Author: David

There has been a push for Shared services adoption across organizations for a while. since such services reduce duplication and can result in cost savings. However there have been challenges to proposing and implementing shared services. Cloud is enhancing the pace to shared services migration and it naturally facilitates the use of shared services since a cloud service can be more easily leveraged by multiple consumers.

Cloud is the true manifestation of a service delivery mechanism and has significantly sped up the transition to consolidation and shared services. Cloud can be termed as the next generation of shared services since it adds the dynamic computing, elasticity, self-service, measured aspects in addition to other aspects for rapid provisioning and on demand access. Cloud solution may offer lower lifecycle costs based on usage and the monitoring aspects can lay out a holistic view of usage, cost assessments and chargeback information. All this information can enhance the ability of the organization to plan and react to changes based on performance and capacity metrics…

Dublin-based Vordel has spun up a newfangled API Server offering the enterprise a single platform to deploy APIs to cloud services and mobile users.

The widgetry builds on its application gateway technologies.

The company sees it as a simpler, more agile way to deploy apps and a quicker way to drive revenue.

The APIs Vordel has in mind are the lightweight REST and JSON APIs used to enable mobile, web and cloud applications; SOAP APIs for SOA; and file-based interfaces for B2B integration.

Architecturally the API Server could replace or stand in front of an application server. It can be deployed in traditional data centers or in an elastic cloud environment, including public, private and hybrid clouds…

iomart Group plc (AIM:IOM), is proud to announce that it won the award for Outstanding Performance in Business Growth at the Digital Technology Awards.

The judges praised iomart Group’s financial performance, profitability and ability to deliver on its business strategy, describing it as "one of the leading cloud computing and managed hosting companies in the UK."

iomart Group plc CEO Angus MacSween said: "We are delighted to have won this award. Our strategy has been to position the iomart Group and its range of hosting brands to capitalise on the continuing growth in the market for cloud services. This market is still large, fragmented and growing and we see real opportunities to benefit from this over the next few years."…

The thinking behind Keen.io is pretty simple: No one should have to build their own analytics infrastructure, especially not mobile developers. It’s a long, hard, complex process that’s only made more difficult in an era where developers want to track a lot more metrics than just pageviews. So Keen built an analytics infrastructure for them — well enough to win over the judges at GigaOM’s Structure Launchpad competition on Wednesday.

According to Co-founder and CEO Kyle Wild, mobile developers are an underserved market when it comes to analytics. They don’t necessarily have the tools to build analytics platform in the first place, but there aren’t many places they can turn for products that will do the jobs they require in an analytics product. Whereas there are plenty of web 1.0-style products for tracking pageviews, Wild said, mobile apps need a way to track everything from subscribers to clicks to how many times an app was opened and closed…

Drive may not be the only cloud-based service Google launches this year. According to GigaOm, sources have confirmed previous rumors that Google wants to compete with Amazon in the corporate cloud services market. That means launching virtual servers like those in Amazon’s EC2. Google already has some similar services for developers, including Google Cloud Storage and Google App Engine, which provide data storage and a web app platform respectively.

If it launches a more comprehensive service, these might end up getting rolled into it, but GigaOm says it’s also planning to work with third parties, specifically cloud management services Rightscale and Opscode…

‘Cloud Computing’ has been on the lips of every IT vendor marketing manager for the past two or three years and Reg readers have always been forthright in telling us what is happening in their organisation compared to the hype. While some vendors think ‘Private Cloud’ to be a contradiction in terms, Reg readers disagree, with many having a good grasp of the solution architecture as well as generally accepting the term itself.

But while public and private Cloud have coined much of the column inches in the press, more recently it is clear that some attention is now being paid to hybrid clouds. In this approach organisations make use of services running inside the enterprise on their private cloud systems and combine these with resources hosted outside the business in public cloud farms. As you’d expect, when we asked readers of the Register to tell us how they see things shaping up here, they filled us in…

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a document, entitled Cloud Computing Synopsis and Recommendations, that aims to cut some of the confusion that chief information officers (CIOs) feel around the issue of cloud business, says a ZDNet report.

The document starts by explaining some of the options for cloud configurations and how organizational goals affect which options are right for a particular business. It paves the way for a deeper look at deployment and service models, economic issues, operational issues, security, and service. With more midsize businesses looking to make the move to cloud-based tools, at least for some non-critical applications, this could be a way to help the decision-making process…