Author: David

July 28, 2012 Off

How a Private Cloud Help Applied Materials Save Suffering Engineers

By David
Grazed from CIO.  Author: Stephanie Overby.

When you’re a global, engineering-driven firm in a competitive industry, the last thing you want is a group of 2,200 ticked-off designers. But that’s what Applied Materials’ CIO faced a few years ago.

The $10.5 billion maker of semiconductors and solar power cell equipment had moved to a fully integrated product lifecycle environment to streamline its engineering operations.

But users said the new 3-D computer-aided design (CAD) systems made their jobs harder. They emailed the CEO about data integrity issues, complained about long load times, and some left the company altogether, calling out poor software performance in their exit interviews. According to one design leader, engineers were losing 30 percent of their productivity…

July 28, 2012 Off

Logicworks: The Cloud Your Way (Public, Private, Hybrid, And…)

By David
Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Joe Panettieri.

Logicworks, a top 100 cloud services provider, is branding around a new tagline dubbed “the cloud your way.” The concept: Whether customers need a private, public or hybrid cloud, Logicworks stands ready to help — even if you want to extend your applications into third-party clouds like Google Compute Engine.

That’s the message from CEO Kenneth Ziegler. “We grew up as a hosting company but our focus has always been on service and being a trusted advisor,” said Ziegler. Hence, the company offers guidance as customers seek to navigate multiple clouds.

Yes, traditional hosting services are a big piece of Logicworks’ business. But the organization is also working closely with media companies, software companies and other types of organizations that demand highly available cloud technologies. Whether you have a private cloud running Citrix XenServer or VMware, you can burst over onto Logicworks’ public cloud. “We’re hypervisor agnostic. We’ll even manage your infrastructure.” (Call it managed services meet cloud services.)…

July 28, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Xamarin Gets $12 Million A Round

By David
Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Remember Mono, Novell’s open source .NET-for-Linux project?

Well, after they were fired last year in the Novell acquisition, Miguel De Icaza and Nat Friedman, the guys responsible for Mono started Xamarin and got perpetual rights to Mono, MonoTouch and Mono for Android.

Now they’ve got a $12 million A round from Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners and Floodgate on the strength of their 7,500 paying customers and reported 150,000 developers.

Xamarin’s focused on mobile apps with Visual Studio and C# and will use the money to scale adoption.

July 28, 2012 Off

Vblocks — here today, where tomorrow?

By David
Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Now that VMware has bought Nicira and its software-defined networking expertise, doubts about the future of the VCE Vblock effort have multiplied. VCE is the three-year-old partnership between EMC, Cisco and VMware. The goal was to sell Vblocks — converged bundles of EMC storage, Cisco servers and networking and VMware virtualization. The theory was that companies want pre-integrated data center technology as opposed to piece parts.

There was strife early as could be expected when three tech powerhouses with their own agendas try to make nice. What’s new is that with Nicira in the fold, VMware gets more directly competitive with Cisco, further stressing the partnership. Cisco is attacking software-defined networking with its $100-millionInsieme spin-in.

“I think [the VMware-Nicera deal] is the last nail in VCE’s coffin,” said Vanessa Alvarez, president of Alvarez Consulting…

July 28, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: DocuSign Raises $47.5 Million D Round

By David
Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

DocuSign, which claims to be the global standard for legally binding, secure electronic-signatures, has raised a $47.5 million D round led by Kleiner Perkins, an investment that will put Kleiner partner Mary Meeker, once Wall Street’s leading Internet analyst, on its board.

Accel Partners and Salesforce.com, Comcast Ventures, SAP Ventures and the National Association of Realtors also participated, the cloud-based San Francisco operation said.

The round brings total investment in the digital platform that replaces slow, expensive paper transactions to $104 million…

July 28, 2012 Off

Oracle: Cheapest Pure Play On Cloud Computing Market

By David
Grazed from Seeking Alpha.  Author: Christopher Bayliss.
 
 

Oracle (ORCL) is the leading producer of enterprise software and a leading producer of computer hardware and products. On June 6, the company announced that it will be focusing its products and efforts on cloud computing namely through platform as a service (PAAS) via its operating systems and network setups, and software as a service (SAAS) via its fusion applications and other software.

Oracle’s main competitors have been SAP, Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG) and Hewlett-Packard (HP). However, this group is somewhat late to the cloud computing market, so principal competitors will now include Salesforce (CRM) and Workday, and HP is now focusing on infrastructure as a service (IaaS). In brief, it appears that Oracle will have the ability to become a player in the promising market for cloud computing and is the least expensive way to gain exposure to this major trend…

July 27, 2012 Off

Porticor Joins Amazon Web Services Partner Network To Further Protect Private Information In Amazon Web Services Environments

By David
Grazed from Porticor.  Author: PR Announcement
 

Porticor, a leading cloud data security company delivering a cloud-based data encryption solution, today announced that it is now a member of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network and AWS Marketplace, where the Porticor Virtual Private Data (Porticor VPD) system is available to AWS customers with a click of a button.

The Porticor VPDsystem is a solution combining data encryption with patented split-key management technology to protect critical data in public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Unlike traditional data encryption solutions, which are complicated and expensive to deploy and manage, Porticor’s split-key management system is offered as a cloud data protection service which ensures customer encryption keys are never exposed.

July 27, 2012 Off

Which Governance Framework Is Right For Cloud Computing?

By David

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

The Threat

Cloud computing is revolutionizing how organizations use technology worldwide and for a good reason, it leverages on economies of scale more than any application of technology in recent history. And with the economic stability of the world swaying back and forth, organizations and businesses are forced to embrace that which makes them more stable and compete in a shaky market. Cloud computing allows them to do just that as it leverages their business processes with high returns and low costs.

But the aggregation of data and information in a single virtual space has its own risks –it becomes a prime target for attackers and opportunists. This is more in line with the concept of data gravity. As data becomes more massive, the faster it attracts other services, application, customers, and yes even attackers. It also becomes harder to move which only assures attackers that the data they want is in the same place at any given time…

July 27, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: Terracotta’s BigMemory Capacity Swells

By David

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Terracotta put out a new 3.7 version of its BigMemory Wednesday that can squeeze 10x more data into in-memory where it can hug ultra-fast processing and search. Poof, instant analysis of real-time Big Data.

The move will let it support the multi-terabyte servers that are now becoming standard fare. Those boxes now come with 2TB-4TB of RAM. Terracotta’s compression technology can squeeze a terabyte of data into 500 gigs of inexpensive RAM and multi-terabyte servers can be added linearly to create massive in-memory Big Data solutions.

The company says it upgraded out of customer demand for ever-increasing scale, speed and performance for their apps…

July 27, 2012 Off

Cloud Aggregator intY is Acquired by Weather Investments

By David

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Weather Investments II S.a.r.l ("Weather") and intY Ltd ("intY") announced today that Weather has acquired intY, the award winning Cloud Computing company, marking a strategic investment to accelerate the growth of cloud aggregation services across the globe.

The intY management and operational team will remain unchanged; driving the business into its next phase of global expansion with its intY CASCADE platform. CASCADE is a key enabling technology allowing service providers and resellers to bring together cloud computing applications from multiple vendors in an integrated solution, with one touch provisioning, billing and management of all services…