Grazed from YahooFinance. Author: JP Mangalindan.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (BABA) reported stellar fiscal first-quarter earnings on Thursday propelled by revenues that spiked 59%, surging past Wall Street estimates. And while talk of e-commerce transactions soaring on mobile dominated the announcement, analysts also paid close attention to the company’s cloud computing business, Alibaba Cloud — and for good reason.

Founded in 2009, Alibaba Cloud has evolved into China’s dominant cloud computing services provider, offering clients including Dutch electronics giant Philips, Schneider Electric and marketing platform Blogmint a wide range of storage, security, and database management options. For its fiscal first quarter, the company reported Alibaba Cloud revenues swelled 156% year-over-year to $188 million with 577,000 paid users…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

I hope you weren’t flying Delta this week. If you were, you know that Delta’s systems experienced an outage, and of course passengers bore the brunt of it in hundreds of canceled and delayed flights. When Delta performs a postmortem on this outage, it will likely find that the outage was caused by a common occurrence: network failure.

However, Delta could not recover or switch to backup systems. As my InfoWorld colleague Andrew C. Oliver wrote, Delta neglected the four pillars of high availability. Delta’s CEO admitted as much, telling the Wall Street Journal that "it’s not clear the priorities in our investment have been in the right place…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Jonathan Vanian.

It’s all about the data. Hewlett Packard Enterprise isn’t slimming today. The business technology giant said Thursday that it will buy computing hardware maker SGI for roughly $275 million. HPE said the deal should close in the first quarter of its fiscal 2017 as long as regulators approve it.

For the past several months, HPE has been slicing off chunks of its business it no longer wants, like a majority stake in the Indian outsourcing subsidiary Mphasis it sold for $825 million in April, and an IT services business group it spun out and merged with Computer Sciences in May to form a new joint venture…

Companies looking to gain entry into the Google Compute Engine but who don’t have the budget or don’t need the full power of Google’s cloud infrastructure now have a better choice.  They can go with Google’s preemptible VMs, a much cheaper alternative to Google’s typical cloud platform.  And now, they can do so even cheaper.  Thirty-three percent cheaper to be exact!

Preemptible VMs are like any other Google Compute Engine VM, with two big caveats: They cannot run for more than 24 hours and Google can preemptively shut down the VMs if they need the capacity for other purposes. 

Zadara Storage, the provider of award-winning enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS) today announced that it has earned a Best of Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2016 award for the Most Innovative Flash Memory Business Application. The award recognizes Zadara Storage for its unique OpEx-based VPSA Storage Array. During the summit, Nelson Nahum, CEO and co-founder of Zadara Storage, led an in-depth presentation on how the market is transitioning from traditional CapEx storage to more flexible, agile OpEx storage solutions.

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

When Amazon launched Aurora in 2014, it was presented as a clear challenge to giants in the $34 billion database market. Today it is Amazon’s fastest-growing product and has already surpassed the growth of Amazon Redshift, which is saying something. Customers of the service are among Amazon’s largest and loudest advocates.

Since the start of 2016, roughly 7,000 databases have been migrated to AWS Aurora — and the rate of adoption has tripled since March 2016. Why is Aurora gaining popularity? As we have come to expect from Amazon, Aurora provides enterprises with the performance and reliability of a commercial product at a fraction of the cost of Oracle or IBM…

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: Hannah Williams.

Cloud is most definitely in fashion when it comes to business tech, but researchers are currently exploring ways in which to literally embed cloud into fashion. US Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham are looking into developing a fully functioning, lightweight cloud computing system embedded into clothing – meaning a wearable personal cloud could soon become the ultimate accessory.

Rajib Hasan, assistant professor of computer and information sciences in the UAB college of Arts and Sciences, and Rasib Khan, a recent postdoctoral graduate student, presented their wearable cloud jacket at the 40th institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society International Conference on Computers, Softwares and Applications (IEEE COMPSAC) in June…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Andrew Froelich.

The rise of cloud computing has been a game-changer for not only businesses, but also IT pros looking to stay relevant. Here are 9 must-have skills in different aspects of cloud technologies needed to compete. Cloud computing is a huge part of IT, and its growth shows no sign of slowing down.

As an IT professional, it makes sense to start looking into obtaining skills in different aspects of cloud technologies to further your career. Here, we’ve identified 9 of those skills. Keep in mind, we’re not suggesting that all IT pros are going to be working for a service provider one day. In reality, most will end up on the customer end of the cloud relationship…

Grazed form PSFK. Author: Leo Lutero.

In the London Olympics of 2012, the US Cycling Women’s trio was 5.676 seconds shy of snatching the gold from the Great Britain contenders (who broke the world record). This year, the US team is leaving nothing to chance by upgrading their tools, using the best technology available in the cloud computing space.

IBM helped develop a groundbreaking analytics system that pairs environmental and rider data. Sensors developed by Stages captures cyclist data 64 times a second. The power required to make sense of this plus many other data inputs rely on the cloud. Through the IBM Watson Internet of Things Platform, coaches can track athlete power watts, lap timing, new muscle oxygenation and matched burned results in real time…

Read more from the source @ http://www.psfk.com/2016/08/olympics-how-cloud-computing-helps-the-us-cycling-team.html

Grazed from CIOReview. Author: Editorial Staff.

Focusing on the credibility and sophistication of today’s cloud offerings, companies often look to strike a deal with the most comprehensive cloud service provider through Service Level Agreements (SLAs). As outputbased contracts, an SLA specifically defines what the customer will receive and not how the service itself is delivered, as it chalks out the services delivered by a cloud provider to fulfill the requirements of their customers.

As Gartner expertly states, an institution considering cloud computing must understand the detailed terms and conditions and the risks of signing the service provider’s standard contract before moving to a cloud computing solution. Most significantly, cloud customers should closely evaluate application workflow in cloud SLAs. This allows them to determine application response time and identify the resources that support the applications…