Category: News

Grazed from DataCenterDynamics. Author: Editorial Staff.

CenturyLink-owned Savvis has won a cloud hosting contract worth almost US$1.1m over three years from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The order was awarded to Savvis Federal Systems, which will provide managed, scalable public cloud hosting services for www.fcc.gov, myfcc.gov and the commission’s other public website domains.

The contract is for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and includes migration of the existing website infrastructure to a CenturyLink cloud data center. Last year, CenturyLink won two task orders to provide private Wide Area Network (WAN) services and Managed Trusted Internet Protocol Services (MTIPS) to the FCC…

Grazed from Piston. Author: Editorial Staff.

Dell can see which way the winds are blowing and has no interest in being left behind. It’s no surprise, then, that it’s basing its cloud on OpenStack architecture as well as deploying (and supporting) other open source software. A July Geekzone article chronicles Dell’s recent announcement that it is expanding its commercial product offerings that leverage open source software like OpenStack and Hadoop.

The fact that Dell is doubling down on the cloud only further indicates how vital cloud computing is for businesses of all sizes – not to mention IT and software companies. Dell is also expanding upon its work with its own Crowbar, an open source community platform to help manage cloud and big data ecosystems…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: David Deans.

There once was a time when many business leaders around the world stood on the sidelines, while the early-adopters of cloud computing reaped the rewards with their first-to-market deployments. Today, managed cloud services are considered a mainstream business technology for all takers — with only the most uninformed laggards still disputing the apparent benefits.

With 90 percent of companies claiming some form of cloud usage, many organizations have moved to the next step, leveraging multiple cloud models in different combinations to optimize benefits and efficiencies, according to findings from the latest market study by CompTIA…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

In times gone by, people and organizations paid IT vendors for something tangible — be it server boxes or software on a disk. Now with the cloud, IT is no longer a product, it is a service. And as with any kind of service, software has become an intangible that requires ongoing payments. There are a bunch of ways to pay for cloud or Software as a Service — and the industry seems to still be in search of the best formula for attracting and keeping customers.

But for now, cloud and SaaS vendors have settled on four basic models. Byron Deeter, partner with the venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, recently co-authored a paper that reviewed the top pricing models, exploring how each model has evolved, and what’s in it for the customer:…

Grazed from VirtualizationReview.  Author: Jeffrey Schwartz.

Workday, one of the fastest-growing Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, this week launched a big data analytics module to add to its portfolio of human resources and financial applications.  Delivered at the company’s seventh annual Workday Rising conference in San Francisco, the new Workday Big Data Analytics is a key component of the company’s latest update to its SaaS offerings called Workday 20. Workday Big Data Analytics gathers data from its portfolio as well as other data sources to help individuals develop specialized reports and benchmarks.

"For our customers, big data is about opening up the Workday cloud to import non-Workday data to more readily make business decisions," wrote Dan Beck, the company’s vice president of product management…

Grazed from Cloudify.  Author: Editorial Staff.

For many companies, cloud computing might seem like a daunting prospect, the sort of revolutionary technology that only global leaders need to invest in. But in fact the opposite is true; the time, money and energy that can be saved through cloud computing is something that everyone should be taking advantage of.  Cloud computing is a virtual platform which allows companies to access their data: anytime, anywhere, period. Safely stored in the Cloud, company data is accessible for employees, enabling flexible working, enhancing efficiency and reducing costs.

At the same time, data is highly secure, protected from any virtual or physical attacks. To make it a hat trick of benefits, Cloud computing connects colleagues globally ensuring uniformity.  The best part is that cloud services don’t even require users to understand what “saving” is. There’s no longer a need to understand file systems, ushering in a level of simplicity computer engineers have been searching for since the personal computer was invented…

Grazed from TheWhir.  Author: Nicole Henderson.

Cloud provider Virtustream announced this week that it has closed a $40 million Series D investment round led by enterprise software provider giant SAP.  The investment will be used to grow capacity of IaaS growth, and be put into further developing of its xStream cloud management software for enterprise and service provider network. In 2012, Virtustream raised $15 million to help grow xStream and expand into more markets.

The investment comes after a long-standing partnership between the two companies, where SAP was both a strategic partner and customer of Virtustream.  Virtustream’s cloud software and IaaS offerings were built to serve the requirements of enterprise applications, including security, compliance, and SLAs. Its platform was one of the first to be certified to deploy the full line of SAP business applications in 2010…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

PrivateCore, the private computing company, today announced that it was selected from hundreds applicants and bested four finalists to win the CloudBeat2013 Innovation Showdown competition. PrivateCore was chosen by a panel of judges from leading venture capital firms including General Catalyst, Norwest Venture Partners, Data Collective, SAP Ventures, Foley & Lardner LLP and Alchemist Accelerator for its groundbreaking full memory encryption technology which secures any application, any data, anywhere on standard x86 servers.

“You could imagine someone from a government security agency going into a data center and putting a snooping device on a server and intercepting all of the communications happening within a server,” said VentureBeat’s Meghan Kelly and Dean Takahashi. “PrivateCore creates a software layer known as a Hypervisor that fits inside the memory of a central processing unit and encrypts the data in the memory. By encrypting memory, PrivateCore vCage makes it safe to run any application in outsourced, hosted, or cloud environments.”…

Grazed from BusinessCloud News. Author: Jonathan Brandon.

Global insurance IT budgets are projected to grow at a 6.5 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) with total IT spend reaching $109bn by 2017. Moreover a growing portion of the investment will be going towards cloud computing technologies among others according to research and analysis firm Ovum.

Charles Juniper, senior insurance analyst, financial services technology at Ovum, believes insurers are beginning to prioritise IT investment once again following a lull in spending brought on by the global economic slowdown, with many firms targeting legacy systems modernisation, online channels, and fraud detection systems as key spending areas…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Agam Shah and Chris Kanaracus.

Shareholders have voted to approve a $24.9 billion buyout of the company by founder and CEO Michael Dell and investment firm Silver Lake Partners. They will be paid $13.75 per share, an increase from the original offer, as well as an additional cash dividend of $0.13 per share, for a total of $13.88 per share, according to Thursday’s announcement.

The transaction was approved by those holding a majority of Dell’s outstanding shares, the company said. An exact tally wasn’t immediately available. For Michael Dell, the vote marks a victory in a long and grueling fight to take the company private. "I am pleased with this outcome and am energized to continue building Dell into the industry’s leading provider of scalable, end-to-end technology solutions," he said in a statement…