Author: David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

It’s a tough economy out there. That’s why some figures from the new Uptime Institute’s 2012 Data Center Industry Survey might surprise those who would expect spending on data center infrastructure to be cut to the bone. That’s not true for the majority of the 1,100 owners and operators that responded to the second annual survey. Here are my top five fun facts from the new survey.

1. Public cloud is big, private cloud is bigger. This year, 25 percent of respondents said they’re adopting public cloud, up from 16 percent last year. And 49 percent are deploying private clouds, up from 35 percent last year…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Michael Cooney.

It’s no secret that agencies core to the U.S. government has as a central plan – known as Cloud First — to move most operations toward a cloud computing service. In the process of course is a never-ending evaluation by other agencies to talk about how those cloud implementations are doing.

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued the Cloud First policy in December 2010 which requires federal agencies to implement cloud services whenever a secure, reliable and cost-effective cloud option exists; and to have migrated three technology services to the cloud by June.

This week the Government Accountability Office issued a report on the overall progress of that plan and in the process found seven common challenges that the GAO said may end up impeding their ability to realize the expected benefits of cloud-based implementations…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Elizabeth White.

ActiveState has announced the general availability of Stackato 2.0, the application platform for creating a private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The private PaaS solution now supports .NET applications, offers web-based visual cluster management and delivers performance improvements that foster enterprise development agility. In conjunction with the release, ActiveState also announced a Stackato enterprise customer relationship with Aeroflex.

According to Bart Copeland, CEO at ActiveState, "Stackato 2.0 redefines private PaaS for the enterprise, enabling more agile development, greater DevOps transparency, more efficient cloud management and faster time to market."…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

GenoSpace, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based informatics company, has launched a cloud computing platform to provide access to a variety of genomic and phenotypic data and designed to advance biomedical research and personalized medicine.

Formed in 2011, GenoSpace leverages years of systems development experience and deep domain knowledge of founders John Quackenbush and Mick Correll, who, together at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, created software systems linking clinical and research data. Recognizing that the rapidly falling cost of genome sequencing would make existing systems obsolete, they developed a cloud-based data storage and "software-as-a-service" platform based on a robust, scalable, and secure data model. A key element of the GenoSpace system is its collection of intuitive, informative, data-access portals that can address the needs of a broad range of users…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Cumulogic, a company with strong Sun Microsystems and Java DNA, wants to make its technology the foundation of enterprise-class PaaSes to be offered by telcos, hosting companies and other service providers.

The two-year old company started out building a managed public PaaS that it would sell to developers, but changed course, said Mike Soby, a CA veteran who joined the company as CEO in February. Now the idea is to be more an arms dealer to service providers that want to offer an enterprise-friendly Java PaaS to their customers.

“We want to be in the software business, not the service provider business.” On Wednesday, that PaaS infrastructure software, which has been in beta for some time, is generally available…

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

Dropbox has doubled the space in its existing $99-a-year Pro 50GB and $199-a-year 100GB cloud storage plans without raising prices and introduced a new $499-a-year 500GB plan.

It says it’s responding to user demand though it’s really more a matter of trying to keep up with the competition. Google Drive only costs $60 a year for 100GB and Microsoft’s SkyDrive is $50 a year for 107GB. Current Dropbox Pro users have been automatically updated to the added space, and all new Pro users can sign up access the new 100GB, 200GB and 500GB plans.

Consumers can still get 2GB for free and businesses may be better off with Dropbox for Teams, which starts at around $800 a year for five users.

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

The European Court of Justice (ECJ), the European Union’s version of America’s Supreme Court, told Oracle last week that it can’t stop the resale of its customers’ castoff software, specifically the stuff that’s downloaded from the Internet.

It held that the new owner can download the "used" software from Oracle’s site along with updates and patches covered by the original maintenance agreement.

Oracle tried to argue that downloaded software was different from software physically transmitted on a CD or DVD…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Cloud Ventures.

The backbone of our upcoming submission to the Canadian Government on how they can best manage their $400m VC industry booster, is a deep expertise in Enterprise Cloud Computing.

We will be able to describe a high-growth fund because we’re able to define where the high-growth industry sector opportunities are. As Gartner describe, Cloud is booming amongst an overall lackluster IT sector growth, forecast to reach over $200 billion by 2016.

This will be shared via various ongoing activities, starting with this first document, my snapshot of ‘The Investors Guide to Enterprise Cloud Computing‘…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

MicroStrategy is adding an Express option for potential users of its cloud-based BI (business intelligence) service, the company announced Tuesday.

The Express edition, now in beta, is a move up from MicroStrategy Cloud’s Personal version, which is available at no charge, but doesn’t offer as much as the full-featured Platform edition.

Personal is aimed at individual users, who can upload information from Excel spreadsheets and Salesforce.com to MicroStrategy Cloud and then run visualizations and analytics against it. The resulting reports can be shared through blog posts or social media…