Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

Dell’s planned acquisition of cloud computing and storage company EMC for $67 billion is the largest technology industry acquisition to date. But the deal is significant beyond its monetary value. It underscores the turmoil among traditional IT vendors as enterprise computing moves from hardware and software products to subscription-based cloud services.

The combined company will be privately held, freeing it from the regulatory scrutiny and earnings pressure faced by public companies. VMware, mostly owned by EMC, will remain a separate publicly traded company. On a conference call for the media, Joe Tucci, CEO of EMC, acknowledged that the IT industry is going through a transformation, and the traditional IT business is being disrupted…

Grazed from BusinessBecause. Author: Seb Murray.

The technologies behind cloud computing and data analytics are set to alter the future of the accountancy landscape and with it the careers of future CFOs. As the big accounting firms — among them PwC, KPMG, EY and Deloitte — face growing challenges from disruptive tech companies like Google and SAP, their employees must master new digital tools.

Nick Frost, partner at KPMG in the UK, says: “To deal with this real threat we must become the best at accountancy-based or financial process data analytics.” The biggest growth in demand is for budding auditors who can trawl through vast quantities of big data using advanced analytics. “Big data is starting to take hold on the industry, with the Big Four leading the way,” says Alex Stremme, assistant dean at Warwick Business School…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Michael Cusanelli.

CSC, an IT services and solutions provider, launched a pay-as-you-go cloud security services solution called On-Demand Workload Protection to allow clients to scale their cloud workload security as needed. The service, which was developed in partnership with CloudPassage, was designed to allow customers to utilize protection and security services in the same vein as public cloud computing services, according to CSC.

The company expects the service to meet growing demand for more flexible, consumption-based security models that customers are already accustomed to. Instead of having to combine different solutions into a single offering, CSC is looking to provide customers with a one-stop shop for all of their security needs…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

It was pretty clear, earlier this year, that EMC was working to rationalize its scattered strategy for its cloud computing business. Now that the company will be acquired by Dell and Silver Lake Partners in a blockbuster deal announced Monday morning, the question is whether their combined assets will make that effort easier or more complex.

Will Dell’s multiple cloud alliances and Boomi cloud integration product fit into EMC’s cloud portfolio, which includes VMware’s vCloud Air and offerings from Virtustream, the software company it acquired in July? On conference calls Monday morning, EMC EMC chief executive Joseph Tucci said the combined company will have a $30 billion (or more) systems business, a virtualization business in VMware, a computer security business, and a cloud computing business led by Virtustream’s software…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Claire Hopping.

Jaguar Land Rover and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) have set out their plans for a driverless car research project, worth £11 million. The study will investigate whether autonomous cars can fully operate without input from humans, how integrated technologies such as distributed control systems and cloud computing can be used in the vehicles and how they will interact with humans and the environment around them.

Ten universities around the country will be involved in the research, alongside the new Transport Research Laboratory set up by the government and announced by secretary of state for business, Sajid Javid. Javid explained that research into driverless vehicles is something the government plans to be heavily involved in, with the department of Business, Innovation and Skills taking the lead where the authorities are concerned…

Grazed from Economic Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Amazon Web Services doesn’t just want to dominate the global business in selling computing online. It also wants to be the rarest thing of all in the technology industry: a long-lived company. Its strategy hinges on an astonishing level of automation in computer programming and maintenance, coupled with offering new products and services at a rate none of the old-guard companies seem able to match.

The idea seems to be to dominate not so much by the traditional "vendor lock-in of hooking customers on proprietary technology but by making itself the center of the styles and habits of cloud computing. At least some of its customers seem to think that will work. On Wednesday, Jim Fowler, chief information officer of General Electric, said, "AWS will be the trusted partner that will run our company’s information technology for the next 140 years." That is how long GE, founded by Thomas Edison, has been around…

Grazed from MIS-Asia. Author: Sharon Gaudin.

If a cloud migration is in your company’s future, some IT cloud veterans are warning you to avoid the technology pitfalls that could be lurking in the dark. Migrating to the cloud is becoming more common, especially for sizable enterprises. Certainly, most CIOs and IT managers are aware that they need to size up their security needs and ask about critical points, like reliability and scalability, before taking such a big step.

There are, however, those pesky missteps that are easy to make and that can lead to major headaches if you don’t plan around them. At the annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week, veterans of cloud deployments laid out some warnings for enterprise teams preparing to make such a move…

Grazed from NWR. Author: Brian Anderson.

Dell Computers is looking to ramp up its efforts in the burgeoning cloud computing and data storage industry. Already the world’s third largest computer manufacturer, and the largest manufacturer of storage hardware, the deal with EMC would give the company a huge presence in the online services sector.

EMC is the world’s second largest server company, and has a big presence in data analytics, big data, security, and other software sectors. According to insiders, Dell is offering $33 dollars per share to buy EMC, a substantial premium over the $28 dollars the stock closed at last week. In total, the deal would be worth about $40 billion dollars…

Grazed from TheGuardian.  Author: John Naughton.

 On Tuesday, the European court of justice, Europe’s supreme court, lobbed a grenade into the cosy, quasi-monopolistic world of the giant American internet companies.  It did so by declaring invalid a decision made by the European commission in 2000 that US companies complying with its “safe harbour privacy principles” would be allowed to transfer personal data from the EU to the US.

Grazed from Albawaba.   Author: Editorial Staff.

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Red Hat Academy, an open source education program that provides hands-on curriculum, labs, performance-based testing, and educator training and support, is available to universities with the required technology and support environments in the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) region.