Category: News

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Chris Preimesberger.

Let the positioning begin. The big, all-purpose IT vendors are beginning to confront each other about how best to use and support OpenStack cloud computing software within their own environments, even though they are hardly experts on the topic.  These guys had little or nothing to do with the development of the fast-rising data center system, yet they are quickly jumping aboard a train that appears to be built for the long haul.

Remember the oft-used line about how innovation usually happens elsewhere? Well, that’s OpenStack. It was born and raised partly in some old military buildings on the site of a former federal airfield and not in some gleaming, new Silicon Valley campus…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Don Simpson.

Whenever I get the chance to talk with our sales divisions, I always like to weave in a statement that gets their attention. During a recent meeting to discuss Professional Services, I started by saying, “The products that you resell are worthless!” After a pause for effect, I added, “Unless the customer actually uses the product.” I now had their attention.

What made me think of this was my time in the federal government as an agency CIO. Within the first few days on the job, I was briefed on a multi-million dollar software purchase that occurred more than two years prior. This agency had been spending several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on maintenance and the software was up for renewal again. However, the software was pure “shelfware,” still in shrink-wrap: There was no adoption…

Grazed from Klipfolio.  Author: PR Announcement.

 Klipfolio, a global leader in cloud-based Web and mobile dashboard solutions, today announced it has secured $1.7-million (CDN) in funding, led by the BDC Venture Capital IT Fund, Mistral Venture Partners and including several leading early-stage investor groups from both Canada and the United States including Fundfire (Ottawa), BOLDstart Ventures (New York), Acadia Woods (New York), and CommonAngels Ventures (Boston).

The Ottawa-based startup has recently grabbed the attention of industry watchers and many of the world’s most recognized brands for its real-time business dashboard, a flexible and powerful solution that allows business users to unite cloud-based and on-premise data sources to create meaningful dashboards without the cost or complexity of traditional business intelligence tools. Klipfolio has experienced dramatic year-over-year organic revenue growth and has a growing customer list that includes Fortune 500 companies…

Grazed from DNA.  Author: Editorial Staff.

IT industry players are not surprised with the latest layoffs estimated to be at over 15,000 employees globally by hardware manufacturer IBM or of over 1,000 employees at IBM India, and a similar development at Dell.  This churn is happening because hardware companies like IBM and Dell, which makes high-end servers and computers, have been hit because it is cheaper to outsource infrastructure as a service to Amazon or a Google. "There has been a paradigm shift in focus by corporate customers who are preferring cheaper IT infrastructure like ‘cloud’ from Amazon or Google and this is the reality," said Srinath Batni, member of the Infosys board.

Cloud computing means the ability to run a program or application on many connected computers at the same time. This is where many corporates have either migrated to or are in the process of migrating, thanks to the immense cost-benefit ratio. This, in turn, has led to higher level of redundancy among existing staffers, especially hardware engineers…

Grazed from MSPMentor.  Author: Jessica Davis.

MongoDB may or may not be on most MSPs’ radar. Yet. But the fact that one big cloud services provider is heavily promoting customer use cases for its new cloud-hosted value-added MongoDB as a service indicates that maybe it should be on your radar.

About a year after its acquisition of MongoDB as a service provider ObjectRocket, Rackspace (RAX) has begun promoting customer use cases of the service. MongoDB, an open source noSQL database (often used for big data analytics and scaling large volumes of mobile app data) came up recently in the company’s quarterly earnings call with analysts, and also in a webcast that looked at two use cases of the technology…

Grazed from Business2Community.  Author: Katrina Manning.

Going away are the days when you had to rely on very sophisticated hardware and software to handle day-to-day operations. Those needs made it crucial to have additional IT departments. Some of these unavoidable tasks included: configuring, installing, securing, testing and even upgrading the computer programs of your business. Though costly, many IT departments still have difficulty with sharing data effectively on top of providing hacker-proof security. However, the good news is technology evolves consistently. Additionally, with the advent of cloud computing, the roles and uses for the IT department are changing, as well. Today, the cloud has quickly become a necessary element towards remaining competitive. Here are a few reasons why.

What Makes Cloud Computing Desirable?

With the cloud, service hosting is delivered through the internet. It allows for flexibility from traditional software to the Internet, which offers more convenient access. Information can be distributed and received from any location at any time. There are no constraints on data extraction. Cloud services can also be up and running much more quickly than it takes to install and to configure expensive hardware…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Todd R. Weiss.

Google is opening the daylong San Francisco-based event to a limited number of developers on-site, but will Webcast the event for other participants around the world. To help developers expand their expertise with Google’s Cloud Platform, the company will hold an all-day Google Cloud Platform Live event in San Francisco on March 25 to highlight new features, capabilities and updates that are now part of the ever-expanding cloud environment.

As part of Google Cloud Platform Live, Google is making a limited number of tickets available to interested developers for the on-site event, which will be held in the Terra Gallery and Venue, 511 Harrison St., in San Francisco, while a limited number of invites will also be distributed for "viewing parties" that will be held remotely at Google offices in Seattle and in New York City. All other interested developers around the world will be able to join the event through live broadcasts of the sessions on YouTube…

Grazed from DailyFinance. Author: Gaurav Seetharam.

In 1976, Bruce Henderson — then CEO of the Boston Consulting Group and a renowned management guru — had an insight that isn’t talked about enough. Mr. Henderson made the observation that stable, competitive markets often have just three major competitors. Yeah, just three.

Market shares for these "Big Three" tend to align in a 4:2:1 ratio — meaning that the industry leader will double the market share of its nearest competitor, which in turn does twice as much business as the next-to-nearest competitor. It’s supposed to be a naturally occurring phenomenon of mature industries…

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Editorial Staff.

The cloud is transforming IT management, whether organisations are building their own private cloud infrastructures or moving their data and apps onto external public cloud networks. This HP white paper examines what is happening as a result of this transformation and some of the issues we need to overcome in order to extend the cloud’s central role further.

IT losing corporate control

Traditional IT departments are losing corporate control of their data through cloud services. At first, this was a gradual shift, but is now a seemingly widening sea change in the way a whole organisation connects to the IT department. The rise of mobile and remote working, the BYOD movement and the uptake of cloud services – including ‘self-service’ on-demand functions like HR – have fed into this relationship change, and the bottom line is that the IT department will have to adapt otherwise it will end up as a non-entity in some quarters of the business world…

Grazed from Hosting.com. Author: James Schwartz.

When it comes to your business, no detail can be overlooked. Storage in the cloud is no exception. In my last post, What is Cloud Storage?, I wrote about cloud storage in general. Here I want to go through the two main options for cloud storage, NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network).

What is Cloud Storage -NAS

NAS is generally used for file-level computer data storage but NAS provides both storage and a file system. In fact, NAS is useful for more than just general centralized storage provided to client computers in environments with large amounts of data. By providing storage services, NAS can enable simpler and lower cost systems such as load-balancing and fault-tolerant email and web server systems…