Category: News

Grazed from Gadget.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Technology has come a long way since IBM announced the System/360 mainframe in 1964. But how did the connectivity we take for granted now come about? MARK WALKER attempts to answer this and gives his opinion on where to next.  It’s April 7, 1964, and while the Beatles are telling the world that ‘Money Can’t Buy Me Love’, IBM is attempting to convince the business community that it can at least buy you a decent mainframe.

The IBM System/360 – touted as the Big Blue’s most innovative iteration to date – had just been announced, and since then the technology industry has changed in extraordinary ways, shaping the way we live, work, and play. The impact on Africa has been profound, with the continent and its people now connected with each other and the rest of the world in ways that couldn’t possibly have been imagined only a decade or so ago. But how did the connectivity we now all take for granted first come about?…

Grazed from GeekWire.  Author: John Cook.

Netflix and Amazon.com are going old-school in their attempts to gain viewers for their Web TV series, with both companies taking out full page ads in The New York Times on Saturday. The ads were spotted by venture capitalist Chris Fralic, and they indicate just how far Netflix and Amazon will go to gain viewers.

Amazon is promoting its dark comedy “Mozart in the Jungle,” which debuts on Dec. 23. Meanwhile, Netflix is getting the word out on its 10-part highly-rated “Marco Polo” series, which is now streaming…

Read more from the source @ http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-netflix-buy-full-page-ads-nyt-promote-web-tv-series/

Grazed from SysConMedia.  Author: David H. Deans.

As this year comes to a close, let’s take one last look at the most pervasive cloud computing trends — including increased usage across the different cloud service models, the key business drivers and the impact of agile innovation strategies.



Cloud computing adoption has matured, with 69 percent of survey respondents stating that at least a portion of their computing infrastructure is in the cloud. However, 56 percent of companies are still identifying IT operations that could potentially move to the cloud, according to the latest market study by IDG Enterprise...

Grazed from IBTimes.  Author: Thomas Halleck.

Sales of Sony’s PlayStation 4 have been underwhelming since its release last year, but one executive says the company is already planning for the PlayStation 5. Whether it is a physical home console or not, Sony says that the PlayStation 5 will be focused on games.

Some have speculated that the release of the PS4 and Xbox One could be the “last generation” of home consoles, as computing increasingly moves to the cloud, with processing done remotely and then streamed to home devices. Sony Computer Entertainment’s executive vice president Masayasu Ito said that gamers should expect a “next generation” of gaming consoles, including the PlayStation 5, but said he was not sure whether the next PlayStation would be a console or not…

Grazed from TheVarGuy.  Author: Elliot Markowitz.

Going forward, every company must look at taking whatever IT functions they have—whatever customer communications, whatever support, whatever data access abilities—and bringing them to the Web.  It’s that clear. And the only way for businesses to get there is with the help of solution providers.

SPs need to help their clients bring their business to the Web and into the digital age quickly, or those companies risk being irrelevant.  “The era of Digital Business has arrived, in which successful companies are defined by their ability to respond quickly and effectively to transient business moments,” according to a recent report by Gartner…

Grazed from TechCrunch.  Author: Frederic Lardinois.

Canonical’s stripped down “Snappy” edition of Ubuntu Core is now available on Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform.  If you’ve followed along over the last few weeks, that’s not a major surprise. Snappy first launched on Microsoft Azure at the beginning of this month and then arrived on Google’s Compute Engine platform earlier this week. It was pretty obvious that AWS’s EC2 would be next.

snappyIf you’re a developer on AWS, you can now use Canonical’s Ubuntu Core machine image to quickly launch a new Snappy instance. Because of the way Snappy works, it only supports hardware virtual machines (HVMs) on EC2…

Grazed from TheStreet.  Author:  Laurie Kulikowski.

Shares of Red Hat (RHT) , an open-source software company, surged on Friday after earnings for its latest fiscal quarter topped analysts’ estimates.  The Raleigh, N.C.-based company reported third-quarter GAAP net income of $48 million, or 26 cents a share, compared with $52 million, or 27 cents a share, in the year-earlier quarter.

Adjusted earnings per share of 42 cents came in higher than analysts’ expectations of 40 cents. Revenue jumped 15% to $456 million.  "Our strong Q3 results marked the eleventh straight quarter of mid-to-high teens revenue growth as we continued to reinforce and expand our strategic relationship with our customers," Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said in the company’s earnings release…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Sharon Gaudin.

For years, people in marketing or HR have been sneaking their apps and data onto the cloud, totally bypassing IT’s approval or help. Buckle up, IT. Those days are coming to an end as more enterprises look into moving critical applications and information to the cloud. IT shops are being called in to corral all of those individual cloud projects, while moving critical data to the cloud, as well.

"Central IT departments are absolutely going to be more involved with how enterprises use, or don’t use, cloud services," said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. "In the past, individual departments or employees have used cloud services like a fat guy would use a buffet…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Microsoft launched its cloud platform, Azure, in 2010. Since the launch, the service has posted triple digit growth, and last year generated over $1 billion in revenue, according to reports. Considering the latest quarterly results, in which the company claimed that its cloud revenue grew a 128% year over year, we estimate that the annual revenue run rate for Azure can be close to $2.3 billion.

Azure, currently, is the only major cloud platform that is consistently ranked as a leader for both infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). While Microsoft continues to use the same platform that is used in Azure for some of its offerings such as X-box live, Bing, Office 365, SQL etc., it is extensively marketing its cloud offering to enterprises to roll out their apps on its platform…

Grazed from TechRepublic. Author: Nick Hardiman.

Sadly, Linux has become old, fat, and slow. After two decades of overindulgence, the once-lean OS has gained some ugly pounds of cruft. Linux may not be the most overweight server OS out there, but it does take up more resources than it used to. According to the Linux Foundation’s 2014 Enterprise End User Report, 75% of enterprise cloud platforms are Linux.

Since millions of cloud computing services are powered by Linux, that’s a lot of extra resources consumed. Do we really need to use an all-singing OS like Linux — one that requires an overloaded kernel and thousands of supporting files? Isn’t there a lighter, faster, and more secure way of providing business value?…