Grazed from FirstPost.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Infosys Ltd, India’s second-biggest IT services provider, said it had signed a partnership agreement with China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd to offer enterprise customers cloud computing services.  Infosys also said it had expanded existing cloud computing partnerships with Microsoft Corp and a Hitachi Ltd unit.

Infosys, led by Chief Executive Vishal Sikka, has been planning to boost investment in cloud computing, smartphone apps and other new technologies to win more high-margin outsourcing contracts. These are expected to help Infosys back to the forefront of India’s $100 billion IT outsourcing industry…

Grazed from Autonews.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Mercedes-Benz is using a cloud-computing setup to protect data as cars’ mobile links and software expand and the industry prepares for driverless travel.  Elements of the technology will include enabling people in a vehicle to control how much of their data is available to the outside world while they’re on the road, Christine Hohmann-Dennhardt, head of legal affairs at Mercedes parent Daimler, said today at a conference to examine connected driving and data protection.

Drivers will also have the option of erasing information automatically once they’ve left the car. "If we say we’re making safe cars, that doesn’t just apply to the mechanical technology but to data security," Hohmann-Dennhardt said at the event here. Protecting information will be key to gaining customer acceptance of comfort and safety products, she said…

Grazed from Oracle. Author: PR Announcement.

Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) today announced that fiscal 2015 Q1 total revenues were up 3% to $8.6 billion. Total Software plus Cloud revenue was up 6% to $6.6 billion. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud revenue was up 32% to $337 million. Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud revenue was up 26% to $138 million.

Hardware systems revenue was down 8% to $1.2 billion. GAAP operating income was up 3% to $3.0 billion, and the GAAP operating margin was 34%. Non-GAAP operating income was up 2% to $3.8 billion, and the non-GAAP operating margin was 44%. GAAP net income was unchanged at $2.2 billion while non-GAAP net income was up 2% at $2.8 billion. GAAP earnings per share were $0.48, up 2% compared to last year while non-GAAP earnings per share were $0.62, up 4%. GAAP operating cash flow on a trailing twelve-month basis was $15.4 billion…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Ashlee Vance and Jack Clark.

Oracle Corp.’s Larry Ellison stepped down as chief executive officer of the software maker he founded, making way for a new generation of executives and ending one of the most profitable runs for a leader in business history. Mark Hurd and Safra Catz, currently co-presidents of Oracle, were both named CEO to replace Ellison, the company said today.

Hurd will run sales, marketing and strategy, while Catz will remain chief financial officer and oversee legal and manufacturing operations. Ellison will become chairman, replacing Jeff Henley, and also take on the title of chief technology officer. Ellison, who turned 70 last month, guided the Redwood City, California-based company for more than 35 years to make it the world’s largest database-software company and one of the biggest providers of business programs…

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Arthur Cole.

Everyone is moving toward “the cloud” and it seems that most individuals and organizations have a pretty good idea of what that is and how they hope to use it. But the cloud is not one thing, and it is most certainly not eternal. It is constantly growing and changing, with new services and new underlying technologies continually adding to and reinterpreting what we know about living and working in a cloud-based data environment. So even while we pursue our cloud strategies, there needs to be some realization that by the time the transition is complete, the cloud may not be what it appeared to be at the outset.

Key cloud providers are already tapping into this reality by pitching their services as “a new kind of cloud.” Rackspace, for example, places great stock in its ability to provide a “Managed Cloud,” which is its way of describing the specialized services and technological hand-holding it offers in contrast to the do-it-yourself commodity experiences that most providers offer…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Trevor Pott.

Anyone who says public cloud computing is "pay for what you use" is trying to rip you off. The public cloud is pay for what you provision, and that is a completely different thing. In order to move away from the model that pretty much every existing application uses – one where you provision the peak amount of resources required and then the application sits idle until it’s needed – you need to throw away your code and rewrite it from the ground up.

This means either convincing your software vendor to scrap their codebase and start over; having your in-house developers do the same; or both. Very few applications are an island, and in the real world one application feeds information into another, which then feeds information into another…

Grazed from EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet. Author: Jude Chao.

When it comes to enterprise data security and regulatory compliance, consistency is half the battle—one reason that automation is becoming increasingly important to information security. Unfortunately, cloud computing complicates matters, particularly for organizations that have adopted more than one public cloud application. Application security varies between vendors, making centralized, uniform activity control and policy enforcement elusive goals. Redwood City-based cloud security vendor FireLayers aims to make those goals much more attainable with its flagship FireLayers Cloud Application Security Gateway, announced today.

How FireLayers delivers consistent cloud application security

Hosted either by FireLayers or in an organization’s own private cloud, the proxy-based Cloud Application Security Gateway sits between users and whatever cloud applications the enterprise has configured it to protect. Users must go through the proxy to get to the applications. "There’s no way to go around us and still get to the cloud application on the other side," FireLayers co-founder and CEO Yair Grindlinger told me…

Read more from the source @ http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsecur/firelayers-cloud-gateway-takes-control-of-multi-cloud-security.html

Grazed from InforSecurity. Author: Phil Muncaster.

The majority of European IT professionals still believe that doing business in the cloud makes it difficult for them to secure mission-critical apps and impairs their ability to protect sensitive data, according to new research from Netskope. The cloud security firm interviewed over 1,000 IT pros across the region and found that 64% think that their firm’s use of cloud computing services reduces their ability to protect important information.

A further 59% said they thought doing business in the cloud makes it difficult to secure applications. More worryingly, a majority appeared to have little faith in their provider’s transparency and adherence to local laws. Over three-quarters (77%) said they thought their CSP would not alert them immediately after a breach of customer data, while 84% doubted their provider would tell them if sensitive IP was exposed…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Dan Gallagher.

Rackspace Hosting has little choice but to go it alone. The provider of cloud-computing services has called off its so-called strategic evaluation process that could have led to a sale of the company. While Rackspace said late Tuesday it had been approached by "multiple parties" under various scenarios, none of the offers matched the value it believes it can create with its own stand-alone plan.

More likely, none of those parties felt up to matching, let alone topping, the $5.7 billion market capitalization Rackspace was sporting. That was in large part due to a run-up in its shares after a May announcement that it was evaluating options. The stock had been around a four-year low before that, predictably drawing interest from suitors looking to bulk up their own cloud offerings…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Tom Miles.

Two-thirds of banks are planning to spend more on information technology this year, the highest proportion since before the start of the financial crisis, according to an annual survey published on Wednesday. The survey of 198 senior bankers by banking software firm Temenos also found only 11 percent anticipated spending less on IT this year, the lowest since 2008.

"Historically, and even more in Switzerland, IT was considered as a necessary evil, something that needed to exist because it existed in the engine room," said Pietro Di Gregorio, head of business intelligence at Swiss private bank EFG Bank. "But as of now, IT has to change its behaviour," he said…