Grazed from OpenStack. Author: Editorial Staff.

The Board of Directors of the OpenStack Foundation has voted unanimously to approve Fujitsu as the newest Gold Member of the OpenStack Foundation. The decision was made during the Foundation Board’s meeting in Austin last week. The move underscores rising momentum for the open source cloud computing project throughout the APAC region, as the worldwide community of OpenStack developers and users prepare for their global Summit in Tokyo this October.

Fujitsu is Japan’s largest IT services provider, with 159,000 employees globally and US$40 billion in revenue. The company operates more than 100 data centers worldwide and holds the No. 1 spot in Japan’s IT services market by revenue. "Fujitsu has been an active and engaged member of the OpenStack community for several years,” said Kenji Kaneshige, director of development department, Linux Development Division at Fujitsu. "The Board’s vote of confidence in our elevated level of commitment to the project is exciting for our entire team, and we look forward to new ways we can help OpenStack users with our experiences running the software at scale in public and private clouds as a unified cloud system.”…

Grazed from MSPMentor.  Author: Pedro Pereira.

Businesses have no shortage of reasons to embrace cloud services, but price shouldn’t be one of them. So says MJ Shoer, president of Jenaly Technology Group, a Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based provider of managed services and cloud solutions.

“If price is the primary driver, we are coming at the conversation from the wrong place,” Shoer says. An overemphasis on cost, he argues, forces you to either reduce capability to meet price requirements or deploy a solution that falls short of meeting business needs…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Government CIOs in states and local districts increasingly are looking to push applications to the cloud, but security and a reliable user experience remain principal challenges, a new survey reports.

Akamai, which provides a leading online content delivery network, tapped the Center for Digital Government to canvas state and local government IT workers to gauge their technology priorities and concerns, finding that poor user experience is a major obstacle for the spread of e-government services.  Government CIOs are struggling to meet rising expectations among consumers for what level of service a website should deliver, and 70 percent of the respondents in Akamai’s survey said that a consistent user experience is an "unmet need."…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Frederic Lardinois.

Security platform Zscaler today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series B funding round led by late stage investor TPG. The company, which offers a wide range of web, mobile and cloud security services for enterprises, has now raised a total of $138 million and says that its valuation in this last round was over $1 billion. Other investors include EMC and previous investor Lightspeed Venture Partners.

“Our mission is to make the Internet safe for business by delivering an amazing security platform that protects our clients and enables the strategic adoption of cloud computing, mobile devices and the Internet of Things,” said Jay Chaudhry, CEO of Zscaler, in today’s announcement…

Grazed from NetworksAsia. Author: Editorial Staff.

With the increasing utilization of data centers and cloud services across the Asia Pacific region, companies have gradually updated or upgraded their existing IT systems, giving rise to the Hybrid IT environment which is fast becoming the new normal.

Besides helping enterprises to drive digital disruption, the latest Hybrid IT environment is also enhancing the customer experience and encouraging business model innovation.  As a result, there is greater acceleration in the adoption of a multi-vendor multi-cloud environment or Hybrid IT…

Grazed from IBT.  Author: Jessica Menton.

Microsoft Corporation’s Windows 10 launch kicked off to a strong start last week, with its usage share jumping by four times in just three days, Computerworld.com reported, citing Irish metrics company StatCounter. Microsoft released Windows 10 Wednesday as a free upgrade for users who are currently using Windows 7 or Windows 8.

The increase was much larger than Microsoft’s last free upgrade of Windows 8.1 in October 2013.  The global Windows 10 usage share, a measure of how active users of the OS were on the Internet, doubled from 0.3 percent to 0.6 percent on the official launch day Wednesday, Irish metrics company StatCounter said…

Grazed from ChannelBiz.  Author: Antony Savvas.

Acronis has announced a partnership with ProfitBricks to deliver Acronis Backup Cloud as its backup solution option for the ProfitBrick’s cloud computing platform.  Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) firm ProfitBricks says that with Acronis Backup Cloud, its managed service provider (MSP) partners and end user customers will have access to “best-in-class” backup through its cloud computing platform.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Joab Jackson.

IBM may be leading the pack when it comes to putting away patents related to cloud technologies.  In the past 18 months, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued more 1,200 patents to IBM related to the cloud, with 400 of those issued so far in 2015, according to an IBM tally released Friday.

Grazed from 7thSpace. Author: Editorial Staff.

IBM today announced that its inventors have received more than 400 new cloud patents in 2015. Furthermore, over the last 18 months, IBM has secured nearly 1, 200 cloud patents, bolstering the company’s ability to deliver innovative new cloud services, solutions and capabilities to clients across all industries. These new IBM cloud patents comprise a wide range of innovations, including enhancing and improving the speed of deployment and security of cloud data centers, as well as easing the management of cloud applications, storage and maintenance. The following are examples:

Patent #9, 015, 164: High availability for cloud server – A key attribute of a cloud computing environment is high availability. Aspects of the disclosed invention enable a cloud environment to take snapshots of virtual machines, which can then be used for recovery purposes…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

I remember the pitch: Cloud computing (called on-demand at the time) was the alternative to traditional enterprise software. You purchased cloud services using an on-demand or subscription model, you paid for only what you used, and you owned no hardware or software. What could be better?

Ten years later, cloud providers are becoming "enterprise-y" in their behavior — more like the very traditional enterprise providers they were supposed to differ from. Many cloud providers are behaving like traditional enterprise software providers: selling multiyear agreements, having their customers sign closed agreements, and even selling maintenance and support…