Cloud computing spells the end for traditional IT outsourcing
The traditional IT outsourcing industry will be dead in five years, AT Kearney’s Arjun Sethi predicted in a recent interview with our sister site CIO.com. The culprit? Cloud computing services. Sethi’s vision of the future of the IT services industry is quite clear, but he’s unsure of the specific implications this industry transformation poses to traditional IT outsourcing customers.
VMware ponders Novell purchase, claims report
VMware is among a number of companies in talks to purchase Novell, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal.
Novell is reportedly looking to split up the company and sell it in separate pieces. It is now in "advanced talks" with at least two buyers, including VMware, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 Continues Company Cloud Strategy
Cloud helps us manage supply chain, says Microsoft
Microsoft is moving its IT into the public and private cloud to help make its supply chain agile and adaptable.
Brian Tobey, corporate vice-president of manufacturing, supply chain, information and services at Microsoft, told Gartner’s Supply Chain Executive Conference in London that the company was moving its IT structure into the cloud to eliminate the traditional approach of dealing with partners in a supply chain via “one-to-one telephone connections”.
Pi record smashed as team finds two-quadrillionth digit
A researcher has calculated the 2,000,000,000,000,000th digit of the mathematical constant pi – and a few digits either side of it.
Nicholas Sze, of tech firm Yahoo, said that when pi is expressed in binary, the two quadrillionth "bit" is 0.
Mr Sze used Yahoo’s Hadoop cloud computing technology to more than double the previous record.
It took 23 days on 1,000 of Yahoo’s computers – on a standard PC, the calculation would have taken 500 years.
Cloud turning outsourcing ‘upside down’
Rolf Jester, Gartner’s Distinguished Analyst and Asia-Pacific vice president for IT services, pointed out that cloud is not yet a major threat to outsourcing because deals that have been struck or are being negotiated, will remain valid for five to 10 years and are delivering value to businesses.
Certeon Creates New Partner Program
Burlington, Mass.-based Certeon, a software-based, hypervisor-agnostic, WAN optimization solution company, has recently taken steps to further embrace the channel with a restructuring of its partner program. The change is intended to help partners deliver high-performance, cost-effective WAN optimization to the virtualization, disaster recovery, and cloud computing markets.
Sage Beefs Up Services in Sage Act! 2011
Sage has taken a different path than most vendors for software-as-a-service and cloud computing. In keeping with the times, the vendor has chosen to infuse its installed contact management product, Sage Act! (formerly known as Act! by Sage), with Web services.
Salesforce Puts Jigsaw Together with CRM
Just a few months after its $142 million acquisition of Jigsaw, a cloud-based data service, Salesforce.com has rolled out Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM. Priced at $29 per user per month, the Jigsaw service will appear natively within Salesforce CRM and its social networking product Chatter. CRM users can receive real-time updates about their contacts, customers, and prospects thanks to Jigsaw’s crowdsourced data model.