CDW Demonstrates Cloud Computing Benefits and Options for Implementing HP CloudSystem Solutions
CDW LLC (CDW), a leading provider of technology solutions to business, government, education and healthcare, announced it has been designated an HP Cloud Center of Excellence, based upon the expertise of its solution architects and integration of HP systems into CDW’s newly opened Technology Experience Center. The center offers customers live cloud computing demonstrations, which may be viewed real-time from any CDW or customer location, as well as in person at the center.
CDW’s HP Cloud Center of Excellence features HP CloudSystem, a complete and integrated solution to build and manage services across private, public and hybrid cloud environments. In addition to HP servers, the center also includes HP storage and networking solutions, including HP Tipping Point network security offerings…
Taking SaaS to the next level
Software as a service has some wildly successful poster boys such as Salesforce.com, Google Apps, NetSuite, Workday, ADP and Concur. Every new independent software vendor is developing for the SaaS market. And for the established software companies, it’s a case of articulate and deliver on a cloud strategy or die.
On the enterprise customer side, there is an increasing familiarity with the SaaS delivery model; continued pressure on IT budgets; and a growing comfort level with the security and performance parameters of cloud computing.
So, why isn’t the SaaS market bigger? What’s holding it back?…
Cloud Computing: The Other Futures of Enterprise IT
Technological change has always outpaced change within the IT organization. Until now.
Between cloud computing, big data, consumer IT, executives feeling capable of making more of their own technology decisions, and the ongoing business pressures for speed, agility and innovation, executives are eager to rethink and reinvent the IT department.
In our survey of 152 senior business executives and 162 IT executives, more executives singled out the IT organization than any other as the function they wanted to rebuild from scratch. Half will revamp their IT organization in the next 12 months…
For Cloud Computing Solutions, Look for Business Outcomes, Not Definitions
A couple of weeks ago, I attended IBM’s Cloud Innovation Analyst Forum in Chicago. The event kicked off with a panel discussion where company customers, including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Top Coder and Colleagues in Care, discussed their experiences with solutions powered by IBM cloud technologies. The benefits that the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee gained in reducing SAP client set-up time by 90% was especially impressive and went right into the heart of the problem of supporting 80,000 students in multiple campus settings. Reducing backup time by 99% overcame time constraints and helped reduce their risk as well.
Interestingly, some of the analysts in the audience expressed concern about whether this was really a cloud solution. In fact, we often hear that using virtualization and application service provider (ASP) or other hosting models does not qualify as a cloud solution. To an extent, these concerns are right as SaaS providers do utilize different architecture models, like web services fine-tuned to provide multi-tenancy applications with a low entry point for consumers. As an example, SalesForce has entry points as low as $50 a year for basic contact management capability that can be enhanced with full web service capabilities for approximately $300 a year…
Windows Azure Recipe: Mobile Cloud Computing
A while back, mashups were all the rage. The idea was to compose solutions that provided aggregation and integration across applications and services to make information more available, useful, and personal. Mashups ushered in the era of Web 2.0 in all it’s socially connected goodness. They taught us that to be successful, we needed to add web service APIs to our web applications.
Web and client based mashups met with great success and have evolved even further with the introduction of the internet connected smartphone. Nothing is more available, useful, or personal than our smartphones. The current generation of cloud connected mobile computing mashups allow our mobilized workforces to receive, process, and react to information from disparate sources faster than ever before…
Privacy Rules, Euro Crisis and Recession Stall European Cloud Adoption
The combination of European privacy rules, multi-country business processes, the Euro crisis and a lingering recession will continue to delay cloud computing adoption in Europe by at least two years compared to the U.S., according to the IT research firm Gartner (News 
– Alert).
Although interest in the cloud is high in Europe, the diversity of Europe’s 44 different nations will result in slow cloud adoption this region of the world, according to Paolo Malinverno, vice president at Gartner.
“The opportunities for cloud computing value are valid all over the world, and the same is true for some of the risks and costs,” Malinverno said. “However, some of cloud computing’s potential risks and costs – namely security, transparency and integration – which are generally applicable worldwide, take on a different meaning in Europe.”…
Cloud Computing: Elliott Management Turns Screw on BMC to Sell
Elliott Management, the $20 billion hedge fund that now owns 6.5% of BMC and wants it to sell out to anybody that’ll better its $6.8 billion market cap, filed a 36-page PowerPoint presentation with the SEC Thursday laying out its case.
Elliott helped push Novell into the arms of Attachmate and thinks that BMC could be fodder for Oracle, HP, Cisco, CA, Dell, EMC, Symantec, IBM or, for that matter, a technology-focused private equity firm such as KKR, TPG, THL, Bain Capital, Blackstone Group, Apax Partners, Silver Lake and Golden Gate Capital.
BMC’s software manages distributed server networks and mainframes. Wall Street has previously offered those names but figures BMC would probably have to be split up to get a sale done…
Keeping Your Cloud Collaboration Services Options Open
There’s lots of pressure on IT folks these days to address three issues at the same time: mobile, cloud computing and social networking. That’s a lot for even the largest of organizations to take on simultaneously. But business users are being relentless in their demands that IT organizations be proactive about delivering these capabilities to the organizations starting preferably tomorrow.
The interesting thing about these three trends is that in many ways they are really just natural extensions of each other, which is the thinking that went into the development of a new Bitrix cloud computing service that was launched today…
According to Stephen Ankenman, senior technology consultant for Bitrix, the Bitrix24 creates a social intranet workspace in the cloud that combines 30 content, project, collaboration, communication, reporting and management tools under a common social media-style interface. That interface makes the environment simple to use in a way that can easily be extended out to mobile computing devices using both HTML5 and native interfaces.
Cloud Computing: HP and Oracle Go to Court
HP’s attempt to get a court to order Oracle to continue to develop software for HP’s mission-critical Itanium-based Integrity boxes began Thursday with jury selection, a selection that could be harder, the Recorder says, because of HP’s announcement last week that it’s going to lay off 27,000 people.
Oracle claims the Itanium is at end-of-life, that the only reason Intel hasn’t pulled the plug on the chip is because HP is paying Intel hundred of millions of dollars to keep it on life support and stopped writing new software for the "dying platform" 14 months ago, ending a disintegrating 10-year relationship with HP.
HP, which makes a packet on the system – or did before all this started – claims Oracle is in breach of contract – an unconventional agreement it claims was forged to overcome its objections to its former CEO Mark Hurd going to work at Oracle as co-president….
Infosys opens development centre to train employees in cloud tech
Infosys has started a development centre within the company to train its current and prospective employees on cloud computing technologies.
This line of business started last fiscal, currently trains 3,000 of its employees who work on cloud computing-related technologies. It has the capacity to train 5,000 employees in a year.
Employees will be trained on technologies such as big data, virtualisation and new ways of coding for companies wanting to shift from mainframe systems to the cloud. Infosys is looking to train system architects and software engineers in Java and Hadoop technologies…