Author: David

Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Verne Kopytoff.

Your company has enthusiastically embraced cloud computing. All its website data, customer records, and payroll information sit in the cloud—that is, on servers managed by third parties. Life is easier, right? Probably. But cloud services aren’t free. Bills can balloon if no one pays attention.

Enter Cloudability, one of several startups that help customers track spending across multiple cloud services and identify waste and potential cost savings. With so many business departments using so many cloud services, it’s common for a company’s accountants to confront unpleasant surprises at the end of the month.

Jason Fuller, head of cloud service delivery for Pega Systems, a business software company based in Cambridge, Mass., says it took two employees two or three days each month to find and organize dozens of cloud service bills. Since becoming a Cloudability customer earlier this year, managers now receive automatic e-mails with updates on spending, along with alerts regarding individual accounts deemed likely to exceed budget…

Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Verne Kopytoff.

Scribbling customer orders on small slips of pink paper was no way for a thriving business such as Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, N.J., to operate. Some orders disappeared. Others were filled twice or written in such harried handwriting as to be illegible. Eventually, the bakery’s management decided enough was enough and adopted Salesforce’s (CRM) computerized system for logging orders and tracking customers. Because the service is in the cloud, the bakery avoids the headache of operating a mini-data center and installing regular security updates.

It’s all handled from Salesforce’s servers. All Carlo’s has to do is to bake cakes. “I’m not in the business of maintaining that kind of infrastructure,” says Leo Minervini, Carlo’s chief information officer. “It was basically pen and paper up until two months ago.”…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

“We cannot be more pleased with the technology and performance of the CenturyLink network and the advantages it is bringing our clients,” commented Dan Cullen, CoSentry Vice President and general manager of network operations. He continued, “We have since upgraded to full Tera-PoP facilities in order to have 10GB to 100GB services available to our clients.”

The project allows clients to purchase integrated cloud and network services at a significant discount and to take advantage of CoSentry’s VBlock systems, backup cloud services, as well as archiving and virtual data center platforms…

Grazed from Computer Technology Review. Author: Editorial Staff.

Logicworks, provider of cloud computing and managed hosting, announced Tuesday new updates to its public cloud platform that will bring enhanced management capabilities and cost savings to customers. Integrated with Logicworks’ array of managed services, the public cloud is built to seamlessly sync with existing enterprise IT infrastructures and deliver the performance needed to power mission-critical applications.

Logicworks has taken an enterprise approach to its public cloud offering, integrating functionality previously available exclusively to private cloud and managed service customers. These updates incorporate a management interface, giving clients increased control and ease of use under one dashboard. Further updates include enterprise-level support, multi-cloud manageability, RightScale-supported configuration management and lower pricing…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Douglas Bonderud.

As cloud computing has evolved into an adolescent technology, so too has its market, with competitors large and small fighting for their piece of the virtual pie. But the expanding options for companies means greater pressure from providers outside American borders, and other nations are now playing up U.S. cloud privacy issues—both real and embellished—to convince small and midsize business IT admins that local isn’t always better.

Scare and Scare Alike

According to a July 26, 2012, article at PCWorld, technology experts are now warning government officials about the challenges of overseas cloud expansion. In a panel warning on July 25, tech experts told members of the House of Representatives that foreign nations are raising concerns about both US security and privacy to convince businesses on their own soil to stay local and to woo American companies that aren’t yet certain how to proceed in the cloud…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

In the last few years, businesses have gone from asking what the cloud is, to investigating how they can leverage the cloud to avoid costly on-premise hardware investments.

A recent IDG Enterprise study notes that two-thirds of IT professionals believe cloud computing is a significantly important enabler of business innovation. Midmarket and enterprise businesses, in particular, prefer private clouds – either on-premise or third-party hosted – because they provide greater manageability and control than hybrid or public clouds. As such, it is not surprising that the IDG study also found that private clouds currently dominate the IT landscape, with 24 percent of enterprises having adopted the model.
Cloud Challenges

Yet, while enterprises understand that they can gain tremendous returns from private cloud investments, the cost of building and sustaining clouds threatens to negate many of those gains. The IDG Enterprise study finds nearly 7 out of 10 enterprises are challenged by the need to evolve their skillsets to develop, implement and maintain private clouds. Just as the cost of maintaining on-premise infrastructure is too expensive, so too is the cost of professional staff to build, manage and maintain private and hosted cloud assets…

Grazed from Internet Evolution. Author: Mara Jander.

Now that the initial euphoria over the safe landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars has passed, it’s time to start asking some questions about the technology behind this amazing mission and what, if anything, it can contribute to the knowledge of enterprise IT pros.

Actually, IT pros may find they’re right in the swim with NASA (to use an Olympic metaphor), perhaps even pulling ahead of it, when it comes to cloud computing.

Case in point: Given the government’s verbal emphasis on cloud’s value (despite resistance from key agencies), cloud computing hasn’t factored very prominently in the Curiosity mission. Indeed, when I phoned Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL) yesterday, a spokesperson denied that any cloud services at all were used in the making of Curiosity…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

Infochimps, the Austin, Texas-based startup that transitioned in February from a data marketplace into a big data platform, has stepped up its abilities to handle streaming data. On Tuesday, it unveiled the Infochimps Platform 1.1, which improves the platform’s real-time analytics engine and turns its Wukong command line interface into a tool for writing scripts that can process streaming data.

The company has described its platform, which is hosted on the Rackspace Cloud, as Heroku for Hadoop — although that characterization is becoming antiquated. While Hadoop is certainly an important part of the Infochimps stack, it’s actually not the focal point. “Usually, people come to us because they have a big data problem and heard they should look at Hadoop,” Infochimps CEO Joe Kelly told me, but they end up accomplishing a lot before they ever turn to Hadoop…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Steven Burke.

GreenPages Technology Solutions CEO Ron Dupler is upping the ante in the solution provider’s no-holds barred cloud-computing services offensive with a big application development bet.

Speaking at GreenPages’ 15th annual summit, billed as "Cloudscape 2," Dupler told about 100 customers that the Kittery, Maine-based company is making "aggressive bets and investments as we move forward around application modernization, big data and business intelligence."

“Applications that aren’t ready to operate in a cloud world is one of the big inhibitors in the shift to the cloud that is going on today,” said Dupler in a keynote address in Portsmouth, N.H. “That’s an area that we see as very important as we move ahead.”…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

The Gartner Gang reports that cloud computing represents the fastest-growing segment of the IT outsourcing market. While still a relatively small piece of this market, it points to a blurring between solutions. Are cloud providers — especially Infrastructure or Platform-as-a-Service vendors — IT outsourcers? Are IT outsourcers and systems integrators becoming cloud vendors? What’s the difference anymore?

Gartner just reported that worldwide spending for IT outsourcing services is on pace to reach $252 billion in 2012, a two-percent increase from 2011 spending of $247 billion. The fastest-growing segment within this market is cloud compute services, which is part of the cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) segment.

Cloud compute services are expected to grow 49% in 2012 to $5.0 billion, up from $3.4 billion in 2011, according to Gartner…