Author: David

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Brandon Butler.

During a series of analyst briefings this week, Oracle has provided additional details of how it plans to play in the cloud moving forward.

The overall strategy is an ambitious one that features software (SaaS) and platform (PaaS) offerings, along with social collaboration tools, all leveraging the legacy database management systems that have made Oracle one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

"They’re investing substantially in the cloud," says Paul Hamerman, a Forrester analyst who is attending Oracle Industry Analyst World 2012…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

One of the initial promises of cloud computing is that it can be built onto existing data center infrastructure. No expensive hardware upgrades this time. To get the highest level of performance, simply implement the proper virtualization and resource allocation software and you’re good to go.

That may have been true enough when enterprises were first looking to build clouds. But now that the time has come to optimize those environments, it seems that a little hardware refresh is in order after all.

Primarily, this is to facilitate the integration of cloud layering technology onto easily deployable hardware footprints, which are quite often the purview of separate business units or entirely different companies. Fujitsu, for example, recently released an optimized System Center 2012 platform consisting of Primergy servers and the ServerView Resource Orchestrator software under Microsoft’s Private Cloud Fast Track partnership program. The end result is a complete server/storage/networking/management package geared specifically toward launching Hyper-V environments into the cloud…

Grazed from PRWeb.   Author: PR Announcement.

En Pointe Technologies Inc. has plenty of experience leading customers to Microsoft Office 365 and providing cloud solutions. The California-based IT solutions company has been recognized as a Cloud Innovator and is the subject of a Cloud Innovators profile at wsj.com this month documenting its success in moving companies to the cloud.

Since the early 1990s, En Pointe has grown from its role as an IT hardware provider into a premier software services and solutions consultant. Providing solutions to its customers is En Pointe’s focus, and the company works with clients at all stages of cloud computing — from those with small parts of their business in the cloud, to those with entire IT infrastructures hosted there. Microsoft Office 365 is a constant thread, offering numerous ways to improve service and reliability…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: John Connors and Brad Silverberg.

It’s no secret that recent consumer-technology innovations, from social networking to online chat to iPhones, are fundamentally transforming corporate IT. At the office, people are now demanding the same types of easy-to-use devices and social features they use at home. Witness new corporate-software products like Salesforce.com’s Chatter product, a sort of Facebook for business, or the decline of BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. That device is losing dramatic market share in corporate environments to the application-rich, consumer-focused Apple iPhone.

But there’s another, much bigger story to this “consumer-ization” of IT. We call it the “re-platforming” of enterprise computing. By that, we mean a move by enterprises to build the next generation of new applications and core services on top of the emerging “cloud-computing” and mobile-device platforms. This re-platforming will fundamentally re-shape the enterprise and usher in a massive new wave of tech innovation, just as similar platform waves such as the personal computer, client-server and the Internet did in the past…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

German enterprise software maker SAP AG aims to double its cloud computing market share this year, and to expand it thirty-fold over the next five years, manager magazin reports, citing an email to employees from board member Vishal Sikka.

Part of the expansion strategy includes further acquisitions in the field, the advance release of the report adds, citing employees at the company’s development facility in the German town of St. Leon-Rot who were present at a meeting with new cloud chief Lars Dalgaard.

A spokesman for SAP declined to comment…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Jason Bloomberg.

Quick quiz for all your Cloud aficionados out there: what’s missing from the NIST definition of Cloud Computing? To make this challenge easy for you, here’s the definition: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” Give up? What’s missing is any mention of data centers. Sure, today’s Clouds typically consist of resources in data centers, running one way or another on racks full of physical servers. But there’s nothing in the definition of Cloud that specifies anything about the physical location of Cloud resources…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Tanmay Deshpande.

Most of the time people look at cloud computing as challenge or they think that cloud computing is luxury and we can implement it only when we are in stable condition. But in fact, in today’s situation where the world is already suffering from a big economic crisis, most companies want to reduce their expenses on IT and IT-related tasks. But at the same time, it is required that those tasks get done, as in today’s cutting-edge technology world, automation of most of the processes are important and we just can’t stop these processes because of a recession . Now, you must be thinking, how to achieve this and how to convince your client to opt for Cloud Computing? Let’s have a look at the main challenges step-by-step and area where we can focus…