Author: David

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

A new study suggests that adoption of cloud offerings — particularly Platform as a Service middleware and application development tools — can cut the cost of U.S. government application development costs to the tune of $20.5 billion a year. at least 31%.That’s the takeaway from a new survey of 153 federal IT executives released by MeriTalk, a public-private partnership for advancing government IT. The study, underwritten by Red Hat, Inc., calculates that Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has the potential to reduce federal IT costs by close to one-third.

The federal government is actually a huge producer of software. More than three-quarters of respondents, 77%, say new application development “is vital to their agency’s ability to meet mission objectives.” However, the report’s authors add that “federal IT is fundamentally broken.”…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

You can’t get through a month without hearing a group of cloud providers tell us how green their clouds are by using alternative energy sources instead of carbon-emitting fossil fuels. Although I’m sure they’re taking steps to reduce the amount of carbon emissions their new data centers put out, just the fact of data centers the size of a large airport seems counterintuitive to the "green" claim.

Last week, for example, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on a panel of cloud providers crowing about how they’ve forced power companies to switch to non-fossil-fuel sources: "By strong-arming power companies — for business, not necessarily altruistic, reasons — name-brand tech giants like Google, Rackspace, and Facebook can claim significant portions of their power comes from renewable sources like wind, hydro, and solar."…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

South River Technologies, Inc. (SRT), an innovator in secure file transfer, has announced the launch of its WebDrive mobile app for iPhone and iPad applications. WebDrive is designed to make accessing files on a multitude of cloud services and corporate web servers more convenient and efficient.

WebDrive for iOS enables users to access all of their files, presentations and videos through one simple app, rather than requiring an application for each storage service. This creates a simple way for users to access, share and view all of their content…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

SolidFire, the leader in all-flash storage systems for the next generation data center, and ShapeBlue, the leading independent global CloudStack integrator, have aligned to build a reference architecture to demonstrate how customers can address the operational challenges encountered when deploying block storage in a multi-tenant cloud infrastructure. The demo will be on display in the ShapeBlue booth at the CloudStack Collaboration Conference this week in Amsterdam. Visitors to the booth will see a demonstration of the performance, scalability and efficiency benefits to be realized from combining CloudStack with SolidFire’s scale-out block storage system.

In addition to collaborating on the CloudStack demo environment, ShapeBlue has joined SolidFire’s Cloud Builders Channel Partner Program. The Cloud Builders Program invests in the success of systems integrators like ShapeBlue that are tackling their customers’ most strategic storage and cloud infrastructure projects…

Grazed from TechVibes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Customer relationship management platform Salesforce and HP this week announced a strategic partnership in cloud computing. Salesforce and HP plan to create what they call a "Salesforce Superpod," a dedicated instance in the Salesforce multi-tenant cloud, running on HP’s Converged Infrastructure. The companies plan to jointly develop and market the Salesforce Superpod to the world’s largest enterprises and HP intends to be the first customer to be deployed on a Salesforce Superpod.

The partnership was announced at Dreamforce in San Francisco. “The Salesforce and HP partnership is a breakthrough in cloud computing,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “The Salesforce Superpod will allow individual customers to have a dedicated instance in the Salesforce multi-tenant cloud, powered by HP’s technology and fully managed within salesforce.com’s world-class data centers.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.techvibes.com/blog/salesforce-and-hp-announce-strategic-cloud-partnership-2013-11-19

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM remains aggressive in pursuing innovation in its key areas of focus, including cloud computing, big data and analytics, mobile and security, among others. IBM has been busy of late with several major announcements areas including cloud computing, big data, security and more.

In any given week, IBM is in the thick of it with new technology announcements, partnerships and other news, but over the last couple of weeks Big Blue seems to have had a little extra going on. For instance, on Nov. 15, IBM announced that scientists at ETH Zurich, a prominent Swiss university and IBM Research, in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), have set a new record in supercomputing in fluid dynamics using 6.4 million threads on LLNL’s 96 rack “Sequoia” IBM BlueGene/Q, one of the fastest supercomputers in the world…

Grazed from GreatResponder. Author: Maria Dehn.

Amazon Web Services AWS has announced a very courageous step towards offering the latest virtual desktop services to its customer base. In a statement, AWS announced that ‘WorkSpaces’ would be very useful services for all types of businesses and corporations to reduce their capital as well as operational cost by cutting these costs to almost zero. Now, the companies can purchase high performance, secure and fully managed virtual desktops without any upfront cost.

This is a very courageous step of AWS to flex its muscles in the cloud computing industry. The company has also announced that the service will be available at as low as half of the traditional VDI solutions offered in the marketplace. The general manager of AWS WorkSpaces Mr. Gene Farrell said, in his statement “The majority of the queries from our customers during the near past were about the provision of virtual desktop services;…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Clint Finley.

Salesforce acquired Heroku in 2010, spending $212 million on the cloud computing outfit. But since then, the two have operated all but independently, with little integration between the Heroku cloud service and the rest of the Salesforce empire. On Tuesday, this began to change. At its annual user conference in San Francisco, Salesforce unveiled Heroku1, a tool that plugs the Heroku cloud service — a means of building and deploying online applications — into the company’s flagship business services. The idea is to make it easier for Heroku-based applications to access all the business data stored on Salesforce. “We want to make every Heroku developer a great Salesforce app without having to learn anything new,” says Heroku vice president of product Adam Gross.

Heroku offers what’s known as platform-as-a-service. Basically, it’s an online tool that lets you build and deploy large online applications without having to worry about the hardware and software infrastructure that keeps them going. Salesforce also runs Force.com, a visual tool for creating and integrating applications on the Salesforce platform, but the Heroku service is something that’s far more attractive to hardcore software developers…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Robert L. Mitchell.

Something happened on the way to the cloud: Too many business customers got burned by bad contracts. It’s not that cloud services can’t deliver value. But in the rush to the cloud, enterprises often end up stuck with contracts that don’t fully meet the business’s needs, lack accountability and cost considerably more than anticipated.

There are several reasons for that, say people who make their living studying licensing issues and advising businesses on contract negotiations. Among other things, seasoned veterans of on-premises software licensing may mistakenly assume that cloud services contracts are just another variation on the same theme…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: CJ Arlotta.

IBM (IBM) is moving its Watson technology into the cloud to create what it calls a new ecosystem of software application providers, infusing cognitive computing intelligence with application development. IBM will be launching IBM Watson Developers Cloud, a cloud-hosted marketplace for application providers looking to develop Watson-powered apps. The marketplace will also include educational materials and access to Watson’s application programming interface (API).

According to Big Blue, the move was designed to populate a new ecosystem of entrepreneurial software application providers, adding that these business partners, along with IBM, will transform the way both businesses and consumers make decisions. Application providers will be able to leverage two sources of data-driven content for uncovering user data: company data or third-party content by accessing the IBM Watson Content Store…