Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Jonathan Feldman.

Last week at Interop and Cloud Connect, I shared a bit about how my staff and I have worked through some very natural fears about our organization expanding the production use of cloud computing. The bottom line: It’s all about communication, mutual flexibility, managing the real operating risks, dispelling irrational fears, and providing a career path forward.

As with many IT and leadership topics, the "how" matters just as much as the "what." The "how" we did it is what I focused on in my Cloud Connect slide deck, and what I explore here…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft Corp currently is not weighing an offer for Salesforce.com Inc (CRM.N), two people familiar with the matter said on Thursday, dampening speculation that Microsoft could be drawn into bidding for the cloud software company. Bloomberg News, citing people with knowledge of the matter, reported earlier this week that Microsoft was evaluating a bid for Salesforce after the latter was approached by another unnamed would-be buyer.

Microsoft considers Salesforce’s current market valuation expensive, one of the people said. It is possible that Microsoft could review a bid for Salesforce in the long term, the other person said. The sources asked not to be identified because the deliberations are confidential. Microsoft and Salesforce both declined to comment…

Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

ANSYS customers can now deploy consistent enterprise-specific simulation workflows and data to more engineers, regardless of geographic location or business unit with today’s launch of ANSYS 16.1 and ANSYS Enterprise Cloud. The new solution, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), simplifies and accelerates the transition to cloud-based simulation by providing a reference architecture for end-to-end simulation that can be deployed within days – minimizing risk while boosting productivity.

Customers who adopt the ANSYS Enterprise Cloud can scale their simulation capacity – including infrastructure and software assets – on demand, in response to changing business requirements, optimizing efficiency and cost while responding to the growing demand for wider use of the technology…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

That didn’t take long. A little over a month ago, cloud company Nebula closed up shop. This week, Oracle said it’s hired 40 of Nebula’s engineers, according to Re/Code. Oracle cloud chief Peter Magnusson, a former top technologist at Google and Snapchat, told the publication that Oracle approached the group soon after news of Nebula’s demise.

It’s easy to see why. Nebula focused on OpenStack, a hot niche of open-source cloud software that many companies are looking to use in their future infrastructure. Most big companies that now run their own servers on-premises or in data centers, see cloud computing as a more flexible and possibly cheaper way to run their applications and store their data…

If you’re like many organizations, you hate your storage. It’s expensive, doesn’t keep up with new application performance needs, constantly requires capacity expansion, and requires expensive staff to keep it operational. Worse, it probably gets conveniently “end-of-life-d” at exactly the wrong time, forcing you in to costly upgrades.

It doesn’t have to be this way! With both current and emerging flash storage systems, companies are gaining benefits that were only dreams in the days of the disk-based SAN. Far beyond just providing crazy levels of performance, flash storage systems have the potential to help IT organizations focus on the business and less on technology. After all, when you have IOPS to spare, other metrics can take center stage. These can include cost per gig, power consumption, gig per rack unit, and many more.

Grazed from Zacks. Author: Editorial Staff.

In a bid to boost its cloud offerings, search giant Google Inc. launched Cloud Bigtable, the managed NoSQL database it has been using internally for a number of years to store huge amounts of data online. A public beta version is now available, that is, it’s open to all developers but doesn’t provide a service level agreement or technical support.

The service costs 65 cents per node with one node delivering up to 10,000 reads and writes per second. Storage on SSD is priced at 17 cents per gigabyte a month on a pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud Bigtable is claimed to be a fully managed, high-performance and highly scalable NoSQL (not only SQL) database service compatible with the open-source Apache HBase application programming interface (API) that most developers are already comfortable with…

Grazed from InvestorPlace. Author: John Kilhefner.

International Business Machines (IBM) last month posted an earnings surprise — good news that was dulled a bit thanks to disappointing overall sales thanks to a strong U.S. dollar. Cloud computing and data analytics made up about 27% of its business in the last year, but dwindling sales of IBM’s ancestral software and services is prompting Big Blue to put its cloud and data business on the front lines.

InvestorPlace’s James Brumley noted that this strategy of IBM effectively buying its way into the cloud race is working, though that premise at the time wasn’t enough to recommend investors start clamoring over IBM stock. IBM’s Vice President of Investor Relations Patricia Murphy reaffirmed the tech giant’s commitment to turning its business around with the more innovative and profitable ventures in the cloud and data analytics, allocating billions of dollars to cloud and data with initiatives in the Internet of Things and Watson Health…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Since a report surfaced in Bloomberg more than a week ago, it’s been the talk of the tech market: Will Salesforce.com be bought out? Perhaps a more intriguing question though is: Should Salesforce sell out? A sale of the $46 billion market-cap company would be one of the largest tech acquisitions in history and could dramatically help a potential acquirer gain a significant foothold in the fast-growing SaaS cloud computing market.

As the company has grown, it’s stuck with its message that business should ditch licensed software they run themselves. That’s an unrealistic proposition for most companies though, a new report by technology researchers finds. That fundamental disconnect between Salesforce’s business model and how enterprises are using the company’s products is one of the biggest reasons Salesforce.com may be sold…

Grazed from HealthCareNews. Author: Mike Millard.

Healthcare is among the top industries that could feel the impact of the emerging phenomenon of cloud-based robotics, according to a new research report from Frost & Sullivan. "Cloud robotics can be viewed as a convergence of information, learned processes, and intelligent motion or activities with the help of the cloud," the report explains. "It allows to move the locus of ‘intelligence’ from onboard to a remote service."

As robots are increasingly deployed for everything from manufacturing to surgery, Frost & Sullivan sees need to better manage them remotely via the Internet. With the Web used to augment robots’ capabilities – off-loading computation and providing services on demand – this will enable expanded memory and storage capabilities and access to shared knowledge, thus increasing their functionality…

Grazed from Fortune. Author: Barb Darrow.

Nearly everyone agrees that cloud computing is the future of information technology. But the market is fragmented and that could make it difficult for companies to choose the best home for their data and applications. In the OpenStack arena alone there are dozens if not more cloud infrastructure options and that makes for a bewildering choice for the chief information officer (CIO) or whoever picks the cloud.

You can bet that the old-line companies who sold servers and storage into his shop hope he just goes with their cloud. But most CIOs have relationships with more than one of these companies so something’s got to give. Who to choose? The latest: EMC said this week it is working with three OpenStack providers—Canonical, Red Hat and Mirantis—to make it easier to deploy the cloud framework in corporate accounts…

Read more from the source @ http://fortune.com/2015/05/07/too-much-open-stack/