Category: News

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Rob ONeill.

Telecom New Zealand has inked a conditional agreement to buy cloud services specialist Appserve. Telecom chief executive Simon Moutter said that the acquisition provides a major new piece in the "cloud jigsaw" after significant investment across the business in cloud services.

“We see this as a strategic business move giving the Telecom group a very strong New Zealand cloud services portfolio. The acquisition of Appserve is an excellent complement to the purchase in 2013 of Revera and the ongoing investment we are making in data centres,” Moutter said. Telecom Retail CEO Chris Quin said thousands of businesses already supported by Telecom and its ICT services arm, Gen-i, want to take advantage of the cloud but need a hand to get there…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Carlos Granada.

There is no denying that cloud computing is a disruptive IT strategy that is driving a services-oriented delivery model. But in many cases IT has struggled to align the vision and promise. Tactics often trump strategy, resulting in limited benefits, increased uncertainty and less control. For cloud adoption to succeed, an approach is needed that aligns strategy with a pragmatic approach to implementation, measured against business and organizational outcomes.

Cloud promises include reduced costs, infinite scalability of resources, IT agility necessary to meet shifting business demands, value, even IT transformation. But one of the most important benefits promised by cloud computing is that it will provide an organization with the agility to keep up with global economic factors, drive innovation and, most importantly, allow organizations to truly focus on what’s important, their customers…

Grazed from V3.co.uk. Author: Daniel Robinson.

Cloud computing giants Google and Amazon have both unveiled new solid-state drive (SSD) block storage options for users of their respective virtual machine services, as the highly competitive cloud price war continues to heat up. Both Amazon and Google have announced new SSD-backed persistent storage options for their respective cloud server offerings, while Google has also added an HTTP Load Balancing feature.

Google said that the new SSD persistent disk product for its Compute Engine service sets a new bar for scalability and performance in Block Storage. It is charging users a flat fee of $0.325 per GB per month and supports up to 30 input/output operations per second (IOPS) per GB. Google also claimed on its Cloud Platform Blog that "while other providers count each and every IOPS and charge extra for them, SSD persistent disk includes IOPS in the base price with no extra charges or fees, making cost completely predictable and easy to model."…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Mojgan Afshari.

Advanced multimedia devices, social media services, sensor networks, and corporate information systems create continuously huge amounts of structured and unstructured data which are called big data. Transforming collected masses of raw data into meaningful and useful information is important for organizations. This knowledge helps managers to make smarter decisions and improve organization’s performance.

The four dimensions of big data (volume, velocity, variety and value) present challenges to businesses such as how to store and manage data, how to effectively analyse data and gain value from big data. Recently, cloud computing has been recognized as a useful technology in handling big data for many of the organizations…

Grazed from CIOToday. Author: Jennifer LeClaire.

Cisco Relevant Products/Services let the world know it plans to acquire a multi-vendor networking software Relevant Products/Services maker that targets both traditional and virtualized networks. The tech titan is grabbing Sweden-based Tail-f Systems for about $175 million.

Tail-f’s products aim to help service providers and enterprise Relevant Products/Services IT implement applications, network Relevant Products/Services services and solutions across networking devices cost-effectively. The foreign firm’s tech also promises to reduce the time-to-market for network equipment vendors building equipment for agile, software-programmable networks…

Grazed from Ars Technica. Author: Lee Hutchinson.

Take ten high-end Intel NUCs, a gigabit Ethernet switch, a couple of terabytes of storage, and cram it all into a fancy custom enclosure. What does that spell? Orange Box. Not the famous gaming bundle from Valve, though—this Orange Box is a sales demo tool built by Canonical. There are more than a dozen Orange Boxes in the wild right now being used as the hook to get potential Canonical users interested in trying out Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS), Juju, and other Canonical technologies. We got the chance to sit down with Canonical’s Dustin Kirkland and Ameet Paranjape for an afternoon and talk about the Orange Box: what it is, what it does, and more importantly, what it is not.

First off, Canonical emphasized to Ars multiple times that it is not getting into the hardware business. If you really want to buy one of these things, you can have Tranquil PC build one for you (for £7,575, or about $12,700), but Canonical won’t sell you an Orange Box for your lab—there are too many partner relationships it could jeopardize by wading into the hardware game…

Grazed from FierceCIO. Author: David Weldon.

The growing adoption of cloud computing is placing greater demand on IT pros with cloud-based experience, but many organizations complain that it’s too hard to find IT talent with the right skills. There are a few reasons for the problem, according to a recent article at CloudTech. "Demand for cloud-skilled IT workers continues to outstrip the supply, and demands keep growing," the article explains.

"Training and on-the-job training are well underway, but growth is just too steep to fill all of the jobs." "Cloud providers do a poor job of providing generalized cloud computing skills. They typically focus only on their technology, which shouldn’t be surprising. However, the majority of enterprises use many clouds, so cloud professionals need to understand most of them."…

Read more from the source @ http://www.fiercecio.com/story/recruiters-struggle-get-cloud-hiring-right/2014-06-17

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Alex Barrett.

Every IT function you can think of is available as a cloud-based service these days: email and communications, payroll, human resources, file sharing, analytics — the list goes on. Cloud services are often used by newer companies with no legacy infrastructure, but they’re also pitched to replace existing on-premises systems. That’s when the trouble starts, said Curtis Peterson, vice president of operations at RingCentral Inc., a provider of cloud-based business communications services that is an alternative to legacy PBX systems.

While higher-level executives may be open to the idea of cloud-based services, more entrenched, operational IT staffers — so-called server huggers — often are not. Here’s what Peterson hears from server huggers and what he has to say to those who just can’t give up their beloved hardware…

Grazed from MoneyNews. Author: Editorial Staff.

Oracle Corp. is nearing a deal to buy hospitality-industry software provider Micros Systems Inc. for more than $5 billion, people familiar with the matter said. Oracle and Micros are in exclusive talks, though the two sides could still fail to reach an agreement, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing a private matter.

Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison is looking to acquisitions to fuel expansion after 10 quarters of sluggish sales growth. The company was late to the market for Internet-based cloud software and Ellison is now rushing to remake Oracle as a provider of gear and programs to underpin its clients’ shift to Web-based computing…

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

After nearly six months in research and due diligence, Hicksville-based NSA Computer Exchange Corp. has launched its Cloud Suite solution. Cloud Suite powered by Axcient is a disaster recovery, business continuity, and monitoring solution for small- to medium-sized businesses.

The main purpose of the Cloud Suite is to protect businesses from data loss due to man-made issues (fire, theft, accidents, etc.), natural disasters (flood, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc.), or server outages, and get them back on their feet in a fraction of the time of other solutions available today. NSA’s focus and client commitment is providing the most user friendly, responsive, and intuitive cloud recovery system on the market. More focus was put into making sure the product could adequately protect businesses from the trials of sudden disasters…