Author: David

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Callidus Software Inc., the leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing, announced today that it received a "strong positive" rating in the latest MarketScope for Insurance Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) Applications[1] by Gartner, Inc., the world’s foremost information technology research and advisory company. "Strong positive" is the highest possible rating given in the Gartner MarketScope.

According to Gartner, a "strong positive" rating indicates that a vendor is viewed as a provider of strategic products, services or solutions, with whom existing customers should continue planned investments and potential customers should consider a strong choice for strategic investments.

Steven Leigh, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner and author of the MarketScope, found that "Callidus is the dominant global provider for insurance ICM with nearly 100 insurance ICM customers worldwide. Its implementation footprint reflects a strong presence in North America (85 implementations), along with 10 European installations and 10 in Asia. Callidus added 18 new customers within the past 12 months, making it by far the most successful in acquiring new business in 2011’s research. With implementations across all product lines and regions, Callidus is one of the few ICM vendors with sufficient reach for global insurers to consider as a single ICM solution for a range of products and various regions with a single platform." Mr. Leigh goes on to note that "Callidus continues to innovate ways to simplify deployments, leverage mobile devices, and improve insurance specific capabilities."…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: J. Gerry Purdy.

Recently, I stated my predictions for 2012. Here, I provide my wish list. The difference is simple: In my earlier column, I predicted things that have not happened yet. However, for this list, I wish for things to be fixed or for things that would make a good extension to something that’s already in the market.

I wish that Microsoft would alter the search algorithm in Outlook so that it would quickly return the first 10 results and then ask if you want more. As people accumulate tens of thousands of emails in their Outlook Inbox, the current search algorithm attempts to search the entire folder. This wastes the user’s time, as 90 percent of the time the answer is contained in the most recent instances. I also wish that Microsoft would improve the Boolean search process by providing a wizard to make it easy to search for the occurrence of two or more things together ("and") or to search for either one ("or")…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Skytap Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today announced that over one million virtual machines (VMs) have been launched by customers using its leading Skytap Cloud service. This represents a major milestone for Skytap, which provides businesses with an easy and secure way to create complex computing environments in the cloud. The announcement follows a string of innovations and accolades achieved by the company throughout 2011, including being selected as a "Best of VMWorld 2011" award winner in the public/hybrid cloud computing technologies category.

"Enterprise demand for simple and secure cloud computing has accelerated over the past year, and it’s clear the market is poised for rapid growth as we head into 2012," said Brett Goodwin, vice president of marketing and business development at Skytap. "Over the last year, we have demonstrated our commitment to providing customers with an innovative cloud solution that delivers self-service simplicity, visibility and control for development and test environments, online demonstrations, and virtual training. Launching over one million virtual machines is a testament to the success and tremendous business value that our customers derive from their use of Skytap Cloud."…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author:  Sourya Biswas.

$1279 an hour – seems a lot to hire a computer, right? What if it’s a supercomputer capable of performing 240 trillion calculations per second, or 240 teraflops (a flop is the acronym for floating point operations per second, the universal measure of a computer’s performance)? This is the performance promised by the latest innovation from the Amazon stable – the supercomputer on the cloud.

This cloud supercomputer runs on Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and features Intel’s Xeon 8C 2.60 GHz processor with 10G Ethernet interconnects providing 65,968 GB of capacity and 17,024 cores. As per the latest supercomputer rankings, this cloud supercomputer ranks as the 42nd fastest in the world. Considering that it’s the only one on the cloud and built with existing non-specialized equipment even as the company continued normal operations, that’s extremely impressive…

Grazed from NetworkWorld.  Author: Sevcik and Wetzel.

The term Intercloud describes the future interconnectedness–or federation–of clouds, similar to the network of networks that is today’s Internet. Like the electrical grid, in which a utility is shared based on supply and demand, the Intercloud will be a mesh of cloud computing resources owned by many, and interconnected and shared via open standards.

Economic forces are propelling cloud service providers toward peering arrangements that presage cloud federation. Federation allows cloud providers to buy external resources when demand exceeds supply, and to rent resources when fellow providers need help meeting demand. It also allows providers to offer service outside their footprint without deploying computing resources in every nook and cranny of the world. Sharing resources among providers is especially compelling for smaller service providers because it enables them compete on a more even footing with Goliaths like Amazon’s EC2…

Grazed from MedCity.  Author: Shahid Shah.

Last year I started a series of ’Do’s and Dont’s’ in hospital tech by focusing on wireless technologies.

Folks asked a lot of questions about do’s and dont’s in other tech areas so here’s a list of more tips and tricks:

• Do start implementing cloud-based services. Don’t think, though, that just because you are implementing cloud services that you will have less infrastructure or related work to do. Cloud services, especially in the SaaS realm, are ’application-centric’ solutions and as such the infrastructure requirements remain pretty substantial ’ especially the sophistication of the network infrastructure…

Grazed from Computerworld.  Author: James Niccolai.

Acer kicked off the Consumer Electronics Show on Sunday by previewing a free cloud service for storing images and other documents online, and showing a novel ultrabook that hides its I/O ports in a hidden pop-up section at the back.

The cloud service, called AcerCloud, will allow people to upload all their images, video and documents to an online service hosted by Acer, and access them over the Web from any PC, mobile phone or tablet running Windows or Android. That includes devices from other vendors…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Lenovo, the world’s number two PC company, is flexing its innovation muscle at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show and beyond, to create a seamless digital experience for its customers across multiple devices, be it PCs, tablets, smartphones or Smart TVs. Lenovo recently unveiled its "Personal Cloud" vision, marking the transformation of the company from a "personal computer" manufacturer to a "personal cloud solution" provider that integrates hardware, software and cloud computing together. The Company’s direction is evident in a variety of new products, including the IdeaTab S2, Smartphone S2 and K91 smart TV…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

iCloudDrive for Business; Performance Edge of a Networked Company through Added Flexibility and Mobility at Affordable Price Points

There are a number of different ways that cloud computing can drive business value. In addition to lowering the cost of IT, cloud can help provide access to new markets and enable new business models. Cloud service provider iCloud Inc. brings a value proposition to SMBs by providing a service that has the potential to transform business strategy in the following ways:

Increasing business responsiveness with mobility providing connect anywhere flexibility and real-time access to all your data and information sharing without device or location constraints…