Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Peak on Wednesday said it has raised $9 million in funding to assist channel partners with leveraging cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS). The Denver-based company enables resellers and agents to white-label Peak’s cloud services as their own. It delivers on-demand computing, network and storage resources to customers offering services.

The company said it expects to leverage the additional funds to accelerate demand for its cloud computing platform, and fuel product development and innovation. Existing investing partners Meritage Funds and Sweetwater Capital led the Series A round, with participation from new investor Ares Capital. Peak has raised a total of $16 million in financing since December 2013…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing-funding-and-finance/111214/peak-raises-9m-funding-cloud-based-iaas-platform

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Pedro Hernandez.

Chief financial officers (CFOs) are generally not the types to keep their heads in the clouds, metaphorically or technologically. Today, during the Cloud Business Summit here, some executives made a strong case for jumping on the cloud computing bandwagon. During a panel discussion at the event, Vinay Mehra, CFO at WGBH, described how digitization and the cloud have not only helped the company successfully adopt Internet streaming technologies, but also improve its operations and financial fortunes.

The Boston-based public broadcaster’s call letters are well-known to PBS viewers, and approximately 70 percent of the primetime programming on PBS is produced by WGBH, said Mehra. Today, viewers aren’t necessarily tuning in, at least with their TVs. Going digital "definitely opened up a lot more opportunities for us on the revenue side," said Mehra. Growth in WGBH’s digital business has "overtaken our traditional advertising and the traditional DVD business," he reported…

Read more from the source @ http://www.eweek.com/cloud/the-rise-of-the-cloud-financial-officer.html#sthash.nrV2b8Lf.dpuf

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Gareth Cartman.

When speculating about where the cloud is heading next, we often think about extra security layers and how hybrid models might grow in prevalence. However, collaboration on the cloud is becoming more of a consideration as files grow. Could the cloud’s next big step be from mostly storage to mostly processing?

Cloud computing or PaaS?

As always with commonly misunderstood areas such as the cloud, there are a host of phrases being bandied around which often mean the same thing to some people, and different things to others. When people talk of cloud computing, they could either be talking about ‘the cloud’ in general, or they could be talking about cloud processing – the act of actually collaborating on a file online, for example, through Google Docs (at its most simple). However, PaaS, a variation of SaaS, is closer to this definition…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Howard Baldwin.

For some CIOs, the idea of being able to offload their computer processing needs to third-party providers like Microsoft and Amazon and Google is heavenly. Their IT departments don’t have to procure, manage, or upgrade hardware. It’s all done magically in the cloud.

For other CIOs, the idea of sending mission-critical data off beyond the boundaries of their data center is like bungee-jumping for the perpetually queasy – something that makes their stomach do flip-flops just at the thought of it. So how can CIOs get that infrastructure-as-a-service agility without an IaaS vendor?…

Grazed from NuageNetworks. Author: PR Announcement.

Nuage Networks announced today that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has named its Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) as a 2014 Cloud Computing Excellence Award winner. The Cloud Computing Excellence Award, presented by Cloud Computing magazine, recognizes companies that have most effectively leveraged cloud computing in their efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market.

“With the ever growing adoption of software-defined networking, we’re honored to be named a winner for the Cloud Computing Excellence Award,” said Sunil Khandekar, CEO of Nuage Networks. “It’s always been our mission at Nuage Networks to empower our customers to finally deliver on the true promise of the cloud and it’s exciting to see this become a reality.”…

Grazed from CMU.edu. Author: Grace Lewis.

Soldiers in battle or emergency workers responding to a disaster often find themselves in environments with limited computing resources, rapidly-changing mission requirements, high levels of stress, and limited connectivity, which are often referred to as “tactical edge environments.” These types of scenarios make it hard to use mobile software applications that would be of value to a soldier or emergency personnel, including speech and image recognition, natural language processing, and situational awareness, since these computation-intensive tasks take a heavy toll on a mobile device’s battery power and computing resources.

As part of the Advanced Mobile Systems Initiative at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), my research has focused on cyber foraging, which uses discoverable, forward-deployed servers to extend the capabilities of mobile devices by offloading expensive (battery draining) computations to more powerful resources that can be accessed in the cloud, or for staging data particular to a mission…

Grazed from Sysfera. Author: PR Announcement.

SysFera has introduced a new version of its high performance computing (HPC) and Cloud management software, SysFera-DS version 5.0, featuring immediate visualization of simulation results without downloading and opening results within applications—to gain a significant boost in productivity. As well, for the first time, HPC administrators can create custom web pages for applications improving their ability to tailor the interface to their clients’ research and analysis needs. These new capabilities, along with significant enhancements to the web interface, promote user-friendly features and tighter applications’ integration, so engineers and researchers can run jobs more quickly and preview results faster.

On display next week in SysFera’s booth #3726 at the SC Conference in New Orleans, LA, SysFera-DS v5.0 boosts HPC and Cloud management with its new, better integration with simulation applications. Users gain faster access and more visibility to their output data. Results are previewed from the web browser, eliminating file search and download time regardless of the type of image their simulation creates for output…

Grazed from SmartData Collective. Author: Stan Roach.

There are two big reasons that leaders across every industry are gung-ho about the Cloud. One reason for this huge confidence in Cloud computing is that it is one of the most disruptive technologies to have emerged on the scene in the last decade. The second and what I think is a far more critical reason is what the Cloud, its adoption and application promises for the future.

It is when business owners “foresee the future” of the Cloud that they say to themselves, “Yes, this is the technology that I want to tie my business fortunes to”. A RightScale 2014 survey called Cloud Computing Trends: 2014 State of the Cloud has come up with some revealing figures:…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Kevin L. Jackson.

The revolutionary business aspects of cloud excite me every day, but the business diversity is even more exciting. This fact really struck me after teaching my last Learning Tree Cloud Computing Introduction class in New York City. I’ve been in the regular rotation here for four months now and have taught three classes during that time. The chart below breaks out the students in these classes by industry.

The heavy US Government slant can of course be attributed to my northern Virginia residency, but the Federal Government has indeed taken on cloud in a big way and the educational focus I’ve experienced from them is commendable. The number of other industries seeking cloud knowledge is also enlightening. As I’ve said many times before, cloud computing is not about technology. It represents a business revolution that is now being universally embraced. In spite of the industry diversity, however, student experiences that drive them to my class and the questions they ask are very similar…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Steven Norton.

Ravello Systems Inc. Tuesday released a tool that it says will help CIOs more easily move software development environments from VMware Inc. to Amazon Web Services and Google Inc. clouds. It joins companies like International Business Machines Corp., EMC Corp. and others in the shift to knit together hybrid cloud environments, a mix of public and private clouds and on-premise applications.

As cloud computing becomes more pervasive in corporations, many CIOs are shifting from having a portfolio of disparate clouds to a hybrid environment, often managed by a single user interface. The ability to easily integrate and manage those complex environments is top of mind for many CIOs who are bringing the cloud deeper into the mainstream…