Category: News

Grazed from Technorati.  Author: Kevin McCafee.

For those of us living in the more general realm of technology, terms like SMM, CRM, and even SEO only begin to scratch the surface of our periphery. In this fast paced information age, simple acronyms easily fade into a broad background of ever growing terminologies that often have a lot more relevance to our daily lives than we think. So what do all of these terms have in common? Simplicity.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a good point of reference. With 70 percent of the world’s Internet browsers using Google as their window to the online world, this should be four letter word essentially dictates the modern business world. Whether you are developing an e-commerce platform or just have a local business listing, there are various ways to boost your SEO, namely increasing the number and quality of inbound links to your site, a simple practice known as link building…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

The next big wave of cloud computing may favor Software as a Service benefits over basic cloud infrastructure, at least if one professional staffing services firm has its way. Sean Perry, chief information officer for Menlo Park, Calif.-based Robert Half International Inc., a heavy user of Amazon Web Services for cloud infrastructure, is looking to deploy more Software as a Service (SaaS) products. SearchCloudComputing caught up with him to reflect on 2013 and hear his cloud computing predictions for 2014. What cloud computing projects did you work on this year? What were the benefits of those projects?

Sean Perry: There were three types of projects that we executed in 2013 related to the cloud.

The first type was projects that positioned systems for easier migration to the cloud in the future. These were very pragmatic projects where some type of upgrade or other work was already planned, and we took advantage of the opportunity to change the underlying technology infrastructure to support future migration to the cloud. This had incremental benefits, in that the newer technologies performed much better. [It also gave] us the opportunity to move [development and test] environments to the cloud and out of our data center…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

IBM has reached into its software portfolio to provide a more sophisticated scheduler for the OpenStack deployments it builds for its customers. "You don’t want a cloud user to feel like their application is not performing as advertised," said Jay Muelhoefer, IBM’s strategy director for the new Platform Resource Scheduler. The Platform Resource Scheduler was originally developed by Platform Computing, which IBM purchased in 2012.

Platform Computing’s scheduler, originally called Platform Load Sharing Facility (LSF), found a home in many financial analysis systems, high performance computing (HPC) environments and in a number of grid computing deployments. Within an OpenStack deployment, the Platform Resource Scheduler can choose the most appropriate server in which to place a new virtual machine based on policies crafted by the administrator…

Grazed from Chicago Tribune. Author: Aurindom Mukherjee.

Oracle Corp, the world’s No. 2 business software maker, said it would buy web-based marketing software maker Responsys Inc for about $1.39 billion to bolster its cloud computing offerings. Oracle, led by billionaire Larry Ellison, has been focusing on cloud software to fend off competition from nimbler rivals such as Salesforce.com and Workday Inc, which offer web-based products at prices that often undercut Oracle.

Four-decade-old Oracle, which came late to cloud computing, has created sales teams targeting specific cloud competitors and is trying to be a one-stop shop for operating systems, databases and software programs over the Web. Responsys makes cloud-based software that businesses use to manage their marketing campaigns across e-mail, mobile and the Internet. Its customers include LinkedIn, Southwest Airlines, and United Healthcare…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Bright Computing, the leading vendor-independent provider of management solutions for clusters and clouds, is now a supporting organization of the OpenStack Foundation. The goal of Bright’s OpenStack initiative is to simplify the task of deploying and managing private clouds based on the OpenStack platform.

OpenStack is an open source cloud platform that enables service providers, enterprises, government agencies, and academic institutions to implement cloud computing solutions. It is used in industries that range from telecommunications to SaaS and eCommerce to finance and healthcare…

Grazed from ITBusiness.ca. Author: Editorial Staff.

I recently spoke with the CEO of the Canadian Cloud Council, Robert Hart, to get his perspective on The Cloud Factory conference. Robert has a unique vantage point of cloud computing in Canada. On April 9 and 10, 2014 senior executives from many of the most respected organizations will be in Banff, Alta. sharing their insights on the state of cloud computing globally and discussing the opportunities and risks for Canadian organizations.

What is the state of cloud computing in Canada today?

Robert Hart: We are past the discussion in terms of “if’” Canadians are interested in cloud computing – we are. It is now a matter of adding real practical value in terms of what cloud computing can do for a business, how IT organizations can develop cloud computing and build business cases internally to get more support for greater adoption and greater investment in cloud computing. And, how Canadians can come together to build an interesting ecosystem that’s going to allow Canadian innovation…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Karen Goulart.

In the first part of this two-part story, CIOs and cloud experts noted that 2014 will be the year when cloud comes into its own. Real planning, with an eye toward end-to-end solutions will take the place of piecemeal use of cloud solutions and services, they said. The second part of this story looks at the maturation of Infrastructure as a Service, a new security focus spurred by revelations of NSA practices, the renewed importance of IT service catalogs and why cost is no longer the biggest driver behind cloud adoption.

One aspect that will make the transition to cloud go more smoothly, said Ed Anderson, analyst at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., is the maturity of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). He predicts that 2014 will see IaaS move from handling the low-risk workloads like testing and development to the mainstream…

Grazed from CIOInsight. Author: Samual Greengard.

It’s no secret that cloud computing has changed the dynamics of business and IT. But along with significant gains, there have been plenty of growing pains. Understanding pricing models and increasingly complex business agreements is at the center of the challenges for CIOs.

"Cloud has long been thought as analogous to electricity, allowing consumers to ‘plug-in’ and consume IT resources, paying only for what they need. Unfortunately, the IaaS market is far, far away from being a utility, and there is a confusing array of pricing methods, chargeable line items, metrics and pre-configured bundles," observes Owen Rogers, cloud economist at 451 Research…

Grazed from BusinessCloudNews. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

Taiwanese PC maker Acer announced Thursday that the company plans to transition to a “hardware plus software plus services company,” and develop more cloud services to complement its notebooks and desktops. The move comes after weeks of mulling a new strategic direction following several quarters of losses for the struggling PC maker, and will see the company embark on a path taken by its biggest competitors.

Acer said that it will look to combine its strengths in the PC market with new competencies in cloud computing technology, and work quickly towards developing an integrated set of hardware and software offerings in what the company is calling a “build your own cloud” or BYOC approach…

Grazed from TheVarGuy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

If 2013 was the year of OpenStack adoption, 2014 will be all about "spitting and polishing" the open source framework for building public and private clouds to make it easier to deploy and use than ever. That’s the message from two veterans of the cloud hosting industry, who shared their insights recently on where OpenStack cloud computing is headed in the coming year.

In a recent call, Jonathan LaCour and Simon Anderson, who are, respectively, CEO and VP of Software Development at DreamHost (Anderson is also a member of the OpenStack Foundation board of directors), emphasized that the last 12 months have witnessed widespread adoption of OpenStack. That was true not only in the United States but also Europe, where OpenStack seemed to enjoy less momentum about a year ago at this time…