Grazed from Electronics360. Author: Peter Clarke.

Toshiba Corp. (Tokyo) and Microsoft Corp. (Redmond, Washington) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to work together on solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT). Toshiba plans to combine its ApP Lite processors, sensors and memory components—and equipment based on them—with its own cloud-based data storage. Microsoft will provide its Azure access and data analytics cloud services to the team effort.

Toshiba plans to start delivering IoT applications for multiple market segments in 2015. Azure is a cloud computing platform from which Toshiba will use private line services called Azure ExpressRoute and advanced analytics known as Azure Machine Learning. Jagdish Rebello, senior director of cloud and computer electronics at IHS Inc., says the deal between Toshiba and Microsoft is a good first step for the two companies to come together and develop solutions that work seamlessly to drive efficiencies and reduce the barriers to IoT deployment. But, Rebello adds, to be effective, it’s important for the two firms to get other players into their ecosystem…

Read more from the source @ http://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/5388/toshiba-microsoft-team-up-for-iot

Grazed from CNBC. Author: Arjun Kharpal.

In its strongest push outside of China, Alibaba has struck a series of partnerships to bolster its global cloud offerings, putting it in direct competition with the likes of Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The deals – including one with Intel – will see Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud division, use existing data centers built by the partner companies to push its own services.

By not building new data centers Alibaba will save money and through the partnership be able to localize its cloud offering and tap potentially new markets. "There are more and more storage problems and more and more clients are in need for bigger storage capabilities," Simon Hu, President of Aliyun, told CNBC by phone…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cnbc.com/id/102736537

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Scott Petersen.

For Hewlett-Packard, it seems, breaking up really isn’t that hard to do after all. First of all, it’s actually happening. The new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and the consumer PC and printer company HP Inc. are going to be operationally separated on Aug. 1, right on schedule, officials said this week at the HP Discover 2015 conference.

The legal separation will occur Nov. 1. It’s going to be the end of an era, not only for a venerable Silicon Valley company, but also for customers who can no longer ignore the benefits cloud computing can bring to their businesses and who must adapt their IT infrastructures to take advantage of those opportunities. The new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is in a unique position to meet those needs…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Michael Kan.

 Acer is still producing PCs, but the Taiwanese vendor is far more bullish about the Internet of Things (IoT), a market the company doesn’t want to miss out on.  On Thursday, the Taiwanese vendor held a news conference not for a new consumer product, but to promote an upcoming miniature PC that will be sold to developers.

The PC, called the aBeing One, will arrive in the third quarter, and is aimed at developers working in the IoT area. It’s designed to connect to smarthome and wearable products, and act as a hub that can analyze incoming data from the devices…

Grazed from IPFinance.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Back on 18 April 2015 The Economist published an instructive summary, “The cheap, convenient cloud”, describing the changes being wrought to the IT industry by cloud-computing services. The piece first identified the leaders in providing cloud services, with Amazon way ahead of Microsoft, IBM, Google and Salesforce.

No real surprises here, except perhaps for the substantial lead that Amazon enjoys as a percentage of the overall market share, reported at nearly 30%. What was of greater interest for this blogger was the discussion that followed on the promise and the challenges facing various other actors in the cloud computing/IP space, namely:…

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Kit Chellel.

Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. are caught in the middle of a clash between European Union lawmakers on whether the U.S. technology giants should be covered by rules forcing companies to report cyber attacks to government agencies in the 28-nation bloc.

While the European Commission wants search engines and social networks included in a revamped law on network and information security, some lawmakers favor a more streamlined approach focusing on critical infrastructure such as banks and power stations…

Grazed from Datanami.  Author:  George Leopold.

The British government and partner IBM are investing £300 million (more than $456 million) to promote big data and cognitive computing research aimed at helping U.K. businesses engage with customers and suppliers.

Among IBM’s contributions to the big data project announced this week is a package of technology and “onsite expertise” valued at £200 million, including access to its Watson cognitive computing platform and at least 24 IBM researchers. They will work with U.K. big data scientists…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.

The number one risk to system availability remains human error, according to the latest disaster recovery industry report from CloudEndure.  The research examines the various protocols businesses have in place for downtime if – or when – it occurs. On a scale of one to 10, human errors – including application bugs – hit 8.1, compared to network failures (7.2), cloud provider downtime (6.9) and external threats (6.7).

Even though the majority (83%) of organisations have a SLA goal of 99.9% or better, this doesn’t often translate into actual results. 44% of firms said they had at least one outage in the past three months, with 27% admitting their systems had gone down within the past month. 9% of respondents said their systems had never gone down…

Grazed from WSJ.  Author: Jack Marshall.

Amazon.com’s cloud computing service has become a popular conduit for fraudsters looking to create “bot” traffic and disseminate it over the Web, according to new research from advertising fraud detection firm Fraudlogix.

Fraudsters use computer generated bots to mimic the actions of real consumers and trick marketers into paying for ads displayed on Web pages. A number of techniques are used to generate artificial traffic, such as infecting consumers’ personal computers with software that loads Web pages without their knowledge, or installing similar software on cloud computing services such as Amazon’s to simulate real users…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Trevor Jones.

OpenStack distribution options continue to shrink as two more small vendors have been gobbled up by bigger players looking to stake their claims in cloud.  Market consolidation around the open source cloud technology has been a familiar theme over the past year, and that continued this week as IBM and Cisco each said they plan to acquire OpenStack providers.

The former plans to buy hosted private cloud provider Blue Box and the latter is set to buy private cloud platform and support services provider Piston Cloud Computing, Inc., though terms of the two separate deals were not disclosed…