Author: David

Grazed from DailyFinance. Author: Editorial Staff.

Around the world, city leaders face the challenge of delivering economic growth while meeting sustainability targets and rising expectations about the quality of municipal services, often in the face of drastic budget reductions. This is forcing many city leaders to improve efficiency and drive further innovation in the creation and delivery of services. According to a recent report from Pike Research, a part of Navigant’s Energy Practice, new platforms for communication, data sharing, and application development – particularly cloud computing and data analytics – will play a key role in this transformation.

Cumulative investment in smart government technology between 2011 and 2017 will be almost $4.8 billion, the report finds. Annual investment in smart government technologies in North America alone will surpass $1 billion in 2017, and annual investment in cloud services for smart cities will reach nearly $1.4 billion worldwide by 2017…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Liau Yun Qing.

Chinese Internet giant Alibaba will be investing US$200 million in its Aliyun OS mobile operating system (OS) team which will be spun off from the company’s cloud computing division.

A report Friday on Xinhua cited an internal memo by Jack Ma which said Aliyun OS will be spun off from Aliyun.com, the company’s cloud computing unit, into a separate entity which will directly report to the Alibaba Group. The memo added that Alibaba Group will be investing US$200 million in Aliyun OS to strengthen its talent, technology and infrastructure…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

The OpenStack Foundation has officially launched boasting $10 million in funding and 5,600 members. The OpenStack community has announced the formal launch of the new OpenStack Foundation to continue to promote the development and adoption of the open-source OpenStack cloud software.

As the independent home for OpenStack, the foundation has already attracted more than 5,600 individual members, secured more than $10 million in funding and is ready to fulfill the OpenStack mission of becoming the ubiquitous cloud computing platform…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Platform as a service is the fastest-growing area of cloud computing: Gartner forecasts the worldwide enterprise market for PaaS platforms will grow from $900 million in 2011 to $2.9 billion in 2016, representing a 26.6 percent rise each year.

The problem is that no two PaaS offerings are alike. Plus, as the market expands, anything and everything that looks like development is adopting the PaaS label, further confusing the field. As a result, I see weak excuses for PaaS clouds these days as wannabes toss their hats into the arena and chase the gold in them thar clouds. But ignore them. The truth is that a small set of established providers rule — and will continue to rule — PaaS…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Bright Computing, the leading independent provider of cluster management software, announced it will present its data aware cloud bursting solution at the PBS Works User Group meeting in San Jose, California. Robert Stober, Bright Computing senior solutions architect, will show how to extend on-premise clusters into the cloud, and manage these resources as part of the local cluster. He will also demonstrate Bright’s unique data aware scheduling capability for the cloud, eliminating the need to manually manage data movement. The combined Bright Cluster Manager® and PBS Professional® workload manager deliver a seamless, intuitive solution for provisioning, scheduling, monitoring and managing the extended cluster and data within one intuitive GUI, or cluster management shell, on-premise or in the cloud.

“Bright Cluster Manager is delivered with PBS Professional as a pre-configured, sys admin-selectable option,” said Stober. “Bright’s integration of PBS Professional, and other workload managers, helps customers get the most productivity from clusters, whether on premise or in the cloud.”…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.

The subscription Web services market is now forecast to grow 19.6 percent in 2012 to total $109 billion worldwide, up from projections of 12 percent to 15 percent. IT researcher Gartner reported Sept. 19 that the global appetite for public cloud services is ramping up faster than it and other analysts expected.

The subscription Web services market is now forecast to grow 19.6 percent in 2012 to total $109 billion worldwide, Gartner said in a report. Business process services (also known as business process as a service, or BPaaS) represent the largest segment, accounting for about 77 percent of the total market…

Grazed from CloudTimes. Author: Florence de Borja.

For those individuals who want to invest in cloud computing stocks, the best advice you can have is to ensure that you have chosen the right company to invest in. Basically, you can do this by comparing the company with important statistics and financial objectives. Rackspace Hosting and Salesforce.com are 2 of the best performing cloud computing leaders in the stock market today. Subjected to Fool.com’s analyses, both subjective and objective, you will find out which company is a better choice to put your money into.

Salesforce.com is known to promote cloud computing through its numerous distributed social and management software. Rackspace, on the other hand, is into hosting services and infrastructure computing. It provides an opportunity for smaller companies to run services and programs using its servers thereby allowing the companies to save resources and money…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Oracle Corp. surprised investors with a new business category in its quarterly results Thursday, “cloud software subscriptions,” in an amusing turnaround for its chief executive, Larry Ellison.

Ellison has often poked fun, especially at the company’s user conference, at the term “cloud computing.” In an interview at the AllThingsD event last May, Kara Swisher asked why he resisted the term. “I objected to people saying, “Oh my God, we just invented cloud computing,” Ellison commented, adding that moving the complexity of the desktop to Internet servers had been recast as cloud computing. He did acknowledge that he thought the term was a “charismatic brand.” See: Oracle’s Larry Ellison at D10 and the dogfight in the cloud…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Yankee Group.

Cloud computing can play an important role in lowering costs for telecom operators and make them more nimble and agile. But the jury is still out whether telcos can compete in the cloud services market. Yet, with traditional revenue streams like voice, messaging and data increasingly being threatened by regulation, competition and over-the-top (OTT) players, gaining share in the fast growing cloud services market will be necessary to maintain relevance and ensure revenue growth.

In the consumer cloud space, popular services like webmail, storage, synchronisation, music and social networking are being delivered by OTT players such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, Dropbox, Spotify and Facebook…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

It makes sense for the CMO to help pick which technology marketing uses — but marketing is just one of many departments of a company. In this age of BYOD, all that autonomy will lead to more “rogue” IT. That’s not always a good thing.

Every time I hear that more IT spending will flow through the marketing department than through CIOs in the future, I get visions of expensive PowerPoint-toting suits designating their server of choice. It’s an odd picture…