Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

Would-be cloud buyers and sellers play a high-stakes game of musical chairs. Buyers need technology, developer cred, and customers. Sellers need to be part of a big offering. Not everyone is going to win. With Tuesday’s news that EMC is buying Virtustream for $1.2 billion, there is one less independent cloud infrastructure provider out there. And those numbers are dwindling by the month.

In the past two years, legacy technology giants IBM IBM -1.21% , Cisco CSCO -1.06% , Hewlett-Packard HPQ -3.97% , EMC EMC -2.05% and Datapipe gobbled up SoftLayer, Metacloud, Eucalyptus, Cloudscaling, and GoGrid respectively to build their cloud stature. Now, you have to wonder what company’s next to go…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

More than half of IT managers surveyed by West IP Communications say they expect to get full return on investment by moving to the cloud – but it’s an unconvincing figure. 54% of the more than 300 respondents said they would be able to fully recoup their costs of cloud computing adoption, which of course means 46% aren’t so sure.

Yet those with bigger IT budgets were more confident: two thirds (66%) of managers with company IT budgets over $5m were “confident” the savings of cloud computing would cover the operating costs. Of those who were expecting ROI, three quarters (74%) expected it to be through reduced costs of doing business, including maintenance costs and the size of the IT staff…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Janakiram.

Internet of Things is no more a science fiction. From smart homes to connected cars to smart healthcare, consumers and vendors are gearing up for the next big thing. There is more to IoT than those fancy wristbands, gadgets, and watches. From chip manufacturers to communication providers to platform vendors to cloud providers, the IoT ecosystem is complex and diverse.

Like most of the technology segments, no single player will be able to dominate this market. But there are a few companies that are well-positioned to exploit the opportunity that exists in consumer IoT. They have a high brand recall, right design elements, proven leadership in software and substantial investments in infrastructure. IoT story has two sides to it – one is the consumer play, and the other is the software and infrastructure…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Mike Vizard.

IT staffs spend an inordinate amount of time and effort configuring the stacks of software to run applications. But if anything was made clear at the OpenStack Summit 2015 conference last week, it’s that much of the work associated with deploying tools like Hadoop is about to become automated.

Case in point is Piston Computing, which used the conference to showcase a turnkey platform for deploying a private cloud. Via the click of a single button, IT administrators can use Piston CloudOS 4.0 to not only launch OpenStack in minutes, but also to deploy Hadoop and Spark on bare metal servers. In the near future, Piston Computing plans to add support for container orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Editorial Staff.

Joe Tucci is at it again. The longtime EMC chief executive and chairman has made another purchase, buying Virtustream, an enterprise-oriented cloud computing company, for $1.2 billion in cash. This move follows EMC’s EMC -2.09% late 2014 acquisition of Cloudscaling and its OpenStack-based private cloud expertise.

Virtustream is focused on big corporate customers—SAP is among its investors—and fields data centers in the U.S., the U.K. and the Netherlands. It particularly suits financial customers and others who require payment card industry (PCI) compliance, as well as federal government customers, according to Gartner’s IT latest cloud computing report. Domino Sugar, Coca-Cola, Heinz, and Lexmark are some of Virtustream’s corporate customers…

Read more from the source @ https://fortune.com/2015/05/26/emc-expands-cloud-push-with-1-2-billion-buy-of-virtustream/

Grazed from Enterprise Irregulars. Author: Dion Hinchcliffe.

I’ve spent much of my Memorial Day Holiday here in the United States pondering the Red Queen effect vs. network effects, seminal laws of technology and business both, that are often held as gospel by their adherents who believe they are the natural and intrinsic properties of their operating environments (digital ecosystems in this case.)

Both hypotheses apply to any connected, relatively closed environment of some kind, which very much includes everything from traditional marketplaces, online communities, app stores, cloud services, SaaS, enterprise social networks, social media, and cable/video networks to e-mail, telephones, and package delivery…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Steven Rosenbush.

Two powerful tech trends—3-D printing and cloud computing—are coming together. And that might make it a lot easier for small companies to get into the manufacturing game. There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about small companies rushing to adopt 3-D printing, taking advantage of the ability to turn computer-generated designs into physical objects.

Yet even though the technology can crank out items more cheaply than traditional manufacturing, for many small firms the investment is too big: Higher-end printers that produce finished products can cost thousands or even millions of dollars, and require specialized skills to use. Enter a new batch of cloud-based services—such as Shapeways, Cubify, i Materialize and Sculpteo—that offer to do the 3-D printing for small businesses…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

With the summer season rapidly descending upon those in the northern hemisphere, it’s time to kick it down a notch and engage in some less stressful pursuits than running a business — namely, reading up on cloud computing. Let’s face it, there will be cloudy days through the summer, so why not get into a cloud frame of mind?

With that in mind, here are some of the works that really help clarify and cut through the confusion on what cloud computing is and can be. These are all works published over the past few years that document the cloud story:…

Grazed from PRWeb.

EasyStreet Inc. has brought to market a new type of cloud computing solution engineered for unrivaled speed and scalability. The EasyStreet Extreme Performance Cloud Computing solution is ideal for situations where access to data has to be quick such as supporting website visitors and data-driven applications. Working with leading products from SanDisk Corporation and Dell Inc., EasyStreet now deploys private clouds with a storage system capable of ten times the performance of a traditional disk system and three times the performance of an all-flash system using the same computing resources. Clients can take advantage of environments that are easy and fast to deploy and are also simpler to maintain. The performance realized with this solution ensures a predictable application response even under heavy utilization.

DealerPeak is one of the first clients to take advantage of this solution and has seen impressive results. DealerPeak supplies solutions to hundreds of automotive dealerships nationwide including the Ron Tonkin Family of Dealerships. The DealerPeak applications provide customer, sales, inventory, and service data to sales staff as well as prospective customers…

Grazed from NetworkAsia. Author: Editorial Staff.

A study of 232 global IT executives this year has revealed that a vast majority of organizations (87%) are concerned with the security and privacy of corporate data in cloud deployments. The survey, titled “Preparing for next-generation cloud: Lessons learned and insights shared”, was conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and sponsored by Hitachi Data systems.

Responses also indicated that outages and failures of public cloud implementations were twice as likely to occur when compared to private cloud. Almost half of the respondents indicated the biggest risk of a failed implementation to be loss of customer data. The report found that while cloud computing has delivered many benefits, cloud adoption also continues to challenge even the most nimble of companies. Other highlights include:…