Grazed from CloudCow.  Author: Hoofer.

Mobile phone providers are beginning to add numerous cloud services to the lineup of basic service plans.  Not so long ago, mobile phone service plans would provide a number, but not much else.  Fast forward 2012…  Now it’s not at all uncommon to have a whole list of value-added services that either come as a default provision, or as pay-for modules that can be turned on for a nominal monthly service fee.

Examples of such services are cloud storage, content sharing, social networking plugins, cloud gaming, and the list goes on…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

WHAT: ServiceMesh, provider of market-leading enterprise cloud platforms for Global 2000 companies, will present enterprise cloud best practices and moderate the Private Cloud track at Cloud Connect 2012, February 13-16, at the Santa Clara Convention Center. ServiceMesh representatives will be available at booth #422 to deliver live demonstrations of the ServiceMesh Agility Platform, the industry’s most comprehensive policy-based governance, security and lifecycle management solution to unlock the business value of cloud computing by dramatically reducing the costs, risks, and time-to-market for delivery of IT services.

ServiceMesh vice president of strategy Dave Roberts will present a session titled "Applications at Scale." This presentation will discuss key methods and technologies necessary to support today’s massively scalable applications in cloud environments. Mr. Roberts is also the moderator and track chair for the Private Cloud Track, which focuses on hybrid and private cloud architectures and their impact on infrastructure, network, and storage decisions…

Grazed from Sac Bee.  Author:  PR Announcement.

Verne Global, an innovative, UK-based developer of power conscious data centre campuses, today announced that GreenQloud®, the world’s first truly green public compute cloud, is basing its hosting service from the Verne Global data centre campus in Iceland. GreenQloud, established in 2010, offers hosting and storage for the European and North American markets and can act a single hub for both markets.

"GreenQloud’s mission is to promote and sell easy to use, competitively priced, carbon neutral, cloud computing services to SMBs, SaaS providers, PaaS providers, enterprises, the public sector and high performance computing users," said Eirikur Hrafnsson, co-founder and CEO of GreenQloud. "We will also let our customers see their live energy metrics and carbon savings so they can report these results as part of their own sustainability programmes."…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Virtustream, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise cloud solutions, today announced that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Enomaly, Inc., an early innovator in cloud and pioneer in cloud exchanges. The integration of Enomaly and its software capabilities will further enhance Virtustream’s enterprise class cloud solutions, enabling customers to benefit from the dramatic operational advantages and cost savings of cloud computing.

Virtustream will continue to support Enomaly’s existing products, including its ECP public cloud software and SpotCloud, a cloud exchange offering a marketplace and cloud-to-cloud federation. Both ECP and SpotCloud will be enhanced further with additional security. In 2012, Virtustream will also integrate additional public cloud functionality and cloud exchange capabilities into xStream, Virtustream’s enterprise cloud solution. In addition, with the acquisition of Enomaly, Virtustream continues to expand its global presence by adding distribution in China and a cloud software development center in Canada…

Grazed from FierceCIO.  Author: Caron Carlson.

Large enterprises continue to have reservations about the security of cloud computing, and apparently the FBI does too. The agency made it clear this week that any cloud providers who want to do business with U.S. law enforcement agencies must abide by its Criminal Justice Information Systems security requirements–which is a very high bar, reports Jaikumar Vijayan at Computerworld.

"The FBI remains committed to using technology in its information-sharing processes, but not at the sacrifice of the security of the information with which it has been entrusted," Stephen Fischer Jr., a spokesman for the FBI’s CJIS division, told Computerworld…

Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle Corp said it will buy web-based recruitment software maker Taleo Corp for about $1.9 billion to expand its line of cloud computing products, one of fastest growing areas of the technology market.

The move will allow Oracle to better compete with rivals including SAP AG, which said in December it would buy cloud human-resources software maker SuccessFactors Inc for $3.4 billion to jump start its expansion into cloud computing.

The Taleo deal value of $46 a share offers an 18 percent premium to Taleo’s Wednesday close of $38.94…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Symform, a revolutionary cloud storage and backup service, today announced that it will be sponsoring and exhibiting at leading industry events in the coming two months, including Cloud Connect, MVP Nation and XChange 2012. Symform executives will also be featured speakers at the conferences, discussing cloud computing, data center efficiencies and distributed architecture.

Cloud Connect Conference & Expo

What: Conference exhibitor When: February 13 – 15, 2012 Where: Santa Clara Convention Center, booth #619 Details: Symform will be demonstrating its revolutionary, global peer-to-peer cloud storage network which is available on Windows and Mac (beta) operating systems, as well as QNAP Network Attach Storage (NAS) devices. Cloud Connect attendees are invited to visit booth # 619 for a product overview from one of Symform’s cloud storage experts…

Grazed from Venture Beat.  Author: Sarah Mitroff.

Cloud computing and desktop virtualization are rapidly growing trends in the tech world, and one company has spent a considerable amount of time developing this technology. Nivio, which started as an idea in 2004, announced today it has received $21 million in its first round of venture capital funding.

Nivio lets you store up to 10GB of your documents, music, and movies in the cloud for free with nDrive. Your files sync across all of your devices — tablets, desktops, and laptops. And when you make changes to a document, Nivio saves bandwidth by only sending the changes you made, not the entire file.

But file storage isn’t all Nivio has up its sleeves. Its break-out product is nDesktop, the most current version of Windows that lives in the cloud and can be accessed on Macs, PCs, or tablets…

Grazed from InfoBoom.  Author: Douglas Bonderud.

Cloud computing has grown from buzzword to a range of real-world applications over the last four years, and many midsized businesses are now using at least one cloud service in their day-to-day IT admin. But while surveys show that clouds are on the rise both in already virtualized First World countries and developing nations, cloud adoption doesn’t always take the smartest route.

Survey Says… 

A recent InformationWeek article talks about the site’s 2012 State of the Cloud Computing Survey, where they asked 511 IT pros about their cloud use. Currently, one-third of companies are using the cloud in some form and 40 percent are considering a move. Only 27 percent of those surveyed weren’t interested in putting their heads in the cloud–a significant improvement over a similar survey conducted four years ago, when there was no agreement on what the term cloud computing even meant; 21 percent of those asked in 2008 said that "the cloud" was "pretty much a marketing term used haphazardly."…

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Stuart Conner.

The group has been tasked with progressing the technical reports that were the output of a previous focus group on cloud computing towards formalisation as ITU-T recommendations.

The ITU announced last month that the ITU-T Focus Group on Cloud Computing would be replaced by a new joint coordination activity on cloud computing (JCA-Cloud) to be lead by ITU-T Study Group 13, which covers future networks including mobile and NGN.

Jamil Chawki of France Telecom Orange has been appointed chair of the WP. It will take responsibility for existing SG 13 work on cloud computing as well as three new questions:..