Grazed from Concur. Author: Editorial Staff.

We sat down with Concur Chief Technology Officer Mark Nelson to talk about the impact of cloud computing on the role of CIOs and IT departments. In his role, Mark is responsible for running all IT for Concur, including the company’s cloud services offerings for customers and internal IT operations for the company. Prior to joining Concur, Mark was responsible for Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, including its Infrastructure as a Service, Java Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure for Fusion Applications SaaS offerings.

1) What is the biggest change in IT landscape w/ advent of cloud computing?

With cloud computing, we’re seeing the traditional role of IT changing quickly. Cloud companies are coming in to sell line of business (LOB) leaders discrete, cloud solutions for their functions. More and more, it’s the LOB, not IT, that’s buying cloud-based solutions, which naturally creates tension between IT and the business…

Grazed from IndustryWeek. Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon is widely known as an online retail colossus, but is also thriving when it comes to sending business aloft in the Internet cloud. Internet industry giants have long been plowing cash into massive data centers and green energy sources to power cloud computing that essentially lets them use massive computing power to provide data and services to Internet-linked devices.

While titans including Apple, Google, and Facebook have resources and reasons to build their own data centers, it is more common for companies to spare themselves the cost and trouble by "renting" server space from cloud computing operations such as Amazon Web Services. Ranks of cloud computing rivals range from specialty firms such as Rackspace to century-old technology veteran IBM, which is working to differentiate its offering by mixing in the smarts of its Jeopardy-game-winning Watson artificial intelligence…

Read more from the source @ http://www.industryweek.com/cloud-computing/amazon-out-front-race-internet-cloud

Grazed from NetworksAsia. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud usage amongst midsize organizations worldwide grew from 79% in 2014 to 82% this year, according to Dell’s latest Global Technology Adoption Index (GTAI). The cloud adoption rate for SMEs in the Asia Pacific region particularly remains healthy and this aligns with data from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), which shows that SMEs spent about US$2 billion on cloud computing services in developed and emerging Asia Pacific in 2014.

The same report also found that cloud computing services for emerging Asia Pacific markets are growing at a rate of 42%. But a number of factors are still holding SMEs back from taking their cloud journey to the next level. “One of the things that we observe during our conversations with SME customers in the region is that cost control and security concerns remain the biggest barriers for midsize organizations when it comes to expanding their cloud usage,” says Chris Kelly (pictured above), an executive director of Commercial Sales & Enterprise Solutions at Dell APJ…

Read more from the source @ http://www.networksasia.net/article/dell-targets-simpler-cloud-experience-emc.1447295769

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

Akamai Technologies (AKAM) is looking to help customers solve weaknesses in their Wide Area Network (WAN) architectures with the release of Akamai Cloud Networking, an integrated system of services designed to protect applications and eliminate network downtime.

The Akamai Cloud Networking service is a globally available system created to strengthen the reliability of enterprise solutions like Software-as-a-Service and cloud-based applications. The system is necessary to meet the increasing connectivity demands created by the use of Direct Internet Access (DIA) breakouts and hybrid WANs among enterprise users, according to the company…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/akamai-debuts-cloud-networking-service-remote-offices

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Brian Bridgwater.

Microsoft has its fingers deep inside the greasy guts of its own Azure cloud computing mechanics right now. The firm doesn’t exactly publicly acknowledge that it lags behind Amazon Web Services in terms of market share, but it is doing as much as it can to make up ground — it has now invested more than US$15bn in building a global cloud infrastructure and cloud services proposition.

There are currently 26 Azure regions around the planet — and a ‘region’ in this case can have more than one datacenter in it, so for example in the Azure world we find that American is two regions: West and East. It is important to remember that AWS is actually bigger than (at least four, some say closer to ten) of its largest cloud competitors combined. The catch up players also include Google, CenturyLink, VMware, Virtustream, Rackspace and IBM’s SoftLayer…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/adrianbridgwater/2015/11/11/microsoft-azure-cloud-evolves-for-intelligent-machine-learning/

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

Fran Shammo, Verizon’s chief financial officer, strongly denied recent reports that the company is selling off the infrastructure underlying its cloud business. These stories are “factless conjecture with no foundation,” Shammo said in response to a question at the Wells Fargo Securities 2015 Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Tuesday.

Late Friday, Reuters reported that Verizon was weighing a sale of enterprise assets, including what used to be known as MCI and Terremark, a data center-and-cloud company Verizon bought 5 years ago to boost its presence in cloud computing. The report said the company was seeking up to $10 billion in a potential sale. A Verizon spokesman had no comment on the report…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Editorial Staff.

One of Amazon Web Services’ most potent weapons in the cloud-computing wars with Microsoft and Google is also one of its least understood. About a year ago, Amazon introduced Lambda, which it describes as "a compute service that runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the underlying compute resources for you."

That sounds like a lot of buzzwords, but developers and customers like Major League Baseball and Twitter’s Periscope love Lambda because of how it makes running apps simpler. So far, none of Amazon’s competitors has come up with anything similar. "As a technologist, there’s almost always a ‘gotcha,’" says Matt Wood, Amazon Web Services’ general manager of product strategy. "Lambda kind of is as magical as it appears."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-web-services-lambda-explained-2015-11

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

Google unveiled some major enhancements to its container-focused cloud offerings on Tuesday to take advantage of new open-source developments and boost the performance of its products in a competitive market. Google Container Engine, a service based on the Kubernetes open-source project that manages clusters and orchestrates Docker containers in Google’s cloud, now has the latest updates to Kubernetes.

Those enhancements came out on Monday, so it’s a quick turnaround. The upgrades include support for horizontal pod autoscaling, which is a fancy term for a feature that scales up resources to smooth out performance during periods of high demand. Container Engine also gets a new networking system that reduces latency, cuts down on CPU overhead and improves reliability…

Cloudnexa enables clients, particularly small-to-medium businesses that lack the in-house expertise and resources, to cost-effectively maximize their WordPress deployment on AWS. The new offering is available in economy, standard, and performance service plans to meet the specific needs of companies deploying WordPress on AWS, managing AWS on their own, or using a web host service to support their WordPress site.

IndependenceIT, an integrated workspace automation software platform provider allowing IT departments, service providers and ISVs to easily deliver workspaces, applications and desktops as a service, today announced general availability of Cloud Workspace Suite Version 4.2. The newest version of the company’s WaaS enablement software provides greater control over how solutions are built and delivered on a customer-by-customer basis to match customer workloads on Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, Artisan Infrastructure, and other cloud platforms.

Cloud Workspace Suite has been enhanced for the benefit of the IT service provider with the availability of version 4.2. Advancements give administrators greater infrastructure alternatives with new support for Microsoft Azure. New features improve controls over how the platform is aligned with compute, memory and capacity resources under management to accelerate performance in unique customer environments. Now, customers with more demanding workloads or who require more customized delivery of applications and data have the industry’s most responsive platform for catering to their computing demands.