Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Appcara, maker of cloud application lifecycle solutions, is using next week’s Interop Las Vegas and Citrix Synergy events to demonstrate a vastly simplified means of onboarding, managing and automating enterprise cloud applications with its AppStack(R) cloud application lifecycle agility and portability platform. As cloud computing expands beyond simple, predefined workloads, AppStack is poised to provide exceptionally fast time-to-market for key business applications — maximizing time, knowledge and profitability.

Despite widespread use of cloud applications, most enterprises are still holding back from placing their more advanced business applications in the cloud – due to the lack of holistic integration and management capabilities required to assure these applications can be installed, configured and tracked reliably to corporate governance and reporting requirements. IT managers still face a limited choice, the need for intensive technical knowledge, and a lot of pain to achieve complete application portability across public and private cloud infrastructures. What is needed is a truly dynamic cloud platform that can address the needs of advanced business applications, and accelerate application services for both enterprises and service providers…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Dan Woods.

One huge question hangs over the cloud computing industry: Can cloud infrastructure support traditional applications that were not built to deliver reliable performance from unreliable components?

If a cloud provider can answer yes to this question, it then becomes possible for a massive number of applications to migrate to the cloud, either public or private versions. Remember, the cloud industry is now at the end of the beginning. The big money, most of the almost $2 trillion that is spent running the IT infrastructure that runs the world, is still going to data centers, on-premise applications, and other technologies of pre-cloud vintage. There are many reasons that this is true, but one of the main barriers to adoption of the cloud is that most of the applications out there were built assuming that the computers, databases, storage, and networks they use deliver high performance…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Connectria Hosting, a global managed hosting provider, today announced the availability of its IBM AIX Cloud.

The IBM AIX Cloud closely follows the launch of Connectria’s IBM i Cloud, demonstrating Connectria’s continued innovation and leadership in Cloud Computing.

Connectria’s IBM AIX Cloud Hosting is designed to run on the reliable IBM Power Systems, leveraging a compelling balance of affordability and performance. An IBM AIX Cloud with Managed Services starts as low as $1,245 per month, and can scale upward from 1/10 core with a 3 GHz processor. With Connectria’s IBM AIX Cloud, customers will be able to purchase the IBM AIX capacity and support they need, when they need it, for as long as they need it — backed by Connectria’s world-class 24/7 IBM AIX administration and support…

Grazed from Thomasnet.  Author: PR Announcement.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is hosting Cloud Computing Forum & Workshop V on June 5-7, 2012, at the Department of Commerce’s Herbert C. Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service-provider interaction. Government, industry, academia and individuals are using cloud services.

NIST’s role in cloud computing is to help accelerate the secure and effective adoption of cloud computing in the federal government. The agency leads efforts to develop standards and guidelines and advance cloud computing technology in collaboration with standards bodies, businesses and other private-sector organizations, government agencies and other stakeholders…

 

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced it will host the largest social enterprise event in Europe, Cloudforce London 2012, on May 22nd at the ICC London ExCeL. More than 14,000 people are expected to register to learn how their companies can use social and mobile cloud technologies to transform into social enterprises. Cloudstock, Europe’s first ever social enterprise developer event, will be co-located at Cloudforce London and allow developers to get hands-on, and start coding the next generation of social enterprise apps.

 

Free registration to attend in person is available at www.salesforce.com/uk/cloudforce or watch the keynote online and join the conversation with Salesforce Live! beginning at 10:00 a.m. BST at www.facebook.com/salesforce…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Darryl K. Taft.

With innovation as the overall theme of its Impact 2012 conference here, IBM (NYSE:IBM) unveiled its first-ever Mobile Foundation, a comprehensive portfolio of software and services designed to help organizations capitalize on the proliferation of mobile environments, including laptops, smartphones and tablets. Building on its recent acquisition of Worklight, the new foundation further expands IBM’s strategy to provide clients with a mobile platform that spans application development, integration, security and management.

For example, using the IBM Mobile Foundation, an airline can transform the way it interacts with its customers by establishing a secure two-way relationship with mobile applications. Airlines can use these new types of applications not only to keep customers apprised of their travel plans and current weather conditions, but also to send push-notifications to alert them if there are changes or opportunities for upgrades…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: George Anders.

Christian Gheorghe hates spending money if he can avoid it. As a teenager in Romania in the 1980s he replaced vacuum tubes to keep his television running and subsisted on a used laptop computer with a busted keyboard. Even after immigrating to the U.S. his frugal habits persisted.

In 2005 Gheorghe seethed at the expenses involved in building OutlookSoft, a business performance company where he was chief technology officer. It cost more than $600,000 to get rolling, buying dozens of servers, ­hiring support staffers to run the ­machines and acquiring costly licenses from the likes of Microsoft and Oracle. “You linger over every single penny,” Gheorghe recalled. “I kept needing to pay for another license. It never stopped.”

Gheorghe isn’t grumbling anymore. He now runs Tidemark Systems, a maker of business-analytics applications that is a penny-pincher’s delight. His corporate e-mail is free, via Google. Other open-source programs take care of databases and word processing. As for computing power, that’s not his headache anymore. He rents access to a constantly changing array of offsite servers, paying as little as 12 cents an hour for such cloud computing…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Kenneth Corbin.

The federal government may not be renowned for its operational speed or agility, and certainly IT is no exception, but federal agency CIOs and their employees have gradually been warming to the new model of cloud computing, according to a panel of industry executives speaking at a conference here on Wednesday.

"We’ve seen movement both in private cloud and public cloud," says Susie Adams, chief technology officer for Microsoft’s federal business.

Adams and others noted that government clients are increasingly looking to commercial cloud services both for infrastructure functions like computing power and storage, and applications such as email and collaboration or CRM-like tools to deliver better citizen services…