Grazed from StreetInsider. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cisco Systems Inc. has struck a deal with Pivotal Software Inc to offer each other’s products in the cloud arena, a sign the giant network company is looking to work with others as it tries to build its presence in one of the fastest-growing areas of computing. The agreement, to be announced later on Tuesday, means the two companies will jointly sell Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which helps developers build and run software on the cloud, and Cisco’s Metapod, a service that lets companies make their data centers more cloud-friendly.

Pivotal’s service helps companies deploy a free, but hard-to-use open-source technology also called Cloud Foundry, much as the free operating system known as Linux generally requires services of a consultant like Red Hat Inc. Pivotal Cloud Foundry competes with services such as IBM’s Bluemix and HP Enterprise’s Helion, while Mirantis competes with Metapod…

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Cisco’s first fully integrated, threat-focused Cisco Firepower Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) marks a significant departure from the focus of legacy NGFWs on application control. By focusing instead on threat defense, Cisco will help organizations better manage and minimize risk. Think of it as legacy NGFWs protecting "homes" by securing windows and doors, whereas Cisco’s approach is to identify, detect and protect against would-be burglars no matter how they try to gain access to a property.

Based on the existing TMS relationship with Red Hat, today’s announced Tibero AWS VM allows Red Hat customers to configure and order Tibero conveniently from the AWS marketplace directly.

"The Office 365 services market has become highly commoditized and thousands of partners that used to make money from migrating email to the cloud are now looking for new ways to grow their business," said Jennifer Martin, vice president of global sales at BitTitan. "Attaching managed services to Office 365 sales is the best way for most service providers to remain competitive."

Grazed from ScientificComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.

One of the most notable changes in the culture of pharmaceutical research and development is the move towards collaboration and outsourcing as the business model. This has been driven, at least in part, by a shift from the development of traditional small-molecule drugs, to large molecule biologics, biomarkers and personalised medicine.

‘Biologics discovery and development will generally require collaboration with CROs, small biotechs or academia that have required IP, or are specialised in different segments of the biologics workflow, perhaps next gen sequencing or biomarker discovery,’ according to Anthony Uzzo, president and cofounder of Core Informatics. ‘This means that collaboration and outsourcing will become an inevitable part of biologics and precision medicine initiatives."…

Grazed from ScientificComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.

Although commerce and consumers have been computing in the cloud for years, the high-performance computing sector has been more hesitant. But all that may now be changing. The cost of cloud computing for HPC is falling, while new programming models that will allow HPC workloads to run more efficiently in the cloud are becoming available. ‘Public cloud’ providers are installing hardware configurations that are more suited to HPC, while private clouds are giving users experience of how to run their jobs in a cloud environment.

Nonetheless, HPC in the cloud has not got off to a flying start. The market research company Intersect360 reported last year that the HPC users they surveyed spent only about three per cent of their budgets on cloud computing – and the percentage has not changed much over the past five years…

Grazed from ITJungle. Author: Alex Woodie.

You don’t need a weatherman to see that clouds are quickly building. American companies are moving workloads to big public computing clouds from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and others at an unprecedented rate, spurring a massive data center building boom. But will IBM i shops fall in line and move to the cloud? That’s where the forecast gets a little iffy.

There’s an abundance of signals reflecting big uptake of clouds, including public clouds run by the aforementioned companies, as well as private clouds run by managed service providers (MSPs) and IBM business partners. A January study of more than 1,000 tech pros from RightScale, a provider of cloud management software, shows that private cloud adoption grew from 63 percent of surveyed companies to 77 percent. The survey found that four out of five companies have a hybrid cloud strategy (unchanged from 2015), but that nearly every company (95 percent) is running or at least experimenting with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) in the cloud…

Grazed from ITProPortal.  Author: Bruce Jubb.

 Grazed from TheGuardian.  Author: John Naughton.