Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Cumulogic, a company with strong Sun Microsystems and Java DNA, wants to make its technology the foundation of enterprise-class PaaSes to be offered by telcos, hosting companies and other service providers.

The two-year old company started out building a managed public PaaS that it would sell to developers, but changed course, said Mike Soby, a CA veteran who joined the company as CEO in February. Now the idea is to be more an arms dealer to service providers that want to offer an enterprise-friendly Java PaaS to their customers.

“We want to be in the software business, not the service provider business.” On Wednesday, that PaaS infrastructure software, which has been in beta for some time, is generally available…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Dropbox has doubled the space in its existing $99-a-year Pro 50GB and $199-a-year 100GB cloud storage plans without raising prices and introduced a new $499-a-year 500GB plan.

It says it’s responding to user demand though it’s really more a matter of trying to keep up with the competition. Google Drive only costs $60 a year for 100GB and Microsoft’s SkyDrive is $50 a year for 107GB. Current Dropbox Pro users have been automatically updated to the added space, and all new Pro users can sign up access the new 100GB, 200GB and 500GB plans.

Consumers can still get 2GB for free and businesses may be better off with Dropbox for Teams, which starts at around $800 a year for five users.

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ), the European Union’s version of America’s Supreme Court, told Oracle last week that it can’t stop the resale of its customers’ castoff software, specifically the stuff that’s downloaded from the Internet.

It held that the new owner can download the "used" software from Oracle’s site along with updates and patches covered by the original maintenance agreement.

Oracle tried to argue that downloaded software was different from software physically transmitted on a CD or DVD…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Cloud Ventures.

The backbone of our upcoming submission to the Canadian Government on how they can best manage their $400m VC industry booster, is a deep expertise in Enterprise Cloud Computing.

We will be able to describe a high-growth fund because we’re able to define where the high-growth industry sector opportunities are. As Gartner describe, Cloud is booming amongst an overall lackluster IT sector growth, forecast to reach over $200 billion by 2016.

This will be shared via various ongoing activities, starting with this first document, my snapshot of ‘The Investors Guide to Enterprise Cloud Computing‘…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

MicroStrategy is adding an Express option for potential users of its cloud-based BI (business intelligence) service, the company announced Tuesday.

The Express edition, now in beta, is a move up from MicroStrategy Cloud’s Personal version, which is available at no charge, but doesn’t offer as much as the full-featured Platform edition.

Personal is aimed at individual users, who can upload information from Excel spreadsheets and Salesforce.com to MicroStrategy Cloud and then run visualizations and analytics against it. The resulting reports can be shared through blog posts or social media…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

With the OpenStack project turning two years old soon amid what will no doubt be a ton of vendor-generated hoopla, Ignacio Llorente wants the world to know that the more mature OpenNebula project continues to evolve, just a lot more quietly.

The latest update, OpenNebula 3.6, released Tuesday, features virtual machine rescheduling, disk cloning and integration with OpenNebula’s new OpenNebula’s Marketplace. That makes it easier for users to find and deploy cloud appliances with a mouse click, Llorente, director of OpenNebula, told me in a recent interview.

The battle for cloud supremacy is on with various OpenStack adherents claiming that their iteration of the open-source cloud stack, launched by NASA and Rackspace two years, ago is key. Then, in April, Citrix, a former OpenStack proponent, threw a monkey wrench into the mix, when it said it would pitch CloudStack as an alternative to OpenStack. That happened just a month after Eucalyptus, which had been seen as a cloud also-ran, jarred the world by aligning itself with Amazon’s public infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Others in the OpenStack claque — including Hewlett-Packard and (somewhat confusingly) Nebula – are all jockeying to position their OpenStack implementations, taking pot shots at Amazon or VMware or Eucalyptus or each other as their needs dictate. Meanwhile, OpenNebula, over in Europe, kept its nose clean and its mouth shut…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

HP CloudSystem Hosting partner SHI International revealed today that its Managed Private Cloud (MPC) solution has been certified by HP and is now available through the HP direct sales channel. Through this expanded partnership, HP customers wanting to buy private cloud services can purchase SHI’s Managed Private Cloud directly through their HP sales representative.

Built using HP CloudSystem solutions, the SHI Managed Private Cloud is an on-site, appliance-based approach to cloud computing. It utilizes the Managed Private vCore to enable Virtual Machines (VMs) to exist with an organization’s data center while being remotely monitored and supported by SHI Labs. SHI’s Managed Private Cloud is delivered via a usage-based pricing model, offering easy acceleration to the cloud with minimal upfront investment…

Grazed from Credit Union Times. Author: Peter Strozniak.

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council released a statement Tuesday highlighting key elements that financial institutions need to address before deciding whether to outsource cloud computing services.

In its summary statement, the FFIEC said financial institutions have to consider the “fundamentals of risk and risk management defined in the FFIEC Information Technology Examination Handbook (IT Handbook), especially the Outsourcing Technology Services Booklet (Outsourcing Booklet).”

The outsourcing booklet reviews specific issues of cloud computing such as data classification, data segregation and recoverability. The booklet also addresses vendor management, information security, legal, regulatory and reputational considerations, business continuity planning and auditing…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

A move to the cloud requires a certain amount of prep work in the enterprise. If you listen to the spin from those who provide cloud services and technology, it’s no big deal. I’m here to tell you it is. To ready your enterprise for public and private cloud adoption, you need to focus on three key areas:

• Becomint service-aware
• Dealing with distributed security
• Upgrading skills

Becoming service-aware is not the same as becoming service-oriented, but if you’re service-oriented, you’re already service-aware. This is key to understanding how to work with clouds, which typically use APIs — in other words, services…