Author: David

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

Apple was the leading worldwide client PC vendor in Q4, pushing HP off its perch, according to Canalys, which unlike Gartner and IDC, doesn’t hesitate to lump tablets in with desktops, netbooks and notebooks.

It says that since Apple shipped over 15 million iPads and five million Macs last quarter it did 17% of the total 120 million client PCs shipped globally, up 6% year-over-year.  Canalys also figures that if tablets are thrown in, the total client PC market grew 16% year-on-year. If they aren’t, the client PC market declined 0.4%.  Canalys predicts that "HP will struggle to compete with Apple following the end of its Touchpad" given doubts about how Windows 8 will do on HP tablets once it’s out…

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

HP has dispensed with the services of former Palm CEO and pivotal Apple graduate Jon Rubinstein, according to AllThingsDigital.

Rubinstein has been like a man without a country since HP, after spending billions on the stuff decided it couldn’t go toe to toe with Apple and Google, and up and dumped Palm’s webOS-based phones and TouchPad last August then announced that by September it would open source the operating system on which Rubinstein spent four-and-a-half years of his life…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

Federal IT managers are working to adopt cloud computing technologies and comply with White House cloud computing initiatives, but aren’t yet sold on cloud computing’s cost savings or security, according to a recent survey.

According to the survey by research group the Ponemon Institute, 91% of federal IT workers are either somewhat or very familiar with the Office of Management and Budget’s Cloud First initiative, but 69% believe that the initiative’s requirement to move three services to the cloud over 18 months is too fast. In fact, 71% of respondents said that pressure to move to the cloud creates security risks for their organizations…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, today announced the availability of Wyse WSM(TM) 4.0 desktop virtualization solution. WSM transforms the concept of PC virtualization and management and elevates virtual PC computing to its ultimate level of performance, security, and manageability by eliminating the PC’s local hard disk drive in favor of a more effective way of delivering and managing PC software over the network. This simple yet powerful concept works for a few or many thousand diskless PCs, making them "virtualized cloud PCs."

For years IT departments in companies large and small have struggled with "the PC problem" — the constant, tedious resource, expense, and time drag imposed by the proliferation of individually configured, managed, and maintained PCs sitting on every employee’s desk. With WSM, Wyse has solved the PC management problem with the ultimate solution — delivering exactly the right software to the PC from the network instead of a local hard disk, in real-time, creating the high-powered PC that’s not a PC…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Cindi Howson.

MicroStrategy touted its social, cloud-computing and mobile business intelligence initiatives at its user conference last week and has since added proof that those bets are paying off.

MicroStrategy Cloud was released in mid-2011, and over the last six months it has been refining that strategy and building out its infrastructure. I was surprised when the company decided to establish its own data centers, in contrast to other SaaS vendors that use public cloud services such as Amazon’s. MicroStrategy claims that owning the infrastructure enables it to better control performance.

Steve Stone, senior vice president of MicroStrategy Cloud, reported that some of its cloud deployments boast better performance than on-premises installs. Stone knows all about customer performance expectations; he’s the former CIO and a 19-year veteran of Lowes, which has some 14,000 MicroStrategy users…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

LiveVox Inc., the provider of cloud contact center applications, today announced it received a 2011 Cloud Computing Excellence Award from Cloud Computing Magazine, a new publication from Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC), a global, integrated media company focused on call center technology.

This follows LiveVox’s recognition earlier this month as Product of the Year from Customer Interaction Solutions, a leading contact center technology publication.

"LiveVox is pleased that its cloud contact center platform has been honored for excellence by a top call center technology thought leader organization," said Louis Summe, Chief Executive Officer, LiveVox. "Cloud deployment offers numerous ways to increase productivity and flexibility for contact centers, but vendors must prove how they can improve security and reliability for contact centers, while simplifying compliance management. We are proud to have been recognized for our efforts in accomplishing this."…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Barb Darrow.

Sumo Logic emerged from the shadows Tuesday with $15 million in Series B funding from Sutter Hill Ventures, Greylock Partners and Shlomo Kramer bringing its total to $20.5 million since its founding in April, 2010. Greylock and Kramer also participated in the Series A round.

The company, founded by Arcsight veterans Kumar Saurabh and Christian Beedgen, aims to bring log monitoring and analytics to cloud computing environments via a software-as-a-service model. In that arena, Sumo Logic is bound to face off against Splunk, which filed for a $125 million IPO two weeks ago, as well as Loggly, a company that spun out of Splunk (see disclosure.)…

Grazed from Sacramento Bee.  Author: PR Announcement.  

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today unveiled Desk.com, revolutionizing customer service for a social and mobile world.  Desk.com enables businesses to deliver personal customer service by offering a help desk that is social, mobile and simple to use and deploy. Built with social at its core, Desk.com allows any business to instantly work with customers over any major social network. Desk.com Mobile allows companies to carry a help desk in their pocket and answer customers on the go. Finally, Desk.com is so simple that any company, even one without an IT staff, can get up and running over a weekend. Businesses can sign up for Desk.com today for as little as $49.

Comments on the News:

• "We built Desk.com so that every company can deliver personal customer service in a social and mobile world. Desk.com is social at its core; its mobile app instantly lets any employee, anywhere, deliver awesome customer service; and it can be deployed quickly and easily," said Alex Bard, vice president and general manager, Desk.com…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Ted Samson.

Recession-fueled stagnation is slowly drawing to an end as U.S. companies are signaling they’re ready to sink some cash into growth and emerging markets. That spells opportunity for certain IT professionals: Companies are looking to hire and retain those who are skilled in areas such as mobility [1], cloud computing [2], software development [3], and big data [4].

Such is the big picture painted by two separate reports released this week. One comes from research company Hackett Group, titled "2012 IT Key Issues: Coming to Terms with the ‘New Normal’ [5]." It identifies Global 1000 companies’ key priorities for the year. The other is IT staffing company Bluewolf’s "2012 IT Salary Guide [6]," which provides an in-depth look at IT salaries and hiring trends…

Grazed from Developer Integration News.  Author: Vance McCarthy.

The explosive success of cloud computing, especially SaaS, will spark searches in 2012 for better ways to ensure security, privacy and enterprise-wide identity and access management, said Darren Platt, CTO and co-founder of Symplified.

Researcher have noted cloud security is attracting more interest from IT. In 2012, IDC predicts as many as 80% of all new commercial apps will be deployed from cloud platforms. Further, by the end of 2012, Forrester Research predicts that enterprises that tap into  the cloud will be using 10 or more cloud-based services or SaaS applications…