Author: David

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

8×8, Inc., provider of innovative business communications and cloud computing solutions, today announced the addition of numerous feature enhancements to its Virtual Office cloud PBX business phone service and integrated Virtual Office Pro unified communications solution, to be unveiled at the Enterprise Connect 2012 conference, March 26 — 29 in Orlando, Florida.

With the 8×8 Virtual Office unified cloud communications solution, businesses can access their core communications services from any location using an IP phone, PC and web browser or smart phone. The latest feature enhancements provide businesses with additional call handling capabilities and more intuitive web-based options, making day-to-day business communications simpler and more productive…

Grazed from Business Wire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Cetrom Information Technology, Inc. (Cetrom), a leader in providing comprehensive Cloud Computing solutions, announces it will bring its custom Cloud Computing solutions for Law Firms to the American Bar Association (ABA) TECHSHOW in Chicago March 29 — 31, 2012. Designed specifically for the needs of the legal community and implemented according to each law firm’s specific needs, Cetrom’s Cloud Computing for Law Firms offers a technology solution to help law practices run more efficiently and focus on clients instead of IT maintenance and upkeep. D.C.-area law firm, Holtzinger Weaver, a professional association, was one of the first law firms to benefit from this custom solution…

Grazed from Computer Business Review.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The utilities prefer private or hybrid cloud deployment options

Big data is increasingly driving the adoption of cloud computing by Western European utilities, with 46.2% of utilities positive that cloud would be able to solve big data issues, according to a new survey by IDC.

The survey found that budget allocation for cloud computing is still not a priority for Western European utilities, with only 25% allocating 1% to less than 3% of budgets to it in 2012, while short-term expectations for cloud computing budget shares are positive…

Grazed from Xconomy.  Author: Curt Woodward.

More money is pouring into Seattle-area enterprise computing startups. Today’s exhibit is Opscode, a cloud-computing software provider that just scored $19.5 million in new venture financing.

The funding round, led by Bellevue, WA’s Ignition Partners, will help Opscode grow its engineering team, which already has a branch office in Raleigh, NC. Previous investors Battery Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson also participated.

Opscode created the open-source-based Chef line of software, which allows IT professionals to set up their cloud-computing resources—and change them more or less on the fly—with a ton of different options…

Grazed from Talkin Cloud.  Author: Brian Taylor.

When Amazon and Eucalyptus finally announced plans to partner on cloud computing, the big winners were cloud integrators seeking to move workloads between on-premise IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and Amazon Web Services. But ultimately, Talkin’ Cloud believes Amazon and Eucalyptus were reacting to OpenStack — which is available as both an on-premise or public cloud platform.

Eucalyptus has always positioned itself as an Amazon-compatible cloud computing platform for on-premises workloads. Now, Amazon is publicly confirming that Eucalyptus compatibility and promising more joint work.

According to a joined announcement from Amazon and Eucalyptus, the relationship:

“enables customers to more efficiently migrate workloads between their existing data centers and AWS while using the same management tools and skills across both environments. As part of this agreement, AWS will support Eucalyptus as they continue to extend compatibility with AWS APIs and customer use cases. Customers can run applications in their existing datacenters that are compatible with popular Amazon Web Services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).”

No doubt, the Amazon-Eucalyptus relationship is good news for CIOs and cloud integrators — two audiences who want to make sure public cloud and private cloud investments don’t require completely different architectures…

Grazed from Ars Technica.  Author: Matthew Braga.

Maybe you’re a Dropbox devotee. Or perhaps you really like streaming Sherlock on Netflix. For that, you can thank the cloud.

In fact, it’s safe to say that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become synonymous with cloud computing; it’s the platform on which some of the Internet’s most popular sites and services are built. But just as cloud computing is used as a simplistic catchall term for a variety of online services, the same can be said for AWS—there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than you might think.

If you’ve ever wanted to drop terms like EC2 and S3 into casual conversation (and really, who doesn’t?) we’re going to demystify the most important parts of AWS and show you how Amazon’s cloud really works…

Grazed from New York Times.  Author: Quentin Hardy.

Last week three of the biggest companies in tech were busy positioning themselves for the future. Collectively, their actions tell you a lot about the turmoil now in tech, which is headed for the rest of the business world.

The three are IBM, EMC, and Hewlett-Packard, with a collective annual revenue of about $250 billion (EMC is by far the smallest, about one-fifth the others’ size.) All of them got very big by selling hardware. All of them have, at different times, sought ways to cope with the immense changes wrought by the Internet, cloud computing and mobile computing…

Grazed from CloudTimes.org.  Author:  Irmee Layo.

Two studies made by SAP and Microsoft brings light to the long standing economic crisis as cloud computing creates jobs and fuels the business market. Sand Hill Group who conducted the study said that the trendsetters for cloud computing will be the mobile cloud, data storage and social networking. The group said that the influence of these platforms may outrun the opportunities created when the Internet was introduced several years back.

In the US alone, cloud computing has already provided thousands of job opportunities that gave hope to people who were badly hit by the recession. It also shows a very promising future for the IT industry and various companies who will maximize the cloud computing services. This cloud trend, however, as promising as it is also presents some risks for users, providers and vendors…

Grazed from Financial Times.  Author: Barney Jopson.

Amazon’s cloud computing service is being used to operate Nasa robots on the surface of Mars, Netflix’s video streaming service and the Guardian’s dating website, as the retailer’s little-known IT business rapidly expands.

The six-year old cloud business remains overshadowed by Amazon’s vast online store, but clients and analysts say the company’s various cloud-computing services are replacing a growing number of in-house IT functions and dominate the sector.

“We continue to see equally rapid growth across all of our [cloud] services as we have in the past,” Adam Selipsky, vice-president of Amazon Web Services, told the Financial Times. The number of files in the Amazon cloud nearly tripled to 762bn last year…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Last August the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) announced at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas a registry that it hoped would serve as a place for prospective cloud users to go to easily inspect and compare cloud vendors’ security controls. But to date, only three companies have submitted their cloud security data, making the registry of limited use.

The Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR) is designed to index the security features of cloud providers using a 170-point questionnaire that end users are then able to peruse. Soon after the CSA announced STAR, big names such as Google, Intel, McAfee, Verizon and Microsoft all agreed to take part. So far though, Microsoft is the only one of that group to have followed through…