Category: News

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

One of the more annoying aspects of anything to do with the cloud is the number of individual services that have to be contracted in order to create something that resembles a workflow within an organization. Each of the services may seem relatively inexpensive, but when you add them all up along with the cost of integrating them, the cost of cloud computing starts to rise considerably. The good news is that we?re starting to see a shift toward the consolidation of cloud services. Case in point is PanTerra Networks, which today launched a SmartBox cloud service that combines file sharing with a unified communications service delivered via the cloud.

PanTerra Networks CEO Artie Chang says that via SmartBox, organizations can now combine file sharing and unified communications to deliver a more holistic approach to managing workflow across the organization that allows users to share, communicate and collaborate within the same cloud service…

Grazed from The Star Tribune. Author: Steve Alexander.

Best Buy appears to be jumping off the cloud. The company said Tuesday that it is selling its MindShift Technologies cloud-computing business to the Japanese firm Ricoh for an undisclosed amount. In 2011, Best Buy paid $175 million for MindShift, a Waltham, Mass., provider of information technology and cloud computing services to small businesses. In cloud computing, customers can use computers, software and data storage in remote data centers rather than buying their own.

At the time, acquiring MindShift was seen by analysts as a way for Best Buy to diversify beyond selling computers and other electronic devices, as well as the company’s first major effort to enter the cloud computing market. Ricoh said MindShift, which has 650 employees, will continue to operate under the same name and management. The deal is expected to close in February…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Gillian Livingstone.

In today’s ERP world, one of the main choices when choosing a business system – is would you like this to be on the cloud or located on a server in your office? From speaking to a variety of different companies, it is clear many people are divided, mainly an age divide.
What becomes more apparent is the lack of understanding of the cloud.

The cloud is used in many different aspects of your everyday life. The first cloud experience I had was my Hotmail account (and I wasn’t even aware I was using the cloud when I created my account) accessing my emails from any device and any time. The next big realisation of the cloud is your iTunes account, streaming your music from all your different Apple accounts whether this was your Mac laptop, iPad or iPhone. Now we have the ability to pick up iMessages on your iPhone or iPad. All these features are down to the creation of the iCloud. Like me, I imagine most people in society would be lost without the ability to get my music at any time…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Don Sheppard.

A definition for cloud computing, despite it having been with us for many years (some say back to the 1960s), seems to be fairly elusive. The U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) definition is perhaps the best known but it is a user-centric definition. Most recently the ISO (International Standards Organization) and the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) have jumped into this game with an emerging standard called ISO/IEC 17788 that provides a basic vocabulary and description for cloud computing.

First, two points to note:

• there is not currently, and there may never be, a single conformance statement for all of cloud computing – it is just too diverse for a single standard.
• cloud computing is really a "paradigm shift"? not a single system – there will be many forms of cloud computing system, with many different deployment patterns…

Grazed from WHTC. Author: Harro Ten Wolde.

German business software maker SAP pushed back its profit target as it waits for subscription revenue from cloud-computing to gather pace and invests more in the business to keep up with a fast-growing market. SAP said on Tuesday it now aimed to hit its operating margin goal of 35 percent in 2017 instead of 2015. The margin was 32.6 percent last year.

The Walldorf, southern-Germany based company and global rivals such as IBM and Oracle are racing to meet surging demand for web-based software products. Known as cloud computing, this allows businesses to reduce their costs by ditching bulky servers for network-based software in their own offices and using remote data centres run by technology companies instead…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Harvey Koeppel.

Innovation is no longer only about new or different products and services. As our world becomes increasing volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, enterprises must adapt in different ways to enhance competitiveness — or even to maintain their existing market positions.

Increasingly, top-performing companies are focusing on business-model innovation — well beyond the scope of traditional product or service research and development — to drive their new strategies and operating models. Cloud computing is ideally positioned to become a significant catalyst of business model innovation, and CIOs and their IT staff need to be thinking about how to leverage cloud computing to increase the value of their IT investments and evolve their roles as value-added enablers of business outcomes…

Grazed from ComTechies. Author: Editorial Staff.

The realm of cloud computing in the arena of technology is growing in popularity at a fast pace. And, this makes sense as more and more people are incessantly demanding access to information, ability to stay updated and connected on-the-go. Now, you no longer need to face the dilemma – particularly the inability to share information and data, even though, you don’t have a desktop or PC.

Why is that so? Well, a Smartphone is all you need today to get access to any type of information, regardless of wherever you are! That said, smartphones are ruling in today’s technological world and replacing the desktop usage, by becoming the go-on computing device…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Nicole Laskowski.

Businesses that ventured early into big data territory leaned on cloud computing for their Hadoop pilot projects, but that’s changing, according to Merv Adrian, analyst with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. These days, his clients are increasingly asking how to deploy Hadoop on-premises.

The Data Mill

Observations like this highlight how quickly big data and its related technologies are evolving. That’s certainly the case, Adrian and fellow analyst Nick Heudecker argued, with the release of Hadoop 2.0, which became generally available in October. The updated version of the Apache Software Foundation’s popular distributed computing framework made headlines last year predominately because of a new feature called YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator), which essentially breaks Hadoop out of batch processing and into the real-time world. The Gartner analysts said the more robust version will almost certainly lead to an uptick of Hadoop deployments and more use cases…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Pekka Porkka.

I think it has been the consumers who have made cloud what it is today; a mega trend. It has been people like you and me using no-cost services which were conveniently available anytime, anywhere and often with any device from the cloud. We as consumers helped providers to develop and improve services which have then also become attractive for enterprise customers. Nowadays a large number of services are offered via the cloud for professional users and all of them come with similar benefits; flexibility, minimal maintenance, and cost savings.

Cloud services in contact centers can make customer service faster, better, and more efficient. A recent study of the Aberdeen Group called Transitioning your Contact Center from On-Premise to the Cloud shows that the overall revenue and the overall profit of companies who rely on a cloud-based model overtop those businesses that rely on on-premise solutions…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Canopy, an Atos company powered by EMC and VMware, today announced support for the Intel Cloud Technology program. This program gives cloud buyers the transparency they need to select cloud services that best meet their requirements. Canopy offers a broad spectrum of dedicated and virtual private cloud solutions powered by Intel Cloud Technology to meet a wide variety of enterprise use cases.

As more and more organisations consider adopting cloud computing for their business critical applications, they are confronted by a myriad of cloud services from different providers. But without adequate transparency into these cloud services, the perceived risk of performance and security requirements not being met is unacceptable to many potential cloud buyers and becomes a major hurdle to their adoption of cloud computing…