Grazed from TechTimes. Author: Alexandra Burlacu.

China’s Alibaba is planning to invest a massive $1 billion into its Aliyun cloud computing business in the next three years. With this notable investment, Alibaba’s Aliyun is gunning for Amazon and its Web Services division, heating up the competition between the two e-commerce companies.

Analysts estimate the global cloud computing market is worth roughly $20 billion, and Alibaba wants a bigger piece of the pie. The company announced that its investment will help set up new data centers for Aliyun in various regions across the globe, including Singapore, the Middle East, Europe and Japan. Moreover, the company also intends to sign business deals with enterprise technology and telecom providers in those markets…

Grazed from Channelnomics.  Author: Scharon Harding.

Channel partners must do more than resell cloud offerings in order to have a "sustainable" place in the market, according to Anurag Agrawal, CEO and analyst at TechAisle.  n a Sunday blog post, Agrawal said partners should offer more than solutions such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS in order to capitalize on cloud.  "Simply reselling cloud solutions … is not a long-term and sustainable strategy," he wrote. "They must be the trusted cloud advisor for the SMB end-customer."

Agrawal pointed to data from Techaisle’s SMB cloud computing adoption survey, which found that 94 percent of SMBs are using some type of cloud solution. He said the market is in different "stages" of cloud adoption. For example, 30 percent of participants said they are reviewing cloud suppliers, while 24 percent are currently getting more details about cloud, according to Agrawal…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Big Data and analytics are the most common cloud tasks for nearly eight in 10 developers, according to research by market intelligence group Evans Data Corporation.

Its report revealed that 79 per cent of 578 developers spend 42 per cent of their time on the tasks, as well as discovering that those who associate cloud computing with the Internet of Things (IoT) are three times as likely to use the cloud as the basis of their development…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Eric Knorr.

We can all agree that there are three IaaS leaders in the cloud: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Right?  It depends on how you look at it. Without question, Amazon maintains a very long lead — and it’s the only playertransparent enough to break out its cloud revenue in detail, with AWS Q2 sales up 81 percent year over year. Microsoft throws in Office 365 revenue, which is not strictly cloud money, but it’s clearly the No. 2 player and now sees the cloud as the most important part of its business going forward.

Yet where the heck is Google? The company doesn’t break out its cloud revenue at all. Microsoft and IBM aren’t terribly transparent on this score, either, but according to last week’s Q2 estimate from Synergy Research Group, each make more money from cloud infrastructure services than Google. After all, they have the leverage to push big existing enterprise customers to their clouds…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Louis Columbus.

 79% of Internet of Things (IoT) app developers spend at least 25% of their time with analytics or databases,  and 42% work on Big Data or advanced analytics projects.  55% of IoT developers primarily connect devices through the Cloud, with 32% connecting through a hub or middle tier.

Grazed from ITProPortal.

Grazed from SuperUser.  Author: Editorial Staff.

If the average 5-year-old isn’t ready for school yet and can barely count up to 20,, given its explosive growth what’s next for OpenStack? As the community around the world blew out candles to mark that half-decade milestone, pundits and contributors wondered what’s in store.  Here are our favorite crystal ball pieces of the week…

Grazed from BusinessInsider.  Author: Julie Bort.

Amazon delighted investors on Thursday by posting a rare profit, helped in large part by its profitable cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services.  AWS sales surged 81% over the year-ago quarter, brought in revenue of $US1.82 billion for the quarter and dropped $US391 million of profit to the bottom line, an operating margin of 21.4%, CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts on the quarterly conference call.

Grazed from The Var Guy.  Author: Michael Cusanelli.

Check Point Software Technologies (CHKP) recently announced an expanded partnership with VMware (VMW) to combine the security vendor’s vSEC virtual network security with the VMware NSX network virtualization platform.

Grazed from CIOToday.  Author: Jeff Cozza.

 These days, Intel has its head in the clouds. It wants to ensure its enterprise clients do, too. Yesterday, the semiconductor company announced a new “Cloud for All” initiative to push for faster adoption of cloud architecture by enterprises. As part of the initiative, Intel said it is teaming up with Rackspace to open a new development center for the OpenStack cloud platform.

OpenStack, a free, open-source platform deployed by organizations under an infrastructure-as-a-service model, was originally developed by Rackspace in collaboration with NASA in 2010. Called the OpenStack Innovation Center, the new center, which will house Rackspace and Intel engineers, will be located at Rackspace’s corporate headquarters in San Antonio…