Author: David

Grazed from Bloomberg Business Week.  Author: Dina Bass.

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), which dropped prices on its Internet-based cloud-computing service last week, said it will keep cutting when it can, putting pressure on competitors like Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) to keep its own prices low.

Customers of Amazon’s EC2 service, which lets clients run their programs on the online retailer’s server computers, saw price cuts of as much as 37 percent on March 5, and other Amazon cloud service prices were trimmed as well. Microsoft responded days later with reductions on its rival Azure services…

Grazed from Zacks.  Author: Editorial Staff.

After a long wait, Palo-Alto based tech behemoth Hewlett-Packard Company (HPQ) decided to make its cloud computing services public with its second quarter results. The announcement was made by an internal source to New York Times magazine. The announcement was in sync with H-P’s intention to shift its focus on the higher-margin cloud computing arena.

As per the internal executive’s statement, H-P is about to air its cloud services, which are expected to be similar to the cloud platform offered by renowned online retailer Amazon.com Inc.’s (AMZN) Web Services…

Contributed Article.  Author: Sinclair Schuller, CEO of Apprenda
 

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

The venture capital boys must have been bitten by the largesse bug. Another cloud company has pulled in a monster fourth round.  Apptio, which already has $41 million, is getting a fresh $50 million from newcomer T Rowe Price (mostly) as well as existing investors Andreesen Horowitz, Greylock, Madrona Venture Group and Shasta Ventures, evidently persuaded the four-year-old start-up is on to a billion-dollar market.

It makes enterprise B2B SaaS software that lets CIOs manage, monitor, budget and forecast their IT spending, including online services. They’re supposed to use it to communicate IT’s cost, quality and value to business management. It will use the money on sales expansion, product development and customer service. It’s going to hire more people adding about 100 to its staff of 260 by the end of the year…

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

Come May a better-late-than-never Hewlett-Packard is going to go into the multi-tenant public cloud business à la Amazon’s infrastructure-as-a-service according to what the head of HP’s cloud services Biri Singh told the New York Times the other day.

The difference is supposed to be more business-ready software with a lot of third-party services, not so different structured and unstructured databases and data analytics-as-a-service.

Naturally the analytics will be coming from HP’s Vertica and pricey Autonomy acquisitions…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Kevin Kwang.

According to Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, program manager of enterprise applications and business analytics at IDC Asia-Pacific, the cloud computing market in Asia-Pacific continues to develop rapidly but cloud services are still "relatively new" to the region and emerging as a component of one’s enterprise IT portfolio.

He pointed out that the region was a "mosaic of cultures", with geographic and business factors, as well as the level of software and cloud maturity, affecting end-user’s purchasing behavior. As such, adoption of cloud-based productivity tools in the region varies from country to country, vertical industry segments and company size, he added…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

NTT Communications has been positioned by Penteo, an independent ICT analyst, as one of the key providers of cloud services in Spain to offer a complete portfolio of cloud based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions.

The report[1] analyzes and evaluates the main players in this area. It discusses the IaaS services aimed at large enterprise or the upper segments of medium enterprises, on grounds of capability (Global, European, Local) and type of solution (Cloud Private, Shared or Public). It concludes, "In recent years NTT Communications has developed a strong IaaS solution offering including public, private and hybrid clouds, which makes it the vendor with the most complete portfolio"…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Eric Savitz.

In the last month, IBM, Red Hat, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson have announced that they are joining OpenStack. This is only the latest indication that OpenStack has exploded onto the IT landscape and, over the last year, has captured the attention of the IT and business communities. While most CIOs already understand the benefits of private cloud, many are still in the dark when it comes to the specific IT services that OpenStack provides. With a global community of over 2,500 users and 150+ companies, OpenStack is here to stay.

So what is it?

OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the open standard for both public and private clouds. Rackspace and NASA are the key initial contributors to the project. Rackspace contributed the Cloud Files platform to power the Object Storage portion of OpenStack, while NASA contributed the Nebula NOVA fabric controller to power the compute portion. Cloud service providers, enterprises and government organizations can take advantage of the freely available, Apache-licensed software to build their own massively scalable cloud environments…

Grazed from PR Web.  Author: PR Announcement.

A recent survey by IBM coincides with trends already experienced by leading enterprise scheduler Appointment-Plus: more and more enterprises are turning to cloud technology for improving the efficiency of their business processes and operations.

In the case of enterprises already utilizing Appointment-Plus, they’re automating, streamlining and simplifying the way their schedule and manage appointments and reservations for a variety of different tasks and services, such as scheduling job applicant interviews, inbound shipments and deliveries, and events, clinics and programs…