Category: News

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Julia King.

Social, mobile and analytics technologies are disrupting business as usual at companies in all industries. In 2014, the disruption will continue, morphing into a new kind of business as usual with enterprises expanding their reliance on the cloud, mobile technologies, social media and, increasingly, predictive analytics. The goals: reducing costs, creating new revenue streams, boosting customer satisfaction and beefing up brand awareness, to name a few.

In the next three to five years, the five technologies most likely to upset the status quo are social networking, the cloud and software as a service (SaaS), self-service IT, predictive analytics and mobile payments, according to Computerworld’s Forecast 2014 survey of 221 IT executives…

Grazed from BusinessWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Xactly, a leading provider of incentive and sales performance management offerings, is speaking and exhibiting at Oracle OpenWorld 2013, this week. The 60,000 attendee event is taking place September 22-26, 2013 in the Moscone Center, San Francisco.

At the event, Xactly chief marketing officer and SVP Scott Broomfield will share observations on some of the latest trends around independent software vendors (ISVs), cloud computing and SaaS in an interview on “The Biz Couch,” which will take place September 24 at 9:40 a.m. PT. “The Biz Couch” is sponsored by Oracle and Intel, and is a place where executives and technology leaders discuss the challenges they have faced in pursuit of profitable progress and growth…

Grazed from National Monitor.  Author: Craig Manning.

Larry Ellison, the ambitious CEO of enterprising hardware and software company Oracle, is taking the company’s cloud computing options to the next level, according to a new report from PCWorld.com. The article states that Ellison and Oracle are preparing to enter the competitive and in-demand world of in-memory computing services, an announcement that should be music to the ears of tech gurus and information technology experts everywhere.

For those who are unfamiliar, in-memory computing services like the one Oracle will soon offer work similarly to other cloud-based server options, storing a company’s data offsite and off-setting the cost of purchasing physical servers. The difference with in-memory computing is that all of the company’s information is stored in a server’s random access memory (or RAM) rather than in the dark depths of the system. This arrangement allows for easier and faster access of information, simpler analysis of massive data banks, and economical drops in computing prices. In other words, in-memory computing is a big boon for businesses anywhere, and it was only a matter of time before a company like Oracle was going to join the fray…

Grazed from CNBC.  Author:  Drew Sandholm.

Grazed from ProgrammableWeb. Author: Michael Vizard.

As cloud computing continues to mature the line between private clouds running on premise or a third-party data center and public cloud computing services gets blurrier with each passing day. At the JavaOne 2013 conference today CloudBees today announced that its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment for Java applications can now be deployed on a public cloud in a way that is tightly integrated with the version of it software that IT organizations currently deploy on premise.

In addition, CloudBees announced that it now also supports iOS and OS X environments in addition to Google Android for organizations looking to build and deploy mobile applications in the cloud. According Steve Harris, senior vice president for CloudBees, enterprise IT organizations want to be able to take advantage of inexpensive public cloud services to build and test applications. But when it comes time to deploy them in a production environment they still prefer to have a more secure private PaaS environment that they can more granularly control…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

StackIQ, a leading provider of cluster management solutions for Big Infrastructure, including Big Data, Cloud Computing and High Performance Computing, today announced an extension to its StackIQ Cluster Manager featuring software-defined automation for the Red Hat Storage open software-defined storage platform. StackIQ Cluster Manager with Red Hat Storage gives enterprise customers powerful new capability to deploy and manage storage with a software-defined storage solution on premise, in virtualized environments and in the cloud.

StackIQ Cluster Manager is a comprehensive software suite for automating the deployment and management of Big Infrastructure. It leverages StackIQ’s industry-leading infrastructure management solution providing everything needed to install, configure, and manage Big Infrastructure. As a result of the extension, StackIQ Cluster Manager is now available to Red Hat Storage customers to manage a wide variety of software-defined distributed storage infrastructure and applications…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Tom Nolle.

Plans for private or hybrid cloud are complex, and one key element is often overlooked: the platform software — the operating system and middleware that will run on the virtual machines or form the basis for Platform as a Service (PaaS). Cloud platform software links applications to cloud infrastructure and frames what you can run and how easy it will be to integrate and administer the final product. To choose platform software, a company must look at its investment in virtualization, its choice of database, network traffic issues and application security and management.

A company’s commitment to virtualization

When choosing cloud platform software, the first consideration is the extent to which your company has deployed virtualization. The easiest way to look at cloud computing is as an extension to virtualization, so if virtualization is already in use, the existing software will be a big factor in selecting the cloud stack and platform software…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Steve Ranger.

The UK will need another 300,000 IT workers by 2020, but already companies are finding it hard to recruit staff for security, mobile, green tech and cloud computing projects. According to the research by tech employers body e-skills UK nearly one fifth of all vacancies are difficult to fill due to skills shortages.

The report said the "digital sector" – which includes software, services and telecoms – contributes nearly £69bn to the economy. It said the UK has around 1.1 million IT workers with just under half working in technology companies, while the rest are most likely to be employed in finance and professional services, manufacturing or the public sector…

Grazed from NextGov. Author: Joseph Sparks.

Against the backdrop of a $150 million lawsuit over a contract to build a secure computer cloud for the U.S. intelligence community, an IBM executive swiped at competitor Amazon last week, calling the company’s cloud services unreliable and not up to government standards. “Amazon’s definition of reliability doesn’t measure up to what the federal government needs for mission critical workloads,” Andrew Maner, managing partner of IBM’s federal cloud business told Nextgov.

Amazon is suing the government in an effort to claw back a contract it initially won to provide cloud computing services to the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The CIA later canceled and re-bid that contract after IBM complained to the Government Accountability Office…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Charlie Osbourne.

Hewlett Packard has launched a new cloud-based analytics service based on HP’s HAVEn Big Data analytics platform. Announced on Monday, the new service will help clients solve business problems and create new revenue opportunities, according to the firm. By leveraging HP HAVEn, clients can more effectively analyze and derive value from their information, such as increasing sales with targeted client offerings, improving supply chain performance, detecting fraud or discovering security risks more efficiently through the new service.

Dragan Rakovich, chief technologist, Information Management & Analytics of HP Enterprise Services said: "Harnessing the value of information is a top priority for our clients and a Big Data solution is a significant investment of time and money for any organization, regardless of industry. HP Enterprise Services has leveraged HP HAVEn’s unified approach to Big Data to provide a low-risk, simplified and accelerated entry path to addressing key client business problems."…