Category: News

Grazed from China Daily.  Author: Shen Jingting.

China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd, the nation’s second-biggest telecom operator by subscriber numbers, announced on Thursday it had started offering cloud-based services to enterprise customers, a move that will help diversify its revenue sources.

Grazed from Computer Technology Review.  Author: Olen Pepple.

Cloud computing is now part of the business vernacular, a term that circulates freely amongst companies and executives alike. But cloud computing also risks becoming a meaningless expression: an overused term that signifies different – and often conflicting – things to a variety of organizations. Think, instead, of the literal and figurative connections between clouds, those tiny droplets of condensed water that band together to form something greater, and the Cloud, which can provide value for businesses that want to maximize the power of technology. Educating ourselves about these similarities (and differences) is essential because we need a better working definition of the benefits – and limits – associated with cloud computing.

 

This emphasis starts with understanding the needs of organizations, where the need for certain services – such as data storage, analytics and process support – does not square with the costs of procuring and/or upgrading and maintaining new infrastructure and software. In that situation, companies will outsource these services to vendors. In turn, vendors typically provide these services through an on-demand, Internet-based model. And, by grouping these organizations together, vendors can – through economies of scale – aggregate expenses, deliver specific services and still make a profit…

Grazed from ITWire.  Author: Beverely Head.

Adoption of cloud computing has reached a tipping point  – but don’t expect legacy systems to disappear for at least two more decades according to Paul Daugherty, chief technology architect of Accenture.

Speaking at the SuiteWorld conference in San Francisco Mr Daugherty said that Accenture, which is a systems integration partner with NetSuite, has now completed 1,700 cloud projects. “We initially saw interest in solving very specific issues. Now there are broader roadmaps for cloud,” he said.

The three key drivers to enterprises adopting cloud computing was that it was seen as an antidote for complexity, offered lower cost and faster rollouts, he said…

Grazed from the Cloud Computing World Forum

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Paula Rooney.

“Enterprise-class” or “cloud class?” Enterprises are now looking to public cloud providers to figure out how to build the best hybrid cloud. At InterOp recently, executives from Rackspace, Terremark and NetScout were happy to offer up a list of to-do’s in this complicated process.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Google is hard at work on a cloud computing offering that will compete directly with the popular Amazon EC2 cloud, according to a source familiar with Google’s plans. Not to be outdone, other sources have confirmed Microsoft is also building an Infrastructure as a Service platform, and that the Redmond cloud will be ready — or at least announced — before Google’s. According to my sources, Google should roll out its service for renting virtual server instances by the end of the year, while Microsoft is slating its big announcement for a June 7 event in San Francisco.

Although Google declined to comment on whether the offering is indeed on the way, an IaaS cloud would make a lot of sense for the company. It already has a popular platform-as-a-service offering in App Engine that is essentially a cloud-based application runtime, but renting virtual servers in an IaaS model is still where the money is in cloud-based computing. Google also has an API-accessible storage offering — the aptly named Google Cloud Storage — that would make for a nice complement to an IaaS cloud, like Amazon’s ridiculously popular S3 storage service is for EC2…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Darryl K. Taft.

IBM has announced advancements to its SmartCloud Services and added customers and partners.

IBM said it has seen rapid adoption of its SmartCloud portfolio as customers and partners move to the cloud. Big Blue manages massive amounts of data and client transactions in its cloud environments, including 1 million enterprise application users working on the IBM Cloud, more than $100 billion in commerce transactions a year in the cloud and 4.5 million daily client transactions conducted through the IBM Cloud.

Moreover, customers and partners are increasingly choosing IBM SmartCloud services, software and hardware to expand into new markets, enable their mobile workforces and develop enterprise applications more efficiently, IBM said…

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

Facebook decision makers and their bankers were reportedly closeted together shortly before the markets closed in New York Thursday trying to decide whether to price Facebook’s IPO at $38 or $39 a share, according to the Wall Street Journal, which evidently had a glass – in the way of a source – pressed to the conference room door.

Although nothing is definite yet, evidently the $39 price might break the camel’s back. They reportedly tried it on investors and got told no.

At $38 Facebook would be valued at a record $104 billion for an IPO and raise $18.4 billion. It would take $41 a share for the social networking site to best Visa’s record-setting IPO in 2008. Of course Visa had a proven business model. Facebook doesn’t…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

The childhood cancer research computing cluster created and donated by Dell for the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) is ready to support the world’s first precision medicine clinical trial for pediatric cancer. The computation performance of the cluster is expected to accelerate analysis and identification of targeted treatments beyond initial projections.

Oncologists from the Neuroblastoma and Medulloblastoma Translational Research Consortium (NMTRC) and biomedical researchers from TGen will use the new high performance computing and collaboration cloud to identify targeted treatments for pediatric cancer patients based on the specific genetic vulnerabilities of each child’s tumor–an approach that could be used to treat many pediatric and adult cancers in the future…