Category: News

Grazed from OnBase. Author: David Jones.

I like to compare the different enterprise content management (ECM) cloud deployment types to my children playing with Legos. We have a large box of Lego pieces that my children can use to build anything. My eldest daughter loves this ground-up style of playing and can make some fascinating creations – simply by combining raw bricks and her imagination.

This compares to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in that all of the raw components to host a cloud solution are provided – servers, virtual machines, load balancers and so on. What is required is the guile and skill to combine these components (Lego bricks) with the required software tools (imagination) to create the desired effect…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Christopher O’Connell.

By September 2015, no new purchasing contracts are to go through the federal government’s Standard Procurement System (SPS). The entire legacy procurement system is slated for sunset by 2017. With the sunset of SPS, there’s an opportunity to do procurement better in the federal government. Let’s call this notion "acquisition-as-a-service."

Some agencies already seem headed in that direction. But before we turn our attention to them, here’s a hard truth: Federal procurement processes have been poorly served by technology. Acquisition is a costly and complicated business, with little uniformity among the applications that automate acquisition’s repetitive functions…

Grazed from CloudServicesWorld. Author: Claire Umney.

In an industry where collaboration and visibility are key requirements, cloud computing is a rather new business model with great potential. In their IT cloud services forecast 2013-2017, market intelligence provider, IDC, reports that on a global level only 20 percent of manufacturers, process agents and retail businesses currently use cloud computing. The same research stated that 75 percent of the companies surveyed were however looking for cloud solutions as an alternative, while projecting a growth rate of at least 7 percent for 2013. What exactly is it that’s driving supply chain professionals into the cloud?

Cost savings

The most obvious benefit of adopting cloud computing solutions is cost savings from deployment and the short implementation time frames. Unlike legacy systems, either custom–built or packaged software – there is no IT infrastructure to maintain on-site, no upfront licensing fees, and no software programmes to install and maintain…

Grazed from Wired. Author: Cade Metz.

When Google engineers John Sirois, Travis Crawford, and Bill Farner left the internet giant and went to work for Twitter, they missed Borg. Borg was the sweeping software system that managed the thousands of computer servers underpinning Google’s online empire. With Borg, Google engineers could instantly grab enormous amounts of computing power from across the company’s data centers and apply it to whatever they were building–whether it was Google Search or Gmail or Google Maps. As Sirois, Crawford, and Farner created new web services at Twitter, they longed for the convenience of this massive computing engine.

Unfortunately, Borg was one of those creations Google was loath to share with the outside world–a technological trade secret it saw as an important competitive advantage. In the end, urged by that trio of engineers, Twitter went so far as build its own version of the tool. But now, the next wave of internet companies has another way of expanding their operations to Google-like sizes. This morning, Google open sourced a software tool that works much like Borg, freely sharing this new creation with the world at large…

Grazed from ScientificComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.

HP has announced new innovations and sustainable enterprise infrastructure solutions designed to deliver the simplicity, efficiency and investment protection organizations need to bridge the datacenter technologies of today and tomorrow. Big data, mobility, security and cloud computing are forcing organizations to rethink their approach to technology, causing them to invest heavily in IT infrastructure. According to Gartner, "Datacenter hardware spending from new types of products and new types of big data deployments will reach $9.4 billion in 2014."

HP is helping enterprises create a foundation for the next generation of enterprise architecture with new solutions and services that address power and physical constraints, accelerate applications, simplify management, create efficiencies and enhance agility — while also lowering IT and operational expenses…

Grazed from Telecoms. Author: James Middleton.

US carrier AT&T has added HP’s offerings to its network-enabled cloud ecosystem, allowing customers to use their VPN to connect to the HP Helion portfolio of cloud services. AT&T said its NetBond tool creates a highly secure private path between a customer’s AT&T VPN and a cloud service provider, like HP, flexing and scaling network resources dynamically as a company’s cloud computing needs change.

The company claimed network elasticity which automatically flexes with the needs of the cloud service allow customers to save as much as 60 percent on networking costs. Moreover, the solution delivers as much as 50 per cent lower latency and three times the availability compared with the public internet, as well as isolating traffic from risks such as DDoS attacks…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Steve Burks.

Are you driving fast, making big bets on new products and services in a cloud-computing marketplace moving at blinding speed? It’s a question worth asking given just how fast recurring revenue cloud-computing services are reshaping the legacy IT landscape. Solution providers that are relying on business models that were developed in the days when on-premise IT projects were queued up like airplanes during a blizzard are never going to be able to dig out and get their businesses off the ground…

Every company should be measuring just how many new practices, products and recurring revenue services they are bringing to the market, and how many new customers they are adding each and every quarter. Think of those critical quarterly measurements as the vital signs of your business…

Grazed from NearShoreAmericas. Author: Narayan Ammachchi.

Microsoft has launched its Azure data center in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state, promising to provide fully secured cloud computing services to Brazilian companies concerned about cyber spying. The new data center will store data within the country and provide customers with better performance through reduced latency.

Microsoft Azure, formerly Windows Azure, is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. Internet security has become a sensitive issue in Brazil after news emerged that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) spied on its President Dilma Rousseff and the state-owned oil company Petrobras…

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

Analyst firm Gartner recently predicted datacentre hardware spending on new types of products and big data deployments will reach $9.4bn in 2014. At HP’s annual conference, Bill Veghte, executive vice-president and general manager for Enterprise Group of HP said: “As customers look ahead, they need business outcome-driven infrastructure that enables the New Style of IT.”

Big data, mobility, security and cloud computing are forcing organisations to rethink their approach to technology, causing them to invest heavily in IT infrastructure, according to HP. The services it has launched are aimed at reducing IT complexity, Veghte said. Among the new products launched is HP Apollo, a new family of HPC solutions to address power and datacentre efficiency challenges…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Daniel Newman.

It seem like over the past couple of years the term cloud has found itself as the center of attention after a long spell of being of interest to only meteorologists and folks with nothing important to talk about. Of course, this is because over the past few years “Cloud” as a means of computing has piqued the interest of so many from tech savvy consumers to enterprise CIO’s.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Cloud Computing is that it isn’t new. In fact, the earliest attribution of cloud computing goes back to the 1960’s and a little known man name Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider who is believed to be its inventor. However, it really wasn’t until the mid 2000’s when Amazon launched its storage cloud that cloud computing started gaining wide acceptance among technologists and really until the past 2 or 3 years with the growth of Apple AAPL iCloud that the adoption grew rapidly among consumers.