Author: David

While some are happy to debate definitions of cloud computing, I prefer to focus on the characteristics that make successful companies, successful. Lately there seems to have been a shift from the anything for anyone cloud to the industry or vertically focused cloud. Adding to this is today’s piece of news from Zynga who announced what they describe as "the beta release of Zynga.com,  a new service enabling third party developers to create and publish games on the Zynga Platform." Yes, that company that brought you farmville is now going to be a cloud service provider enabling a whole new crop of game companies, which I can only assume they will acquire when the time is right.

So why is this news important? It’s another great example of a trend in the cloud computing sector of "Vertically focused" cloud products and services. In the early days, there was this mentality of just build it and they would come. Problem was that for most, they never really came. Instead you had a handful of very large players and everyone else fighting over the table scraps. What those who survived learned, is that in order to be successful it isn’t about being the best funded or even the best performing, but instead it is about being the most focused on the needs of a particular customer vertical. Those who focus on a particular problem, be it for a particular enterprise sector, application or customer need will have a clear and distinct differentiation in a market dominated by me-too cloud services…

Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle Exadata Database Machine have been selected for CISDI INFO’s cloud computing platform, a cost effective information system, which allows enterprises to demonstrate and manage their design results on the design service platform.

Oracle will enable CISDI INFO to offer complete solutions for customers, and achieve its strategic objective to become the "International Engineered Technology Company and the Engineered Technology Service Provider- the first choice of steel companies"…

DocuSign today announced its DocuSign Cloud Partner Program to bring together leaders in cloud computing who are standardizing on DocuSign for eSignature to make it easier, faster, and more secure for companies of all sizes to manage online transactions and signatures in the cloud.

“Electronic signature has gone from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘must have’ as companies look for innovative ways to increase speed to results, reduce costs, and delight customers,” said Keith Krach, chairman and CEO of DocuSign. “We continue to see more industries, businesses, and individual professionals embrace DocuSign to sign everything, everywhere in the cloud – driven in part by partners integrating with DocuSign for their eSignature platform.”…

‘Cloud Computing’ are the words on everyone’s lips – it’s the latest technology, the way forward and has many benefits – but how safe is it? Is it reliable? How secure will your information be? Just what are the risks associated with Cloud Computing?

‘Cloud Computing: Assessing the Risks’, the latest book from ITGP answers these questions and many more, using jargon-free language and relevant examples, analogies and diagrams. Up-to-date, clear and comprehensive it truly is a guide to the security, governance, risk, and compliance elements of Cloud Computing. Find out more here: www.itgovernance.co.uk/products/3820…

VMTurbo, the leading provider of intelligent workload management software for cloud and virtualized environments, today announced the release of VMTurbo Operations Manager 3.1. This new release extends product integration to include the application delivery controller (ADC) infrastructure and CloudStack, the open source cloud computing platform. The addition of ADC support in the product automates the control and real-time resource allocation decisions for multi-tiered applications front-ended by acceleration and load balancing appliances.

Adding to the product’s existing support for VMware vCloud Director, the new support for CloudStack provides enterprises and cloud service providers with choice and delivers service assurance and improved utilization for the rapidly growing cloud infrastructure build-out…

Riverbed Technology, the performance company, today announced a continued partnership with VMware, which was developed to help enterprises accelerate their journey to the cloud, enabling businesses to increase efficiency and improve productivity while reducing costs. With the latest collaboration, Riverbed(R) wide area network (WAN) optimization solutions accelerate virtual machines (VMs) moving between clouds — private, public and hybrid — with VMware vCloud(R) Connector. The combination of Riverbed and VMware solutions can enable cloud service providers to maximize their cloud computing offerings by empowering their customers to utilize their existing IT investments…

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is becoming increasingly popular for high-performance computing. It’s now capable of running many of the applications that previously required building out a large HPC cluster or renting time from a supercomputing center. But as you might expect, Amazon EC2 can’t do everything a traditional supercomputer can.

Scientific applications that require super-fast interconnects are still the reserve of the IBM Blue Genes and Cray supercomputers of the world. However, Amazon’s adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections in its high-end cluster compute instances have expanded the usefulness of EC2.

As we’ve reported before, clusters of 30,000 cores, even 50,000 cores have been run on Amazon’s cloud for real-world scientific applications. A caveat is that these tend to be “embarrassingly parallel” applications, in which the interconnect speed isn’t important because each calculation runs independently of all the others…

Let’s set the stage with a couple of assertions:

• There will be a proliferation of cloud solutions within an enterprise – recall the days of client/server computing, where each line of business (LOB) or department went out to purchase its own solution, outside the control of IT.
• Recognizing the previous assertion, enlightened IT leaders have already started working proactively with their peers within the LOBs, sourcing, and with the financial controllers, to “educate” them about cloud, and ensure that they and IT are invited to the party!

Within this context, and before delving into enterprise architecture, let’s consider for the moment different aspects of a system…

Advances in virtualization, cloud computing, and mobile technology have created a perfect storm for a new era in end-user computing, one in which users can revel in their own personal cloud, connecting to all their apps and data, anyplace and anytime from any device, be it a Wyse thin client at work, a company-issued Android phone on the road, a personal iPad at the airport, or a Windows XP machine at home.

Although the trend means greater productivity for users, it can be a pain for IT admins charged with the unenviable task of ensuring that those disparate services, apps, and data are delivered consistently and securely, regardless of device or platform. With the the unveiling of an enterprise-grade Dropbox-like file sharing solution called Project Octopus, VMware aims to make the personal cloud a practical reality for businesses…