Grazed from PC World.  Author: Brandon Butler.

When online marketing firm Hubspot started in 2006, the company’s IT needs were not very taxing, but they expanded quickly as the company realized success.

Hubspot – which provides software for businesses to coordinate their online marketing efforts – started with a private cloud for its front-end web hosting. Soon though, CIO Jim O’Neill realized he would need additional computing power for the company’s web analytics programs and "big data" storage needs.

The public cloud was a natural fit. "We really wanted the flexibility to scale up into a larger capacity when we needed it," he said…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Clare Computer Solutions, a San Francisco Bay Area IT service provider, headquartered in San Ramon, California is announcing a series of seminars for businesses on the subject of Cloud Computing.

The 90-minute seminars are free and will provide information on how cloud computing can improve efficiency and help businesses to reach their goals and objectives. Attendees will discover how the cloud affects a company’s technology choices and the pros and cons of moving to the cloud…

 

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Some European and fast-growing developing countries such as Brazil and China fear the U.S. will run away with the emerging cloud computing market. As a result, they have erected barriers to data moving across their boundaries and impeded the development of a global cloud market, said a large software business group on Wednesday.

European countries frequently object to the U.S. Patriot Act and use it as an excuse for more barriers. In fact, the powers of the act granting permission to inspect data when hunting for evidence of terrorist activity are often found in their own laws, said Business Software Alliance CEO Robert Holleyman as his group issued a report on cloud computing Wednesday…

Grazed from EON.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The growing shift to cloud computing can deliver significant value—but most enterprises have little knowledge of the perils of transferring IT decision making away from technology specialists to business unit leaders. Eliminating oversight and governance from cloud computing decisions can create significant risk to organizations, effectively undermining any benefits of moving to the cloud and, at the same time, potentially creating serious issues for organizations.

“Cloud computing presents a unique opportunity for enterprises—and is particularly a game-changer for small and medium enterprises because its availability means that technology infrastructure is not the market differentiator it has been in the past”

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Onit, a leading provider of business productivity and process management apps, today announced it has joined the Legal Cloud Computing Association (LCCA), a consortium of leading cloud computing providers.

The LCCA was created to facilitate the adoption of cloud computing among legal professionals and provide a unified and consistent voice for vendors in the legal cloud computing market. Additionally, the organization is responsible for collaborating and cooperating with Bar Associations and other policy-forming bodies in efforts to form policies and guidelines relating to the use of cloud computing in law practices; defining standards and best practices; and providing educational resources to attorneys and the broader legal community on cloud computing…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Furthering its commitment to running high performance session border control (SBC) on commercial off-the-shelf platforms, Metaswitch Networks today announced that its industry-leading Perimeta SBC software is being made available for deployment on generic enterprise servers as well as virtual machine environments to support elastic cloud computing networks.

Introduced in September 2011 and already selected by more than 60 service providers worldwide, Perimeta’s flexible architecture supports independent scaling of an SBC’s signaling and media functions — allowing service providers to cost-effectively address the signaling-heavy, changing mix of network traffic. With Perimeta now available to run on various hypervisors, large operators can take advantage of private elastic cloud environments to scale SBC functions completely independently of dedicated hardware…

Grazed from The Var Guy.  Author: Christopher Tozzi.

The jury may still be out on what exactly cloud computing even means, but that isn’t stopping most IT movers and shakers from churning out incessant reminders of how important the cloud is. Canonical, which this week released a new publication highlighting the way Ubuntu fits into the cloud, is no exception. Here’s a look at this latest effort to market Ubuntu to a cloud audience, and what it says about Canonical’s strategy over the longer term.

As the results of Canonical’s survey of Ubuntu server users indicated last week, the cloud is an area where Ubuntu still has a lot of room to grow. And since that growth isn’t likely to happen all by itself, Canonical has been pushing the cloud hard to consumers. It has developed a cloud-computing portal for the Ubuntu community and is actively pursuing cloud-oriented technologies everywhere from the desktop (think Ubuntu One) to the server (home of the Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure)…

Grazed from The New York Times.  Author:  Quentin Hardy.

Amazon Web Services, the company’s computing-for-hire division, announced new products on Tuesday that make it easier to run workflow-based applications, both on Amazon’s computers and on corporate machines that are connected to Amazon’s giant computing cloud. This is a cheap (and probably easy) way for in-house engineers to build and deploy software that does tasks like analytics and billing, or internal financial operations and decision-making. It can even aid in the design logic of multiplayer games, Amazon says…

Grazed from V3.co.uk.  Author: Dan Worth.

SAP has unveiled the roadmap for its human capital management (HCM) services that will integrate with the cloud-based tools it acquired with its $3.4bn purchase of SuccessFactors late last year.

Chief among these developments is SAP’s intention to offer all of its HCM products as cloud-based services, alongside its traditional on-premise offerings, to meet the growing demand for cloud services…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Cloud Council of 7 (CCO7), a non-profit association of business users, policy makers, technology and service providers, and academics working with Cloud technology, today announced it has launched operations. The organization, formed to benefit users of Cloud technology, is open to IT executives, enterprise end-users, and technology and service providers of Cloud technologies, services and products.

"Many experts say Cloud computing is the number one priority for CIOs, yet few CIOs can link current definitions of Cloud computing’s with business value. To help eliminate this confusion, the Cloud Council of 7 was created," said Carole Gunst, Executive Director, Cloud Council of 7. "Our diverse community is collaborating to drive consensus to help enterprises make informed decisions when specifying and selecting Cloud technologies and services. All discoveries and recommendations are shared with the CCO7 community."…