Author: David

Grazed from CloudBees. Author: PR Announcement.

CloudBees, Inc., the Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) innovation leader, today announced a record-setting first half of 2013 with growth in revenue, customers and partnerships. In the first half of 2013, CloudBees’ revenue increased by 148 percent compared to the first half of 2012. That success, along with an expanded global presence, continues to lay the foundation for further growth for the rest of 2013.

The demand for the CloudBees PaaS continues to grow as organizations realize they can use it to significantly accelerate the delivery of web and mobile applications. In the first half of 2013, the number of new CloudBees accounts more than doubled over the same time period of 2012. The growth demonstrates the increasing adoption of PaaS technology, overall, and the CloudBees PaaS, specifically. CloudBees also increased the size of its total customer base by 135 percent during the same timeframe…

Grazed from The Next Web. Author: Rich Quick.

In the first of a series of articles on enterprise cloud computing, TNW takes a look at why many corporates still fear the cloud and what it will take to fix this. Cloud computing has been a hot topic for several years, but while startups have been quick to adopt cloud computing, many corporates have been more cautious to make the switch.

According to a recent survey, 49% of executive-level managers think cloud computing will transform their business, yet many business have been slow to adopt the cloud because of a range of concerns. But why are enterprises fearful of the cloud? Here are 5 of the top reasons large corporates are worried about making the move:…

Grazed from Business Cloud News. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

A recent breakthrough in multi-party computation (MPC) cryptography may result in a “sea change” in computing security according to Peter Scholl, a researcher in the Cryptography and Information Security group at the University of Bristol. The essential idea behind MPC, a subset of cryptography, is that it should enable two or more people to compute any function choosing secret inputs, without actually revealing the contents of those inputs to either party.

Scholl is among a team of researchers from the Department of Computer Science at University of Bristol and Aarhus University in Denmark who are jointly developing a practical implementation protocol for MPC called SPDZ (pronounced “speeds”)…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Klint Finley.

Cloud computing isn’t just a new way of hosting and running applications. It’s also a new way to think about how applications are designed in the first place, how they store and retrieve data. Joe Arnold was the chief technology officer at Engine Yard, a San Francisco company that offers a cloud service where developers can house their applications, and over the last half decade, he witnessed firsthand the shift towards a new way of building software that runs across tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers. “We were watching people build more mobile and web applications,” he says. “And how they used storage was a lot different from how it started when we first started doing infrastructure.”

That was because Engine Yard plugged into a cloud storage service from Amazon known as Simple Storage System, or S3. By stripping away many characteristics of traditional storage systems — such as the hierarchical “file folder” style of organization — S3 and systems like it can provide more speed and scalability while remaining extremely reliable. It’s an approach called “object storage,” and thanks to Amazon, it has become a popular way for websites and web applications to serve static content, such as images, videos, and other media…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

The cloud is an amorphous technological construct with varying degrees of performance and availability, depending on the location and the network of the end user. That’s where the Cedexis Radar cloud app performance and benchmarking service comes into play, providing users with visibility into cloud availability and performance metrics.

Marty Kagan, co-founder and CEO of Cedexis, explained to eWEEK that his company is now expanding the scope of its monitoring business to provide a more comprehensive view into cloud services delivery. The Cedexis Radar service is now being enhanced with improved data visualizations and alerts that enable users to compare multiple aspects of cloud availability and performance, including page load times…

Grazed from BusinessInsider. Author: Julie Bort.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff is often credited with inventing cloud computing or at least the form of it known as software-as-a-service (SaaS), where an app is delivered over the Internet.
Other people say that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison invented SaaS cloud computing, as he was the inspiration and the financial backer for both Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

Benioff was working at Oracle, in a meeting with Larry Ellison, when he thought of Salesforce.com, the story goes. But on Tuesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Benioff talked about his other mentor: Steve Jobs and his role in shaping Salesforce.com…

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Sarah Frier.

Seagate Technology (STX) Plc, a maker of storage drives, is on the lookout for software acquisitions that can help it meet booming demand for cloud computing, said Chief Executive Officer Stephen Luczo. The company is determining where it has holes to fill and what to potentially buy, Luczo said in an interview yesterday at Bloomberg’s New York headquarters. The CEO said he sees a bubble in the valuation of cloud-storage providers, which could present buying opportunities when it deflates, he said.

“We do need some technology that we don’t have on the software side,” Luczo said. “When do you buy it and what you pay for it is a different question. Right now it seems a little frothy.” Western Digital Corp. (WDC), the world’s largest maker of hard-disk drives by market value, agreed yesterday to buy Virident Systems Inc., a company backed by Seagate, for $685 million to expand in flash storage…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Enhancing their Managed Service offering for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Datapipe, a global provider of managed services and infrastructure for outsourced IT and cloud computing, today announced it has acquired Newvem, a pioneer in cloud usage analytics and operations optimization.

The acquisition brings Datapipe to the forefront of the cloud ecosystem by combining Datapipe’s proven managed IT services with an innovative cloud optimization platform. This comprehensive cloud solution empowers enterprises to easily deploy, govern, analyze, optimize, and manage their workloads on the AWS cloud to meet specific business requirements…

Grazed from Wireld. Author: Joshua McKenty.

The Discovery Center in Times Square has a fascinating exhibit of sculptures built out of Legos. Human figures of various sorts emerge from the blocks, providing a similar feeling to the exhibition of partially finished sculptures of Michelangelo, which are in the same gallery in Florence that houses his famous statue of David. Looking at these sculptures and thinking about Michelangelo led me to consider building a replica of David out of Legos (note to self: it’s been done).

In the computing business, we have a new sort of Legos: those created by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Because they are exciting and new and can solve many different computing problems, people often get the idea that you can and should build everything out of them. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. What are the signs that AWS is not a good fit for an application?…

Grazed from ABA Banking Journal. Author: John Ginovsky.

By now those freaky acronyms SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS shouldn’t need to be spelled out for those in the IT know. (For all the rest, they stand for, respectively, software, platform, and infrastructure as a service.) They are subsets of what’s become known as the cloud, which previously was known as virtualization or hosted services, which previously were known as the internet, which once was capitalized as The Internet before it became commoditized.

Without further belaboring the terminology history, what’s important here is to know that businesses, and especially banks, are tearing ownership of the cloud away from the IT gurus. The other Cs beside the CIO—CEO, COO, and CFO—are waking up to the fact that cloud systems offer the potential for increased efficiency, lower costs, higher security, regulatory compliance, and world peace…