Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Brian T. Horowitz.

Dell and Siemens are coming together to provide a massive amount of cloud storage space for medical images.

The two companies will create the Siemens Image Sharing and Archiving (ISA) service, which will provide a cloud platform for vendor-neutral image archiving and sharing. ISA will incorporate Dell’s Unified Clinical Archive. The Dell archive will also provide redundant archiving support for the Siemens Healthcare Cloud Computing Center.

Dell and Siemens will formally announced the agreement at the HIMSS12 health care IT conference in Las Vegas, which begins Feb. 20.  "With Siemens, they’ll have a first copy in their data center; the other copy will be in our Dell Unified Clinical Archive," Dr. Jamie Coffin, vice president and general manager for Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences, told eWEEK…

Grazed from ServerWatch.  Author: Sean Kerner.

The open source OpenStack cloud computing platform has grown significantly since it was first introduced in July 2010. The effort was originally started by NASA and Rackspace and has since grown to include more than 100 vendors including HP, Dell and Cisco.

Now OpenStack developers are aiming to help make it easier than ever for enterprises and developers to get familiar with OpenStack. A new effort called TryStack debuted this week, providing developers and users the opportunity to try OpenStack on a hosted infrastructure…

Grazed from The Lagonian.  Author: Alexa Hemken.

Foster City-based E2open Inc. has registered for an initial public offering to sell up to $86.2 million in stock.  Founded in 2000, E2open is a provider of on-demand software solutions that enables companies to manage their supply chains.  The company was recognized three years in a row as one of the Best Places to Work in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times and the Silicon Valley Business Journal.


E2Open’s offering is being underwritten by BofA Merrill Lynch, William Blair & Company, Pacific Crest Securities, Canaccord Genuity, and Needham & Company…

Grazed from Government Technology.  Author: Justine Brown.

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Thor Olavsrud.

t’s an oft-repeated mantra: Organizations engaged in or investigating cloud computing in any of its many flavors are concerned about security. In fact, concerns about security, data privacy and data residency are often cited as inhibitors to cloud adoption. But are the concerns justified? Some security experts say visibility and control are the missing elements.

In a recent study of IT and business executives, CompTIA, the IT industry association, found that 50 percent of respondents cited greater reliance on Internet-based applications like cloud computing and software-as-a-service as a driving factor in their cyber security concerns. But a number of cloud experts say that in many ways data in the cloud is more secure than in an on-premise installation—or at least rapidly becoming that way—especially for smaller organizations that don’t have the resources to dedicate to security technology and expert staff…

Grazed from Investors.com.  Author:  Reinhardt Krause.

As competition in cloud computing services mounts, telecom leaders AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ) aim to win a tug-of-war with tech titans Amazon.com (AMZN) and IBM (IBM).

All are battling to provide services to companies that are steadily warming to the idea of buying Web-based, or "cloud," computing services. Companies tap computing resources in remote data centers to cut their spending on servers and storage, and to easily ramp up or down. Research firm IDC says the global cloud infrastructure as a service, or IAAS, market will jump to $14.9 billion by 2014 from $6.6 billion in 2011…

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

Just when the US Postal Service looks down for the count, a self-funded Seattle start-up called PaperKarma figures its destiny is to suppress junk mail on which the post office depends.

The company was started by Sean Mortazavi, who hasn’t given up his day job at Microsoft yet, and PaperKarma’s sole employee Brendan Ribera. The pair has developed a free multi-platform mobile app that lets junk mail-inundated protesters take a picture of the junk mail flooding their mailbox, hit an "Unsubscribe" button and send it to PaperKarma.

The start-up will automatically pass it on to the mailer with Federal Trade Commission-enforced instructions that the recipient be dropped from its mailing list…

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

Centrify is going into the mobile business in support of iOS and Android phones and tablets.

The move involves putting its multi-platform support for Microsoft’s Active Directory on its own cloud so companies can protect the increasing ubiquitous BYOD they need to control and secure whether they’re on the corporate network or not.

It promises an organization can re-use its Active Directory investment without deploying a complex new infrastructure or dealing with yet another "pane of glass" in the form of another standalone management console…

Grazed from CNBC.com.  Author: Bernadette Tansey.

Michael Stoudt was getting tired of all the tasks involved in exchanging financial records with his clients and staffers. They’d email him files, he’d download them to his computer, work on them, and then email them back.

The Allentown, Pa., accountant longed for a common environment where the files could live, always visible to himself, his client, and his part-time employees who worked on the same bookkeeping documents from home. So he tried uploading a few records to the free Web-based file sharing service called Dropbox.

The accountant had taken his first step into the cloud…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Bernard Golden.

The debate about the economic benefits of cloud computing is intense, and is commonly boiled down to a talking point labelled OpEx vs. CapEx. Very often, like many talking points, the headline conflict is really a stalking horse that conceals the true source of conflict.

In the case of OpEx vs. CapEx, what often underlies the discussion is really an indirect, coded debate about the future of IT infrastructure and operations groups: Will they be operators of assets owned by the larger organization, or will they be operators of assets owned by an external provider?

It doesn’t take a genius to understand why being responsible for operating hundreds of millions of dollars of owned assets, along with all of the people associated with ownership (technical evaluation, vendor relationships, capacity planning, etc.), is typically seen as more prestigious and important than managing assets from an external provider who takes responsibility for all of those areas. An even more nightmarish vision is that infrastructure and operations groups will be cut out of the equation entirely, with application groups taking responsibility for dealing with external providers, leaving I&O with a dwindling responsibility set, managing an ever-eroding installed asset base…