Author: David

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Robert L. Mitchell.

Guardian Life Insurance isn’t about to take big risks when making IT investments, and CIO Frank Wander will be the first to tell you that he doesn’t have a cloud computing strategy, per se.

But over the past five years, the $10 billion financial services company has moved 18 applications into the cloud. It shut down a compute grid and moved its actuarial modeling application into an Amazon EC2 cloud. And it’s now in the process of broadly deploying two major software-as-a-service suites.

One of the two is Workday’s human resource management suite. Guardian wasn’t ready to reveal the other, but at the Atmosphere conference last fall, Google announced that it had signed Guardian as a Google Apps customer…

Grazed from Cloud Times.  Author: Martin Tantow.

Platform as a service (PaaS) remains to be the core element of cloud computing in any personal or business solutions. Any changes, therefore, to its make up will definitely affect cloud vendors and users according to the research analyst Gartner.

Vice president and Gartner analyst, Yefim Natis said, “With large and growing vendor investment in PaaS, the market is on the cusp of several years of strategic growth, leading to innovation and likely breakthroughs in technology and business use of all of cloud computing. Users and vendors of enterprise IT software solutions that are not yet engaged with PaaS must begin building expertise in PaaS or face tough challenges from competitors in the coming years.”

Grazed from InforWorld.  Author: Nancy Gohring.

Uptime Software is the latest company aiming to help eliminate bill shock for cloud users.

UptimeCloud is a new hosted cloud cost-monitoring service for Amazon Web Services users. The service is meant to help users predict and manage spending on AWS.

The service should be useful to both new and veteran cloud users because most cloud users struggle to predict and control costs, said Nick Johnson, director of marketing for Uptime. One UptimeCloud beta customer aptly described the process of spinning up cloud services as "deploy, pray and pay," he said…

Grazed from Technet Blogs.  Author: Yung Chou
 

Grazed from Business Insider.  Author:  Matt Lynley.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is mulling over starting an investment fund that will specialize exclusively on cloud computing startups, Bloomberg reports.

The venture capital firm, which has invested in the likes of Groupon and Zynga, could invest $100 million in cloud computing-focused companies this year, according to the report.

Cloud computing is a process where all the difficult calculations and all data is stored on a remote server, but accessed through a less powerful computer via the Internet. The result is basically a supercomputer packed into a MacBook Air.

Grazed from GigaOm.  Author: Charlie Oppenheimer.

Amazon Web Services (AWS), as the trailblazing provider of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), has changed the dialog about computing infrastructure. Today, instead of simply assuming that you’ll be buying and operating your own servers, storage and networking, AWS is always an option to consider, and for many new businesses, it’s simply the default choice.

I’m a huge fan of cloud computing in general and AWS in particular. But I’ve long had an instinct that the economics of the choice between self-hosted and cloud provider had more texture to it than the patently attractive sounding “10 cents an hour,” particularly as a function of demand distribution. As a case in point, Zynga has made it known that for economic reasons, they now use their own infrastructure for baseline loads and use Amazon for peaks and variable loads surrounding new game introductions…

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

Aping Apple, Google wants to open a 1,323-square-foot open-to-the-public retail store complete with an eye-catching mezzanine visible from the street at its European headquarters in Dublin, according to a local planning application.

It hasn’t explained what it wants to sell there but the mezzanine area is for visiting "business partners and contributors."

Maybe it’ll sell the Android-based, smartphone- or tablet-operated "home-entertainment system that streams music wirelessly throughout the home" that the Wall Street Journal said Thursday it’s developing and means to move under its own brand. The widgetry, which might stream other media, is reportedly due later this year after years of tinkering…

Grazed from SmartData Collective.  Author: Amanda Mork.

It seems that the world’s tech consciousness is at the crux of a hockey stick curve of innovation, growth and connectivity.  Two of the hottest tech trends of 2011, big data and the cloud, can take a lot of the credit for the cognitive shift that is already happening.  It’s the realization that these two concepts are in fact intuitively inclined to bring together siloed departments and processes to work to achieve new levels of social, customer, and organizational awareness.   This past year has been a wake up call to many organizations that a new kind of thinking is required for 2012, it’s time to take advantage of all this newly accessible information and turn it into knowledge…

Grazed from InfoBoom.  Author: Douglas Bonderud.

While many companies talk a good game about cloud computing, few are willing to put money on it. Software and service giant Oracle, meanwhile, has proven time and again that it is not only on board with cloud computing but ready to spend–even above market value–to acquire strategic investments. With the recent acquisition of Taleo, a provider of talent management software, Oracle earns the prize of the first big cloud acquisition of 2012. Though the buyout isn’t something midsize and enterprise business IT will feel right away, it speaks to a growing trend in the cloud–one of consolidation, rather than diversification…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

The cloud computing model of services-based computing has changed the way we not only ‘architect,’ ‘structure’ and ‘plan’ software applications, it has also changed the way we, subsequently, need to ‘deploy,’ ‘test,’ ‘monitor’ and ‘manage’ cloud-based applications.

Now that’s a lot of nouns (actually they’re mostly verbs too) relating to the actions we take upon our applications, so what do we really mean by these terms?

The fact is that cloud computing has become enough of a tangible reality to warrant the development of testing procedures that reside and operate inside the cloud…