Category: News

Grazed from Cloud Computing Journal.  Author: Pat Romanksi.

"Over the past year, a cross-industry call for more paperless process automation has cultivated the need to deliver that automation in more ways to address a wider array of business challenges than ever before," said Nick Sprau, vice president of marketing with Metafile. "In 2011, cloud-based delivery of AP and AR automation technology will continue to increase, as will the technology’s use in managing evolving 1099 reporting requirements and intensifying transactional demands in the retail sector."…

Grazed from IT Wire.  Author: Stephen Withers.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online – the cloud version of Dynamics CRM 2011 – is now available. The on-premise and partner-hosted versions won’t be released until the end of February.

Microsoft is using the launch of Dynamics CRM Online to go after Salesforce.com and Oracle customers.

This starts with an promotional price of $A42.25 per user per month (available until June 30, and applying only to the first 12 months of service).

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Ann All.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my years in journalism, it’s that you have to take surveys with a grain (or sometimes a whole shaker) of salt. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen surveys with similar questions yield wildly different results, depending on the size and composition of the sample, the way the questions are asked, who asks them, etc., etc.

 

Grazed from Experian QAS.  Author: Neil Hill.

Business owners in New Zealand may be interested in attending a summit on the topic of cloud computing that is set to take place in Auckland next month.

The event is due to be held on February at a yet-to-be-disclosed location in the city, with speakers from Microsoft and IT analyst Gartner set to be in attendance, reports the TechDay website.

With the conference being organised by the former company, among the topics up for discussion will be the myths, challenges and opportunities related to cloud computing.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Amazon Web Services, which popularized cloud computing with its Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service, has moved up the stack from infrastructure to providing Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, its Platform-as-a-Service play. However, Amazon is layering its PaaS offering on top of its other services in a way that’s easily reversed, which means developers can take the easy way out of developing on Beanstalk, or they can peel back the platform to manually provision and tweak their underlying VMs if they want.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Karl Freund & Barry Evans.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Arthur Cole.

The popular consensus is that 2011 will be the year of the cloud. Well, not quite. More likely, it will be the year of the hybrid cloud.

Despite what appears to be a mad rush to push infrastructure concerns to someone else, the fact is that most enterprises will be content to test the cloud waters over the next few years. The best way to do that is to integrate local resources with those available on the cloud. In that way, you retain control over data and applications while scaling resources up when the need arises.