VA Considers Cloud Collaborative Tools
The Department of Veterans Affairs is seeking advice from cloud computing vendors on the feasibility of using commercial software-as-a-service collaborative tools that eventually could meet the needs of all of its 134,000 medical personnel.
In a recently issued request for information, the VA asks vendors for suggestions for using web-based collaborative software that will integrate with the VA’s existing systems. The project would start with a pilot including up to 5,000 participants. That could lead to the use of collaborative tools by all of the VA’s 17,000 staff physicians, 36,000 residents and 81,000 other medical staff members…
HP’s Search for ‘Clouds’ Leads to Autonomy
Computer-maker Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) is reportedly in negotiations to purchase Autonomy Corp. for about $10 billion and concurrently plans to spin off its personal-computer business.
HPQ, which is slated to release its quarterly earnings reports after the market closes on Thursday, may announce the deal before then, according to Bloomberg…
CA Technologies Completes Acquisitions of Interactive TKO and Watchmouse B.V.
CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) today announced it has completed the acquisitions of privately-held Interactive TKO, Inc. (ITKO) and Watchmouse B.V. (WatchMouse). The acquisitions expand the breadth of solutions CA Technologies offers enterprises and service providers for using and providing cloud computing to rapidly deliver business services.
The addition of ITKO, a leading provider of service simulation solutions for developing applications in composite and cloud environments, allows CA Technologies to add a new and critical dimension to modern IT management and extend it to encompass the entire service delivery lifecycle. In particular, the acquisition will help customers overcome the limitations of current organizational approaches and break down the silos across development, testing and operations…
Cloud Computing: BI Cloud Start-Up Gets Andreessen Horowitz Money
GoodData, which claims to be the "first company to truly leverage cloud computing in delivering comprehensive BI capabilities" – as opposed to traditional BI providers who rely on expensive hardware to provide data analytics – has gotten $15 million in Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.
The VC’s general partner John O’Farrell along with Google enterprise president Dave Girouard is joining its board…
Hitachi, Microsoft offer private cloud-computing
Watcharasit Santisuknirun, Thailand country manager of Hitachi Data Systems, said the first in a portfolio of converged data-centre solutions built on Microsoft Hyper-V Cloud Fast Track and integrated with Microsoft Exchange 2010 would enable organisations to have virtualised, automated and optimised environments.
The system is designed to help organisations adopt cloud-computing at their own pace. The new solutions also combine innovation and expertise to optimise storage and networking as well as provide ready-to-deploy information technology for running multiple applications that simplify management and reduce cost and floor space…
Cloud computing – a green opportunity or climate change risk?
Cloud computing enables users to to share resources and carry out tasks remotely. Rather than using your own local PCs or servers to do the work, you connect to a remote data centre, often provided by an IT services or software company. It means more computing is migrating to purpose-built data centres.
From a low carbon perspective it’s no bad thing. Data centres tend to be more energy efficient than individual servers distributed around an organisation and, while there is still vast room for improvement, many companies are working to make their computing facilities more energy efficient. Software and IT services suppliers, for example, have been vying to be seen as the greenest provider – apart from the PR value there is a great deal of money to be saved in greater energy efficiency…
Sustainable Energy Sources to Power Cloud Computing
Frankly speaking, the title of this article is somewhat optimistic, considering what I am about to write about is merely a study on the subject. However, considering the big names behind this research project, it is not too much of a leap of faith to expect some concrete directions towards the use of sustainable energy sources to power cloud computing.
Exploration of the relationship between energy consumption and cloud computing is not new on this website. Earlier, I had written on opposing studies that have feted and vilified cloud computing as regards its environment-friendliness (See: How Green Is Cloud Computing? and Environmental Challenges to Cloud Computing ). I had also discussed not only saving money on energy through cloud computing (See: Saving Money on Energy by Going on the Cloud but actually earning money through the process (See: Harnessing Data Center Heat to Warm Houses). Today’s article explores the possibility of marrying renewable energy sources and cloud computing…
Cloud Computing & Virtualization: Hot Trends Organizations Can’t Ignore
The use of virtualization and cloud computing is growing quickly among companies of all sizes. Currently, 30 percent of servers are virtualized, and surveys show that by 2012, that number will grow to 50 percent.
Virtualization and cloud computing go hand-in-hand, and virtualizing servers is just the tip of the iceberg. The trend to virtualize everything from servers to processing power to software offerings actually started years ago in the personal sector. In the recent past, it was common for individuals within major organizations to use virtualized services or cloud computing when at home, but at work they weren’t using those services at all. Why? Because corporate IT didn’t trust the lack of security of the cloud and they weren’t sure it was a hard trend – something that was definitely here to stay. Today, we know better…
Events: Cloud Standards Customer Council quarterly meeting – September 20, 2011
CSCC Quarterly Meeting
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Orlando, FL USA
The council will separate the hype from the reality on how to leverage what customers have today and how to use open, standards-based cloud computing to extend their organizations.
The Cloud Standards Customer Council is an end user advocacy group dedicated to accelerating cloud’s successful adoption, and drilling down into the standards, security and interoperability issues surrounding the transition to the cloud…
The Council will provide cloud users with the opportunity to drive client requirements into standards development organizations and deliver materials such as best practices and use cases to assist other enterprises.
The Council will complement existing cloud standards efforts and establish a core set of client-driven requirements to ensure cloud users will have the same freedom of choice, flexibility, and openness they have with traditional IT environments. The Cloud Standards Customer Council is open to all end-user organizations. The group will work to lower the barriers for widespread adoption of Cloud Computing by helping to prioritize key Interoperability issues such as cloud management, reference architecture, hybrid clouds, as well as security and compliance issues.
The Cloud Standards Customer Council will:
- Drive customer requirements into the development process to gain acceptance by the Global 2000
- Deliver customer-focused content in the form of best practices, patterns, case studies, use cases, and standards roadmaps.
- Influence the standards development process for new cloud standards.
- Facilitate the exchange of real-world stories, practices, lessons and insights.
The Cloud Standards Customer Council’s mission, strategies, and tactics center on the following premises:
- Cloud computing adoption is a key enabler for the 21st century enterprise
- Achieving the benefits of cloud computing requires significant changes for both IT and business executives
- Cloud computing is perceived by business executives as an IT integration and productivity story, rather than a business agility story
- Cloud computing practitioners would greatly benefit from a vibrant practitioner community to drive local, business-driven, cloud success, and to spur broader enterprise, and industry-wide, cloud adoption.
Cloud Standards Customer Council founding enterprise members include IBM, Kaavo, CA Technologies, Rackspace, Software AG.
More than 100 of the world’s leading organizations including Lockheed Martin, Citigroup, State Street and North Carolina State University have already joined the Council.
Agenda:
| 08:00 – 09:00 | Continental Networking Breakfast |
| 09:00 – 09:15 | Welcome |
| 09:15 – 10:00 | Maximizing Return-on-investment and managing risks from cloud computing initiatives Steven Woodward, CEO Cloud Perspectives |
| 10:00 – 10:15 | Break |
| 10:15 – 11:00 | The Challenge of Deploying and Managing Distributed Business Applications and Workloads in the Clouds Sponsor Presentation: Kaavo |
| 11:00 – 12:00 | Business in the Cloud: Mitigating Risk Joe Basirico, Director of Security Services Security Innovation |
| 12:00 – 13:00 | Lunch |
| 13:00 – 13:45 | Security in the Cloud Adam Vincent, CEO CyberSquared |
| 13:45 – 14:15 | Break |
| 14:15 – 16:00 | Working Group Presentation of Deliverables |
| 16:00 – 17:00 | Next steps, New business, and Closing |
Microsoft Office 365 outage a disaster or false flag
Some may argue that the recent outage of the Microsoft Office 365 online service on Wednesday across major centres in the US was a major embarrassment for the software behemoth. But was it really or was it a vindication of the company’s legacy in-house software model?
Let’s face it, software as a service (SaaS) aka cloud computing should be anathema to a company that dominates the global market in productivity software sales. For more than two decades Microsoft has been making tens of billions selling software that companies and consumers are forced to buy and load on their local hard disks.
All of a sudden along comes a thing called the Internet. Until relatively recently – say 10 years ago – no problem. Neither the bandwidth nor the applications were there…