Grazed from Wired.  Author: Jacques Pavyenli.

IBM and many others have been extolling the real business benefits of Enterprise 2.0, or more recently, social business, for several years: improving customer engagement; increasing workforce productivity; and speeding and improving product and service innovation. Lately, though, I and my colleagues have seen social business adoption move from “nice to have” to a strategic imperative. There are three intertwined trends that seem to be supercharging social business adoption:

The growth of social networks for business. Social networking account for 22% of all time spent online. Real business is taking place today in public and private social networks. It has moved far beyond using LinkedIn for recruiting, or Facebook for consumer marketing outreach. The benefits accrue quickly from being able to communicate and collaborate easily with extended networks of employees, partners, customers, across internal and external social networks…

Say you’ve got an application that’s been running in-house but is now nearing end of life. You find a cloud service that can achieve the same result. You evaluate the vendor’s infrastructure and security mechanisms, processes and procedures and determine that they’re sufficient to meet your needs. You’re looking forward to outsourcing this to the cloud and relieving yourself of all the associated responsibilities. It’s all smooth sailing ahead, right?.

Maybe, but unfortunately, there’s one more thing: You can’t outsource your compliance obligations to a cloud vendor.

If you move a function to the cloud that’s governed by legal or regulatory requirements and later your company falls out of compliance due to an error on the cloud vendor’s part, the law won’t go after the vendor – it will come after you. So you need to ensure that the cloud vendor can fully comply on your behalf…

Grazed from Information Management.  Author: Mark A. Smith.

The company’s new leader in cloud computing is Lars Dalgaard, previously CEO of SuccessFactors and now part of the executive board of SAP. I assessed SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors when it occurred. As part of the combined organization, SuccessFactors continues to conduct semi-independent in marketing, sales and product development, but now it has more applications and people that were part of SAP’s cloud computing efforts. SAP unveiled its global payroll software, which is now part of its Employee Central suite, and both of these can operate as software as a service in the cloud.

The company boasted about its 200-person localization team deployed around the world to bolster international efforts. SAP is making progress on expanding its portfolio, including its human capital management applications. Many companies that use SAP HR applications on-premises should look at SuccessFactors for the future, since its software leaps past the older SAP software in many capabilities, including usability and capability…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

At EMC World 2012, EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) today introduced its largest-ever wave of new transformative products and technologies–42 in total. Today’s announcements mark the company’s most significant single-day launch of new capabilities for customers and partners, delivering a sweeping refresh that spans key products across its entire information storage, backup, virtualization and management portfolio. As a result, EMC is taking IT efficiency and agility to new levels within both traditional and virtualized data centers.  Through its market-leading and enhanced information infrastructure portfolio, the company is making it easier for customers to more quickly take advantage of the shift to Hybrid Cloud computing with data at its core, and implement the changes needed as they transform their IT, their business and their talent base…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Robert J. Mullins.

As the Open Source Business Conference gets underway in San Francisco, a survey shows that open-source software is contributing to development in some of the top IT trends of the day.

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Appcore, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service company, today announced their partnership with IP-Converge, a telecommunications and IT provider and data center facility operator in the Philippines, to deliver cloud hosting services in the region.

The solution chosen for deployment was Appcore Onsite(TM), an IaaS solution which incorporates hardware, software, networking and support into a single cloud computing on-site platform. Appcore Onsite’s easy-to-use software modules include Launch to Cloud(TM), a one-step process which enables users to provision servers in five minutes and select from a comprehensive store of applications…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Financial Executives Research Foundation (FERF) and Intacct today announced the availability of a new cloud computing research report, titled: "Building the Business Case for Cloud Computing." FERF, the research affiliate of Financial Executives International (FEI), the leading advocate for the views of corporate financial management, conducted all the research behind the report – including interviewing CFOs from a diverse array of industries. The announcement was made from the 2012 FEI Leadership Summit, taking place this week in Orlando, Florida.

 

The new FERF report takes a broad look at the motivations for choosing a cloud-based system, the tangible benefits of the cloud, and the impact of cloud computing in transforming the finance function. William Sinnett, senior director of research for FERF, conducted a series of interviews with CFOs and included their commentary and profiles on their use of cloud computing in the report…

Grazed from Silicon Republic.  Author: John Kennedy.

The use of rugged mobile devices in production and services industries allied with the cloud and RFID are contributing to major advances in industries from food to pharmaceuticals and fashion beating the threat of counterfeit goods.

Clonmel-based VisionID is joining forces with tech giants Motorola, Microsoft and Zebra Technologies and its independent software vendor partners to study the impact of cloud and mobility on service-based industries at a conference in Dublin…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Eric Knorr.

The knock on Amazon Web Services and other IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers is that they’re not reliable enough for enterprise-class workloads. And even with recent price drops, it’s cheaper over the long haul to buy and run your own infrastructure.

I’m not going to attempt any in-depth cost comparisons since so much depends on the workloads in question and granular provider pricing for various sevices. But I’m pretty convinced that reliability concerns about cloud computing are going the way of cloud security worries: If you know what you’re doing, in most cases the public cloud is probably at parity or better with the risk posed by your own infrastructure (ultrahardened, mission-critical workloads excepted)…