Author: David

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

ViaWest, one of the largest privately-held data center, cloud computing and managed services providers in North America, announces today it closed an additional $65MM of debt financing to fund future growth initiatives. This additional investment reflects the strong support of the company’s growth prospects, operational infrastructure and delivery of the highest-level of data center services.

Since its acquisition by Oak Hill Capital Partners in 2010, ViaWest has continued its rapid growth. In 2011, the company opened new premium data centers in the Portland, Oregon and Dallas, Texas markets, bringing its total number of datacenters to 22. ViaWest also recently announced several strategic product launches including its KINECTed Storage, Managed Security, KINECTed Back Up and KINECTed Cloud solutions. ViaWest anticipates that it will utilize the additional capital to continue its market expansion and to further drive its product portfolio, particularly in cloud computing and managed services…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Balaji Viswanathan.

Mobile cloud is the convergence of cloud computing and mobile apps. It is one of the hottest trends in cloud computing that is expected to play an increasingly important role in the future. The need for mobile clouds stem from the following trends:

1. Enterprise and consumer mobiles apps are getting increasingly smart. The days of using mobile phone just to access the Exchange and browsing the web is giving away into using the mobile for accessing spreadsheets, delivering presentations and performing data processing. To cater to the intensive computing needs on the mobile, advanced apps run from the cloud.

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

This being the 21st century, dissident stockholder Third Point LLC has taken its nascent proxy fight over the soul of Yahoo to the web.

Under a "vacancy" sign, it’s set up a precedent-setting blog at www.valueyahoo.com where it intends to pick apart the litany of Yahoo’s missteps to convince its fellow investors that the company’s destiny would be better off in savvier hands like those of the four pretty high-profile independent directors it’s proposed should sit on the Yahoo board.

The site is done up in Yahoo’s signature purple and there’s a linking Facebook page. (You will of course remember that Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson, ex of PayPal, is suing Facebook for infringing Yahoo patents.)…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Citrix today unveiled the next phase of its strategy to accelerate the broad adoption of open, interoperable cloud computing. As a key part of this strategy, the company’s popular CloudStack™ solution will become the first cloud platform in the industry to be submitted to the Apache Software Foundation, home of the world’s most successful open source projects. Elevating CloudStack into a full open source Apache project will further accelerate its mission of delivering a powerful, proven, hypervisor-agnostic platform that helps customers of all sizes build true Amazon-style clouds. CloudStack brings to Apache more than 30,000 community members, thousands of certified apps, and hundreds of production clouds, collectively generating more than $1 billion in cloud revenue from some of the biggest brands in the industry. To capitalize on this market momentum, Citrix will also deliver a commercially supported release of the proposed Apache CloudStack distribution as the centerpiece of its cloud infrastructure product portfolio…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

YouDazzle today announced that it has for the first time combined online file sharing and web meetings in a simple, centralized interface accessible via any device, harnessing the communications power of the cloud for companies and professionals of all shapes and sizes. In addition, YouDazzle today brought the $100 billion cloud services market opportunity to millions of home-based businesses by introducing the first sales distribution model that makes it easy for anyone to learn cloud technology and enter this lucrative market space.

"The cloud will change the way the world lives, works, plays, and learns. Our goal is to provide a rich but simple way for anyone to synchronously and asynchronously collaborate and interact on any device," said Cary Cole, founder and CEO, YouDazzle. "We’ve developed a simple cloud-based service for companies of all sizes to dazzle their clients, prospects and colleagues. Professionals can conduct business in an elegant, branded data room by storing, sharing or presenting data at any time from anywhere."…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Virtela, the world’s largest independent managed network, security and cloud services company, today announced that its Cloud-based Mobile Device Management (MDM) service has won the 2011 Cloud Computing Excellence Award presented by global media company TMC. The award recognizes companies that most effectively leveraged cloud computing efforts to bring new, differentiated offerings to market in the last year.

Virtela was honored for exemplifying innovation and excellence in the cloud computing market by helping global companies manage the pervasive use of smartphones and tablets in the enterprise and implement successful mobility strategies. Gartner recently announced that worldwide smartphone sales grew 47% in the fourth quarter of 2011 to reach 149 million units, to total 472 million units sold for the year. This number will increase in 2012 as more devices make their way into the enterprise, spurring companies to implement mobile device management…

Grazed from PR Web.  Author: PR Announcement.

SkyDox, a leading provider of cloud-enabled file sharing, file synchronization, storage, and collaboration tools, today announced that it has been invited to speak at the Hosting and Cloud Transformation Summit Europe 2012 (HCTS EU) to a group of senior-level executives about the future of the cloud computing industry. Analyst group, 451 Research, is hosting the two-day conference at the Hotel Russell in London on the 2nd and 3rd April.

Anthony Foy, SkyDox CEO, will take part in a panel debate on cloud storage business models together with other major vendors across the hosting and cloud storage sector. Drawing on expertise in building profitable companies and increasing shareholder value, Anthony will be providing insights on how vendors can meet demand from Information Communication Technology (ICT) decision-makers for value added storage and collaboration service that help them drive operational efficiencies. Over 250 hosting and infrastructure providers, software and hardware vendors, enterprise decision-makers and financers will be attending the event…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: David Linthicum.

As enterprises continue to move to cloud computing, blunders will occur, but we’ll also see success with the cloud. Now is a good time to survey what works — that is, the best practices around cloud deployment. Here is my initial list, but it will evolve over the next few years.

Note: These are mainly management concepts dealing with the people aspect of cloud computing. The best practices around the use of the technology are emerging, but the most common breakdowns seem to be reside within brains, not servers…

Grazed from Gadget.com.   Author: Tim Walter.

With the arrival of uncapped and affordable ADSL products for SMEs, cloud computing is set to transform the way that businesses consume ICT services within the next two years, says TIM WALTER of Nashua Mobile.

The high price and erratic quality of bandwidth in South Africa are the two of the major factors that have held back cloud computing. With the arrival of innovative and affordable data products such as uncapped ADSL products aimed at SMEs, this picture is rapidly changing…

Grazed from SmartHouse Media.  Author: Oonagh Reidy.

International cloud services are making significant headway in the Australian enterprise market, with Amazon Web Services, Apple and Google widely used here.

Two thirds of Oz enterprises that use IaaS (infrastructure as a serivce) are using a cloud computing service from an offshore provider with servers located ouside the country, according to technology analyst Telsyte.  This means "the opportunity is ripe for local providers to fill the void for Australian cloud services," say analysts.

The Infrastructure and Cloud Computing Market Study surveyed 260 Chief Information Officers and showed the massive penetration of the big cloud computing vendors within local enterprises…