Category: News

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

MicroStrategy is adding an Express option for potential users of its cloud-based BI (business intelligence) service, the company announced Tuesday.

The Express edition, now in beta, is a move up from MicroStrategy Cloud’s Personal version, which is available at no charge, but doesn’t offer as much as the full-featured Platform edition.

Personal is aimed at individual users, who can upload information from Excel spreadsheets and Salesforce.com to MicroStrategy Cloud and then run visualizations and analytics against it. The resulting reports can be shared through blog posts or social media…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

With the OpenStack project turning two years old soon amid what will no doubt be a ton of vendor-generated hoopla, Ignacio Llorente wants the world to know that the more mature OpenNebula project continues to evolve, just a lot more quietly.

The latest update, OpenNebula 3.6, released Tuesday, features virtual machine rescheduling, disk cloning and integration with OpenNebula’s new OpenNebula’s Marketplace. That makes it easier for users to find and deploy cloud appliances with a mouse click, Llorente, director of OpenNebula, told me in a recent interview.

The battle for cloud supremacy is on with various OpenStack adherents claiming that their iteration of the open-source cloud stack, launched by NASA and Rackspace two years, ago is key. Then, in April, Citrix, a former OpenStack proponent, threw a monkey wrench into the mix, when it said it would pitch CloudStack as an alternative to OpenStack. That happened just a month after Eucalyptus, which had been seen as a cloud also-ran, jarred the world by aligning itself with Amazon’s public infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Others in the OpenStack claque — including Hewlett-Packard and (somewhat confusingly) Nebula – are all jockeying to position their OpenStack implementations, taking pot shots at Amazon or VMware or Eucalyptus or each other as their needs dictate. Meanwhile, OpenNebula, over in Europe, kept its nose clean and its mouth shut…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

HP CloudSystem Hosting partner SHI International revealed today that its Managed Private Cloud (MPC) solution has been certified by HP and is now available through the HP direct sales channel. Through this expanded partnership, HP customers wanting to buy private cloud services can purchase SHI’s Managed Private Cloud directly through their HP sales representative.

Built using HP CloudSystem solutions, the SHI Managed Private Cloud is an on-site, appliance-based approach to cloud computing. It utilizes the Managed Private vCore to enable Virtual Machines (VMs) to exist with an organization’s data center while being remotely monitored and supported by SHI Labs. SHI’s Managed Private Cloud is delivered via a usage-based pricing model, offering easy acceleration to the cloud with minimal upfront investment…

Grazed from Credit Union Times. Author: Peter Strozniak.

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council released a statement Tuesday highlighting key elements that financial institutions need to address before deciding whether to outsource cloud computing services.

In its summary statement, the FFIEC said financial institutions have to consider the “fundamentals of risk and risk management defined in the FFIEC Information Technology Examination Handbook (IT Handbook), especially the Outsourcing Technology Services Booklet (Outsourcing Booklet).”

The outsourcing booklet reviews specific issues of cloud computing such as data classification, data segregation and recoverability. The booklet also addresses vendor management, information security, legal, regulatory and reputational considerations, business continuity planning and auditing…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

A move to the cloud requires a certain amount of prep work in the enterprise. If you listen to the spin from those who provide cloud services and technology, it’s no big deal. I’m here to tell you it is. To ready your enterprise for public and private cloud adoption, you need to focus on three key areas:

• Becomint service-aware
• Dealing with distributed security
• Upgrading skills

Becoming service-aware is not the same as becoming service-oriented, but if you’re service-oriented, you’re already service-aware. This is key to understanding how to work with clouds, which typically use APIs — in other words, services…

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

Salesforce.com is going to buy a two-year-old Nova Scotia start-up that just launched last September called GoInstant for a reported $76 million.

The outfit does real-time shared web browsing, a slick answer apparently to the cumbersome WebEx.

The start-up’s page on CrunchBase says, "All participants that join a co-browse session can click, scroll, type and browse at the same time. Co-browsing does not require any downloads or plug-ins to work; all users need is a web browser. A co-browse session can be used to co-browse any web site for customer support, sales, e-commerce and training."…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Numerate, Inc., a technology platform company that is leveraging proprietary algorithms and the power of cloud computing to transform the drug design process, announced today that its drug discovery platform, based on its open-source distributed framework, Numatix, has been shown to reliably and cost-effectively scale to 10,000+ cores using spot instances on Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Cloud Compute (AWS EC2). The 10,000+ cores were used to screen virtual compounds against predictive assay models in one of the company’s commercial partnerships.

Numatix is a dataflow processing platform developed by Numerate that enables great scalability and flexibility in distributed computing with minimal operational overhead. Combining online processing with detailed dataflows, Numatix allows for the deep and interactive analyses of large data sets. At Numerate, Numatix is used for the computational assessment of billions of molecules in the search for new drugs and for the development of complex systems biology models of drug behavior in various animals and humans…