Grazed from Wired.  Author: Robert McMillan.

Amazon has pulled off a pretty amazing trick over the past decade. It’s invented and then built a nearly $5 billion cloud computing business catering to fickle software developers and put the rest of the technology industry on the defensive. Big enterprise software companies such as IBM and HP and even Google are playing catchup, even as they acknowledge that cloud computing is the tech industry’s future.

But what kind of a future is that to be? Yesterday Amazon said that while its cloud business grew by 90 percent last year, it was significantly less profitable. Amazon’s AWS cloud business makes up the majority of a balance sheet item it labels as “other” (along with its credit card and advertising revenue) and that revenue from that line of business grew by 38 percent. Last quarter, revenue grew by 60 percent. In other words, Amazon is piling on customers faster than it’s adding dollars to its bottom line…

Grazed from CloudAcademy.  Author: Editorial Staff.

2014 will be the year of cloud computing.  During the last year we heard about cloud in different situations, often referring a change in how companies and people access and store data. From what I see this change is almost completed.

If I look at the number of services that I use on a daily basis, more than 80% of them are storing and computing data in a cloud computing infrastructure. I cannot even say what is the last time that I used a licensed-software on my PC/Mac. Everything runs on a browser: invoices, payrolls, bank, docs, files.  We have already switched to a Cloud model for all of our data and daily operations…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author:  Mike Vizard.

Technology generally is most powerful when the largest number of people can easily access it. With cloud computing, most organizations are hamstrung because they still require the skills of a professional programmer to build anything that has any meaningful business value.

This has created a lot of demand within some segments of the channel for application development services. But the dependency on professional developers also has served to limit the potential size of the overall market, because professional developers are perennially in short supply…

Grazed from Westel.  Author: Ediotial Staff.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in the cloud refers to shared online computing resources that include data processing, storage and networking. While users may not own the platform, they can control the operations of software and data for their purposes. The following characteristics will help you clarify this customized infrastructure.

On Demand Access

One of the most important characteristics of infrastructure as a service is on demand self-service for users. Examples might be the capabilities for consumers to set their own appointments or a function that allows them to independently upload and store content on a cloud server. Another characteristic is the ability for consumers to order as many items at a time as they choose…

Grazed from ITProPortal.   Author: Editorial Staff.

Despite a rapidly rising number of organisations using cloud computing in some form, many are still afraid of it and others have concerns about expanding their cloud use. This HP whitepaper outlines what these concerns are and gives some hints as to how the perceived threats can be mitigated against.

Many organisations fear the cloud, as it can bypass IT departments and information security officers into the bargain. Maybe this isn’t surprising when one considers the case of a convicted former employee of a US cloud service provider this year…

Grazed from NYTimes. Author: Quentin Hardy.

The central organizing principle of much of the tech industry is Moore’s Law. In one very important sense, it may be of less value than it once was. The rule itself shows no sign of vanishing. Moore’s Law is the notion that the density of transistors on a chip tends to double every 18 to 24 months. It has held up for nearly five decades, and looks to keep going.

That doubling was also a way of organizing the industry, though, and that is what is changing. If chips doubled in power every two years, people wrote device software that anticipated the increase. Performance was steady while features grew. Corporate spending on information technology was keyed to “upgrade cycles.”…

Grazed from NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

To take advantage of Seattle’s highly skilled workforce and experienced cloud engineering community, Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) has unveiled a new cloud development facility in the city’s tech corridor. The company plans to hire more than 100 engineers in Seattle to bolster and build its growing portfolio of public cloud computing services. The new center will be unveiled during HackerX, an open house and recruitment event aimed at giving cloud developers a chance to explore employment opportunities at Oracle.

Today, Oracle unveiled its new cloud engineering center in downtown Seattle, Washington, where developers will focus on building new cloud computing services as part of Oracle’s comprehensive cloud offerings. Oracle expanded its presence in Seattle to take advantage of the deep expertise in cloud computing available in Seattle’s rapidly growing technical community…

Grazed from CIO-Today. Author: Jennifer Leclaire.

The unified Relevant Products/Services communications company is working hard to fast-track customers to the cloud Relevant Products/Services. Avaya just kicked off the first of several major moves it plans to optimize Relevant Products/Services solutions and processes for delivering Collaboration-as-a-Service (CaaS) via its Avaya Collaborative Cloud.

What’s spurring Avaya to make a push? Strong demand from large and midsize companies for its communications and collaboration Relevant Products/Services applications. With its CaaS initiative, the company is promising expanded reach and scale Relevant Products/Services and focusing on driving easier, faster provisioning that demands fewer resources…

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence. Author: Atul Sood.

Cloud has catapulted into a position of prime importance in any IT strategy. Cloud enables enterprises to dynamically address business requirements. However, the transformation from physically centralised to virtually distributed IT environments often causes enterprises to be wary. Businesses are spread across diverse economic, financial, geographic, competitive, socio-cultural, regulatory and technological environments.

These are ‘stimuli’ and cannot be easily influenced. However, products, services, processes, procurement, pricing and promotions (‘responses’ as I would like to say) are within the span of control of a business. These are the vectors that drive decisions around infrastructure and the applications that support the business. In a certain way, we are referring to the common denominator for growth and competitiveness among enterprises…

Grazed from TheVarGuy.  Author: Christopher Tozzi.

ownCloud 7, the latest version of the open source file-sharing and storage service for building private clouds, debuted this week, bringing with it major end user experience updates and an innovative way to share files between clouds.  On July 23, ownCloud announced the general availability of version 7 of ownCloud Community Edition, which first appeared in beta form earlier this summer.

Now, as then, the biggest update that makes the software stand out from other cloud services is a server-to-server sharing feature, which allows users of one ownCloud cloud to share files with those on a completely separate instance, without having to use file-share links. That’s a big deal because it means ownCloud users can exchange data as easily as they would using a public cloud, but without the security and privacy concerns of traditional public-cloud platforms…