Category: News

Grazed from IBM. Author: PR Announcement.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Emeryville, CA-based Aspera, Inc. Aspera’s technology helps companies securely speed the movement of massive data files around the world. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Licensed to clients and partners either in the cloud or on premise, Aspera’s high-speed transfer technology reduces transmission times for large files or data sets by up to 99.9 percent – potentially cutting a 26 hour transfer of a 24 gigabyte file, sent halfway around the world, down to just 30 seconds. Aspera’s patented fasp™ technology overcomes inherent bottlenecks in broadband wide area networks that slow the transfer of extremely large files, such as high-definition video or scientific research files, over distance.

Companies today are struggling to manage increasing volumes of structured and unstructured data created by everything from sensors to social media. They must accelerate the velocity of sending and receiving this data to improve competitiveness in a variety of ways – including the ability to more quickly uncover valuable business insights, bring products to market faster and improve employee productivity…

Grazed from CloudComputingIntelligence. Author: Matthew Finnie.

The biggest barrier to progress in businesses today is the inefficiency of IT. Many enterprises are losing time and money because valuable content is separated by a sprawling mass of incompatible legacy systems that require individual expertise and resources. This technologic chaos is the equivalent of keeping money in your mattress. Enter the cloud. And, the cloud offered CIOs the option to consolidate resources and drive greater mobility. Cloud computing effectively provides on-demand access to a wide range of configurable resources – networks, storage, computers/servers and applications. It’s faster because an outsourced network is much wider than a company one and it’s cheaper because they are only paying for what they are using.

Many CIOs are still hardwired towards internal control

However, many CIOs are still hardwired to want to control all company data internally. They are nervous about moving physical assets and data storage out of the company firewall, citing the same concerns of data security, compliance and cost they cited some years ago. But, a lot of this hinges on a lack of understanding of the cloud and its benefits. With the right cloud provider CIOs will have the security they need, alongside the on-demand flexibility that enables them to scale usage up and down at will and host data in a location that suits their needs…

Grazed from TechWeekEurope. Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Cisco Systems has teamed up with VMware and Citrix Systems as it launches a cloud-based desktop-as-a-service solution, aimed at both service providers and enterprises. The new service will complement Cisco’s existing on-premises virtual desktop infrastructure offering.

DaaS Service

The new Cisco Desktop as a Service (DaaS) offering will be based on the networking giant’s Unified Computing System (UCS) converged data centre solution and the company’s enhanced desktop virtualisation solution. The new cloud offering will give service providers a new service to offer their customers, while at the same time, enterprises will be able use the solution to launch a DaaS solution in their private clouds….

Grazed from BizTech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft India, today, launched a contest for independent software vendors (ISVs) and technology start-ups that is expected to result in the creation of over 100 applications (apps) and solutions for businesses and governments in six months. The contest is supported by a panel of organisations including National Informatics Centre (NIC) of the Government of India, NASSCOM, TiE, Nokia, Nokia App Campus, Intel and BarrierBreak.

ISVs and technology start-ups can win nine awards in four categories – Enterprise, MSME, Government Enablement and Citizen Services. Special credit will be given to apps and solutions that are accessible to differently-abled people and/or are created to promote social good. An NIC-backed, special award is earmarked for the ‘Best solution for social good using Open Gov Data’. 56 Indian government departments and ministries recently opened their data sets to the public and NIC is encouraging ISVs to develop applications using these data sets…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Rene Millman.

Cisco has moved to boost its mobile collaboration efforts with the acquisition of Collaborate.com. The terms of the deal were undisclosed. The deal is part of Cisco’s bid to bolster its presence in mobility and cloud computing with Collaborate.com’s mobile collaboration platform. The platform provides unified document sharing, task management and team communication capabilities.

The firm said this platform allows the mobile workforce to collaborate with team members on projects. It enables users to instantly create virtual collaboration rooms where they can chat and share documents, notes, photos and videos. The platform integrates messaging, document sharing, and task management in a mobile app for iOS, Android and web…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Michael C. Daconta.

This week, IBM took out several ads trumpeting its cloud market share. Following quickly on the heels of IBM’s announcement, Google announced the “general availability” of the Google Compute Engine, a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud. Along with the upgrade of its service from beta to general availability, Google also announced three new features of its infrastructure-as-a-service offering: lower price, greater Linux support and the Docker “container-as-a-service” platform. What’s going on? Let’s examine each of these developments and then consider the ramifications.

Google dropped its prices by 10 percent for the most popular IaaS compute instances and 60 percent for disk storage. Price competition for IaaS services is continuing to heat up, with many sites calling it a “cloud price war.” In fact, 12 hours after Google’s announcement, AWS announced a 26 percent drop in prices for its Windows virtual machines…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panetierri.

Oracle (ORCL), a Top 100 Cloud Services Provider in 2013, says cloud computing bookings grew 35 percent in Q2 2014. That sounds impressive but it’s unclear how much of that revenue involve channel partners and integrators driving customers toward Oracle’s cloud. New Oracle Channel Chief Rich Geraffo hasn’t said much to the media. But CEO Larry Ellison and President Mark Hurd both professed cloud success during an earnings call earlier today.

Hurd stated: "In Cloud, we had bookings growth of 35%, and saw excellent growth across all major product pillars. Fusion SaaS was even better with HCM, sales force automation and ERP, all up triple digits. We are adding customers at high growth rates, contract sizes are growing and hundreds of customers are now live Fusion SaaS."…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

It’s that time of year that everyone issues their predictions for the year ahead, and there certainly have been some good forecasts about impending or continuing developments in the cloud market. Louis Columbus, a fellow contributor here at Forbes, recently channeled a compelling list of cloud predictions from research firm IDC, and Suhas Sreedhar adds additional insights for the year ahead. In the spirit of prediction-making, I am offering my own. But rather than provide another list, I have just one prediction for the year ahead. That is, cloud computing is set to become mainstream computing, period.

We’ll continue to call it “cloud” for some time to come, and vendors will continue to pitch it as “cloud,” but it’s now the mainstream. We’ve seen this before. In the early 1990s, there was client/server computing, in which PCs were provided access to larger back-end systems. Then, it was Internet computing, in which applications and data were exposed through websites. We still have mobile computing, but the act of using smartphones to access back-end applications and data is simply being thought of as computing as well…

Grazed from CruxialCIO. Author: Brian T. Horowitz.

Amazon Web Services has signed an agreement to expand its ability to provide cloud computing services from data centers located inside China. The company announced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on Dec. 18 with the Beijing and Ningxia governments. Businesses such as Xiaomi Qihoo 360, TCL, Tiens, NQ Mobile, FunPlus Kingsoft, Mobotap and Papaya Mobile already work with AWS in China.

During a limited preview of its China Region, a select China-based and multinational companies will be able to use the AWS platforms to run their applications. Chinese providers ChinaNetCenter and SINNET will offer the infrastructure, bandwidth and network capabilities to allow AWS to operate in the country…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

In mid-November, Microsoft unveiled a facility on its Redmond, Wash., campus that had become the new home for its Digital Crimes Unit. It took the opportunity to offer up new details about the multi-agency initiative that disrupted the huge Citadel botnet earlier this year. What Microsoft hasn’t yet talked much about is the role the cloud played in the Citadel project and how the cloud enables the company to tackle cyber crime. I had a chance to hear more about it from Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, this week.

The Digital Crimes Unit has some dedicated hardware on-premises, although Boscovich revealed only a few specifics. “We do in fact use quite a lot of storage power, a lot of compute power,” he said. “We have a Hadoop cluster on SQL server and a parallel data warehouse right here on-premises. We’re talking terabytes of storage.”…