Category: News

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lynnette Nolan.

Most of the companies benefiting from public cloud services today are small businesses with few IT assets, according to a recent blog post on the Forbes Magazine website. The post cites a study of 260 Amazon Web Services customers. It revealed that 53 percent of companies using the service have 50 or fewer employees, while large organizations (10,000 or more employees) represent only four percent.

It’s great that so many small businesses are benefiting from cloud computing. Few small businesses, however, understand the differences between public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds. Let’s take a step back and clarify the differences between them…

Grazed from The Guardian. Author: Jim Reavis.

We all know about the massive presence of computing and the internet in our everyday lives. It therefore boggles the mind to consider how rudimentary our use of technology will seem in just a few short years as many projections point to 100bn internet-connected devices in 2020, compared with just 8bn today. This post-PC world of pervasive computing, from appliances to automobiles to the electrical grid will centre around cloud computing.

The massive cloud data centres of today will grow at a phenomenal pace to manage these devices and store their data – a utility on a global scale. Like a utility, the cloud is always on and available. Individual countries and federations of nations, such as the European Union, are scrambling to understand how to regulate the cloud and promote its growth, while protecting the rights of its citizens…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Ariel Shuper.

The immense growth of IaaS cloud computing has given rise to a need for highly scalable and secure virtual networks, without requiring significant investment in replacing or adding to the existing infrastructure. One virtual overlay technology that has emerged to address this is VXLAN, which uses MAC-in-UDP tunneling to capitalize on the best aspects of existing layer 2 infrastructure and the advantages of layer 3 transport. However, while VXLAN seems an ideal solution, this article points out performance challenges that arise with its usage, which must be addressed for its benefits to be fully realized.

Background: The Need for Virtualized Overlay Networks

Over the past few years, cloud computing has grown at a tremendous rate, with worldwide spending on IT cloud services tripling since 2008 and expected to reach over $100 billion in 2014.1 More specifically, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the fastest-growing segment of the public cloud services market, having grown over 45% in 2012 alone…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

CumuLogic is launching its Cloud Services Platform software suite on Nebula and Cloudscaling IaaS clouds. The vendor announced at OpenStack Summit last week that its platform was now available those two OpenStack-based clouds, which brings Amazon Web Services (AWS)-style cloud services to OpenStack customers.

Previously, CumuLogic launched its PaaS on HP Cloud Services with the intention of speeding adoption of Java-based applications on the cloud. The company is also no stranger to the OpenStack world. More than a year ago, CumuLogic extended its Java PaaS to OpenStack clouds after scoring initial successful as a Java platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider on Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) EC2…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Intralinks(R) (NYSE: IL), a leading, global SaaS provider of content management and collaboration solutions, today announced that Gartner ranked the company the number one vendor in the team platforms and social software suites market*. Intralinks leads the category with 20.1 percent market share, based on worldwide revenues, over Microsoft, IBM and Jive Software in 2012. This is the seventh consecutive year that Gartner has recognized Intralinks as the leading technology provider for the team platforms and social software suites (formerly team collaboration) market.

"The traditional team collaboration vendors and the maturing enterprise social software vendors are evolving and intersecting to support information creation and sharing, team communication and coordination, communities and collective intelligence and collaborative decision making and informal interactions," according to Gartner.**…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Madeline Bennett.

CA Technologies is embarking on a project that will see the software management firm transformed into a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, focused on innovation and engineering, according to the firm’s new chief executive. Mike Gregoire, who took the helm at the company in December, shared his plans with delegates at the CA World user event in Las Vegas.

During the next few days, Gregoire said the firm plans to make announcements around the CA SaaS platform, which will let customers run their apps behind their own firewall, in CA’s private cloud or in a public cloud…

Grazed from InsiderMonkey.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The co-CEO of business software maker SAP AG says its push into cloud computing is starting to make money — and he predicted it would reach profits that rival or exceed those of its traditional business.

The cloud business contributed about 28 million euros ($36.72 million) to first-quarter earnings. SAP AG (ADR) (NYSE:SAP), whose software helps companies manage personnel, sales and customer relations, said Friday its overall net profit rose 17 percent to 520 million euros in the quarter. Revenues grew 7 percent to 3.6 billion euros…

Grazed from Wall Street Cheat Sheet.  Author: Abbey

IBM’s winning streak ran into a problem this quarter as the revenue decreased due to hardware problems and economic uncertainty. On Thursday, the company stated a 1 percent dip in profit and a 5 percent drop in revenue, which caused some investors concern. The stock dropped more than 8 percent on Friday.

IBM has a reputation for dodging problems that affect others in the industry, and this has normally installed confidence in investors. Now though some analysts are speculating that the technology giant may be having problems due to cloud computing…

Grazed from UNC Charlotte.  Author: PR Announcement.

Software as a Service (SaaS) has become a common delivery model for many business applications, including accounting, collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM), management information systems (MIS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), invoicing, human resource management (HRM), content management (CM) and service desk management. SaaS has been incorporated into the strategy of all leading enterprise software companies.

One of the biggest selling points for these companies is the potential to reduce IT support costs by outsourcing hardware and software maintenance and support to the SaaS provider; however there are still many concerns surrounding security, legal, performance, and technical issues…

Grazed from Enterprise Storage Forum.  Author: Drew Robb.

The race to the cloud is on. Companies are falling over themselves to get onto the cloud, much the same as they rushed headlong onto the Internet in the nineties. Of course, many of the early websites and e-commerce outfits were complete duds, which offers a warning for those eager to adopt cloud computing.  So here are some cloud storage pitfalls to watch out for—rather than just trying to set an Olympic record for getting yourself on the cloud.

1. Are Interfaces Compatible?

Although cloud storage brings the obvious benefits of pay-as-you-go storage, businesses using traditional storage systems may find a number of surprises once they deploy cloud storage. A big one is interface incompatibility.  “Cloud storage employs object-based interfaces, which are not compatible with today’s applications,” warned Nicos Vekiarides, CEO of TwinStrata…