Category: News

Grazed from ChinaCSR.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The Beijing municipal government has reached a cooperation agreement with IBM to use the tech company’s advanced weather forecast and cloud computing technologies to solve the stubborn smog problem in the city.

Facing serious environmental pollution problems, the Chinese government has promised citizens that it will take measures to improve the environmental situation. To handle the haze and pollution problems, it is necessary to enhance data collection and monitoring and forecast abilities. Beijing has reportedly established an early warning system with data from 35 monitoring stations and the system can warn about heavily polluted weather three days in advance and adjust traffic volume accordingly…

Grazed from TheHansIndia.  Author: Kuldeep Nayar.

India’s second largest IT services provider Infosys Ltd said on Friday it would boost investment in cloud computing, smartphone apps and other new technologies to win more high-margin outsourcing contracts.
 
The move towards these more lucrative deals heralds a change in focus by Infosys, once a trendsetter in India’s $100 billion IT outsourcing industry but which has struggled in recent years to retain staff and market share. Analysts say new technology is the next big requirement for global corporations. Infosys currently derives the bulk of its revenue from low-margin and highly competitive businesses like application development and maintenance and IT infrastructure management services. "Change is inevitable," Outgoing Chief Executive Officer and co-founder S.D. Shibulal told reporters after Infosys posted a higher-than-expected quarterly net profit growth of 21.6 percent…
 

Grazed from Top Tech News.  Author: Barry Levine.

Tech giant Amazon wants in on enterprise storage Relevant Products/Services and collaboration. On Thursday, the company announced the launch of a limited preview of Amazon Zocalo, an online storage and sharing service for businesses.

Zocalo, which translates from Spanish into square or place, allows PC, Mac or tablet users to comment on files, distribute them for feedback, and control versions. Administrators can integrate the service with existing corporate directories or audit logs, implement sharing policies, and determine where files will live. Policies can be set to control how users share…

Grazed from DefenseOne.  Author: Frank Konkel.

The intelligence community is about to get the equivalent of an adrenaline shot to the chest. This summer, a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the Central Intelligence Agency over the past year will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community. If the technology plays out as officials envision, it will usher in a new era of cooperation and coordination, allowing agencies to share information and services much more easily and avoid the kind of intelligence gaps that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

For the first time, agencies within the IC will be able to order a variety of on-demand computing and analytic services from the CIA and National Security Agency. What’s more, they’ll only pay for what they use…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Amy Reichert.

Your organization is ready to move to the cloud in order to reap all the benefits of pre-built development and deployment tools; seamless data access; and a fast, reliable user experience with your application. All your organization’s "stuff" is accessible, and if the system goes down, the vendor has to respect the service-level agreement and fix it. All your organization needs to do is crank out applications and features. It sounds too good to be true.

It sounds too good to be true because it’s complex. The complication is due to the number of integration points between information and the applications in a cloud platform, as well as the legacy applications that already exist. Any time code is altered to accommodate new technology, those changes tend to expose integration problems…

Grazed from EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet.  Author: Arthur Cole.

The cloud is emerging as one of the key drivers of network modernization in the data center. Across the board, enterprises are beefing up internal infrastructure to make it easier to provision server and storage resources for stakeholders, and the best way to do that is with a top-flight network.

Private cloud needs drive network infrastructure upgrades in the data center

According to Infonetics, the average spend for enterprise networking upgrades was $1.1 million last year, and if current trends hold, 2014 should see a healthy 20 percent gain. While wireless LAN technology is a top priority, most CIOs report that the need to build private clouds is paramount. This upgrade is being fueled by two main factors: the need to provide services and applications directly to users to stem the flow of data to public clouds, and the desire to ultimately build hybrid networks that can provide both the ease of use and scalability that emerging, data-driven industries require…

Grazed from CRN.  Author: Kevin McLaughlin.

Salesforce.com has acquired RelateIQ, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that has been touting its big data-infused software as the next generation of customer relationship management.  Salesforce.com is paying $350 million for RelateIQ, which sells a "relationship intelligence platform" that gathers and analyzes data from salespeople’s interactions with contacts, including email, calendars and smartphone calls. It then uses this data to provide insights that can help deals move faster.

RelateIQ’s software supports Office 365, Exchange 2013, Exchange 2010 and Google Apps. It also works with Facebook to let users add photos and verify contact information…

Grazed from ITBusiness.ca.  Author: Shawn Freeman.

It’s not every day that NASA creates a position just for you.  NASA did just that for Chris C. Kemp in 2010. The tech pioneer became the space agency’s first Chief Technology Officer for Information Technology, appointed to lead and nurture IT innovation at the U.S. space agency.

Kemp focused on cloud computing, open-source software and open government, and prior to becoming CTO for IT, partnered with Google and Microsoft to help create Google Moon, Google Mars, and Microsoft World Wide Telescope. He also led the development of OpenStack, an open-source cloud project, with the goal of enabling any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware…

Grazed from PC Magazine.  Author: Michael Miller.

In my last post, I talked about how cloud computing, and in particular Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), is and is not particularly flexible. Flexibility comes from a model that doesn’t require any data center hardware and from a series of extensive APIs that are an integral part of the best SaaS offerings. But at the same time, SaaS applications are inflexible in that they don’t allow much customization to the core software itself and that typically every customer has to be running on the same, most current version with no options.

As I look at it, I’m beginning to think that the areas in which cloud applications are most inflexible may actually turn out to be one of their strongest features. I can argue that traditional client-server applications have offered too much flexibility, and large organizations in particular have spent too much time, effort, and expense in customizing them. We all know examples of organizations that have spent millions (or sometimes, tens of millions) of dollars on customizing their ERP solutions, perhaps with limited upside…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Colby Hochmuth.

Cloud computing has become ubiquitous for the federal IT workforce, as many if not most agencies have begun to move functions like email or data storage into the cloud. But approaching cloud as a software-defined environment is still a relatively new concept in government.

A software-defined approach holistically automates network, computing and storage capabilities and opens the lines of communication between them, according to Anil Karmel, founder and CEO of C2 Labs Inc. and former deputy chief technology officer at the National Nuclear Security Administration…