Category: News

Grazed from DBTA. Author: Editorial Staff.

IBM is accelerating the adoption of open technologies for cloud computing, with the goal of assisting enterprises in integrating existing infrastructures into the cloud space. To this end, IBM said it is working on an open integration model with Docker, an open source platform for developers and systems administrators to build, ship, and run distributed applications, and the open source Docker project community.

“The IT industry continues to rally behind a cloud built on open and community-driven technologies,” said IBM vice president of Open Technologies and Cloud Performance Angel Diaz. “IBM continues to firmly believe that the best means to truly drive wide-spread adoption and innovation of cloud computing is to ensure open technologies are at its core.”…

Read more from the source @ http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/News-Flashes/IBM-Tightens-Collaboration-with-Docker-Open-Source-Cloud-Community-97791.aspx

Grazed from Information-Management. Author: Bob Violino.

In a new study looking at the future of cloud, nearly half (49 percent) of the 1,358 organizations surveyed are using cloud services to fuel revenue generation or new product creation. The fourth annual "Future of Cloud Computing" study by venture capital firm North Bridge Venture Partners in conjunction with research firm Gigaom Research and 72 collaborating organizations analyzes the inhibitors and drivers behind cloud adoption.

Other key findings of the survey include that 45 percent of businesses say they already, or plan to, run their company from the cloud. Software-as-a-service adoption has more than quintupled since 2011, rising from 13 percent adoption to 74 percent in this year’s survey…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Doug Bonderud.

In 1957, prolific science fiction writer Issac Asimov penned "The Feeling of Power." In it, Asimov describes a futuristic world in which humans no longer have the knowledge to perform even basic mathematical functions, leaving the task to computers instead. When math is reintroduced under the name "graphitics," there is speculation about its authenticity, let alone the ability of any human to comprehend its myriad rules. Midsize IT professionals may be witnessing the start of a similar progression with the rise of intelligent cloud services ? are they too smart for their own good?

Going… Going… Gone!

While there is little chance the average IT admin will forget how to add, subtract or multiply any time soon, a June 18 Ars Technica article makes a good point: Software and applications are disappearing. Consider legacy customer relationship management (CRM) software, for example. Painstakingly designed in-house from the ground up, many legacy deployments are now being replaced with cloud alternatives. It is a logical move, since cloud-based solutions are faster, operate in real time and give frontline employees access to everything they need at a single glance. But what happens to the legacy? In many cases, it vanishes forever…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Beth Pariseau.

Whether it’s human genome data or restaurant recommendations, the world is inundated with data, and huge swaths of that information have entered the public cloud through AWS big data customers. Business intelligence and data analytics are among the most popular uses for cloud computing, according to a survey conducted by TechTarget last fall. Out of 456 total respondents, 36.2% said they use the cloud for these workloads.

Big companies choose to put big data into Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) cloud because massive machine resources from compute to networking and storage are instantly available, and its many data centers worldwide offer a place for collaborators — from researchers to programmers and data scientists — to meet…

Grazed from MSPToday. Author: Gary Kim.

Major changes in computing architecture do not occur overnight, but every change in computing architecture has implications for wide area network data traffic. According to Ericsson, for example, in 2013 data traffic across global networks was eight times as heavy as voice traffic. That is a direct consequence of a shift to cloud-based or distributed computing, widely used by consumers. That is a shift from past eras, where data traffic on wide area networks was driven by business computing centers.

Most of today’s growth is driven by use of the Internet by consumers. In the past, wide area network data traffic was driven by enterprise computing centers. Recent Gigaom Research surveys suggest that another big round of cloud-technology adoption is coming. Though one might argue the first wave of cloud-based computing was driven by startups, the next wave will be driven more by companies re-inventing their own businesses, Gigaom suggests…

Grazed from NIST.gov. Author: Evelyn Brown.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cloud Computing Program (NCCP) is forming three public working groups to provide solutions to cloud computing challenges. A teleconference on Wednesday, June 25, 2014, at 11 a.m. Eastern will kick off the effort. Program leaders will discuss group goals, member roles and responsibilities, meeting schedules and deadlines. The NCCP provides leadership and guidance to catalyze and facilitate the use of cloud computing within industry and government.\

NIST’s cloud computing public working groups bring together industry, government and academic experts from across the world to address requirements laid out in the NIST U.S. Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap, Release 1.0 (Draft).* The combined efforts of several public working groups drew up the roadmap and others are working on security, standards and accessibility…

Grazed from ReadWrite. Author: Jodi Mardesich.

The great cloud computing war of 2014 is in full pitch. Cloud storage providers continue to jockey for the chance to store all your digital data, they’re giving away more for free and dropping the prices for their paid add-ons. Microsoft wants to remind everybody that it has significant stake in the game. Today, Microsoft announced that it is now offering 15 GB (up from 7 GB) of storage on its personal cloud storage service OneDrive for free.\

If you use Office365, Microsoft ups the ante to one terabyte. Microsoft also decreased paid storage options by up to 80%. “If you use Office, you don’t need to buy storage from anyone else,” said Angus Logan, director of marketing for OneDrive at Microsoft. “We give you more than enough to do what you need to do.”…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

Bright Pattern, the only provider of next generation cloud contact center solutions, has been named a most promising cloud computing company by CIO Review magazine. The company has been recognized for its innovative ServicePattern platform, a unified cloud contact center solution that natively supports voice, web chat, social media and rich contact experience options for mobile customers that enhance customer satisfaction in today’s connected world.

ServicePattern provides customers and partners with the flexibility to deploy how they want, where they want, (SaaS, private cloud, hybrid) and build and differentiate their offering by essentially custom ‘skinning’ the core contact center functionality with add-on applications…

Grazed from TheVaryGuy. Author: Chris Talbot.

OpenStack seems to have found its niche in the cloud computing market. An ever-increasing number of major vendors and cloud providers are turning to OpenStack to build out their own offerings and provide cloud infrastructure for customers. But, according to one analyst, OpenStack has its limitations, and it will stay within the private cloud world.

Battery Ventures technical fellow Adrian Cockcroft’s analysis on OpenStack was recently reported on at GigaOM. And Cockcroft, a former cloud expert who was most recently working at Netflix before moving to Battery Ventures, noted that OpenStack is really catching on in the private cloud. For those who have joined the growing open source cloud movement, this is great, as Cockcroft noted that the brand will dominate in the private cloud world…

Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Andrew Froehlich.

I’m about as pro-capitalism as one gets. Nevertheless, I believe there are instances when the US government must step in and impose regulation on industries with near monopolies. Our Internet carriers are one example of a near monopoly. That’s why I’m very much in favor of net neutrality to protect customers from being shaken down by a handful of carriers.

However, the FCC is wavering in its commitment to support a full-blown net neutrality policy by considering a proposal to allow ISPs to sell tiered services to businesses like Google and Netflix for preferential treatment of their Internet content on backhaul links. The plan, though sounding capitalistic in nature, would create artificial barriers to entry and could slow cloud growth…