Category: News

October 1, 2012 Off

Oracle Readies Cloud Blitz With New Partner Specialization, Integration Programs

By David
Grazed from CRN.  Author: Chad Berndston.

Oracle (NSDQ:ORCL) plans to attack the cloud computing opportunity with a slew of new channel offerings for its 25,000 partners, including programs that will designate specialized Oracle partners as cloud builders and others that will pay partners referral fees and extra incentives for their cloud integration expertise.

It’s the latest in a series of cloud-centric moves from the software giant, for which a software-and-services strategy is seen as increasingly important as its hardware business continues to erode. The launch is actually five distinct channel offerings that Judson Althoff, Oracle senior vice president, worldwide alliances and channels, is scheduled to unveil to partners during an Oracle Partner Network (OPN) keynote on Sunday — the channel kickoff to Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco…

October 1, 2012 Off

Cloud computing: Solving the problems of security and storage

By David
Grazed from Police One.  Author: Doug Wyllie.

The vast majority of people would rather keep their money in a bank, rather than hiding it under the mattress. Most would rather have their electricity supplied by the power company, as opposed to a gas-powered generator in the back yard. And pretty much everyone wants to have programs automatically appear on their television, not trudging someplace to get a DVD of every single thing they watch. 

If you’re a money-under-the-mattress, generator-out-back, run-to-the-video-store type of person then perhaps cloud computing isn’t for you.

But if you agree that the massive FDIC-insured vault at the bank is more secure than your Posturepedic, and that the power company is more likely to keep the lights on than the little Honda in the yard, and that a trip to Blockbuster looks rather lackluster, then read on my friends…

September 30, 2012 Off

ArcusIT upgrades cloud platform

By David
Grazed from ArcusIT.

Philippine cloud computing services provider ArcusIT (www.arcusit.ph) recently announced the latest update on their ArcusIT Cloud Server offering.

“With the new platform upgrade, the ArcusIT Cloud Server now has even more extensive configuration and Virtual Machine (VM) management features, including load balancing, autoscaling, availability & performance zone selection, network, and storage management. All cloud management and provisioning takes place through an intuitive web-based Control Panel,” said Oamar Gianan of ArcusIT.

ArcusIT virtual server service provides users with a simple, web-based interface for ordering, deploying, configuring, and monitoring cloud resources on demand.

September 28, 2012 Off

The Old Law of Cloud Computing

By David

Grazed from Who’s Who Legal. Author: Clive Gringas.

To appreciate why the “cloud” is the future of computing, one must understand a law of economics coined in 1890 and learn what happened around the same time at 57 Holborn Viaduct in London, England. In 1890, Alfred Marshall finished a decade’s work. His eight-volume Principles of Economics was finally ready. Those who read the fourth volume were introduced, for the first time, to the concept of “economies of scale”. Marshall’s analysis, then novel, was that in some trades “in which a man gains no very great new economies by increasing the scale of his production, it often happens that a business remains of about the same size for many years, if not for many generations.” These could be contrasted with trades.

“in which a large business can command very important advantages, which are beyond the reach of a small business. A new man, working his way up in such a trade, has to set his energy and flexibility, his industry and care for small details, against the broader economies of his rivals with their larger capital, their higher specialization of machinery and labour, and their larger trade connection. If then he can double his production, and sell at anything like his old rate, he will have more than doubled his profits. This will raise his credit with bankers and other shrewd lenders; and will enable him to increase his business further, and to attain yet further economies, and yet higher profits: and this again will increase his business and so on. It seems at first that no point is marked out at which he need stop.”…

September 28, 2012 Off

Top 5 Cloud Computing Trends Of The Future

By David

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Gregory Msungu.

Cloud computing as a technology trend has caught up fast in recent years. It has revolutionized IT in a way never seen before. It has clearly changed how the traditional software works for businesses. This has many benefits, considering many of the former models are rather physical, coupled with expensive licenses. Cloud computing is a dynamic technology and the following are some of the trends that experts and analysts have identified.

1. Cloud computing is scaling investment value

Cloud computing streamlines how software, business processes, and services are accessed. More than ever before, this is helping businesses scale operations and optimize their investments. This is not only through lower costs, efficient business models, or greater agility in operations. It has a lot to do with how businesses use it to optimize their investments. In the same breadth, businesses are scaling into more innovation with their IT capacity. This will certainly help them make more investments and draw corporate income…

September 28, 2012 Off

Cloud Computing: The dark side of OpenStack

By David

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Buyer beware when it comes to adopting OpenStack — or any open-source cloud — according to a newly released Gartner report. Long story short: evaluate OpenStack just like you’d assess a commercial offering, cautions analyst Lydia Leong. Just weeks before for the big OpenStack Summit, a new report cautions prospective users not to buy into the hype around this (or any) open-source cloud computing platform.

Gartner Research VP Lydia Leong suggests that prospective users proceed with eyes wide open and recognize that OpenStack, while promoted as an end to vendor lock-in can represent its own sort of “ecosystem lock-in.” She recommends the use of a third-party cloud management tool or API library that will work with multiple clouds…

September 28, 2012 Off

Avnet Study Finds that Style over substance has caused “Cloud confusion”

By David

Grazed from ARN. Author: Patrick Budmar.

Is the hype for the Cloud justified? If you ask Avnet A/NZ services general manager, Adam Chicktong, it is both a yes and no.

“I say ‘yes’ because the technology has advanced enough to enable this particular model of computing to be leveraged and consumerised in a way that was impossible before,” he said. The benefits of the Cloud typically include reduced costs, scalability, moving Capex to Opex, redundancy, and on-demand compute power as some of the advantages. “It has enabled business’ to develop and grow into areas they would not have been able to 15 years ago,” Chicktong said…

September 28, 2012 Off

3 ways to improve cloud performance

By David

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Performance issues hold back some cloud computing efforts. This happens because many of those who stand up cloud-based applications did not account for the latency systemic to many cloud-based systems.

For the most part, these performance issues are caused by the fact that cloud-based applications are typically widely distributed, with the data far away from the application logic, which itself may be far away from the user. Unless careful planning has gone into the design of the system, you’re going to run into latency and even reliability issues…

September 28, 2012 Off

Lingering Barriers to Cloud Confidence

By David

Grazed from InformationManagement. Author: Jim Ericson.

A new study of cloud computing users in 50 countries finds that organizations remain concerned about many issues related to service providers, chiefly governmental regulations, exit strategies and data privacy. The latest Cloud Market Maturity study comes from a pair of non-profit industry organizations, the Cloud Security Alliance and ISACA, which develops standards and practices for information systems.

The study reports positive experiences that encourage adoption, including confidence that services are meeting expectations and that problems are being addressed by providers. That supports the perceived value of cloud computing, but business buy-in also needs to improve and senior management needs to perceive cloud services as a business asset rather than a technical issue.
“We must provide our organizations with new services and it must come from business leadership that understands cloud risks and value,” says Yves LeRoux, a member of CSA and the ISACA Guidance and Practices Committee. This is not a gadget, this is something to enable our people.”…

September 28, 2012 Off

Oracle Plans Cloud Push to Take On Salesforce, Workday

By David

Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Aaron Ricadela.

Oracle Corp. (ORCL) plans to unveil the first new version of its flagship database program in five years and an expanded line of high-end servers, as the software maker steps up its effort to win more cloud-computing business.

At its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Sept. 30, Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison will show the new 12c database, designed for cloud computing, and more powerful systems to handle ballooning amounts of corporate data more efficiently, Mark Hurd, co-president at Oracle, said in an interview yesterday…