Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

XO Communications today announced the launch of Concentric Cloud Solutions. Concentric Cloud Solutions offers new cloud computing, content acceleration, and cloud voice solutions for businesses. These solutions are designed to help customers quickly and cost-effectively deploy and manage infrastructure and services they need, when needed, in order to accelerate performance without significant capital expenditures.

"Concentric Cloud Solutions represents the next step for XO Communications’ cloud services strategy," said Mike Toplisek, president of Concentric Cloud Solutions. "Through our own technology and the partnerships we have established, Concentric Cloud Solutions offers customers best-of-breed cloud-based solutions for their mission-critical virtualized environments, web site acceleration and interactive voice needs. Our cloud-based solutions allow companies to spend more time building their businesses and less time maintaining their infrastructures." …

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Corent Technology, Inc., a disrupting innovator in the cloud computing space, announced that its key product – Corent Multi-tenant Server(TM) – has been named a finalist for the most innovative cloud computing product/technology in the TechAmerica Orange County High-Tech Innovation Awards. Now in its 19th year, this premier business event celebrates excellence and achievement in the region’s technology industry, and honors local companies, individuals and products that drive innovation in Orange County.

"The technology community in Orange County are producing breakthroughs that advance cloud computing, e-commerce, medical device, hardware, software and telecommunications solutions around the world," said Bob Brunson, director of TechAmerica in Orange County. "As a strong indicator that the local technology economy is flourishing, we received nearly 100 nominations, including many from companies new to the competition. We congratulate all of the finalists and look forward to celebrating their achievements at the awards dinner."…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

NTT America, a global IT infrastructure services provider and wholly owned subsidiary of NTT Communications Corporation, today announced its continuing support for the company’s cloud, global connectivity and green efforts and the refocus of key business units to address customer requirements and market dynamics. In addition the company has won awards for both green efforts and in marketing.

As enterprise cloud demand continues to grow in parallel with customers’ interest in global connectivity to support large scale cloud deployments, NTT America has ensured its leadership through a variety of partnerships and an ongoing speaking platform to bring insights and information to the industry…

Grazed from SC Magazine.  Author: Stephen Lawton.

As cloud computing becomes ubiquitous, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are looking to it as a way of securing their data more efficiently at a potentially lower cost. While service providers tout the cloud as more secure than a corporate data center, experts are not as certain.

At issue is how the company negotiates its security agreement with the cloud provider. Some vendors offering services to consumers or small businesses, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service, write into their user agreement that the provider is not responsible for any data security at all. At the other end are companies such as Carpathia Hosting of Dulles, Va., which provides cloud services to the CIA and the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. Between these poles are many options.

The question a CISO must address before contracting with a cloud provider is: For how much security is the company willing to contract and how much will remain its own responsibility, says Simon Crosby, CTO and co-founder of security start-up Bromium…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Alex Barrett.

Like a hurricane barreling up the coast, cloud computing is gathering strength and expected to make landfall shortly. In some IT shops, cloud is already here, bringing the winds of change along with it.

But unlike a natural disaster, cloud computing doesn’t destroy everything in its wake – merely transforms it.

In the data center, IT operations managers who have experimented with cloud — private, public, and otherwise — report it’s already had a profound effect on the way they run their IT environments and do their jobs. And they expect even more changes to come…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Maribel Lopez.

Cloud computing is top of mind for computer geeks, information technology (IT) providers, web and mobile start-ups, and most CIOs (chief information officers), but should other senior executives care?  After all, can CxOs afford to take time out from global growth concerns, foreign corrupt practice allegations, dysfunction in D.C., and other business exigencies merely to immerse themselves in abstruse technology plumbing?  To be a leadership priority, “computing” in general and the “cloud” in particular—a network-centric, pay-per-use, on-demand service model for IT—would have to be strategic.

It’s been argued that “IT Doesn’t Matter,” since IT is available to anyone, and thus is a commodity like electricity.  Therefore, this argument concludes, IT can’t be a source of strategic competitive advantage.  This line of reasoning seems plausible at first glance, but conflates IT’s infinite malleability and algorithmic possibilities, often limited only by imagination, with its more mundane physical incarnation—computers, storage, and network gear—and therefore fails to explain how a Google or Facebook—started from scratch with no brand, no assets, no preferential access to resources, no marketing, no sales force, no regulatory protection, in fact, with nothing more than ideas and business concepts encapsulated as IT—could rocket from dorm room project to multi-billion dollar annual revenues in short order…

Grazed from Technorati.  Author: Blake Dukes.

The cloud has become the Holy Grail of business technologies. Every day dozens of new stories and blog posts pop up, touting the fantastic impact and developmental leaps being made by companies switching over to some form of cloud computing, whether that’s Software, Platform or Infrastructure as a Service. But another use for cloud services has emerged: IT as a Service. In this model, cloud services are used not only to increase a company’s computing capabilities and make their technology more agile, but also to supplement or free up their in-house IT staff. There are several benefits for companies that begin using ITaaS…

Grazed from ChannelInsider.  Author: Michael Vizard.

Over the years a huge percentage of the custom application development being done by corporations has been outsourced to the channel. Whether it’s modernizing COBOL applications using developers in India or creating mobile computing applications by relying on the expertise of independent application development houses, the channel in many ways dominates application development these days.

With the rise of platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings in the cloud, however, that independence is being threatened. In addition to being optimized for only one or two development languages, PaaS environments come with a lot of application management tools that ultimately serve to lock developers into a specific platform. Worse yet, it’s difficult to develop composite applications that span multiple clouds. Customers obviously need that capability because just about every application ever built is dependent on another for one service or another…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Tanmay Deshpande.

PaaS is nothing but uploading your small kernel of code with business logic and the PaaS service provider will run that code on allocated computing and storage instances. The aim of PaaS is to let the developers concentrate on developing their code rather than creating and maintaining their ecosystem required for it. When Google launched App Engine in 2008 it had very basic functionalities but gradually it has evolved to support much good functionality like Channel APIs.

But when it comes to language support, selection of cloud, selection of database, control over database, Cloud foundry gives great amount of flexibility as compared to App Engine. Also, when it comes to supporting Java packages also, Google App Engine doesn’t allow developers to free their arms as there are quite a few important packages which are still not part of App Engine’s white list…

Grazed from Talkin Cloud.  Author: Joe Panitierri.

Cloud Computing and cloud services stocks closed April 2012 on a high note, and our Talkin’ Cloud Stocks Index is up roughly 28 percent since January 1, 2012. The most recent weekly winners included SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI), Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN), Equinix (NASDAQ: EQIX) and Citrix Systems (NASDAQ: CTSX).

For the week ending April 27, 2o12, cloud computing and cloud services stocks rose 3.21 percent, though many of our Talkin’ Cloud Stock Index members saw small declines on the final day of trading this month (April 2012). And in broader markets, there are concerns about the U.S. economy potentially slowing…