Category: News

Some of the benefits of cloud computing have been highlighted by an industry expert, who noted that the biggest positive is that business do not have to set the system up themselves.

Stuart Hibbert, chief executive of icomplete.com – a service that brings big business resources to smaller enterprises that may not have been able to do so because of price or experience restrictions – explained that firms do not even have to own their own servers…

The shift towards Cloud Computing will lead to half of all organisations needing to revise their privacy policies by the end of 2012, according to research firm Gartner.  

But for the hard pressed ICT professional or privacy officer, the challenge is going to be how to balance the legitimate concerns and requirements around security and privacy due to their high profile, with not getting carried away unnecessarily and neglecting other responsibilities. ..

Infratel, a provider of call center products and general telephony services for the small and midsize business, announced the market launch of a cloud–based service that is engineered to make it easy and inexpensive for midmarket businesses to employ advanced voice solutions.

"Cloud computing has created an amazing opportunity for SMBs to immediately level the playing field when it comes to accessing phone systems equivalent to the ones used by their larger competitors," said Jim Southwell, general manager of Infratel’s North American operations. "We’re currently selecting top Web hosting firms to partner with us in distributing the service and hope to make a major impact in the market during 2012."..

Parallels, a provider of virtualization and automation software that optimizes computing, stated that U.K. cloud services provider Cobweb is now one of the fastest growing Hosted Exchange providers on its platform.

According to Parallels, its Automation for Cloud Infrastructure is a turnkey, scalable cloud computing solution that makes it easier than ever for service providers to profitably deliver cloud computing services to SMBs. The infrastructure comes packed with virtualization, automation, billing, and customer self-service capabilities…

The next big leap in both technology and business models around sharing elastic compute resources might be bidding for those resources at auction or acquiring them through a broker, according to a report issued Thursday from Forrester. The report argues that while the technologies aren’t here today, a business built on aggregating clouds from public and private networks and delivering capacity and services in an automated, on-demand fashion to companies will emerge by the end of this year, and standards will start appearing in 2012.

Forrester believes that today we have a simple cloud broker model where companies can buy access to infrastructure as a service on demand, things such as Enomaly’s SpotCloud fit this mold. However, in the future, it expects a”full broker” to emerge that automatically spans all clouds and acts as a “fixer” for companies seeking to deploy new apps or handle busy times of year. The fixers don’t just do this for compute resources, but also will one day do it for people, making the idea of hiring seasonal workers something the full cloud broker could do — providing both the IT resources to support those people but also the people themselves…

Year-old PHP PaaS hoster AppFog, née PHP Fog, has gotten an $8 million B round led by Ignition Partners with participation from new investors Simon Crosby, Citrix’ former data center and virtualization CTO, and VC Matt Ocko as well as existing investors, Madrona Venture Group, First Round Capital and Founders Co-Op.

That makes $9.8 million altogether…

NextComputing, a leading provider of portable workstations and dense, small-footprint servers, announces a new rugged portable server solution for forward deployed military environments or any remote location that requires enterprise computing resources. The Vigor EX-B is NextComputing’s first completely battery-powered and fully mobile rugged server, able to run on its own internal power for up to 4 hours. Designed to support tactical operations centers and other mission-critical environments, the Vigor EX-B is the ideal platform for delivering virtualized “local cloud” computing services to multiple users in a remote setting…
 

Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) Wednesday rolled out a new SMB partner program and encouraged partners to step up their move toward cloud computing.

Eric Martorano, senior director of the U.S. SMB channel group at Microsoft, launched the new Top VAR Program from XChange Americas, where he delivered a keynote address. The program provides a designated Telepartner account manager as well as increased incentives, MDFs and technical support to qualified partners committed to building Microsoft SMB practices…

Martorano also exhorted partners to “lead with the cloud” this year as they build their solutions sales strategies.

 “There is an opportunity for you to build, tell, sell and support the cloud. There’s opportunity out there, and that’s not going to change,” Martorano said. “Those partners that are leading with cloud get more on-premise revenue. Why? Because they are the trusted advisors,” Martorano said. “I say to every partner, lead with the cloud.”…