Category: News

Grazed from eCommerceTimes. Author: Jeffrey Kaplan.

I’ve been charting the evolution of the corporate app store idea in this column for more than three years. Until recently, most of the focus has been on how various service providers and other institutions can establish app stores to resell apps to their customers. Now, enlightened CIOs are discovering they can also implement internal app stores to control the consumerization of IT and satisfy their corporate constituents.

I was first intrigued by the notion of banks and other institutions becoming commercial app store providers in 2010. Innovative companies like Bank of America and Staples have deployed online marketplaces with varying success…

Grazed from Computing.co.uk. Author: Danny Palmer.

Major cloud providers such as Google, Amazon and Facebook will "gobble up" the competion as smaller providers struggle to compete with what the giants have to offer. That’s what Josko Grljevic, information systems director for TheTrainline.com told Computing ahead of next month’s Computing Data Centre Summit, where he’s going to be one of many high profile speakers.

"I think you’re going to have a lot more of these mega-data centres, with the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft building massive facilities," he said on the subject of the future of data centres.  "They’re probably going to gobble up the smaller guys over time," Grljevic continued, pointing out that the competition will struggle to compete with the low-cost solutions on offer…

Grazed from Windows IT Pro. Author: Michael Otey.

When I talk with different businesses about their hurdles and reservations about moving to the cloud, the one thing that always comes up is security. Many businesses have trust issues with the cloud and they feel uneasy about the level of protection that their data and other computing resources may have in the cloud. While in a sense that may seem a bit overly paranoid because cloud vendors will all tell you that their data centers are far more secure than your data center ever will be, and that they have security specialists who rigorously follow all the security best practices.

Even so, in another sense from the personal perspective you can see that it really does require a big step of faith and a lot of trust in your cloud vendors to entrust them with your data. After all, you would be moving the data—which is essentially one of your organization’s most valuable assets—from your on-premise infrastructure which is 100 percent under your control to an off-premise hosting environment that is 100 percent not in your control. That requires trust…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Cloud Ventures.

Computing refers to best practices for larger organizations to adopt Cloud Computing, and how it can be applied to achieve business transformation.The primary benefit is enhanced business agility. Improving the ability of a complex organization to react more quickly to market opportunity, like launching a new product, is where the impact of new Cloud technologies will be seen more effectively rather than one about a debate over in-house versus outsourcing, public vs private Clouds.

These sentiments are reflected by industry experts, and coincides with the evolution of the role of the CIO to become more strategic, closing the gap between business and IT that ZDNet describes here…

Grazed from Barrons. Author: Tiernan Ray.

Global Equities Research‘s Trip Chowdhry today offers up the findings of his examination of how cloud computing services operators charge for their offerings, arguing that Amazon.com (AMZN) has created a formidable obstacle to Microsoft (MSFT) and others by successive price decreases.

Chwdhry, after surveying the pricing schemes of 21 publicly-listed companies, and 33 private companies (he doesn’t say how their pricing data was gathered), concludes that Amazon, along with privately held VoltDB, and the EMC (EMC)/VMware (VMW) spin-off Pivotal are “setting the tone” for the industry…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

It sounds like an oxymoron, but some cloud providers offer bare-metal servers — and some organizations consider them an appealing alternative to shared infrastructure. Cloud service providers that offer bare-metal servers include IBM’s SoftLayer Technologies Inc., Rackspace Hosting Inc. and Internap Network Services Corp. While bare-metal servers stem from a traditional managed hosting business for these vendors, newer offerings have a single interface for managing cloud and bare-metal assets, and they allow for more flexibility with bare-metal servers than was traditionally available in hosting environments.

"Just a few days ago, I said we needed a bigger RAID 10 array because our database size is increasing, and in about four hours I had a completely new database server," said Hrishi Dixit, chief technology officer (CTO) of LearnVest Inc., a financial planning services startup based in New York, which uses Internap’s Agile Hosting service for both bare-metal servers and cloud computing…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: DH Kass.

VMware (VMW) reached into SAP’s (SAP) executive ranks to nab Sanjay Poonen, a 20-year IT industry veteran who’s been the visible leader of the developer’s mobility and Big Data analytics initiatives, to run its End User Computing business unit as executive vice president and general manager.

Poonen, whose background reads like an IT who’s who with executive roles at Symantec (SYMC), Veritas and Informatica (INFA) following software engineering stints at Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL), is tasked with handling strategy, products, engineering and delivery across all of VMware’s end user computing solutions…

Grazed from USA Today. Author: Byron Acohido.

Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing escapades could seriously undermine the growth of cloud computing and thus stifle the growth models for America’s biggest tech companies. And that appears to be the reason why Apple CEO Tim Cook, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, Google computer scientist Vint Cerf and other tech executives met behind closed doors with President Obama Thursday.

"The meeting appears to be for a variety of reasons, but basically the companies want to understand exactly what the government is doing with their systems as they try to assuage a lot of concerns from a lot of different stakeholders," says Brian Henchey a privacy and information tech attorney at Baker Botts…

Grazed from GlobalNewswire. Author: PR Announcement.

Cbeyond, Inc., the technology ally for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), today announced it will participate in Cloud4SMB Expo and CVx ChannelVision Expo, both collocated with ITEXPO West, August 27-29, at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Conference Center in Las Vegas, Nev. Hosted by TMCnet and billed as "the world’s largest communications and technology event," ITEXPO West explores new ways to leverage powerful communications solutions to expand business. Cbeyond cloud experts will be featured on multiple panels and be on hand at booth #224 to discuss the company’s cloud and network solutions for channel partners targeting SMBs.

Cloud4SMB Expo is the first event of its kind focused on the unique needs and challenges of small and medium businesses (SMBs) seeking to leverage the benefits of cloud computing solutions. ChannelVision Expo (CVx) is designed to help channel players and wholesale service providers develop partnerships that cross traditional lines of business…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Joanie Wexler.

It’s funny how computing and networking trends fall in and out of style cyclically. The patterns are reminiscent of home furnishings and fashion, except that with computer networking, it won’t do you much good to hold on to the old stuff and bank on being able to use it when it becomes faddish the next time. It’ll be too slow, too big, too insecure, too clunky, too something. But the concept behind it might persevere into another era.

This is a roundabout way of pointing out that distributed computing, which became the “in” thing when PCs hit the scene, is likely on its way out. Will it be forever? Who knows, because for most of us mere mortals, it’s impossible to imagine what the future holds. But what we do know is that some trends with virtualization, cloud computing, and wearable gadgets are changing up again where the brunt of computer processing resides…