Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Patrick Thibodeau.

IBM's announcement this week that it would base its cloud services on OpenStack may help establish the open-source platform as the standard in enterprises. IBM along with Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Cisco, Red Hat and Rackspace, which helped developed the platform, are supporting OpenStack.

This means that just about every Fortune 1000 company will be using vendors that are building products and services based on the OpenStack-based cloud platform. Considering that OpenStack is less than three years old, this may be remarkable. The rapid rise of OpenStack may not have happened without NASA. That may be worth noting, especially in a time of government sequesters, budget cutting and retreats on R&D spending...

Grazed from PRWeb. Author: PR Announcement.

An important industry forum, the Canada Cloud Network, is launching an exciting R&D program: Always On Cloud Computing. The initiative will enable Canada to become a world leader in the global Cloud computing sector.

Recent downtime incidents from giant Cloud providers and lack of effective SLAs, highlight that despite the advances in underlying technologies, operating critical IT infrastructure in a single data centre still presents a major risk of a catastrophic failure that can endanger customer relationships and ultimately lead to business failure...

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Krishan Lal Khatri.

Cloud computing also helps companies to benefit from online services like unified communications services and collaboration that improves productivity and reduces the cost on travel and meetings. Microsoft SharePoint, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Online Services Business Productivity Suite, etc. are a few examples of collaboration platforms that can be used by companies with a monthly subscription without having to purchase software licenses. Some cloud vendors also offer free upgrades to latest hosted software versions.

Cloud to Test Network Configuration

Testing of network equipment configuration is one of the expensive exercises for small and medium sized companies. Cloud computing offers a solution to testing the network equipment configuration with little cost. Traditionally, the network administrators required to build smaller scale test labs replicating their network and test out their network configuration changes before actual roll out. Building a test lab is quite expensive, and the test equipment is rarely used after completion of testing. The cloud computing has resolved this problem and now the expensive network equipment can be leveraged more efficiently by virtue of cloud computing services. Network administrators can request network equipment remotely through a GUI or web services interface, build, configure, and test the configuration without having to invest into building a test lab physically...

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Krishan Lal Khatri.

Cloud computing is gaining popularity since last few years. It is a computing model that uses shared infrastructure to provide computing resources to companies dynamically over a cloud, such as internet. It enables companies to use data storage, software applications, and computer processing power owned and maintained by cloud service providers through the internet or proprietary network of the service provider. The cloud computing services are broadly divided into three categories:

1. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)

2. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

3. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Alternatively, some providers use some different nomenclature, e.g. Hardware-as-a-Service (HaaS) for IaaS and only SaaS for later two categories...

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

For enterprises, customer relationship management (CRM) is moving ahead of enterprise resource planning (ERP) as the main priority for application software investment. That was just one of the takeaways from Gartner’s latest report, “User Survey Analysis: Cloud and CRM Nexus Will Drive Enterprise Software Spending in 2013 and 2014”, published last month. Other key factors emerging from the report include the clear differences between emerging and emergent markets in terms of cloud models.

Mature regions are more likely to go public, accepting the security risks and reliability rewards of the public cloud. Emerging markets, by contrast, are more likely to use a private cloud. “This could be due in part to an immature telecommunications infrastructure in some emerging countries, while data security is a persistent concern related to public cloud services among our clients in developing-region countries,” said Hai Hong Swineheart, Gartner research analyst in a statement...

Grazed from Smallbusiness.co.uk. Author: Mark Seemann.

It’s no surprise that cloud computing services are so enticing to businesses: the minimal upfront costs, pay-as-you-go cost structure, flexible access to software and data, and the promise that the cloud vendor will handle the awkward, costly parts of IT.

Cloud services can make applications that were once the preserve of only the largest organisations, like CRM, sales management, contact centre software, call recording – available to any company, from a two-person business to a £20 million turnover organisation. It puts what were once the big kids’ toys in the hands of any business, irrespective of size. However, using the cloud can still be perceived as a leap of faith. Some businesses are concerned about exactly how to choose the right cloud applications, how to get the best use from them, and if their data will be secure when it’s up there. To help dispel these doubts, here are the key questions you should ask a cloud service provider before committing.

Grazed from Daily Markets. Author: Editorial Staff.

Software for innovation markets at $73.4 billion in 2012 are anticipated to reach $196.4 billion by 2019. Growth is a result of enterprise need to innovate to grow. It is not enough to maintain a static position in a market, nimble competitors steal market share away if innovation is not pursued. Innovation provides competitive advantage and protection of market position.

IBM concentrates on building end to end systems that are able to adapt of market changes. While this may make the IBM product set seem overly heavy in the short run, in the long run, this is of enormous value to clients as proved by the company market leading position in innovation software...

Grazed from CRN. Author: Joseph Kovar.

VMware is staying focused on a simple three-part message about the software-defined data center, hybrid cloud and end-user computing, and it is encouraging its solution providers to do the same if they want to successfully navigate the tremendous changes going on in the data center. That's the word from VMware President and COO Carl Eschenbach during his closing keynote of this year's VMware Partner Exchange conference, held this week in Las Vegas.

Eschenbach, speaking before a packed hall of solution providers and technology partners, said that VMware two weeks ago told its own team during the company's 2013 internal global kickoff event that VMware is embarking on the next part of the journey to transform the IT industry as it moves toward adopting cloud infrastructures...

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Juan Carlos Perez.

Microsoft will upgrade on Wednesday its existing Office 365 cloud email and collaboration suites for businesses, as well as introduce new bundles, growing even more the list of Office 365 editions, which some analysts and users had already termed somewhat confusing.

The components of the Office 365 suites for businesses, like the Web-hosted versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync, are getting upgraded to the latest 2013 code base of the products. In addition, Microsoft is introducing three new configurations of the suite. Office 365 ProPlus, which had been previously announced, includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, InfoPath, Access and Lync. Customers can download it from Microsoft data centers and install it on up to 5 Windows PCs or Macs. It costs $144 per user, per year if bought as a standalone suite...

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Red Hat is outlining its five big data "must haves" with a new strategy that pushes ahead with its cloud big data analytics workload plans for the next year or so. With a new Apache Hadoop plugin that connects Red Hat storage products into Hadoop open platforms, the company is looking to help partners provide customers with a comprehensive big data solutions portfolio.

"Red Hat is uniquely positioned to excel in enterprise big data solutions, a market that IDC expects to grow from $6 billion in 2011 to $23.8 billion in 2016.2 Red Hat is one of the very few infrastructure providers that can deliver a comprehensive big data solution because of the breadth of its infrastructure solutions and application platforms for on-premises or cloud delivery models. As a leading contributor to open source communities developing essential technologies for the big data IT stack – from Linux to OpenStack Origin and Gluster – Red Hat will continue to play a pivotal role in in Big Data," said Ashish Nadkarni, research director of storage systems and co-lead of Big Data Global Overview at IDC, in a prepared statement...