of varied clouds and network technologies toward unrestricted functionality, storage, and mobility…"

That’s a definition offered by researchers at the University of Malaya’s Mobile Cloud Computing Research Lab, and it has the merits of being both current and clear. Their 2012 paper on the subject, from which the definition is taken, is well worth reading in full…

July 16, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing Growth Still Going Strong

By David

Grazed from MidSize Insider. Author: Shawn Drew.

There are tremors of economic uncertainty reverberating throughout almost every segment of IT. Through it all, cloud computing continues to grow as strong as ever. With performance and management benefits that non-cloud solutions have difficulty matching, it’s little wonder that the cloud is one of the few areas of IT still showing growth. But recent surveys have shown that midsize businesses may be a little slow to adopt the cloud and, in this market, that could be killing them.

Gartner IT Predictions

This certainly isn’t the perfect time for many businesses. Enormous economic uncertainty in the United States, Europe, and China has put a damper on many business performance predictions, with analysts choosing caution in the face of such an uneasy customer base. However, this global downtrend doesn’t seem to be affecting IT as badly, and it has the cloud to thank…