Cloud Education Helps Businesses Wise Up
Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) often hear the refrain that cloud computing is an essential move if they want to cut costs and become more agile. Often lacking, however is training necessary for the deployment of new technology, leaving SMBs with fewer benefits than expected. Now, "cloud education" is becoming a priority for businesses of all types.
Training a New Breed of IT
Businesses looking to operate in a cloud environment need two things–an effective provider and IT staff knowledgable about how the cloud operates. According to an article at Technocrati, the non-profit trade association for the IT industry CompTIA has now introduced a Cloud Essentials Program, which will provide IT professionals with the training necessary to manage cloud resources effectively. The move is a nod to the separate and distinct channel that cloud education occupies, that is, one that isn’t satisfied by knowledge of localized data best practices or those relating to legacy systems…
No more access to Google’s Hadoop cloud for researchers
Google today announced that it is ending its Academic Cloud Computing Initiative, a joint program with IBM and the National Science Foundation that gave researchers access to a massive Hadoop cluster on which to run their data-intensive projects.
The project kicked off in 2007 via a partnership with a handful of major universities as a way to introduce students and researchers to webscale computing, and broadened its scope to the entire scientific community by getting on board with the NSF’s Cluster Exploratory program in 2008. However, what was once novel has become fairly commonplace, so Google is ending the ACCI altogether…
Apple iCloud, Dropbox and iCloud Inc. iCloudDrive
Huge headway has been made in 2011, “the year of cloud computing” by both cloud providers and the markets that have embraced the cloud services they offer. Both consumer and business markets have embraced cloud services as users see the benefits a cloud service brings with it. As we move into 2012, we will further see the benefits cloud adoption brings with it including a way to cut costs by switching to more flexible on-demand IT resource that increases efficiency and brings flexibility with it. While there are several cloud providers that will contribute to making for an interesting year in the cloud arena and assist in the shift in the way we access our information, Apple, Dropbox and iCloud are three that will have an impact on cloud adoption across both the consumer and business markets...
New Relic Joins OpenStack Community to Provide Proven App Performance Management for Organizations Leveraging Open Source Cloud
New Relic, Inc., the SaaS-based cloud application performance management provider, today announced that it has joined the OpenStack(TM) community, a global collaboration of developers and technologists producing the open standard cloud-computing platform for both public and private clouds. Organizations deploying web applications on OpenStack can use New Relic to automatically monitor web apps in production and proactively identify and eliminate potential bottlenecks.
"We are witnessing first hand the accelerating adoption of the cloud and many of our customers and partners are taking full advantage of open platforms like OpenStack," said Bill Lapcevic, New Relic’s vice president of business development. "Having a performance monitoring solution that deploys in minutes on OpenStack, is easy to use, and has been proven effective on OpenStack provides a huge benefit for organizations that want to ensure application performance and scalability. We are thrilled to be joining OpenStack’s growing community of cloud leaders."…
Leading Cloud Computing Provider Etherios Opens Solution Centers in Chicago and Dallas
Etherios, a leader in enterprise cloud computing technology, today announced the opening of two new Solution Centers in response to the company’s rapid growth and its success in delivering cloud-based solutions for its clients.
"With the rapid growth of enterprise cloud computing, our unique Solution Center designs in Chicago and Dallas enable us to leverage our team of highly trained, experienced, and certified consultants across projects while lowering implementation costs for our clients," says Mike Dannenfeldt, Etherios Founder and CEO. "These Solution Centers, combined with our unique project delivery process, allow us to realize unmatched results and success. This success is further evidenced by our achievement and maintenance of the highest level of customer satisfaction."
Cloud Computing: Cloud-Standard Alliances Unite
The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA) and The Green Grid (TGG) alliance have announced that they’re joining forces in their efforts to create standards for the cloud.
The Green Grid is a non-profit, open industry consortium of end-users, policy-makers, technology providers, facility architects, and utility companies collaborating to improve the resource efficiency of data centers and business computing ecosystems. The Green Grid is trying to create a set of metrics for power, cooling, and space as related to the efficient operation of data centers. Their metrics have helped many operators in designing, building and running more efficient facilities. It makes sense that the ODCA would team with the TGG. The TGG has been working on the problem of data center efficiencies for some time and has generated several generations of standards in this area.
In particular, the two groups will collaborate on Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) metric developed by The Green Grid’s which addresses data center-specific carbon emissions. The joint collaboration is expected to complete sometime in the first part of 2012…
Cloudability lands $1.1M venture round
Cloudability, a Portland startup providing software to help manage cloud computing spending, on Thursday announced a $1.1 million investment round.
Though the seed round was led by a pair of Bay Area venture capital firms — Trinity Ventures of Palo Alto, Calif., and Walden Venture Capital of San Francisco — around half of the funds came from a collection of angels, including $255,000 from Portland investors.
“What we had heard over and over is you can’t raise a lot of money in Portland and have to go out of town for it,” said J.R. Storment, one of the company’s founders. “It’s been a really cool experience to get deeper into the community and have some of these people just go out for us.”…
Akamai to Buy a Cloud Services Provider
Though the year is drawing to a close, there is no end in sight for cloud fever.
Akamai Technologies has made its first cloud services acquisition, agreeing on Thursday to buy a three-year-old company, Contendo, for about $268 million in cash.
Akamai is in the business of speeding up the delivery of Web content, but in Contendo it will acquire a host of technologies aimed at speeding up delivery of online content using so-called cloud computing, the use of the Internet to process data on remote servers. Contendo’s products include software that adjusts the speed of content delivery to match a user’s download speed…
Is there a cloud bubble?
People like to talk about bubbles. And the cloud. And, more recently, a potential cloud bubble. But are we really heading in that direction?
Not yet. It’s too early to tell whether some of the recent inflated valuations (a la SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors) are justified. What’s clear is that the shift from on-premise to cloud-based software can no longer be dismissed as a passing trend. "We believe that larger enterprise software vendors such as Oracle (ORCL), SAP (SAP), and IBM (IBM) have been losing share to their smaller, faster growing SaaS competitors that are increasingly being accepted in the market," JMP Securities analyst Patrick Walravens wrote in a recent report. "Increasingly, we believe these companies are viewing acquisitions as a way to stem market share losses and position themselves better in the competitive SaaS marketplace."
In the last few months alone, Oracle acquired RightNow Technologies (RNOW), SAP bought SuccessFactors (SFSF) and IBM snapped up DemandTec (DMAN). Large, on-premise enterprise software makers are finally admitting that the way companies buy technology is changing. They’re also acknowledging that they don’t have the DNA to compete in the cloud, which is why they’re acquiring smaller players that have built their business on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model…
Five Essential Building foundations For The Cloud
Cloud Computing is undoubtedly one of the most talked about IT trends of 2011. But unnecessary jargon has caused confusion and stopped widespread adoption of cloud services. With new buzzwords appearing almost every week, it’s not surprising that just one in ten firms has moved to the cloud so far.
Yet despite all the waffle, moving to the cloud can be easier than you think. One of the great things about the cloud is that it gives you free rein to tinker and adjust technology to fit your needs. So choosing a service provider who can give you the freedom to do this will make your cloud experience a painless one. And, thinking about what you want to achieve from the cloud will help you sift through the sales spiel and identify exactly what solution you need. Here are my top tips to get you on your way to cloud heaven:
1. Know what you want
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to cloud, so success is rooted in understanding what it is you hope to achieve. Think about whether you’re looking to reduce IT expenditure, improve application performance, access the latest technology or make it easier for staff to work remotely. Once you know what you want, you can work with your service provider to create a bespoke solution that meets your needs perfectly…