Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

Relational databases were not designed from the ground up for the cloud or, for that matter, to handle big data. Nobody knows that better than Bob Muglia, former head of the Server and Tools division of Microsoft (MSFT). As the CEO of startup Snowflake Computing, Muglia has taken the wraps off a Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse service in the cloud, built on top of a relational database that Snowflake developed specifically for that purpose.

In addition, Snowflake Computing announced it has picked up an additional $26 million in funding, part of which will be used to create a customer and partner ecosystem around the new cloud service. After a brief detour at Juniper Networks, Muglia is back in the software infrastructure business…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

EMC has announced it is to merge data centre biz VCE into its main organisation, buying out all but 10% of Cisco’s stake in the company. The news comes weeks after EMC announced the buy of open cloud provider Cloudscaling, and can be seen as an advancement of the ménage a trois-esque relationship between EMC, VMware and Cisco in ownership of VCE.

The converged infrastructure (CI) provider was originally set up as a joint venture between EMC, VMware and Cisco in order to create Vblock, a cloud computing platform which morphed into CI. In a blog post reflecting on this alliance Gary Moore, president and COO of Cisco and Howard Elias, president and COO of EMC, described is as “the most successful in IT history.”…

Grazed from BostonGlobe. Author: Jack Newsham.

Watson, the superintelligent computer built by International Business Machines Corp., is perhaps best known for its tour-de-force performance on “Jeopardy!” in 2011, with swift responses such as “Who is Eleanor Rigby?,” to a clue about the subject of a Beatles song who “died in the church and was buried along with her name.”

But IBM chief executive Virginia Rometty argues Watson’s genius is best used to come up with answers to much more serious, real world challenges — treating cancer, for example. The computer, which can understand questions posed in natural language, was a main feature of Rometty’s address in downtown Boston Wednesday about business uses of Big Data, cloud computing and cybersecurity measures…

Grazed from HP. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is driving change in all aspects of business, large and small. Some of the most common uses include dev/test, data archiving, storage, and disaster recovery. Everyone is familiar with SaaS players such as Salesforce and Workday and storage options such as Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive, and Dropbox.

Cloud-based collaboration tools such as Mikogo and Vyew are proliferating as well. In this post, I’d like to share what I consider some of the most interesting uses of cloud, and how they help enterprises achieve faster time to market, increase customer engagement, and drive revenue. Cloud plays a pivotal role in each of these customer stories:…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Bill Kleyman.

The growth of cloud computing and truly distributed IT environments has created a demand for a new type of IT professional. Today’s IT pro must be well-versed in new and emerging technologies, but also have skills in a range of core areas such as storage. So what do you need to do to acquire cloud computing skills and advance your cloud career? Here are some tips.

Learn the language of cloud

APIs, SaaS, the Internet of Things (IoT), software-defined platforms, and much more make up the cloud dictionary. It really feels like acronyms are popping up everywhere. You have to keep an eye and ear out for new and emerging technologies. And because everything is so integrated in the cloud, you also need to understand how all of these technologies interact…

Grazed from Trefis. Author: Editorial Staff.

VMware announced its third quarter earnings on Tuesday, October 21. The company reported an 18% increase in net revenues over the prior year quarter to almost $1.52 billion – close to the upper end of the guidance given at the end of Q2. Services revenues were up by 21% y-o-y to $876 million while software license sales rose by 14% to $639 million. VMware has maintained its full year net revenues guidance at just over $6 billion, which is 15-16% higher than 2013 revenues.

In line with our expectations, software licenses gross margin (GAAP) expanded by almost 2 percentage points to 92.8%. On the other hand, as the company generated higher service revenues from hybrid clouds, network virtualization and end-user computing, its cost of services rose by nearly 50% y-o-y to $196 million. As a result, the gross margin (GAAP) for the services division was about 4 percentage points lower than the year ago period at 77.6%…

Grazed from HostingNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Flux7, an IT consultancy focused on delivering cloud migration, application development and process optimization solutions using DevOps-based approaches, today announced the availability of Cloud Attune, a new service focused on helping startups, incubators and venture capital companies to develop production-ready cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Flux7’s cloud architecture expertise, provided by AWS-certified consultants, helps growing organizations to minimize risk and increase business agility to meet new opportunities while postponing hiring of specialized staff.

“Working with Flux7 brought key AWS expertise to our team, sped our overall product development, and helped us to meet a number of short-term business opportunities while improving business agility for the long-term by improving our time to market,” said Mark Troutfetter, vice president engineering at Pristine, a company pioneering Google Glass solutions for healthcare…

Grazed from CorpCounsel. Author: Marlisse Silver Sweeney.

It seems that government-based auditors and general counsel may have their heads in the clouds, at least with respect to accessing data that’s stored there, according to Sandra Jontz in Insurance News Net. She says the U.S. government’s rush to adopt cloud-computing technologies “left policy aperture fraught with challenges that caught some agencies unprepared—particularly adjuncts in inspector general and general counsel offices.”

Take, for instance, the Office of Management and Budget. Its policies require agencies to adopt “cloud-first” technology. Yet the same policies don’t provide contract language guaranteeing GCs will have access to the data stored by these commercial cloud services for internal investigations, says Jontz…

Read more: http://www.corpcounsel.com/id=1202674126675/Regulation-Lagging-for-CloudBased-Government-Data#ixzz3GsmMjLKS

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Mirantis, which describes itself as the leading "pure-play" OpenStack cloud computing company, today received its strongest affirmation yet with the announcement of $100 million in series B funding, which makes Mirantis the recipient of the largest investment of its kind in open source history.

Mirantis says the funding will allow it to double the size of its engineering resources for developing its OpenStack distribution, Mirantis OpenStack, which it promotes as the best vendor-neutral, lock-in free OpenStack platform. The financing will also support further investment in the company’s other OpenStack products and services, including its rivate cloud-as-a-service platform, Mirantis OpenStack Express…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Microsoft (MSFT) has partnered with Dell to package a cloud-in-a-box offering for the data centers of its enterprise and service provider customers. Dubbed Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS), the solution — first introduced yesterday by Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s cloud and enterprise group, during a Microsoft webcast — combines pre-integrated hardware from Dell and software from Microsoft for Azure customers.

CPS, available for purchase on November 3, is built on Dell hardware, Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and Windows Azure Pack. It was designed to scale from a single rack to up to four racks and optimized for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) deployments…

Read more from the source @ http://mspmentor.net/cloud-computing/microsoft-dell-package-azure-cloud-box-offering