Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) today announced the creation of the Open Cloud Institute, an initiative to develop degree programs in cloud computing and big data and foster collaboration with industry, positioning UTSA and San Antonio as world leaders in open cloud technology.

Through the 80/20 Foundation and other industry supporters, the Open Cloud Institute will launch with initial gifts and in-kind investments of $9 million. The foundation has committed $4.8 million to support four endowed professorships, up to two faculty research positions, 10 graduate student endowments and research funding…

Grazed from MSPMentor.  Author: Michael Brown.

Will 2015 be the year the cloud gets past the hype? While cloud-based file sharing and other cloud services are being adopted by almost all businesses, the cloud is still in the early stages of its technological revolution. Whether it is personal computers, the internet, or 3D printing, every new technology goes through a period of hype and disillusionment before the really productive innovation takes place.

Gartner calls this the Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies. According to Gartner, cloud computing has already passed the inflated expectations people had about it and everyone is beginning to become disillusioned by it…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Dan Kobialka.

Docker is expanding its "batteries included but swappable" open source ecosystem to empower developers and system administrators to launch and manage portable distributed applications.

The San Francisco-based open source platform provider has released three new orchestration tools that are designed to help developers and system administrators create Dockerized apps…

Grazed from Effective Software.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud based platforms are a modern, reliable and cost effective way to manage the day to day running of your business. As well as being secure, cloud based platforms are scalable, allowing for easy future expansion when your business needs it.

In recent years, interest in cloud computing has skyrocketed. The business world has been quick to embrace it. This is because the benefits cloud based platforms can offer businesses are becoming more and more apparent. These benefits can be reaped by a wide range of businesses across multiple sectors…

Grazed from ReCode.  Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

Computing and IT services giant IBM will spend $4 billion on its cloud services, data analytics and mobile businesses in a bid to turn it into what CEO Ginni Rometty said will be a $40-billion-a-year-in-revenue business by 2018.

On a conference call ahead of its annual investors presentation in New York, Rometty said the three businesses, which she referred to as IBM’s “strategic imperatives,” have grown in overall importance as it has divested itself of its older traditional business units. Five years ago the divisions amounted to 13 percent of IBM’s sales, Rometty said. By the start of 2015 they accounted for 27 percent…

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Tom Henderson.

The cloud can be an enormously cost-effective way to increase storage and computing musculature, and also, sadly, a way to further add misery to those seeking privacy—or who just want to be left alone. It’s rare to see organizations stand up and shout, "we’ll not give your data to anyone!" or "the life of all stored data, except opt-in assets you want us to store, is always 90 days!" or "yes, we can determine in absolute certainty that your data has been erased to protect you and your identity."

The cloud, in some warrens, has become a storage ground for the various factories of "big data," whose ideals are generally to sell things to consumers and businesses. Correlating facts is huge. Ask Target, whose insight into discovering pregnancies helped them capture a nicely profitable market in the pregnancy and new mother world. Smart, you say. There is a downside to this…

Grazed from CloudTech.  Author: James Bourne.
 

Cloudy software provider Salesforce has announced its latest financial results, with $5.37bn (£3.46bn) in total annual revenue and another billion dollar quarter.  The results were in line with Wall Street’s expectations, with earnings per share at $0.14 and a year on year growth of 26.1%.

It certainly seems a long way since 2009, when Salesforce’s first billion dollar annual figures arrived, and late 2013, when the first billion dollar quarter arrived. CEO Marc Benioff saw the latter, understandably, as a major achievement initially – it’s now almost de facto…

Grazed from CustomerThink.  Author: Gary Gould.

What we can expect from the Cloud over the next ten years.  In the United Kingdom, almost seventy per cent of businesses are using at least one cloud based service.  That’s a huge leap from five years ago, when the Cloud would barely crop up in conversation.

Nowadays, we are forever reading about cloud technology, the Internet of Things, virtual desktops and wearable technology. For the small business owner, there’s a lot to keep up with. After all, you never know when the next generation-defining innovation is going to be launched, and you need to be prepared to use it to its full potential when it finally drops…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Research conducted by Tata Communications, a leading provider of A New World of Communications™, has found that organisations with 500+ employees are seeing tangible benefits from cloud computing. 85% say cloud had lived up to industry hype, with 23% declaring that cloud had exceeded their expectations.

According to the global survey, this groundswell of positive opinion has been contributed to by enterprises experiencing tangible benefits when using cloud services – with 83% of enterprises feeling they have experienced benefits they did not expect to see. The most popular of these benefits cited by respondents were: increased productivity (69%), better access to data (65%), and reductions in costs (63%)…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

IBM announced today that Forrester Research has positioned the company as the leading supplier in the global infrastructure outsourcing segment, based on an evaluation of most significant suppliers.

In a new report, "The Forrester Wave™: Global Infrastructure Outsourcing, Q1 2015," IBM scored the highest or among the highest among 13 suppliers across all three high-level evaluation criteria: Strategy, Current Offering and Market Presence. Forrester recognized IBM’s vision for the future of infrastructure services, noting that cloud services has become a major element of IBM’s infrastructure management strategy…