Category: News

Grazed from ITBusiness.ca. Author: Jeff Jedras.

Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR) used its second annual Global Partner Conference in Las Vegas to announce an expansion of its Partner Advantage partner program to include two key new revenue opportunities for partners: services and cloud computing. The program, which launched in 2012, now supports more than 12,000 global partners, and is being expanded to include cloud offerings, as well as new support, maintenance and professional partner services.

"Last year at the Global Partner Conference, Juniper Networks announced the most significant investment in our partner organization since the company launched into the channel. Throughout 2012, our partners have leveraged the program to enhance their value and drive profitability through new opportunities with their customers,” said Emilio Umeoka, senior vice-president, worldwide partners and alliances for Juniper, in a statement…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

A new partner program from Box could help its end customers by making the cloud storage and file sharing service more broadly and easily integrated with third-party enterprise Web and mobile applications. The new program, called Box Partner Network, is designed to let Box increase and deepen its relationships with ISVs, developers, resellers, and systems integrators. By turbocharging its partner ecosystem, Box hopes to advance its ambition to become the file and document repository for all its customers’ cloud applications.

Box’s goal is to simplify for end users the process of storing documents from a variety of applications in a central cloud-based container, and from there sharing them internally and externally for improved collaboration among employees and outside parties…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Bridget Botelho.

One of the most common questions potential cloud customers have surrounds data ownership. In the case of Microsoft’s Windows Azure, customers own their data — but there are caveats around data use. Microsoft uses language in its cloud data privacy policy to reserve rights on customer data that companies need to carefully consider when deploying to Windows Azure, said Rob Sanfilippo, analyst with Directions on Microsoft, an independent analysis firm based in Kirkland, Wash.

"Organizations should consult with their lawyers when planning solutions to be hosted on Azure, especially when those solutions contain customer data, intellectual property, trade secrets and any other sensitive data," Sanfilippo said. Even though customers own their data on Windows Azure, Microsoft can still use it for various reasons…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

A recent TechNavio study predicts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for global cloud computing of 6.2 percent between 2012 and 2016, informed in large part by the decreasing costs of cloud ownership, but tempered by potential security and legal concerns surrounding data use. Some experts believe the cloud represents not just a global IT improvement but argue this growth signals the rise of a "4th utility," one that will stand alongside other utilities like roadways, water, and electricity.

Overall Market Growth

According to a press release at PR Newswire, the TechNavio report includes an in-depth market analysis from market experts and growth predictions for global cloud computing as well as the market’s key vendors, which include Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. The report cites a reduced total cost of ownership as a well emerging hybrid approaches for the growth prediction. Simply put, the cloud market is now broad and deep enough that its technology is a business necessity…

Grazed from BizTech2. Author: Editorial Staff.

SAP AG has announced that the SAP PartnerEdge program now supports an expanded portfolio of SAP cloud solutions. As a result, more than 500 partners of SuccessFactors, an SAP company, will be transitioned into the program in 2013. SAP PartnerEdge has been designed for partners that resell, build or provide implementation services for SAP solutions across the SAP portfolio. The integration of SuccessFactors partners is another step in strengthening the overall partner ecosystem and underlining SAP’s commitment to making it easier to partner and collaborate with the company.

By enabling existing SAP PartnerEdge members to resell, service and build solutions on top of SAP Cloud, these partners now have the opportunity to tackle the fast-growing cloud market and offer best-of-breed cloud solutions and suites to their installed base customers and prospects. SAP also supports partners’ economic models, enabling partners that sell cloud solutions to boost profitability by offering quarterly payments in arrears for cloud solutions from SAP…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

The rumors of Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) being acquired are true. Michael Dell has teamed up with Silver Lake and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to fund a $24.4 billion takeover of the company he founded in 1984 in an effort to take the company out of the public trading space and back into private hands.

Our sister site, The VAR Guy, provides analysis on what this deal will mean for Dell and the community of channel partners it has built up over the last few years, but what about the cloud? Should the deal go through and the company return to being a private company under control of Michael Dell and Silver Lake, with a minority share being held by Microsoft (which is lending $2 billion to the deal), what might happen to the company’s ever-growing cloud strategy?…

Grazed from InformationWeek. AuthorL Gary Flood.

When it comes to Joe Q. Public, it seems Main Street U.S.A. is a lot weaker on its cloud understanding than its British High Street peers. The issue that’s embarrassing many U.K. cloud mavens is that despite that disparity, it’s in the Land of the Free, not Her Majesty’s domain, that actual cloud projects seem to be getting done. A new poll from European cloud supplier Webfusion of 1,000 U.S. citizens found 31.8% claimed to have no understanding of the term "cloud" at all, and only 25% said they had a clear grasp of the topic.

In terms of age groups, 25 to 34-year-old people performed best on this question, with 33.8% claiming to know what cloud computing is. The same exercise found 63% of these U.S. respondents weren’t able to recognize Dropbox, iTunes, Gmail or Microsoft’s Hotmail as cloud services, and 91% did not see the term "scalable hosting" as equivalent to cloud…

Grazed from FutureGov. Author: Sri Narayanan.

With all the buzz around cloud computing, it’s easy to ignore the more mundane aspects of auditing and cost allocation when investing in the cloud. In a recent conversation with Philippine CIOs during a breakfast meeting in Manila, the question of government auditing and budgeting guidelines for cloud services spurred a spirited exchange. They readily admitted to grappling with how to set accounting guidelines for cloud services even as the Philippines sets aggressive targets to move public services to the cloud. The issue is one of governance and control; if you can’t see what you’re buying, how would you know what you’re actually spending on?

The problem, it seems, is that the public sector is not quite sure what to make of the ‘utility or pay-as-you-go model’ of cloud computing. While there are provisions for subscription-based resourcing for commodities such as energy supplies, there is precious little literature preparing the government sector for subscription-based cloud computing. The same applies to annual contracts for Infrastructure- or Platform-as-a-Service solutions…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

SaaS-based application performance monitoring start-up New Relic, which has already raised $34.5 million in venture capital, has gotten a whopping $80 million in mezzanine financing to move into native mobile applications, open an office in Europe, add staff and prepare to IPO. The handsome sum, which gives it a total of $115 million and a reported valuation of $750 million, comes largely from Insight Venture Partners and T Rowe Price, marking the first time since Twitter that the pair has funded a start-up together.

Other participants include Dragoneer Investment Group, Passport Ventures and the company’s existing investors Allen & Company, Benchmark Capital, Trinity Ventures and Tenaya Capital. New Relic says it saw 200% year-over-year revenue growth including 18 quarters of consecutive growth from playing in the data center and cloud markets monitoring deployed web applications implemented in Ruby, Java, .NET or PHP…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Sharon Florentine.

Welcome to Generation Now. Today’s users want information in an instant. Make them wait more than a second or two for your webpage to load and they’ll surf over to the first competitor who feeds their demand for instant gratification. Using a Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network (CDN) to quickly load static elements of your site to hasten access can deliver quicker gratification for customers. And stickier eyeballs — and greater profits — for you.

Basically, a CDN is a number of highly optimised web servers located around the globe, explains Joost de Valk in an article posted to Yoast.com. Though de Valk’s article deals specifically with using a CDN to speed performance of Wordpress sites, a CDN is beneficial for almost any organisation with a Web presence, in any industry. Users expect that all elements of a site will load in an instant: web objects including text, graphics, URLs and scripts, downloadable objects like media files, software, documents, e-commerce applications, portals, streaming media and the ubiquitous social networks…