Author: David

Grazed from LifeHacker. Author: Angus Kidman.

Cloud computing promises us flexible and reliable service delivery based on charging for what we use, but that’s a model which mainframe computing has been using for decades. How will the use of mainframes evolve in the future? The comparison between clouds and mainframes isn’t a new one. Sendmail inventor Eric Allman made the point at Linux.conf.au 2011: “Cloud computing is a return to centralised administration. You are handing the keys back to people in those glass rooms.” But not all the people in glass rooms ever left.

BMC Software’s recent global survey of mainframe users emphasises two key points: mainframes aren’t going anywhere soon, but they’re not generally being used for new tasks. Within ANZ, growing use of mainframes is largely driven by existing applications; 91 per cent of regional respondents to the survey said that this was the main reason for the growth in MIPS (millions of instructions per second, the standard measure of mainframe performance). Key priorities for change include reducing costs and improving disaster recovery. We already know that reducing costs on mainframes is a priority. Beyond that, the big switch has been that the data produced from mainframes is often used to deliver information to consumers accessing (for example) bank accounts via smart phones, rather than simply feeding into corporate systems…

Grazed from The Boston Globe. Author: Kevin J. O’Brien.

AT&T and International Business Machines planned to announce Tuesday that they are teaming up to sell cloud computing services over a mutually owned, private global network to win new business customers reluctant to send sensitive data over the Internet.

The two companies said the effort would combine AT&T’s secured telecommunications network for business customers with IBM’s global network of data centers into a private system where corporate data could be processed remotely, but never travel over the Internet. International Data Corp., a research firm, forecasts that global sales of cloud computing services will more than double from $40 billion this year to $100 billion by 2016…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

On day four of Oracle OpenWorld 2012, Wikibon cofounder and senior analyst Dave Vellante talked about the overall assessment of Oracle OpenWorld 2012, Oracle’s new strategy on cloud computing, virtualization, infrastructure as a service and who are Oracle’s biggest competitors are now. He also noted EMC’s strategy on the flash storage array.

EMC used much of its keynote time at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on day four to talk about its forthcoming all-flash storage array, which is the result of its recent Israeli flash-memory startup XtremIO acquisition…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Sean Ludwig.

Platform-as-a-Service is part of the booming cloud computing sector, one area of the cloud that some analysts, companies, and developers have overlooked. But recent research shows that PaaS is no longer the ugly duckling of the cloud industry — and that it’s ready to grow quite a bit during the next few years. PaaS will make up barely 1 percent of the overall $109 billion cloud industry this year. But it will likely grow more than 30 percent annually over the next four years, according to research firm Gartner.

This could make PaaS a $2.9 billion market by 2016, or more than 2 percent of the $209 billion total cloud market. While small, it’s the second fastest growing “layer” of the cloud and one that cloud-watchers should be paying closer attention to…

Grazed from InsiderMonkey. Author: Marshall Hargrave.

We believe that a continued rapid consumption of network capacity, driven by a rising use of tablets and smartphones, will propel companies operating in the cloud computing and wireless network optimization space. In the interim, these companies are seeing a slowdown due to uncertainty in the economy, which has led to IT budget cuts. It appears that several funds are making moves into the cloud computing space in preparation for a future shift in enterprise technology that includes data center consolidation and virtualization. The five companies below are some of the top ways to play cloud computing—and include shareholders such as Jim Simons, D.E. Shaw, Steven Cohen and Ken Griffin.

The traditional data networking company, Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO), is in competition with server and computing players for market share in the cloud computing and wireless area network optimization—see our other thoughts on Cisco. Cisco, being a $100 billion market cap company, has attracted some big name interest, including Ken Fisher and D.E. Shaw. Also, as of 2Q, Cisco was an Edinburgh Partners’ Top Pick and saw five funds with over 5% of their 13F portfolio invested in Cisco—see all funds owning Cisco. There have been a round of insider sales of late around $19, which is where the company currently trades. With Cisco’s initiative to focus on data storage partnerships versus acquisitions, the company is expected to grow EPS by only 7.7% next year…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Davey Winder.

The Cloud Market Maturity study, a joint effort between the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and ISACA, has revealed the major areas where confidence in the cloud is lowest across users in 50 countries. The third biggest concern was international data privacy, followed by legal issues, contractual lock-in and data ownership/custodial responsibility. That I have focused on points three to six in a top ten list is no accident.

For a start, the Corporate Cloud Computing Trends report from The451’s ChangeWave Research, apart from being a mouthful also surveyed more than a thousand business folk and discovered that the most popular use of public cloud services was in the software as a service (SaaS) sector,which should really come as no great surprise, yet it’s exactly this kind of public cloud service usage that could cause problems of across-borders data privacy, legal issues and data ownership…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Seville, Spain-based startup Besol is trying to take on companies like RightScale with a new cloud-management platform called Tapp. The company is currently honing its skills providing management interfaces for European telcos’ cloud offerings, and will start a push into North America in 2013.

It’s a crowded market for companies trying to make a living by adding a uniform management layer over multiple cloud-computing offerings, but Seville, Spain-based startup Besol thinks there’s room for one more. With its flagship product offering, called Tapp, the company — which is presenting at our Structure: Europe Launchpad competition next week — thinks it can compete globally with established players such as RightScale, enStratus and Scalr by making it easy for small and mid-sized enterprises to get started with the cloud…

Grazed from MyDigitalFC. Author: Varun Dutt.

Cloud computing has had a sweeping affect across the IT realm in recent years but there has been hardly any clarity on what it actually is. According to Jonathan Stri­ckland of How Stuff Works? Cloud computing is the use of computing resources that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the internet). End users access cloud-based applications through a web browser or a desktop or mobile app while the business software and user’s data are stored on servers at a remote location. It allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster, with improved manageability and less maintenance, and enables IT to rapidly adjust res­ources to meet uncertain business demand.

Strickland argues that buying computers for everyone in an organisation can be costly in terms of both the hardware and software but cloud computing provides an impressive alternative: Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, one just needs to load one application which would allow workers to log into a web-based service hosting all the programs…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

KANA Software, Inc., a global leader in customer service solutions delivered on-premise or in the cloud used by more than 900 organizations worldwide, including half of the Global 100 and 250 government entities around the globe, today introduced Lagan Express, a knowledge-centric multi-channel cloud customer service solution delivered via the Software as a Service (SaaS) model to meet the constituent service needs of mid-market public sector organizations, here at the 98th Annual Conference of the International City/County Management Association in Phoenix, Ariz.

Lagan Express provides a complete suite of integrated multi-channel contact and knowledge management capabilities to support improved customer service quality, accuracy and response times. A single, integrated platform ensuring consistent customer service across all channels including phone, email, chat, web self-service, virtual assistant and social media, Lagan Express unifies customer contact records and knowledge resources and automatically delivers contextual help and information when and where it is needed…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Many organizations are still in the early stages of their cloud computing journeys, and the reports are: so far, so good. No major flaws or “gotchas” have emerged in nascent cloud engagements, and CIOs are saying full steam ahead. Still needed, however, are more security assurances, and more vendor flexibility.

That’s the key takeaway from a new report just published by Navint Partners, LLC, which finds large companies are seeing mainly positive results from their cloud computing efforts. The consulting company convened a roundtable with 20 CIOs from Fortune 500 companies to discuss their progress and concerns about cloud computing. Nine out of 10 respondents, for example, say they have received 100% of the savings they expected from their cloud computing projects. In addition, four out of five say their cloud efforts have helped their organizations achieve some sort of competitive advantage, and two-thirds say cloud has helped their organization’s efficiency and effectiveness…