Grazed from ITWire. Author: Beverley Head.

The advent of ubiquitous and affordable cloud computing is bringing to an end a 30-year long era during which change in IT systems was synonymous with risk.

According to Paul Strong, chief technology officer global customer and field initiatives for VMware who is currently visiting Australia, advances in cloud computing means that it is now far simpler and less risky to introduce information systems change to organisations as applications were increasingly being decoupled from infrastructure.

This he said would allow CIOs to be restored to their proper position as chief information officers, rather than chief infrastructure officers…

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Geoff Simon.

When customers go online and complete web forms, they’re creating business opportunities. Millions of companies manage those opportunities with intranet-based CRM systems that help them process leads and orders. But for most companies, there was no fast, easy way to exchange information among ecommerce sites, CRM, and the intranet. Now there is, according to Bitrix, Inc. who recently launched Bitrix24, a cloud-based service that allows companies to create digital workspaces. And now with this integration, website orders and leads are automatically imported to the CRM via a smart connection.

With so much competition surrounding collaboration in the cloud, Bitrix has taken a unique approach in it’s design. By allowing companies to take their entire instance of their Bitrix cloud and move it to an on-site server of their choice, the worry about the whole public vs. private cloud computing deployments going forward aren’t affected by decisions to use Bitrix24 today. This gives customers the flexibility to deploy whatever solution they want down the road without having to worry about an existing system limiting their options later…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathan Eddy.

Small and midsize businesses are turning to cloud computing as an easier-to-manage, lower-cost alternative to traditional computing, but concerns over security and cost of implementation remained barriers to adoption, according to a survey of more than 100 companies by cloud computing specialist Twin Strata.

Overall, five out of six respondents indicated that they were either already using or plan to use cloud storage in some capacity, making it the most widely planned cloud initiative – even more than software as a service (SaaS)…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Liam Lahey.

Network performance monitoring sure isn’t what it used to be. Given the changes that have unfolded in the past few years–private clouds, public clouds, the growing need for Wi-Fi access and increase in mobile devices–the very idea of a network belonging to an organization has all but evaporated. So how can organizations get a view across the network? That’s the question facing enterprises today.

"Old-school tools demanded you owned all the pieces of infrastructure in order to measure and monitor it," Matt Stevens, CTO at AppNeta in Boston, explained. "At the end of the day, there is no single network. It’s a combination of multiple networks and the single biggest challenge is how to understand end-to-end performance across networks that I don’t own and yet still have to rely on."…

Grazed from HostReview. Author: PR Announcement.

ViaWest provides cloud computing environment for Zulahoo’s hosting — Anticipating rapid growth, Zulahoo required a solution with on-demand scalability — Significant cost savings and customer support made ViaWest the clear choice for Zulahoo’s cloud solution

ViaWest, one of the largest privately-held data center, cloud computing and managed services providers in North America, announces it has been selected by Zulahoo to provide on-demand cloud computing services with its KINECTed(TM) Cloud platform. Zulahoo is an Internet start-up community commerce portal focused on promoting secure and private collaboration services. As a company anticipating rapid growth, Zulahoo was looking for a scalable and flexible cloud-based solution…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Adrian Sanders.

Most small business owners understand cloud computing as a tool. A pay-as-you-go, web based tool. Not more, not less. And they’re pretty much right.

Thing is, tools matter. They carry distinct advantages and disadvantages, which are sometimes subtle, long term, and structural. Cloud computing is no exception: besides the usual advantages, cloud based tools help businesses become more transparent, more flexible, and (ultimately) more profitable. Here’s how.

1. Cloud computing makes business more transparent.

First off, cloud computing tools tend to centralize everything together. Contacts and files and tasks aren’t spread across multiple desktops or servers anymore: they’re nested online, in one place, always. This tends to make business more transparent, as it’s harder to partition data off than it is to keep things open. We’ve seen clients go from pitting reps against one another to providing shared incentives and a company-wide contact repository. That’s a crazy change, and it happened because of cloud based tools…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

Red Hat is planning to roll out a number of product sets for building hybrid clouds over the next few months, the company announced Wednesday at the Red Hat Summit conference in Boston.

"This is a new era for Red Hat," said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering, during a press conference. Years ago, customers were primarily Red Hat Linux customers, but now they’re consuming a number of the vendor’s products, he said. To this end, the new hybrid cloud announcements represent Red Hat’s intention to integrate groups of products into single offerings with their own road maps, he said.

The OpenShift Enterprise PaaS offering will bundle Red Hat’s CloudForms management framework along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss middleware.

OpenShift was first launched last year as a public PaaS (platform-as-a-service) offering hosted by Red Hat. "What we heard from [early users] is that they love [OpenShift], but they want to consume it completely inside their data center," as well as in hybrid form, leading to the new on-premises option, Stevens said…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

FORTRUST, the Rocky Mountain Region’s premium data center and colocation services provider, today announced that Ajubeo, a national provider of enterprise-class cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), has chosen its Denver, Colorado data center for their high-density cloud computing colocation deployment. The decision was based on FORTRUST’s 100% uptime track record as well as its ability to accommodate Ajubeo’s need for 17 kW per cabinet/rack. FORTRUST owns and operates the 224,000 square-foot data center that is an SSAE 16 SOC 1 and 2 Type 2 compliant facility in Denver, Colorado.

Cloud infrastructure companies such as Ajubeo are ideal customers for FORTRUST due to their high-growth potential, interconnection ecosystem development and on-site co-marketing synergies such as data center consolidation endeavors that include hybrid colocation to cloud deployments. Analysts have projected the cloud computing market to grow at a 56% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next five years…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Google’s new infrastructure-as-a-service offering Compute Engine is a big, big deal in the world of cloud computing. My colleague Om Malik covered the details in a post earlier today, and we’ve both offered our pre-emptive views in posts breaking the news that Compute Engine was coming and then confirming it would be announced at IO.

Now that it’s a reality, here are five things I think Google Compute Engine means for the cloud industry…