Grazed from CloudWedge.  Author: Erick Wingfield.

SteelBrick has rapidly gained recognition inside of the SalesForce ecosystem by providing small businesses the ability to “Configure, Price & Quote” their customers.  SteelBrick gives small businesses a rapid method of collecting payments from their customers. SteelBrick automates much of this process, giving it’s users a leg up on the competition. So why is SteelBrick worth $360M when so many other cloud based vendors exist that do essentially the same thing?

Grazed from Upstart. Author: Maia Heymann.

Hyperconverged virtualization or infrastructure is a massive tech trend that is the most recent architectural shift to reduce IT costs and improve efficiencies. As with prior architectural waves, we expect that in 2016 and beyond, entrepreneurs will form many new disruptive companies to benefit from this new way of providing infrastructure.

One of the leaders is here in Massachusetts: SimpliVity, based in Westborough. SimpliVity is the first private company in this infrastructure space to reach a $1 billion valuation in under two years, indicating the huge market potential that venture capitalists see. Waltham-based Actifio, too, is also another company in this space that has raised significant funding — more than $200 million…

Grazed from CloudWards.net. Author: Editorial Staff.

Mergers and acquisitions have changed the financial situations of cloud computing companies. Innovations and advancements are setting the technological tone for the year past and the one to soon come.

Looking Back at 2015

The cloud computing world consolidated with several companies involved in:

• Mergers
• Partnerships
• Acquisitions

The highest price tag of 2015 was $67 billion, paid by Dell for EMC, including its VMware virtualization software. Dell was in the news also for a new partnership with Microsoft to create Azure in a Box, a cloud system that can be used in multiple industries. Meanwhile, Microsoft also announced a partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise that involves each being a preferred partner to the other…

Grazed from InsuranceNetworking. Author: Joe McKendrick.

“In the future, enterprises may be as unlikely to stand up their own data centers as build their own power plants.” We’ve been hearing this message for some time – that data center capacity would be delivered in the same manner of electricity, in which companies can plug in and receive their service.

However, it appears that cloud computing has achieved a momentum that is on the verge of making this a reality. Is it time for insurance companies to start gravitating away from the business of managing large data centers to depend on the cloud? In a recent post at InfoWorld, Matt Asay points out that the data center as we’ve known it is moving to the cloud en masse…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Basit Farooq.

Microsoft continues to improve the integration between its cloud and on-premises products and services, and SQL Server 2014 features take a big step in that direction by enabling hybrid cloud scenarios. Now you can integrate an on-premises platform with the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform (e.g., to back up data in Azure or add an AlwaysOn replica in Azure virtual machines, or VMs, for improved on-premises disaster recovery).

Let’s look at the features that allow your organization to use SQL Server 2014 to create hybrid cloud scenarios and move from an on-premises data center at your own pace. SQL Server 2014 features enable native support for SQL Server database files as Microsoft Azure blobs. This feature, which lets you create and place your database data and log files as blobs in Microsoft Azure storage, works for on-premises SQL Server instances and SQL Server instances running in Azure VMs…

Read more from the source @ http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/feature/SQL-Server-2014-features-enable-hybrid-cloud-scenarios

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

If one company among all companies is synonymous with cloud-centered computing, it would be Google. From the very beginning, Google built a business located somewhere in the murky depths of the Internet, and its search engine continues to be one of the most formidable engineering marvels of the modern world. When was the last time there was an outage?

It’s only natural that anyone looking to build an information-based business that spans the Internet would turn to Google and leverage all of its experience. As pioneers, if Google needed a technology, Google engineers had to develop it themselves, then deploy it. Now everyone can profit from Google’s skills and build a Google-grade system with Google-grade reliability for pennies per hour or per click…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/3017978/cloud-computing/review-google-cloud-flexes-flexibility.html

Grazed from SiliconHills. Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle Tuesday announced plans to build a 560,000-square-foot campus and parking development on 27 acres on the waterfront of Austin’s Lady Bird Lake. In addition, Oracle is buying an adjacent 295-unit apartment building for employees to live and “to support a work-life balance.” The campus will be focused on Oracle’s cloud expansion.

Oracle also announced plans to expand its local workforce by 50 percent during the next few years. The company declined to disclose how many employees it currently has in Austin. The Austin Chamber of Commerce reports Oracle has between 1,000 and 2,000 employees in Austin. The new jobs will be in Oracle Direct, its cloud sales organization. The company plans to hire a lot of recent university graduates and technical people early in their career…

Grazed from InformationManagement. Author: Ravi Shankar.

Enterprise executives are always facing new challenges when it comes to running their IT operations. Today, this is especially true as the number and demand for new cloud applications spurs a corresponding complexity of service delivery models. More and more, IT departments are choosing a hybrid model that incorporates several options: developing “born-in-cloud” applications, selecting certain external applications to be hosted in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment, and modifying existing applications that then must be hosted either on premises or in the cloud.

In the end, IT executives must ensure that each application meets the business needs and computing architecture policies of the company. To do so, IT leaders must apply a set of high-level evaluation questions:..

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Manek Dubash.

Security continues to top the list of concerns cited by cloud computing users, so you can be sure that cloud service providers also place a high priority on ensuring that your data is neither compromised nor corrupted. Below are some of the key points you should check that your provider has implemented.

The service provider should embed security into the fabric of the infrastructure, test for vulnerabilities and respond quickly to any that may be discovered. They need to operate a rigorous set of operational security controls, including tight control over authentication and high levels of monitoring, logging and reporting…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Matt Egan.

What CIOs, business technology executives, and thought leaders had to say in 2015 about cloud computing. PLUS: what you need to know about cloud computing for 2016

The CIO on… why cloud?

Vince Stobart, Eddie Stobart IT director, says "Cloud service provision [is important] for flexibility and rapid deployment." He says the logistics company is adding to its cloud arsenal: "The focus in on reducing time cycles to produce meaningful data and dashboards for both execs and operational management. Tactical BI solutions are deployed in finance via Cognos TM1 to improve information accuracy and speed of production using memory cube technology. The second focus is on near real time operational performance measures to enable better decision making."…