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

Remember .NET, the other application software platform besides J2EE, which always seems to dominate cloud conversations?

Well, Apprenda, which has got a rare if not unique "deploy anywhere" private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) stack for .NET, has just released Apprenda Platform 3.0, hoping to set the standard for enterprise-ready PaaS offerings.

For one thing, it’ll work with any .NET or SQL Server application now, making it appealing to service providers as well as enterprises interested in a private Azure-like set-up…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

Former state CIO Tony Tortorice left the role in October 2010 after only 15 months on the job, and there has not been a full-time CIO since. Tortorice had been working to push through a shared services initiative, and the state is working to consolidate several data centers into a $255 million office building and data center complex that will also double as the state information services division’s headquarters.

After the data center build was announced, state legislatures questioned its expense, pointing out that cloud computing services from tech vendors, including in-state companies such as Microsoft and Amazon, could potentially be cheaper than consolidating everything into a brand new data center…

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

General Electric must have gotten the memo from McKinsey’s research arm calling Big Data the "next frontier" and promising untold riches to those who unlock its secrets.

The company is going to pour a reported billion dollars over the next three years into a new global software headquarters that it’s moving into San Ramone in San Francisco’s East Bay where it will build the "Industrial Internet," a sub-category of the Internet of Things and create intelligent connect systems to harness Big Data.

It means to hire 400 more software architects, engineers, biz dev and user experience people, presumably folks who don’t want to cross the bridge to Silicon Valley proper…

At the Symantec Vision 2011 conference here Friday, Enrique Salem, the security vendor’s president and CEO, reiterated that the significance of cloud computing, mobility and virtualization in driving IT transformation.

"IT trends in mobile and cloud computing are driving increased connectivity on an unprecedented scale.

"These connections are creating greater opportunities and greater points of risk to our intellectual property, financial integrity, corporate reputation, control of our individual and corporate identities, privacy and even national infrastructures," Salem explained…

 "Morphlabs has developed strategic cloud computing solutions for enterprise infrastructure which extend far beyond server consolidation and virtualization," said Winston Damarillo, founder and CEO at Morphlabs. "Lee has a proven track record of taking disruptive open source innovations and implementing them successfully in mission-critical environments. With more than 25 years of experience in balancing open initiatives and proprietary technologies in large-scale deployments, Lee is the right CTO to help Morphlabs to execute on driving the adoption of Dynamic Infrastructure Services in the enterprise."…

Grazed from LightWave Online.  Author:  Mannix O’Connor and Vladimir Bronstein.

Cloud computing promises to reduce IT expenditures, increase network flexibility, and streamline communication infrastructure. This is the first in a series of three articles in which we will examine communications technologies as key enablers that can make cloud computing a reality. Specifically, we will look at protocols, traffic management, and the control of wide-area communications and how the application of industry-standard techniques can assure network designers robust performance in their cloud offerings.

In this article, we’ll define specific communications reference points (RPs) within cloud computing networks so that software designers and network architects can better understand and address specific problems. Each RP presents unique requirements and challenges for creating, maintaining, and managing connectivity. Creating proper communication paths on the network and configuring them correctly at these RPs, or interfaces, will maximize cloud performance. The communication RPs will be defined individually; for each RP we will analyze the type and characteristics of the data communicated, describe the expected traffic patterns at the RP, and discuss the reliability requirements, the need (or lack thereof) for real-time traffic delivery, quality of service (QoS), and other characteristics of communication technologies, such as security…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

FXI Technologies, a hardware and software startup based in Trondheim Norway, demonstrated today the world’s first any screen, connected computing USB device. Codenamed "Cotton Candy", this sweet little device serves as a technology bridge between any display, the Cloud, and any input peripheral.

The vision for Cotton Candy is to allow users a single, secure point of access to all personal Cloud services and apps through their favorite operating system, while delivering a consistent experience on any screen. The device will serve as a companion to smartphones, tablets, notebook PCs and Macs, as well as add smart capabilities to existing displays, TVs, set top boxes and game consoles…

Grazed from GlobalNewsWire.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Now, using the next-generation platform‑as‑a‑service (PaaS) offering Jelastic, it is possible to build and run any Java application in the cloud instead of from a personal computer — speeding development time and maximizing computing resources.

Jelastic allows developers to make code changes and rebuild applications in the cloud, removing the lag time caused whenever files are updated and uploaded from a personal computer. Jelastic can take application source code directly from version control repositories, via either the Git or SVN protocol.

Using Jelastic, developers can easily swap test and production environments with simple point-and-click. The same is true for cloning an exact copy to test or prepare an application for production deployment. Jelastic is fully compatible with existing Java applications and libraries…