Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Stanton Jones.

Grazed from GovLoop.  Author: Olivia Jefferson.

 Unless you’ve been pulling a Rip van Winkle in the woods for the past 20 years, you’ve probably heard of cloud computing by now. Many private sector companies have successfully integrated cloud services into their infrastructure; now government organizations are beginning to follow suit.  At Govloop’s Evolution of the Cloud event, Deputy CIO of the FCC John Skudlarek discussed how his organization is leading the way in the public sector adoption of cloud computing.

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

Tech giant IBM and enterprise cloud storage provider Box have announced a wide-ranging partnership, aimed at content management and social collaboration to improve the enterprise cloud and digital push.

The two companies aim to integrate their existing products and services to develop new solutions across multiple verticals, from medicine, to engineering and academia.  Among the developments proposed, Box will integrate with IBM’s enterprise content management solution, as well as collaborating to integrate Box into IBM’s business email and social collaboration platforms, IBM Verse and IBM Connections. IBM will leverage Box’s platform and APIs in its iOS applications, while Box will for the first time enable customers to choose a partner’s cloud platform for data storage…

Grazed from AndroidHeadlines.  Author: Tom Dawson.

While we all think of Google as a major player in the Cloud Computing space, it’s hard to forget that Amazon and their AWS web service, which powers popular websites, have been around for some time now as well. Before them however, was Cloud.com, a small startup that figured out a way of turning any data center into a cloud platform. Citrix paid over $200 Million for them back in 2011, and now some of the original employees are back with a new venture, dubbed Rancher Labs, and they have some choice words to share concerning Google and friends.

Rancher Labs CEO Sheng Liang and Director of Engineering Will Chan recently enjoyed a $10 Million investment round, and are now focusing on software containment, similar to the new hot product from Docker. You could think of software containment as a reverse engineering of cloud services, only to put it back out there again…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: Blair Hanley Frank.

 Snowflake Computing announced Tuesday that its cloud-based data warehouse service is available to all users.  Called the Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse, the service allows companies to pool all their data and workloads in a single warehouse that can be accessed by all their users. The warehouse is designed to handle administrative tasks for many of its users, like automatically scaling to match a company’s demands and handling hardware provisioning by itself so that administrators don’t need to spend as much time managing it.

 Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

 Most enterprises do not have the experience or talent to effectively take advantage of private or public cloud resources, so adoption is a trial-and-error process.  Even if you use case studies from other enterprises with similar problem domains, you’ll still run into issues that are unique to your enterprise, including problems with data integration, governance, and poor application design.  When enterprises deploy their first cloud projects, there are three outcomes:

• ImplementIng something that’s not a cloud (such as virtualized servers); enterprise IT calls it a cloud, then declares success
• Implementing public or private cloud services in improper ways; enterprise IT falls on its face, then declares success
• Implementing cloud-based applications and other resources successfully; enterprise IT quickly moves on to the next cloud projects…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/2937730/cloud-computing/3-ways-to-screw-up-a-cloud-deployment.html

 Grazed from DataCenterJournal.  Author: Editorial Staff.

IT operational spending plans are rising in 2015 at the fastest rate since the Great Recession, but IT capital spending remains on hold and hiring is muted in what could signal a broad-based shift to cloud computing.  "There is a notable shift from IT capital spending to operational spending, which is exactly what we would expect as companies move from software licenses implemented on premises to cloud subscriptions,” said Frank Scavo, president of Computer Economics, Irvine, Calif.

“Economic uncertainty is also at play, but we think the shift to cloud computing is the greater factor.”  The findings from the executive summary of this year’s Computer Economics IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks study indicate investment in cloud-based applications is beginning to have a noticeable impact…

 Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle Corp founder and Executive Chairman Larry Ellison said his database company is expanding its cloud-computing offerings, bringing Oracle into more direct competition withAmazon.com Inc.  "We’re prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price," said Ellison in a webcast presentation on Monday, after announcing that Oracle would offer online storage and capability for customers to run their applications entirely in Oracle’s cloud.

The expansion is a major new step for Oracle, which is shifting its traditional database and customer relationship management businesses to the cloud.  "This is a really big deal," said Ellison, who stepped aside in 2014 as chief executive of the company…