Grazed from FirstPost. Author: Vikram K.

If there’s a defining characteristic of business in this millennium, it’s that failure comes faster. Think about the shift from VHS and DVDs to on-demand content streaming services, and the impact this had on retail stores. Giants in the industry stumble when they fail to innovate and the inability to adapt quickly to the changing technology landscape, the on-demand economy and consumer behavior can be catastrophic.

However, businesses in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) are starting to take notice and understand the importance IT plays in innovation. In fact, according to HP, New Style of Business Survey, 2015, 54 percent of firms in APJ now view their IT teams to be at the heart of their business and believe IT is fundamental to their success…

Grazed from BizNews. Author: Brian Womack.

Oracle Corp. Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said his company will continue its push into the cloud while noting the industry still has much room to grow. Leadership in the field remained up for grabs with the biggest cloud-only businesses still relatively small — none at around $100 billion, Ellison said, probably referring to annual sales.

Oracle now counts relatively newer entrants such as Amazon.com Inc, Workday Inc. and Microsoft Corp. among its most formidable competitors, the company’s billionaire founder said on Sunday. “This is how much our world has changed,” Ellison said during a keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. “We no longer pay any attention” to traditional competitors SAP SE and International Business Machines Corp. “It is quite a shock.”…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich took the stage Sunday night with Oracle CEO Mark Hurd during the opening night at Oracle’s tech conference. The two companies have been partners for decades but now, they have a new common competitor: IBM. This now that IBM has sold its Intel-based computer server business to Lenovo and is now concentrating on selling only the more expensive, higher-margin computer servers that use its own Power chip.

So a few months ago, Oracle’s rising star head of engineering and products, Thomas Kurian, met with a few of Intel’s Software and Services Group, Doug Fisher said on stage. Fisher and Kurian decided to set up a joint team of engineers from both companies near Intel’s facilities in Oregon, code named Project Apollo…

Grazed from BusinessInsider.  Author: Portia Crowe.

Grazed from BusinessInsider.  Author: Matt Weinberger.

Oracle is taking some drastic, far-reaching steps to fix its troubled cloud-computing business and turn it into a major player.  Right now, Oracle has a cloud service, based at least in part on the technology it got in the acquisition of startup Nimbula. This business is struggling to gain traction against Amazon, Google, and others.

 Grazed from DispatchTimes.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Starting with the September quarter, Microsoft is reporting revenue and operating income for three segments: Productivity & Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing. One thing that did go up was net income, which Microsoft reported to have gone from $4.5 billion to $5.4 billion, a 2 percent hike year after year.

Enterprise support services revenues posted 16 percent growth, while demand and revenue for Azure compute more than doubled. It is expected to report earnings per share of 58 cents on revenue of $20.96 billion, according to a Thomson Reuters consensus estimate. Windows sales to computer makers were also 6 percent lower, as the launch of Windows 10 had yet to gain pace, and phone revenue fell 54 percent at constant exchange rates, as Microsoft scaled back its presence in the market…

Grazed from ABCNews. Author: Mae Anderson.

The e-commerce powerhouse reported a surprise third-quarter profit, driven by a boost in revenue from its Prime Day promotion and continued strong growth in its cloud-computing offerings. Results beat expectations, and shares jumped 10 percent in aftermarket trading. Amazon’s strategy has long been to invest the money it makes back into its businesses, particularly by expanding offerings in its $99-a-year Prime loyalty program and its cloud-computing business, called Amazon Web Services.

But in recent quarters, it has shown an ability to turn a profit, too. Revenue jumped 23 percent during the quarter, helped by strong sales of electronics and general merchandise, a good sign for the Seattle retailer ahead of the crucial holiday months of November and December, when retailers make a substantial percentage of their annual sales…

Ubuntu 15.10 will be available for download from Canonical on 22nd October 2015. The new update brings a host of incremental improvements and benefits for business users and Ubuntu developers-alike.

New in 15.10 (Wily Werewolf)

Canonical’s OpenStack Autopilot now GA

• Full high availability of all cloud controller services, deployed using best practice architecture based on available hardware resources
• Smart automated scale out that re-architects cloud controller services as hardware resources are added
• Full integration of Open Daylight SDN controller
• Choice of Swift or Ceph for object storage

New with 15.10, Canonical is debuting its newly launched Ubuntu OpenStack cloud deployer and management tool – OpenStack Autopilot – the most powerful and easiest way to deploy scale and manage Ubuntu OpenStack clouds without the complexity and costs associated with major cloud projects.

EMC Corporation and VMware announced plans to form the Federation’s new cloud services business by combining their respective cloud capabilities, along with existing Virtustream cloud offerings, under the Virtustream brand. Virtustream will be jointly owned by VMware and EMC and led by Rodney Rogers, CEO of Virtustream. The parties are finalizing a definitive agreement for the transaction. Virtustream’s financial results will be consolidated into VMware’s financial statements beginning in Q1 2016.

Virtustream is expected to generate multiple hundreds of millions of dollars in recurring revenue in 2016, focused on enterprise-centric cloud services, with an outlook to grow to a multi-billion business over the next several years. Virtustream will be a leader in hybrid cloud, one of the largest markets for IT infrastructure spending. The company will provide a complete spectrum of managed services for on-premises infrastructure and its enterprise-class Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform, enabling customers to move all their applications, including mission-critical applications, to cloud-based IT environments. Virtustream will offer a compatible public cloud experience for customers who deploy the Federation Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solution within their business.

SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable hybrid IT infrastructure management software, today launched SolarWinds Server Health Monitor free tool, the latest to join more than 30 free tools from SolarWinds’ comprehensive IT management product family. SolarWinds Server Health Monitor provides IT professionals with detailed visibility into multi-vendor server infrastructure.

"Monitoring the underlying IT infrastructure that supports the health and performance of business critical applications is a necessity for IT pros to ensure business continuity," said Nikki Jennings, group vice president, product strategy, SolarWinds. "Understanding the performance of server infrastructure is a big part of the performance of the entire IT infrastructure, and is a key metric that all IT pros should have clear visibility into. SolarWinds now provides IT pros with a free tool that offers insight into health status and availability of multi-vendor server hardware to pinpoint the cause of performance issues faster."