Category: News

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

Microsoft has taken the wraps off updates for two of its customer-facing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products: Outlook Web App and Skype for Windows Phone 8. Outlook Web App, the enterprise-focused version of its Outlook.com cloud email service, now sports a delegate access configuration feature. Even though you’re off having a good time, it’s still business as usual in the office. The feature allows users to give permission for others to check their inbox and manage their calendar while they are away.

In a blog post introducing the delegate access feature for Outlook Web App, three members of the Office 365 team wrote: “Let’s say you’re about to go on vacation and … you’ve decided to turn work email off on your phone and leave your laptop at home for this trip…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Doug Henschen.

Cloud computing heavyweights Salesforce.com and Workday both reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue increases last week, keeping up their impressive growth track records. It’s fresh evidence that enterprise applications are moving into the cloud, with new InformationWeek research showing that the trend is not limited to small- and midsize-businesses or to lightweight "edge" applications like travel and expense management.

Salesforce.com’s latest quarter ended July 31 was highlighted by a 31% year-over-year increase in revenue to $957 million — well ahead of the $941 million revenue mark expected by analysts at Wells Fargo Securities. The increase was fueled in part by the company’s $2.5 billion acquisition of cloud-based marketing firm ExactTarget. But the bigger story is Salesforce.com’s effort to target "the largest and most important companies in the world," as Benioff put it during last week’s conference call with analysts…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

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 new research from CompTIA, the non-profit association for the information technology (IT) industry.

As cloud computing becomes a default part of the IT landscape, more companies are relying on cloud computing for business processes such as storage (59 percent), business continuity and disaster recovery (48 percent) and security (44 percent), CompTIA’s Fourth Annual Trends in Cloud Computing study reveals…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

IBM is just starting to see hints of the new breed of apps that will become possible as more businesses start adopting cloud computing. I had a chat last week with Ric Telford, vice president of IBM Cloud Services. I tossed a range of questions at him about the demands IBM is getting from customers. But the conversation seemed to keep coming back to apps.

Telford has a vision of a new breed of apps that are “born-on-the-cloud apps as opposed to born-on-the-enterprise,” he said. “We’re entering the next generation of enterprise apps where it’s basically going to follow the models you see on the consumer side,” he said…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

Private clouds are all the buzz these days, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that everybody’s doing it. But in fact, fewer companies than you might think have deployed ‘true’ private clouds. Forrester found in a recent survey of 2,330 people that 26% of IT executives say they have a private cloud. But among those who claimed they have a private cloud, only 13% implemented the technologies that Forrester says truly define a private cloud, like self-service and automated provisioning, among other features. Instead, they built private environments that have some but not all the features of a private cloud.

Further, some businesses that are building private clouds would really be better off with a standard virtualized data center or with a public cloud, experts say. Around half the time, businesses build private clouds for the wrong reasons and should be doing something else instead, estimates David Linthicum, a consultant at Cloud Technology Partners…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization advancing technology for humanity, today announced its second IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing for Emerging Markets (CCEM) in India, taking place in Bangalore 16-18 October, 2013. During the three-day event, which will bring together industry, government, and academic leaders in cloud computing from across the world, Dr. Sam Pitroda, Chairman of the National Innovation Council for India, will unveil a white paper on "Roadmap for Cloud computing innovation in India".

Infosys’Kris Gopalakrishnan will deliver the inaugural address. To learn more about the conference and to register visit http://cloudcomputing.ieee.org/ccem. Other eminent speakers at the conference include – Dr. Anurag Srivastava, Senior VP & CTO, Wipro; Manish Israni, Infrastructure Head, Vodafone India; Shailesh Lakhani, Principal, Sequoia Capital India; Dr. Fausto Bernardini, VP & distinguished engineer, Cloud Managed Services, IBM USA; Dr. C.S.R. Prabhu, Deputy Director General, National Informatics Center India; Dr. Anand Deshpande, Founder Chairman and MD, Persistent Systems; Prof. Sadagopan, Director, IIIT – Bangalore and Perraju Bendapudi, Partner Architect, Microsoft Development Center, Hyderabad among others…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Daryl K. Taft.

Enterprise cloud computing could see explosive growth over the next two years, according to a recent analyst report. TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, released its latest cloud computing study, which projects big growth in the number of enterprise cloud computing projects. Indeed, 60 percent of respondents to a survey conducted by TheInfoPro said they view cloud computing as a natural evolution of IT service delivery and do not allocate separate budgets for cloud computing projects.

Yet, of those that do have separate budgets for cloud computing, 69 percent said they expect their spending to increase in both 2013 and 2014 compared with the prior year. "As organizations are completing their transition to a virtualized data center infrastructure, their focus is switching rapidly to cloud computing projects," said Peter Ffoulkes, TheInfoPro’s research director for cloud computing, in a statement…

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

The competition between Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) has moved to the caching layer: Both companies updated their caching services this week. Caching services can improve response times for applications by delivering frequently consulted data and functionality from a server’s working memory, or RAM, without calling it up from a slower hard drive.

AWS has expanded its ElastiCache service with a second popular open-source caching engine, Redis. The company has offered Memcached, on object storage cache, for some time. Like Memcached, Redis offers an in-memory key-value store, one good for storing sorted sets and lists. ElastiCache supports Redis’ master/slave replication capabilities, making it useful for offering multi-zone redundancy…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Richard Minney.

To state the obvious, businesses of all sizes are moving their applications to the cloud or renting software as a service (SaaS) instead of licensing or buying the software outright. The number one reason people cite is cost. Businesses large and small are under the impression they can save a bundle by moving their apps to the cloud. At the same time, companies who handle a move to the cloud badly can suffer a negative backlash from their user community.

When you consider all the cost factors, like your time, energy and risk to your business, will you save money in the long run by going with SaaS? The short answer is no. One thing is clear: businesses will pay less up front for cloud vs. on-premise. Modern SaaS systems are rented on a pay-as-you-go basis, or might have short-term contracts…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steve Ranger.

You could be forgiven for believing that cloud computing floats on nothing (apart, perhaps, from the hot air emited by overexcited vendors), but it actually has a very solid base, otherwise known as infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS comprises the most fundamental building blocks of any cloud service; the processing, storage and network infrastructure upon which all cloud applications are built.

In a typical IaaS scenario, the service provider delivers the server, storage and networking hardware and its virtualisation and then it’s up the customer to implement the operating systems, middleware and applications they require…