Improve the WAN, Improve the Cloud
It’s almost inevitable at this point that the enterprise industry will be wholly dependent upon cloud services in a few short years. If 2010 was the proof-of-concept phase, then 2011 will see the kind of broad rollout that will make the cloud a standard enterprise component by mid-decade.
But while most of the attention is going toward the increased scalability and flexibility that the cloud provides, there is one aspect of this evolving paradigm that has gone largely unnoticed: the increasing dependence on Wide Area Networking (WAN) to support general data center functions.
Salesforce.com launches Chatter Free application
Salesforce.com has announced the launch of Chatter Free, a new no-cost edition of its popular Chatter application.
The new service is available to all employees of current Salesforce.com customers who want to use the enterprise social-collaboration tool to communicate with their colleagues.
Chatter works on a similar principle to Facebook and Twitter, with profiles, status updates and real-time feeds, allowing users to follow people, along with business processes and application data.
Salesforce.com unveils cloud database platform
Salesforce.com is getting into the cloud database business with a new on-demand service, Database.com, set to be announced Tuesday at the Dreamforce conference.
Database.com is partly powered by Oracle’s flagship database, which has long been used by Salesforce.com. But the service contains dozens of other supporting technologies that constitute Salesforce.com’s cloud infrastructure, which now supports some 87,000 customers around the world, said Eric Stahl, senior director of product marketing.
Unisys offers hosted private cloud
Unisys has introduced a dedicated, hosted computing service that lets customers quickly add extra capacity for short-term use, a feature Unisys says is unique among what it calls "hosted private clouds".
Customers will sign up for the service by first establishing a minimum amount of capacity, for which they pay a set monthly fee. If they require more capacity, due to a spike in traffic for instance, they fill out an online request for additional resources. Unisys charges for the additional capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis.
The cloud, copyright, hosting and the law
When Mr Justice Floyd decided the other week that copyright infringement happens in the country the material in question is hosted in, it was tempting to think that he might have opened up a huge legal loophole.
After all, with Cloud computing allowing content to be hosted anywhere in the world, wouldn’t this give free rein to anyone who wanted to put bootleg movies online without fear of being sued?
Cloud services, mobile computing and social networking fusing into new platform
Cloud services, mobile computing, and social networking technologies are going to mature in 2011 and beyond, according to IDC.
The research firm predicts these technologies will coalesce into a new mainstream platform for both the IT industry and the industries it serves.
Critical transition
According to IDC, the platform transition will be fuelled by another solid year of recovery in IT spending. The research firm forecasts that next year, global IT spending will be US$1.6 trillion representing an increase of 5.7 per cent over 2010.
Salesforce.com to take database to the cloud
Scheduled for general availability next year, Database.com has always been deployed in the backend to support existing Salesforce.com customers but will now be available to enterprises as a standalone service. It will support a range of languages and platforms including PHP, Microsoft Windows Azure and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor did not specify when exactly Database.com will be launched next year, but is expected to release it as a private beta first, acording to reports.
Google Unveils First Chrome OS Computer: the Cr-48
One way to summarize Google’s week so far is to say that it picked fights with two of the biggest computing companies on the planet. On Monday it unveiled a bookstore that competes with Amazon’s Kindle line. Today it took the wraps off an attempt to displace Microsoft from the provider of the most popular operating system.
"With Chrome OS we have a viable third choice for OS on the desktop," said CEO Eric Schmidt at the launch event in San Francisco, drawing a comparison with Windows and Mac OS. He spoke after a lengthy demonstration that showed off a new vision of the computer that strips away pretty much everything except the browser.
Red Hat’s PaaS Play & the Future of Cloud
Last week, Red Hat Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT) announced that it had acquired platform-as-a-service (PaaS) software company Makara and was rolling it into its own PaaS offering. The deal is just the latest step by Red Hat in creating an open-source software stack for cloud computing.
Software-as-a-service market ‘set to grow at impressive rate’
The global market for software-as-a-service products is expected to grow at a rapid rate over the course of the next few years.
In an article published on IT Web, it was explained that while several areas of the IT sector have experienced a downturn as a result of the current economic climate, software-as-a-service solutions have bucked this trend to a significant degree.
"According to international research group IDC, the prediction is that software-as-a-service uptake will show 30 per cent compound annual growth rate for the next five years," the report said.