Author: David

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Kevin Fogarty.

Cloud computing is such an attractive, all-encompassing integrated enterprise, data-center-quality, dynamic computing paradigm that every company seems to want to jump on board.

They’re doing it, to be sure, but not nearly as quickly or enthusiastically as most analysts expected even a year ago (when adoption rates were, similarly, a disappointment from the previous year).

The issue isn’t how big or complicated the company or its IT is. In a report comparing spending on software by SMBs vs. enterprise (big) companies, Gartner estimated SMBs are adopting cloud at a higher rate than enterprises. About 34 percent of SMB software budgets go for cloud-based apps or services; only 27 percent of enterprise budgets swing that way…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Stuart Johnston.

Enterprises with big Citrix Systems installations will see fleshed out features in the new version of its public and private cloud computing platform, but it may not be enough to help Citrix break from the crowded pack of cloud vendors. 

Citrix said recently that the first fruit of last summer’s Cloud.com acquisition, CloudStack 3, is now generally available in beta and the production version will be out by the end of March. It’s the first release of CloudStack since Citrix disclosed the purchase in July 2011…

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

EMC and VMware are going into the cloud business with Atos, the big, publicly owned, Paris-based global IT services firm, intending to take an equity position in Canopy, an end-to-end cloud company Atos is setting up using EMC and VMware technology.

The companies said Wednesday when Canopy was announced that their shareholder agreement wasn’t set in stone yet and wouldn’t be until early Q2 but the Americans are talking about kicking in tens of millions of dollars. At least EMC is.  The object of the game is to cash in on what is projected to be a $267 billion cloud market by 2020, up from $59 billion this year…

Grazed from ITPortal.  Author: Ravi Mandalia.

Microsoft seems to be keen on exploiting the boom in enterprise cloud computing industry by taking advantage of its unique standing in the market that very few of its competitors can dare to come even remotely closer to.

According to the group of analysts, it is Redmond’s influence on both the public as well as private cloud domains that will be giving it an edge over other rival forces. Being equally capable in both public and private cloud sectors would allow the software giant to attract all those businesses that were previously unsure about shifting full time to public cloud platforms…

Grazed from FederalNews Radio.  Author: Jason Miller.

By the end of the year, agencies likely will have an online marketplace to buy cloud computing services.

Dave McClure, the General Services Administration’s associate administrator in the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, said the online store will give agencies an avenue to offer, for a fee, excess storage, virtualization and other software-as-a-services to others.

"We want to create a robust environment so that the government is maximizing the use of its computing environment, which is not occurring and which has not occurred historically," McClure said after a speech Thursday at the Cloud/Gov 2012 event sponsored by the Software and Information Industry Association in Washington. "We are talking to government entities that we think are natural candidates to be in that provisioning space. The second step we have to do is to address the policy, security and all those other things that from a government-to-government interaction, that we have a process in place that is quick, efficient and used the same across government."…

Grazed from IT Web.  Author: PR Announcement.

As more organisations move more of their computing into cloud-based services, maintaining the quality of network connections becomes more and more important – and, says Christopher Burrell, VPN manager of Vox Telecom, a new generation of network management tools is needed.

“Network performance is the single biggest factor that determines end-user experience and productivity,” says Burrell. “But finding the source of a network problem is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. It’s made worse by the fact that the issue may not be on your local network; it could be with your ISP, or with their upstream service provider, with an overseas link or even with the application itself.”…

Grazed from The Register.  Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

Managed hosting and cloud computing provider Rackspace Hosting has hired a bunch of techies with expertise in a particular software stack, this time focusing on Microsoft’s SharePoint web content and document collaboration tools.

Rackspace today snapped up privately held SharePoint911, a consulting firm based in the hamlet of Maineville in southwestern Ohio that, as founder Shane Young puts it, pays the "big mouths" that are "fanatical about SharePoint."…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Sourya Biswas.

The usefulness (and necessity) of developing universal cloud computing standards has been covered in several articles (See: Cloud Computing Standards: How Important Are They?  and Cloud Computing Standards – is it time? ). However, now that some concrete steps are being taken towards this goal, the industry is facing non-cooperation from several big players. Come to think of it, that’s not surprising.

Consider what the big names like Amazon and Microsoft may lose out on if universal standards come into place. One, they would lose the power of vendor lock-in by which existing customers would be forced to continue with existing vendors because switching costs would be too high. With universal standards, switching costs would decrease drastically, forcing the big players to keep demanding customers happy. And with multiple players vying for customers’ attention, that may not be too easy. As can be seen in the cell phone industry where portability is easy, there’s a lot of customer churn between vendors…

Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: Joab Jackson.

Extending its range of open-source projects to cloud computing, the Apache Software Foundation has approved the Deltacloud as a top-level project, the organization announced Thursday.

First developed by Red Hat in 2009, Deltacloud offers a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that can be used to interact with multiple cloud service providers. Red Hat submitted Deltacloud to Apache in 2010, and Apache accepted the project in incubator status.

The Apache acceptance "is a significant milestone" for Deltacloud, said Scott Crenshaw, Red Hat vice president and general manager, in a webcast. "It reflects the breadth of the project’s community and the strong and fair governance structure around the project. While it was started by Red Hat, it is governed by an independent community."…

Grazed from Network World.  Author: Kenneth Corbin.

Amid mounting budget pressures and a maturing set of technologies, the federal government is poised for the rapid adoption of cloud computing services over the next several years, according to one of the senior agency leaders helping craft a government-wide cloud strategy.

While federal tech chiefs have long envisioned an environment in which agency storage and applications are hosted and shared throughout the government, the policy reforms required for such a shift, though still very much a work in progress, have recently come into focus and figure to precipitate a major migration to the cloud over the next several years, said David McClure, the associate administrator of the General Services Administration’s Office Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies…