Author: David

Grazed from Wall Street Cheat Sheet.  Author: James Flaherty.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) will headline a list of new clients for Oracle’s (NASDAQ:ORCL) most recent foray into cloud software.  Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Thursday hinted at the fact that his company had new alliances with their cloud technology. Microsoft then announced that on Monday they would be holding a press conference to highlight a new partnership with Oracle. According to The Wall Street Journal, the headliners for the press event are Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Oracle President Mark Hurd, and the president of Microsoft’s division with server and cloud software, Satya Nadella.

In Oracle’s earnings call Thursday, Ellison let slip that his company would be announcing new partnerships for its cloud computing software — also known as SaaS, for software as a service…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Ellen Messmer.

Trusting the cloud to handle sensitive transactions and security services isn’t for every enterprise, but organizations from banks to app developers are starting to give it a try.  Gartner predicts the global cloud computing market will grow 18.5% this year to $131 billion, with business process-as-a-service accounting for the biggest chunk of that at 28%. According to Gartner’s numbers, management, security and automation accounts for just 2.8%.

Even more traditional and conservative types of companies, such as banks, are venturing into the cloud to carry out complex processes that, in some cases, they find they can do far more efficiently outside of internal data centers…

Grazed from I.T. World Canada.  Author: Howard Solomon.

An oracle, according to one online dictionary, is a statement given by a highly regarded person that can be ambiguous or obscure.  By that measure Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison issued a few oracles on Thursday.   During a conference call with financial analysts after releasing the company’s latest results, Ellison briefly mentioned an upcoming version of its database that will more directly challenge SAP’s HANA in-memory platform.  

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Raj Sabhlok.

Companies are moving more and more of their IT functions online in the form of publicly-available cloud computing services, software-as-a-service applications and the like. That’s not really a big surprise. Where the controversies, or at least the questions, arise are in the company’s IT department.

For instance, does the rise of the public cloud render the enterprise IT department obsolete? With so much IT activity performed by third-party SaaS and cloud service providers, what activities are left for the company’s internal IT team? And what does the future look like for enterprise IT?  Spoiler alert: The answers are “no,” “plenty” and “cloudy.” Let me explain…

Grazed from Google. Author: PR Announcement.

Google is collaborating with Red Hat to enable developers to run Java application designed for Google’s App Engine Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) in private cloud installations, according to a post on Google’s Cloud Platform Blog. Both companies have been working together, improving the open source App Engine Test Compatibility Kit (TCK) to further interoperability between Google’s own platform and Red Hat’s third party implementation CapeDwarf.

The result is an implementation on top of Red Hat’s JBoss application server that allows users to transfer their Java code from Google’s infrastructure to their internal JBoss installation and back. The lion’s share of the interoperability work was taken up by Google engineers providing tests for their native App Engine implementation for the TCK while Red Hat developers contributed tests for CapeDwarf. All tests were then run against Google’s App Engine service, a locally installed App Engine SDK and a CapeDwarf implementation…

Grazed from Fort Mills Times. Author: Editorial Staff.

Gravitant, a cloud services brokerage and management software company, has been awarded the 2013 American Technology Award for Internet Services, E-Commerce & Mobility by the TechAmerica Foundation at a gala event Thursday in Washington, D.C. The American Technology Awards recognize the best products and services from across the technology industry.

Gravitant’s cloudMatrix cloud services brokerage platform helps organizations transform their IT departments and simplify the use of cloud technology. cloudMatrix tackles the complexity and provides a practical path to cloud adoption, helping customers truly realize the benefits of cloud computing, including agility and cost optimization…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

SaltStack is a Salt Lake City startup that beat out five other startups to win the Structure 2013 LaunchPad competition. Actually, the two companies committed to DevOps types of systems emerged as the winners. A three-judge panel of venture capitalists — Luis Robles of Sequoia Capital, Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad and Bipul Sinha of Lightspeed Venture Partners — selected SaltStack for its comprehensive deployment management system and its early traction and rapid buildup of customers. The Salt open source project on which it is based is only two years old.

CEO and co-founder Marc Chenn said developer interest in Salt, a Python-based system, has propelled it into the top 10 open source projects in the world, ranking just behind the big cloud project, OpenStack, according to a GitHub ranking in December. SaltStack itself is "cloud agnostic" and can be used on top of multiple cloud systems…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Editorial Staff.

Red Hat OpenStack was mentioned 32 times during the Linux company’s Q1 2014 earnings call earlier this week. The open source cloud platform is receiving tons of hype. But here’s the reality check: Red Hat (RHT) concedes OpenStack will NOT drive any material revenues, billings or bookings for the next 12 months. Does that mean Red Hat partners and customers can ignore OpenStack for now? Not necessarily. Here’s why.

When asked about Red Hat OpenStack during the earnings call this week, CEO Jim Whitehurst offered these revealing sound bites:

• "Regarding OpenStack, we’re very excited about the momentum we have around OpenStack, the interest, the early customers who we’re working with on it. But I also want to temper expectations."
• "My guess is we will do a lot of POCs [proof of concepts] in the next year on OpenStack, but people don’t start writing even 6-figure checks for software. They may for some services, but for software, until they get a little closer to production, that’s probably still a year or 18 months away."…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

"I’m really surprised when people say they’re not doing SOA now, they’re doing ‘cloud.’ Statements like that really concern me. Because it reflects a lack of understanding that these are not in any way competing or alternative approaches to building and evolving IT enterprises. It’s the opposite."

Those are the cautionary words of Thomas Erl, co-author of the just-released book, Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture, who points out that a lot of the work that took place behind creating and building service oriented architecture is now serving to better plan and deploy cloud computing-enabled systems. I recently spoke with Thomas, who is also CEO of Arcitura Education, an SOA an cloud certification and training firm, about the evolving cloud architecture space, as well as his latest book…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Ingrid Lunden.

Some consolidation in the area of cloud services for enterprises: Intuit, the business services company that targets SMEs, is buying Elastic Intelligence, creators of Connection Cloud, a product that helps SMEs create DIY cloud-based apps. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Elastic Intelligence was founded by Roger Sippl, the serial entrepreneur who also founded Informix (sold to IBM for $1 billion), Vantive (now a part of Oracle) and Visigenic. He’s also an investor in IFTTT, among other things. Sippl is joining Intuit as part of the deal.

Intuit says that it plans to integrate the Connection Cloud technology with Intuit QuickBase, its web database software platform. The idea, says Sippl, will be to attract more SMBs to the platform with the promise that apps will be easy for them to develop, “without the need for expensive developers or complex API programming.”…