Category: News

Grazed from CMO. Author: Editorial Staff.

No discussion of cloud computing goes far before the topic of security crops up. Putting vital corporate data ‘out there’ into the cloud can make any CIO nervous. Fortunately there is no shortage of advice on how to cloud compute securely. However, according to BitCloud CEO, Bennett Oprysa, ultimately the ‘security challenge’ comes down to the customer’s understanding of their business needs and any associated risks. “There are a number of government organisations willing to provide information on cloud security, but growing and mid-size companies often lack the internal resources to adequately assess the risks associated with cloud computing,” he said.

“This leads to fear and inertia in relation to cloud adoption. We understand these dilemmas. We also believe that from day one all cloud providers should focus on security and risk management, secure their own systems and have default settings to keep their infrastructure protected from internal attacks. This applies to all offerings: public, private and hybrid cloud.”…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Blue Ridge announced today that it has been selected by Supply & Demand Chain, Executive magazine as a 2013 “Supply & Demand Chain Executive 100” award winner. In the 11th annual listing, Supply & Demand Chain Executive recognized Blue Ridge for driving significant bottom-line results by implementing the company’s SaaS demand forecasting, replenishment and analytics solutions at Swedish retailer Procurator.

Procurator, omni-channel retailer of industrial safety supplies, sought a more precise solution to predict the influence of their demand-shaping activities and to ensure inventory was positioned where the company drove demand. Less than a year after implementing the Blue Ridge demand forecasting, replenishment and analytics solutions, Procurator increased in-stock performance from 89 percent to 97 percent, cut inventory by a total of 25 percent, and more than doubled inventory to 6.5…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: RJ Burgess.

There comes a point in the ERP selection process when it is time to take deployment model into consideration. There are several reasons why SaaS ERP often comes out on top based around the positive perceptions businesses have of its overall effectiveness. Specifically, a study conducted by The Aberdeen Group in October of last year (2012 ERP Benchmark survey) found six points that organizations consistently named as deciding factors in choosing SaaS ERP.

1. Lower Total Cost of Ownership
The top reason companies opted for SaaS ERP (cited by 82% of the 363 respondents) was a reduction in the total cost of ownership (TOC). While this was mainly because most SaaS ERP cloud hosting services are paid for on a subscription basis, there are other cost savings involved in this method of deployment that many businesses many not have considered…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Andrew C. Oliver.

I always enjoy talking to my longtime colleague Sacha Labourey. Sacha is a fellow member of the so-called JBoss Mafia and is now founder/CEO of CloudBees, a public PaaS provider. (Full disclosure: My company just announced a partnership with CloudBees.) Sacha always thinks ahead and sums up elegantly what you have on the tip of your tongue, but can’t quite find the words to say.

Recently, we were reviewing some of the challenges surrounding PaaS discussions with what he termed "core IT" — and the resistance offered by middle and upper management. I asked him how to convince them to consider migrating to PaaS. As usual, his answer shocked me at first, but after the call, I realized he was absolutely right. His take: You don’t. PaaS, as it turns out, has other, more willing customers…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Adam Riglian.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) has been talked up as a must-have for enterprise development teams, but experts and vendors say actual adoption of PaaS technology hasn’t kept up with the hype. Ask any PaaS vendor about adoption, and you’re likely to get a response along the lines of "we’re still explaining what it is and how it works." Analysts from Gartner Inc. and elsewhere have suggested that PaaS adoption rates will grow, but the researchers also say many major vendors won’t have fully formed platforms before the end of this year.

Currently, vendors are focused on "talking to customers and explaining how PaaS can fit their needs and how they can really take advantage of PaaS," said Krishnan Subramanian, principal analyst with Rishidot Research LLC…

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced advancements to its award-winning, private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, OpenShift Enterprise. OpenShift Enterprise 1.2 is now available for deployment within on-premise datacenters or in private, public, or hybrid clouds with updated pluggable technology cartridges and other enhancements. The updates to OpenShift Enterprise 1.2 continue Red Hat’s commitment to enhance developer productivity and IT service delivery with PaaS offerings that enable developers to design and code applications without losing time on technology integration. With OpenShift Enterprise and the company’s recently announced, commercially available public PaaS offering, OpenShift Online, Red Hat is the only enterprise software company with public and private open source PaaS offerings. The strength and value of the OpenShift platform continues to be demonstrated through adoption by global systems integrators, leading edge start-ups, and large established enterprises.

OpenShift Enterprise is a versatile platform for application development, operations, and IT architecture as it provides users with access to a cloud-based application platform built on a trusted stack of open source Red Hat technologies, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and OpenShift Origin, the upstream code that powers both OpenShift Enterprise and OpenShift Online. OpenShift Enterprise automates much of the provisioning and systems management of the application platform stack in a way that enables the IT team to more easily meet growing business demands for new application services. OpenShift Enterprise also provides an on-demand, elastic, scalable, and fully configured application development, testing and hosting environment for application developers so that they can focus on coding these new application services. With its unique Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) approach to handling secure multitenancy, OpenShift Enterprise also offers reliable security and multi-tenancy with the ability to subdivide the operating system instances for efficiency.

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Amazon Web Services (AMZN) has cut cloud pricing for the 27th time. Google App Engine (GOOG) and Microsoft Windows Azure (MSFT) are sure to respond with their own price cuts. But let’s not call this a cloud price war. And as an MSP or VAR, you shouldn’t panic about falling cloud services prices. Here’s why.

Instead of a price war, let’s call this the ongoing reality — the NORM: Public cloud pricing for IaaS will fall seemingly forever. Instead of fearing that reality, channel partners should embrace it. Aggresively. The vast majority of VARs and MSPs should never attempt to build their own clouds. That’s like building your own power plant when power is cheap and widely available from multiple service providers…

Grazed from DataCenter Dynamics. Author: Penny Jones.

Virtualization and cloud computing are pushing data center operators to think beyond their traditional network set up, according to a report released this week by Brocade. The network vendor, based on the results of its survey, said it believes a majority of the industry is yet to take up new networking technologies to cater for this demand.

It said 91% of respondents said their current IT infrastructure requires upgrades to meet new networking requirements and one third said they are already experiencing multiple network failures a week as a result of growing amounts of data…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

IBM is to buy Israel-based virtualisation management provider CSL International to expand its cloud offerings by adding management capabilities. The financial terms of the deal will not be disclosed, IBM said. The acquisition is expected to close in the third quarter of 2013, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions. The IT assets from CSL will be integrated with IBM’s zEnterprise System portfolio. IBM says its System z products help enterprises integrate data with analytics and enables cloud delivery.

With the zEnterprise System tools, businesses can host the workloads of thousands of commodity servers on a single system for simplification and cost savings. CSL International’s software, CSL-WAVE, is used by enterprises to monitor and manage the virtual machine hypervisor z/VM and Linux on System z environments…