Category: News

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Arthur Cole.

Some interesting research came out last month regarding the enterprise’s attitude toward the cloud and what it will take to push more of the data load, and mission-critical functions in particular, off of local infrastructure. It turns out that while security and availability are still prime concerns, flexibility and federation across multiple cloud architectures are equally important.

In IDG’s most recent Enterprise Cloud Computing Study, more than a third of IT respondents say they are comfortable with the current state of cloud technology, with about two thirds saying the cloud increases agility and employee collaboration. The key data, however, comes in the attitude toward advanced networking technologies like software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), with more than 60 percent saying they plan to increase their investment in these areas specifically to enhance their ability to access and manage disparate cloud environments…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itbusinessedge.coam/blogs/infrastructure/working-our-way-toward-the-federated-cloud.html

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Todd Bishop.

Microsoft investors will gather Wednesday morning for a yearly tradition, the company’s annual shareholders meeting at Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Wash. It’s Satya Nadella’s first shareholders meeting since becoming CEO nine months ago, and it caps a year of massive change for the company.

If Nadella follows the tradition set by his predecessors, he will give a broad update on the company and do his best to persuade shareholders to buy into his vision. That vision, in his words, is to make Microsoft the “productivity and platform company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world.”…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Cade Metz.

Docker is the hottest new idea in the world of cloud computing, a technology embraced by Silicon Valley’s elite engineers and backed the industry’s biggest names, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Based on technologies that have long powered Google’s own online empire, it promises to overhaul software development across the net, providing a simpler and more efficient means of building and operating websites and other massive online applications.

But some of Docker’s earliest supporters now believe that the company behind the technology, also called Docker, has strayed from its original mission, and they’re exploring a new project that aims to rebuild this kind of technology from scratch. On Monday, a San Francisco startup called CoreOS unveiled an open source software project called Rocket, billing it as a Docker alternative that’s closer to what Docker was originally designed to be…

Grazed from BreakingFinanceNews. Author: Toi Williams.

International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM) has announced that it signed a 10-year, $10 billion deal with ABN AMRO to provide cloud services to the banking company. The multibillion-dollar service agreement includes the management of the IT infrastructure of the bank and the implementation of a private cloud for the bank’s global operations. ABN AMRO is based in the Netherlands and serves private, corporate, and retail banking customers.

The contract with IBM includes fully managed services for servers, storage, end-user computing, application support, and a help desk. The 10-year agreement also includes the standardization and simplification of the bank’s entire IT landscape. IBM will handle a wide variety of IT tasks for the company, including upgrading its mobile computing operations and maintaining the company’s existing mainframe infrastructure…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Ben Kepes.

A new initiative backed by IBM and with the involvement of a number of second-tier European vendors was recently launched. It’s always interesting to see these “open initiatives” – they’re generally heralded by triumphant sounding press releases, marketing department-fuelled hyperbole and little else.

Over the past half dozen years or so I have been amazed at the number of times these things have been launched (and, as an aside, does anyone else notice that IBM IBM -0.17% is often the central figure in these deals?). I’ve seen, off the top of my head: DCRM, DMTF, OCCI, ODCA, OSIMM, OVF, SNMP, TOSCA, CAMP… you get the idea. Of these acronyms and initiatives, very few still exist, and even less gained any real traction…

Grazed from BizJournals. Author: Efrat Kasznik.

Software vendors across the world are embracing the software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud-based business model in growing numbers. According to Software Equity Group, SaaS software revenues will likely represent about 25 percent of the overall software market in the next five years. Research firm Gartner estimated that global spending on SaaS will reach $22.1 billion by 2015.

Some software vendors are converting their software delivery and revenue models to SaaS, while others acquire SaaS companies to gain access to this market. SaaS mergers and acquisitions transactions grew 25 percent last year, and the median SaaS exit multiple was more than double that paid for traditional, on-premise software targets, according to the Software Equity Group…

Read more from the source @ http://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/how-to/funding/2014/12/how-the-saas-business-model-affects-valuations.html

Grazed from RenaissanceCapital. Author: PR Announcement.

Workiva, which offers a SaaS platform used by companies to manage the SEC filing process, announced terms for its IPO on Monday. The Ames, IA-based company plans to raise $101 million by offering 7.2 million shares at a price range of $13 to $15. At the midpoint of the proposed range, Workiva would command a fully diluted market value of $581 million.

Workiva had 2,176 customers as of September 30, with 60% of both the Fortune 500 and Fortune 100, including The Coca-Cola Company, Wal-Mart, Cardinal Health, Boeing, Credit Suisse, Google and Chevron. Its ten largest customers make up 5% of revenue. The company’s subscription revenue retention rate was 97% as of September 30, and 108% including additional seats purchased by existing customers. The company’s management team will collectively own 82% voting power-post IPO…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Cloud computing has been named as one of 12 disruptive technologies which will change the relationship between the CIO and the boardroom, according to a report by Advanced 365. The evolving role of the CIO, and the C-suite in general, has long been a feature of modern business. Opinions differ, whether it’s a wag who proclaims CIO to mean ‘career is over’, or whether it’s a report which advocates more fluency and fluidity between executives.

The Advanced 365 paper takes a look at the different types of CIO today and how it fits in to various businesses:

• CIO as manager: A CIO who delivers today, may not be as much of an ideas person but manages the business for commercial success
• CIO as leader: Engaging in and delivering change throughout the organisation, planning for tomorrow and designing new positions within the company
• CIO as entrepreneur: Dreams about the future, seeks out change and innovates against those changes to improve commercially…

Grazed from TheRegister. Author: Trevor Pott.

Sysadmin Blog Docker is slowly taking over the world. From its humble origins, which we explored on Friday, as an internal project at dotCloud, through to Microsoft’s recent announcement that it will support Docker natively in Windows, Docker looks set to become a major component of modern IT infrastructure.

Today, Docker is powered by Libcontainer, rather than the more widespread LXC. The switch has some very real implications for the future of Docker, for its potential adoption and for its interaction with the community. Libcontainer matters for the same reason that Android matters: control. Consider for a moment that while there are eleventy squillion distributions of Linux out there, almost nobody says "Android Linux."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Srikanth RP.

Though cloud adoption continues to be on the rise, there are still a host of mid-sized companies for whom cloud computing is still a complex topic. Cloudstrats, a startup, aims to do just that by simplifying the adoption of technologies like cloud for organizations. “In today’s world, only large organizations have access to high-end technology solutions.

Most of the industry best practice solutions are not cost effective for others to explore. SMEs and sectors like education intend to leverage IT best practices for their businesses but are inhibited by the costs and unavailability of the right partner to support them. Cloudstrats was founded with the vision to Make IT Simple for all our customers. We intend to accelerate the adoption of latest technologies by enhancing their accessibility for every company in the market,” explains Piyus Kanti, CEO, Cloudstrats. Kanti says that the firm’s aim is to use IT as a success factor for business, instead of being a bottleneck…