Grazed from Reuters. Author: Eric Auchard.

Telecom equipment maker Ericsson and chipmaker Intel have agreed a partnership deal to help network operator customers build datacentres, putting them on a more competitive footing against big, cloud-based Internet firms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. "We will build datacentre equipment which will actually have the same performance as many of the big cloud providers are doing for themselves," Ericsson’s chief executive, Hans Vestberg, told a news conference at the Mobile World Congress telecoms trade show in Barcelona on Monday.

Ericsson, the world’s leading maker of mobile network equipment, said it will help its global base of major telecoms companies to shift to cloud computing using Intel datacentre designs to compete more actively with Web rivals. No financial terms of the partnership were disclosed…

Read more from the source @ http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/03/02/uk-telecoms-mwc-ericsson-idUKKBN0LY1GU20150302

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: Eleanor Burns.

Compare the Cloud has today released the global #CloudInfluence rankings for February 2015, highlighting how IBM has leapfrogged AWS and Apple into second place. Coming in behind Microsoft who retained the number one spot, IBM’s leap from 6th to 2nd was put down to the planned $4 billion investment to grow revenue in areas like cloud computing to $40 billion by 2018. Trailing behind Microsoft and IBM, Apple took the 3rd spot while Amazon and its cloud business AWS took 4th and 5th respectively.

"All the cloud players are in a massive battle for market share and mind share," commented Dan Thomas, founder of Compare the Cloud. "Until Amazon breaks out its AWS revenues separately as it will for the first time in its next financial report, we won’t know for sure, but its cloud growth appears to be faltering in the face of recent stiff competition from Microsoft and IBM…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today debuted VMware vCloud® for NFV, an integrated Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform that will combine VMware’s production-proven virtualized compute, networking, storage and management solutions with integrated OpenStack support. With support for more than 40 different virtual network functions (VNFs) from more than 30 vendors, VMware vCloud for NFV is the only platform available today that runs different VNFs from different vendors side by side on the same unified platform for the cloud. With vCloud for NFV, communication service providers (CSPs) can deploy NFV solutions into production on a proven platform to achieve faster time to market for new and differentiated services while driving sustainable cost reductions.

At Mobile World Congress, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger will deliver a keynote address titled, "The New Mobile Identity" on Wednesday, March 4, 2015 from 9:15 – 10:45 a.m. CET in Hall 4, Auditorium 1. Faced with declining margins and the need to accelerate service innovation, CSPs globally are embracing NFV to make their core network more agile and cost-effective. As the pioneer in virtualization and cloud, VMware is engaging with CSPs to deliver NFV solutions today…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced its intent to acquire Connectem, a privately-held company in the LTE virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) market, in an all-cash transaction. The continued explosive growth of traditional mobile data combined with emerging requirements around machine-to-machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity place new demands on mobile networks.

To meet these challenges, mobile operators are looking to the power of virtualization to create flexible, scalable, and easy-to-deploy packet cores. Connectem provides highly-differentiated vEPC solutions with unique architectural attributes that leverage cloud computing, network virtualization, and software networking technologies to deliver higher scale and efficiency on industry-standard x86-based servers. Connectem software focuses on mapping mobile workloads to cloud resources, eliminating the constraints of physical equipment boundaries yet still maintaining the capablity to integrate with traditional node-based EPC architectures.

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Editorial Staff.

Over 4,000 VMware partners, in over 80 countries around the globe, gathered together and Dared to Thrive at this ever-growing and evolving high-tech industry event—Partner Exchange 2015. The event unveiled a major product launch and partnership as it kicked off with a General Session keynote, led by VMware President and Chief Operating Officer Carl Eschenbach. He challenged three members of the company’s leadership team to describe the value proposition of a specific part of the business in just five minutes.

• Bill Fathers, EVP and GM of Cloud Services at VMware, discussing hybrid cloud
• Raghu Raghuram, EVP of the Software Defined Data Center Division at VMware, discussing the value proposition of the software defined data center
• Sanjay Poonen, Executive Vice President and General Manager of End-User Computing at VMware, discussing the current and future state of end-user computing…

Read more from the source @ http://mspmentor.net/blog/bridging-gap-future-cloud

Grazed from SocialMediaToday. Author: David H. Deans.

Cloud service management is going to become yet one more segment of the legacy enterprise software sector that’s being affected by the ongoing adoption of open-source software subscription models. The shift in end-user IT consumption preference to cloud services will trigger disruption and pressures old-school Infrastructure Management (IM) software vendors on two fronts, according to the latest market study by Technology Business Research (TBR).

Cloud consumption models rely on subscription revenue. The revenue recognition patterns for subscriptions are in stark contrast to the expensive software vendor license models that include ongoing maintenance support agreements, generally purchased after the first year of deployment. The shift to subscription models negatively impact margins as traditional IM software vendors shift go-to-market and delivery strategies to align with end-user consumption preferences — and the growing demand for a lower-cost IT operations model…

Read more from the source @ http://www.socialmediatoday.com/technology-data/2015-03-01/how-cloud-computing-service-management-evolving

Grazed from DataPipe.  Author: Chris Bateman.

The rise of big data analytics was a game-changer for just about every industry. For years, businesses have possessed tremendous amounts of raw, unstructured data that they thought was more or less unusable, as there was no way to glean valuable insight from the information in this form.

With advanced big data analytics, though, this was no longer the case. Quickly, enterprises began to leverage these big data resources, gaining unprecedented insight into their markets, as well as their own operations.  Now, increasingly, big data analytics’ impact is growing, thanks to accelerating influence of cloud computing…

Grazed from LogicWorks.  Author: Editorial Staff.

What are the top CIO challenges in 2015? According to a survey reported yesterday on CIO.com, security, downtime, and staffing top the list of workplace issues “keeping CIOs up at night.”

No surprises there. After a flurry of recent high-profile cyber-attacks and internal security breaches, the majority of CIO executives will ramp up the security and availability of their systems in 2015, according to the report. Unfortunately, this often means that teams are scrambling to finish a checklist of CIO security concerns to patch up the most immediate vulnerabilities, rather than taking a longer view and building rigorous and monitored security practices into all layers of their IT deployments…

Grazed from TopTechNews.  Author: Jeremy Owens.

Silicon Valley’s cloudy outlook for software Relevant Products/Services grew stronger in 2014, as Salesforce and Workday sales continued to pile up, and investors bet Wednesday that the growth will continue in 2015 and beyond.

Salesforce, a pioneer in software-as-a-service offerings, topped $5 billion in annual revenues for the first time thanks to a fourth quarter that exactly matched analysts’ expectations for both adjusted profits and revenues, according to Thomson Reuters calculations. The San Francisco company reported a quarterly loss of $65.8 million, or 10 cents a share, on sales of $1.44 billion in its fourth quarter, which stretched to Jan. 31; after adjusting for stock-based compensation and other costs, Salesforce said profits were 14 cents a share…