Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Sadagopan Singam.

Cloud computing has cast a shadow over the IT landscape in the past several years, sparking as much confusion as genuine interest. But despite the buzzword du jour feel of the topic, most people now agree that cloud computing is more than just a new IT delivery model and instead represents a sweeping transformation of IT. For CIOs, it can be a significant career enhancer, enabling them to drastically decrease costs and improve IT services for their organizations.

With more and more enterprises planning to transition IT to the cloud, there’s a daunting task facing every CIO who must decide what, when and how to invest in cloud infrastructures and how to leverage opportunities created by transforming their processes and the associated systems. The key challenges include appropriate opportunity selection, choosing the right cloud solution framework, ROI/benefit assessment, resource management and change management…

Grazed from Government Computer News.  Author: Rutrell Yasin.

Federal agencies looking to move IT services to the cloud have yet another option.

 

CSC has unveiled a cloud computing platform designed primarily for federal agencies, which provides infrastructure-as-a-service offerings.

Built using National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines, the CSC CloudCompute for Government will offer other cloud services in the future. The multitenant community cloud can respond rapidly to changing requirements at a fraction of the cost of a private cloud or a traditional data center, CSC officials said…

Grazed from iHotDesk.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The days of having to install, update and manage single product software for anti-virus protection and security could soon be over thanks to new developments in cloud computing.

John Dunn, security editor of Techworld, believes that security monitoring in real time using a cloud-based system is likely to soon become the norm for both individuals and companies in the not so distant future.

However, he points out that some large online security product manufacturers have been a little slow in working towards producing a suitable cloud-based anti-virus system…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

independenceIT(TM) (iIT), provider of the complete cloud workspace, today announced that it has received THINKstrategies’ Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Award. THINKstrategies is the leading strategic consulting company focused on the business implications of the on-demand services and uses its BoSS award program to promote the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

"In today’s challenging business climate, businesses are seeking ways to better leverage technology and business applications without adding more IT staff," stated Jeffrey M. Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies, and the founder of the SaaS Showplace, which is now a part of the new Cloud Computing Showplace. "independenceIT delivers a cost-effective, Cloud-based IT management solution which enables businesses to scale their operations without adding unnecessary management costs."…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Shenick Network Systems, provider of per-flow IP communication test and performance measurement solutions, today announced that it is leading the market with an IP test and measurement solution that can operate in a multi-hypervisor environment. Shenick’s diversifEye(TM) Virtual Machine (VM), a virtual, per-flow test solution for cloud computing environments, gives service providers and network equipment manufacturers the ability to emulate and analyze real-time IP traffic in cloud environments for multiple hypervisors right down to each individual application flow.

Shenick is bringing the benefits of testing the virtualization of key network infrastructure in the cloud, ensuring that data migration works properly in both crisis and everyday data migration scenarios. For companies that deploy networks in virtualized environments they need to have the ability to test with opensource hypervisors as well as fully supported vendor hypervisors. The end result is virtualized network performance that is more reliable with greater visibility of issues in virtual IP networks…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Callidus Software Inc., the leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing, announced today that it received a "strong positive" rating in the latest MarketScope for Insurance Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) Applications[1] by Gartner, Inc., the world’s foremost information technology research and advisory company. "Strong positive" is the highest possible rating given in the Gartner MarketScope.

According to Gartner, a "strong positive" rating indicates that a vendor is viewed as a provider of strategic products, services or solutions, with whom existing customers should continue planned investments and potential customers should consider a strong choice for strategic investments.

Steven Leigh, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner and author of the MarketScope, found that "Callidus is the dominant global provider for insurance ICM with nearly 100 insurance ICM customers worldwide. Its implementation footprint reflects a strong presence in North America (85 implementations), along with 10 European installations and 10 in Asia. Callidus added 18 new customers within the past 12 months, making it by far the most successful in acquiring new business in 2011’s research. With implementations across all product lines and regions, Callidus is one of the few ICM vendors with sufficient reach for global insurers to consider as a single ICM solution for a range of products and various regions with a single platform." Mr. Leigh goes on to note that "Callidus continues to innovate ways to simplify deployments, leverage mobile devices, and improve insurance specific capabilities."…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: J. Gerry Purdy.

Recently, I stated my predictions for 2012. Here, I provide my wish list. The difference is simple: In my earlier column, I predicted things that have not happened yet. However, for this list, I wish for things to be fixed or for things that would make a good extension to something that’s already in the market.

I wish that Microsoft would alter the search algorithm in Outlook so that it would quickly return the first 10 results and then ask if you want more. As people accumulate tens of thousands of emails in their Outlook Inbox, the current search algorithm attempts to search the entire folder. This wastes the user’s time, as 90 percent of the time the answer is contained in the most recent instances. I also wish that Microsoft would improve the Boolean search process by providing a wizard to make it easy to search for the occurrence of two or more things together ("and") or to search for either one ("or")…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Skytap Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced that over one million virtual machines (VMs) have been launched by customers using its leading Skytap Cloud service. This represents a major milestone for Skytap, which provides businesses with an easy and secure way to create complex computing environments in the cloud. The announcement follows a string of innovations and accolades achieved by the company throughout 2011, including being selected as a "Best of VMWorld 2011" award winner in the public/hybrid cloud computing technologies category.

"Enterprise demand for simple and secure cloud computing has accelerated over the past year, and it’s clear the market is poised for rapid growth as we head into 2012," said Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development at Skytap. "Over the last year, we have demonstrated our commitment to providing customers with an innovative cloud solution that delivers self-service simplicity, visibility and control for development and test environments, online demonstrations, and virtual training. Launching over one million virtual machines is a testament to the success and tremendous business value that our customers derive from their use of Skytap Cloud."…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author:  Sourya Biswas.

$1279 an hour – seems a lot to hire a computer, right? What if it’s a supercomputer capable of performing 240 trillion calculations per second, or 240 teraflops (a flop is the acronym for floating point operations per second, the universal measure of a computer’s performance)? This is the performance promised by the latest innovation from the Amazon stable – the supercomputer on the cloud.

This cloud supercomputer runs on Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and features Intel’s Xeon 8C 2.60 GHz processor with 10G Ethernet interconnects providing 65,968 GB of capacity and 17,024 cores. As per the latest supercomputer rankings, this cloud supercomputer ranks as the 42nd fastest in the world. Considering that it’s the only one on the cloud and built with existing non-specialized equipment even as the company continued normal operations, that’s extremely impressive…