SilkRoad Technology, the aptly named competitor of, say, the up-and-coming Workday that peddles cloud-based social talent management solutions, has topped up its funding with another reportedly oversubscribed $35 million round That makes an incredible $162 million since 2003. The latest money comes from new investors Keating Capital and NTT Finance along with existing investors Intel Capital, Crosslink Capital, Foundation Capital, Azure Capital and Tenaya Capital, among others. It's supposed to support worldwide expansion and product innovation ahead of a potential IPO this year or next. Hmm, Workday is up to picking the bankers for its IPO. Global human capital management (HCM) spending is expected to hit $8.1 billion by 2015, according to IDC and SilkRoad is encouraged by the spate of recent acquisitions in the sector like SAP's $3.4 billion acquisition of Succ... (more)

Cloud Expo NY: Predictive Analytics Leads to Successful Recommendations

Cloud Expo New York $500 Savings here! Businesses today generate billions of events or 100s of TBs of data in a month. These data contain valuable insights into customer behavior, key trends, buying patterns, etc. If these are successfully mined, they can lead to successful decision-making to maximize revenue and traffic for the business. Successfully driving a business is only partly about understanding what happened; the other part lies in knowing what's going to happen next. In order to use past data and predict future events, there needs to be sufficient technology that is no... (more)

Application-Aware Firewalls

[by Andy Thurai] "Application-Aware Firewalls."You may have heard this term recently and wondered what it meant. When it comes to security, everyone thinks of Firewalls, Proxies, IPS, IDS, Honeypots, VPN devices, email security and even Web security, but most people don’t think in terms of application level security unless either you are the developer, admin, or user of those specific services or perhaps a hacker. Especially when your traditional network boundaries disappear you can’t carry all of those devices with you. When you move out of your traditional boundaries, towards ... (more)

Design Guidelines for Cloud Computing

Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service offer us easy scaling of services. However, scaling is not as easy as it seems to be in the Cloud. If your software architecture isn't done right, your services and applications might not scale as expected, even if you add new instances. As for most distributed systems, there are a couple of guidelines you should consider. I have summed up the ones I use most often for designing distributed systems. Design for Failure As Moore stated, everything that can fail, will fail. So it is very clear that a distributed system will fail... (more)

Nvidia Claims Cloud GPU

Nvidia Tuesday unveiled a VGX platform - reportedly the result of five years of effort - that it called the world's first virtualized GPU meant to accelerate graphics from cloud computing centers. IT departments are supposed to use it to deliver virtualized desktops with the graphics and GPU performance of office PCs or workstations to employees using any connected and BYOD devices regardless of operating system including thin clients, laptops, tablets and smartphones. The dingus, an enterprise implementation of the company's new Kepler GPU, is also supposed to work with 3D desig... (more)