Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Patrick Burke.

Grazed from Gadget.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

Microsoft will be offering $60 000 of free cloud services to selected small software businesses through its BizSpark Plus initiative.

$60 000 of free cloud computing over two years? Sound too good to be true? But it’s exactly what Microsoft will be offering a select few local small software businesses through its BizSpark Plus initiative, a global program designed to help accelerate the success of early stage startups.

Clifford de Wit, developer and platform lead at Microsoft SA, says the initiative is aimed at building a vibrant local software development community in South Africa.

“We really want to give small software developers the incentive they need to not only develop local software, but also the business savvy they need to take their software to market. Ultimately, we’d like to see South Africa becoming an exporter, rather than an importer, of intellectual property!”…

Grazed from V3.co.uk.  Author: Rosalie Marshall.

There has been a lot of conversation and debate about Google’s entry into the cloud storage market and how its new Drive service will compete with the likes of DropBox, SkyDrive, and iCloud.

However, a deeper discussion exists on whether the increased numbers of cloud storage offerings available to businesses signals problems ahead for traditional on-premise storage vendors, like EMC, IBM and Oracle.

The storage-as-a-service market is still underdeveloped when compared to the software-as-a-service market, but this is unlikely to be the case for long, when there is so much industry focus and investment on taking storage services to the cloud…

Grazed friom MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Callidus Software Inc., the leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing, announced today that Accenture and salesforce.com will deliver keynotes at C3 2012 (CallidusCloud Customer Connections), its annual conference of customers, partners, and industry thought leaders, held May 6-8, 2012, at the Aria Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Mark Woollen, Vice President, Product Marketing, Sales Cloud, salesforce.com, will speak about the social revolution that is taking place today and how companies can transform themselves into social enterprises to create opportunities to delight their customers in meaningful new ways. Specifically, Woolen will showcase how companies are leveraging social, mobile and open cloud technologies to collaborate, communicate and share information with customers and employees to stay competitive in this new business climate…

Grazed from ITWeb.  Author: Nadine Arendse.

Cloud computing is to take some credit for the £52 million raised by this year’s Sport Relief, The Cloud Circle reports.

The record-breaking sum of money received by the Sport Relief charity in 2012 came through more than 300 000 donations, peaking at an incredible rate of 149 payment transactions per second. The resilient and scalable features of the cloud have been hailed as an integral factor in allowing the charity to cope with such demand.

Over the course of the campaign earlier this year, the www.sportrelief.com Web site attracted more than three million unique visits. On one day alone, the site received 500 000 hits.

Carrenza operates and manages two core cloud platforms for Comic Relief, a donation platform and a core Web sites platform, The Cloud Computing Journal writes…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

Piston Computing plans to build a bridge to EMC VMware’s Cloud Foundry, meaning it will link Piston’s own OpenStack-based cloud IaaS offering. What does this mean for cloud development? It’s the start of many other such integration efforts, I suspect, to battle the meteoric rise of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cloud Foundry is a popular open source platform service, which VMware promotes as a PaaS for any infrastructure. Piston is one of many companies that rely on OpenStack. The OpenStack fraternity includes Akamai, AMD, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, CloudScaling, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, NTT, Rackspace, and Yahoo. The OpenStack movement is really a competitive pushback on AWS in the IaaS space. Both Cloud Foundry and Piston’s OpenStack are available under the Apache 2 license…

Contributed Article.  Author: Nati Shalom, CTO of GigaSpaces Technologies

 

Cloud bursting is an application deployment model in which an application runs on a private cloud or datacenter and bursts to a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes. A burst is a specific amount of data sent or received in one intermittent operation when a threshold is reached. The advantage of such a hybrid cloud deployment is that an organization only pays for extra compute resources only when they are needed.

Neal Sample the former CTO of X.commerce at eBay gave an interesting talk last year on the economic benefit of Cloud Bursting. Neal pointed out eBay traffic statistics and showed some real numbers of the business impact of bursting peak load activities using on-demand cloud resources as presented in the diagram below.

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) today welcomed T-Systems, corporate customer arm of Deutsche Telekom, to the organization’s steering committee, as well as Cloudera, Hortonworks, Lenovo, Link4Dev , MapR, SAS and Symantec as solutions provider members. The membership of the Alliance continues to grow as companies recognize the need for a common voice in the expansion and development of cloud computing requirements.

The ODCA also announced a call for papers for ODCA Forecast 2012 Poster Chat and Birds of a Feather discussions. Held on June 12, in conjunction with the 10th International Cloud Expo in New York City, ODCA Forecast 2012 will bring together hundreds of members of the Alliance, industry experts and leading technology companies to showcase how ODCA usage model adoption can accelerate ROI for businesses deploying cloud solutions and services…