Category: News

Grazed from Barrons.  Author: Tiernan Ray.

Piper Jaffray hardware analyst Andrew Nowinski today offered his thoughts coming out of the Global Tech Distributor Conference held in New York, where Ingram Micro (IM), Tech Data (TECD), Anvet (AVT) and others spoke about their experiences selling cloud computing wares.

His conclusion from the talks by distributors is that public cloud computing services such as those offered by Amazon.com (AMZN), are “not having as much of an impact on enterprise storage revenue growth as the valuations seem to imply,” and that spending is improving for traditional tech products, and so he’s still bullish on EMC (EMC), NetApp (NTAP), and also on shares of challenger Nimble Storage (NMBL), all of whose shares he rates Overweight…

Grazed from EnterpriseTech. Author: Timothy Prickett Morgan.

Running distributed applications on cloud computing capacity means, in theory, that IT shops never have to do capacity planning again. For large enough aggregations of lines of business inside of a company or enterprises that share capacity on a public cloud, the ups and downs across time zones and workloads should all balance out.

This is precisely what Microsoft executives recently told EnterpriseTech was one of the key benefits of hyperscale cloud computing, and added that this was something that very few companies in the public cloud arena could offer. (Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure has massive scale for sure, and IBM SoftLayer, Rackspace Hosting, and a bunch of others are working on it.) Even with excess capacity, all cloud builders need to be able to get more capacity online relatively quickly, whether it is the internal IT department or your public cloud provider…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Cheryl Conner.

What does every entrepreneur have in common? A need for increasingly better tools to accomplish work faster and without compromise, from the devices they already have. We hear the same questions continually: “How do I streamline collaboration?” “How can I improve project management?” “How do I maintain internal controls?” “How can I enable my employees to communicate and work more efficiently?”

Increasingly, the answers include one of today’s fastest growing sectors, according to my friend and frequent collaborator Tom Lowery: Cloud Virtualization. (Forbes staffer Bruce Rogers has written about this emerging sector in his profile of startup Veeam Software here.)…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Joab Jackson.

Red Hat continues to enhance its software portfolio for helping organizations run and manage cloud services in their own data centers, adding more features to its OpenShift Enterprise software package to accommodate enterprise requirements such as policy orchestration and multiregion availability.

OpenShift Enterprise 2.1, available now, also includes new releases of the latest open source software used in the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) hosting package, such as PHP and MySQL. Although it gets less attention than the IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service)-style cloud services, PaaS services can be valuable…

Grazed from FCW. Author: Alistair Mitchell.

Three years ago Vivek Kundra unveiled the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy. The strategy set out to transform the government’s existing IT environment, which was "characterized by low asset utilization, a fragmented demand for resources, duplicative systems, environments which are difficult to manage and long procurement lead times." Cloud computing would be the change agent and transform federal IT for the better.

With Kundra estimating 25 percent of the government’s $80 billion annual IT spend could be migrated to cloud computing services, it would only be a matter of time before agencies could reap the rewards of the cloud’s key benefits: efficiency, agility and innovation. To accelerate cloud computing adoption, the cloud-first policy was instituted to ensure cloud services were evaluated prior to any new IT investments being made…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

IBM, HP, Cisco, and AT&T are the preferred infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers, topping the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, or Rackspace, according to a new IDC report on enterprise cloud computing. In a key finding, the report says, "buyers selected IBM as their overall top preference among providers they believe can most effectively provision IaaS, whether private or public. Following IBM in the top spots were Cisco, HP, AT&T, and Google."

The report, "U.S. Buyers Rank IBM, Cisco, HP, AT&T, and Google as Likely Most Effective Top 5 Providers in Delivering IaaS," is IDC’s first Public Cloud Tracker report. It was authored by IDC analyst David Tapper. Tapper defined infrastructure-as-a-service as either shared, multi-tenant servers in the cloud (public IaaS) or dedicated servers in the cloud (private IaaS)…

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Rackspace has received multiple inquiries about strategic investments or a potential sale to another company, the New York Times has reported. To help the company evaluate its options, it has hired banking giant Morgan Stanley. It’s got Cloud Chronicles thinking: Who would be in the market to buy Rackspace?

First some background on Rackspace: The company has its roots in managed hosting, but during the past half dozen years has broadened its focus to now cover cloud computing as well. Rackspace is synonymous with OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform after it started the initiative with NASA four years ago…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

Plenty of vendors are taking advantage of this week’s OpenStack Summit in Atlanta to showcase their open source cloud computing innovations. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has been one of the loudest, with a slew of announcements regarding OpenStack support on Ubuntu, Ubuntu OpenStack training and more.

The announcements came from Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu and the former CEO of Canonical who has continued to play a leading role in the Ubuntu world despite having stepped down as CEO of the company in early 2010. During a keynote address at the OpenStack Summit, Shuttleworth discussed an array of developments that, in Canonical’s view, underscore Ubuntu’s competiveness in the open source cloud ecosystem:…

Grazed from DataCenterDynamics. Author: Hollie Luxford.

US-based cloud computing software manufacturer Stoneware – a subsidiary of Chinese computer technology company Lenovo – is planning to offer hosted application services that it will build on existing secure cloud and virtual desktop services, according to Techworld. Lenovo acquired Stoneware in 2012 to enhance and expand its cloud computing solutions.

Last year Lenovo opened its first public cloud service, Reach which it built around technology is gained from Stoneware. Stoneware’s WebNetwork virtual desktop currently offers a cloud desktop, with a browser-like interface and also provides secure and server-defined access to Web-based software such as Salesforce applications…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

Microsoft is going cloud — or already has gone cloud, depending on whom you talk to. What’s not as well understood is how this shift will affect people who work with enterprise Microsoft systems. Will this mean a significant change to, or even elimination of, your job?  Unlike AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google, and IBM, Microsoft is relocating its core products, such as operating systems and databases, to the cloud.

AWS does not have existing on-premises systems, so AWS’s movement to the cloud is for new platforms. As with AWS, IBM offers a new cloud (via its SoftLayer acquisition) that doesn’t replicate its existing enterprise technology. The same can be said about Google’s cloud offering. So Microsoft is a unique case…