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…

Grazed from CIOToday. Author: Jef Cozza.

A new data backup and recovery service by Google is out of beta and ready for prime time. Google Cloud Storage Nearline, which the company first announced in March, is available to enterprises looking for online storage for data that does not need to be frequently accessed.

The company also said it would offer new customers a “Switch and Save” program, providing 100 petabytes of storage free for six months to companies that migrate their documents over from existing cloud storage services such as Amazon Web Services’ Glacier storage system…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: David Weldon.

Cloud computing adoption continues to rise, cloud costs continue to fall, and cloud savings continue to be available for those organizations that negotiate right. Those are the conclusions of three new cloud computing studies from 451 Research, Cloud Cruiser and International Data Corp.

Perhaps the best news for IT leaders is that the cost of cloud computing investments is dropping, even if only slightly. But the savings can be substantial for those organizations that "negotiate and commit," according to 451 Research. While the price of on-demand cloud services has fallen by a slight 2.25 percent since October, smart negotiators have seen price reductions of 12 percent, the research firm reveals…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

IBM is ramping up its commitment to open source technologies by releasing a new platform which enables developers to build cloud applications. The platform, called developerWorks Open, allows developers to not only download the code but have access to blogs and videos, comprising a global network to accelerate development projects.

IBM has had more than 20 years in the open source computing biz, becoming a main player in projects such as Apache, Linux and Eclipse. Big Blue is a platinum member of the OpenStack foundation, which announced a partnership with Google earlier this month. The company is also spearheading a project called Academic Initiative for Cloud, where the next generation of developers will be equipped with IBM’s platform as a service offering Bluemix…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Mike Butcher.

The scale of the opportunity in Cloud computing and SaaS was underlined today with the news that Notion Capital has closed its third fund with a first round of $120m, with a final close of $150m expected. Funds under management will therefore be over $300m. Partners and brothers Ben and Jos White formed Notion in 2008 after selling MessageLabs to Symantec for $700m, one of Europe’s largest B2B SaaS exits. But what is key to note here is the scale of opportunity for European enterprise startups.

For starters, the news makes Notion the biggest dedicated B2B SaaS fund in Europe with 33 investments including Tradeshift, NewVoiceMedia, CurrencyCloud, DueDil, AdBrain and Trustev. It’s already had European exits such as Shutl, to Ebay and Star, to Claranet. Its portfolio also includes many of hottest SaaS companies in Europe right now, including Adbrain, Brightpearl, Currency Cloud, Duedil, IOCS and MOVE Guides…