Vlocity, Inc., a leading industry cloud company, is fundamentally transforming how the world’s leading communication companies engage with their customers by building business support system (BSS) applications in the cloud, on the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. The company today announced the general availability of its 12^th product release, Vlocity Communications Summer ’16, now available on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Vlocity’s communications industry domain expertise, combined with the power of Salesforce, the world’s #1 CRM company, enables organizations to launch new offers in hours, capture and fulfill orders, and effortlessly engage B2B and B2C customers through their channel and device of choice. 

Service providers are constantly working to increase business agility, reduce IT cost and complexity, and deliver an effortless digital customer experience. To achieve this, these organizations are increasingly replacing their legacy customer-facing systems with innovative new CRM and BSS applications born in the cloud. Vlocity and Salesforce are on the vanguard of this historic technology transition. 

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Application workloads that migrate to the cloud often need some work before the move, but IT usually opts to get the workloads to the cloud as expeditiously as possible, which means the workloads often go to the cloud as is. If you don’t modify or refactor the application or data, you will probably not take advantage of some cloud-native features that could really improve your ROI.

However, when you do modify the application, you must consider portability trade-offs. Can you move your application workload to the public cloud without any modification? Perhaps, but only if the workload in question passes these tests. All three answers must be yes…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft on Monday posted a surprising case study about a $13 billion company: Land O’ Lakes. Land O’ Lakes owns several businesses, among them the agriculture tech company WinField. On Monday, Land O’ Lakes CIO Mike Macrie described in a blog post published by Microsoft how WinFien will be moving its "R7” app to Microsoft Azure.

"This app takes a vast array of agronomic research, weather information and satellite data and puts it together on a mobile device for farmers – and the WinField specialists who help them – so they can make important planting decisions and react to real-time changes in the field, every day," Macrie says…

Grazed from HumanResourcesOnline. Author: Jerene Ang.

While cloud-based technologies have the potential to revolutionise the HR function, this requires more than simply plugging into the cloud – people, processes and technology need to be successfully integrated in order to realise the greatest benefits from a cloud HR management system (HRMS).

According to the recently released KPMG 2016 Global HR Transformation Survey, of 854 HR executives from 52 countries surveyed, 42% are intending to replace their current HR system with a cloud-based one. However the survey also pointed out that HR’s high expectations for cloud computing to deliver revolutionary business benefits are largely failing to materialise…

Grazed from Cloudwards. Author: Editorial Staff.

Long associated with Bitcoin and not well understood, blockchain technology is generating more discussion, as well as going beyond its Bitcoin connection. IBM Blockchain has announced beta testing for a secure cloud service for the new technology. The IBM Blockchain beta is one of a series of recent announcements from the company of cutting edge technologies.

In May, they introduced IBM Quantum Computing, an experimental cloud-enabled quantum computing platform. In June, they launched the Data Science Experience, a cloud-based development environment for data scientists. Blockchain, as explained by IBM is: "a technology for a new generation of transactional applications that establishes trust, accountability and transparency while streamlining business processes"…

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: John Ribeiro.

IBMs revenue continued to decline in the second quarter but growth in some of its strategic initiatives like cloud computing and data analytics suggest that the company may be on track in its transition plans. The Armonk, New York, company said Monday that revenue from its new “strategic imperatives” like cloud, analytics and security increased by 12 percent year-on-year to US$8.3 billion. That increase was, however, lower than the growth the company had reported in these businesses in the first quarter.

Cloud revenue – public, private and hybrid – grew 30 percent in the second quarter, while revenue from analytics grew 4 percent, revenue from mobile increased 43 percent and the security business grew 18 percent. Over the last 12 months, strategic imperatives delivered close to $31 billion in revenue, and now accounts for 38 percent of the company’s revenue, said Martin Schroeter, IBM senior vice president and chief financial officer, in a conference call…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Sedar Yegulalp.

Prometheus, an open source system for monitoring and alerting a wide spectrum of enterprise IT events, including containers, released its 1.0 revision this week. It’s also the second product in what amounts to a portfolio assembled by the CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) for realizing the promise of a container-powered cloud built entirely on open source and open standards.

Originally developed at music hosting site SoundCloud, Prometheus has been a work in progress over the past four years, but during that time it’s enjoyed attention and uptake from major names. CoreOS, for instance, found Prometheus useful for improving the performance of Google’s container scheduling system Kubernetes, and Kubernetes now integrates natively with Prometheus without needing a plugin…

Grazed from InfoSecurity. Author: Phil Muncaster.

A US federal appeals court has ruled in favor of Microsoft in a major privacy case related to whether the government can demand access to data stored on servers outside the country. The decision reverses a court order from 2014 requesting that the computing giant hand over emails stored in Ireland for use in a drugs case.

Judge Susan Carney of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York ruled that the Stored Communications Act only applies to data stored in the US. Microsoft had argued that if the government got its way in the case, it could open the floodgates for foreign agents to raid its offices in jurisdictions all over the world and demand access to US citizens’ data…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Eric Knorr.

At last week’s AWS event in Santa Clara, California, Amazon GM of product strategy Matt Wood gave a rousing recapitulation of the abundant services offered by the world’s leading public cloud, from good old Elastic Map Reduce to Kinesis to AWS Lambda to the ruggedized AWS Snowball box for shipping data via UPS 80TB at a time.

When you hear this litany, it’s hard to avoid wondering how other clouds can catch up in the sheer number and variety of services, let alone in market share. At the same time, Google and others maintain they’re hearing enterprise customers say they don’t want to put all their eggs in one basket and are spreading their bets across multiple clouds…

Grazed from CCI. Author: Editorial Staff.

Issues around mobility and multi-tenancy, identity and access management, data protection and incident response and assessment all need to be addressed. And with multiple modes – SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, public, private, hybrid – creating added complexity in how security and compliance is carried out and by whom, this can lead IT leaders to think twice about leveraging cloud…

Organisations already in the processes of implementing ISO 27001 to audit and report on the state of controls within their environment will know the immense amount of work required. However, while addressing compliance in the cloud is undoubtedly tough, it doesn’t have to be an obstacle…