Grazed from TechTarget. Author: John Moore.

As the story of cloud computing continues to unfold, channel partners are encountering some interesting and perhaps unexpected plot twists. Recent research suggests organizations continue to push decisively to the cloud. Survey results released last week by Insight Enterprises, a hardware, software, cloud and service provider based in Tempe, Ariz., revealed that more than 80% of organizations plan to invest in cloud services in 2016.

Large and medium-sized organizations are poised to be the biggest adopters, but 72% of small companies are also ready to invest in cloud technology. The Insight-commissioned research is based on a survey of 403 IT professionals. But while adoption continues, many organizations lack a coherent cloud governance model and financial management strategy for successful deployment…

Grazed from TopTechNews. Author: Dan Heilman.

IBM and longtime partner SugarCRM announced today that companies now have the option of running the Sugar customer relationship management (CRM) platform across IBM’s worldwide network of cloud data centers. That arrangement promise security-rich cloud environments, data isolation and performance, SugarCRM said. Based in Cupertino, Calif., SugarCRM produces the Web application Sugar, a CRM system available in both open source and commercial open source applications. A typical end user for Sugar is in a regulated industry such as banking, healthcare or financial services.

Partnership Means New Offerings

By choosing IBM Cloud, Sugar can be deployed across bare metal cloud servers, dedicated off-premises clouds or private cloud environments behind the firewall, according to SugarCRM. IBM Cloud is the only cloud company to offer SugarCRM customers those options. Organizations will also gain access to on-demand, scalable computing power, a global footprint, and a fast, private network via IBM’s 46 cloud data centers worldwide, according to a statement from the companies…

Read more from the source @ http://www.toptechnews.com/article/index.php?story_id=032000J3TFLS

Grazed from TheWeek. Author: Jeff Spross.

Microsoft announced on Monday that it’s dropping $26.2 billion to acquire LinkedIn, the social network geared towards resumes, employment history, and connecting corporate professionals and white-collar workers. It’s a generous offer: The buy per share is 49.5 percent over where LinkedIn’s stock closed on Friday. It may seem quixotic when a tech giant known for its personal computer businesses buys a social network. But if you dig through Microsoft’s history, there’s a pretty clear strategy here.

Microsoft got going as a dual juggernaut in both the world of PCs and the software you run on them. It’s not just individual consumers who buy PCs — it’s also companies, and they buy in bulk. This provided an excellent opportunity for Microsoft to place its PCs, its Windows operating systems, and its software package of Microsoft Office products into one big grab bag for bulk buyers…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Nicole Henderson.

With EMC shareholders ready to vote on the Dell-EMC merger next month, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger was in Toronto meeting with Canadian partners and media last week to provide an update on the company and his vision for the future of cloud computing. Over the hour-long conversation, Talkin’ Cloud came out with 5 key takeaways on the cloud landscape, how channel partners can be successful, and how being wary of change isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To read the full interview, go to Talkin’ Cloud sister site The WHIR.

1. Vendors, Partners Must Adapt – or Get Left Behind

The technology landscape is changing at a rapid pace – and vendors, partners, everyone in the ecosystem has to navigate through those changes to be successful. “None is as significant as the period we are in right now,” Gelsinger said. “You have consumer-driven technologies, the shift from on-premise to off-premise, the disruptive effects of mobile and mobile cloud, change of business models from perpetual and capitalized to subscription, all of these are creating such violent shifts that everybody, including us, needs to navigate to the other side of that.”…

Read more from the source @ http://talkincloud.com/cloud-computing/conversation-vmware-ceo-5-key-takeaways

Grazed from CIO. Author: Mary Branscombe.

Given the strength of SQL Server in business, you might be surprised to learn that Microsoft has spent the last five years building a distributed NoSQL database – until you remember that services like Power BI, Bing and the Office Web apps face the same challenges as services like Netflix. They’re problems more and more enterprises have to deal with too: the deluge of data, the demands of mobility and the need for low latency even though you’re relying on cloud services.

That’s why Microsoft’s Dharma Shukla, who previously built key technologies like Windows Workflow Foundation (and worked on both Live Mesh and the never-shipped Courier tablet), has been developing Microsoft’s global-scale distributed database since the end of 2010. DocumentDB, which launched in April 2015, emphasizes the fact that NoSQL really stands for “not only SQL,” because the aim is to give you the best of both worlds…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Clare Hopping.

Bright Computing and ProfitBricks have joined forces to offer an elastic high performance computing (EHPC) solution to speed up deployment of clusters and save costs with a pay-per-use model. The new offering combines ProftBricks’ IaaS with Bright Computing’s infrastructure management tech to offer a fully-scalable way of managing the infrastructure to power data-intensive workloads.

Supporting both traditional HPC and HPC-based Big Data analysis with Hadoop or Spark environments, ProfitBricks and Bright Computing’s solution allows enterprises, research institutes and universities to have a more flexible approach when running analysis. “Cloud-based solutions are increasingly appealing as they offer a cost-effective alternative to traditional on-premise solutions," Petra-Maria Grohs, CSO EMEAA at ProfitBricks said. "Infrastructure is no exception and we are excited at the level of interest we are seeing in moving HPC and Big Data environments into the cloud, in order to unlock cost and time savings.”…

Grazed from OnWindows. Author: Lindsay James.

A new blog post by Elena Bonfiglioli, senior director of the EMEA health industry in Microsoft’s Public Sector division, has highlighted how cloud computing can help the European healthcare sector improve medical care in powerful ways. “It empowers 3,600 mobile caregivers working in the field of mental health in Arkin to be more productive and deliver better care,” she explains.

“It opens up new ways of engagement for mental health patients in Finland through the Health Village. It optimises care processes with remote support and post stroke management in the NHS. It provides a digital identity and a resilient future proof infrastructure for all care givers in the HSE ensuring doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers have access to the real-time information they need – when they need it…

Grazed from CXOToday. Author: Bino George.

The Indian manufacturing sector has clearly taken center stage post the announcement of the current government’s ‘Make-in-India’ initiative aimed at raising global competitiveness of the sector for the country’s long term-growth. The vision of this first-of-its-kind policy is to witness an increase in the share of manufacturing in the country’s Gross Domestic Product from 16% to 25% by 2022. The government has listed technology as of the key contributing factors in achieving this target.

A lot rests on the Indian manufacturing sector to up the ante in terms of growth performance to compliment efforts made to make India ‘the next manufacturing destination’. According to a research report on the technology adoption trends among manufacturing enterprises in India, ERP is the largest priority for spend in a CIO’s budget with significant growth expected over the next 5 years…

Grazed from FirstPost. Author: Naina Khedekar.

DigitalOcean, a cloud computing platform, brings its first data centre in Bangalore, India. Headquartered in New York City, DigitalOcean offers simple on demand cloud computing resources to more than 700,000 registered customers across the globe. Bangalore becomes DigitalOcean’s eighth region globally, following New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Singapore, London, Frankfurt, and Toronto.

More than 700,000 developers around the world have launched over 14 million cloud servers on Digital Ocean’s platform in just four years. In a conversation with Tech2, Prabhakar Jayakumar, Country Manager, DigitalOcean said that the Bangalore datacenter will feature DigitalOcean’s latest servers and network architecture aimed at offering a consistent and seamless experience for users everywhere regardless of which region they select…