Author: David

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Victoria Barrett.

Oracle for years has seemed impervious to cloud computing. First Larry Ellison dismissed it. Then he sort of touted it, his version at least. But all along, Oracle was growing nicely. The industry chatter didn’t seem to matter. Big companies buy big software systems.

Something changed this winter.  

Oracle’s software license sales limped up just 2% in December, and the company blamed customer budget cuts and fears over the European debt crisis. Sales to Europe, Africa and the Middle East make up a third of Oracle’s revenues. The stock took an instant 8% hit, but perhaps more tellingly is 22% off its May 2011 high. Investors appear to be signalling that Oracle‘s recent woes are due to more than just stingy customers. Could it be true that big, hulking IT organizations are changing buying patterns?…

Grazed from Reuters.  Author: Doug Palmer.

The Business Software Alliance, which represents U.S. industry heavyweights such as Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O), said Brazil finished last in its survey of 24 countries, earning only 35.1 points out a possible 100 because of its policies in areas such free trade, security, data privacy and cybercrime.

India, which has the world’s second-largest software industry after the United States, and China, whose information and communications technology sector is expected to nearly double to $389 billion by 2015, also were in the bottom six, with scores of 50.0 and 47.5, respectively…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Trusted Computing Group (TCG), a worldwide open industry standards organization, will showcase a number of new demonstrations at its half-day seminar, "The Paradox of Security: Is the Status Quo Acceptable?", at the RSA Conference 2012 on Monday, Feb. 27, 10 a.m. — 2 p.m. in Esplanade Room 301-303, San Francisco.

Demonstrations, many being shown for the first time, include:

— Comply to connect: Boeing, HSR, Juniper Networks and Microsoft have collaborated to demonstrate the TCG’s new comply to connect solution, which uses TCG standards to easily integrate products from different vendors and ensure continuous monitoring of device security…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

The Cloud Identity Security Leader(TM), today announced open registration and the initial lineup of workshops, lectures, discussions and featured speakers for the 2012 Cloud Identity Summit. Identity and security thought leaders, architects, and enterprise practitioners will converge at Vail, Colorado’s Cascade Resort July 16-20, 2012, to explore the central role of identity in enterprise cloud security and discuss how cloud computing, mobile device access and social networking are transforming the role of IT.

To remain competitive and capitalize on new opportunities, organizations require IT systems that are increasingly complex and heterogeneous. Pressure from employees to bring their own devices (BYOD) further complicates the demands placed upon IT. Cloud computing has been the proposed solution to these challenges, but enforcing, and monitoring access to corporate resources that are scattered around the Internet is difficult. Successful adopters of this new computing paradigm have recognized that identity is the new network perimeter…

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Matt Hamblen.

Antenna Software today unveiled cloud-based software called AMPchroma for designing, testing and managing mobile apps and mobile websites.

Sold as a managed service, AMPchroma will give companies access to their apps and mobile sites from a single Web-based console that can be shared by work groups and IT workers, said Jim Somers, chief marketing and strategy officer for Antenna.

Somers said part of the value of AMPchroma is to help large companies centrally manage an array of mobile-related projects. Forrester Research recently reported that some companies have dozens of mobile projects under way at any one time, including designing of custom mobile apps…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Kevin Fitchard.

At Mobile World Congress next week, Nokia Siemens Networks plans to reveal its most ambitious mobile network design to date: a complex system of 100 small LTE, HSPA and Wi-Fi cells that behaves, from the network’s point of view, as a single cell site. NSN is using a concept from cloud computing called a ‘fabric’ and retooling it for the purposes of mobile broadband. While we probably won’t see this technology in live networks for some time, it has huge implications for the heterogeneous networks (or hetnets) of the future, which aim to create a sea of cheap bandwidth through which our devices can leisurely swim.

Such architectures speak to the growing complexity in cellular networks as more people use more devices on them. Plus, the very mobility of such devices makes building out a network even more of a challenge. Base stations are fixed devices with fixed characteristics. Turning them into something that can scale to deliver capacity on command isn’t easy. But NSN thinks it has found a way…

Grazed from govWin.  Author: Ronald Sherwin.

The simple economic model for cloud computing is relatively straightforward:

• The enabling technologies (virtualization, blade servers, SANs, etc) drive data centers to massive consolidation to achieve economy-of-scale.
• The required capital investment drives government budget wonks to favor a service delivery model of ‘cloud computing" that rolls these up-front costs into the cost of per-unit delivery.

Lobbyists have been successful in writing language into recent legislation (i.e., NDAA 2012) that establishes a pre-bias towards cloud computing, by stating that it is cheaper and more secure than existing capabilities. But do we really understand the true costs involved; what economists refer to as the marginal costs (since they are rarely included in a simplified cost analysis)…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Art Wittmann.

The cloud is one of those amorphous technologies that gets trotted out as the answer to all of our woes, usually by people who don’t think all that deeply about IT and its challenges. We hate to puncture anyone’s bubble with a dose of reality, but at a macro level, adoption of all public cloud services except software as a service is going pretty darned slow.

For the past five years as part of our annual cloud survey, InformationWeek Reports has asked a simple question: What are your company’s plans for cloud computing? The response we watch most closely is: We’re receiving services today from a cloud provider. In 2008, 16% of survey respondents chose that option. In 2009, it was 21%, then 22% in 2010. It jumped to 31% last year, and to 33% this year…

Grazed from CIO.com.  Author: David Taber.

In the decade since the Agile Manifesto, the movement has encouraged a number of best practices like test-driven development, user-centered design, iIterative development, clean code, refactoring, continuous integration, and—arguably—cloud computing. I’m a card-carrying Agile zealot, and to me its benefits are unarguable. (Although here’s a great spoof site that does argue against it.)

There’s a catch, though: not every IT organization can really implement Agile, let alone profit from it. There are organizational, project, and personnel characteristics that can make Agile downright dangerous. The awesome price of freedom is that you have to live up to its obligations…

Grazed from ChannelEconomics.  Author: Larry Walsh.

If distribution has an undisputed king of cloud computing enablement of solution proiders, it’s Ingram Micro.

According to the forthcoming Cloud & Technology Transformation Alliance’s (CTTA) State of the Channel Cloud Report, Ingram Micro led the field of distributors in enabling and supporting solution providers in reaching the burgeoning cloud marketplace.

When asked which distributor provided the channel with the best support for developing cloud practices and participating in cloud computing opportunities, Ingram Micro overwhelmed the rest of distribution with the endorsement of 26.5 percent of the survey participants. The next closest distributor, ScanSource, garnered only 7.8 percent of the channel’s preference. And ScanSource barely edged out Tech Data, which received the commendation of 7.2 percent of solution providers. (See below for the Top 5 Distributors in Cloud Computing.)…