Month: September 2015

September 27, 2015 Off

Cloud Computing: IBM opens Watson to the world

By David

 Grazed from SteelersLounge.  Author: James Hoffman.

One obvious use case is marketing – an application built with Visual Insights could give a company a more rounded view of what its customers are interested in. IBM’s cloud development partners have created systems for query support for card payments, customer support Q&As for financial services, live event media aggregation "as a service" social marketing and apps for the entertainment and marketing industries.

Big Blue wants Watson to be used on mobile devices, cloud services and connected systems. The company also previewed its Watson Knowledge Studio, where the company will open up its machine learning and text analytics capabilities in a single tool. In addition to the new capabilities, IBM announced that it is establishing a new Watson hub located in San Francisco, which will also serve as the new global headquarters for IBM commerce…

September 27, 2015 Off

The symbiosis between Financial Tech startups and cloud

By David

Grazed from EnterpriseInnovation.  Author: Harry Singh.

 In today’s modern world, there’s an app for everything. We use them to check our bank balances, order a cab, play games, and so much more. Many of these apps have been developed by small start-up companies, or even individuals. But how do they scale-up to reach their target audience? They make their apps available to a ready-made market of users on a recognised platform.  How about if the same principal was applied to the world of the financial markets?

 
Over the last decade, the financial sector has experienced significant regulatory upheaval. We’ve witnessed a new approach to supervising financial institutions, with regulators moving from a ‘light touch’ approach to an ‘interventionist’ one…
September 27, 2015 Off

Microsoft signs seven new cloud partners in Malaysia

By David

Grazed from MIS-Asia.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Productivity and cloud solutions company Microsoft Malaysia’s Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) programme has received another boost with the signing of seven new partners.   During Microsoft Malaysia’s Channel Partner Conference (CPC), held at the Sunway Convention Centre, the seven new partners were announced as:
 
 – Maxis
– Shinjiru Technology
– SoftwareOne
– VADS
– Crayon Software Experts Malaysia
– Ingram Micro Malaysia
– Rhipe Malaysia
 
  Microsoft Asia-Pacific president César Cernuda said that as CSP partners, these companies will be able to directly manage the entire Microsoft Cloud customer lifecycle, using dedicated in-product tools to directly provision, manage and support their customer subscriptions…
September 26, 2015 Off

Placing the Need Before the Cloud

By David

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

Arguing over which kind of cloud is “best” for the enterprise is like arguing over what kind of apple tastes better than the others. Some people like the crispy sweetness of the Red Delicious, others the floral spiciness of the Courtland or the classic apple-taste of the Macintosh. And then the criteria change completely if you plan to bake a pie, make applesauce or press some cider.
 
The best cloud, therefore, is obviously the one that satisfies strategic and operational objectives to the highest degree, which means that most enterprises are going to rely on a mix of public, private and hybrid infrastructure to get the job done…
September 26, 2015 Off

Tea traceability cloud launched

By David

Grazed from TaipeiTimes.  Author: Chen Wei-Han.

The Council of Agriculture has developed a tea traceability system using cloud computing to allow consumers to trace the source and production of tea, while using Facebook to provide instant advice on pest prevention and control to farmers.  To boost the quality and traceability of tea amid recent pesticide scares involving tea drinks, the council’s Tea Research and Extension Station on Tuesday said that it launched an online platform for tea farmers and enterprises to list the information of each product batch, which consumers can access via a QR code attached to the product or access on a Web site to search for approved suppliers.

Information listed on the Web site includes the product’s place of origin, manufacturer, pesticide test results, certificates and the flow and volume of each harvest, the council said.  Four major tea companies have been included in the system, the Tait Marketing and Distribution Co, the producer of Kaisi oolong tea, and Good Young Co, which supplies the nation’s Starbucks franchises, the council said…

Read more from the source @ http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2015/09/27/2003628710

September 26, 2015 Off

More proof that we live in a multi-cloud world

By David

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Barb Darrow.

If your company, like most, runs some stuff in the cloud plus non-cloud-ready databases or enterprise apps, RightScale may have a management tool for you.  There’s lots of evidence showing that when companies move workloads to the cloud, they are apt to use more than one cloud.

Part of the reason is that different constituencies spin up their own cloud operations outside the normal IT approval process. It’s also true that most companies still run some older databases and enterprise applications that do not lend themselves to cloud deployment…

September 26, 2015 Off

The Cloud Gets More Popular and Complex

By David

Grazed from GovTech.  Author:  Steve Towns.

After some initial skepticism, government agencies are embracing the cloud. That’s putting pressure on public-sector IT organizations to deliver a new class of cloud solutions to their customers.
 
Georgia is a good example. With agency customers asking both for more and more complex cloud services, the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA) is developing an enterprise approach to cloud, and thinking about the type of support and resources agencies will need to deploy more sophisticated cloud services successfully and securely…
September 25, 2015 Off

One of our generation’s “most brilliant geeks” on cloud-computing and Bill Gates comparisons

By David

Grazed from MIT. Author: Adam Conner-Simons.

CSAIL researcher Matei Zaharai was recently profiled by The Economist in a story about the state of cloud-computing start-ups. Zaharia is co-founder of Databricks, a promising startup whose data-crunching technology Spark has drawn the attention of prominent developers, as well as a little company called IBM.

From The Economist:

“When my hair gets long, I kind of look like him.” Matei Zaharia jokingly evades the question about what he thinks of being compared to Bill Gates. But the 30-year-old Romanian-Canadian computer scientist is indeed reminiscent of Microsoft’s former boss in his early days: he is considered one of the most brilliant geeks of his generation; he has developed an exciting new technology, called Spark, to crunch data; and he is one of the founders of a promising startup, Databricks…

September 25, 2015 Off

HP’s CIOs Purchase More Cloud And Mobile Services And Shows HP Adapting To Changing Demands

By David

Grazed from CrucialCIO. Author: Evangeline Alfeche.

On Sept. 22, Hewlett-Packard has announced its plans to lay off about 30,000 workers in the next three years as it moves on with its restructuring. With HP Enterprise and HP Inc., the CEO plans to focus on the former company that will work more on developing cloud computing and other high-growth technologies.

As of now, CIOs focus more on cloud infrastructure services and mobile devices and less on hardware and data centres. The recent move clearly shows the tech giant’s struggle for survival in a changing world of corporate computing. In the end of July this year, HP has announced its agreement with ActiveState to buy Stackato at an undisclosed amount…

September 24, 2015 Off

Analytics Becomes Next Great Cloud Service

By David

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Mike Vizard.

When it comes to analytics there are primarily two types of use cases. The first generally involves fairly sophisticated end users that access analytics applications via a traditional user interface. Less conventionally, however, more users of other types of applications are starting to invoke analytics engines via an application programming interface (API).

Case in point is Salesforce, which at the recent Dreamforce 2015 conference announced that it has opened the programming model surrounding the Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud. Anna Rosenman, senior director of product marketing for Salesforce Wave Analytics Cloud, says that while the first version of this cloud offering was aimed primarily at line of business users, Salesforce is now also focusing on recruiting independent software vendors (ISVs) to make use of Salesforce Analytics Cloud as part of applications that invoke Salesforce customer records…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/analytics-becomes-next-great-cloud-service