Grazed from CloudWedge. Author: Hadley Jones.

At the beginning, cloud computing was the promise of additional, more affordable IT resources for many organizations. Flexible, scalable and pay-as-you-went, cloud computing was the ideal add-on to cope with data growth and in-house servers that were struggling with workloads. On top of the infrastructure resources being offered, providers also created innovative business applications. IT power that had hitherto been reserved for only the largest corporations became available to the mid-sized and the small businesses too. Now the opportunity is open to beat the competition by not just bolting these online resources onto what you already have, but by directly basing your business in the cloud.

Not Just Cost Advantage, but Strategic Too

While cloud computing can be a better IT solution per se, there’s much more to be gained too. Cloud and collaboration go together. Opening up business processes to third parties (with appropriate security, of course) can reinforce partnerships, cement customer loyalty and increase business resilience…

Grazed from EnterpriseTech. Author: George Leopold.

IBM said Monday (January 12) it has been awarded more than 7,500 patents in 2014, including more than 3,000 related to cloud computing, data analytics and online security. The company also took credit for topping the annual list of U.S. patent recipients for the twenty-second consecutive year.

Since 2010, IBM claimed it has more than doubled the number of patented technologies in sectors like cloud computing and big data. Of these, more than 500 covered emerging computing technologies that could help propel its Watson cognitive computing effort. The annual patent race underscores the growing importance of intellectual property as the coin of the technology realm…

Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Aaron Ricadela.

SAP SE reported fourth-quarter cloud-computing sales that beat analysts’ estimates as more users of traditional business software bought programs delivered through the Internet. The shares rose the most in more than a year. Revenue from cloud subscriptions and support rose 72 percent to 360 million euros ($426 million), the world’s largest maker of business-management software said today, citing preliminary figures.

That exceeded the 319.6 million-euro average estimate compiled by Bloomberg. Software and related services revenue, which captures newer cloud products, traditional on-premise software as well support sales, rose 8 percent to 4.73 billion euros, also topping estimates. The numbers show that Chief Executive Officer Bill McDermott is convincing clients to add cloud products to the SAP software they already run in their data centers…

Grazed from TheStreet. Author: Rebecca Borison.

For the first time in Golden Globes history, an online streaming service took home an award, sidestepping the old media giants. Amazon’s (AMZN) original show Transparent snagged the "Best TV Series, Comedy or Musical" award, with its star Jeffrey Tambor also taking home the "Best Actor in a TV Comedy" award.

Amazon has been producing original content out of Amazon Studios since 2010, but yesterday marked the first time that it actually emerged as a true contender in TV and film. After backing Studios with more than $100 million in the third quarter of this year, Amazon has been going at the original content space at full throttle, and yesterday’s win signals that we can only expect bigger and better things in the future…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Amazon has made available new C4 virtual machine instances on its Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud platform, designed to offer a higher level of processor performance for customers with demanding workloads. First announced last year, the new C4 instances are being delivered from infrastructure based on a custom version of Intel’s latest Xeon E5 v3 processors, created specifically to meet the requirements of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, according to AWS.

The new instances are available from today in seven AWS regions covering the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific, the firm said, with charges starting at $0.116 per hour for the smallest c4.large instance with two virtual processor cores (vCPUs) and 3.75GB of memory. This scales up to 36 vCPUs on the c4.8xlarge instance with 60GB memory, which is charged at $1.856 per hour…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

BrightLine CPAs & Associates, Inc., a leading provider of cloud computing compliance and attestation reporting services, will be a sponsor and exhibitor at the Federal Cloud Computing Summit. The event, scheduled for January 14-15, will take place at the Marriott Metro Center in Washington, D.C. BrightLine professionals will be on-hand to discuss compliance initiatives, including FedRAMP and FISMA as well as complementary assessment programs such as SSAE 16, SOC 2/3, ISO, PCI, and the Cloud Security Alliance STAR Certification and Attestation programs.

The Federal Cloud Computing Summit provides Federal Government and private sector technology subject matter experts an opportunity to discuss the latest tools, trends and strategies driving the adoption of mobile, cloud, virtualization and big data technologies throughout the government. The sessions provide collaboration and learning through panel discussions, round table discussions, breakout sessions and a showcase featuring demonstrations of cutting-edge technology and professional services.

Grazed from ABCNews. Author: Julie Pace.

President Barack Obama wants Congress to pass legislation requiring companies to inform customers within 30 days if their data has been hacked, a move that follows high-profile breaches at retailers including Target, Home Depot and Neiman Marcus. A White House official said Obama will announce the proposed legislation Monday, along with a measure aimed at preventing companies from selling student data to third parties and from using information collected in school to engage in targeted advertising.

Obama’s proposals are part of a White House effort to preview components of the president’s State of the Union address in the lead-up to the Jan. 20 speech. The official, who insisted on anonymity, was not authorized to discuss the proposed legislation by name ahead of Obama’s speech at the Federal Trade Commission…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Over the weekend, Verizon’s cloud service, Verizon Cloud, was offline as it looked to add ‘seamless upgrade functionality as well as other customer-facing updates.’ The maintenance period was put in to improve the service and to ensure further updates went ahead without any hitches to customers.

The telco giant warned the fixes could take up to 48 hours, but was completed after 40, with Verizon taking the bizarre step of issuing a press release to announce the work had been done. “The seamless upgrade functionality allows Verizon to conduct major system upgrades without interrupting service or limiting infrastructure capacity,” the release states. “Traditionally, updates have been made via rolling maintenance and other methods…

Grazed from DevNetwork.  Author: Event Announcement.

DeveloperWeek 2015 is San Francisco’s largest one-week tech event series with over 60 week-long events including the DeveloperWeek 2015 Conference & Expo, Accelerate 2015 (1,000+ attendee hackathon) GirlDevWeek Events, Robotics Dev Summit, DevOps Summit, 1,000+ attendee tech hiring mixer, and 60+ city-wide workshops, open houses, drink-ups, across San Francisco!

DeveloperWeek puts the spotlight on new dev technologies. Event hosts and supporters of last year’s DeveloperWeek include Google, Facebook,Yelp,Rackspace, IBM, Cloudera, Red Hat, Optimizely, SendGrid, Blackberry, Microsoft, Neo Technology, Eventbrite, Klout, Built.io, Ripple, GNIP,Tagged,HackReactor, and 30+ more here!…

Grazed from BusinessSpectator. Author: Michael Swinson.

For a new technology to reach mainstream acceptance, two things are generally required. Firstly it must address and overcome concerns flagged by early critics (in the way that clever user interface design has effectively countered the criticism that smartphones are too small for business functions).

Secondly, it must receive some endorsement from the key incumbent players in the market (in the way that Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia ultimately confirmed the overriding power of the smartphone). On this basis, cloud computing (which has long been regarded as an “emerging” technology) now seems primed and ready for a mainstream breakthrough…