Author: David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: David Meyer.

The cloud-based customer service suite now has a simplified and more unified UI, and has also pulled in major funding from big names such as Index and Goldman Sachs.

Zendesk, one of the poster children for the recent wave of enterprise cloud services, has just raked in $60m in fresh funding. And the timing for that could be most opportune – the news coincides with a significant revamp of the browser-based user interface for the customer support suite, and the revelation of significant European expansion plans…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Amazon — which knows a thing or two about online marketplaces — is launching one for Amazon Web Services customers who may have over-provisioned their EC2 reserved instances. Now they can buy or sell those instances with other AWS customers.

Amazon is sticking its toe into tricky new waters: It’s building a spot market for cloud computing resources with a new plan to let users buy and sell their Amazon cloud resources. This is tricky because previous attempts to navigate these waters haven’t done much. Enomoly tried a variation of this plan and Verizon has a patent for it, but there’s not been much traction…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

OAGi (http://www.oagi.org) today announced they are adding capabilities to their Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) open standard to support REST processing for their JSON based API’s. These are the most common technologies used for common mobile and cloud platforms. This is being done to enable users to leverage their investment in the OAGIS XML-based open standard for Mobile Business and Cloud Solutions. OAGi just released a Position Paper on this topic that has more detail. You can download it on their web site at http://www.oagi.org.

When OAGi was formed 17 years ago, the vision was to provide a business process based data exchange language standard for B2B, Enterprise Integration, and Enterprise to Execution Systems. The membership decided over time that XML was the best way to express OAGIS for those tasks. Now the membership of OAGi sees their Mobile Business and Cloud Computing initiative as a natural evolution to support these new platforms that enterprises, their customers, and their suppliers are now working with…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Master agent Telecom Brokerage Inc. (TBI) (Booth #304) has announced the launch of Cloud Clarity, an agent program designed to educate and guide TBI partners in the essentials of cloud computing, clarification of cloud service models, and proper development and implementation of cloud deployment methods.

TBI built the Cloud Clarity program to address its partners’ need to better understand the often times confusing array of cloud services. Through a structured education curriculum and guidelines, TBI will enable its partners to sell cloud services confidently to their customers. TBI has Cloud Clarity sessions planned each month through April of 2013, focusing on various topics including compliancy, storage, disaster recovery, business continuity and more…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Kevin McLaughlin.

vCloud Director has become VMware’s second most important product after vSphere, and it is central to the vendor’s vision of virtual data centers running entirely on software. Yet few people outside the VMware ecosystem understand what vCloud Director is and what it does. That’s a problem for VMware and a potential roadblock to its cloud computing ambitions.

With Tuesday’s launch of vCloud Suite 5.1, VMware is looking to get customers better acquainted with vCloud Director by bundling it with vSphere and its other management, security and storage products…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Chris Preimesberger.

Intel, whose processors are firing away in 95 percent of all data centers, literally has been at the center of the data center world for generations. However, with all that power and influence in the silicon hardware sector, it has never been recognized by the general public — and Wall Street, for that matter — as the major player in the software world it is.

That non-awareness is changing. Intel, with 12,000 of its 100,100 full-time people employed in its software development and testing division, now describes itself as the fifth-largest software producer in the world. And this isn’t just about firmware; we’re talking about software applications in all forms…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Data storage, maintenance and access are critical components in every business today driving public and private cloud adoption. Logicalis, an international IT solutions and managed services provider, today announced enhancements to its cloud consulting and hosted services practice that will continue to help IT pros define individualized cloud paths that are tailored specifically to the needs of their businesses.

“The adoption of cloud computing promises to help organizations lower IT operational complexity, reduce IT operational costs, increase speed of IT services deployment and help IT and, therefore, business agility. But this is a complex arena,” according to Robert Mahowald, research vice president for SaaS and Cloud Services at IDC. "Data from IDC’s 2012 CloudTrack survey suggests that cloud providers need to work with their customers to design and plan thoroughly, and delineate all their underlying operational processes and systems via workshops, and then continue to provide them with guidance and consultancy as their business requirements change.”…

Grazed from BankSecurityInfo. Author: Peter Spier.

The fact of the matter is that when you and I say "cloud," we may be thinking of two very different things. Partly this stems from the adage "what’s old is new again" (welcome back, centralized computing) and partly from a lack of common definition or standards to provide a ready frame of reference.

Thankfully, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is on the case. With its release of Special Publication 800-146 [see NIST Issues Long-Awaited Cloud Guidance], the term "cloud" is defined as a service that maintains a pool of hardware resources to maximize service and minimize cost while providing a resource efficiency that permits hardware refresh without impact to its users…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

The Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) will be holding a webinar to introduce a new whitepaper, “Security for Cloud Computing: 10 Steps to Ensure Success,” on September 18, 2012 at 11am EDT. The whitepaper itself has been published and is available for free download. Anyone interested in learning more about the “Security for Cloud Computing” whitepaper should attend this free webinar and download a free copy of the document. Visit http://www.cloud-council.org/security-pr to register and download the whitepaper.

The “Security for Cloud Computing: 10 Steps to Ensure Success” whitepaper provides a practical reference to help enterprise information technology (IT) and business decision makers as they analyze and consider the security implications of cloud computing on their business. The paper includes a list of steps, along with guidance and strategies, designed to help these decision makers evaluate and compare security offerings in key areas from different cloud providers. The paper discusses the threats, technology risks, and safeguards for cloud computing environments, and provides the insight needed to make informed IT decisions on their treatment…

Grazed from Fox Business. Author: Claes Bell.

Does every cloud have a scammy lining?

Even if you don’t know what cloud computing is, it’s likely that "the cloud" is playing an ever-increasing role in your financial life. Whether it’s a company storing your sensitive financial information on remote computers owned by a third party or you storing financial information on cloud-based money management or tax software, cloud computing means more of your key data are stored beyond your physical reach.