Author: David

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

Cloud computing is assumed to be an IT staff initiative at most businesses. But business strategists at IBM have concluded that it needs to be a top management priority.

Too many companies are experimenting lightly with cloud computing. They’re using it to tweak existing operations, as opposed to thinking about how it could revise or re-invent the fundamental way they sell their goods and services, said Saul Berman, global strategy consulting leader in IBM’s global technology services.

Berman based his remarks on a survey conducted by the Economist Intelligence research unit of the Economist magazine in the fourth quarter of 2011, based on interviews with 572 business and IT managers. IBM sponsored the survey, which will be released later this week, titled The Power Of Cloud: Driving Business Model Innovation. InformationWeek was given an advance look at its contents…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author:  PR Announcement.

Business cloud computing users will take note: the power of AT&T’s "virtual private cloud" has arrived.

AT&T* today announced AT&T Synaptic Compute as a Service(SM) with VMware vCloud® Datacenter Service. 

The new enterprise-class cloud service combines technologies from virtual private networking (VPN) industry leader AT&T(1) and cloud infrastructure software industry leader VMware.

Like AT&T’s other cloud offers, this new cloud capability is embedded directly into its network. This means compute and storage services can be scaled, managed, routed and delivered to business customers, down to virtually any fixed or mobile device, quickly and flexibly, on demand, with enterprise-grade security and performance…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

6fusion, a provider of utility-metered public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructure management software and services, today announced it will be previewing its free 6fusion Cloud Resource Meter for VMware(R) vSphere at the VMware Partner Exchange (booth #504) and Santa Clara Cloud Connect (booth #910).

Understanding how many computing resources are being used (and by whom) is essential in infrastructure planning, upgrade planning and cost allocation or chargeback. 6fusion’s patent pending metering algorithm, the Workload Allocation Cube (WAC), normalizes the way cloud infrastructure is metered both for suppliers and consumers. The UC6 web based console federates private data center and third party cloud operators, providing a single console to allow IT organizations of all types to access, meter, manage and optimize hybrid cloud infrastructures…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Brocade, the leader in fabric-based data center networking solutions, today announced the company will be exhibiting and attending Cloud Connect Santa Clara 2012, the premier technology event for cloud computing. Scheduled for Feb. 13 – 16 at the Santa Clara Convention Center, this year’s event will feature the latest technologies, platforms, strategies and innovations within cloud computing. Brocade (booth #204) will be discussing its vision and strategy for helping organizations transition smoothly to a world where information and applications reside and can be accessed anywhere, whether the objective is a private, public or hybrid cloud.

The Brocade vision for organizations that are considering cloud deployments is simple: Networks must be cloud-optimized at every critical point because they will define the application performance and the end-user experience within the cloud. With a strong heritage in both data and storage networking, Brocade uniquely delivers solutions that are capable of providing data center-class capabilities across the entire network…

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…