Grazed Forbes. Author: Jason Bloomberg.

In the days since a Bloomberg article let slip that Salesforce.com CRM +0.47% might be on the block, there has been no end of punditry regarding potential suitors. Oracle is the most likely – except it’s not. Salesforce’s Benioff had lunch with Microsoft’s Nadella – only perhaps it was dinner. IBM IBM +0.88%, Amazon.com, or perhaps even SAP are in the mix. Only it’s not SAP. Apple anyone?

The more interesting question, however, isn’t who, it’s why. Oracle ORCL +0.96% and Microsoft MSFT +0.06% are looking to beef up cloud computing operations, according to a Reuters article. It certainly couldn’t be because Salesforce has a booming business, as it lost $263 million in 2014, with no turnaround in sight…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Stanton Jones.

What does a typical enterprise cloud services buyer look like? It’s a tricky question to answer. Cloud services are everywhere: in the data center, in development teams, in shared services organizations on manufacturing floors. It’s also delivered in many different ways: as software, as infrastructure that behaves like software and as business processes supported by cloud software. Complicating matters further, what one buyer may call cloud another may call a rack of dedicated, virtualized servers, making the line of demarcation between “cloud” and “traditional” very blurry.

Regardless how one chooses to define this boundary, cloud is permeating just about every corner of the enterprise, and the buyers that are driving this transformation are as varied as the functions they represent. However, buying “archetypes” are starting to emerge. Here are six of the most common:…

Grazed from Phys.org. Author: Yijun Yu.

The recent earthquake in Nepal demonstrated yet again how difficult it is to reliably predict natural disasters. While we have a good knowledge of the various earthquakes zones on the planet, we have no way of knowing exactly when a big quake like the 7.8-magnitude event in Nepal will happen.

But we know that many animals seem able to sense the onset of such events. We could use powerful computers to monitor herds of animals and make use of their natural instincts to provide forewarning of natural disasters. Immediately before an earthquake, herds of animals often start to behave strangely – for example suddenly leaving their homes to seek shelter. This could be because they detect small, fast-travelling waves or because they sense chemical changes in ground water from an impending earthquake…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Predictions tend to be more of an end-of-the-year activity, but I took some time to write down a few ideas and their likely outcomes based on patterns in the market that we can currently see. Here are a few to consider. There will be more market convergence around Google, AWS, and Microsoft. This is as easy to call as the sunset. Enterprises moving to public clouds are largely going with these three companies.

Moreover, the big three are placing their technology bets in cloud computing right now, and this will continue for the foreseeable future. Many thought this would be race of a dozen or so public cloud providers, but the market has taken care of most of them. Indeed, smaller cloud providers, such as Rackspace, could not keep up with the investment and have moved to a narrower and more niche-oriented focus…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/2916564/cloud-computing/4-predictions-for-the-immediate-future-of-cloud-computing.html

Grazed from Engineering. Author: Shawn Wasserman.

SimScale appears to be the latest to target its CAE tools to individual consultants and small companies. These users will have access to the web-based simulation platform, training and support from SimScale’s team of consultants. "Engineering simulation is now available not just for the largest companies, but for start-ups,” said David Heiny, managing director of SimScale.

“CAE simulation can help start-ups bring their designs to reality more quickly than ever before. The start-ups that we are working with are creating a wide range of projects, including structural mechanics and thermodynamics designs." The key features from SimScales’s product are similar to other cloud-based simulation offerings:…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Sander Van Vugt.

There’s little debating that VMware’s influence in the data center has been matched by few other companies. With vSphere, it has been the leading server virtualization market for many years. But now that VMware is moving into new areas, namely cloud computing, things aren’t quite so clear-cut.

In the cloud world, the big news of the last couple of years has been OpenStack. OpenStack is an open source cloud initiative that is developed by many leaders in the software and hardware industry. Because every significant player on the IT market seems to be involved with it, OpenStack has become the go-to cloud platform. It can be used to deploy public and private clouds…

Read more from the source @ http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/VMware-Integrated-OpenStack-lifts-workloads-into-cloud

Grazed from CNBC. Author: Ari Levy.

Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has made some bold moves since taking over the world’s largest software company last year. But nothing like a $50 billion-plus acquisition. At least one analyst sees it as a real possibility. Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter, that Salesforce.com hired financial advisors upon being approached by potential buyers.

While much of the speculation immediately turned to rival Oracle, Alex Zukin of investment bank Stephens says Microsoft makes the most sense. Nadella has made cloud computing his No. 1 priority as CEO, and even projected at a company conference this week that Microsoft could reach $20 billion in cloud revenue by 2018, up from a current annualized rate of $6.3 billion…

Grazed from Oracle.  Author:  Mattias Drefs.

European companies increasingly enjoy the benefits of cloud computing, whereby, however, private and public clouds are combined in a hybrid model. That is the result of a survey among 625 IT decision-makers in medium-sized and large companies, carried out by IDG Connect on behalf of Interxion, the Dutch data centre service provider.

45 % of those surveyed said that their company has already established a hybrid cloud. 80 % even expect that they will be using a hybrid IT solution featuring a combination of private and public cloud in 2016. Although 50 % of companies currently still rely on their own data centre alone, this figure is expected to drop to a mere 15 % in the coming year...

Grazed from SeattleTimes.  Author: Alex Sherman and Cory Johnson.

Salesforce.com is working with financial advisers to help it field takeover offers after being approached by a potential acquirer, people with knowledge of the matter said.

There is no certainty any deal will transpire, the people said, asking not to be named because the information is private. The people didn’t identify potential acquirers. Bankers may help rebuff any suitor or work out an eventual sale, one of the people said.  Salesforce stock jumped 11.6 percent in New York trading Wednesday, giving it a market value of about $49 billion…

Grazed from MoneyControl.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft Corp is targeting USD 20 billion in annual revenue from its cloud-computing businesses by the end of fiscal 2018, Chief Executive Satya Nadella said on Wednesday, signalling a tripling of such revenue in three years.

The world’s largest software company is one of the leaders in the cloud, essentially providing computing power and storage to customers through its network of data centres. Microsoft said last week that its total commercial cloud revenue, which includes online versions of its Office and Dynamics applications, is running at USD 6.3 billion per year…