Author: David

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) today announced the Netflix Cloud Prize, a competition designed to make cloud computing better for everyone. With US$100,000 in available prize money, the Netflix Cloud Prize challenges developers around the world to do their very best to improve the features, usability, quality, reliability and security of computing resources delivered as a service over the Internet, popularly known as cloud computing. Contest submissions will be judged by a panel of experts. All submissions will be available freely to anyone.

"Cloud computing has become a hot topic recently, but the technology is still just emerging," said Neil Hunt , chief product officer at Netflix. "No doubt many of the key ideas that will take it to the next level have yet to be conceived, explored, and developed. The Netflix Cloud Prize is designed to attract and focus the attention of the most innovative minds to create the advances that will take cloud to the next level."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Ayushman Baruah.

Adobe’s popular creative software such as Photoshop, Flash and Premier are among the most pirated. The reason for this is, everyone wants to use it but no one wants to buy it because of the huge one-time cost. With Adobe’s Creative Cloud launched in India today, you no longer need to pay upfront for the software and this will invariably tend to reduce software piracy. “With the easy of availability of products through the Creative Cloud and the attractive price points, we do see a significant impact on the piracy rate of our products,” Umang Bedi, Managing Director–South Asia, Adobe.

This launch is also seen as a major shift in Adobe’s business model wherein it could be offering more software through the cloud in the days to come. Adobe’s Creative Cloud is aimed at giving creative professionals their first chance to experience a radical new way of accessing Adobe’s tools and services. Creative Cloud is a membership-based service that provides users with unlimited access to download and install all Creative Suite desktop applications like Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe Muse, Adobe Edge tools and services, game developer tools and integration with Photoshop Touch apps…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

SnapLogic has released an update to its SnapLogic Integration Platform enterprise platform. New and enhanced features in this release were designed to enable users to more quickly build, deploy and efficiently manage multiple high-volume, data-intensive integration projects.

Key features in this release revolve around helping enterprises improve data provisioning in their SaaS and on-premise apps while also increasing agility by enabling private enterprise SnapStores, according to the company. The new features include:…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Peter Wayner.

The message from the cloud has always been simple: Surrender your cares, IT managers, and we’ll handle everything. Forget about skinning your knuckles installing servers, double-checking diesel backups, or fretting about 1,000 or 10,000 things that could go wrong. Give us a credit card number and your data. We’ll do the rest.

For the last few months, I’ve been living the dream, building a vast empire of computers that spanned the globe. Machines everywhere crunched my data into teeny tiny bits, then crunched the numbers even more. Private networks carried my secret scraps of info between the machines so that others could work the data and reform it into pretty graphs. Sure, my desktop is a bit old and it could use more RAM, but with my browser I created a worldwide army of machines with about as much ease as the sorcerer’s apprentice in "Fantasia."…

Grazed from InformationWorld. Author: Charles Babcock.

VMware told Wall Street analysts Wednesday that it is launching an approach to hybrid cloud computing that will enable its customers to use their VMware-based data center environments in conjunction with infrastructure-as-a-service providers in the public cloud.

In VMware’s view, its virtualization management console will be the command post for both sets of workloads and will allow movement out to the cloud and back again. Before such a situation can become a reality, however, VMware must move further down the road to virtualized networks that act as an integral part of a software-defined data center…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Jack McCarthy.

In the coming months, the cloud will change businesses in ways we can’t imagine. Companies are rushing to develop new technologies to speed cloud development. Across the board, vendors young and old are offering new solutions that are making cloud computing easier, faster, more effective and less expensive.

The cloud is not new. Software-as-a-Service models promoted by Salesforce.com’s on-demand CRM packages captured the attention of businesses years ago. Hosting centers have handled infrastructure needs. Virtualization, eliminating the need to keep hardware on-premise, has acted as a disrupter of traditional IT notions. Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN).com formalized the cloud business model using its own infrastructure and opened the floodgates of the cloud era…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

VMware has created a new business unit focused entirely on hybrid cloud services. The new VMware Hybrid Cloud Services business unit will be led by Bill Fathers, the former president of Savvis who resigned his position at the end of November. The virtualization company outlined to investors its corporate strategy, which will be three-pronged approach related to software-defined data centers, an expansion of hybrid cloud offerings and empowering the multi-device era. It’s big news for cloud computing, and as part of the news, VMware unveiled plans to launch the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service later this year.

The service, which does not yet have an exact launch date, will extend VMware’s software-defined data center strategy, which will involve extending virtualization benefits to all areas of the data center. The hybrid cloud service is being designed to enable customers to reap the benefits of the public cloud without changing existing applications. Customers will also be able to use a common management, orchestration, networking and security model, the company noted…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

With the intent of rounding out its software stack for building hybrid clouds, Oracle is acquiring Nimbula, a provider of private cloud infrastructure management software. Based in Mountain View, California, Nimbula was co-founded by Chris Pinkham, who managed the development of Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), along with a number of other EC2 team members now with Nimbula. The company also has expertise with the OpenStack cloud software stack.

Nimbula’s flagship software, Nimbula Director, is designed to deploy and manage workloads across both private and public clouds. The software can be used for managing such cloud jobs as distributed software development, IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) and SaaS (software-as-a-service) hosting, batch processing and Hadoop deployments…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Rick Stevenson.

A major enabler of cloud computing over the past five years has been the rise of ubiquitous, commodity broadband and the drop in price for consumer wired and wireless telecommunications. Today, we can cheaply connect people and devices anywhere to almost anything else – a trend that’s created an explosion of cloud-based products and services. Although bargain data plans have enabled mesh-like connectivity, this growing complexity has also killed an idea that we, as an industry, were obsessed with in the late 1990s; namely, five 9s reliability.

This isn’t necessarily bad, but it does require a rethink. The game isn’t about uptime any more. It’s about how quickly you can fix complex systems when the inevitable happens. And just to make it more interesting, those systems are no longer neatly contained in your data center…