Category: News

Grazed from SmartData Collective. Author: Stan Roach.

There are two big reasons that leaders across every industry are gung-ho about the Cloud. One reason for this huge confidence in Cloud computing is that it is one of the most disruptive technologies to have emerged on the scene in the last decade. The second and what I think is a far more critical reason is what the Cloud, its adoption and application promises for the future.

It is when business owners “foresee the future” of the Cloud that they say to themselves, “Yes, this is the technology that I want to tie my business fortunes to”. A RightScale 2014 survey called Cloud Computing Trends: 2014 State of the Cloud has come up with some revealing figures:…

Grazed from SysCon Media. Author: Kevin L. Jackson.

The revolutionary business aspects of cloud excite me every day, but the business diversity is even more exciting. This fact really struck me after teaching my last Learning Tree Cloud Computing Introduction class in New York City. I’ve been in the regular rotation here for four months now and have taught three classes during that time. The chart below breaks out the students in these classes by industry.

The heavy US Government slant can of course be attributed to my northern Virginia residency, but the Federal Government has indeed taken on cloud in a big way and the educational focus I’ve experienced from them is commendable. The number of other industries seeking cloud knowledge is also enlightening. As I’ve said many times before, cloud computing is not about technology. It represents a business revolution that is now being universally embraced. In spite of the industry diversity, however, student experiences that drive them to my class and the questions they ask are very similar…

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Steven Norton.

Ravello Systems Inc. Tuesday released a tool that it says will help CIOs more easily move software development environments from VMware Inc. to Amazon Web Services and Google Inc. clouds. It joins companies like International Business Machines Corp., EMC Corp. and others in the shift to knit together hybrid cloud environments, a mix of public and private clouds and on-premise applications.

As cloud computing becomes more pervasive in corporations, many CIOs are shifting from having a portfolio of disparate clouds to a hybrid environment, often managed by a single user interface. The ability to easily integrate and manage those complex environments is top of mind for many CIOs who are bringing the cloud deeper into the mainstream…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jason Perlow.

Back in the summer of 2013 I wrote a series of articles on what I called the "Datacenter Zombie Apocalypse." The first was an observation of the troubles IBM was undergoing trying to shift its very datacenter-oriented services and outsourcing business to one that was more cloud focused and how it might serve as a bellwether for the IT industry as a whole.

The other was about how, as an IT practicioner, one might transition their skills to be more cloud-oriented. Where are we now with all of this, over a year later? IBM’s situation has gotten worse. While it continues to invest in Cloud, its services revenue is flat, and has been forced to divest two separate hardware businesses — its x86 server business to Lenovo and its silicon manufacturing capacity that powers their System p and System z enterprise systems to GlobalFoundries…

Grazed from TechTimes. Author: Chritian de Looper.

Rackspace’s financial results for the third quarter in 2014 show a better-than-expected jump of 18.3 percent in revenue from the same time last year. Revenue in the quarter was $460 million, up by 4.2 from the previous quarter. Net revenue was up by 4.4 percent from last quarter and 16.1 percent from last year.

"We are pleased with our operating performance this quarter and encouraged by the momentum we are seeing in the business," said Taylor Rhodes, president and CEO of Rackspace. "We are poised to capitalize on the massive opportunity ahead in the managed cloud market, where we see increasing demand for our managed services and expertise. And while we made strong progress this year, we’re determined to continually improve our execution and seize our future."…

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

TrademarkNow, a Helsinki-based legal technology startup with a stellar client base of well-known international companies, is expanding to the United States with the opening of a new office in New York City. Since the company’s founding in 2012, TrademarkNow has fulfilled an unmet need in the trademark management space felt by enterprises, law firms and branding agencies around the world. With numerous clients using their platform on a daily basis, the company’s rapid growth led to TrademarkNow securing Series A funding of $3.5 million in May 2014 to invest in strengthening the company’s global coverage and presence. Investors included Balderton Capital.

The core technology behind the TrademarkNow platform is based on 12+ years of research, and powers the two current solutions, NameCheck and NameWatch. NameCheck delivers comprehensive trademark search reports in seconds that reflect not only database searches, but analyzes of millions of existing trademarks and other relevant data for product similarity, how the word looks, how it sounds when pronounced, and word meaning in over 150 languages…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Adrian Bridgwater.

Companies in all business verticals are using cloud computing and its hosted virtualized methods for supplying software applications along with data processing power and storage. This basic axiom we know to be true, so what factors are changing? Somewhere around ten years ago it was a case of ‘cloud is a security concern’. Five years ago it was ‘maybe let’s consider cloud for some use cases’.

Now as we close 2014 it is increasingly ‘cloud first’, or ‘born on the cloud’ if you will. This means that applications and data sets are being architected and structured for a hosted virtualized existence from the start. In turn then, this means that a new operational layer has sprung up i.e. firms are exchanging cloud-based information around the world and some of it is sensitive as it comes under the purview of regulatory controls…

Grazed from Fool. Author: Evan Niu.

Microsoft hosted a media event at its Redmond headquarters last week, and CEO Satya Nadella gave some key insights to investors on where his priorities lie. At a high level, the CEO only cares about three things when it comes to customer usage and the source of Microsoft’s revenue. Unsurprisingly, they are Windows, Office 365, and Azure.

The big three

Of course, Windows and Office have long been Microsoft’s two primary cash cows, followed closely by the company’s server offerings. Compared to those three businesses, Azure is relatively young. With the announcement of Windows 10, Microsoft is doing away with the distinction between Windows and Windows Phone. Windows 10 will operate on all form factors, including smartphones and tablets…

Grazed from NewsFactor. Author: Editorial Staff.

SoftNAS, the No. 1 Best-Selling NAS in the Cloud, today introduced version 3.2 for SoftNAS Cloud, a full-featured, enterprise-grade NAS (Network Attached Storage) filer for private, public and hybrid clouds running on popular cloud computing platforms, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and VMware vSphere.

SoftNAS also announced Express Edition, with a usable capacity up to 1 Terabyte (TB), as well as integration with Docker, an open platform, or container, where developers can build, ship and run distributed applications. SoftNAS Cloud version 3.2 provides persistent shared storage, as opposed to Docker’s native ephemeral storage, to the Docker container to ensure high-availability and scale-out clustering for DevOps professionals delivering continuous deployment/integration and applications that scale…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Larry Dignan.

Cycle Computing which specializes in technical and high-performance cloud computing, and Western Digital’s HGST unit ran the largest Fortune 500 production workload and went from zero to 50,000 cores in 23 minutes. The cloud computing run, executed over the weekend and code-named Gojira, utilized various regions on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and maxed out at 70,980 cores.

In 60 minutes, the companies built a 729 TeraFLOPS cluster, or the equivalent of the No. 63 supercomputer on the June Top500 list. The workload ran over 8 hours. Jason Stowe, CEO of Cycle Computing, said the HGST workload is an example of how enterprises are increasingly using technical computing and high-performance clusters to run analytics workloads and simulations…