Category: News

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Ellis Booker.

Line of business decisionmakers are more interested in cloud computing’s strategic potential than are their IT counterparts. That was one of the surprises in IBM’s latest global research into the cloud-computing phenomenon. The survey, released in late October, involved 800 companies in 13 countries and 24 industries. LOB executives are embracing software-, platform-, and infrastructure-as-a-service more quickly than their IT peers, the survey found.

"Three years from now, 72% of the people we surveyed in the line of business believe it’s going to be ‘strategically important’ to transforming their companies," said IBM’s VP of cloud services Ric Telford, who teased some of the research’s top-level findings during his keynote at last month’s Cloud Connect conference in Chicago…

Grazed from InfoChimps. Author: Editorial Staff.

The enterprise is currently in a ‘Big Data Limbo’, where leadership has begun, or is preparing to invest in analytics – but lacks clear direction with where and how to implement. The technology is powerful, and like the moniker suggests, “Big Data” is massive, leaving some executives with the impression that for these projects to be successful, IT departments must ready themselves to boil the proverbial ocean…

To view the Big Data infographic, visit http://www.cloudtweaks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Big-Data-Info.jpg

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Joe Weinman.

CIOs are already addressing the opportunities and challenges of cloud computing. It is now time to consider the next phase of the cloud: the Intercloud. In the same way the Internet enabled interoperability between proprietary networks, the Intercloud will enable proprietary clouds to interoperate, and it will encourage third-party services such as cloud marketplaces.

The IEEE is developing the IEEE P2302™ Standard for Intercloud Interoperability and Federation. Also, a recently announced complementary IEEE Intercloud Testbed initiative is under way to ensure that the standards work under real-world conditions. A number of interesting technologies and concepts, such as the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF), are under evaluation as part of a comprehensive architecture and engineering plan…

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Michael Scaturro.

If Germany’s special parliamentary session on U.S. surveillance this week was any indication, European politicians are still worked up about former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks. Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that the revelations had “tested” U.S.-German relations. Green Party politician Hans-Christian Strobele urged the German leader to thank Snowden and offer him asylum for discovering that her cell phone “was probably bugged.”

Merkel even got called a “scaredy-cat” for not standing up to Washington. The criticism comes as politicians in the region—from Estonia to Germany—are calling for the European Union to create a cloud-computing infrastructure of its own to compete with American providers like Amazon, Google, and Verizon…

Grazed from ChannelPartnersOnline. Author: Carl Meadows.

Many channel partners see cloud solutions as a threat to their hardware sales, but in the case of private clouds, they can be a boon. Whether an enterprise establishes its own private cloud or retains a private cloud hosting provider, the partner can still sell the cloud hardware and, with the latter, the partner also can resell cloud hosting services.

Indeed, channel partners should be happy if their customers use either a combination of cloud and traditional solutions — a hybrid environment. Why? Because all signals point to a huge increase in spending for private cloud computing by businesses and organizations over the next few years…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

NICE Systems (NASDAQ: NICE) today announced that it is a winner of the 2013 Cloud Computing Excellence Award for its cloud-based Workforce Optimization (WFO) suite. The award, from TMC’s Cloud Computing magazine, recognizes companies that are able to effectively leverage the cloud to bring new, differentiated offerings to the market.

NICE’s WFO suite is the first one fully available in the cloud, enabling greater flexibility, lower upfront costs, and faster implementation for contact centers, back offices, branches, and retail. Driven by real-time, cross-channel analytics and Voice of the Customer insights, the NICE WFO offering delivers targeted solutions for enhancing the customer experience, enhancing operational efficiency across the enterprise, and improving employee performance. Organizations can mix and match on-premise and cloud-based applications, including Recording, Quality Management, Interaction Analytics, Workforce Management, Performance Management, Incentive Compensation Management, and Voice of the Customer…

Grazed from BizTech Magazine. Author: Ricky Riberio.

It’s true: Moving operations to a public cloud requires organizations to become comfortable with letting go of complete control of their data. While handing over control of organizational data to a third party inevitably creates a vulnerability, data stored in the cloud isn’t inherently less secure than non-cloud data.

We reached out to Kurt Roemer, Citrix Systems’ chief security strategist, to get a better understanding of how companies can secure their data in cloud environments that they own or don’t own.

QUESTION When it comes to the cloud, how much security can an organization really expect from infrastructure that they don’t own?…

Grazed from Investors.com. Author: Reihardt Krause.

Amazon.com’s widening push into cloud-computing services has the traditional IT industry bracing for more competition. Amazon Web Services, the cloud unit of the e-commerce leader, this month showcased its fast-growing cloud wares for large enterprises at its own developers conference. Amazon’s shift in focus from smaller companies to big enterprises is having an impact on many information technology companies.

Shares of data center technology firmsCitrix Systems (CTXS) and VMware (VMW) fell last week after AWS announced new services. IBM (IBM) has launched an ad campaign vs. Amazon (AMZN) on their respective cloud prowess. Rackspace Hosting (RAX) and others, meanwhile, are struggling to make the investments needed to challenge AWS…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) has long been heralded as the next big wave for cloud computing (disclosure, I’m an adviser to ActiveState, a PaaS vendor). Distinct from the more readily understood (and more broadly adopted) Infrastructure as a Service, PaaS provides higher value to organizations by abstracting more non-core technological requirements away from the business.

PaaS offerings further facilitate the deployment of applications when compared to IaaS since they not only take care of the infrastructure-level requirement but also offer further integrated services and the application development platform. It’s fair to say though that PaaS brings with it some broader concerns than the more simple IaaS – concerns have long been raised about the amount of lock-in that PaaS vendors create for their customers – one of the earlier PaaS offerings, Force.com is often complemented in one breath for the way it democratizes development, but criticized in the other breath for the lock-in that it creates…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Penguin Computing, a provider of high performance and enterprise computing solutions, today announced future availability of the new Arctica 3200xl open network switch based on the Broadcom StrataXGS® Trident II chipset. Introduction of Arctica 3200xl adds 32-port 40 Gigabit Ethernet capability to the Arctica family. Arctica 3200xl also enables up to 96 servers and storage systems to be connected over 10 Gigabit Ethernet to a single Top-of-Rack switch while supporting 40 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks for aggregation. With existing Arctica 4804i, 4804x and new 3200xl models Penguin has a full suite of open switches for High Performance Computing and Internet Data Center applications.

40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GigE) ports available in Arctica 3200xl alleviate I/O bottlenecks in congested storage servers. Used as Inter-Switch Links (ISLs), 40GigE connections aggregate traffic from multiple 10/40GigE Top-of-Rack switches. Arctica 3200xl also offers new high port count 10 Gigabit Ethernet options to support ultra high density rack form factors, such as Penguin OpenHPC™. Multiple Arctica 3200xl and 4804x units can be used to span large non-blocking fabric topologies (Clos networks) to support High Performance Computing clusters. For data center and virtualization workloads, Arctica 3200xl provides wire speed VXLAN functionality to address the management and security concerns in large multi-tenant cloud deployments…