Category: News

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey Nelson.

As cloud computing continues to develop into the inevitable future, it’s playing a big role on a particular area – your IT department. Every day those CIOs not investing in developing the skills of their workforce are risking being outsourced completely to third party services providers. This is called Shadow IT and it’s when departments outside of IT use budget to implement a third party software product without IT’s approval or knowledge. So as a CIO, how can you combat this?

How To Prepare Your IT Team For Cloud Computing

First, work with your infrastructure and operations teams. Get them comfortable with the cloud and using it. Do an internal audit and see which departments are using what, then bring your I&O team up to speed on how they can support. Having employees who are educated and trained on the latest and greatest can prevent your team from hitting the curb. Because if your IT team can’t figure it out, your fast-paced sales teams will find someone who can…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Alex Williams.

Gartner Research is reporting mobile CRM apps will grow 500 percent by 2014, another sign of a shifting market that has more to do with work getting done in the cloud more so than from a server behind the firewall. This is buttressed by Gartner’s news that SaaS providers will represent more than 50 percent of profits in the CRM market by 2016 and the steep decline in PC shipments that Gartner reported yesterday.

Gartner reports there are 200 apps now in app stores. By 2014, there will be 1,200. Mobile apps will come in a variety of flavors, attacking specific aspects of the CRM experience. Gartner, citing a CIO survey of more than 2,000 people, predicts that vendors will need to build mobile apps around their specific strengths. Gartner also reported that Salesforce.com remains the No. 1 CRM vendor with 26 percent growth and $2.5 billion in revenue last year. In contrast, Gartner states SAP grew 0.1 percent year-on-year and totaled $2.3 billion in CRM revenue…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Julian Box.

I’ve seen every definition of cloud computing; from old services such as a managed desktop services delivered through 10-year-old Citrix-based shared desktops, to software delivered like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) but it’s really an application service provider(ASP) model rehashed but branded as cloud when clearly they aren’t, along with services that are spin-offs of the original area of cloud like Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Has the time now come for service providers to drop the term cloud and become far more prescriptive about the different offerings being delivered under what is now a very broad umbrella of services? I believe that time is rapidly approaching, but I can also hear you saying WHY would we bother to drop the term cloud? This is what so many vendors are using to describe their offerings and users and customers have become use to the term and, therefore, does it not make sense we continue to use it?…

Grazed from AG-IP News. Author: Editorial Staff.

CA Technologies today announced in a press release that it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against AppDynamics Inc. a provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based Application Performance Management (APM) software, in the US District Court in the Eastern District of New York. CA Technologies is seeking undisclosed damages for lost profits and legal costs and an injunction against AppDynamics prohibiting the infringement of CA Technologies patents and the misuse of the company’s intellectual property.

The complaint alleges that AppDynamics, founded by Jyoti Bansal, a former CA Technologies and Wily Technology employee, infringes three important CA Technologies APM patents. CA Technologies took ownership of key APM patents, including the three described in the complaint, when the company acquired Wily Technology in 2006 for $375 million…

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Lindsey Nelson.

Cloud computing is the trend that isn’t going away. As the world grows, so does our need for real time collaboration, sharing documents and storing data easily, as well as access to information from any device. Cloud computing can be delivered 1 of 3 ways: software, infastructure, and platform as a service. Last time we discussed the in’s and outs of who, what, and why’s of software as a service (SaaS), now we’re going to cover infrastructure as a service.

What is Infrastructure as a Service?

Defined by SearchCloudComputing, infrastructure as a service is a “model in which an organization outsources the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components.”…

Grazed from PCBDesign007. Author: Dr. Raul Camposano and Steven McKinney.

A cloud is typically defined as a set of virtualized resources, most commonly software, platforms, and infrastructure that can be accessed through the Internet. Cloud computing can be private, meaning that the resources are in-house, or they can be public, where a company offers cloud infrastructure as a service. To be useful, clouds tend to be large, providing the illusion of unlimited resources and are often associated with service (as opposed to licenses or capital goods) as a business model. One example is software as a service (SaaS).

A commonly held view is that the cloud is shifting the computing paradigm: Simply put, large-scale commodity computing (millions of servers) virtualized and delivered through the Internet is better than smaller computer centers, regarding cost of ownership, scalability, performance, and utilization. As a result, the cloud is being adopted widely across consumer and enterprise applications. We use cloud-based applications every day with e-mail, search, social media, and gaming. Every time you pick up your smartphone, the apps rely on sourcing data from another location over the Internet, which is cloud-based. Indeed, the cloud plays a role in our daily lives, but how can it be beneficial to electronic design?
At first glance the advantages of the cloud for designing integrated circuits, packages, and boards may seem obvious:…

Grazed from Datamation. Author: Sean Michael Kerner.

While working for NASA as a cloud architect, Joshua McKenty helped to build the Nebula compute project and start the OpenStack open source cloud platform. McKenty has since gone on to found Piston Cloud computing, which launched its first public release in September of 2011. Piston is now updating its OpenStack solution in a 2.0 release that aims improve and ease the management of cloud deployments.

"We are still the better, faster, easier way to get up and running with OpenStack," McKenty told Datamation. McKenty’s vision for an enterprise OpenStack company has been greeted by an influx of $12.5 million in venture capital. Among Piston’s investors is networking giant Cisco Systems. "When we said we were an OpenStack company, people assumed that what is in our product is OpenStack and that’s it," McKenty said…

Grazed from RenewEconomy. Author: Giles Parkinson.

The fact that cloud computing services use wireless networks does not mean they need less energy. In fact, it could be that the opposite is true. According to a new report prepared by Melbourne’s Centre for Energy Efficient Telecommunications (CEET) suggest that energy requirements for data networks (WiFi and 4G LTE) will surge more than five fold in the next three years, and will consume more than 10 times the amount of energy of data centres.

The report – The Power of Wireless Cloud – warns that industry has vastly underestimated energy consumption used by services such as Google Apps, Office 365, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Facebook, Zoho cloud office suite, and many others. It says urgent action is required to curb spiraling energy consumption and CO2 emissions. It says these networks will likely consume 43TWh by 2015, but it could be as high as 51TWh. That compares to 9TWh in 2012…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Louis Columbus.

Relying on cloud computing strategies to free up dollars and time that can quickly be re-invested in product and service innovation emerged as the highest priority for respondents in a recent Rackspace survey. While cost reductions were significant, the greatest contributions were seen in investments in innovation (48%), new product & service development (45%), and boosting sale efforts (38%).

Rackspace recently commissioned a study with market research firm Vanson Bourne, who surveyed 1,300 organizations in the UK and the U.S., including 1,000 Small & Medium Enterprises (SME) and 300 enterprises with 1,000 employees or more. The methodology included coverage of Financial Services, Retail, IT/Technology, Manufacturing, Business and Professional Services, Media, Logistics, and Mobile Telecommunications sectors, with a further small representative group from other sectors…