Author: David

I’m a big fan of the work done by Weta Digital to bring to life films such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. When a chance presented itself to speak with Scott Houston, CEO of GreenButton and former CIO of Weta Digital, I had to schedule time for a meeting regardless of the company or its products. As it turns out, GreenButton is doing clever things to make it easier for software suppliers to package and deliver functions to the cloud to help their customers.

Houston helped Weta Digital set up and run a sophisticated data center in New Zealand to support the digital content creation for the films. The data center almost couldn’t grow fast enough to support the timely implementation of Peter Jackson’s vision for the films. Once the films were finished, the next question was how to make profitable use of the equipment to support the needs of other companies…

Coupa Software, the leading provider of innovative cloud spend optimization software, today announced that TMC, a global integrated media company, has named Coupa’s Cloud Spend Management Solution a winner of the 2011 Cloud Computing Excellence Award presented by Cloud Computing Magazine.

"At Coupa, we leverage the power of the cloud to deliver a simplified, easy-to-use software that provides our customers unparalleled time to value," said Rob Bernshteyn, CEO of Coupa Software. "Being recognized for our innovative solution reflects our goal of giving our customers a best-in-class solution to help optimize spend and improve profitability."…

Over the last year I have been working on the CloudStack Open Source Cloud Computing project. This month we are getting ready to launch CloudStack 3.0 which really raises the bar for cloud computing platforms.  So what is CloudStack? It is an infrastructure-as-a-service(IaaS) platform that orchestrates virtualized servers into an elastic compute environment. The project was originally developed by Cloud.com and is now sponsored by Citrix since they acquired Cloud.com in July of 2011…

The hot technology buzzword in computing today is the “cloud.” You see this used all over the place from consumer services like Apple’s new iCloud™ or Pandora to business services from companies such as Oracle or IBM but what does this mean to radio? What is the cloud? Does radio have a place in the cloud? Does radio care and if so, why?

Let’s start with what “the cloud” is. Simply put, having something in the cloud just means that where you used to operate your own servers (either on your site or more likely in a data center) that performed all of your digital services (ad management, trafficking, automation, hosting, streaming, etc.), you can now run your digital services on computers that someone else manages and maintains.  Furthermore, cloud companies’ offer a host of important but low-level services that you don’t have to think much about anymore including fault-tolerance so your services are always “on”, ability to add new capacity automatically, disaster recovery, and more.  This means cloud computing can dramatically lower your costs and will certainly lower the cost of launching new services and maintaining them…

Hewlett Packard (NYSE:HPQ) on Monday unveiled a new storage service support model and gave partners a sneak peek at a cloud computing partner specialization that’s slated for launch in November.

On the storage side, HP is now giving select partners the option of selling their own branded services backed by HP support. The new model, dubbed ServiceONE Partner Support for HP Storage, will be available for select partners in March with a worldwide rollout slated for later this year…

Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, took home first place wins in 148App’s Best App Ever Awards, with Wyse PocketCloud Pro winning Best Android Remote Access App and Wyse PocketCloud Explore winning Best Android Business App. Wyse PocketCloud Pro also came in second place for Best iOS Remote Access App, with Wyse PocketCloud Explore earning honorable mentions for Best Android Mobile Office App and Best Android Remote Access App. Wyse PocketCloud was the most awarded app across the Mobile Office App, Business App and Remote Access App categories…

South Korea has better broadband than we do. Australia has faster wireless networks. And according to Forrester’s Internet Population Forecast, by 2013 the number of online consumers in emerging markets will dwarf those in the US and Western Europe. In Forrester’s Forrsights Budgets and Priorities survey, these same countries are putting far more priority on cloud computing than we are. Does this mean we could lose our lead in cloud?

We all know that cloud computing is an agility play and that our business colleagues are more excited about it than us in IT. We also know that it’s much easier to invest in public cloud services due to their economic model and ubiquitous delivery capabilities – heck it’s an Internet-based service. And we know that organizations with less in-house IT are able to leverage cloud services more readily. On top of all this, according to Forrester’s Global Tech Market Outlook For 2011 and 2012, the markets increasing their investments in IT goods and services the most – nearly twice that of other regions – are Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa…

Businesses may need to let go of the old ways of doing things and start moving into the future of Cloud computing if they are to stay ahead of the game, according to the former chief information officer of the United States Federal Government, Vivek Kundra.

As a former CIO, Kundra knows all too well what it means to keep churning out projects using an old model that doesn’t work. He has long maintained, when working for the US government, the status quo as an old model was not sustainable…

The decision to migrate company information-technology functions to the cloud or elsewhere is usually broken down as a set of specific cost-benefit calculations. However complicated the weighing of the startup savings and the longer-term returns involved in outsourcing IT, it at least appears to be a rational process.

But for sure, turf battles and human egos also enter the picture. And they receive the focus in a study by Subrata Chakrabarty of the University of Nebraska and Dwayne Whitten of Texas A&M, recently revised.

For their research they break company executives into two camps: On the one hand are IT executives like the CIO and head of IT; and often opposing them, "business executives" — aka CEOs, CFOs and COOs…