Grazed from TechnologyTell.  Author: Kayla Matthews.

The Obama administration has included $3.5 billion in grid modernization in its budget for the 2016 fiscal year. On top of that, the smart grid IT market is expected to double by 2024 and the future for implementation of smart grid technology is all but certain, with cities like Austin, Chicago and Sacramento leading the way.  Here’s a bit more about smart grids and how they could improve life as we know it:

Smart Technologies – A Brief History

The formal move toward an intelligent grid started in 2002, when the Electric Power Research Institute proposed a research project called IntelliGrid. Eighteen months later, IntelliGrid Architecture was born and the first smart grid architecture was available for power distribution.  The focus of the new architecture was on the following four areas:…

Read more from the source @ http://www.technologytell.com/gadgets/159759/smart-grids-101-connectivity-future/

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Larry Dignan.

Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft were the top four most innovative companies, according to a survey of technology and business decision makers.  The findings via Tech Pro Research’s IT Innovation Report 2015: Top companies, key tech drivers, and biggest roadblocks illustrate how the enterprise vendor pecking order is being revamped by the cloud.

Meanwhile, respondents from larger companies say their established vendors are falling short on innovation. However, Cisco and IBM both had strong innovation showings in our survey…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Cisco is one of the leading participants in the open-source OpenStack ecosystem and is also helping encourage others to participate. At the OpenStack Summit here, Lew Tucker, vice president and CTO of cloud computing at Cisco, discussed the company’s cloud efforts, including OpenStack and intercloud, in a video interview with eWEEK.

Cisco first officially joined the OpenStack effort in 2011, during the OpenStack Bexar release cycle. Tucker currently serves as vice chairman on the OpenStack Foundation’s board of directors…

Grazed from FranchiseNews.  Author: Michael Smith.

Microsoft officials have dropped their bid for ownership over global cloud computing company Salesforce following Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff’s price tag request of $70 billion.

Salesforce officials were offered a $55 billion package by their counterparts, but declined the offer. The San Francisco-based company is still under negotiations for a future buyout…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview.  Author: Jeffrey Schwartz.

Although research firm Gartner Inc. listed both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure as leaders in its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) report, AWS came out as the top dog. Microsoft, of course, begs to differ.

Close followers in the IaaS space, which Gartner describes as "visionaries," include CenturyLink, Google, VMware and IBM/SoftLayer. Among the others that Gartner described as "niche" providers were Rackspace, Joyent, Virtustream, Interroute, CSC, Dimension Data, Fujitsu, NTT Communications and Verizon…

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence.  Author: Richard Kemp.

As it approaches its first birthday, ISO 27018 – the first international standard focusing on the protection of personal data in the public cloud – continues to move centre stage as the battle for the Cloud moves up a gear.

At the highest level, this is a competitive field for the biggest companies – think billion dollar investments and million square foot data centres with a hundred thousand servers using enough energy to power a city.  According to research firm Synergy, the Cloud infrastructure services market – Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas), Platform as a Services (PaaS) and Private and Hybrid Cloud – was worth $16bn in 2014, up 50% on 2013, and is predicted to grow 30% to over $21bn in 2015…

Grazed from DarkReading.  Author Editorial Staff.

Huawei today launched its cloud service-oriented Cloud Fabric 3.0 Architecture at the HNC2015 (Huawei Network Congress 2015). By leveraging software defined network (SDN) technology, it supports fast service innovation and implementation, and efficient ICT resource integration in the cloud computing era.

"With core infrastructure carrying cloud services, enterprises are facing new challenges within data centers," said Liu Shaowei, President of Switch and Enterprise Communication Product Line, Huawei, "Our latest Cloud Fabric 3.0 is developed to help enterprise build data centers that are elastic and scalable to support evolving business needs."…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly.  Author: Cliff Saran.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of open-source supplier Canonical, continues to strive towards the vision of a converged handheld device, despite his failed attempt to raise $32m through crowdfunding for Ubuntu Edge, the smartphone that doubles as a desktop PC.

Recalling the crowdfunding initiative that fell short by $13m, he says: “I’m really proud how people stepped up and said it was a good idea. We concentrated all our efforts on the software and now we’re shipping phones.”…

Grazed from EveryCloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

The cloud can be a difficult concept to wrap your head around. What exactly is the Cloud? When are you using it? Where is it found? Sure, the cloud is useful for backing up files and accessing globally distributed software, but how does one pin down those nebulous definitions? To make matters worse, terms like “PaaS” and “SaaS” have popped up recently, further mystifying peoples’ already foggy understanding.

Fortunately we’ve put together a simple infographic breaking down the three layers of cloud computing ­ PaaS, IaaS and SaaS ­ by explaining just what each one does and how it contributes to cloud computing as a whole. From providing core computer infrastructure like operating systems and file storage at a global level, to consumer-facing software users can download or access through their web browser, these three layers encompass pretty much everything about the cloud…

To read more from the source and view infographic, please visit http://www.everycloud.eu/blog/dispel-cloud-computing-confusion-with-our-3-layers-infographic.html

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

Building a company from freely available software might not seem like the most logical idea, but it’s one that is working for many vendors in the OpenStack cloud ecosystem. In a panel session at the OpenStack Summit here, the founders of cloud service provider Blue Box Cloud, cloud database vendor Tesora, cloud storage vendor SwiftStack and cloud vendor Piston Cloud Computing as well as the CEO of Dreamhost detailed their experiences and challenges in building OpenStack-powered businesses.

Jesse Proudman, founder and CTO of Blue Box Cloud, told the standing-room only audience that he initially built his company as a single founder and that was a really hard thing to do. In retrospect, he found, having the right team from day one is a key element of success. As a single founder, for some of the early years of Blue Box, he was also bootstrapping the company with his own money, using every resource possible, including credit card debt…

Read more from the source @ http://www.eweek.com/cloud/entrepreneurs-share-how-to-build-an-openstack-powered-business.html