Grazed from Microsoft. Author: Todd Thibodeaux.

Creating a unified operating system with Windows 8 seemed brilliant from a development perspective. But Microsoft (MSFT)’s inability to implement that vision led to less-than-enthusiastic adoption rates among enterprise customers (and contributed to the now notorious "Windows Pattern"). Microsoft is eager to correct these flaws with Windows 10 and has demonstrated a commitment to incorporating many enterprise-oriented features as well. Here are three of the top improvements that have the potential to make Windows 10 the new bedrock of corporate workstations:

A Smarter Command Prompt — While most of us have moved on to PowerShell to handle most of the heavy lifting, the fact remains that neither the command prompt nor PowerShell utility has received much attention from Microsoft over the years. Windows 10 is poised to change that with a variety of simple but helpful features, including text selection, transparency, text wrapping and keyboard shortcuts for common tasks…

Grazed from DataCenterDynamics. Author: Nick Booth.

HJ Heinz Company has become the first organization to number crunch its data both ‘in memory’ and across the globe, after hiring a migration specialist for its maiden cloud voyage. The food giant used Virtustream’s xStream to create a platform as a service (PaaS) environment on which SAP’s HANA in-memory database system could analyse masses of data quickly.

The company’s ‘in memory’ cloud system ran across its computing resources in 40 different countries. Heinz’s first foray in cloud computing has seen it roll out SAP HANA globally and, according to Heinz, ahead of schedule. Heinz said the exercise will give it a granular, real-time visibility into company performance, which it can budget for on a consumption-based billing model…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Editorial Staff.

Throughout the channel, it is obvious that the cloud is not only a great way to expand your business model but also to enhance the customer IT experience and drive incremental revenues. The opportunity is substantial. Gartner has predicted that the public cloud services market will exceed $244 billion by 2017. That’s only two years away.

This reality check has provided many of us–from ISVs, distributors, MSPs and VARs–to realign our business models and get a bigger piece of the proverbial pie. Is Infrastructure as a service or hybrid cloud the solution? Or, should DaaS or DBaaS be at the top of our list of initiatives?…

Grazed from BusinessCloud. Author: Steve Brooks.

China is vast, it is the second largest country by land mass in the world with 9.6 million square kilometres and a population of 1.3 billion. The challenges of providing cloud services to such a huge market are huge and China Telecom as one of the main providers in China has turned to Nuage networks to solve one of its key issues.

With the need to build a dynamic software defined network (SDN) to enable it to deliver new services, China Telecom has turned not to Huawei, as one might expect, but to Nuage networks. With a large and increasingly complex network the SDN technology will be important to meet the growing demand on its network and cloud services. Part of the contract also includes security services to mitigate against Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS), which because of the volume of computers on the network becomes almost a certainty as a result of events rather than malicious intent. In the event of targeted attacks against specific customers the technology is able to isolate parts of the network to mitigate that attack…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Stephen F. Deangelis.

In “Practical Artificial Intelligence Is Already Changing the World,” I promised to write a follow-on article that discussed why Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly), the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, and Irving Wladawsky-Berger, a former IBM employee and strategic advisor to Citigroup, are optimistic about the future of artificial intelligence (AI).

In that article I noted that some pundits believe that AI poses a grave threat to humanity while other pundits believe that AI systems are going to be tools that humans can use to improve conditions around them. I also wrote that it would be foolish to predict which school of thought is correct this early in the game…

Grazed from NewScientist. Author: Jacob Aron.

These days it’s easy to access ultra-powerful computers: just borrow one from Amazon, Microsoft or other firms offering cloud computing services. But analysing data on someone else’s hardware means they can see what you’re doing – not ideal if you want to keep it secret. Now it seems a dash of quantumness might be the best way to stay safe in the cloud.

There are currently two ways to run secure cloud computing. The first is called homomorphic encryption, essentially a complex mathematical trick that means you can send your data to a cloud provider in an encrypted form. Without this trick, the cloud computer would normally be unable to run calculations on data that was obscured like this. Computer firm IBM has been working on this since 2009…

Grazed from WindowsITPro. Author: Richard Hay.

Are you interested in learning more about Microsoft Azure, its offerings and the basics about Microsoft’s cloud services that are available on the growing platform? Yesterday, Microsoft Press announced the availability of an electronic book by authors Michael S. Collier and Robin E. Shahan that is actually the first in a series about Microsoft Azure.

I have been poking around Azure for several months now and currently host several aspects of my WindowsObserver.com website on the service including my Observed Tech PODCAST MP3 files, Windows Themes and other miscellaneous downloads. Recently I even built a few small websites on the service using WordPress to see how reliable it is and so far with these sites and the downloads I mentioned it has been rock solid…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

Very few applications have generated more profits and revenues for solution providers than the portfolio of offerings created by SAP. But with the launch today of SAP Business Suite 4 for HANA (SAP S/4HANA) in the cloud, solution providers might want to take stock of how the application delivery and customization is rapidly evolving around them.

Instead of always having to deploy highly customized versions of its software running on premise, SAP envisions moving large portions of its customer base to upgrade to a cloud application hosted by SAP. Naturally, for a whole range of security and compliance concerns there will still be instances of SAP S/4HANA that run on premise…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

As enterprises turn to public cloud services and managed service providers to meet their IT needs, colocation providers have seen their customer base gradually diminish. Infact, managed service providers now bring in five-times more revenue. Colo providers are aware their traditional business models are no longer relevant and that they need to give enterprises what they want: the cloud.

But incorporating cloud into their provision in such a saturated market won’t be simple. To have any chance of success, colo providers need to carve out what differentiates them from their competitors and implement the right technology to underpin their offering. But where do they start? Service providers who got into the cloud game early seemed, at the time, to be more visionary…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: carrie Simpson.

Using IT terminology in your sales pitch can be confusing to a non-technical audience. We can learn a lot about why we should keep it simple by considering a visit to the doctor’s office. If a physician said, "You present with ecchymosis, vastus medialis," would you understand what she was telling you? Would you spend a few minutes wondering if you should ask them to clarify the terminology?

Would you feel a little uncomfortable? A little panicked, perhaps? That overly complicated terminology means the patient has a bruise on the inside of their thigh above the knee. Doctors have learned to bring their terminology to an accessible level. You have "a cold," or you have "the flu" or a "bruise on your knee."…