Author: David

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

Birst figures it’s scored an industry first by making its cloud-based Mobile Business Intelligence (BI) SDK available for the Apple iPad.

The new iOS SDK lets developers embed highly interactive and visual Birst-powered business analytics in their native iPad apps. Taking advantage of the iPad’s gesture-based interface, they can build mobile applications that filter information of interest and drill into details on both charts and report tables.

The widgetry saves developers from having to concentrate on the plumbing, such as the data warehouse, data integration, data quality and core BI engine, and lets them focus on building business intelligence into their applications. By writing to Birst’s Mobile APIs, the company says they can bypass the complicated data integration, quality and consolidation issues that underpin BI implementations…

Grazed from IT World.  Author: Kevin Fogarty.

Build a cloud computing service based on hardware belonging to other people, but sell it just like any other commercial cloud service.

Use the same highly distributed approach SETI did in the ’90s and try not to notice the similarity between a legitimate cloud service based on borrowed CPU cycles from privately owned machines, and malware-driven botnets that do the same thing except that they deliver DDOS rather than financial results.

The good and evil in that model changed places a bit, according to Kaspersky Labs, which yesterday identified both the malware and the plan malware writers used to exploit a cool new idea in cloud computing for their own benefit. …

Examples of cloud computing programs in business include SaaS, file storage, online backup storage, file syncing, and customer relationship management. In fact, it is now possible for companies to create their own private cloud, which is used to provide specialized services unique to a specific group of employees…

It says developers can now "code, connect and deploy" software on an enterprise-grade platform backed by 24/7 support, uptime SLAs and integrations with the usual development solutions and both public and private cloud production environments.

Figure Amazon, Google App Engine, Force.com and Joyent…

Grazed from Technorati.  Author:  Jason Heavey.

The evidence is beginning to slowly seep through: the public sector is finally starting to “get” cloud computing.

Almost every day we hear of corporations, local authorities and other public bodies dabbling with software as a service.

Small and medium-sized businesses have been “getting it” for a while but what is causing the public sector to join the cloud revolution?

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Flex Discovery, a leading provider of managed e-discovery and attorney review services today announced the availability of its new Managed Hosting Service. The innovative offering provides law firms and corporations all the benefits of cloud computing for managing e-discovery without the security challenges of sharing the organization’s environment in a public cloud.

Utilizing dedicated computing equipment residing in a state-of-the-art data center, this service provides clients with a Private Cloud to manage e-discovery. Clients can license industry leading e-discovery software from Flex Discovery or can transfer applications currently held in-house to the Private Cloud environment, or both. This enables clients to transfer the IT infrastructure acquisition and maintenance responsibilities to Flex Discovery…

Grazed from FormTek.  Author: Dick Weisinger.

Enterprise IT strategies are under pressure to change, and increasingly the cloud is becoming an important component in revised strategies.  Analysts at IDC expect that Enterprise IT shops will increasingly implement private-cloud solutions.  And often the central component of these cloud solutions is storage.

Spending on private-cloud storage is expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 28.9 percent from 2010 to 2015. At that rate, private-cloud storage will triple by 2015.  That’s huge compared to the growth of on-premise storage which is growing currently at about 4 percent annually.  The report notes that while revenues for cloud services will see huge growth over the next four years, the amount of money that public and private cloud providers will be required to spend is equally huge.  Private and Public cloud providers are expected to be two of the biggest spenders on IT products over the next four years…

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

Remember .NET, the other application software platform besides J2EE, which always seems to dominate cloud conversations?

Well, Apprenda, which has got a rare if not unique "deploy anywhere" private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) stack for .NET, has just released Apprenda Platform 3.0, hoping to set the standard for enterprise-ready PaaS offerings.

For one thing, it’ll work with any .NET or SQL Server application now, making it appealing to service providers as well as enterprises interested in a private Azure-like set-up…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

Former state CIO Tony Tortorice left the role in October 2010 after only 15 months on the job, and there has not been a full-time CIO since. Tortorice had been working to push through a shared services initiative, and the state is working to consolidate several data centers into a $255 million office building and data center complex that will also double as the state information services division’s headquarters.

After the data center build was announced, state legislatures questioned its expense, pointing out that cloud computing services from tech vendors, including in-state companies such as Microsoft and Amazon, could potentially be cheaper than consolidating everything into a brand new data center…

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

General Electric must have gotten the memo from McKinsey’s research arm calling Big Data the "next frontier" and promising untold riches to those who unlock its secrets.

The company is going to pour a reported billion dollars over the next three years into a new global software headquarters that it’s moving into San Ramone in San Francisco’s East Bay where it will build the "Industrial Internet," a sub-category of the Internet of Things and create intelligent connect systems to harness Big Data.

It means to hire 400 more software architects, engineers, biz dev and user experience people, presumably folks who don’t want to cross the bridge to Silicon Valley proper…