Category: News

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

The venture capital boys must have been bitten by the largesse bug. Another cloud company has pulled in a monster fourth round.  Apptio, which already has $41 million, is getting a fresh $50 million from newcomer T Rowe Price (mostly) as well as existing investors Andreesen Horowitz, Greylock, Madrona Venture Group and Shasta Ventures, evidently persuaded the four-year-old start-up is on to a billion-dollar market.

It makes enterprise B2B SaaS software that lets CIOs manage, monitor, budget and forecast their IT spending, including online services. They’re supposed to use it to communicate IT’s cost, quality and value to business management. It will use the money on sales expansion, product development and customer service. It’s going to hire more people adding about 100 to its staff of 260 by the end of the year…

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

Come May a better-late-than-never Hewlett-Packard is going to go into the multi-tenant public cloud business à la Amazon’s infrastructure-as-a-service according to what the head of HP’s cloud services Biri Singh told the New York Times the other day.

The difference is supposed to be more business-ready software with a lot of third-party services, not so different structured and unstructured databases and data analytics-as-a-service.

Naturally the analytics will be coming from HP’s Vertica and pricey Autonomy acquisitions…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Kevin Kwang.

According to Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, program manager of enterprise applications and business analytics at IDC Asia-Pacific, the cloud computing market in Asia-Pacific continues to develop rapidly but cloud services are still "relatively new" to the region and emerging as a component of one’s enterprise IT portfolio.

He pointed out that the region was a "mosaic of cultures", with geographic and business factors, as well as the level of software and cloud maturity, affecting end-user’s purchasing behavior. As such, adoption of cloud-based productivity tools in the region varies from country to country, vertical industry segments and company size, he added…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

NTT Communications has been positioned by Penteo, an independent ICT analyst, as one of the key providers of cloud services in Spain to offer a complete portfolio of cloud based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solutions.

The report[1] analyzes and evaluates the main players in this area. It discusses the IaaS services aimed at large enterprise or the upper segments of medium enterprises, on grounds of capability (Global, European, Local) and type of solution (Cloud Private, Shared or Public). It concludes, "In recent years NTT Communications has developed a strong IaaS solution offering including public, private and hybrid clouds, which makes it the vendor with the most complete portfolio"…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Eric Savitz.

In the last month, IBM, Red Hat, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson have announced that they are joining OpenStack. This is only the latest indication that OpenStack has exploded onto the IT landscape and, over the last year, has captured the attention of the IT and business communities. While most CIOs already understand the benefits of private cloud, many are still in the dark when it comes to the specific IT services that OpenStack provides. With a global community of over 2,500 users and 150+ companies, OpenStack is here to stay.

So what is it?

OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the open standard for both public and private clouds. Rackspace and NASA are the key initial contributors to the project. Rackspace contributed the Cloud Files platform to power the Object Storage portion of OpenStack, while NASA contributed the Nebula NOVA fabric controller to power the compute portion. Cloud service providers, enterprises and government organizations can take advantage of the freely available, Apache-licensed software to build their own massively scalable cloud environments…

Grazed from PR Web.  Author: PR Announcement.

A recent survey by IBM coincides with trends already experienced by leading enterprise scheduler Appointment-Plus: more and more enterprises are turning to cloud technology for improving the efficiency of their business processes and operations.

In the case of enterprises already utilizing Appointment-Plus, they’re automating, streamlining and simplifying the way their schedule and manage appointments and reservations for a variety of different tasks and services, such as scheduling job applicant interviews, inbound shipments and deliveries, and events, clinics and programs…

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Ted Samson.

Hungry to expand the Office 365 customer base beyond small businesses, Microsoft has announced price cuts of up to 20 percent on subscriptions for enterprises. Whether a dip in prices is sufficient to lure large organizations to Office 365 remains to be seen — more likely, Microsoft will need to make good on its vision of bringing more sophisticated, enterprise-oriented tools to the service first.

To its credit, the company has gone six months now without a service outage to Office 365, according to Windows IT Pro, which could also bolster confidence among would-be customers to step into Microsoft’s cloud…

Grazed from All Things Digital.  Author: Arik Hesseldahl.

You hear a lot in enterprise computing circles these days about analytics. It basically means taking long streams of data about something important, usually something that gets repeated a lot, crunching through it with a lot of computing oomph and finding useful patterns that can make that repeatable process less costly, more efficient, faster or better in some way — and at the same time, helping to eliminate the bits that get in the way.

It’s something that IBM does a lot of, and does well, and it’s something that Hewlett-Packard is starting to talk about with increasing regularity, especially in the wake of its acquisition last year of Autonomy, while outfits like Splunk and open source efforts like Hadoop make it easier to do the crunching. And there are lots of start-ups working at finding ways to bring new levels of analysis to stale old business data that used to sit collecting virtual dust, unloved and unused on hard drives…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Jean-Marc Seguin.

In my last installment on the benefits of cloud computing, Considerations for catalogs, controls, compliance in private clouds, I raised points about what needs to change to get to the private cloud, and I focused on three main areas: people, process and technology. Before we get started transforming each area, it’s important to understand where you are today so that you can plot the right trajectory, and as you progress toward your goal, you can make course corrections as needed.

One thing to keep in mind as we discuss this maturity model is that it is not a clean-cut exercise. In any organization, you will find areas that can be scored "more mature" and other areas that can be scored "less mature" on the same topic. This is normal. Depending on the focus, one or more areas will have improved significantly while other areas have not. Let’s take a look at them now…