Category: News

Grazed from CIO. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

Selling SaaS (software as a service) applications aimed at specific lines of business is one way that SAP has tried to stake a claim in the world of cloud computing and during the Sapphire conference it unveiled a broad series of updates to the portfolio.

For marketing purposes, SAP has oriented the line-of-business applications into four thematic areas: people, customer, money and suppliers. SuccessFactors falls into the first category with its HCM (human capital management) products, with SAP’s Cloud for Customer, Cloud for Financials and Ariba fitting in the other categories…

Grazed from LinuxInsider. Author: Jay Lyman.

Hybrid cloud technology is garnering much attention of late — whether for cutting-edge development and the continuous integration and release processes achieved through devops, or for traditional enterprise-proven approaches to infrastructure and applications.

There’s more to hybrid clouds than hype. The ability to effectively and efficiently manage different infrastructures and applications across a range of cloud computing environments allows organizations to align their many applications, initiatives and units with whichever cloud environments — public or private — make the most sense…

Grazed from Technorati. Author: Curt Finch.

Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, dismisses cloud computing as merely the latest fashion in the computer industry. I suppose he also dismisses that more than one in five IT decision makers have deployed over half of their total applications to the cloud, according to the Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey. Regardless of any debate, cloud computing adoption rates are on the rise. According CDW LLC’s 2013 State of the Cloud Report, 39% of organizations either already utilize cloud computing solutions or are currently implementing them. This number is up from 28% in 2011.

Maybe somewhat surprisingly, cloud computing is a very attractive option for business accounting software. Accounting software takes up a significant amount of hard drive space, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. Cloud computing solves this problem by putting the majority of files and data on a separate server. This frees up hard drive space for individual desktop computers and saves money that might have been spent on additional storage equipment…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Adam Selipsky, VP of marketing and product management at Amazon Web Services, is tired of seeing headlines that announce another competitor has emerged to challenge Amazon. Selipsky won’t name specific competitors, but in a recent interview with InformationWeek, he didn’t hesitate to lay down the gauntlet to them. "Many old guard companies" are now talking about cloud products and cloud services.

These are the same companies that are "threatened by the model we’ve brought to market" of low-cost compute cycles distributed from cloud data centers and charged for by the hour, he said. The old guard might be Oracle and IBM. It might also be Microsoft, which recently announced its Azure revenues had passed the $1 billion mark and said as it offered infrastructure as a service in March that it would match Amazon prices…

Grazed from Fox2Now. Author: Editorial Staff.

‘This is really one of the key components to our company,’ says Connectria CEO and founder Richard Waidmann. ‘It’s really the heart of our culture which is our no jerks allowed company policy.’
His company is called Connectria. It’s a high tech firm that manages hosting and cloud computing. ‘It’s a computer resource,’ says Waidmann. ‘It could be the computing, the memory, and the disk storage. We’re just running some sort of software for some computer somewhere else. It just happens to be connected to the internet and they call it the cloud.’

Waidmann’s golden rule has given Connectria the gold medal among U.S. based cloud providers. ‘We`re first in the United States, ahead of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, all of the major companies,’ says Waidmann. Instead of setting up shop in Silicon Valley, the company`s main servers are just steps from Busch Stadium…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Derrick Harris.

People often ask me where the smart money is in big data. I often tell them that’s a foolish question, because I’m not an investor — but if I were, I’d look to software as a service. There are two primary reasons why, the first of which is obvious: Companies are tired of managing applications and infrastructure, so something that optimizes a common task using techniques they don’t know on servers they don’t have to manage is probably compelling. It’s called cloud computing.

The other reason is that the big part of big data really is important if you want to get a really clear picture of what’s happening in any given space. While no single end-user company can (or likely would) address search-engine optimization, for example, by building a massive store comprised of data from hundreds or thousands of companies as well as the entire web, a cloud service dedicated to that specific task can…

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: PR Announcement.

ExtraHop Networks, the provider of real-time IT operational intelligence from wire data, today announced that its ExtraHop for AWS solution won the Cloud Computing and Virtualization category of the 2013 Best of Interop awards; other finalists included entries from Brocade and Riverbed. ExtraHop’s flagship EH8000 appliance was also named a finalist in the Management and Monitoring category, distinguishing ExtraHop as the only company to be nominated in two Best of Interop categories.

Moving application workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduces yet another layer of abstraction that hinders visibility into the performance of business-critical applications. And while AWS provides basic availability and resource utilization metrics to customers, it still does not provide the critical insights needed to troubleshoot problems, answer important business questions, track security compliance, monitor end-user activity, or tune the infrastructure for performance and efficiency…

Grazed from 2X. Author: Charlie Williams.

Private clouds can be used for a number of different purposes, but one of the most popular uses involves providing users with virtual desktops. Building a private Desktop as a Service (DaaS) architecture involves more than just hosting desktop operating systems on a hypervisor. There must be a system in place to connect end users to the virtual desktops.

Matching end user requests to virtual desktops is usually the job of a connection broker. In most DaaS environments, the connection broker receives the end user’s request for a virtual desktop session and then connects the user to one of the available virtual desktops within a virtual desktop pool. Although this brokering of connections is of undeniable importance, there are other tasks that the connection broker must also perform if the DaaS infrastructure is to operate efficiently. One of the most important of these tasks in load balancing…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Tim Crawford.

IT is dead. Long live IT! 2013 is turning into a watershed year for CIOs as the traditional CIO is not the CIO of today. Business expectations, IT leadership styles and technology solutions are all driving an evolutionary change for CIOs and the IT organizations they lead. The changes did not happen overnight as business shifts, Shadow IT and New Technology were all contributors. Now that the industry is reaching a tipping point where the new CIO model becomes the new standard, look for a number of changes moving forward:

Business-IT Relationship
The CIO will lead the charge in transforming the relationship between IT and the rest of the business. In a related post I talk about the importance of the Three-Legged Race on the business, CIO and IT relationship. As such, business leaders start to view IT as providing greater business value rather than just a support organization. The new CIO works with peers toward revenue growth, not just expense containment…

Grazed from TechNet. Author: Steve Lipner.

Today marks the first day of the Security Development Conference 2013. Security professionals from companies, government agencies and academic institutions have traveled from all over the world to learn, network and share proven security development practices that can reduce an organization’s risk. As I sit here waiting for Scott Charney to take the stage, I am reminded that it’s been almost a decade since Microsoft implemented its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). So much has changed in that time.

In the past decade, Internet usage has gone from roughly 350 million people online to more than 2.4 billion. Today there are more opportunities than ever before for developers. Windows 8 is still relatively new, the cloud is in its early stages of adoption and there has been an explosion in new mobile devices and platforms. While the Internet has created many new opportunities and ways to do business, it has also spawned a digital underground for online crime. Security breaches that have financial consequences or lead to intellectual property loss, website defacement or espionage have become a reality in today’s computing landscape…