Category: News

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?…

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Ben Miller.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service is making gains against Amazon.com Inc.’s market-leading Amazon Web Services cloud product. That’s according to Reuters, which reports Amazon is having a tougher sales job these days in a post Edward Snowden information leak world, because Amazon doesn’t have the worldwide presence like Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) possesses.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is reportedly losing some cloud clients to Microsoft because it doesn’t have data centers in many countries, unlike Microsoft. Microsoft, which employs roughly 1,200 people in Irving, is able to offer companies more direct oversight over their data storage because of its broader local presence around the world…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/blog/techflash/2014/12/microsoft-making-gains-in-worldwidecloud-computing.html

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Roland Moore-Colyer.

Moving entire IT infrastructures into the cloud is an unrealistic goal, and businesses need to take a hybrid approach instead, according to Dell’s cloud strategy leader. Gordon Davey (pictured) said in an interview with V3 that cloud computing is "overhyped", and that cloud vendors have enticed companies to make major shifts to the cloud without considering a model that works for their business.

"I think it’s definitely a case of cloud as a buzzword is overhyped. The idea of cloud for the sake of cloud doesn’t really stand out," he said. "The problem comes from customers that have seen the buzzword and want to get the benefits and are just jumping on the bandwagon because it is an industry hype thing, rather than actually evaluating the benefits that a true cloud can bring, and applying that to their business requirements."…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

According to Wanted Analytics, there are 3.9 million jobs in the United States affiliated with cloud computing today, with 384,478 in IT alone. The median salary for IT professionals with cloud computing experience is $90,950. Globally, there are 18,239,258 cloud computing jobs, says Wanted Analytics, with the plurality in China (40.8 percent).

The growth in the United States has been fueled largely by enterprises seeking cloud talent to get their migration projects on track. Both cloud architects and developers seem to be in high demand. How do you cash in? First, always look at new and emerging trends, such as cloud, big data, and the Internet of things…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Dan Worth.

Cloud computing is now an established way of doing business. Software tools for HR, ERP, CRM and other such services are now used in the cloud by all types of company, offering flexibility, reduced costs and regular feature upgrades. Tech giants such as IBM, HP, Microsoft and Oracle are spending millions and devoting endless staff hours on developing new platforms, products and tools to meet this demand, as well as expanding data centre footprints into numerous regions.

This is all to make sure that vendors can reassure customers on issues ranging from security and data sovereignty to latency and data access. However, all this could be in vain if the US government has its way. A court battle is raging between Microsoft and the US authorities over whether the government has the right to access data on a US company’s servers when stored overseas…