Category: News

Grazed from Parallels.  Author: PR Announcement.

Parallels®, a leading hosting and cloud services enablement provider, is proud to announce that the company has been named as one of the Top 20 Coolest Cloud Vendors of 2014 as part of the Cloud 100 by CRN, for the second year in a row. This annual list recognizes the most innovative cloud vendors and solutions tailored to address the cloud computing industry’s unique needs.

“Parallels offers a breakthrough platform for hosters,” industry site CRN said, citing Parallels tremendous growth of its partner channel year-over-year and more than a 400% increase in partners who use the Parallels PartnerNet portal…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge.  Author: John Rath.

During a busy week at the Distributech conference in San Antonio, and its own Cisco Live event in Milan, Italy – Cisco (CSCO) announced an extension of its cloud portfolio with InterCloud, and an expansion of its vision of Fog computing, to spark new innovations in the Internet of Things.

At Cisco Live, Cisco debuted its new InterCloud hybrid solution, introduced new validated designs, Cisco Services for cloud strategy, management and operations, and version 4.0 of its Intelligent Automation for Cloud (IAC).  “Cisco introduced the concept of the ‘World of Many Clouds’ two years ago, and since then, we and our partners have been enabling an ever-expanding world of highly secure clouds, helping organizations shape their own unique cloud journeys,” said Robert Lloyd, Cisco president of development and sales…

Grazed from GreatResponder.  Author: Maria Dehn.

A substantial reduction in the prices of Azure cloud storage services is being implemented by Microsoft Corporation in the wake of making its cloud computing services more affordable and competitive against the cloud services giant AWS. This was announced by the software giant on Jan 28, 2014.

This announcement came after the announcement of AWS to reduce the prices of its public cloud services earlier a few days before. This cost reduction in the domain of cloud storage and other cloud computing services indicates a clear rivalry of these two giants to capture as much customer base as possible, in this domain of business…

Grazed from Recode.net.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Is it possible that IBM’s new cloud computing services business unit — the one that got suddenly bigger last year after the acquisition of SoftLayer — is bigger than cloud computing’s dominant player, Amazon Web Services?  It turns out that it is, but it’s not a very good comparison. It all depends on what you consider to be “the cloud.”

Let’s start with the basic numbers, which have emerged in recent days as both IBM and Amazon have reported their fourth-quarter and annual results.  If you look at IBM’s cloud business strictly by revenue, the company’s CFO Martin Schroeter disclosed on a conference call with analysts on Jan. 21 that it finished the year with $4.4 billion in cloud revenue, a 69 percent increase over the prior year…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author James Carlini.

So many organizations switched to third-party help desk solutions without really putting in place any performance measures or tracking mechanisms to really measure how good – or bad – the support is. Some executives got a big bonus for "thinking out of the box" and coming up with a cost-cutting initiative to outsource IT help desks.

Those same executives do not want to hear all the complaints of people getting no results and wasting a lot of time in repetitive phone calls as well as no solutions to their problems. Even routine problems become time-consuming nightmares because the third-party support person on the other end doesn’t understand the caller or the caller just doesn’t understand them…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Glenn Blake.

With many organizations in the United States opting to access cloud services as an alternative to traditional technology infrastructure and equipment, vendors and businesses are continuing to emphasize practices and policies that help companies take advantage of cloud computing without undermining security.

According to a recent report by Forbes, United States companies will spend more than $13 billion on new cloud services in 2014. Cloud-based solutions offer businesses state-of-the-art technology, immediate software updates, and scalability on a subscription or pay-per-use basis. In most cases, cloud services reduce or even eliminate an organization’s dependence on such hardware products as servers as well as concerns about software licensing and upgrades. Experts note that cloud services often decrease technology costs over time while improving such functions as collaboration and accessibility to data…

Grazed from CMSWire. Author: David Roe.

It’s a just about a cliché at this stage to note that cloud computing has been one of the big technology disruptors in recent years. However, according to Gartner, the best — or worst, depending on your perspective — has yet to come. It seems Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications are doomed to legacy status or even the trash bin.

ERP Legacy Systems

According to a recently published report. Predicts 2014: The Rise of the Postmodern ERP and Enterprise Applications World (fee charged), monolithic ERP implementations will start to disappear by 2016, especially as alternatives mature. Gartner describes a legacy system as any system that is not sufficiently flexible to meet changing business needs…

Grazed from v3.co.uk. Author: Editorial Staff.

NetSuite has posted record results for the fourth quarter and the whole of 2013, thanks to “unstoppable” demand for cloud computing among businesses. In the firm’s fourth quarter, which ran from October to December 2013, the firm made sales worth $115m, up eight percent from the third quarter, and an increase of 35 percent compared with the same quarter the previous year. The on-demand enterprise resource planning (ERP) firm also saw similarly impressive growth for the whole year, increasing 2013 sales by $106m or 34 percent to $414.5m.

Zach Nelson, chief executive of NetSuite, pointed out during a conference call on Thursday that 2013 was the fourth consecutive year of record revenue growth, a feat he said is matched by very few other public companies.  However, the firm has some way to go before it posts a healthy profit. NetSuite made a net loss of $20.2m during the fourth quarter, up from $9.6m during the same quarter in 2012. Across the whole year, NetSuite posted a net loss of $70.4m, compared to $35.2m in 2012…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Editorial Staff.

When CRN first introduced its annual 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors list in 2010, the space was still ripe, rapidly evolving from an industry buzzword to a legitimate means for solution providers to enable customers to eliminate the overhead and capital expenditures that come with on-premise hardware.

In 2014, the fourth year of the Cloud 100, "the cloud" is now mainstream and the shift from a traditional on-premise solution provider model to a cloud-based services model is not just a trend, but in many cases a crucial move for survival. The Cloud 100 list aims to help solution providers navigate the growing cloud marketplace and identify the best solutions to support the IT channel…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Wyatt Kash.

As we reported last week in an in-depth analysis, cloud service providers are queuing up for a rigorous government review process that certifies their service meets a strict baseline of security standards. This certification, known as the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, is mandatory for any cloud service provider looking to do business with federal agencies.

But the stakes are equally high for the federal agencies. The Office of Management and Budget, which mandated in 2011 that agencies begin using cloud services, has given them until June 5 to show that those services meet federal security standards. A big question now is what happens if cloud service providers don’t get the security certification by the June deadline? And where does that leave agencies trying to migrate slices of their IT operations to the cloud if their preferred provider’s services have not yet been approved?..