Grazed from BusinessCloud. Author: Steve Brooks.

VMWare announced EVO:RAIL on the first day of VMWorld in San Francisco and Fujitsu immediately announced their first VMWare specific hardware appliance. There were a total of six vendors named by VMWare who will produce the SDDC appliance (Software Defined Data Centre): Fujitsu, Dell, Supermicro, EMC, Inspur and Net One

Of the six vendors, Fujitsu are the only one to have their appliance available immediately. Dell is due in September while Supermicro, EMC, Inspur and Net One have no ship date yet. The latter two vendors are also only focused on the Asia Pacfic market while Fujitsu, Dell, Supermicro and EMC will ship worldwide. the big four vendors are no stranger to the appliance market and have worked with other vendors such as SAP to deliver solution specific appliances…

Grazed from CloudComputingInfo.  Author: Editorial Staff.

CloudForms is Red Hat’s cloud management platform, built from the open source ManageIQ acquired in December 2012 and part of the company’s new open hybrid cloud program that aims to converge private, public and hybrid clouds.

Yesterday Red Hat announced version 3.1 of CloudForms, that will be generally available in September also as a part of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, this new release will introduces the following new capabilities:…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

There has been much discussion over the past year or two as to just how committed Google is to executing upon its chance to be one of the big cloud infrastructure vendors. Sure they have the technical know-how and scale, but do they have all the cultural and organizational components that are required to deliver a real enterprise business?

Increasingly the answer to that question is yes, Google understands that it needs to develop an ecosystem, embrace partnership, reach out to press and analysts and talk about its road-map in order to build faith within large businesses. I had breakfast this morning with Greg Demichillie, head of product management for the Google Cloud Platform product group (disclosure: I had an omelette, Google paid). We discussed the challenges and opportunities that Google faces…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Jive Software has pushed out updates for the cloud versions of both its enterprise social networking (ESN) suite and its JiveX software for building external online communities. The main enhancement for the Jive ESN suite is what the company is touting as native integration with Cisco’s WebEx and Jabber, following a partnership the vendors announced in May.

Back then, Cisco said it was axing its WebEx Social ESN suite, formerly called Quad, and that it would resell the Jive suite instead. The bundle includes WebEx Meetings and Jabber for online meetings, Web conferencing, IM and audio/video communications, and Jive’s ESN software…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Kymm McCabe.

For acquisition professionals, buying cloud computing is a bit like stepping from a 21st-century city into the Wild West. Federal buyers must move from the known, predictable, more or less standard procurement world into one that is unknown, unfamiliar and as yet untamed. It’s no wonder that in ASI Government’s polls of acquisition professionals at 110 federal organizations, 64 percent of respondents believe they lack the necessary technical expertise in cloud computing and thus are challenged in structuring contracts for it.

"There’s no exact fit for commercial cloud in the [Federal Acquisition Regulation]," Mark Day, deputy assistant commissioner of the General Services Administration’s Office of Integrated Technology Services, told attendees at a March conference on cloud acquisition. Agencies that have acquired cloud services have done so in different ways, and only with time will it become clear which approaches work best, said Michael McFarland, director of GSA’s Office of Acquisition Operations…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jason Perlow.

Over the last two years, due to career changes, I’ve made the transition from datacenter consolidation specialist to a cloud architect. It could be argued that very little has actually changed in terms of the tools of the trade and the methodologies that I work with, as both make heavy use of virtualization and systems automation, but the reality is that I haven’t done a lot of work in the datacenter itself since shifting the focus of what I do.

In my professional life, I help hosters, service providers and ISVs build new cloud offerings, whether they are deployed as IaaS, desktops as a service or hosted/subscriber applications via SaaS. If it’s cloud in the public or in the private space, I’m all over it. Until recently though, I didn’t practice what I preached. Vestiges of my former life still existed, in the form of my own private server lab, which I used for software testing and storing files and for multitudes of other things…

Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/why-i-ditched-my-servers-for-the-cloud-7000032959/

Grazed from IT BusinessEdge. Author: Loraine Lawson.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is nice and all, according to 92 percent of the 350 IT executives surveyed conducted by Dimensional Research, but it would be much better if integration weren’t such a concern, the respondents said, according to an Integration Developer News report.

“The ability to avoid SaaS silos and easily obtain consistent data integration and data quality across on-premise and cloud-based data is definitely a top concern among those IT decision makers we surveyed,” Richard Broome, CIO of Host Analytics, told IDN. Overall, 88 percent reported “challenges” with SaaS business applications and 67 percent specifically cited data integration problems…

Grazed from GCN.  Author: William Jackson.

Faced with steep budget cuts, Oregon’s Department of Land Conservation and Development needed to find a way to cut the cost of meetings with staff and stakeholders around the state without giving up the benefits of face-to-face communication.

The Department of Land Conservation and Development is a regulatory agency with about 60 staffers scattered across offices at department headquarters in Salem, at the state office building in Portland and at regional offices at Newport, La Grande, Tillamook, Eugene, Medford and Bend. Staff members also must work with local governments, industry officials, land owners and developers across the state…

Grazed from TechRepublic.  Author: James Sanders.

Microsoft’s internal IT department introduced a plan last week on what steps it’s taking to move the business processes into Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.This move, as explained in the posting on the Microsoft TechNet Blogs website, is necessitated by Microsoft closing two data centers over the next 24 months, as well as allowing leases on others to expire.

In addition, thousands of existing servers will reach end of life over the next five years, which would require $200 million to replace. The migration to the new model of hybrid cloud infrastructure built on top of Microsoft Azure is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2018…

Graze from TalkinCloud. Author: Steph Martin.

As one of the newest members to join CompTIA’s Partner Advisory Council a few weeks ago I was immediately and affectionately dubbed the "poster child" for the Hybrid VAR. Along with my new and somewhat daunting poster child status, the council proceeded to essentially begin the evangelism of the newest buzz term for this mystical technology unicorn and so was born (pardon the pun) the "born in the cloud" partner — also known as me.

Now before I launch into the meaning of what is sure to explode into the newest cliche in an industry well-known for it’s overuse of acronyms and homegrown vernacular, I want to publicly set the record straight (mostly to put my children and friends at ease and dispel the confusion surrounding my miraculous mythological birth with this talk of the ever-elusive concept cloud computing)…