Category: News

Grazed from Enterprise Irregulars. Author: Louis Columbus.

2014 continues to be a year marked by the accelerating hiring cycles across nearly all cloud computing companies. Signing bonuses of $3K to $5K for senior engineers and system design specialists are becoming common, and the cycles from screening to interviews to offers is shortening. The job market in the cloud computing industry is leaning in favor of applicants who have a strong IT background in systems integration, legacy IT expertise, business analysis and in many positions, programming as well.

One of the most common questions and requests I receive from readers is who the best companies are to work for. I’ve put together the following analysis based on the latest Computer Reseller News list The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2014. Using the CRN list as a baseline to compare the Glassdoor.com scores of the (%) of employees who would recommend this company to a friend and (%) of employees who approve of the CEO, the following analysis was completed…

Grazed from ODCA. Author: PR Announcement.

Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) today announced it has published 2.0 versions of cloud deployment usage models in the areas of service orchestration and Compute Infrastructure as a Service (CIaaS). The alliance has also updated its conceptual model document map, which provides an overview of the organization’s usage models, particularly how they fit into a larger cloud computing and next generation data center context.

The documents that have been updated include:

* Open Data Center Alliance Master Usage Model: Service Orchestration Rev. 2.0-describes the processes, interfaces and aspects to be considered when deploying services on cloud platforms. This usage model includes 19 usage scenarios of a cloud service engagement as well as the foundation for the next phase of usage development including bursting between clouds and other areas that include Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). The Service Orchestration Rev. 2.0 usage model is available for free download on the ODCA website…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Keith Townsend.

I’m wondering if the battle between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud platforms is even worthy of debate. That’s because it seems that the ultimate goal of any IaaS platform is to give organizations the ability to abstract the data center and run its resources from anywhere, on any service. I’m asking a larger question: What happens when you are able perform a physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion of the entire data center?

Let’s fast forward the conversation around cloud computing by a few years. What happens when Moore’s Law, which dictates that computing capabilities double every 18 months, catches up with cloud? There will be an unavoidable effect on cloud computing. If we draw an intersection between the virtual data center and cloud computing, we come up with a model of computing that’s much more abstract than it is today…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Ophir Shalitin.

Modern innovations in networking technology, virtualization, Big Data processing, storage, and analysis, along with cloud computing, are giving new shape to the information technology realm of today and the future.  Organizations have, for many years, effectively sourced a number of non-core business functions to outside service providers.

Marketing, accounting, customer service, sales and administrative staffing are just a few examples of such outsourcing; today, organizations can also get computing services on demand in virtually any location, and tailor those services to their specific needs. Such "micro outsourcing" can apply to functions such as processing, storage, software, security, and support…

Grazed from TechPageOne. Author: Dennis Smith.

In a Computer Weekly article, Archana Venkatraman discusses why Virgin Management opted for an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform. We’ve seen similar successes with other companies. There are several common threads among cloud computing adoptions that ensure successful outcomes, including cost, scalability, and capability.

As with many IT projects, simply deploying on existing infrastructure is seldom an option. Upgrades are usually needed, which can include increased server bandwidth and storage capacity, and new/additional software licenses. When a change is underway – as was the case with Virgin Management during office relocation – it becomes an opportunity for IT teams to identify new ways to optimize their resources. Cloud computing represents a significant opportunity to offload new or existing workloads…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Canon Information and Imaging Solutions, Inc. (CIIS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Canon U.S.A., Inc., announces that it now resells glovia OM, a cloud based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system built on the Salesforce1 Platform. Bringing together Canon’s imaging technologies and information management expertise, CIIS provides consulting, professional services, and solutions in the areas of Business Process Automation, Sales & Marketing Automation, Records Management, Visualization & Prototyping, and Print Management.

The addition of glovia OM to the company’s portfolio enables CIIS to offer Glovia’s outstanding cloud order management solution, with Canon’s expertise and understanding of business process. "One of the main reasons why Canon is the proven market leader in office document solutions, besides our world class imaging technology, is that we have mastered the operational excellence needed to supply office equipment and document solutions" said Satoshi Nagata, president Canon Information and Imaging Solutions…

Grazed from MidsizeInsider. Author: Daniel Cawrey.

IT solutions have always gone through some degree of customization, and the cloud application programming interface (API) is an up-to-date example of this. Software-based solutions for IT infrastructure mean that vendors must offer increased flexibility. A recent article on ZDNet notes the ease of using cloud API.

As is par for the course, technology for businesses continually changes. Cloud computing allows vendors to sell IT prepackaged services with a different type of delivery. Midsize organizations often have the upper hand with cloud vendors. Options have increased, and cloud software has become more powerful than ever before…

Grazed from CBROnline. Author: Joe Curtis.

IBM has admitted demand for the open source initiative Cloud Foundry is "in its infancy", but predicts the collaborative venture will catch and keep developers with the quality of its cloud computing technology. The firm signed up to the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) project last July, and just last week was announced as one of the founding members of a forthcoming independent organisation, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, which will oversee the neutrality of the initiative.

Cloud Foundry has emerged as the cloud computing equivalent of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) counterpart OpenStack since its creation in April 2011, and lets developers develop and deploy applications on its PaaS platform.  IBM is just one of numerous tech firms to bet on the initiative, and last week announced a $1bn investment to develop its PaaS capabilities…

Grazed from IT-TNA. Author: Steve Wexler.

Calling it the last OpenStack you’ll ever try, the new release of Piston OpenStack 3.0 has been generating a lot of controversy, if not interest. Unveiled last week, it had to compete with sub-Arctic weather, RSA security conference, Mobile World Congress, the Winter Olympics and Russian brinkmanship in the Ukraine.

Then there was the little misunderstanding that saw Piston Cloud Computing, Inc. uninvited from next month’s Red Hat Summit, and a couple of hours later re-invited again, with an apology. Apparently somebody at Red Hat was unhappy with Piston because a Fortune 100 customer decided to change vendors. It seems that enterprise customers, never mind REALLY BIG enterprise customers, are hard to come by…

Grazed from CDT.org. Author: David Sohn.

CDT and a group of trade association allies warned the Supreme Court today that the stakes in the Aereo case go well beyond just television. In an amicus brief, we explained to the Court that the wrong approach to this case could undermine the cloud computing industry by creating new legal risks for services that store and transmit data from remote locations. We urged the Court to avoid any such approach. In the brief, we didn’t take a position on the legality of Aereo’s particular service, which enables users to watch local broadcast programming over the Internet.

CDT believes that cloud computing plays an important role in facilitating online innovation and speech. It makes powerful computing resources once available only to large entities now broadly available via shared platforms, in a manner that is efficient, secure, flexible, and scalable…