Author: David

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: JP Morgenthal

There’s been a lot of discussion about what makes cloud computing different than other forms of computing that have come before. Some refer to the set of attributes set forth by NIST, while others rely on less succinct qualifications simply satisfied to identify network accessible services as cloud, and others define cloud by applicable business models. In the past, I have written about scale as a common abstraction based on upon some of these other definitions. However, more recently, I’ve come to the realization that we need to define cloud by where it’s going and not what it is in its infancy.

Cloud computing is following in the vein of the automobile and fast food industries. These industries introduced their first products with little to no customization and then changed and competed on value based upon significant customization. The automobile industry started out offering only a black Ford Model T and today allows buyers to order a completely custom designed car online delivered to their home. Likewise, cloud computing started out as vanilla infrastructure services and is rapidly moving towards greater levels of customization. Ultimately, cloud computing will not be defined by service model monikers, but will be a complete provision, package and deliver (PPD) capability facilitating control over the type of hardware, operating systems, management systems, application platforms and applications…

Grazed from Wall Street Journal. Author: Clint Boulton.

Gartner said IT spending is expected to rise 3% to $3.6 trillion in 2012, largely on the strength of increased spending on cloud computing. The outlook for this year was raised from an earlier forecast of 2.5% growth. Nonetheless, the growth for this year will be much slower than the 7.9% gain in 2011, as economic turmoil in Europe, and slowdowns in China and the U.S. put pressure on IT budgets.

Cloud computing, which lets CIOs offload their hardware hosting and maintenance to a vendor, is one of the “bright spots” in IT spending, said Gartner analyst Richard Moore. Spending on the cloud is expected to rise to $109 billion this year from $91 billion last year. Moore said cloud-based business process software accounts for the bulk of cloud spending by enterprises, followed by platform as a service, software as a service and infrastructure as a service. Moore said cloud spending could nearly double to $207 billion by 2016…

Grazed from Wall Street Journal. Author: Clint Boulton.

CIOs are focusing the bulk of the growth in their IT spending on cloud computing and mobile technologies, which squares with the findings of Gartner’s new report on global IT spending.

Dominion Enterprise CIO Joe Fuller said mobile application development currently accounts for 26% of his total budget for the marketing services firm, but will rise to 40% by the end of the year as the company seeks to better compete with Zillow and other online brands.

He and his team developed roughly 29 mobile applications to enable customers to access brand websites such as ForRent.com and Homes.com from the iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone handsets. “We want to have the best mobile offerings out there,” Fuller said. “So we’ve got to step it up a notch.” Fuller is also on the process of testing hybrid cloud computing using virtualization software from VMware with the notion to gradually move away from locally-stored software to a complete cloud for its brands…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Rumors keep swirling about for the next-generation of video game consoles.

What sort of specs will the Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 have? How will these systems compare to the current-gen consoles? To gaming PCs? And how will cloud-computing figure in to the next generation of games, both in terms of processing power and distribution?

There’s no clear or certain answer to any of this, and likely won’t be for some time…

Grazed from HealthTech Zone. Author: Deborah Hirsch.

For a long time, healthcare organizations shied away from cloud computing, rightfully worried about privacy issues and security when confidential data was stored and managed on the Web.

But all that seems to have dissolved. A recent report by Dallas-based research firm MarketsandMarkets predicts the market will grow to $5.4 billion worldwide by 2017, according to a story by James Ritchie. In 2011, market penetration for cloud computing in healthcare was apparently 4 percent, representing only a $1.7-billion market.

Cloud computing allows organizations to rely on remote machines owned by another firm for software and data storage via a Web-based service for such functions as electronic medical records and for back-office functions, including billing and payroll, according to the study…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

As the presidential campaign gets into full swing in advance of the November election, there’s obviously a lot of focus on the employment outlook. While the accuracy of the numbers that the Department of Labor posts are dubious at best, there’s no doubt that the employment picture could be better. A lot of factors go into determining what the employment picture actually winds up being. But one factor that a lot of folks don’t seem to be appreciating is the role IT and cloud computing are about to play in reshaping in the economy.

While most of the employment chatter these days about cloud computing centers around the impact this shift will have on people working inside IT, the reality is that the impact on people working outside of IT is going to be exponentially greater. Once a company starts moving IT into a third-party data center, it’s only a matter of time before entire business processes start heading in that same direction. Once business process outsourcing starts to occur in volume, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that one smaller group of people in the cloud can automate a process or task that used to be performed by 10 times as many people working in 10 different companies. As that trend continues, it’s not like those jobs moved somewhere and will come back one day; they just simply disappeared into the cloud…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Arthur Cole.

Now that enterprises are becoming more comfortable with the cloud computing model for basic applications like backup and recovery, attention is starting to shift toward some of the more advanced possibilities.

Key among them is Infrastructure-as-a-Service, which promises not only software and operating instances on-demand, but entire data environments. While a number of high-profile services are up and running (most of the time, anyway) the question remains how close we are from making the transition from ad hoc service-based infrastructure to full utility computing.

At the moment, implementing a working IaaS architecture is a bit more complicated than switching the lights on. Hardware and software integration, network pathways, usage and governance policies and a range of other items generally mark the "to-do" list when it comes to establishing cloud infrastructure. However, it seems the process is becoming more streamlined, particularly as enterprises transition to more cloud-like architecture within their own data centers…

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

Microsoft is buying Perceptive Pixel Inc. (PPI), which makes large-scale, multi-touch displays, a new hardware line for the software giant.

Terms were not disclosed. 3M is understood to be an investor in PPI.

Kurt DelBene, president of Microsoft’s Office Division, said in a statement Monday that "PPI’s large touch displays, when combined with hardware from our OEMs, will become powerful Windows 8-based PCs and open new possibilities for productivity and collaboration."…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: Steven D. Jones.

Cloud computing is lifting the cloud over software mergers.

Recently SAP AG SAP -1.15% bid $4.3 billion for Ariba Inc. ARBA -0.08% , a manager of online purchasing networks. A day after that announcement, Oracle Corp. ORCL -0.31% said it was buying privately held Vitrue Inc., a maker of cloud-based social marketing software, for an undisclosed sum. A couple of weeks later, Microsoft Corp. MSFT -0.93% announced it would acquire social networking provider Yammer Inc. for $1.2 billion.

Even cloud companies are buying cloud companies. Salesforce.com Inc. CRM -3.34% announced it would purchase Buddy Media Inc. for $689 million. The company makes software that manages ad campaigns on social media such as Facebook FB +1.58% , Twitter and YouTube…