Category: News

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Editorial Staff.

Arista Networks Inc, which makes network switches for large data centers, filed for an initial public offering on Monday, the latest in a string of cloud computing firms tapping investor enthusiasm around the technology. Arista’s filing comes a week after data storage provider Box Inc filed to raise up to $250 million in one of Silicon Valley’s most highly anticipated IPOs of the year.

Box rival Dropbox is expected to file plans for an IPO in the coming months. Santa Clara, California-based Arista listed Morgan Stanley and Citigroup as lead underwriters to the offering in its IPO filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday. The company, whose competitors include Cisco Systems Inc, said it would raise $200 million from the offering, but the final size of the IPO could be different…

Grazed from FederalNewsRadio. Author: Tom Temin.

Cloud computing and mobile computing are somehow mutually reinforcing trends. But how exactly? One can exist without the other. I heard a really good answer from Rory Read, the chief executive officer of AMD. Advanced Micro Devices, the perennial No. 2 to Intel in the PC processor market, is in the midst of a bet-the-company strategy change. The PC in the traditional form of a box or a notebook, while not disappearing, has lessened in importance as a platform for innovation. So much energy is going into mobile devices — smart phones, phablets, tablets and "ultra" this, that and the other with touch screens and solid state drives.

These hardware form factors have been accompanied by a change in the way applications are programmed and architected. Apps exist independently of the data stores they draw from. That means they can synthesize output from lots of data sources from the rows and columns in relational databases to the geographic data that describes the whole world. Increasingly, Read and others believe that data will be stored in public clouds. Much of it already is when you consider how many organizations offer up their information to be available to apps…

Grazed from The Guardian.  Author: Matthew Taylor.

The vast scale of online surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden is changing how businesses store commercially sensitive data, with potentially dramatic consequences for the future of the internet, according to a new study.  A survey of 1,000 business leaders from around the world has found that many are questioning their reliance on "cloud computing" in favour of more secure forms of data storage as the whistleblower’s revelations continue to reverberate.

The moves by businesses mirror efforts by individual countries, such as Brazil and Germany, which are encouraging regional online traffic to be routed locally rather than through the US, in a move that could have a big impact on US technology companies such as Facebook and Google.  Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, said the study confirmed "anecdotal evidence that suggests US tech firms are going to be hit hard in the coming years by a global backlash against technology ‘made in America’"…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Joe McKendrick.

The crew in the engine room of the Titanic really did a fantastic job of delivering top performance and keeping things running efficiently.  But the ultimate success of the voyage depended on the ship’s crew up above — steering things safely in the right direction, taking advantage of all information available to them. IT, in many ways, is tasked with running the engine room, but then gets blamed when the ship runs into trouble.

The Titanic analogy came to mind when reading Philippe Abdoulaye’s account of a hypothetical (and likely composite) company that does all the right things with IT, and gets great results with its implementation. But the company is still running aground, and everyone is looking to IT, wondering why things aren’t going as planned.  The good news is unlike the engine room crew of the ill-fated Titanic, IT leaders are in a position to influence the new course of the business — but they can’t do it alone…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Chris Preimesberger.

When IBM realized it needed to go outside to acquire a cloud services-provisioning company a couple of years ago and eventually settled in June 2013 on a lesser-known outfit in Dallas called SoftLayer, the move surprised some IT industry watchers.  After all, multinational IBM was investing a reported $2 billion into a smaller cloud-services provider—whose 28,000 customers, using about 90,000 servers, were mostly midsize companies.

On the surface, this didn’t sound like a natural fit into IBM’s big-picture enterprise strategy. Did a player such as SoftLayer have the IP, the engineering and the management wherewithal to scale up to the numerous deployments IBM was going to need?…

Grazed from BusinessInsider.  Author: Julie Bort.

Earlier this week, Cisco dropped a bombshell when it vowed to spend $US1 billion to build a brand new cloud service that competes with similar services from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, HP, IBM, VMware, and others.  Cisco is calling it the Intercloud.

With the Intercloud, Cisco is joining all the other enterprise tech companies who are chasing the cloud market.  That’s because companies today are using the cloud instead of buying new computers and software for new IT projects. They spent $US131 billion in 2013 on the cloud, Gartner says. They will $US174.2 billion in 2014 and $US235 billion by 2017, predicts market research firm IHS…

Grazed from PRNewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Fonds de solidarité FTQ Investissements croissance (FSIC) and FSIC partner Investissements W2 are backing COLO-D, a company headquartered in Drummondville, Québec. Their financial support will fuel the growth of this new economy firm.

"COLO-D offers a new generation of server colocation services. Our strength is the flexibility of our products and services. We help our customers set up their high-density infrastructures, from a single cabinet to the deployment of many megawatts in dedicated corporate suites," said COLO-D’s chief executive, Patrick David…

Grazed from CopperEgg.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing has resulted in plenty of debates between IT professionals over the years, but the growing feeling about the technology today is much more positive than negative. Surveys continue to find that more businesses are embracing the possibilities of cloud-based environments as a way to replace antiquated solutions with more flexible models.

A recent 451 Research survey conducted on behalf of Microsoft found that 45 percent of firms have transitioned from pilot stages to real cloud deployments. Another 32 percent of respondents currently have a formal cloud initiative in place…

Grazed from PCAdvisor.  Author: Zafar Anjum.

Microsoft Azure is now generally available for all customers in China, making it the first global public cloud provider to have comprehensive cloud operations in China, Microsoft China announced today.  Operated by 21Vianet, Microsoft Azure provides fully functional services to cloud customers in China, and is already leading the market with over 3,000 customers, including CNTV, LineKong, GMW.cn, and Coca-Cola China, the software vendor said in a statement.

"Cloud computing is a strategic, growing industry in Shanghai that is playing a significant leading role in economic transformation and long-term sustainable development. Shanghai has a long-standing relationship with Microsoft, which has resulted in many contributions to local economic development and innovation," said Zhiqin Rong, the general secretary of Shanghai Municipal Commission Of Economy and Informatization…