Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

A recent pact between Google and VMware reflects a new air of co-opetition among major cloud computing service suppliers, as companies try to keep Amazon from running away with the market. Ray Noorda, the late founder of Novell, popularized the term co-opetition, meant to convey how competitors will cooperate where their interests overlap in one narrow sphere, while continuing to compete on many other fronts.

Amazon’s continued ability to innovate and create new on-demand computing services around its online retailing base of operations has made it a formidable competitor. As enterprise IT shops experiment with and embrace cloud services, rivals including VMware, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace, and IBM SoftLayer have reason to worry that Amazon will win today’s cloud-services land grab before they can bring forth a full suite of competing services…

Grazed from Financial Times. Author: James Crabtree.

Infosys has bought US-based technology group Panaya in a $200m deal, marking the most significant step in chief executive Vishal Sikka’s drive to offer high-end software and boost the outsourcer’s growth. On Monday, the Bangalore-based group announced it had acquired Panaya, which was founded by an Israeli entrepreneur in 2006 but has its headquarters in California, in an all-cash deal based on an enterprise value of $200m.

Panaya specialises in automation technologies, in particular those that can help large companies manage and upgrade complex software packages bought from the likes of US-based Oracle or German technology group SAP. Infosys’s move provides the clearest indication yet of the direction outlined by Mr Sikka since he took the helm of the group last June, having previously been SAP’s chief technology officer…

Read more from the source @ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/05682e48-b5e4-11e4-b58d-00144feab7de.html#axzz3RwCdrYMo

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

Cloud computing isn’t going anywhere. In fact, there are more cloud platforms, services and environments being developed each and every day. The evolution of the cloud has seen many organizations evolve from private to public and now hybrid cloud platforms. In reality, almost every cloud environment within a pubic cloud has some sort of connection back to the central data center.

So, at some level, all public clouds are some percentage hybrid. Moving forward, the hybrid cloud model will give end-users even more services and benefits. A recent Gartner report found that the use of cloud computing is growing, and by 2016 this growth will increase to become the bulk of new IT spend…

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Maria Deutscher.

The promise of cloud computing remains elusive for the traditional enterprise nearly a decade after the trend first reared its head. Organizations are caught in a trade-off between control and flexibility that makes it difficult to realize the full benefits of the model, but striking the right balance became a notch easier last week as the vendor community took a collective step forward toward seizing it.

AppDirect Inc. led the charge, revealing a $50 million funding round meant to fuel the development of its namesake platform, which provides a way for business workers to consume cloud services on their own terms while still upholding governance policies. It offers a selection of pre-screened applications that administrators can assemble into catalogs tailored to the requirements of their organizations and regulate usage accordingly…

Read more from the source @ http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/02/16/what-you-missed-in-cloud-disrupting-consumption-models/

Grazed from BackupTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

Complete automation is a myth. Absolute agility is a dream. But, the cloud makes it possible to automate those routine processes and activities that would otherwise consume considerable amount of time and deprive the organisation of the precious time that can be spent innovating, communicating, and building up their business.

The first step towards smarter computing is to spell out your rules and policies. These are triggers and frames for intelligent process definitions. For instance, if you want only certain section of your employees to have access to a specified set of data, it is important to have a user management policy. Each employee who can be authorised for access must be given a user id and password that allows access to the data set…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Is cloud computing finally opening up the doors to analytics? Everyone wants advanced data analytics, but the bar to achieving these capabilities has been high — requiring high-level skills, as well as highly scalable data management and storage. Cloud offers a way into the world of analytics, especially for small to midsize organizations that may may never have been able to afford it.

For large enterprises, it provides ways to quickly spin up or test new applications and data sets without crowding out existing infrastructure. A recent survey by O’Reilly Media and sponsored by Teradata finds that 40 percent of respondents who identify themselves as big data practitioners currently use cloud services for analytics…

Grazed from FutureGov.  Author: Editorial Staff.

As the mobile channel becomes an increasingly important access point for government services, HP has launched a new Software-as-a-Service solution to improve the way government agencies monitor their mobile apps.

HP AppPulse Active monitors the performance of both native apps and browser-based apps, allowing IT departments to see service levels in real time – rather than when it is too late and a fault has already occurred…

Grazed from SeekingAlpha.  Author: Zejia Yao.

When we talk about Alibaba, we always refer to its e-commerce business. In fact, Alibaba is more than just an online shopping operator. It also offers cloud computing services that are underappreciated by the market.

Aliyun ("yun" means cloud in Chinese) is Alibaba’s cloud computing division. Originally, it was founded to handle the traffic volume and serve the data management of its own e-commerce platforms and Alipay, the payment platform. Since 2010, it has shared its cloud computing resources to generate revenue…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Tom Tennant.

As an IT professional, what would you say are the top three concerns that keep you awake at night? According to the results of a recent survey, your peers listed security, downtime (disaster recovery), and talent management, in that order.

The survey was commissioned by Sungard Availability Services, a cloud computing, disaster recovery, and managed hosting services provider based in Wayne, Pa. I had the opportunity to discuss the findings with Ric Jones, CIO at LifeShare Blood Centers, a blood donation services provider in Shreveport, La., that’s a Sungard AS customer. Jones ranked disaster recovery ahead of security on his own list of concerns, but he indicated that the two are inextricably linked…

Grazed from Network World. Author: Linda Musthaler.

Does your organization have a shadow IT problem? Would you even know if you did? According to the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), 72% of respondents to the 2014 Cloud Adoption Practices and Priorities survey know the scope of shadow IT in their computing environments.

CSA defines shadow IT as “technology spending and implementation that occurs outside the IT department, including cloud apps adopted by individual employees, teams, and business units.” Nearly half of the survey respondents (49%) say their primary concern about shadow IT is the security of corporate data in the cloud…