Grazed from ABCNews.  Author: PR Announcement.

Hewlett-Packard Co. said Tuesday that its enterprise services unit has received a contract from the Army for cloud computing services that could be worth up to $249 million.  Cloud computing allows workers to fetch computer programs and key documents stored remotely on any device with an Internet connection.

The contract is for one year, with four one-year options. The Army wants to use cloud computing services to help it consolidate data centers and cut costs…

Grazed from CRN.  Author: Antonio Piraino.

While it seems like everyone is trying to get in on the cloud computing craze, service providers and VARs are in a unique position to capitalize on the growing demand for cloud services. The focus to date has been on creating or emulating the "top" cloud computing platforms, such as Amazon EC2 and Windows Azure, from an infrastructure, self-service and pricing perspective. As cloud infrastructure becomes more commoditized, service providers need to set themselves apart from the competition. Giving their constituents something palpable to hang their prized IT assets on, that would otherwise become discernably opaque to them in the clouds, is one way to elevate themselves above the fray…

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

For the second day in a row Dell Tuesday bought a company and left everybody to wonder what it paid.  This time it said it bought Chicago-based Clerity Solutions. It’s kinda amusing for a PC maker to be buying a mainframe company.

To IBM’s irritation, Clerity, which has been around almost 20 years, migrates mainframe users’ applications off the beasts and over to more modern x86-based widgetry.

Dell will put Clerity’s applications re-hosting UniKix automation widgetry and other soothing tricks with its services operation, which will get to rub elbows with the high-class set of corporations and public sector agencies still using mainframes. It says they will get a faster path to the cloud…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author:  Mikael Ricknäs.

Users need to become better at asking cloud providers questions about the finer points of availability and vulnerability management in contracts, according to a new guide from the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA).

ENISA’s goal is to improve the public sector’s understanding of the security of cloud services and the potential indicators and methods that can be used during service delivery, the authors said.

Procuring and managing service contracts for cloud services is an increasingly important task for IT staff…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud computing — the current topic at many IT departments. Current research proves the increasing popularity of cloud solutions at companies. They expect more flexibility, less costs and therefore enhanced competitiveness. This is why companies outsource company data and applications to a central cloud. Simultaneously, with respect to increased demand, cloud service providers have to ensure that they keep their promise of high-availability and data security. In this way alone can they be successful in the long-term. An absolutely necessary condition is the multi-tenant capability of the software used: customer data need to be reliably secured — that one customer can see the data of another is a definite no-go. HOB GmbH & Co. KG offers with its HOB RD VPN a trustworthy solution…

Grazed from Embedded.com.  Author: George Leopold.

Cloud computing could help usher in the next wave of technological innovation and, with it, provide a new engine for economic growth, say the authors of a forthcoming study on the emerging cloud computing ecosystem.

John Zysman, coauthor of the cloud study and co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy here, argues that “cloud-enhanced services” promise to take up much of the economic slack caused by the steady shift over the last several decades from manufacturing to services. Despite the loss of those U.S. manufacturing jobs, “direct linkages” persist between high value-added services and manufacturing. Zysman and coauthor Stephen Cohen argued in their book, “Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy,” that manufacturing remains fundamental to economic growth and that service sector jobs only complement rather than replace critical manufacturing employment…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

ViaWest, one of the largest privately-held data center, cloud computing and managed services providers in North America, announces today it closed an additional $65MM of debt financing to fund future growth initiatives. This additional investment reflects the strong support of the company’s growth prospects, operational infrastructure and delivery of the highest-level of data center services.

Since its acquisition by Oak Hill Capital Partners in 2010, ViaWest has continued its rapid growth. In 2011, the company opened new premium data centers in the Portland, Oregon and Dallas, Texas markets, bringing its total number of datacenters to 22. ViaWest also recently announced several strategic product launches including its KINECTed Storage, Managed Security, KINECTed Back Up and KINECTed Cloud solutions. ViaWest anticipates that it will utilize the additional capital to continue its market expansion and to further drive its product portfolio, particularly in cloud computing and managed services…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Balaji Viswanathan.

Mobile cloud is the convergence of cloud computing and mobile apps. It is one of the hottest trends in cloud computing that is expected to play an increasingly important role in the future. The need for mobile clouds stem from the following trends:

1. Enterprise and consumer mobiles apps are getting increasingly smart. The days of using mobile phone just to access the Exchange and browsing the web is giving away into using the mobile for accessing spreadsheets, delivering presentations and performing data processing. To cater to the intensive computing needs on the mobile, advanced apps run from the cloud.

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

This being the 21st century, dissident stockholder Third Point LLC has taken its nascent proxy fight over the soul of Yahoo to the web.

Under a "vacancy" sign, it’s set up a precedent-setting blog at www.valueyahoo.com where it intends to pick apart the litany of Yahoo’s missteps to convince its fellow investors that the company’s destiny would be better off in savvier hands like those of the four pretty high-profile independent directors it’s proposed should sit on the Yahoo board.

The site is done up in Yahoo’s signature purple and there’s a linking Facebook page. (You will of course remember that Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson, ex of PayPal, is suing Facebook for infringing Yahoo patents.)…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Citrix today unveiled the next phase of its strategy to accelerate the broad adoption of open, interoperable cloud computing. As a key part of this strategy, the company’s popular CloudStack™ solution will become the first cloud platform in the industry to be submitted to the Apache Software Foundation, home of the world’s most successful open source projects. Elevating CloudStack into a full open source Apache project will further accelerate its mission of delivering a powerful, proven, hypervisor-agnostic platform that helps customers of all sizes build true Amazon-style clouds. CloudStack brings to Apache more than 30,000 community members, thousands of certified apps, and hundreds of production clouds, collectively generating more than $1 billion in cloud revenue from some of the biggest brands in the industry. To capitalize on this market momentum, Citrix will also deliver a commercially supported release of the proposed Apache CloudStack distribution as the centerpiece of its cloud infrastructure product portfolio…