Grazed from CIOToday. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

Looking to jump into the next generation of networking technology, Verizon is working with Cisco Relevant Products/Services, Juniper Networks, Nokia Networks, and Alcatel-Lucent to deploy a software Relevant Products/Services-defined network Relevant Products/Services (SDN) architecture.

Essentially, Verizon is laying the groundwork for operational efficiencies that will set the stage for faster delivery of new services and applications. SDNs make it possible for network admins to manage network services more dynamically and cost-effectively. It’s a perfect solution for high-bandwidth applications in the telecom industry…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: David H. Deans.

Digital Business Transformation projects gained momentum in 2014, as more companies moved their legacy IT workloads to cloud computing platforms and launched a variety of new cloud-native applications. This pervasive trend will continue and accelerate for the duration of 2015.

Total cloud IT infrastructure investment (server, disk storage, and ethernet switch) is forecast to grow by 21 percent year-over-year to reach $32 billion in 2015 — accounting for about 33 percent of all IT infrastructure spending this year, which will be up from about 28 percent in 2014…

Grazed from CNBC. Author: Reem Nasr.

Shares of Salesforce.com jumped on Wednesday amid a Bloomberg report that it is working with financial advisors to help with a potential takeover offer. The report didn’t name any particular suitors, though it noted that a takeover of Salesforce would be the largest software acquisition ever, according to Bloomberg data.

The cloud-computing market has grown increasingly competitive, as behemoths such as Google, IBM, Microsoft and start-ups jostle for business. Shares were trading at all-time high levels since the company went public in 2004…

Read more from the source @ http://www.cnbc.com/id/102631435

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Dan Heilman.

The organizers of Interop’s annual IT trade fair announced the winners of the 2015 Best of Interop Awards in Las Vegas on Tuesday. There was one winner chosen from three finalists in each of 10 categories.
The 2015 Best of Interop winners were:

Grand Prize & Winner in the Applications Category: JumpCloud Directory-as-a-Service

JumpCloud Directory-as-a-Service lets organizations stop managing directory services locally, and enables them to move to a cloud Relevant Products/Services-based alternative. It can act as an extension or a replacement for existing AD or LDAP directories, and allows users to extend access to SaaS applications…

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Rachel Lerman.

Amazon has been the “Everything Store” for consumers for a long time, and now the Seattle company is making a push to offer everything for businesses. Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) launched Amazon Business on Tuesday, a site for office supplies from IT equipment to pens. The service will allow Amazon to target the huge amount businesses spend online, which is estimated to soon top more than $1 trillion a year, according to ZDNet.

The service could also help Amazon build relationships with large companies that would also be likely to use Amazon cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services. AWS is considered one of Amazon’s fastest growing businesses, and the company said last week it was worth more than $5 billion…

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: Editorial Staff.

The European cloud market, from a legal standpoint, is still a fragmented one which leads to a complexity which may impact trust in cloud adoption for companies. Across 28 European countries, no specific cloud contract laws were found to exist and no ‘cloud cases’ were seen to be reported.

This has resulted in general laws being applied to a cloud environment, which leads to fragmented solutions internationally on various topics, with one key example relating to the debate on the return of data stored in the cloud after a contract’s termination. There is also confusion on an EU level on how to deal with protected information that is stored in the cloud…

Grazed from Rappler. Author: Chris Schnabel.

Let’s start with a few assumptions, said May-Ann Lim, executive director of Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA): if you think that Asia will be the next driver of global growth, then you’ll wonder what powers that growth. “Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) make up 99.95% of all enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region,” Lim said in an exclusive interview.

Enabling faster SME growth therefore enables you to have the greatest positive impact on regional development, she added. Cloud computing, the ACCA believes, has the potential to be the ‘great leveler’ for both SMEs and developing economies. Adopting the cloud allows SMEs to have greater reach, greater speed, and greater flexibility in acquiring or serving customers, ACCA says in 2015 SMEs in Asia market report…

Read more from the source @ http://www.rappler.com/business/features/88184-cloud-great-leveler-smes-asean?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rappler+(Rappler)

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has been putting rockets into the air since World War II, but its involvement with cloud computing goes back only about six years. JPL is a federally funded research center, run by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for space exploration projects, particularly robotic missions.

Despite its mission to "dare mighty things," JPL must also be cautious in order to protect lives, complicated equipment, and money while managing missions in extreme environments. JPL built the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars on Aug. 6, 2012, as part of the Mars Science Laboratory mission…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

The idea of devops is very simple. It automates the notion of agile, which provides the ability to remove the traditional latency around the application development lifecycle. The advantage is that developers can make changes, then test, integrate, and deploy those changes automagically. The cloud provides more of an advantage for the devops model.

Since the applications are centrally deployed and managed, they could change several times a day, adding both fixes and enhancements. While this kind of freedom and automation empowers developers, users also benefit. Indeed, as users discover issues with the cloud-hosted software or offer suggestions for improvement, they can communicate requests to developers, then correct and enhance the issues in hours or days, not months or even years…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/article/2913966/cloud-computing/cloud-devops-empower-users-developers.html

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols.

If you really want your web pages to impress, you need to get them in front of your viewers’ eyes as fast as possible. So it is that Rackspace, the managed cloud company and one of the OpenStack cloud parents, has announced the availability of Rackspace Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Of course, while you can just roll out a cloud with enough servers, rolling out a CDN isn’t that easy. You need low-latency storage, such as that provided by SanDisk’s new Fusion ioMemory PCIe flash storage cards, data-centers across the country, and multiple tier-one network connections. Rackspace has the data centers, six throughout the world, but it didn’t have the connections…