Appcara, maker of cloud application lifecycle solutions, announced a major new version of its AppStack(R) application and portability platform that helps enterprises and service providers accelerate complex applications into the cloud and deliver new application-based revenue sources. Incorporating a real time Dynamic Application Environment layer that eliminates the need for server templates or scripting, AppStack Release 2 changes the rules of cloud computing. With AppStack 2, enterprises and service providers gain exceptionally fast time-to-market for key business applications — maximizing time, knowledge and profitability.

While cloud deployments are common for simple web apps, the $385 billion enterprise application market remains the province of on-premises data centers, in large part because IT staffs lack the tools required to truly govern VMware, Citrix, or other private and hybrid applications running on Amazon Web Services, Citrix CloudStack or VMware vCloud. While cloud app management solutions exist, they require deep technical knowledge of application stacks, and a lot of manual, error-prone effort to use…

Yet, much of China’s data center infrastructure is underutilized due to a lack of killer cloud applications, and local software development expertise is not easy to find. And this classic technology chicken-and-egg scenario is preventing the Chinese cloud-computing market from taking off.

Technology Integration Group, San Diego, Calif., has a plan for stimulating cloud application development. If it works, it just might jump-start China’s long awaited cloud revolution…

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"Salesforce.com now has the number one players in social listening and marketing – Radian6 and Buddy Media," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "With CMOs surpassing CIOs in spend on technology within the next five years, our Marketing Cloud leadership will allow us to capitalize on this massive opportunity."…

There’s no magic potion for stamping out cloud computing’s copious hidden costs. Rather, the answer lies with getting serious about tried-and-true best practices to deliver enough real-time visibility so there are no surprises when the bill arrives.

"Transparency is really the challenge, especially when you’re looking at costs across various public clouds," notes Dave Zabrowski, founder and CEO of CloudCruiser, a cloud cost-management platform. "There are very tangible hidden costs that can be eliminated just with transparency of knowledge."

For example, consider the simple problem of over-allocation. Companies typically sign up for public cloud computing power or storage capacity with the assumption that their workloads command a specific instance–therefore, they err on the side of over-provisioning and lock in at a higher price just to make sure they are covered. "But what happens is a lot is the workloads in real life aren’t as demanding as people think," Zabrowski explains. "By having transparency into usage vs. allocation, for example, companies within hours can downgrade to a cheaper instance."…

Improvements in technology and the need for greater efficiency have led to heightened interest in cloud computing–the delivery of information technology services, data storage, and/or software applications using the Internet and central remote servers…

CDW’s HP Cloud Center of Excellence features HP CloudSystem, a complete and integrated solution to build and manage services across private, public and hybrid cloud environments. In addition to HP servers, the center also includes HP storage and networking solutions, including HP Tipping Point network security offerings…

On the enterprise customer side, there is an increasing familiarity with the SaaS delivery model; continued pressure on IT budgets; and a growing comfort level with the security and performance parameters of cloud computing.

So, why isn’t the SaaS market bigger? What’s holding it back?…

Between cloud computing, big data, consumer IT, executives feeling capable of making more of their own technology decisions, and the ongoing business pressures for speed, agility and innovation, executives are eager to rethink and reinvent the IT department.

In our survey of 152 senior business executives and 162 IT executives, more executives singled out the IT organization than any other as the function they wanted to rebuild from scratch.  Half will revamp their IT organization in the next 12 months…

A couple of weeks ago, I attended IBM’s Cloud Innovation Analyst Forum in Chicago. The event kicked off with a panel discussion where company customers, including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Top Coder and Colleagues in Care, discussed their experiences with solutions powered by IBM cloud technologies. The benefits that the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee gained in reducing SAP client set-up time by 90% was especially impressive and went right into the heart of the problem of supporting 80,000 students in multiple campus settings. Reducing backup time by 99% overcame time constraints and helped reduce their risk as well.

Interestingly, some of the analysts in the audience expressed concern about whether this was really a cloud solution. In fact, we often hear that using virtualization and application service provider (ASP) or other hosting models does not qualify as a cloud solution. To an extent, these concerns are right as SaaS providers do utilize different architecture models, like web services fine-tuned to provide multi-tenancy applications with a low entry point for consumers. As an example, SalesForce has entry points as low as $50 a year for basic contact management capability that can be enhanced with full web service capabilities for approximately $300 a year…