Grazed from ChannelInsider. Author: Mike Vizard.

With Amazon Web Services now several times larger than rival cloud service providers combined, the presence of AWS across the channel is ubiquitous. In fact, at the recent AWS re:invent 2016 conference, the company revealed that in the last year, it has added more than 10,000 partners. Competition between partners across the AWS cloud ecosystem is already fierce.

AWS is also starting to extend its influence beyond the public cloud, and a new AWS Lambda service can run compute functions locally. At the same time, AWS is recruiting partners interested in moving workloads that previously ran VMware in a local data center environment into AWS. In addition, AWS is targeting workloads running on Oracle databases that can now run on a new Postgres database service that’s compatible with existing Oracle applications…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.

New-generation companies aren’t the only ones bringing IT innovation into the marketplace. IBM, the granddaddy of all IT companies that has been in business since before World War I (1911), continues to be quietly inventive and probably doesn’t get enough credit for its own innovations.

Big Blue revealed Jan. 9 that it broke the U.S. corporate patent record in 2016 with 8,088 patents granted to its inventors in a single calendar year. This marks the first time any company or organization has earned more than 8,000 patents in one year, and it is the 24th consecutive year that IBM has been No. 1 on the list…

Actifio, the copy data virtualization company, today announced support of Microsoft Azure with the availability of the Actifio Sky in the Azure Marketplace. Actifio’s copy data virtualization platform helps enterprise customers move faster to the cloud, speeding up hybrid cloud adoption for test data provisioning for application development, backup, disaster recovery, instant recovery, data migration, long-term retention or analytics.

IT leaders are driving initiatives to accelerate business innovation and speed to market via faster software development while driving down costs. Actifio helps enterprise CIOs reduce risk while moving faster to a hybrid cloud, with a data management platform that:

CSC today announced the expansion of its strategic alliance with Microsoft through the advancement of Industrial Machine Learning (IML) solutions that enable data scientists to produce new data-derived enterprise insights, leading to better and more timely business decisions.

Most large, data-rich companies fail to benefit from information on an enterprise-wide scale because they are not equipped to effectively capture and analyze available data sources. A recent survey from PwC and Iron Mountain found that 57 percent of businesses are unable to extract significant value from their information, and 23 percent are unable to derive any real value at all. Regardless of size, geography or sector, businesses are struggling to fully realize value from their information.

CloudCraze, an enterprise digital commerce solution built on the Salesforce platform, has secured $20 million in funding led by Insight Venture Partners. Salesforce Ventures joins Insight as an additional investor. The combined funds will supercharge product development, support continued growth in the United States and EMEA, and expand the company’s team of B2B commerce experts.

CloudCraze is a Platinum Salesforce ISV Partner. Built on the Salesforce platform and leveraging the agility of the cloud, CloudCraze allows businesses to harness the power of digital commerce to generate online revenue fast and easily scale for growth. It provides seamless omnichannel interactions and a holistic view across all customer touchpoints. CloudCraze is focused on solving the complex needs of B2B companies including several iconic brands, such as Coca-Cola, Avid, AB InBev, Barry-Callebaut, Ecolab, GE, Land O’ Lakes, Kellogg’s, and WABCO.

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Chen Wu.

Dynamic resource management for cloud computing is at a critical crossroad. The ultimate objective when provisioning software-defined infrastructure, synchronizing inter-cloud resources, or allocating network bandwidth is allowing applications to successfully execute on demand without concern for capacity. While these approaches are effective in supplying applications with additional capacity on demand, the downside is that application performance may not be optimized in the process.

Cloud applications and services have become so complex that the runtime synchronization of resources required to support them drags down overall performance and leaves capacity unused. To tap this unused capacity, and deliver the performance expected, we need to enhance resource management with something like intelligent resource execution. Let me explain…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

2016 was an interesting year in cloud computing. For the European market, data protection regulation came into force, while many of the major cloud providers began to move their operations into and build data centres in Europe, from AWS, to Microsoft, to IBM. Regarding acquisitions, Oracle bought NetSuite, Microsoft bought LinkedIn and Samsung acquired Joyent, while in terms of trends, DevOps, containers and security continued to be the primary talking points. Here is our short review of the main stories from the more than 400 that went live on CloudTech last year:

2016 in review

AWS celebrates its 10th birthday. On March 14 2006, a press release went out on the wire from Amazon announcing “a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs.” Thus AWS was born, and a decade on the company enjoys significant market share leadership in the IaaS space…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2017/jan/05/was-year-was-2016-cloud-and-whats-horizon-2017/

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Brandon Bulter.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) recently announced a new Managed Services product for its public cloud that aims to ease migration of legacy enterprise applications. AWS Managed Services is a series of infrastructure operations management tools meant to provide ongoing management, support, monitoring, and security of an AWS cloud environment.

It’s delivered jointly by AWS employees and certified AWS partners and is meant to serve AWS’s largest clients who are planning to migrate workloads to Amazon’s public cloud. Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Lydia Leong says most workloads can be broken down into two categories:…

New data from Synergy Research Group shows that across six key cloud services and infrastructure market segments, operator and vendor revenues for the four quarters ending September 2016 reached $148 billion, having grown by 25% on an annualized basis. IaaS & PaaS services had the highest growth rate at 53%, followed by hosted private cloud infrastructure services at 35% and enterprise SaaS at 34%. 2016 was notable as the year in which spend on cloud services overtook spend on cloud infrastructure hardware and software. In aggregate cloud service markets are now growing three times more quickly than cloud infrastructure hardware and software. Companies that featured the most prominently among the 2016 market segment leaders were Amazon/AWS, Microsoft, HPE, Cisco, IBM, Salesforce and Dell EMC.

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.2, the latest version of its award-winning open hybrid cloud management solution. IT operations teams can face slow, manual processes to deliver services internally, which may cost time, money and competitiveness. To address these challenges, IT teams can use Red Hat CloudForms to increase service delivery while enabling IT teams to focus on critical, business-impacting issues.

Red Hat CloudForms, based on the open source ManageIQ project, provides an advanced open source management platform for physical, virtual and cloud IT environments, including Linux containers. CloudForms helps IT organizations offer composable services through a self-service portal, managing the service lifecycle from provisioning to retirement. It can also define and enforce advanced compliance policies for new and existing IT environments, better enabling operators to optimize the costs of a given environment and system.

Red Hat CloudForms 4.2