Grazed from Portland Business Journal.  Author: Erik Seimers.

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    Trinity Ventures Latest from The Business Journals ScaleArc gets .33M for expansion plansScaleArc raises .33M for expansion plans New Relic raises M Follow this company of Palo Alto, Calif., and Walden Venture Capital    Walden Venture Capital Latest from The Business Journals PowerCloud raises millionPowerCloud Systems gets M in Series B funds PowerCloud Systems raises M in Series B funds Follow this company 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.”…

Grazed from New York Times.  Author: Michael J. De La Merced.

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…

Grazed from Fortune.  Author: Michal Lev-Ram.

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…

Grazed from IT Pro Portal.  Author:  Andy Perrin.

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…

Grazed from GigaOm.  Author: Barb Darrow.

2011 was the beginning of the big data onslaught, but hold onto your hats: big data will only get bigger in 2012.

I’ve spoken to a bevy of experts in the last few weeks, ranging from venture capitalists to vendor execs. Here are some of their thoughts on how the world of big data and cloud computing infrastructure will shake out next year.

1: Look for a battle of the PaaSes

Nearly every vendor has a platform as a service now, and it’s not clear there’s enough business for all of them. Microsoft Azure, Salesforce.com’s Heroku and Red Hat’s OpenShift all promise multi-language support, but they’re facing an array of spunky upstarts in the forms of AppFog, StandingCloud, EngineYard and DotCloud, among others…

Grazed from InfoBoom.  Author: Shawn Drew.

Microsoft recently announced that it has succeeded in adopting a number of security certifications and standards for its Office 365 products. These new Office 365 security features are designed to help Microsoft expand into the international cloud computing space, as regulatory compliance and security become larger barriers preventing cloud app adoption…

Grazed from The Server Side.  Author: Andreas Grabner.

Obviously, cloud computing is not just a fancy trend anymore. Quite a few SaaS offerings are already built on platforms like Windows Azure. Others use Amazon’s EC2 to host their complete infrastructure or at least use it for additional resources to handle peak load or do “number-crunching”. Many also end up with a hybrid approach (run distributed across public and private clouds). Especially hybrid environments make it challenging to manage cost and performance overall and in each of the clouds.

In this blog we discuss the reasons why you may want to move your apps into the cloud, why you may need a hybrid cloud approach or why it might be better to stay on-premise. If you choose a cloud or hybrid-cloud approach the question of managing your apps in these “Silos” comes up. You want to make sure your move to the cloud makes sense in terms of total cost of ownership while ensuring at least the same end user experience as compared to running your applications the way you do today…

Grazed from InfoBoom.  Author:  Douglas Bonderud.

That cloud computing and virtualization are on the rise is no surprise for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), but what’s more important than cloud adoption is cloud evolution–the ways that businesses can implement the cloud in their everyday practices and reap tangible returns.

Provider Evolution

One half of the cloud-evolution equation comes in the form of service providers like Nefsis, which develops cloud-based video conferencing applications. A recent PR Newswire press release highlights the benefits of this technology and shores up how it has changed over the last few years. The initial development of cloud video conferencing systems saw them as mirrors of standard boardroom video equipment: meant to capture meetings and perform a very narrow set of functions. As the power of the cloud has expanded, companies like Nefsis have also increased the scope of their offerings, and now support video conferencing anywhere that a user has access to a webcam and a reliable Internet connection. The ability of Nefsis to take on all maintenance and infrastructure costs leave SMBs with the expense of an off-the-shelf webcam…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional association, announced that the November/December issue of IBM Journal of Research and Development has been published and appears exclusively in the IEEE Xplore® digital library.

IBM Journal of Research & Development is the #1 most-cited journal in the category Computer Science, Hardware and Software, according to the 2010 Thomson Reuters Journal Citation Reports, released in June 2011.

This issue focuses on cloud computing and emphasizes new technologies that form the foundational building blocks for scalable and secure computing. Cloud computing has the potential to greatly reduce the complexity of information technology (IT) management. Building on virtualization technologies, cloud computing transforms the traditional model of IT into a set of easily configurable, manageable, and scalable services…

Grazed from Seeking Alpha.  Author:  Dana Blankenhorn.

Oracle’s (ORCL) earnings bombshell yesterday is the first indication that cloud computing is hitting enterprise IT.

Regardless of what it may say publicly, Oracle is not a cloud company. It sells big iron, Sun servers and Exadata data systems. It sells big software, in the Oracle database and all the applications around it. It needs people to write big checks every year for its licenses, and bigger checks whenever they want to grow.

But something has changed. Cloud has changed.

Cloud is not based on expensive servers, but commodity hardware. Cloud is based on open source, not vendor lock-in. Cloud is based on Software as a Service (SaaS), not enterprise IT as it has existed in the past. With cloud, you pay for what you use, not what you need…