Grazed from NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Tech Data Corporation (Nasdaq:TECD) today announced the introduction of a new cloud-focused education and enablement program through Tech Data’s TDCloud business unit. Offered as part of TDCloud Academy, the program offers customized education tracks for solution providers focused on launching, expanding, and maximizing cloud businesses.

TDCloud Academy is Tech Data’s tiered cloud education program for solution providers, designed to accelerate adoption of cloud solutions and identify new cloud opportunities. The announcement was made in conjunction with Tech Data’s TDCloud Partner Summit, taking place this week in Miami, Florida…

Grazed from GPSWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

Spectra Precision introduced a new cloud computing service for Spectra Precsion applications. The company also announced new road modules for version 5.5 of its Survey Pro software and for Spectra Precision Survey Office. The announcements were made at InterGeo 2014, being held this week in Berlin.

Spectra Precision Central. A dedicated cloud computing service for Spectra Precision survey applications, Spectra Precision Central offers survey teams in the field and office the ability to rapidly exchange survey and project data with team members when and where it is needed…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Dave Hart.

If I asked you to name a multi-billion dollar market that’s getting a long overdue cloud makeover, would field service management be at the forefront of your mind? It should. This $15 billion industry has only just begun to dip its toe into the huge pool of possibility thanks to software as a service, the tablet and smartphone revolution, and senior management’s recognition that service is indeed strategic.

Add to this the commercial insight into addressable revenue-generating opportunities and the resulting top line growth, and you’ve got a new cloud darling. Service businesses represent around 70% of the world’s economy, yet to date, only about a third of the world’s large service businesses currently use field service management solutions…

Grazed from EETimes. Author: Levent Gurgen.

The ClouT project is a joint Europe-Japan collaboration to make cities smarter, helping them face emerging challenges in efficient energy management, safety and security, and economic growth and development. The project is creating a layer of services to bridge cloud computing and the Internet of Things to establish a communications and collaboration platform that exploits all possible information sources.

ClouT — which stands for cloud of things — is providing infrastructure, services, tools that will be used by cities, their citizens, service developers, and application integrators to create, deploy, and manage applications that take advantage of IoT and cloud capabilities. In addition, the program will help end-users create and share their own cloud services…

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

NTT Communications is giving the power of choice to network administrators, releasing an upgrade for its Enterprise Cloud platform that will allow for on-the-fly changes to bandwidth capacity and VPN connections. The server side of cloud computing already offers IT managers a large degree of flexibility. Enterprises can use self-service options and APIs (application programming interfaces) to customize server functions…

However, network managers have far less control over network connections between users and cloud-based servers, according to Len Padilla, vice president of product strategy at NTT Communications. With its upgrade to Enterprise Cloud, which has been live for about two-and-a-half years, NTT wants to change that. The upgrade lets network administrators increase or decrease the available bandwidth of connections to the cloud service, depending on the amount of traffic they expect at a given time…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Flash storage provider SolidFire has beefed up its funding pool with a series D round of $82m, bringing its total up to $150m. The funding was led by Greenspring Associates, a new investor, along with current investors NEA, Novak Biddle, Samsung Ventures and Valhalla Partners. SolidFire says the new funds will be part of a global push and to advance its all-flash storage architecture.

“Series D financing for SolidFire is important,” Jay Prassl, SolidFire VP marketing, told CloudTech. “When you’re building an infrastructure company and a storage company like SolidFire, it’s a capital-intensive business. “This D round funding is very important because it puts SolidFire very much on a path to profitability,” he added…

Grazed from TMCNet. Author: Editorial Staff.

TMC, a global, integrated media company helping clients build communities in print, in person and online, today announced the recipients of the 2014 Cloud Computing Backup and Disaster Recovery Award. The Cloud Computing Backup and Disaster Recovery Award recognizes technologies and vendors that have built cloud solutions that allow businesses small or large to remain active and productive under even the most challenging conditions, minimizing lost business opportunities.

"Congratulations to the winners of the 2014 Cloud Computing Backup and Disaster Recovery Award," said Rich Tehrani (News – Alert), CEO, TMC. "The winning solutions are enabling organizations to feel confident during regular business and in stressful situations. I look forward to seeing continued innovation from these award recipients."…

Read more from the source @ http://news.tmcnet.com/news/2014/09/30/8043634.htm

Grazed from InsideHPC. Author: Rich Brueckner.

Computing in the cloud could be seductive for scientists and engineers, but in his first report from the ISC Cloud conference, Tom Wilkie from Scientific Computing World finds that there are still problems to be overcome. Wolfgang Gentzsch is certain, both when writing in Scientific Computing World and in his talk to the ISC Cloud conference in Heidelberg at the end of September: the Cloud is the way to entice all those scientists and engineers who are still wedded to their workstations (about 95 per cent of them) to embrace the advantages of high-performance computing.

Michael Resch, who runs the Stuttgart supercomputing centre, worries about the obstacles – and they come in the form of lawyers, taxmen, accountants, and politicians, he told the conference. So much promise. But, rather as literal clouds are high in the sky, so ascending to ‘the cloud’ can be hard for scientists and engineers…

Read more from the source @ http://insidehpc.com/2014/10/hazy-future-cloud-computing/

Grazed from StarTribune. Author: Michael Liedtke.

Smartphones, tablets and other gadgets aren’t just changing the way we live and work. They are shaking up Silicon Valley’s balance of power and splitting up businesses. Long-established companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and eBay Inc. are scrambling to regain their footing to better compete against mobile-savvy trendsetters like Apple and Google, as well as rising technology stars that have built businesses around "cloud computing."

That term covers a swath of Internet-driven services that shifted technology from the days software users paid a one-time fee to buy and install programs on individual machines where they also stored all their data on hard drives. But with the advent of the "cloud," people can now rent software to use over the Internet…

Grazed from Barron’s. Author: Tierman Ray.

In the wake of last week’s breakup announcement for eBay (EBAY), this morning’s breakup announcement by Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), RBC Capital Markets’s Mark Sue wrote a note urging Cisco Systems (CSCO) to go the breakup route. “Split/spin-off parts of Cisco’s business and we think the lagging stock could get to $40, a price not seen in 14 years,” writes Sue.

eBay, Agilent, JDSU and even HP this morning get high marks from investors for their ability to adapt to a changing world.” Sue has in mind a switching and routing and services company, on the one hand, and a cloud computing company on the other: We believe Cisco could separate parts of its routing, switching and services into Cisco Solutions which are mature and profitable and manage these businesses for higher FCF. Cisco Solutions could also drive industry consolidation by acquiring high cash-flow businesses, taking capacity out of the system (carriers have all the purchasing power), improve profitability metrics through cost optimization and return FCF to shareholders via dividends and buybacks…