Category: News

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Google App Engine gained ground as a developer platform Wednesday when Google added a dedicated, as opposed to shared, caching service that can significantly speed up many applications. The move puts App Engine on a more equal footing with Microsoft’s Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services, which launched its ElastiCache service in August 2011. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings Heroku and Engine Yard also offer caching services.

The App Engine service is based on open source Memcached (pronounced "mem-cache d"), a caching system that automatically saves frequently used data to cache and, when necessary, pushes out aging data as it falls into disuse. It was created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 2003 to support the operation of the interactive consumer site LiveJournal. It was later rewritten in C and became a popular open source code module…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

RiverMeadow Software, a software developer with the most peaceful name in the automated server migration space, has launched the 2.0 version of its Cloud Migration SaaS. Developed to accommodate both Linux and Microsoft (MSFT) Windows server-to-cloud migrations, the cloud migration software is intended to automate the cloud migration process to make the switch quicker and remove the need to install agents or take servers out of production.

According to RiverMeadow, as long as the customer’s chosen IaaS supporters Windows or Linux, the cloud migration offering can migrate source servers as-is to the cloud. That’s good for customers, but for solution providers, this could be an incredible time-saver. Of course, RiverMeadow isn’t the only vendor with a cloud migration tool or service on the market, and there are plenty of options to choose. But automation is key in making that initial switch as painless as possible…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider, Databarracks, has today launched its white paper ‘The Real Challenges and Benefits of Cloud Computing to Law Firms’. The paper investigates the current state of the cloud according to a variety of senior IT professionals from within the legal sector including Berwin Leighton Paisner, Sidley Austin LLP and Stephens Scown Solicitors.

Written by Frank Jennings, Commercial and Cloud lawyer at DMH Stallard LLP and Chair of the Cloud Industry Forum’s Code Governance Board, the paper examines experiences and attitudes of those who have adopted cloud services. It highlights their common concerns and perceived barriers to entry, most prominently security of data…

Grazed from IT-Director. Author: Neil Ward-Dutton.

While I was at IBM’s IMPACT conference in the spring, I participated in a panel with Sandy Kemsley and Bruce Silver, and also Pierre Haren and Eric Herness of IBM. The theme was about the future of BPM and, among other things, we were asked to talk about the impact of the ‘big 4′ technology trends that everyone talks about—Social, Mobile, Cloud Computing and Big Data Analytics—on BPM discipline, business cases and results over the coming years.

Like all keen panellists, I did a bit of prep on these topics before we actually got onto the stage—making sure I’d thought through various angles and thought of ways to explain them plainly to what looked like it would be quite a mixed audience. As we got towards the end of the panel session I was glad I’d done that prep. We were all asked to provide some closing thoughts to the audience, and something struck me in the moment. We’d all been talking about the impact of social, mobile, cloud computing and big data as isolated concerns in the context of business processes; but really, they’re all very much connected together…

Grazed from Biztech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

F5 Networks, Inc. has announced new solutions to make it easier for organisations to scale to the cloud, extend software defined networking (SDN) deployments, and add intelligence and programmability to IT environments. With a unified suite of physical and virtual products featuring F5’s innovative ScaleN architecture, organisations can seamlessly scale operations to realise the full value of virtualisation, cloud computing, and on-demand IT.

With this announcement, F5 is introducing BIG-IP v11.4 software, providing enhanced features including integration capabilities with SDN topologies based on VXLAN and NVGRE environments, increased programmability and control-plane extensibility with F5’s new iCall technology, providing the dynamic automation of event-driven policy decisions in the network and updated platform offerings, including the completion of the BIG-IP hardware refresh, on-demand licensing, and more powerful BIG-IP virtual editions with the industry’s broadest hypervisor support…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

MobileSmith, a leading provider of enterprise-class mobile solutions, announced the long-awaited release of iPad functionality in its popular mobile app development platform. Preempting the demands of the mobile app market driven largely by tablets, MobileSmith is now offering easy, coding-free tools to create sleek, native iPad apps.

"iPad tablets are now driving mobile app usage, and MobileSmith is one of the first SaaS app platforms to accommodate this trend," said Bob Dieterle, Senior VP and COO of MobileSmith. "If you are looking for a quick and cost-effective path from your mobile ideas to full-featured native iPhone, Android, and now iPad apps, MobileSmith is your solution. Enterprise users will find the new iPad functionality, along with the streamlined workflow and UI of MobileSmith 3.0, totally compelling!"…

Grazed from Purchasing Insight. Author: Pete Laughlin.

Earlier in the week we wrote about the brave transition that Basware made from old school to new school thinking on software sales. To many if not most who take an interest in enterprise software, whether that’s from an end user or buyer point of view or from a software supplier point of view, the case for SaaS ranges from attractive to compelling. But there seems to be a significant community that remains wedded to the old school way of thinking.

I sit on the end user/buyer side of the fence and, for the benefit of those old schoolers on the other side of the fence, I’d like to describe from personal experience, the contrast between the two models, not from a functional perspective but from from a commercial relationship perspective…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Catherine Shu.

Open-Xchange, a maker of Web-based communication, collaboration and office productivity open-source software, has received $20 million in funding from United Internet, former Deutsche Bank COO Hermann-Josef Lamberti and existing shareholders. Part of the proceeds will be used for a secondary transaction. This investment round is notable because it’s the first time Open-Xchange has announced new funding since 2008, when it raised a $9 million Series B.

The company has delivered Open-Xchange in the form as software-as-a-service (SaaS) for six years, making them pioneers in that area, and it’s now poised to take advantage of the shift toward cloud office systems, which Gartner estimates will rise from 50 million users today to 695 million by 2022. The company plans to use the funds to invest in software development, professional services and international business development, as well as marketing and sales…