Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

I’m often taken aback by businesses that are unaware of the influence of cloud computing when it’s about to hit them upside the head.

We saw this before, back in the early days of the Web. Some businesses got it and thrived. Others did not, and they had to play catch-up or shut their doors. Indeed, a great business skill is to understand when technology will require you to move in different directions, and cloud computing is another instance of that shift.

What are they missing? I have a few items for the list.

Reduction in IT overhead creates a price advantage. How can your competition sell its product at the price it does and still make money? Well, instead of putting $50 million a year into IT, the company has cut its costs in half through the use of cloud-based services. Or perhaps it avoided an investment in that new data center. Instead, thanks to the use of the cloud, your competitor passed that savings on as lower prices, which increased sales and led to higher profits…

Grazed from InfoBoom.  Author:  Douglas Bonderud.

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) often hear the refrain that cloud computing is an essential move if they want to cut costs and become more agile. Often lacking, however is training necessary for the deployment of new technology, leaving SMBs with fewer benefits than expected. Now, "cloud education" is becoming a priority for businesses of all types.

Training a New Breed of IT 

Businesses looking to operate in a cloud environment need two things–an effective provider and IT staff knowledgable about how the cloud operates. According to an article at Technocrati, the non-profit trade association for the IT industry CompTIA has now introduced a Cloud Essentials Program, which will provide IT professionals with the training necessary to manage cloud resources effectively. The move is a nod to the separate and distinct channel that cloud education occupies, that is, one that isn’t satisfied by knowledge of localized data best practices or those relating to legacy systems…

Grazed from GigaOm.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Google today announced that it is ending its Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, a joint program with IBM and the National Science Foundation that gave researchers access to a massive Hadoop cluster on which to run their data-intensive projects.

The project kicked off in 2007 via a partnership with a handful of major universities as a way to introduce students and researchers to webscale computing, and broadened its scope to the entire scientific community by getting on board with the NSF’s Cluster Exploratory program in 2008. However, what was once novel has become fairly commonplace, so Google is ending the ACCI altogether…

Grazed from PRWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Grazed from Information Week.  Author:  PR Announcement.

New Relic, Inc., the SaaS-based cloud application performance management provider, today announced that it has joined the OpenStack(TM) community, a global collaboration of developers and technologists producing the open standard cloud-computing platform for both public and private clouds. Organizations deploying web applications on OpenStack can use New Relic to automatically monitor web apps in production and proactively identify and eliminate potential bottlenecks.

"We are witnessing first hand the accelerating adoption of the cloud and many of our customers and partners are taking full advantage of open platforms like OpenStack," said Bill Lapcevic, New Relic’s vice president of business development. "Having a performance monitoring solution that deploys in minutes on OpenStack, is easy to use, and has been proven effective on OpenStack provides a huge benefit for organizations that want to ensure application performance and scalability. We are thrilled to be joining OpenStack’s growing community of cloud leaders."…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Etherios, a leader in enterprise cloud computing technology, today announced the opening of two new Solution Centers in response to the company’s rapid growth and its success in delivering cloud-based solutions for its clients.

"With the rapid growth of enterprise cloud computing, our unique Solution Center designs in Chicago and Dallas enable us to leverage our team of highly trained, experienced, and certified consultants across projects while lowering implementation costs for our clients," says Mike Dannenfeldt, Etherios Founder and CEO. "These Solution Centers, combined with our unique project delivery process, allow us to realize unmatched results and success. This success is further evidenced by our achievement and maintenance of the highest level of customer satisfaction."

Grazed from FormTek.  Author: Dick Weisinger.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) and The Green Grid (TGG) alliance have announced that they’re joining forces in their efforts to create standards for the cloud.

The Green Grid is a non-profit, open industry consortium of end-users, policy-makers, technology providers, facility architects, and utility companies collaborating to improve the resource efficiency of data centers and business computing ecosystems.   The Green Grid is trying to create a set of metrics for power, cooling, and space as related to the efficient operation of data centers.  Their metrics have helped many operators in designing, building and running more efficient facilities.  It makes sense that the ODCA would team with the TGG.  The TGG has been working on the problem of data center efficiencies for some time and has generated several generations of standards in this area.

In particular, the two groups will collaborate on Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) metric developed by The Green Grid’s which addresses data center-specific carbon emissions.  The joint collaboration is expected to complete sometime in the first part of 2012…

Grazed from Portland Business Journal.  Author: Erik Seimers.

Cloudability, a Portland startup providing software to help manage cloud computing spending, on Thursday announced a $1.1 million investment round.

Though the seed round was led by a pair of Bay Area venture capital firms — Trinity Ventures    Trinity Ventures Latest from The Business Journals ScaleArc gets .33M for expansion plansScaleArc raises .33M for expansion plans New Relic raises M Follow this company of Palo Alto, Calif., and Walden Venture Capital    Walden Venture Capital Latest from The Business Journals PowerCloud raises millionPowerCloud Systems gets M in Series B funds PowerCloud Systems raises M in Series B funds Follow this company of San Francisco — around half of the funds came from a collection of angels, including $255,000 from Portland investors.

“What we had heard over and over is you can’t raise a lot of money in Portland and have to go out of town for it,” said J.R. Storment, one of the company’s founders. “It’s been a really cool experience to get deeper into the community and have some of these people just go out for us.”…

Grazed from New York Times.  Author: Michael J. De La Merced.

Though the year is drawing to a close, there is no end in sight for cloud fever.

Akamai Technologies has made its first cloud services acquisition, agreeing on Thursday to buy a three-year-old company, Contendo, for about $268 million in cash.

Akamai is in the business of speeding up the delivery of Web content, but in Contendo it will acquire a host of technologies aimed at speeding up delivery of online content using so-called cloud computing, the use of the Internet to process data on remote servers. Contendo’s products include software that adjusts the speed of content delivery to match a user’s download speed…

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Michal Lev-Ram.

People like to talk about bubbles. And the cloud. And, more recently, a potential cloud bubble. But are we really heading in that direction?

Not yet. It’s too early to tell whether some of the recent inflated valuations (a la SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors) are justified. What’s clear is that the shift from on-premise to cloud-based software can no longer be dismissed as a passing trend. "We believe that larger enterprise software vendors such as Oracle (ORCL), SAP (SAP), and IBM (IBM) have been losing share to their smaller, faster growing SaaS competitors that are increasingly being accepted in the market," JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walravens wrote in a recent report. "Increasingly, we believe these companies are viewing acquisitions as a way to stem market share losses and position themselves better in the competitive SaaS marketplace."

In the last few months alone, Oracle acquired RightNow Technologies (RNOW), SAP bought SuccessFactors (SFSF) and IBM snapped up DemandTec (DMAN). Large, on-premise enterprise software makers are finally admitting that the way companies buy technology is changing. They’re also acknowledging that they don’t have the DNA to compete in the cloud, which is why they’re acquiring smaller players that have built their business on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model…