Category: News

September 28, 2013 Off

Oracle CFO Says Cloud Computing Will Lift Profit Margins

By David

Grazed from Bloomberg.  Author: Aaron Ricadela.

Oracle Corp., the world’s largest database-software maker, will boost operating margins by shifting to services delivered via the Web from software installed on computers, Chief Financial Officer Safra Catz said.

Oracle will be more profitable as technology spending is directed toward cloud-computing tools, Catz, who is also co-president, said at a meeting with analysts in San Francisco yesterday. Analysts project on average that Oracle will reach an operating margin of 48 percent for the fiscal year through May, compared with 39 percent in the previous year …

September 28, 2013 Off

Outdated IT Skills Slowing Enterprise Shift to Cloud Computing

By David

Grazed from Xconomy.  Author: Benjamin Romano.

What’s the biggest thing stopping big companies from using cloud computing for their business? People with outdated skills.  So says Simon Crosby, co-founder and CTO of Bromium, a cloud security company, and a panelist at this week’s Washington Technology Industry Association TechNW: North to Innovation event on cloud computing and big data.

Crosby, who previously co-founded XenSource, maker of the Xen open-source hypervisor used by services including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, says public clouds are ready for enterprise IT use. But the people working in enterprise IT organizations came up in the world racking and stacking on-premises servers, and installing and managing Windows—”skills we don’t need anymore,” he says…

September 27, 2013 Off

BrightBox Solutions Set to Launch Private Cloud Hosting Option, Providing More Secure SaaS Help Desk Software

By David

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

BrightBox Solutions, the innovative technology company behind Help Desk Premier, is pleased to announce the upcoming availability of a private cloud version of the application. BrightBox Solutions is a leading provider of help desk software for the SMB market, and they recently received $500,000 in new investment. The investment is targeted at, among other things, strengthening their SaaS offering. The product, which has long been offered as an on-premise solution, will be offered as a hosted solution, and now as a private hosted solution.

BrightBox Solutions began beta testing the cloud-based version of the program on September 3, and along with that testing comes the announcement of the availability of a private cloud option. As with any cloud application, BrightBox Solutions will host the clients database, but instead of commingling the data with that of other companies, the customer will have a dedicated cloud instance that operates exclusively as a home for their data…

September 27, 2013 Off

Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS Tools Aimed at Enterprise App Developers

By David

Grazed from ADTMag. Author: Jeffrey Swartz.

Red Hat this week announced an expansion to its OpenShift Platform as a Service (PaaS) portfolio. The tools are targeted at letting developers build modern, composite and mobile apps to public, private and hybrid cloud environments

The company outlined its new JBoss xPaaS services for OpenShift suite, based on its development environment for enterprise Java and middleware. In addition to providing new tooling for developers to build modern and mobile apps for PaaS clouds, Red Hat officials said the new suite will help developers connect existing legacy apps to cloud environments without recoding them…

September 27, 2013 Off

The “Magic Cloud” for Rural Service Providers

By David

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Esmeralda Swartz.

Here at MetraTech we work hard to provide a billing and compensation platform that will help service providers monetize their services, whether those services are deployed in the cloud, across the Internet or other methods. However, we have learned that before proposing a billing solution, we first need to understand the full extent of the problems our customers face.

The cloud business model is already exciting enough, offering opportunities for a plethora of new services, delivering services in new and better ways and enabling collaborative business models that could be worth more than the sum of their parts. But, if all that isn’t enough, the cloud is now being infused with "magical" properties. This week I read several articles that introduced a new concept that takes the cloud one step further: the magic cloud. Here is just one example from Billing World:…

September 27, 2013 Off

One Major Reason Companies Abandon Cloud Projects

By David

Grazed from I.T. Business Edge. Author: Loraine Lawson.

One of the main reasons cloud computing is taking off is that it’s just so darn easy. It’s cheap, it’s quick, and you don’t need to go through a lengthy battle to do it. You’ve heard it a hundred times — it only takes a credit card and you’re up and running.

But while that may be what makes cloud popular, it’s not the best way to leverage cloud computing’s real power, writes Rex Wang, vice president of Oracle’s Product Marketing, in a recent Forbes column. By taking a long-term, strategic approach to cloud computing, you can use cloud computing to drive transformational change, he writes…

September 27, 2013 Off

NSA Encryption Cracking Could Worsen Potential Losses For U.S. Cloud Industry

By David

Grazed from CRN. Author: Kathy Kim.

Potential NSA-related losses for the U.S. cloud industry could steepen following the recent disclosures about the government’s encryption cracking practices, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

Last month, the ITIF released a report that claimed the U.S. National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program, dubbed PRISM, could cost the U.S. cloud computing industry anywhere between $22 billion and $35 billion over the next three years. But recent revelations about NSA’s antiencryption program could have an even more detrimental impact to the industry if foreign customers choose to not store their data with U.S. companies…

September 27, 2013 Off

Cloud Computing: Google Hits Microsoft, Making Quickoffice Available for Free to Everyone

By David

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: CJ Arlotta.

Google (GOOG) is offering its mobile app Quickoffice — a tool for working with Microsoft (MSFT) Office documents — for free to to all users. The app was previously available to Google Apps for Business users and enables users view and work with Microsoft Office documents across all devices, from PCs to iPad, iPhone and Android phones and tablets. The VAR Guy has said that QuickOffice could be Google’s ultimate Trojan Horse into the Microsoft Office market.

The release of QuickOffice to all users for free has the potential to further disrupt Microsoft’s lock on the productivity market. "Everyone likes free stuff, which is why … we’re making Quickoffice available for free, for everyone," Google Engineering Vice President Alan Warren acknowledged in a Google blog post…

September 27, 2013 Off

Cloud Security Alliance Releases Big Data Reports

By David

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: TalkinCloud.

Big Data analytics are being used to help organizations make better decisions based on large volumes of data they have collected, but such analytics are also being used to determine threats to cloud computing. The Cloud Security Alliance’s Big Data Working Group has released the results of its "Big Data Analytics for Security Intelligence" report.

The initial report does focus a little bit on the differences between traditional and Big Data before it dives into how Big Data analytics is being used to obtain actionable intelligence in real time. It’s still early on in the technology’s maturation, though, as there are still a few challenges to be overcome, according to the report. Data provenance, privacy, securing Big Data stores and human-computer interaction are all areas the report noted still need some work and continued evolution…

September 27, 2013 Off

Cloud Platform Provider Covisint Goes Public

By David

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

In a move that represents one of the first pure cloud players to go public, Covisint unveiled its initial public offering (IPO) of 6.4 million shares this week. But this isn’t a typical Silicon Valley IPO story, as Covisint is a wholly owned subisidary of Compuware, technology performance solutions provider.

Covisint joined the Nasdaq Global Select Market to offer its shares to potential investors at $10 per share, starting yesterday. The shares being offered represent 17.6 percent of its issued and outstanding shares. Credit Suisse acted as the lead bookrunner for the IPO, with Pacific Crest Securities acting as joint bookrunner. Evercore acted as co-manager…