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…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Jim O’Reilly.

Different vendors hold different views about the future of cloud computing. Amazon Web Services, for example, believes private and hybrid clouds are only a stepping stone on the road to public cloud. But enterprise concerns around job protection, security and compliance are leading to private and, especially, hybrid cloud deployments. According to industry analyst IDC, more than 65% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to the hybrid cloud model before 2016.

But when it comes to hybrid cloud implementation, things can be less organized than some would hope. In hybrid clouds, data is transferred between public and private clouds, but the parlous state of WAN communications, especially in the U.S., makes this a problem…

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: Joao Lima.

Alibaba’s data centre arm Aliyun Cloud Computing has unveiled plans to build a second US data centre, with Aliyun senior product director Li Jin stating that the facility will open in the coming months. The director added that the group is planning to build more data centres in Europe, Japan and Singapore ahead of its intentions to become a global cloud service provider. Tiny Haynes, research director at Gartner, told CBR that it will take a lot more than a second data centre to win over the intenational market.

"Although Alibaba has significant market share in the Chinese domestic market, it is Gartner’s view that the transition to the international market will require more investment in the go to market capabilities such as sales engineering, account management and reseller recruitment, along with building the trust of the US corporate and medium sized businesses."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cbronline.com/news/cloud/public/can-alibaba-win-over-the-international-cloud-market-4630713

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Intel executives are kicking off a broad initiative to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing in enterprise data centers and to position the company’s silicon and related products as the enabling technologies for the infrastructure that will power the clouds. Officials with the giant chip maker on July 23 unveiled the Intel Cloud for All strategy, which includes not only supplying the processors for the systems running in the cloud environments, but also investing in the ecosystem that will develop the solutions for software-defined infrastructures, leveraging Intel’s platform technologies to optimize the infrastructure to run an array of cloud workloads, and pushing the development of open standards and offerings to encourage cloud deployments.

The investments could come in a range of forms, from product launches and acquisitions to investing in other companies and partnerships, according to Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group. The goal of all this is to "accelerate the adoption of highly efficient clouds for businesses and providers," Bryant said during a conference call with journalists and analysts…

Grazed from Fool. Author: Leo Sun.

Microsoft reportedly has agreed to acquire Israeli cloud security company Adallom, which was founded three years ago, for about $320 million. Adallom develops a technology that protects an application or data as it sits on a remote server. Remote access is handled by Adallom’s command and control mechanism, which logs and reports any suspicious activity.

This layer compartmentalizes and protects cloud-based data for enterprise customers. The start-up has raised $49.5 million to date, including a $30 million investment from Hewlett-Packard. The acquisition of Adallom would complement Microsoft’s other recent purchases in the cloud, enterprise, and security markets. Last November, it acquired another Israeli firm, Aorato, which specializes in enterprise security and machine learning. It also acquired analytics firms Equivio, Revolution Analytics, and Datazen Software to beef up its big data capabilities…

Grazed from ThePlatform. Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

It is hard to believe, but one of highest-growth markets that the IT industry has ever seen – the transition from bare metal machines to fully orchestrated virtual infrastructure that we have come to call clouds – is not rocketing up fast enough for the world’s largest chip maker. So Intel is going to do something to stoke the fires even more, and that something is spend money.

Specifically, under a new program called the Cloud for All initiative, Intel is seeking to make cloudy infrastructure, whether public or private, the default way that organizations consume compute, storage, and network infrastructure and thinks it can do so by working at all levels of the cloud software stack to make it work better together and work best with Intel’s own technologies…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

IBM continues to build out its database portfolio with the acquisition of Compose, which offers several open-source-oriented database options. Compose, which raised about $6.4 million dollars since its founding in 2011, is privately held; terms of the IBM purchase were not disclosed.

What Compose, in Mountain View, Calif., brings to the table is a way to attract a new flock of web and mobile developers that are not part of the IBM enterprise rubric and let them try out lightweight database services based on MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, RethinkDB and other databases…