Category: News

When VMware announced last week that it would loosen the radical change in price structure it announced only a month ago, it was doing more than mollifying a few disgruntled customers. It was responding to a revolt among customers, analysts say, even at large companies that rarely considered competing virtualization platforms due to VMware’s lead in the technology.

VMware was also responding to increasing pressure from a whole new class of competitors who see the cloud not as a higher level of abstraction on the data center (as VMware has traditionally approached it), but as the primary platform on which end-user companies can run the applications they actually want…

BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) today announced additional capabilities integrated into its BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution that proactively ensures the service quality of cloud services and avoids many of the risks of cloud computing such as outages, performance and capacity issues, while simplifying cloud administration…
 

Service provider Logicworks has chosen the ScienceLogic^™ Inc. EM7^™ IT operations and cloud management platform to provide its enterprise managed hosting customer base with advanced monitoring options. New York-based Logicworks provides enterprise managed hosting and managed cloud solutions for mission-critical applications and content for clients including Dow Jones, Starwood Hotels, Radar Online, and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts…

Firstly, there was just the Cloud; now we have to deal with the hybrid Cloud. So what on earth is it?…

A commission of 71 top cloud computing experts has released IT and policy recommendations to help governments adopt cloud computing. IDN looks at core recommendations from the “Cloud First Buyer’s Guide for Government” with commission member Sanjay Poonen, president of SAP’s global solutions unit…

Amazon Web Services’ cloud-computing infrastructure experienced a brief network outage this evening that knocked offline popular sites such as Netflix, Quora, Reddit, and Foursquare.

The network connectivity issues struck Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) at Amazon’s northern Virginia site, which handles AWS operations for the U.S. East Coast at 7:39 p.m. PDT and were resolved about 25 minutes later, according to the Amazon Web Services Health Dashboard…

Cloud computing seems simple in concept, and indeed, simplicity of operation, deployment and licensing are its most appealing assets. But when it comes to questions of compliance, once you scratch the surface you’ll find more questions than you asked in the first place, and more to think about than ever before.

Compliance covers a lot of ground, from government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the European Union Data Protection Act, to industry regulations such as PCI DSS for payment cards and HIPAA for health data. You may have internal controls in place, but moving to a public-cloud infrastructure platform, a cloud-based application suite or something in between will mean giving up some controls to the cloud vendor…

I wrote earlier about an IDC report that mentioned Cloud server revenue will grow to $9.4 billion in the US by 2015. This is up from a little more an estimated $4 billion this year.

What if companies were to be issued a 100% tax credit for such a purchase?

To be sure, purchase of these servers would already be included as a capital expenditure, to be deducted from profits over a period of years. A million dollars worth of hardware, depreciated over five years, means that $200,000 per year is not subject to taxes…