Category: News

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

AppFog Founder and CEO Lucas Carlson isn’t shy about touting platform-as-a-service as the ideal way for developers to access cloud computing resources, but he isn’t blind either. Although PaaS has been around for a couple years now and has already spurred hundreds of millions in M&A spending, Carlson knows it’s nowhere near the mainstream yet.

Carlson lays out his version of the evolution of cloud computing in the infographic below. Right now, API-based infrastructure-as-a-service offerings like that from Amazon Web Services and SysOps (or DevOps) tools are developers’ best friends in the cloud. Application-lifecycle platforms such as Cloud Foundry (the VMware-ran open source project  on which AppFog is built) and Red Hat’s OpenShift  are poised to reach critical mass in 2012, whereas so-called “NoOps” platforms such as AppFog and Heroku will reach that point in 2013…

Grazed from YouTube.  Author:  Blackwateropsdotcom.

Public, Private, Community and Hybrid — these are the four types of cloud that are recognized by the NIST model. Of cource, Hybrid is a combination of the first three.  But for ease of discussion, these are the four types of Cloud.

 

 

Grazed from Cortado.  Author: PR Announcement

Cortado, a leading innovator of the business class of cloud desktop services, announces today that its business app, Cortado Workplace, is now available on the Amazon Appstore for the newly released Kindle Fire*. Cortado Workplace is a free app that provides users with round-the-clock access to files and documents and true cloud printing, allowing them to fully utilize the Kindle’s local capabilities and work on the go just as they would with a desktop PC.

With the Cortado Workplace app, managing files and cloud printing are easier than traditional cloud services as no additional running applications or a running computer are needed, delivering a unique approach to cloud desktop devices.

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

Apple was the leading worldwide client PC vendor in Q4, pushing HP off its perch, according to Canalys, which unlike Gartner and IDC, doesn’t hesitate to lump tablets in with desktops, netbooks and notebooks.

It says that since Apple shipped over 15 million iPads and five million Macs last quarter it did 17% of the total 120 million client PCs shipped globally, up 6% year-over-year.  Canalys also figures that if tablets are thrown in, the total client PC market grew 16% year-on-year. If they aren’t, the client PC market declined 0.4%.  Canalys predicts that "HP will struggle to compete with Apple following the end of its Touchpad" given doubts about how Windows 8 will do on HP tablets once it’s out…

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

HP has dispensed with the services of former Palm CEO and pivotal Apple graduate Jon Rubinstein, according to AllThingsDigital.

Rubinstein has been like a man without a country since HP, after spending billions on the stuff decided it couldn’t go toe to toe with Apple and Google, and up and dumped Palm’s webOS-based phones and TouchPad last August then announced that by September it would open source the operating system on which Rubinstein spent four-and-a-half years of his life…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

Federal IT managers are working to adopt cloud computing technologies and comply with White House cloud computing initiatives, but aren’t yet sold on cloud computing’s cost savings or security, according to a recent survey.

According to the survey by research group the Ponemon Institute, 91% of federal IT workers are either somewhat or very familiar with the Office of Management and Budget’s Cloud First initiative, but 69% believe that the initiative’s requirement to move three services to the cloud over 18 months is too fast. In fact, 71% of respondents said that pressure to move to the cloud creates security risks for their organizations…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, today announced the availability of Wyse WSM(TM) 4.0 desktop virtualization solution. WSM transforms the concept of PC virtualization and management and elevates virtual PC computing to its ultimate level of performance, security, and manageability by eliminating the PC’s local hard disk drive in favor of a more effective way of delivering and managing PC software over the network. This simple yet powerful concept works for a few or many thousand diskless PCs, making them "virtualized cloud PCs."

For years IT departments in companies large and small have struggled with "the PC problem" — the constant, tedious resource, expense, and time drag imposed by the proliferation of individually configured, managed, and maintained PCs sitting on every employee’s desk. With WSM, Wyse has solved the PC management problem with the ultimate solution — delivering exactly the right software to the PC from the network instead of a local hard disk, in real-time, creating the high-powered PC that’s not a PC…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Cindi Howson.

MicroStrategy touted its social, cloud-computing and mobile business intelligence initiatives at its user conference last week and has since added proof that those bets are paying off.

MicroStrategy Cloud was released in mid-2011, and over the last six months it has been refining that strategy and building out its infrastructure. I was surprised when the company decided to establish its own data centers, in contrast to other SaaS vendors that use public cloud services such as Amazon’s. MicroStrategy claims that owning the infrastructure enables it to better control performance.

Steve Stone, senior vice president of MicroStrategy Cloud, reported that some of its cloud deployments boast better performance than on-premises installs. Stone knows all about customer performance expectations; he’s the former CIO and a 19-year veteran of Lowes, which has some 14,000 MicroStrategy users…