Grazed from CIO. Author: Chris Doig.

For the past six years, the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) San Diego chapter has hosted the annual one-day Cloud Computing Conference in San Diego. This year is no exception, and the seventh conference is being held on Oct. 29 at the Town and Country Resort and Convention Center in San Diego. This time around the conference has expanded beyond its cloud computing roots to include big data, Internet of Things (IoT), innovative technology and hands-on cloud coding labs.

From my perspective, it has always been interesting to hear speakers like Peter Coffee, VP and Head of Platform Research at Salesforce. Peter has been the opening speaker for the past few years and, as a senior executive of a major Silicon Valley company, he brings a very interesting perspective on the leading edge of innovation. To quote Matt Stamper, VP of Services at redIT: “Peter is an amazing speaker and technical evangelist. His insight into the industry and how computing services continue to evolve is thought provoking. I’ve had the opportunity to hear Peter speak on cloud (networked) computing and have benefited from each discussion.”…

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

In 2010 research firm Gartner placed cloud computing at the “peak of inflated expectations” in its famous hype cycle. How quickly things have changed! Companies that held off embracing cloud now find themselves at a competitive disadvantage as those that were early adopters become mature users of cloud services and start to get some strategic benefits, beyond those initially identified for cloud.

That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Harvard Business Review Cloud: Driving a Faster, More Connected Business. “As cloud services have matured and adoption has increased, research has consistently shown that using cloud has enabled companies to act more quickly and to collaborate more easily,” it says…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: James Henderson.

Many organisations are slow to adopt Cloud computing due to confusion around the financial impact of its implementation and management. “Despite the hype, the uptake of cloud computing as a solution has not been as rapid as first anticipated, in part because of the confusion created around the financial benefits,” says Sanil Solanki, research director, Gartner.

“While it’s said to be cheaper than on-premises, Cloud gets push-back from the finance function because it increases operating expenditure (opex) costs. “IT departments let finance take the lead on this decision, and this stalemate is rarely broken.” Solanki claims that while using cloud computing does increase opex costs, CIOs and IT decision makers should consider other financial factors before making a decision…

Grazed from DigitalNewsAsia. Author: JY Pook.

CLOUD computing is great … theoretically at least. With the cloud, we get to extend our IT platform beyond our on-premises infrastructure, and we get to access applications, data and storage over the Internet, as and when we need it. Highly scalable, lower cost and no hassle. It is no wonder that we are seeing almost everything being offered over the cloud. Some call this the trend of ‘Whatever as-a Service (XaaS).’

Similar to how Database-as-a-Service (DaaS) platforms have become viable options that are fully or partly supplementing in-house databases these days, many business intelligence (BI) and analytics users are also turning to cloud data warehousing technologies, blurring the lines between where data is stored and where it is being analysed…

 Grazed from SteelersLounge.  Author: James Hoffman.

One obvious use case is marketing – an application built with Visual Insights could give a company a more rounded view of what its customers are interested in. IBM’s cloud development partners have created systems for query support for card payments, customer support Q&As for financial services, live event media aggregation "as a service" social marketing and apps for the entertainment and marketing industries.

Big Blue wants Watson to be used on mobile devices, cloud services and connected systems. The company also previewed its Watson Knowledge Studio, where the company will open up its machine learning and text analytics capabilities in a single tool. In addition to the new capabilities, IBM announced that it is establishing a new Watson hub located in San Francisco, which will also serve as the new global headquarters for IBM commerce…

Grazed from EnterpriseInnovation.  Author: Harry Singh.

 In today’s modern world, there’s an app for everything. We use them to check our bank balances, order a cab, play games, and so much more. Many of these apps have been developed by small start-up companies, or even individuals. But how do they scale-up to reach their target audience? They make their apps available to a ready-made market of users on a recognised platform.  How about if the same principal was applied to the world of the financial markets?

Grazed from MIS-Asia.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Productivity and cloud solutions company Microsoft Malaysia’s Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) programme has received another boost with the signing of seven new partners.   During Microsoft Malaysia’s Channel Partner Conference (CPC), held at the Sunway Convention Centre, the seven new partners were announced as:

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

Grazed from TaipeiTimes.  Author: Chen Wei-Han.

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Barb Darrow.

If your company, like most, runs some stuff in the cloud plus non-cloud-ready databases or enterprise apps, RightScale may have a management tool for you.  There’s lots of evidence showing that when companies move workloads to the cloud, they are apt to use more than one cloud.

Part of the reason is that different constituencies spin up their own cloud operations outside the normal IT approval process. It’s also true that most companies still run some older databases and enterprise applications that do not lend themselves to cloud deployment…