Grazed from Virtual-Strategy Magazine.  Author: PR Announcement.

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Mobile chip giant Qualcomm is getting into the data center market with a new joint venture to design and sell server chips in China. The joint venture was announced Sunday morning in China, and brings together Qualcomm and the government of China’s Guizhou province.

A Qualcomm subsidiary will own 45% of the newly formed company and the Guizhou government owns 55% for a total value of RMB 1.85 billion, or about $280 million.  As part of this deal with the province Qualcomm will also establish an investment company in Guizhou that will serve as the vehicle for future investments in China…

Grazed from MarketPlace. Author: Ben Johnson.

Intel reported fourth quarter earnings after the market closed Thursday, that showed a continuing decline in its PC chip sales and only a slight growth in its data center business. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip maker reported that it’s net income in the fourth quarter fell 1 percent to $3.6 billion, or 74 cents earnings per share, compared to $3.7 billion, or 74 cents earnings per share, in the quarter a year earlier. The company posted revenue of $14.9 billion, up 1 percent from the previous year.

Wall Street analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected earnings of 63 cents per share on $14.8 billion in revenue. Full year revenue was $55.4 billion, down 1 percent. Net income was $11.4 billion, down 2 percent. Despite the earnings beat, shares fell 4.61 percent in the after-hours period to $31.22, after trading up 2.6 percent to $32.74 in Thursday’s session…

Often dwarfed by IaaS and SaaS services, platform as a service or PaaS is a category that has quietly been growing in scope and demand over the past couple of years. This category of cloud services offers customers a platform to develop and manage their own web applications, without any need to build the supporting infrastructure. So what comes next for PaaS? Here are a few predictions of what could happen over the next year.

Cloud services in 2016

To understand the position of PaaS among cloud computing trends as a whole this year, it helps to look at the bigger picture first. This year, leading cloud experts have made predictions showing that the whole field will grow and change in significant ways. For example, it’s expected that an increasing number of enterprises will jump on the cloud bandwagon as a whole, with many businesses choosing to diversify their cloud strategy rather than rely on a single provider. So while a business may choose one vendor for their storage services, they may choose another for PaaS, which opens up the playing field.

TSO Logic Cloud Enablement streamlines transformation with these key capabilities:

Grzed from InfoWorld. Author: Serdar Yegulalp.

In a new twist, Amazon has again repackaged and repriced its services, this time allowing Amazon EC2 instances to be treated as if they were scheduled jobs — at up to 10 percent off Amazon’s usual prices. SRI (Scheduled Reserved Instances) allows customers to "reserve capacity on a recurring basis with a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule over the course of a one-year term," according to the blog post announcing the new feature.

Purchasing an SRI is similar to setting up a conventional reserved instance. After the user selects a time frame for running instances, Amazon provides a list of instance types available for that segment. To that end, using SRIs slightly resembles using EC2 Spot instances. Instead of bidding for capacity, as one would with a Spot Instance, customer bids for one of a limited number of usage slots available in a given window…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3022758/cloud-computing/amazon-web-services-offers-part-time-computing-at-a-discount.html

Grazed from PEHub. Author: PR Announcement.

Fugue (formerly Luminal), a Maryland-based startup developing an infrastructure-level operating system for cloud computing, announced it has closed a $20M Series C financing round, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Previous investors, including Core Capital, also participated in the round. This brings the total amount of financing to $34M. The company also announced its name change to Fugue [few-g], which is the name of its cloud operating system.

The rapid adoption of cloud computing brings new challenges as applications have become distributed and infrastructure has proliferated. Fugue reins in this complexity and simplifies operations by building, enforcing, and optimizing cloud infrastructure, continuously and automatically. Fugue can be used to operate cloud-native workloads and to migrate and run traditional datacenter applications in the cloud. It will initially operate workloads on Amazon Web Services…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Clint Boulton.

If you’re a CIO the chances are good your computing environment looks something like this: A hybrid cloud comprising core business software hosted internally but interfacing with software-as-a-service applications that are important but not mission-critical. And you also have public cloud services where you test applications.

Eighty-one percent of 3,000 vice presidents of IT, network and infrastructure architects surveyed last summer by F5 Networks fit that profile, indicating that they plan on operating a hybrid cloud environment in the next two to five years, says Karl Triebes, CTO of the application services provider. He says some respondents are also considering migrating their networking systems to software-defined networks (SDNs), and embracing DevOps to gain greater operational efficiencies…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

Ingram Micro today announced it has extended the availability of IBM Cloud to five additional Cloud Marketplaces around the globe, providing companies increased access to infrastructure capabilities from SoftLayer. Building on its existing distribution relationship with Ingram Micro in the U.S., IBM Cloud is now available through the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the U.K., with plans to extend the offering into additional markets soon.

The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace is an ecosystem of buyers, sellers and solutions that allows channel partners to purchase, configure, provision, and manage cloud technologies with confidence and ease. It removes the complexity in procurement, management, and support that is often characteristic in cloud technologies, while helping channel partners simplify success in the cloud…

Grazed from TheDataCenterJournal. Author: Bob Lamendola.

In today’s competitive market, cloud computing offers an outstanding opportunity not just to innovate, but to do so more quickly and more cost-effectively than ever. It is an exceptionally efficient platform for IT-service delivery. Because you can create new virtual servers in a cloud with unmatched speed and consistency, as well as allocate IT resources like processing power and storage automatically on the basis of policies, clouds can bring new services into production much faster than traditional architectures.

Additionally, operational costs—particularly capital expenditures—fall because of cloud computing’s utility-style billing, which is based on real use. This approach makes it much less risky for organizations to experiment with new services. Unsuccessful services that see little utilization will generate low bills. On the other hand, if service usage is high, the costs will be justified by the fact that the service is successful, end users are receiving the intended value and, in the case of external services, significant new revenues are generated…