Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Matt Rosoff.

The tech industry is red hot. Salaries for computer programmers hit an all-time high last year. Tech workers are asking for more money than ever before — and can often pick and choose between multiple job offers. The top six best-performing cities in the US are all tech hubs. Rents in San Francisco and Silicon Valley are absurd.

So can you guess which industry had more layoffs in 2014 than any other? The computer industry. That’s right: According to job placement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, the computer industry cut 59,528 jobs last year. That’s up 69% from 32,136 job cuts in 2013, and it’s way ahead of the No. 2 worst-performing sector, retail, where 43,783 jobs were cut in 2014…

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Are software makers writing themselves out of a good living? Recent trends in the computer business indicate we are about to see a phenomenal growth in computing power and the relative ease with which software can be created to utilize it. In one case, powerful cloud computing companies that are accessible to the public — and often to developers of new software — appear to be quickly expanding.

Intel says that in the last five years it has seen a tenfold increase, to 200, in the number of public clouds. There is no sign of that slowing down, with big companies like Google and Amazon offering even more services for software developers to put more things online, including connected household devices, millions of hours of video, and fast-growing start-ups like Airbnb or Khan Academy…

Read more from the source @ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/13/why-software-containers-wont-be-bad-news-for-programmers/?_r=0

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknas.

More price cuts are expected this year because of fierce competition between cloud and on-site software providers, and enterprises will be the beneficiaries. In particular, in the customer relationship management market, a key cloud battleground, seat prices for segments such as sales force automation are expected to decline in the next twelve months and by 25 percent through 2018, according to market research company Gartner.

This will be caused by incumbent vendors heavily discounting their cloud offerings to try and prevent their existing on-site customers from defecting to companies such as Salesforce.com and SugarCRM. Enterprises will also benefit from increased price competition in other areas, such as database management system application infrastructure and middleware. However, the price competition in these sectors isn’t quite as ferocious…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Robert McMillan.

Microsoft has made Verizon Communications the centerpiece of its effort to build out a worldwide network to speed up video delivery for users of its Azure cloud computing service. To some, the move comes a bit of a surprise. Microsoft had been building out this network itself, according to observers, but now appears to have reversed course.

When it comes to internet infrastructure, giant Web players like Microsoft typically build out their own offerings, rather than relying on service providers such as Verizon. And in recent years, these content delivery networks, or CDNs, have seen some big build-outs. When you’re Netflix and Google, it helps to have full control of your CDN, so that you can more efficiently deliver a significant slice of the internet’s Sunday evening data…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Nicholas Rando.

When it comes to cloud computing, there are three main options: public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud. Public cloud offers scalability, elasticity and a pay-per-use model on shared infrastructure. Hybrid cloud is a mixture of private cloud and public cloud services with orchestration between the two. But what about private cloud?

While private cloud and public cloud offer similar benefits, enterprises choose private cloud for its on-premises nature and control. In a private cloud environment, a firewall limits user access and eliminates many companies’ concerns regarding data security and compliance. However, companies must plan carefully for a private cloud project…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ginna Raahauge.

By now you’re probably tired of hearing about how cloud computing is changing the nature of business. We are familiar with the benefits: having access to data when and where we want, the ability to sync our mobile devices and the ability to collaborate in real time. Despite the cloud bringing us many great things; it has also brought business leaders many challenges since most people expect cloud-like experiences when not all enterprises can or will offer every application or business function in the cloud.

Whether it be budgetary constraints, technical limitations, security concerns or performance issues, not every application will make it to the cloud. This brings us to the hybrid enterprise, which is a mix of data center and cloud-hosted apps and data, and networks comprised of private (hosted), public (Internet) and cloud infrastructure…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Jordan Novet.

Cloudways, a startup that sets up and manages components for applications on top of cloud-computing infrastructure, has learned that developers want to try out the Google Compute Engine public cloud. So Cloudways is adding support for it, even though it’s still young in comparison with, say, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“They have slashed their prices drastically — by 40 or 50 percent — and are trying to give a hard time to AWS,” cofounder Aaqib Gadit told VentureBeat in an interview. The price cuts have brought more attention to the Google cloud, Gadit said, but it’s got “many, many complex options.” So it makes sense for Cloudways to simplify application deployment on Google…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

Once again, IBM received more patents than any other company in the world over the past year, and again Big Blue broke a record for the number of patents received in a year. IBM announced that it received a record 7,534 patents in 2014—marking the 22nd consecutive year that the company topped the annual list of U.S. patent recipients.

IBM inventors earned an average of more than 20 patents per day in 2014, propelling the company to become the first to surpass more than 7,000 patents in a single year. The company’s record-setting 2014 patent output was led by more than 3,000 patents—40 percent of its annual total—covering a range of cloud computing, analytics, mobile, social and security inventions…

Grazed from SysConMedia. Author: Liz Macmillan.

Citrix announced on Monday that is has completed its acquisition of Sanbolic, a provider of workload-oriented storage virtualization technologies. Sanbolic technology enables customers to software-define storage to optimize the delivery of application-specific workloads, from any media type – SSD, Flash and hard drives in NAS, SAN, server-side and cloud deployments – improving storage load balancing, application availability and delivering the highest-performance end-user experience.

The acquisition of this robust set of workload-oriented infrastructure technologies, combined with its XenDesktop, XenApp and XenMobile products, enables Citrix to develop a range of differentiated solutions. These solutions will improve the economics and reduce the complexity of Windows application delivery and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments…

Grazed from TechTimes. Author: Quienten Plummer.

Microsoft’s presence in GameStop stores is moving beyond Xbox consoles. The company will prop up in-store beacons pushing video and promotions via the Azure cloud to customers’ mobile devices as they shop in the retailer’s brick-and-mortar stores. Microsoft is the latest company to sign on as a partner in the GameStop Technology Institute (GTI). Microsoft’s Azure cloud will also fuel employee tablets with customer data.

The "magic" begins as soon as a customer enters a GameStop location and an Azure-connected beacon pushes a "digital welcome message" to a shopper’s device. The welcome message will detail in-store promotions and deliver a map of the store’s other beacons, which will serve up game trailers and other product data…