Grazed from VAdvert.co.uk.   Author:  Kelly Dunst.

The European Environment Agency (EEA), Esri and Microsoft Corp. today announced, at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the launch of the Eye on Earth network, an online community for developing innovative services that map environmental parameters. The new cloud computing-based network provides a collaborative online service for hosting, sharing and discovering data on the environment and promotes the principles of public data access and citizen science. In addition, the organisations also announced NoiseWatch, a new web service available on the Eye on Earth network that measures noise in 164 European cities.

The Eye on Earth network provides organisations with a security-enhanced central location for managing their geospatial environmental content. It uses Esri’s ArcGIS Online cloud services coupled with Windows Azure and Microsoft SQL Azure, and it hosts the data in the Environmental Data Store. The network’s user interface enables the easy creation and sharing of map-based services, translating complex scientific data into accessible, interactive and visual web services. With Eye on Earth, users can create and share maps within their organisation or make the content publicly available as web-accessible services. Eye on Earth was first launched in 2008 as part of a public-private partnership between the EEA and Microsoft with the joint goal of making environmental data available to all 600 million citizens across the EEA’s 32 member and seven cooperating countries…

Grazed from V3.  Author: Shaun Nichols.

Grazed from HedgeCo.net.  Author:  Mary Beth hamilton.

The increased use of cloud-based services is undeniable. Analyst firm Forrester forecasts that the global market for cloud computing will grow from $40.7 billion in 2011 to more than $241 billion in 2020. The advantages of using “the cloud” include the ability to:

• Quickly implement and use enterprise-grade technology systems and applications without employing a dedicated IT team;
• Outsource management and maintenance of technology to third-party experts responsible for ensuring continuous availability and high performance levels;
• Transition technology spending from capital expenditures to operating expenditures; and
• Easily scale technology environments to match business needs – eliminating the need to over or under buy when forecasting business growth.

When weighing adoption of cloud-services, it is important to understand the difference between cloud deployment models, namely public and private clouds…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Patrick Thibodeau.

Chipita America may be as close to a server-less company as one can find. Its ERP systems, EDI, BI, Office, Exchange and file servers are all hosted in a service provider’s cloud.

About six years ago, when many IT managers were debating Nicholas Carr’s book " Does IT Matter ," Chipita CIO Scott Martin was moving the Tulsa, Okla.-based snack food maker’s email to a third party’s cloud hosted platform. Since then Chipita has moved the rest its core systems to the cloud.

Martin said he didn’t see a competitive advantage in managing internal systems, believing that his time could be best spent focusing on business needs…

Grazed from Wall Street Journal.  Author: Ben Worthen.

Cisco Systems on Tuesday unveiled what it’s calling a “framework” for building big data centers, letting potential customers know how they can use various Cisco products together–and hopefully leading to more sales of its equipment.

The products in the announcement are largely things that Cisco already sells. But now Cisco is laying out a vision for using them to better manage information across data centers.

“For a long time we’ve provided individual components,” said Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology officer, who issued a blog post on the announcement. “What we are doing now is bringing these sets of products together.”…

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

Spooked by the "volatile economic climate" and "current market conditions," GlassHouse Technologies, which provides cloud, virtualization, security and next-generation data center consulting and managed services, has dropped its plans to IPO.

It said it would withdraw the registration statement that it filed with the SEC last year thinking it could raise $75 million.

It’ll be the second time GlassHouse has scrubbed an IPO. It wanted to raise $100 million in 2007 but pulled those papers two years later because of market conditions too.

The 10-year-old Pennsylvania company has raised close to $87 million over five rounds from VCs, according to CrunchBase, including not insignificant contributions from Cisco and Citrix…

Grazed from China Tech News.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Chinese technology giant Lenovo Group held a launch ceremony in Beijing to announce a new cloud computing strategy, a new smartphone, a tablet computer, a new personal computer, and TV products.

Its new personal cloud product can realize three types of services, including personal information management, interconnectivity, and social networking. Lenovo will also reportedly provide users with a whopping 200 gigabytes of storage space for all their connected devices.

A new automatic synchronization function can now update data among various Lenovo terminals and devices. For its social networking focus, Lenovo will provide a one-click publishing function within many of its devices. With a single click, users will be able to publish texts, photos, and videos on Chinese social media and social networking websites…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Intacct today introduced Intacct Fall 2011, the latest release of the cloud computing-based Intacct Financial Management and Accounting System. Intacct Fall 2011 features the introduction of Intacct Services Resource Planning, a complete cloud-based ERP system for project and service-based businesses. Intacct Fall 2011 also includes a completely re-imagined, "consumerized" user interface, plus new support for tablet and mobile devices. The introduction of a new marketplace for partner applications, major enhancements to Intacct Project Accounting, Intacct Revenue Management and Intacct’s global business management capabilities, along with more than 225 additional new features round out Intacct Fall 2011.

New Intacct Services Resource Planning Intacct Services Resource Planning is a complete, cloud-based ERP system for project and service-based businesses. It is comprised of an integrated, best in class combination of salesforce.com for customer relationship management, Intacct for financial management and project accounting, and Clarizen for project management and planning. Intacct has also developed new, three-way synchronization between these three applications plus extensive workflow and automation for the key tasks that drive productivity for project and service-based organizations. Intacct Services Resource Planning is modern, cloud-native, and features real-time visibility across the project delivery lifecycle…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Bill Kleyman.

Cloud managers work within a distributed WAN computing infrastructure; one of the biggest shifts from the traditional data center is that all data is stored, managed and administered in a private cloud. Effective cloud-based workload monitoring can capture performance issues before they happen. Knowing how your cloud is behaving allows you to deliver a more powerful cloud computing experience.

Gathering cloud performance metrics
IT admins must actively gather and log cloud-facing server performance metrics and data, especially since most servers that host cloud workloads are virtual machines (VMs) that require dedicated resources. Over-allocating or under-allocating resources to cloud servers can be a costly mistake…