Grazed from RiverBed. Author: Ian Downard.

Everyone loves talking about the weather but when it comes to taking the temperature of cloud infrastructures too many businesses throw caution to the wind. If your organization only recently started investigating cloud computing, you may not yet understand how much money you can save by provisioning just the right amount of compute power to meet demand.

In this blog, I’ll talk about how cloud computing is creating new opportunities for application performance monitoring (APM). I’ll give you three reasons why APM is something enterprises on the cloud can’t live without and I’ll talk specifically about how Riverbed is providing new APM capabilities for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform with SteelCentral AppInternals…

Grazed from Virtual-Strategy. Author: PR Announcement.

Advanced Clustering Technologies, a leading manufacturer of high performance computing solutions, today announced it has partnered with CD-adapco to offer the company’s industry-leading engineering simulation software solution, STAR-CCM+®, to customers using Advanced Clustering’s on demand HPC cluster in the cloud, ACTnowHPC.

“We’re pleased to announce that our HPC cloud now makes STAR-CCM+® immediately accessible to engineers who purchase the license from CD-adapco,” said Kyle Sheumaker, President of Advanced Clustering Technologies. “With STAR-CCM+®, we’re making it easier than ever for our customers to enhance workflow productivity in order to discover better designs faster.”…

Grazed from MarketWired. Author: PR Announcement.

American Industrial Systems, Inc. (AIS), an innovator, designer and manufacturer of Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs), HMI Touch Panels, Industrial Touch Screens, Displays, Operator Interface Terminals (OITs), Box PCs, Industrial PCs, and Thin Clients, announce their Smart family PC-based HMI Touch Screen Panels and Industrial Panel PCs (IPCs) are designed and engineered to accommodate and support key requirements of Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things applications for control, monitoring and automation.

AIS’s Premium, Standard and Compact series of advanced, intelligent HMIs support Open Platform Communications (OPC), Message Quieting Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Representational State Transfer (REST), Internet of Things (IoT) Protocols and Web-based software necessary for IIoT applications…

Grazed from ITBrief. Author: Catherine Knowles.

Government digital transformation is still at its embryonic stage, largely because of shortages of skilled workers and rigid organisational culture, according to a new survey by Gartner. The 2016 CIO Agenda survey shows, analytics, infrastructure and cloud computing continue to be the top three technology priorities for government CIOs, but the skills shortage and unadaptable cultures are among the major barriers to implementing digital priorities.

The 2016 CIO Agenda survey asked 2,944 CIOs worldwide about their top digital business opportunities, threats and strategies, and includes responses from 379 government CIOs. The government survey data indicated that leveraging digital technologies to transform traditional operational and service models has risen to the top of the business agenda for many elected leaders and public officials…

Grazed from i-programmer. Author: Ian Elliot.

Mozilla has been clarifying some of its plans to convert the Firefox OS project into four IoT based projects. At a casual glance this seems like a naive move that is doomed to failure. Just about everyone wants a slice of the action that is the Internet of Things (IoT), but few are very clear how to make it happen or what is required – even though they are all 100% sure that they know.

Mozilla had a really good idea with Firefox OS. but the implementation was poor and progress slow. Without a market success it seems that Mozilla lacked the resources to keep working on it. So it decided to stop working on it, see Mozilla Confirms End of Firefox OS For Smartphones. Instead Mozilla has proposed four IoT oriented projects:…

Grazed from IntelligentUtility. Author: Kathleen Wolf Davis.

The cloud—however you may define it—has morphed most of the modern world, but utilities are still a bit behind with this disruption. So, we sat down with Richelle Elberg, principal research analyst in energy with Navigant, to talk the how, whats and whys of this utility/cloud disconnect.

How are utilities utilizing cloud computing?

Elberg: For right now, minimally. Cloud computing can be done on a multitude of levels. With public cloud, there’s not a whole lot of that happening in the utility space. With managed services in a private cloud hosted by a vendor with limited access, there is more going on there. Some functions are being done in that way, especially back office items or areas related in some way to AMI…

"The market has started to realize that do-it-yourself approaches to deploying private clouds are too time consuming, too expensive and too prone to failure," said Nils Brauckmann, CEO of SUSE. "As the first to offer an enterprise OpenStack cloud distribution, SUSE continues to focus on providing the OpenStack solution of choice for businesses. We combine rapid and simple deployment, configuration, management and maintenance with enhanced high availability features and the widest hypervisor support in the industry to give our customers access to the benefits of OpenStack without the complexities that hold some companies back."

ElasticBox, the hybrid cloud application manager, today announced updates to its enterprise SaaS and virtual appliance products. This release brings enhanced capabilities to enable IT organizations to drive value, productivity and confidence throughout the enterprise. ElasticBox enables enterprises to scale and update private and public cloud deployments, and to easily migrate workloads from one cloud to another. ElasticBox provides a highly adaptive model that helps customers standardize the process of deployments and provision environments to ensure the ongoing performance of production applications.

"Based upon customer feedback, we continue to enhance ElasticBox to help our customers maximize the efficiency of their cloud operations. We’re excited about these enhancements which help enterprises take advantage of the latest services from cloud providers and the promise of containers," shared Carol Carpenter, CEO of ElasticBox.

"We are honored to present the 2016 lineup of CRN Channel Chiefs, comprised of outstanding executives who move our entire industry forward by cultivating exemplary partner programs and executing cutting-edge business strategy," said Robert Faletra, CEO, The Channel Company. "They represent an extraordinary group of individuals who lead by example and serve as both invaluable advocates and innovators of the IT channel. We applaud their incredible strides and look forward to following their accomplishments in the coming year."

The panel, chaired by Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, will be held from 1:30 pm – 2:15 pm EST on March 8 in the Sun D Room of the Gaylord Palms in Orlando, Fla.