Grazed from InfoBoom.  Author:  Douglas Bonderud.

That cloud computing and virtualization are on the rise is no surprise for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), but what’s more important than cloud adoption is cloud evolution–the ways that businesses can implement the cloud in their everyday practices and reap tangible returns.

Provider Evolution

One half of the cloud-evolution equation comes in the form of service providers like Nefsis, which develops cloud-based video conferencing applications. A recent PR Newswire press release highlights the benefits of this technology and shores up how it has changed over the last few years. The initial development of cloud video conferencing systems saw them as mirrors of standard boardroom video equipment: meant to capture meetings and perform a very narrow set of functions. As the power of the cloud has expanded, companies like Nefsis have also increased the scope of their offerings, and now support video conferencing anywhere that a user has access to a webcam and a reliable Internet connection. The ability of Nefsis to take on all maintenance and infrastructure costs leave SMBs with the expense of an off-the-shelf webcam…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional association, announced that the November/December issue of IBM Journal of Research and Development has been published and appears exclusively in the IEEE Xplore® digital library.

IBM Journal of Research & Development is the #1 most-cited journal in the category Computer Science, Hardware and Software, according to the 2010 Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports, released in June 2011.

This issue focuses on cloud computing and emphasizes new technologies that form the foundational building blocks for scalable and secure computing. Cloud computing has the potential to greatly reduce the complexity of information technology (IT) management. Building on virtualization technologies, cloud computing transforms the traditional model of IT into a set of easily configurable, manageable, and scalable services…

Grazed from Seeking Alpha.  Author:  Dana Blankenhorn.

Oracle’s (ORCL) earnings bombshell yesterday is the first indication that cloud computing is hitting enterprise IT.

Regardless of what it may say publicly, Oracle is not a cloud company. It sells big iron, Sun servers and Exadata data systems. It sells big software, in the Oracle database and all the applications around it. It needs people to write big checks every year for its licenses, and bigger checks whenever they want to grow.

But something has changed. Cloud has changed.

Cloud is not based on expensive servers, but commodity hardware. Cloud is based on open source, not vendor lock-in. Cloud is based on Software as a Service (SaaS), not enterprise IT as it has existed in the past. With cloud, you pay for what you use, not what you need…

Grazed from MSPMentor.  Author: Renee Bergeron.

I know what you’re thinking: Consumerism? Have you lost your mind? No, but I do want you to consider the positive impact consumerism can have on your business when it comes to cloud adoption.

For beginners, as consumers, we use cloud computing in our everyday life — and have been for some time. We use iTunes for our music, stream Netflix to our TV when we want to watch movies, and check our Gmail and even our finances from our laptops, our smartphones — even our cars.

We never think twice about using our iPad or our BlackBerry to conduct personal business — while we are in airports, waiting for oil changes, or sitting in the drive-through at the local McDonalds. We’ve learned — as consumers — that cloud makes us more productive, more connected, and more accessible to everyone from our boss to our kids. In fact, we’ve learned that lesson so well that studies show the adoption of cloud services on the consumer side could be as high as 90%…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Howard M. Cohen.

Consumers who have been using online services for more than a decade may have become confused when popular software providers such as Microsoft started declaring “to the cloud” in reference to just about every imaginable online service. The typical consumer computer user didn’t realize they were using what is now called cloud services.

An August report from The NPD Group found that while only 22 percent of U.S. consumers claimed familiarity with the term “cloud computing,” more than three-quarters were using services that could be characterized as cloud-computing services. 

Primary among these consumer cloud activities were email, tax preparation, online gaming and photo and video sharing…

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

Maybe Android won’t be vaporized in the thermonuclear war that Steve Jobs promised to fund before he died; maybe it’s doomed to suffer a thousand cuts.

After the International Trade Commission decided Monday that HTC’s Android phones definitely infringe an Apple patent, it said Tuesday that Motorola’s Android widgets infringe a Microsoft patent and that US sales could be blocked.

Like HTC, Motorola is playing the verdict as a victory since it’s not as bad as it might have been. It’s a preliminary decision by an administrative law judge that the ITC’s commissioners could overturn by April 20 and Microsoft originally went after MMI with nine patents but only wound up nailing MMI on four claims of one patent called ActiveSync that lets users schedule group meetings across mobile devices. Microsoft dropped two patents and the judge threw out six…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge.  Author: John Rath.

After almost two years into the Federal Government data center consolidation project an interesting roadblock may have emerged to redirect cloud computing efforts. Plans to favor the DISA (Defense Information Systems Agency) cloud for military departments and agencies may be set aside in favor of private sector clouds.

Migration to private sector

Nexgov reports that a part of the 2012 Defense Authorization Act passed last week has lawmakers directing Defense CIO Teri Takai to develop a plan to use commercial cloud computing services instead of DISA’s. Within the act, Takai is directed to submit a plan by April 1, 2012, for “migration of Defense data and government-provided services from department owned and operated data centers to cloud computing services generally available within the private sector.”  This comes less than a month after a Pentagon report stating that as much as $680 million a year, starting in 2015, could be saved if the Defense Department consolidated data centers. The authorization act also zeroed out the Army budget to consolidate its enterprise email with DISA until the service examines alternatives…

Grazed from CRN.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

HP has introduced new cloud solutions to advance deployment of private, public and hybrid clouds. The company has integrated its HP CloudSystem with Alcatel-Lucent to enable communication service providers for networking.

HP has also introduced HP CloudAgile Service Provider program, HP CloudSystem Matrix 7.0, HP Cloud Protection program, HP Enterprise Cloud Services–Compute, and training programs to transform legacy data centers for cloud computing.

“Clients want to understand, plan, build and source for cloud computing in a way that allows them to gain agility, reduce risk, maintain control and ensure security,” said Santanu Ghose, Country Head, Converged Infrastructure Solutions, HP India…

Grazed from Virtualization Review.  Author: David Davis.

I’ve been working on a project for a company that uses infrastructure-as-a-service to dynamically bring up virtual machines in the public cloud for temporarily use. I am excited and bullish on cloud computing and, prior to this project, I didn’t see a lot of negatives to "the cloud" (as long as you understood today’s technology limitations). However, through this project I have come to believe that the greatest limitation to using IaaS in today’s public cloud may be the utter chaos when it comes to pricing.

Lack of Public Cloud Pricing
In trying to get pricing to compare one cloud service offering to another, I went to each company’s Web site and tried to obtain their list price. This doesn’t work. Most companies don’t publish their prices publicly and they say "contact us to have a sales person contact you."…

Grazed from SmartDataCollective.  Author: Mark Smith.

I attended the annual SAP Influencer Summit (Twitter #SAPSummit), at which executives from SAP meet with analysts and customers from around the world to discuss the company’s direction. Pointing out that in 2012 SAP will reach its 40th anniversary of operations, chief communications officer Hubertus Kulpus and chief marketing officer Jonathan Becher kicked off the summit, then passed the microphones to co-CEO Jim Hagemann-Snabe and CTO Vishal Sikka for overviews of the business and technology strategies. They presented a well-rehearsed dialogue on SAP’s definition of its software business as being in two areas, the “system of record” and “system of engagement”; the first term describes its transactional applications and the second its portfolio of business analytics…