Category: News

Grazed from HOB Software. Author: PR Announcement.

HOB announced today that the Cloud Computing Awards, a program dedicated to celebrating excellence in cloud computing across the U.S. and internationally, has named HOB the winner of the Security Innovation of the Year. The Cloud Computing Awards program recognizes the best web-based cloud computing services from both start-ups and established enterprises. The Security Innovation of the Year is awarded to the company with a genuinely original and inventive approach to cloud security.

HOB is the market leader in pure software-based solutions, specializing in secure connectivity – and mobile worker access. HOB’s core competence is in server-based computing with RDP. HOB provides secure access to remote desktops, virtual desktop infrastructures, legacy systems, data or networks from any device around the world with its most popular security solution, HOB RD VPN. It provides multi-client capability and utilizes reliable SSL-encryption, ensuring a high level of security…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Rick Whiting.

Reaping the benefits of its initiatives in cloud computing, mobile technology and its HANA in-memory database, software giant SAP (NYSE:SAP) Wednesday reported double-digit growth for its fourth-quarter and fiscal 2012 sales. SAP also is undergoing a reorganization and centralization of its sales operations, putting both channel sales and regional direct sales under Rob Enslin, president of global operations.

SAP reported total revenue of 5.0 billion Euros (U.S. $6.7 billion) for the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, up 12 percent from 4.5 billion Euros (U.S. $6.0 billion) in the same period one year earlier. After-tax profits, however dropped 8 percent to 1.1 billion Euros (U.S. $1.5 billion) from 1.2 billion Euros (U.S. $1.6 billion) one year earlier…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Intermedia, a provider of cloud services and one of the largest third-party providers of hosted Microsoft Exchange services, is planning to acquire cloud-based communications services providers Telanetix for about $55 million, including the assumption of approximately $13 million in net debt and certain liabilities.

With the pending acquisition, Intermedia plans to expand its Office in the Cloud strategy, which includes an integrated suite of cloud services for small and medium businesses. Telanetix does business under the AccessLine brand, and through that, Intermedia will gain about 100 new staff members with experience in providing hosted voice services…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Mikael Ricknäs.

Microsoft continues to expand its cloud offerings with the general availability of Windows Azure Media Services, which lets enterprises skip building their own infrastructure for streaming on-demand video. The service, released Tuesday, can be used to deliver training videos to employees; stream video content from a website; or build video-on-demand service similar to Hulu or Netflix, Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie said in a blog post.

Like many cloud-based platform-as-a-service offerings, Windows Azure Media Services aims to make it easier, in this case, to roll out video streaming services. Building a media distribution platform that encodes and streams video to various devices and clients is a complex task, which requires hardware and software that has to be connected, configured, and maintained, according to Guthrie. Windows Azure Media Services makes it easier by eliminating the need to provision and manage a custom infrastructure, he said…

Grazed from Serena Software. Author: PR Announcement.

Serena Software, the leader in Orchestrated IT solutions, today announced the results of an annual survey on application development and delivery priorities and initiatives for 2013. The survey, conducted at Gartner’s recent Application Architecture, Development and Integration (AADI) Summit, showed delivering applications faster and aligning IT to business goals as the highest priorities for 2013. These findings underscore the trend that online enterprises have elevated themselves past departmental IT concerns. Instead, the survey results show they are now focusing on the competitive goals of the business itself.

The third survey of its kind, the research uncovered changing IT priorities, as both reducing application costs and moving applications to the cloud were reported much less of a priority in 2013 compared to last year. Both fell multiple spots on the one to ten number scale of priority, the same measurement tool used in last year’s survey as well. A graphic summarizing the survey findings can be found here: http://ser.so/app-dev-infographic…

Grazed from CloudComputing News. Author: James Bourne.

The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has published an opinion piece detailing opposition to the well documented European Union (EU) computing initiative. The EU’s cloud strategy, ‘Unleashing the Potential of Cloud Computing in Europe’, announced in September featured two main takeaways; a yearly 160bn Euro (£127.6bn) boost to the European GDP by 2010, and a net gain of 2.5m jobs.

Sounds good on first glance, but the EESC’s opinion – carried by 158 votes to two in a plenary held on January 16 and 17 – disagrees. It’s not that the EESC is opposed to cloud computing in general – the committee agrees that it is “an opportunity for European growth and competitiveness” – more it suggests an alternative complementary vision to the European Commission’s original plan…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Joe Masters Emison.

There’s a growing demand for standards to bring some sanity to the cloud computing market. Both buyers and sellers have their reasons to want common ways to do things such as transfer data from one cloud-based app or infrastructure to another. But the competition to be in control is fierce. "The Internet had the IETF, which wrangled people and protocols," says Mathew Lodge, VP of cloud services at VMware. "But in the cloud, the standardization landscape is so fragmented. There isn’t a central body or forum or place, although lots of people and organizations are trying to be that."

Two main factors drive demand for standards. Cloud vendors want to show they can meet companies’ security requirements, since that’s the biggest roadblock to adoption. IT pros also see value in formalized standards for cloud services, according to the 400 respondents to our InformationWeek Standardization Survey: 89% rate standards for cloud infrastructure vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft Azure or Rackspace as extremely (53%) or somewhat (36%) helpful to their organizations; 85% say the same about software-as-a-service. Why? Would-be cloud customers want to avoid getting locked in to one vendor, so investments in cloud services now don’t end up limiting future flexibility…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

Cisco is not a cloud service provider, but it has an expanding suite of products under the label "Cisco Intelligent Automation for Cloud 3.1." With it, Cisco is building out a private cloud across seven major data centers in hopes that its experience will serve as a model for customers to build out their own private clouds. Intelligent Automation for Cloud 3.1 derives both from Cisco’s own data center experience and from acquisitions such as Tidal Software in 2009 with its IT automation products, and newScale in 2011 with its service catalogue, self-service portal and process orchestrator.

When it started its data center conversions in 2009, Cisco moved decisively into virtualization and found that server consolidation leads to many other changes. IT operations managers wrote scripts that automated steps in the virtual server creation process. Some integrated Cisco software with open source code. Others generated scripts for provisioning a simple database server…

Grazed from DesignNews. Author: Cabe Atwell.

Cloud computing is simply computers somewhere else, dolling out software or hardware recourses over the Internet or local network. The inherent risks all still exist, but not on site. Despite this, the cloud has become quite popular with businesses and institutions as a way of storing and accessing data and information on demand.

Some of these institutions, including large US law firms, are slowly and reluctantly implementing the use of these services, but have fears that sensitive information could potentially be compromised (hacked) by exploiting their relatively weak security measures. Using these services, such as IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), StaaS (storage-as-a-service), and PaaS (platform-as-a-service), can be both beneficial and potentially risky for those involved in the US justice system…

Grazed from Backup-Technology. Author: Editorial Staff.

Does the UK lag behind in usage and adoption of cloud computing? Are UK businesses more sceptical of cloud computing than other nations? A recent survey released by Redwood Software would suggest just that. The survey into the use of cloud computing by large US and UK firms (1,000 employees and above), conducted by Vanson Bourne, looked at usage levels of cloud computing and general opinion of cloud computing, e.g. data storage and automation of business processes. In general, the study found that significantly more US businesses are using cloud computing, for example, 58% of US businesses who took part in the survey use the cloud for private data storage compared to 35% in the UK. As well as data storage, 47% of US businesses use cloud computing for capacity management of IT resources compared to just 24% of UK businesses.

Not only is there a significant difference in current usage of cloud computing between the two countries, there is also a disparity in opinion of its benefits. Of the 200 US companies who made up the survey 71% believed cloud computing would “improve agility in supporting business needs”, compared to just 47% of the 100 UK businesses. When asked if they thought that the cloud gave them a “faster return on investment” 57% of US businesses said yes compared to just 36% of UK businesses, while 45% of US businesses believed that cloud computing “reduced labour costs”, compared to 29% of UK businesses…