Cloud Services & Consumerization Driving Competition with Internal IT

There are two market forces that are fundamentally changing the nature of enterprise application delivery and consumption:

1. delivery of enterprise applications as a service via the cloud
2. the rapid shift of accessing enterprise applications on mobile devices

IT organizations are facing stiff competition from Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud providers who are delivering enterprise applications as a service that are faster, cheaper and accessible anywhere, on any device.

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Veeam Software, innovative provider of backup, replication and virtualization management solutions for VMware vSphere and Windows Server Hyper-V, announced it has won the 2012 Microsoft Management and Virtualization Partner of the Year Award. The company was honored among a global field of top Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.

“Veeam is pleased to be recognized as the 2012 Microsoft Management and Virtualization Partner of the Year,” said Ratmir Timashev, President and CEO, Veeam Software. “We have been working with Microsoft to help our customers manage and monitor their virtualized environments using System Center for more than five years. With the introduction of System Center 2012, we believe the promise of cloud computing is tangible and the benefits to businesses large and small will be immense.”…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Stoneware, the leader in Unified Cloud computing, announced the upcoming availability of LanSchool 7.7. This release includes many new features but remains simple and easy-to-use, as teachers and tech coordinators have come to expect. LanSchool v7.7 includes the ability to provide Distance Teaching, expanded iOS Teacher Assistant, iOS Student and Android Student support.

“We are proud to be the first classroom management vendor to provide Distance Teaching over the Internet,” said Rick German, CEO of Stoneware. “With this release, classroom management is no longer bound to an internal school network. Teachers have the same ability to help students learn wherever they are located.”

Distance Teaching is made possible by combining LanSchool with the webRelay technology inside Stoneware’s webNetwork 6.1…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Today, Sogeti, a leading provider of professional technology services, proudly announced it has won the 2012 Microsoft Alliance Cloud Innovation Partner of the Year Award. The company was honored among a global field of top Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.

"We at Sogeti are honored to be recognized as the Alliance Cloud Innovation Partner of the Year as well as the Windows Azure Partner of the Year. It is a rewarding to see the results of our commitment to the Microsoft Platform and the great collaboration between our two companies in this very exciting space," said Luc-Francois Salvador, Chairman and CEO of Sogeti Group.

"Cloud Computing is going to play a major part in the future of computing. We are therefore very excited to play a leading role in the innovation around this technology from the very beginning working together with Microsoft. We are committed to providing high quality technology solutions on the Microsoft Cloud Platform that create business value and results for our clients," added Sanjeev Agarwal, Sr. Vice President, Microsoft Solutions Practice at Sogeti…

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

Salesforce has bought SMB-focused corporate perks and employee rewards management start-up ChoicePass a year after the outfit drummed up $250,000 in seed money.

Its site will be shut down on June 30 and the team that put the operation together sucked up into Salesforce according to an official blog posting.

It said that "Since launching our Perks product, we’ve found that there is massive demand from businesses for innovative ways to manage employee engagement, rewards and incentives. It has been an amazing experience for us to work with such great companies, partners and of course, people."…

Grazed from Economic Times. Author: Editorial Staff.

Your e-mail has been on the internet cloud ever since you started using one. Now brace up to store more content on the cloud-with the convenience of being able to access it anywhere, anytime on any connected device. That’s the promise of cloud computing and this trend will only accelerate over the coming years.

According to research firm Gartner the desire to share content and to access it on multiple devices will motivate consumers to start storing a third of their digital content in the cloud by 2016. Gartner said that just seven percent of consumer content was stored in the cloud in 2011, but this will grow to 36% in 2016.

"Historically, consumers have stored content on their PCs, but as we enter the post-PC era, consumers are using multiple connected devices, the majority of which are equipped with cameras. This is leading to a massive increase in new user-generated content that requires storage," said Shalini Verma, principal research analyst at Gartner. "With the emergence of the personal cloud, this fast-growing consumer digital content will quickly get disaggregated from connected devices."…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

It’s one thing to be able to share files via cloud computing service; it’s quite another to be able to collaborate with multiple people who share access to the same applications on their favorite mobile computing device.

To help achieve that goal, Box today announced that it is extending the BoxOne Cloud service to add support for Google Android devices and applications alongside Apple iOS. According to Chris Yeh, vice president of platform at Box, Box is asking Google Android and Apple iOS application developers to use a Box application programming interface (API) in a way that allows their applications to be hosted in the BoxOne Cloud environment. At the moment, Yeh says that Box has 50 third-party applications available on the BoxOne Cloud platform for both Google Android and Apple iOS…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

Perhaps the biggest problem with cloud computing today is not the technologies involved, but rather the way IT organizations approach it.

In a new “Cloud Computing for Dummies” book, Judith Hurwitz, president of the IT consulting firm Hurwitz & Associates, and other well-known industry analysts make the case that IT organizations are not taking enough of a holistic approach to managing the cloud. The economics of cloud computing, says Hurwitz, are far from simple. IT organizations, she says, need to pay particularly close attention to the characteristics of the application workloads that are being put into the cloud and, given network bandwidth fees, how much and how often data is going to need to be moved.

Without a concerted plan, Hurwitz says IT organizations are going to wind up recreating the same mess that many of them have inside their data center in the cloud, which will be even harder to manage across multiple cloud service providers. The discipline needed to manage cloud computing, adds Hurwitz, begins with an emphasis on service-oriented architecture (SOA) fundamentals because at the end of the day, cloud computing is really all about the delivery of IT as a service…

Grazed from The Moscow Times. Author: Val Draggeim.

Internet technology has helped to create new business models since the late 90s that have reshaped how companies do business today. Now, the adoption of cloud computing is producing a new range of business services that are much more comprehensive and efficient, and they will undoubtedly define the next decade of business. The qualities that define cloud computing include on-demand service, elastic capacity, and variable consumption; these qualities offer a powerful new way to deliver new business services and business models.

Prospects of Cloud Computing in Russia

Worldwide spending on cloud computing is forecast to exceed $150 billion by 2013, with Russian spending likely to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Since IT use in Russian companies is less developed than in the United States and Western Europe, proportionately fewer organizations in Russia have significant data center infrastructures and fully automated, core business processes. For many companies, the main question is what path to take when building IT structures for the future, and the choice of computing infrastructures and business applications potential offers unlimited opportunities…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Lee Moorman.

Here’s a question. What if your computing needs outgrow the horsepower and features of your current stable of PCs and servers? Simple. You go buy better ones. Maybe try a different brand. And if you hate the new ones? No problem. Simply try another option. Or go back to the original. You always have a choice with hardware.

That, however, was yesterday. Today, companies of all sizes are getting themselves out of the hardware business and instead are buying their computing as a service, in the cloud. Trouble is, the freedom of choice and portability that you’ve enjoyed when purchasing computer hardware has been largely absent when you’re buying cloud services.

To see what I mean, consider movie rentals: a business revolutionized by cloud computing. Remember just a few years ago when you had to drive to Blockbuster and hope the movie you wanted wasn’t already checked out? Now, the cloud has enabled a growing list of services like Netflix, which allow us to stream any movie onto any device with the click of a button. Today’s cloud gives movie buffs unlimited choice and freedom. But is it giving businesses that same kind of choice and freedom?…