Author: David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

The OpenStack Foundation is official as of Wednesday with a new 24-person board, $10 million in funding, 5,600 members, and a mandate to promote flexible open-source cloud infrastructure. Question: Will the foundation echo the success of Eclipse or the failure of OpenOffice?

After a sometimes contentious incubation period, the OpenStack Foundation is now official, with a new 24-member board chaired by SUSE exec and Linux Foundation director Alan Clark; 5,600 members; and $10 million in backer’s funding. Rackspace’s Jonathan Bryce, who did a lot of the heavy lifting moving OpenStack along, is executive director. The news comes after a few weeks of dramatic back-and-forth discussion (surfacing on Twitter) about who should be voted in and how public that process should be…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

No company in any industry can afford to ignore cloud computing, a recent report out of Accenture comments, but its impact will be strongly felt within the financial services sector. The report, which was authored by Emmanuel Sardet of Accenture Financial Services, and Emmanuel Viale of Accenture Technology Labs observes that banks in mature markets “can use cloud computing to enter and scale up in emerging markets more quickly and at lower cost and risk. And banks in emerging markets will use cloud computing to reach their unbanked populations by leapfrogging physical branch networks and moving straight to electronic and mobile banking.”

As banks adapt to changes in their competitive and technological environments, cloud computing will play a major role. Cloud’s combination of low cost and high scalability, effectively unlimited processing power and storage, unprecedented agility and speed to market, and variable pay-per-use cost structures all support the qualities that banks will need to compete and win in the future…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is reaching the stage of maturity. Across any vertical market and at varying degrees of uptake organisations are taking off to the cloud, whether for test and development, email, collaboration, sales automation, HR or more bespoke applications.

Just last week the Business IT Hub discussed the importance of CIOs addressing the customer end user experience when using a mobile device to procure from your organisation, cloud computing too must have a strong focus on end user experience in its implementation by CIO…

Grazed from Samsung. Author: PR Announcement.

Samsung Electronics introduced its next-generation cloud computing solution products, highlighted by the B Series Cloud Base Station, the C Series Cloud Monitor, and the new X Series Cloud Box. Created in response to increasing customer demand, the new cloud computing solutions aim to further expand the company’s lineup of virtual desktop solutions.

The latest cloud computing devices from Samsung allow users to securely store and access data on one centralized server or network, thereby consolidating servers and eliminating the fear of stolen or misplaced data. By simplifying system management and improving productivity, Samsung’s new cloud solutions can connect to a user’s central server, thereby providing users direct access to the operating system (OS) and the applications they need. Such capabilities are accompanied by unparalleled performance whose versatility can accommodate a wide spectrum of customer needs…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Bryron Deeter.

Today “the cloud” surrounds us, literally and figuratively. IBM and Microsoft are running enterprise-oriented ads about cloud computing, Apple features iCloud and Siri (running in the cloud) prominently in marketing messages, and while Amazon.com remains most famous for e-commerce, its Amazon Web Service unit is the cloud infrastructure running popular websites from Netflix to Pinterest.

Underneath these friendly marketing campaigns and infrastructure offerings rages an early battle for the future of the software industry, with tens of billions of dollars at stake. For years, the entrenched software giants have spent most of their energies selling against the cloud computing trend and the startup companies that were leading this revolution: see Oracle/Ellison vs. Salesforce/Benioff. But the fight has largely proven futile, and the big guys have switched to playing catch up by building, buying and partnering their way to relevance…

Grazed from DailyFinance. Author: Tim Brugger.

Last month’s announcement of the strategic partnership between Cisco (NAS: CSCO) and cloud technology provider VMware (NYS: VMW) was the latest confirmation of Cisco’s shift in business philosophy. CEO John Chambers’ objective to become a leader in the exploding cloud marketplace should be sweet music to Cisco shareholders’ ears. The 6% jump in share price year to date, along with the recent dividend payment, sounds pretty good, too.

Cloud technology concerns
The newest additions to Cisco’s existing cloud solutions — SecureX, data loss prevention, and secure mobile services — addresses areas of concern for many businesses slow to embrace cloud computing…

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Editorial Staff.

Federal managers believe they can save more than $16 billion annually by moving critical technology infrastructure to cloud computing, a survey released Wednesday shows. That’s more than three times the highest figure to come from the Office of Management and Budget.

In May 2011, then-federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told a Senate panel that moving computer storage and services to the cloud would save the government a minimum of $5 billion annually…

Grazed from NASDAQ. Author: Editorial Staff.

Amazon ( AMZN ) is widely believed to be the market leader in cloud computing market and competes directly with Google ( GOOG ), Microsoft ( MSFT ), IBM ( IBM ) and HP ( HPQ ). Amazon’s pricing model of charging by the hour has been challenged by a new service ProfitBricks, which bills by the minute. The per minute service would be particularly attractive to companies or applications with constantly fluctuating computing/traffic requirements. Recently, the company announced an online marketplace where users of its cloud computing services can sell their reserved server instances to other companies. We expect the marketplace to help the company somewhat offset the threat posed by the bill by minute model.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers its users reserved instances, which allow them to lower their cloud costs by making a one-time payment to reserve computing capacity for a specified time period and receive a discount on the hourly rates. The online marketplace would allow users to move their instances across AWS Regions, change it to a new type or sell capacity for projects that ended before the completion of their term. The AWS management console will be the gateway for these transactions…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Before there was cloud computing, there was service oriented architecture (SOA). While cloud encompasses implementation and application delivery options, SOA is concerned with the foundation underneath that makes it all possible.

Fittingly, next week’s 5th International SOA, Cloud and Service Technology Symposium, being held in London, will host a program that represents the natural evolution between the two disciplines — and “service technology” is an apt term that describes both. Originally, the conference was called the International SOA Symposium. (Disclosure: I serve on the planning committee for the conference.)…