Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Editorial Staff.

From every angle, developers are the key to the public cloud. Unfortunately, today’s developers often aren’t up to the challenge and frequently end up being as much of a roadblock as operations administrators. New breeds of technologists are required, bringing new ways of thinking to using the emerging infrastructure superpowers of tomorrow.

Actually, I lie. What’s needed isn’t – for the most part – a particularly new way of thinking. It’s a rather old one, with a twist. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start at the beginning, of the modern era of computing. This began with the introduction of the microcomputer. Suddenly (it took about 15 years) everyone had a computer on their desks. Servers held some centralised resources, but individual PCs could crunch away on things and nobody had to worry about time sharing on mainframes…

Grazed from CCI. Author: Editorial Staff.

Parallels, has announced the rebranding of its virtualisation and cloud service provider business unit. Effective from today, the company’s Service Provider business will operate as Odin while the cross-platform solutions unit will continue to operate as Parallels. From this week the new Odin brand will handle the businesses cloud hosting solutions which currently powers a wide range of businesses from small and local hosters to some of the world’s largest telecommunications providers.

The brand will service and support more than 10,000 service providers in delivering applications and cloud services to more than 10 million SMBs from 15 countries. The Odin business will provide consultancy, a catalogue of cloud applications (Plesk, Plesk Automation, and Virtuozzo), and a selection of software including web business builder, server virtualisation, provisioning, and billing automation…

Read more from the source @ http://cloudcomputingintelligence.com/item/2239-parallels-renames-service-provider-business-unit-odin

Grazed from FoundersWorkbench. Author: Gerry Stegmaier.

Having recently examined scalability as a key motivation to founders’ use of cloud computing funding, we will now take a look at the various legal issues that may arise from cloud computing-based transactions. The implementation of cloud computing infrastructure implicates several issues inherent to the technology – most notably data control and regulatory compliance.

The simple act of contracting with a cloud computing service provider, for example, requires a company to delegate significant control over its data and computing infrastructure to that service provider. Because the purchasing company likely continues to have responsibility for that core business data, ensuring that the cloud relationship addresses this responsibility remains an important operational consideration…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Charlene OHanion.

One of the topics I often find myself discussing with both vendors and partners is cloud services. To be more specific, the role cloud services should play in channel partners’ business models. And with every conversation, one thread keeps popping out: Channel partners should embrace cloud services, but shouldn’t expect to make the transition overnight.

In other words, make it an evolutionary event, not a revolutionary event. Two conversations I had last week bolstered this idea. One was with Blake Wetzel, vice president of CenturyLink’s Channel Alliance, and the other was with Bob Skelley, vice president of Global Channel at Infinio…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

After years of competitive price cutting, it looks like Microsoft, at least, is hiking prices on its cloud computing infrastructure. IBM is also making changes. Will Amazon follow suit? Companies spoiled by round after round of price cuts on cloud computing services over the past year or so had better gird themselves for change.

It turns out nothing falls forever. Microsoft is raising prices on its Azure cloud. Last week blogger Aiden Finn, a Dublin-based Microsoft-focused consultant, posted excerpts from a company email alerting customers that Azure prices in the Eurozone will rise 13% as of August 1. The message cited currency concerns, which is understandable given the current situation in Greece…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Frederic Paul.

Need more proof that cloud computing is taking over? Just before the Independence Day holiday, research firm IDC released its assessment of the Worldwide Cloud IT Infrastructure Market—and the numbers were astonishing. According to the firm’s Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, server, storage, and Ethernet switch revenue for public and private cloud systems grew by 25.1% year over year to nearly $6.3 billion in the first quarter of 2015.

Even more importantly, perhaps, the percentage of total IT infrastructure spending devoted to the cloud continues to mushroom to nearly 30%, up from 26.4% a year ago. Private cloud revenue jumped 24.4% to $2.4 billion, while the public cloud grew even faster—25.5%— to $3.9 billion. Servers led the way, up 28% for the private cloud and 33% for the public cloud…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Tony Pagano.

It’s mid-2015, and it’s clear that the cloud paradigm is here to stay. Its services are growing exponentially and, at this time, it’s a fluid model with no steady state on the horizon. As such, adopting cloud computing has been surprisingly slow and seen more IT leaders, as well as business leaders, try to get their footing on what can otherwise be described as a very slippery slope.

Businesses are involved in a struggle to transform their firms into innovative and agile organizations, as well as gain a competitive advantage in their respective industry via a collaborated effort between the IT department and its internal business units. And this is impacting all types of enterprises…

Grazed from TheGlobeAndMail. Author: Mark Cunningham.

The “race to zero” is alive and well, as Google Inc. made clear a few weeks ago when it announced that its new Photos app will be free, including unlimited storage. Cloud services have finally reached zero. Over the past two years, the cloud industry’s price war has been good for pretty much everyone.

Lower upfront costs, tumbling storage prices and cheaper “compute” (non-storage) services are benefits that software vendors and end consumers alike can thank the race-to-zero gods for providing. But as prices keep dropping across the board, we’re starting to see a levelling of the playing field among major vendors…

Grazed from ConvergeDigest. Author: Leon Adato.

Learn from the past, live in the present and prepare for the future. While this may sound like it belongs hanging on a high school guidance counselor’s wall, they are words to live by, especially in IT. They apply perhaps to no other infrastructure element better than the network. After all, the network has long been a foundational building block of IT, it’s even more important today than it was in the days of SAGE and ARPANET, and its importance will only continue to grow in the future while simultaneously becoming more complex.

For those of us charged with maintaining the network, it’s valuable to take a step back and examine the evolution of the network. Doing so helps us take an inventory of lessons learned—or the lessons we should have learned; determine what today’s essentials of monitoring and managing networks are; and finally, turn an eye to the future to begin preparing now for what’s on the horizon…

Read more from the source @ http://www.convergedigest.com/2015/07/blueprint-evolution-of-network.html

Grazed from SeattleTimes. Author: Rachel Lerman.

It has officially been nearly two decades since shoppers of the world were introduced to the idea of buying books online. Seattle-based Amazon.com’s e-commerce website turns 20 years old this month. The company has grown from an idea hatched by founder and CEO Jeff Bezos to use the burgeoning Internet to revolutionize the book-selling business into an international “Everything Store” that has undeniably changed the way the world shops.

The company seems to be on a never-ending growth trajectory — Amazon employs more than 165,000 workers worldwide and last year brought in nearly $89 billion in revenue . Amazon celebrated its 20th anniversary of incorporation a year ago, in July 2014, and now, on July 16 of this year, it’s marking the two decade-point of its website launch and first book sold…