Category: News

Grazed from Wall Street Journal.  Author: Steven D. Jones.

Virtualization underpins the shift to cloud computing, which makes more efficient use of servers by pooling their resources. The software allows companies to run multiple computers on a single machine, saving hardware cost and handling tasks from banking to retail.

Redmond, Wash-based Microsoft introduced its HyperV virtualization software in 2008 and has climbed to second in the $5 billion market behind industry leader VMware Inc. VMW -0.53% of Palo Alto, Calif.  “We’re now in a situation where we have a very, very strong market share. We’re growing every quarter, and the dominant guy is losing every quarter as it relates to virtualization,” Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said at an investment conference this week. VMware said no one was available to comment…

Grazed from VentureBeat.  Author: Mark Boyd.

Fragmentation between software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions is beginning to affect the average business that has moved from server-based software to the cloud.  Christian Staples runs spa installation business Arctic Spas Utah, and uses eight SaaS apps: accounting using Xero, CRM and support with Zoho, collections through Bill.com, ecommerce on Big Commerce, email marketing via Constant Contact, Service Pro, and a phone system from Ringio.

Like many businesses that have moved to some or all in cloud for their business IT, the difficulties now are in getting these apps to connect data and keep business processes flowing along.  “The frustration is to get everything to talk with each other and sync. Everything is manually entered. It is hours everyday for sure,” Staples said…

Grazed from InfoQ.  Author: Aslan Brooke.

Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project, discussed how private Platform as a Service (or PaaS) fits into DevOps with Steven Witkop, John Skovron, and Elis Booker in early may. Elis Booker facilitated the discussion with questions about DevOps, dispelling misconceptions about private PaaS, and how to get started with private PaaS. Each panelist contributed a distinct view on the topics to create a multifaceted message about private PaaS.

Gene Kim provided insight into the problem domain by describing the theory of constraints as it applies to DevOps and listing constraints in developing software that should be addressed in sequence:

1. Provisioning of environments/deployment (for which PaaS is a solution)
2. Test Setup, Test Runtime
3. Architecture Changes
4. Development/Product Management…

Grazed from GCN. Author: Rutrell Yasin.

Five years from now there will be a suite of international interoperability standards that will lead to a cloud of clouds, or “inter-cloud,” a future where there will be tight integration between multiple clouds. This tighter integration of clouds will have practical implications for government agencies, giving analysts the ability to sift through siloes of big data applications to make better informed decisions, according to John Messina, a senior member with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s cloud computing program.

Big data sets that hold kernels of information that can be useful for decision-making are in semi-structured and unstructured formats in siloed data sources. “Think of the data resources you will have access to that will allow you to find kernels or nuggets that will help you make better business decisions” in a scenario where different types of cloud infrastructures are interconnected, Messina said during a panel discussion May 30 at the Federal Cloud Computing Summit held in Washington, D.C…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Datapipe, a global provider of managed services and infrastructure for outsourced IT and cloud computing, today announced that TMC, a global, integrated media company, has honored the company’s Stratosphere(R) cloud computing platform as a 2013 TMC Labs Innovation Award winner presented by INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine.

Stratosphere(R) is Datapipe’s globally available, high-performance managed cloud computing platform, designed to meet enterprise requirements for governance, usability, compliance and interoperability. The Stratosphere(R) cloud management portal enables self-service cloud environments, cloud diversity in conjunction with the AWS ecosystem, as well as hybrid cloud options featuring Datapipe’s managed hosting, compliance and security services…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tim Worstall.

An interesting little report here about how Amazon’s AWS cloud computing services are a serious threat to a certain segment of the enterprise computing market. The specifics of it aren’t quite what I want to talk about it, rather, to use this as an example of how economies advance. The moneymen have finally looked up from beneath their golden canopies and noticed, hovering above them, a cloud named Amazon that is putting traditional IT companies in the shade.

Amazon’s cloud poses a major threat to most of the traditional IT ecosystem, a team of 25 Morgan Stanley MS +1.7% analysts write in a report, Amazon Web Services: Making Waves in the IT Pond, that was released on Wednesday. Brocade, NetApp NTAP -0.63%, QLogic, EMC EMC -0.2% and VMware VMW +1.37% are said to face the greatest “challenges” from the growth of AWS…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The latest cloud computing report this time comes from Microsoft in collaboration with 451 Research, and again looks towards the hybrid as the tangible future of cloud computing. The study, ‘The New Era of Hosted Services’, took responses from more than 1500 organisations and revealed that in two years’ time 68% of organisations will adopt the hybrid cloud model, up from 49% currently. “The next two years will be the era of the hybrid cloud”, trumpeted Marco Limena, Microsoft VP hosting service providers business.

This is simply the latest in a series of reports examining the importance of the hybrid cloud, utilising the best elements of private and public clouds. Earlier this month CloudTech reported that hybrid cloud was the “wave of the future”, according to seven in 10 IT executives, with the primary reason for adoption being that cloud apps were deployed faster; whilst back in April Virtustream research revealed that 86% of companies in the study with more than 1000 employees used hybrid clouds. Similarly, a recent research study from PEER 1 outlined that 78% of those surveyed preferred a hybrid solution…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Karsten Strauss.

We knew this was going to happen. We’d heard about the “forthcoming era of cloud computing” as Bill Gates stepped away from Microsoft MSFT +0.46% in 2008 and the company’s then mission seemed to be to adjust to post-PC realities. Steve Jobs tried to sucker Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston into selling him the cloud-sharing company in 2009 prior to Apple AAPL +1.47%’s eventual release of iCloud.

Now that we’re knee-deep in the cloud, some users are getting a little bit nervous about having their data stored somewhere else, overseen by who knows who. It’s this uncertainty and nervousness that StoAmigo’s CloudLocker is built on. For those for whom Google GOOG +0.27%, Amazon, Microsoft and Dropbox’s server farms are too far away for comfort, CloudLocker gives you your own private cloud…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

The technology landscape has truly evolved over the past few years – and with that evolution comes a new demand for the future of IT administration. IT managers and engineers are tasked with knowing more, understanding further components within their own environments and must have the ability to truly be creative. The old days of IT saw engineering dedicated to one process. Rare interaction between teams was seen as an exception rather than norm. Cross-IT team collaboration would be usually done at the management level, and even then it wasn’t always successful.

There is a new breed of engineers being born from the era of cloud computing. New job titles are being created with demands being placed on engineers who are unique and have the ability to communicate. In this post, we’ll outline some of the traits which are in high demand from this new type of IT professional. Among many new traits and personality qualities that an engineer may have, the following are beginning to emerge as truly defining characteristics of the new IT pro:..

Grazed from The Register. Author: Jack Clark.

Heroku has released the public beta of a platform API to help its developers build apps and services that sit on top of its PaaS, which in turn sits on Amazon Web Services. With the platform API, Heroku is letting developers "automate, extend and combine Heroku with other services," the company wrote on Thursday. This lets you build a service which sits on a platform (Heroku) that sits on a virtualized infrastructure cloud (Amazon).

Potential use cases include automating workloads, combining Heroku with other services, and building apps for controlling Heroku environments from smartphones and tablets. A handy way of thinking about this is that Heroku is a pilot fish to Amazon’s great big shark, and now Heroku has made an API available that could let developers build little complementary Heroku fish…