Grazed from IBM. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM reported higher-than-expected quarterly revenue and profits last night, as it pressed ahead with its shift to higher-end businesses such as big data, cloud computing, and security and mobile services. The business technology giant’s total revenue fell two per cent to $24.4bn (£14.3bn) in the second quarter, above analysts’ average estimate of $24.1bn.

Profit rose to $4.1bn from $3.2bn during the same period last year. On Wednesday, IBM announced a partnership with Apple to begin selling iPhones and iPads into enterprises, as well as developing business-specific applications for use on Apple’s platforms.

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Ray Solnik.

Like most maturing industries, standards are required to achieve broad adoption and maximum value. For the cloud, in particular cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings like Amazon Web Services and Rackspace Cloud, it’s time for a standard method for presenting these services so buyers can reasonably compare and contrast and make better buying decisions.

At the moment, purchasing IaaS is similar to how groceries were bought decades ago – very difficult to compare – both the product contents and the price/value vary from one vendor to another. A recent study conducted by the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) – involving Intel, Appnomic Systems and a number of other ODCA enterprise members – illustrates just how difficult the situation is today…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

Companies moving aggressively to adopt cloud computing are winning competitive advantage by reducing complexity and increasing business agility, according to a recent study by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. Angelia Herrin, research director at HBR, says 70 percent of respondents to HBR’s survey had adopted cloud computing, and 35 percent of adopters "are very aggressively moving forward where ever it makes sense."

Drilling deeper, 56 percent of aggressive adopters told HBR they were gaining "significant advantage" as a result." "The people that are really getting competitive advantage are the ones who are moving aggressively," Herrin says. "And they’re certainly not leading with cost as a reason to do this."…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Joining a plethora of other vendors to support the open source cloud computing platform, software giant Oracle this week announced a partnership with pure-play OpenStack distributor Mirantis, blessing this company’s open source software to support Oracle Linux and Oracle VMs.

This is not Oracle’s first foray into the OpenStack community – in fact the company is a corporate sponsor of OpenStack and has its own distribution of the open source cloud management platform. But, it is one of the company’s first alliances in this competitive, yet still nascent community…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Do you remember last Christmas? Target lost data from about 40 million credit and debit cards that were stolen at its stores between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, the height of the holiday shopping period. Thieves tampered with the sales terminals’ card swipers to gain access to the data stored on the magnetic stripe on the back of credit and debit cards.

And do you remember Sony’s huge PlayStation Network security blunder that exposed as many as 100 million credit card numbers? It cost Sony big and required user account reboots. What do all these security issues have in common? All are breaches that occurred from internal systems — systems in which IT departments were in direct control…

Grazed from PredictionIO. Author: Editorial Staff.

PredictionIO today announces the finalization of $2.5M in funding in a capital raise whose investors include Azure Capital QuestVP, CrunchFund, Stanford StartX-Fund, Kima Ventures, IronFire, Sood Venture and XG Ventures. The funding will be used to accelerate product development and marketing and sales and operations for the company’s open source machine learning server for predictive analytics.

PredictionIO aspires to fill the role in the predictive analytics space played by MySQL in the relational database space by delivering an open source platform that empowers data scientists to both leverage a pre-defined library of predictive algorithms as well as create new algorithms that they can either choose to contribute to the platform, or keep to themselves. Built using Scala, the PredictionIO platform supports JVM and Java-based code as well as backend Hadoop-based data. Typical use cases for PredictionIO’s technology include the production of personalized content and recommendation engines, as well as algorithms that predict the behavior of users and industries based on historical trends…

Grazed from ChannelWeb. Author: Fleur Doidge.

The EMEA region’s spend on cloud computing-related hardware is continuing to grow, according to market analyst IDC; in fact it is now expected to exceed $4bn (£2.4bn) this year. Giorgio Nebuloni, research manager of the EMEA enterprise server group at IDC, said: "The rise of cloud has triggered a revolution in the hardware market.

"While white-box and a few large OEMs fight to absorb the surge in demand for public cloud, most incumbent hardware players invest heavily in offerings enabling on-premises and hosted private cloud environments, such as integrated systems, high-end networks, and high-performance storage."…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Sharon Gaudin.

Companies interested in moving to cloud computing are increasingly choosing a private cloud for the increased security and, often, compliance features instead of the public cloud, according to a recent survey. "Companies have noticed that the public cloud only goes so far," said Allan Krans, an analyst with Technology Business Research. "You can’t customize it. The security is what it is. [With the private cloud], you don’t have to own the infrastructure, but you get all the benefits of cloud but with the additional security, compliance and delivery options."

The analyst firm did a recent study showing that private cloud adoption is growing at a faster rate than companies choosing the public cloud. The public cloud market has grown 20% year over year, according to the TBR survey that polled about 2,200 enterprise buyers worldwide earlier this year. The private cloud, however, is expected to grow between 40% to 50% a year for the next several years…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Doug Henschen.

SAP is seeing "a new tailwind," CEO Bill McDermott reported in a call with financial analysts, highlighting a better-than-expected 39% increase in cloud subscription and support revenue for the second quarter. The tailwind is tied to SAP’s move toward simplification, McDermott said, and he highlighted the SAP Hana platform as the underpinning of IT simplification, whether on-premises or through SAP’s cloud services.

In his remarks, McDermott focused almost exclusively on cloud computing, noting big competitive wins against Workday at Telefonica and Bombardier Recreational Products. SAP’s 39% increase brought cloud subscription and support revenue to ?242 million ($327 million) for the quarter…

Grazed from Global Knowlege. Author: John Hale.

Cloud computing has been around now for several years. To set the stage for the problem I’ll discuss in this post, here’s what has happened so far:

1. Everything was physical, leading to silos of expertise and lots of wasted resources (CPU, memory, network, and disk)

2. VMware’s vSphere, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, Red Hat’s KVM, etc., came along and virtualized those four key resources for each VM, but while CPU and memory have virtualized and scaled well, network and disk provisioning have lagged behind. In addition, VMs were manually deployed as requested after networking and storage were prepared and configured as needed. Storage was somewhat simplified by using virtual hard disks, but networking remained a bigger issue as VLANs and other settings needed to be set up…