Cloud Foundry Foundation, home of the industry-standard multi-cloud platform, today launched a new Fellowship program. The program is designed to solicit select expertise from member companies to help drive critical Cloud Foundry needs. Abby Kearns of Pivotal will join Cloud Foundry as Vice President, Industry Strategy to drive ecosystem and content strategy for Cloud Foundry.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation Fellowship program draws from the Foundation community to contribute focused resources for a period of time to work on targeted initiatives. The program will strengthen membership value and engagement for and within the Cloud Foundry community.

RapidFire Tools Inc. announced today that it won another coveted industry accolade, the MSPWorld Cup 2016 award for "Best MSP Solution." The MSPWorld Cup program is sponsored by the MSP Alliance in association with its MSPWorld Spring Conference, which took place early April at the Swan Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Fla. The conference is a premier managed services and cloud computing event, one of the few in the IT industry that maintains a single, vendor-agnostic focus on managed service providers (MSPs) and the ecosystems that support this profile of channel professionals.

New Q1 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate the cloud infrastructure services market with a 31% worldwide market share, dwarfing the chasing pack. The big three followers — Microsoft, IBM and Google — in aggregate accounted for 22% of the market, while the next 20 top-ranked cloud providers accounted for another 27%. The good news for Microsoft and Google is that they both achieved growth rates of well over 100% so they are at least slowly gaining some ground on the market leader. Outside of the big four, the next 20 cloud providers are growing at an average 41% per year, but in a market that is growing at over 50% that means that most of them are losing market share.

Grazed from TechWire. Author: Ángel González

Local behemoths Amazon.com and Microsoft, as well as other tech firms that rent out computing power and storage, are rapidly becoming some of the biggest spenders in the corporate world, as they lay down the bases for a future in which most computing will take place in the so-called cloud. These companies are spending billions in acquiring or leasing the data centers that embody the cloud and employing the thousands of engineers that operate the new technology.

The ramp-up was spurred by the widespread adoption of mobile computing, as smartphone and tablet-toting consumers wanted their data accessible from anywhere, including Netflix movies and music from Spotify. But it became massive when large companies started shunning their own server farms for those operated by tech giants, a phenomenon that took off a couple of years ago…

Grazed from BBCNews. Author: Matthew Wall.

Cloud computing – storing data and applications remotely rather than on your own premises – can cut IT costs dramatically and speed up your operations. But is it safe? Despite the rise of public cloud platforms offered by the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, less than 10% of the world’s data is currently stored in the cloud. So what’s holding many companies back? Technology of Business explores the issue of cloud security.

What’s so good about the cloud anyway?

Building your own energy-hungry data centres is expensive and time-consuming, while managing hundreds of software applications chews up IT resources. If you can outsource a lot of this hardware and software to specialist tech companies that can expand or reduce the level of service according to your needs, it can save you a lot of time and money…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36151754

Grazed from GeekWire. Author: Taylor Soper.

Amazon is happy about its cloud computing business, and so are investors. The Seattle-based company crushed analyst expectations for its Q1 2016 earnings on Thursday, as the company’s stock spiked more than 12 percent in after-hours trading. Wall Street expected Amazon to post earnings per share of $0.58, but the company ended the quarter with a record-high $1.07 EPS, nearly doubling the estimate.

That’s up from a $0.12 net loss in the year-ago quarter. The profit growth — Amazon posted profit for the fourth consecutive quarter — can certainly be credited in large part to Amazon Web Services, which reeled in $2.57 billion during Q1 2016, up from $2.4 billion in the previous quarter and $1.57 billion a year ago, a 64 percent year-over-year growth. Analysts expected AWS to make $2.53 billion last quarter. Operating income for AWS in Q1 was $604 million, up from $195 million last year…

Read more from the source @ http://www.geekwire.com/2016/amazons-cloud-computing-cash-cow-aws-now-10b-business-fuels-record-quarter-company/

Grazed from ManagementToday.  Author: Adam Gale.

 Amazon is the Terminator of disruptors. One of the early names Jeff Bezos considered for his business was relentless.com, which says all you need to know about its ethos. For 20 years, Amazon has pursued retail market share with ruthless efficiency and unwavering determination, transforming it from a novelty bookseller into one of the biggest companies in the world.

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

Looking at the other countries, there was minimal change, with the likes of Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand only moving one place up or down over the past year. South Korea, a certainly developed market and the second most cloud ready Asia Pacific nation in 2012, has dropped into mid-table obscurity with an overall position of #7 in 2016…

Grazed from TopTechNews.  Author: Jef Cozza.

Chipmaker Intel has its head in the clouds these days. Or, to be more accurate, in the cloud. CEO Brian Krzanich outlined a set of core beliefs yesterday guiding the company’s strategy for the future — chief among them that the cloud is the single most important trend influencing the future of computing.

“Our strategy itself is about transforming Intel from a PC company to a company that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices,” Krzanich wrote in a blog post yesterday. Krzanich’s comments come just a week after the company announced a major restructuring initiative that would see it shift its focus to its data center and Internet of Things businesses…

Increasingly, cloud computing is becoming more and more popular, with large numbers of businesses of all sizes making the move over to the cloud. The greatest advantage of the cloud is that there is no need for a physical infrastructure when you move over to the cloud as it is an online hosting service, where you can run applications and store data purely online.

Not only is this helping many businesses to save money, it is also allowing for more efficient SEO strategies and helping businesses to improve their online presence and SERPs ranking…