Category: News

Grazed from Huawei. Author: Editorial Staff.

The first OpenStack Days China Conference was held on July 14th and 15th at the China National Convention Center in Beijing. In this event, Huawei participated and shared the practices of public cloud and private cloud with the China Telecom’s Guangzhou Research Institute and Dongfeng Motor Corp. Huawei also introduced container deployment technology, cascading technology and data protection technology based on OpenStack.

By working with open-source entities, partners and customers, Huawei’s goals are to jointly build a cloud ecosystem and to help enterprises achieve their digital transformation, moving them forward on the path to a fully cloudified IT enterprises. Jiang Xiaoli, OpenStack & Container Open Source Ecosystem General Manager of Huawei, introduced Huawei’s FusionCloud, an open, hybrid and integrated cloud architecture based on OpenStack…

Grazed from Omaha.com. Author: Editorial Staff.

In a world where there’s a smartphone app for everything, one company — Amazon.com — has long been the host for an outsized share of online software and computing services. Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella wants to change that. Nadella has poured billions of dollars into building new data centers around the world, hoping to position Microsoft as the leading alternative to Amazon in selling online computing power — housed in remote centers, or “clouds” — to Internet startups, big corporations and consumers.

As evidence the investment is paying off, Microsoft Corp. reported Tuesday that its Azure cloud-computing business more than doubled in sales last quarter, compared with a year earlier. That growth, combined with increases in revenue from Windows software licenses and other key segments, helped offset a big decline in revenue from the Nokia smartphone business that Microsoft largely shut down last year…

Eight VFX, known in the industry for delivering high-end visual effects on tight timelines, was experiencing challenges when delivering on-demand render power to customer projects for BMW, Chevrolet, HP, Mars, Nike, Puma and Samsung. The studio initially turned to rental nodes to manage its fast-changing production pipeline and dynamic digital assets, however this process proved to be time and equipment intensive. Due to these issues, the studio explored a number of cloud-based rendering solutions with burst-compute capability, and found that Avere Systems was the only solution that did not require complex scripting or data management.

INFINIDAT, a leading provider of enterprise data storage solutions, today announced that Brightsolid, a leading UK cloud provider, has implemented the InfiniBox enterprise-proven storage array to improve storage performance and reliability in its VMware cloud environment. Using InfiniBox, Brightsolid reduced the time to deploy storage from hours to minutes, and lowered write latencies from 2-10 ms to below 1 ms, thereby gaining a competitive edge in its market. 

“Our mission is to deliver technical innovation with personal service. By this, we mean finding the best way to apply the most effective technology so that we always surpass the expectations of our customers in the performance, reliability and price of our service,” said Richard Higgs, CEO at Brightsolid. “InfiniBox has delivered the outstanding performance we require as we serve some of the most data-intensive industries, such as energy. Flexibility is one of our key priorities and the scalability of the InfiniBox platform meets this requirement, particularly where customers need to quickly spin resources up and down depending on business demand and budget.”

Vlocity, Inc., a leading industry cloud company, is fundamentally transforming how the world’s leading communication companies engage with their customers by building business support system (BSS) applications in the cloud, on the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. The company today announced the general availability of its 12^th product release, Vlocity Communications Summer ’16, now available on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Vlocity’s communications industry domain expertise, combined with the power of Salesforce, the world’s #1 CRM company, enables organizations to launch new offers in hours, capture and fulfill orders, and effortlessly engage B2B and B2C customers through their channel and device of choice. 

Service providers are constantly working to increase business agility, reduce IT cost and complexity, and deliver an effortless digital customer experience. To achieve this, these organizations are increasingly replacing their legacy customer-facing systems with innovative new CRM and BSS applications born in the cloud. Vlocity and Salesforce are on the vanguard of this historic technology transition. 

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Application workloads that migrate to the cloud often need some work before the move, but IT usually opts to get the workloads to the cloud as expeditiously as possible, which means the workloads often go to the cloud as is. If you don’t modify or refactor the application or data, you will probably not take advantage of some cloud-native features that could really improve your ROI.

However, when you do modify the application, you must consider portability trade-offs. Can you move your application workload to the public cloud without any modification? Perhaps, but only if the workload in question passes these tests. All three answers must be yes…

Grazed from Reuters. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft on Monday posted a surprising case study about a $13 billion company: Land O’ Lakes. Land O’ Lakes owns several businesses, among them the agriculture tech company WinField. On Monday, Land O’ Lakes CIO Mike Macrie described in a blog post published by Microsoft how WinFien will be moving its "R7” app to Microsoft Azure.

"This app takes a vast array of agronomic research, weather information and satellite data and puts it together on a mobile device for farmers – and the WinField specialists who help them – so they can make important planting decisions and react to real-time changes in the field, every day," Macrie says…

Grazed from HumanResourcesOnline. Author: Jerene Ang.

While cloud-based technologies have the potential to revolutionise the HR function, this requires more than simply plugging into the cloud – people, processes and technology need to be successfully integrated in order to realise the greatest benefits from a cloud HR management system (HRMS).

According to the recently released KPMG 2016 Global HR Transformation Survey, of 854 HR executives from 52 countries surveyed, 42% are intending to replace their current HR system with a cloud-based one. However the survey also pointed out that HR’s high expectations for cloud computing to deliver revolutionary business benefits are largely failing to materialise…

Grazed from Cloudwards. Author: Editorial Staff.

Long associated with Bitcoin and not well understood, blockchain technology is generating more discussion, as well as going beyond its Bitcoin connection. IBM Blockchain has announced beta testing for a secure cloud service for the new technology. The IBM Blockchain beta is one of a series of recent announcements from the company of cutting edge technologies.

In May, they introduced IBM Quantum Computing, an experimental cloud-enabled quantum computing platform. In June, they launched the Data Science Experience, a cloud-based development environment for data scientists. Blockchain, as explained by IBM is: "a technology for a new generation of transactional applications that establishes trust, accountability and transparency while streamlining business processes"…

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: John Ribeiro.

IBMs revenue continued to decline in the second quarter but growth in some of its strategic initiatives like cloud computing and data analytics suggest that the company may be on track in its transition plans. The Armonk, New York, company said Monday that revenue from its new “strategic imperatives” like cloud, analytics and security increased by 12 percent year-on-year to US$8.3 billion. That increase was, however, lower than the growth the company had reported in these businesses in the first quarter.

Cloud revenue – public, private and hybrid – grew 30 percent in the second quarter, while revenue from analytics grew 4 percent, revenue from mobile increased 43 percent and the security business grew 18 percent. Over the last 12 months, strategic imperatives delivered close to $31 billion in revenue, and now accounts for 38 percent of the company’s revenue, said Martin Schroeter, IBM senior vice president and chief financial officer, in a conference call…