Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Jeff Norman.

They say change comes slowly or not at all. The cloud computing movement is thankfully maintaining a slow crawl over the powers-that-be in our governments at every level: local, state, national, even international. (But let’s save the complex, meaty discussion of the global cloud for another piece.) Although practically all of us are quite aware of the influence cloud exerts over the Internet-savvy members of our communities — that is to say, “everybody” — the government still hesitates to truly engage with the growing technological power. True, our leaders and their processes rarely belly-flop into any venture. Yet, with the pace at which cloud is growing, shouldn’t our leading administration make a bigger effort to get hip?

One cogent reason for that hipness to set in asap is how cloud computing is rewriting the definition of boundary in government. Specifically, the cloud is slowly but surely restructuring the division between the public and private sectors. The concept of information technology as business is a primary impetus in this restructuring. Certain sectors predicted last May that the cloud would explode into both sectors, and that prognostication seems to be holding true. Yet a failure to acknowledge and embrace this news will sooner or later do harm to how relevant and effectual our country’s management can be…

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

Informatica, which already counts its Cloud processing upwards of a billion cloud integration transactions a day, has upgraded the stuff. It reckons its new Cloud Spring 2012 release will deliver the industry’s most comprehensive cloud integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS).

The biggest addition is a new Cloud Developer Edition that consists of a cloud connector toolkit and dynamic cloud integration templates for rapid connectivity to applications. Developers can embed end-user customizable integration logic and connectivity into cloud applications and platforms.

System integrators and ISVs should be able to build, customize and deliver native connectivity to any cloud or on-premise business and social applications that have published Web Services APIs…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Patrick Burke.

Grazed from Gadget.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

Microsoft will be offering $60 000 of free cloud services to selected small software businesses through its BizSpark Plus initiative.

$60 000 of free cloud computing over two years? Sound too good to be true? But it’s exactly what Microsoft will be offering a select few local small software businesses through its BizSpark Plus initiative, a global program designed to help accelerate the success of early stage startups.

Clifford de Wit, developer and platform lead at Microsoft SA, says the initiative is aimed at building a vibrant local software development community in South Africa.

“We really want to give small software developers the incentive they need to not only develop local software, but also the business savvy they need to take their software to market. Ultimately, we’d like to see South Africa becoming an exporter, rather than an importer, of intellectual property!”…

Grazed from V3.co.uk.  Author: Rosalie Marshall.

There has been a lot of conversation and debate about Google’s entry into the cloud storage market and how its new Drive service will compete with the likes of DropBox, SkyDrive, and iCloud.

However, a deeper discussion exists on whether the increased numbers of cloud storage offerings available to businesses signals problems ahead for traditional on-premise storage vendors, like EMC, IBM and Oracle.

The storage-as-a-service market is still underdeveloped when compared to the software-as-a-service market, but this is unlikely to be the case for long, when there is so much industry focus and investment on taking storage services to the cloud…

Grazed friom MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Callidus Software Inc., the leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing, announced today that Accenture and salesforce.com will deliver keynotes at C3 2012 (CallidusCloud Customer Connections), its annual conference of customers, partners, and industry thought leaders, held May 6-8, 2012, at the Aria Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Mark Woollen, Vice President, Product Marketing, Sales Cloud, salesforce.com, will speak about the social revolution that is taking place today and how companies can transform themselves into social enterprises to create opportunities to delight their customers in meaningful new ways. Specifically, Woolen will showcase how companies are leveraging social, mobile and open cloud technologies to collaborate, communicate and share information with customers and employees to stay competitive in this new business climate…

Grazed from ITWeb.  Author: Nadine Arendse.

Cloud computing is to take some credit for the £52 million raised by this year’s Sport Relief, The Cloud Circle reports.

The record-breaking sum of money received by the Sport Relief charity in 2012 came through more than 300 000 donations, peaking at an incredible rate of 149 payment transactions per second. The resilient and scalable features of the cloud have been hailed as an integral factor in allowing the charity to cope with such demand.

Over the course of the campaign earlier this year, the www.sportrelief.com Web site attracted more than three million unique visits. On one day alone, the site received 500 000 hits.

Carrenza operates and manages two core cloud platforms for Comic Relief, a donation platform and a core Web sites platform, The Cloud Computing Journal writes…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

Piston Computing plans to build a bridge to EMC VMware’s Cloud Foundry, meaning it will link Piston’s own OpenStack-based cloud IaaS offering. What does this mean for cloud development? It’s the start of many other such integration efforts, I suspect, to battle the meteoric rise of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cloud Foundry is a popular open source platform service, which VMware promotes as a PaaS for any infrastructure. Piston is one of many companies that rely on OpenStack. The OpenStack fraternity includes Akamai, AMD, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, CloudScaling, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, NTT, Rackspace, and Yahoo. The OpenStack movement is really a competitive pushback on AWS in the IaaS space. Both Cloud Foundry and Piston’s OpenStack are available under the Apache 2 license…