Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author:  Juan Carlos Perez.

Things will get rowdier for vendors of cloud collaboration, communication and office productivity applications now that Microsoft plans to unleash a take-no-prisoners assault on the market with Office 365.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author:  Jeff Jedras.

SAP has claimed that the cloud will render Oracle‘s stratgey of owning the entire hardware and software stack irrelevant.

Speaking to press and analysts gathered for SAP’s Influencer Summit via satellite from Dresden, German, SAP co-CEO Jim Hagermann-Snabe said cloud computing isn’t good news for Oracle, or for its own the stack mantra.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: James Niccolai.

Oracle has stepped up its efforts to rebuild Sun‘s hardware business, announcing a high performance clustered database system that could turn up the competitive pressure on rivals IBM and HP.

Called the Sparc Supercluster, the system can include dozens of rack mount servers based on Oracle’s recently released 16-core Sparc T3 processor, linked in a cluster with high-performance InfiniBand connections, Oracle’s Real Application Clusters software and Sun’s FlashFire solid state storage acceleration technology.

Grazed from IT Wire.  Author: Stephen Withers.

Izzy Azeri, vice president of business and corporate development at Acronis, reckons SMEs need backup software that can cope with physical and virtual systems, and that can store backups locally or in the cloud.

Doing all this from a single console and one set of policies keeps things simple to administer, while cloud storage means the images can be restored anywhere there is an Internet connection.

Grazed from Server Watch.  Author: Kenneth Hess.

If your data center costs are out of control, it’s time to consider moving to an agile data center. Agile is a buzzword that’s tossed around a bit too much these days, but learning what it really means will translate into significantly higher profits for your data center’s shareholders. An agile data center uses efficient hardware, better design, fewer employees and better tools. It also has less wasted space. You might think that the only driving force behind moving to an agile data center is the need to save money. It’s a good reason, but it isn’t the only one. There are 10 driving forces behind the move to agility in the data center. Are you there yet?

Grazed from Internet Evolution.  Author: Sean Gallagher.

There’s a great deal of debate over both the WikiLeaks disclosure of classified Defense Department and State Department documents, and over the response of the US government and other governments to those leaks. I’m not going to add to it here. Instead, I want to focus on what the WikiLeaks case — and the state of social media in general — can teach us about the future of such information leaks, and (for a lack of a better term) "information warfare."

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author:  Eileen Yu.

Asked if cloud has moved beyond the "vaporware" stage and evolved as a sustainable business model, Arun Chandrasekaran, research manager at Frost & Sullivan, cited findings from an end-user study that the research firm recently conducted in the region, where 23 percent of respondents in mid-market companies and large enterprises are using some form of cloud computing.

Grazed from MIT Technology Review.  Author: Tom Simonite.

Smart phones and tablets have never been more popular, but they pack puny computing power compared to the average desktop computer. Two companies hope to change this by connecting modestly powered portable devices to powerful Internet servers that perform intensive tasks on their behalf. This week, both these companies—OnLive, based in Palo Alto, California, and GameString, in Vancouver, Canada—demonstrated handheld gadgets running high-end games and other complex software.

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Lilac Schoenbeck.

How would you go about remodeling a home you just purchased? Would you do this all at once, or would it be done incrementally? Most people start with one area, such as the kitchen, and then do other upgrades in stages.

Similarly, if you are seeking to "remodel" your IT operation through a move to cloud computing, you don’t have to take an all-at-once approach. The key is in knowing where to begin.

The fundamental technologies that enable cloud computing–virtualization, automation, and user portals–have been around for many years. Moving to cloud computing involves leveraging these capabilities to create a highly dynamic and flexible infrastructure.

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

It’s almost inevitable at this point that the enterprise industry will be wholly dependent upon cloud services in a few short years. If 2010 was the proof-of-concept phase, then 2011 will see the kind of broad rollout that will make the cloud a standard enterprise component by mid-decade.

But while most of the attention is going toward the increased scalability and flexibility that the cloud provides, there is one aspect of this evolving paradigm that has gone largely unnoticed: the increasing dependence on Wide Area Networking (WAN) to support general data center functions.