Author: David

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Lenovo today announced a comprehensive and validated architecture design to help small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) implement a private cloud environment. Lenovo supports EMC’s VSPEX(TM) program, which specifies EMC-validated technology — including Lenovo ThinkServers — to assemble a virtualization solution that’s pre-tested and proven to meet the IT challenges SMBs often face, such as mitigating costs associated with supporting IT infrastructure and accelerating IT service delivery.

"Lenovo ThinkServer as a core component of a validated VSPEX architecture, specifies leading virtualization, server, and network technology to create a complete virtualization solution that enables SMBs to spend less time and money on IT infrastructure and more time on their business," said Darrel Ward, vice president, Enterprise Product Group. "SMBs and channel providers will benefit from Lenovo’s VSPEX private cloud solutions, which are designed to scale and perform in a simple-to-deploy, single rack."…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

One of the most common questions I get from students is where they can find free cloud computing and enterprise software research. Few if any of my students work for companies who have subscriptions with the top analyst firms however. A small group of students are working on a start-up on the side and want to absorb as much market data as they can.

Many of my former students are also in IT management roles, and when they become interested in a specific cloud computing or enterprise topic over time, they write me and ask if I have any data on their subject of interest. I keep the following list updated from them too. To serve all these students I’ve been adding to the list shown below for a number of years…

Q&A Series: ProfitBricks.  Author: Hoofer.

ProfitBricks is a cloud computing company that provides high-end infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for companies and IT professionals.  They offer fast and stable virtual data centers that are based on high standard virtualization technology, which allows customers to easily scale their individual infrastructure to fit their specific needs at any time.  To find out more about this company, I spoke with Pete Johnson, the senior director of cloud platform evangelism.

Q: With so many players getting involved in public cloud, what are differentiators that make ProfitBricks stand out?

A: First generation public cloud providers did a great job creating the market, but like any initial offering 1.0 is never the endgame.  At ProfitBricks, we consider ourselves to be the price/performance leader in the public cloud space which we accomplish with our Cloud Computing 2.0 architecture. By that we mean a more flexible, easier to use public cloud with superior performance and at a better price…

Grazed from IT Jungle.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Long-time IBM i platform reseller and system integrator Key Information Systems is going into the data center co-location, connectivity, and cloud computing businesses after acquiring ISWest, a data center operator located in its neck of Southern California.

Key Info did not disclose the financial details of the acquisition, but Leif Morin, the company’s president, tells The Four Hundred that the opportunity to acquire the assets of ISWest and take on its team of data center operations experts was too good to pass up. Key has 55 employees and generates around $55 million per year from its reseller and consulting businesses, while ISWest has about 15 employees and generates around $15 million…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Editorial Staff.

In previous blog we introduced ‘Private PaaS‘ as a major segment that will drive overall Enterprise Cloud adoption. We touched on how Appscale enables a ‘Google in a Box’ for the PaaS segment, along with others like Apprenda and Cloudbees.

Openstack for the Enterprise

Another option is of course Openstack and despite the VMware CEO claiming it’s not for the enterprise, it’s more likely it will become extremely popular in this space.  Already Openstack is a vibrant vendor partner community, meaning that the core platform can be extended in many different ways, such as high availability, federation, and more, and so can be tailored for the many demanding requirements of large enterprise customers…

Grazed from New York Times.  Author: Quentin Hardy.

VMware is a 15-year-old tech company with a market capitalization of $36 billion. Next week, it will host 21,000 customers in San Francisco and will start to find out if that means it is young or old.  “It’s a statement of our success how quickly we’ve become mainstream,” said Pat Gelsinger, the company’s chief executive. Now, however, he says, “we’re at the crossroads.”

As what he calls “the last great company of the client-server generation,” VMware is going through much of the same transition to the world of cloud computing, big data, and mobility, that bedevils so many giants of the old tech world.  Uniquely, the company has a legitimate claim to have helped destroy the software world in which it started…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: James Duval.

Cloud computing has for many years been like the Wild West of business IT – a vast, untapped wilderness full of possibilities for profit and adventure but still largely unpopulated. For the IT contractors who possessed the particular set of skills needed to traverse the cloud landscape, things have been pretty great for some time now. But the market for cloud services is changing rapidly and those original contractors are going to increasingly find themselves in the middle of a modern day gold rush where their skill set is no longer as unique as it was.

The dynamics of the cloud computing market are interesting in that together they form a classic example of a business technology where widespread understanding has lagged far behind technological innovation. As more and more businesses begin to come to terms with the fact that cloud computing is really just a set of tools that utilise a certain kind of computer network and third party hosting rather than a huge and unintelligible leap forward, the market rewards for contractors are going to start to diminish. Why is this? Well, to answer that we first need to look at why the market is currently so good for contractors…

Grazed from PRWeb.  Author: PR Announcement.

Compare the Cloud, an independent cloud computing comparison, information, and advice website, today announces the launch of CloudPitch.me.  CloudPitch.me is a free online resource where Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) have the opportunity to pitch for your business’s cloud computing requirements. In 150 words or less, each service provider has to explain why their cloud solution or technology will solve a particular business problem better than their competitors. Visitors to the site then have the opportunity to ‘vote up’ pitches that resonate with them; and overall voting directly impacts the order of appearance of that provider.

The concept of the “150 word Cloud Pitch” was spawned from a Compare the Cloud blog written in March 2013 by Paul Bevan – a Bloor Research Analyst, who identified the need for service providers to “make the connection to their customer’s needs and aspirations” and to “articulate the benefits,” or face the prospect of disappearing into obscurity – even if their offering is technically superior…

Grazed from Business Solutions.  Author: Editorial Staff.

dinCloud, a cloud services provider that offers business provisioning in the cloud, recently announced that dinServer, its hosted virtual server offering, is now available to Ingram Micro Inc.’s North American channel partners via the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace. The expanded distribution agreement allows Ingram Micro to market, sell, and support dinServer to its growing base of cloud-focused channel partners, which includes VARs (Value Added Resellers), MSPs (Managed Service Providers), and SIs (Systems Integrators).

“dinCloud is helping channel partners transform the way companies use the cloud,” said Renee Bergeron, vice president of managed services and cloud computing, Ingram Micro North America. “dinCloud’s server is very complementary to the hosted desktop service from dinCloud that we currently offer to our growing base of channel partners.”…

Grazed from MidSize Insider.  Author: Shawn Drew.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the cloud was an obscure new technology that only a handful of companies were successfully leveraging, but things have truly come full circle. Cloud computing is now almost ubiquitous, and cloud adoption rates by both IT and the public continue to soar. But a small group of businesses are rethinking their cloud strategy and finding that sometimes the cloud just isn’t the right fit.

The Realities of the Cloud

The benefits of cloud computing are undeniable. But as more and more businesses adopt individual cloud solutions, some cracks are starting to appear in this new technology’s armor.  For scalability or elasticity, the cloud reigns supreme, but for businesses that have outgrown the need for constantly shifting IT power, it may not always be the most economical option. As Wired points out, once a company can accurately predict their computing needs, buying hardware at a discount often contrasts advantageously with a public cloud solution for reasons of economy…