Author: David

Grazed from Thomasnet.  Author: PR Announcement.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is hosting Cloud Computing Forum & Workshop V on June 5-7, 2012, at the Department of Commerce’s Herbert C. Hoover Building in Washington, D.C.

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service-provider interaction. Government, industry, academia and individuals are using cloud services.

NIST’s role in cloud computing is to help accelerate the secure and effective adoption of cloud computing in the federal government. The agency leads efforts to develop standards and guidelines and advance cloud computing technology in collaboration with standards bodies, businesses and other private-sector organizations, government agencies and other stakeholders…

 

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced it will host the largest social enterprise event in Europe, Cloudforce London 2012, on May 22nd at the ICC London ExCeL. More than 14,000 people are expected to register to learn how their companies can use social and mobile cloud technologies to transform into social enterprises. Cloudstock, Europe’s first ever social enterprise developer event, will be co-located at Cloudforce London and allow developers to get hands-on, and start coding the next generation of social enterprise apps.

 

Free registration to attend in person is available at www.salesforce.com/uk/cloudforce or watch the keynote online and join the conversation with Salesforce Live! beginning at 10:00 a.m. BST at www.facebook.com/salesforce…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Darryl K. Taft.

With innovation as the overall theme of its Impact 2012 conference here, IBM (NYSE:IBM) unveiled its first-ever Mobile Foundation, a comprehensive portfolio of software and services designed to help organizations capitalize on the proliferation of mobile environments, including laptops, smartphones and tablets. Building on its recent acquisition of Worklight, the new foundation further expands IBM’s strategy to provide clients with a mobile platform that spans application development, integration, security and management.

For example, using the IBM Mobile Foundation, an airline can transform the way it interacts with its customers by establishing a secure two-way relationship with mobile applications. Airlines can use these new types of applications not only to keep customers apprised of their travel plans and current weather conditions, but also to send push-notifications to alert them if there are changes or opportunities for upgrades…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: George Anders.

Christian Gheorghe hates spending money if he can avoid it. As a teenager in Romania in the 1980s he replaced vacuum tubes to keep his television running and subsisted on a used laptop computer with a busted keyboard. Even after immigrating to the U.S. his frugal habits persisted.

In 2005 Gheorghe seethed at the expenses involved in building OutlookSoft, a business performance company where he was chief technology officer. It cost more than $600,000 to get rolling, buying dozens of servers, ­hiring support staffers to run the ­machines and acquiring costly licenses from the likes of Microsoft and Oracle. “You linger over every single penny,” Gheorghe recalled. “I kept needing to pay for another license. It never stopped.”

Gheorghe isn’t grumbling anymore. He now runs Tidemark Systems, a maker of business-analytics applications that is a penny-pincher’s delight. His corporate e-mail is free, via Google. Other open-source programs take care of databases and word processing. As for computing power, that’s not his headache anymore. He rents access to a constantly changing array of offsite servers, paying as little as 12 cents an hour for such cloud computing…

Grazed from CIO.  Author: Kenneth Corbin.

The federal government may not be renowned for its operational speed or agility, and certainly IT is no exception, but federal agency CIOs and their employees have gradually been warming to the new model of cloud computing, according to a panel of industry executives speaking at a conference here on Wednesday.

"We’ve seen movement both in private cloud and public cloud," says Susie Adams, chief technology officer for Microsoft’s federal business.

Adams and others noted that government clients are increasingly looking to commercial cloud services both for infrastructure functions like computing power and storage, and applications such as email and collaboration or CRM-like tools to deliver better citizen services…

Grazed from Windows IT Pro.  Author:  Jeff James.

Cloud computing adoption is gradually picking up steam, yet legitimate concerns about security, data portability, auditing, compliance, and other issues have kept some IT departments on the sidelines. Security solution vendor StillSecure hopes to tackle some cloud security concerns with their new Cloud Network Security Appliance (NSA).

"Security in a cloud environment can be both a black box and a minefield of risk at the same time. Most people aren’t prepared to cope with the kind of exposure and weaknesses that used to be hidden behind a firewall," said Carl Brooks, an infrastructure and cloud computing analyst at The 451 Group that was quoted in the StillSecure NAS launch announcement. "Fear of the unknown and having to rely on the ‘just trust us’ model are a bad combination. That’s why security remains one of the key factors preventing cloud adoption."…

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Onit, a leading provider of business productivity and process management apps, today announced that Paul Zengilowski, Customer Development Executive, and John Gilman, Director of Products, will present at the Managing Litigation Forum 2012. The duo will focus on the benefits of cloud computing and how law departments can leverage the increasingly app-centric approach to technology deployments in a session scheduled for May 3.

Based in New York City, Managing Litigation 2012 will host hundreds of corporate counsel interested in litigation readiness and how to put project management principles into practice…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Mobile operators are able to capitalize on demand for cloud services by bundling those services with their mobile data plans, according to a new report from Pyramid Research ( www.pyr.com ).

How Mobile Operators in Europe Monetize Consumer Cloud Computing Services analyzes the pricing models for cloud services launched by mobile operators in Europe. It begins by reviewing the existing pricing models and highlighting their limitations for telecom operators. Then Pyramid Research provides examples of how data plans evolve in order to address three key objectives of operators: increasing spending from existing users, retaining customers and attracting new users. Finally, Pyramid’s outlook on emerging models that will enable operators to make the most of their investments in deploying cloud-based services for the consumer market is presented. The report includes case studies of three operators: Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM), Orange Romania and Vodafone Portugal…