Latest [saaslatest] from Cloud Computing Journal

IBM To Build E-Government Cloud for Ho Chi Minh City

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:00:00 EST

IBM says it’s been hired to build an e-government cloud for Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, the one-time capital of South Vietnam. As a first step it’s supposed to consolidate all of the city government’s e-mail systems and web sites. The work will apparently be done in collaboration with something called Quang Trung Software City (QTSC), which let IBM the contract. QTSC will evidently run the new data center.

Cloud Computing: A Security Analysis

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:15:00 EST

With its ability to provide users dynamically scalable, shared resources over the Internet and avoid large upfront fixed costs, cloud computing promises to change the future of computing. However, storing a lot of data creates a situation similar to storing a lot of money, attracting more frequent assaults by increasingly skilled and highly motivated attackers. As a result, security is one – if not the – top issue that users have when considering cloud computing.

Database as a Service: A Different Way to Manage Data

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

DaaS is the latest entrant into the “as a Service” realm and typically provides tools for defining logical data structures, data services like APIs and web service interfaces, customizable user interfaces, and data storage, backup, recovery and export policies. To ensure successful DaaS implementations, developers and database professionals need to address traditional challenges associated with data design and performance tuning. They will also need to address new challenges introduced by the lack of physical access for backup, recovery and integration.

rPath Refines Release Automation Platform

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:00:00 EST

rPath today announced enterprise-focused productivity and management enhancements to the rPath release automation platform. The upgrades refine the functionality and user experience of the fully version controlled release automation solution, meeting the needs of each stakeholder in the enterprise release management process. These upgrades are the first product delivery against “Project Javelin,” which extends rPath’s system version controlled management model into the broader data center automation market.

Enterprise Clouds Require Service-Level Discipline

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

The Enterprise Cloud Requires a real time infrastructure and a management discipline that understands and can enforce service level discipline. Organizations have become increasingly dependent on technical infrastructure to enable customer interactions. As such, the business has a vested interest in making sure its technology partners understand what constitutes good customer experience so that it’s prepared for projected volumes and rapidly knows how to resolve any impediments.

Apparent Networks Updates PathView Cloud Service

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:45:00 EST

Apparent Networks today announced that it has released an updated version of PathView Cloud, its hosted network management service. The new version includes unique features for managing end-to-end network performance in virtualized environments. With PathView Cloud’s virtualization-enabled analytics, IT and operations teams can, for the first time, understand network performance from the perspective of applications running on virtual machines. With this extended visibility, PathView Cloud lets IT teams quickly find and fix network performance problems, regardless of whether they occur in physical or virtual infrastructure.

Kindle Breaks Record for Sales in a Single Month During November

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:00:00 EST

Amazon.com today announced that November is already the best sales month ever for Kindle, even before Cyber Monday. Kindle continues to be the most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon. The latest generation Kindle – just released in October – is $259 and available for immediate shipment today at www.amazon.com/kindle.

CloudBench Applications Reports Q3 2009 Results and Business Highlights

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 17:15:00 EST

CloudBench Applications, Inc. announced its financial results for the three months and nine months ending September 30, 2009. All amounts are stated in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Revenues from BasicGov, the Company's cloud computing solution for local government, grew to $66,649 in the third quarter, a 140% increase from $27,822 in the same quarter of the prior year. The Company's annualized committed recurring revenues, a non-GAAP measure, increased 220% to US$288,000 compared to US$90,000 for the same period last year.

CSC Signs Cloud Computing Agreement With UK Royal Mail Group

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

The new contract is an industry first, with CSC being the first Microsoft partner to lead and win a cloud computing services agreement of this scale. Under terms of the contract, CSC will provide Royal Mail Group's 30,000 employees with access to new IT services using Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), part of Microsoft Online Services. CSC will also provide first line helpdesk support. CSC's cloud services are designed to help businesses easily and securely adopt cloud computing solutions, allowing them to reduce the costs of managing and maintaining business systems while giving them access to the latest Microsoft Online Services including Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Office Communications Online and Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

GDS International: Global Warming Scam?

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Operates in over 170 countries and is one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. Richard Tarboton talks for MeettheBoss.TV on his role as Head of Energy & Carbon for BT and what they are doing towards reducing carbon emissions.

CA & BMC To Support Salesforce.com

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

CA is going to put its Agile Planner software on salesforce.com’s Force.com platform in the first half to accelerate development time and give users visibility over their development initiatives to reduce time-to-market. Customers are supposed to be able to accelerate the deployment of Salesforce CRM within their organization. The software will include CA Clarity PPM On Demand, Federation Manager and CA Wily Application Performance Management to monitor and manage cloud-based composite applications. BMC will be putting a new cloud-based service desk offering on Force.com for self-service and inventory management in Q2.

Sun Fields Cloud Desktop for K-12

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Despite its uncertain fate Sun soldiers on. Monday it trotted out a cloud-based multiplatform desktop as a service for K-12 and community colleges that can run Windows, the Mac OS, Linux and Solaris applications to nearly any client device, including its own Sun Ray thin clients. Sun claims it’s the industry’s first full-function, cloud-based desktop as a service. It runs on Sun’s Open Cloud Platform. Its subscription pricing can run as little as $1 a day per concurrent user. Ashbourne Technology Group is apparently taking it to market.

No Real Recovery with Europe Still in the Tank: HP

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST

HP, which pre-announced relatively happy results a couple of weeks ago when it said it was buying 3Com, came in exactly on target with earnings of $2.4 billion, or 99 cents a share, up 14%, on revenues of $30.8 billion, down 8.4% year-over-year from $33.6 billion. And the company reiterated that it should do $29.6 billion to $29.9 billion this quarter and earn 90 to 92 cents a share. Its full-year outlook is for $118 billion-$119 billion and EPS of $4.25-$4.35.

Move Over BI, Here Comes PI - Performance Intelligence

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:30:00 EST

"As companies such as MySpace continue to expand the richness of their site, the big thing is trying to seek a higher level of customer experience by replicating "beyond capacity" in a test environment, so that a company can see what it is exactly that they will need when traffic surges to peak levels and beyond, so that they know the "risk points" of their own success," Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA, told SYS-CON's Jeremy Geelan in an interview with Cloud Computing Journal on the day that SOASTA announced a significant test of the newly launched MySpace Music Videos hub using the Cloud.

Ulitzer Names The World's 30 Most Influential Virtualization Bloggers

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:45:00 EST

Ulitzer.com announced today "the World's 30 most influential Virtualization bloggers," who collectively generated more than 24 million Ulitzer page views. Ulitzer's annual "most influential Virtualization bloggers" list was announced at Cloud Expo 2009 West, which took place at the Santa Clara Convention Center, California. Cloud Expo 2009 West drew more delegates than all other Cloud-related events put together worldwide. "The world's 50 most influential Cloud bloggers 2010" list will be announced at the Cloud Expo 2010 East, which will take place April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center, in New York City, with more than 5,000 expected to attend.

Azure Gets its First Commercial ERP App

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:15:00 EST

While Microsoft is webifying bits and pieces of its client/server Dynamics ERP solution, it ain't gonna put any full-blown Dynamics ERP on Azure. Too much customization and integration to make a good candidate apparently. Enter Acumatica, a potentially competitive third-party ERP solution that compares itself to NetSuite except NetSuite is wholly SaaS and Acumatica, out only since June but one of the few programs already in production on the still-in-beta Azure, straddles both a client's on-premises site and the Microsoft cloud. The Acumatica software is the same in the cloud as it is on-premise and experimenting with in on site is supposed to make accounts more comfortable with the idea of using it in the cloud.

Achieve Better, Faster & Cheaper Through Holistic Data Center Architecture

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:00:00 EST

The three perpetual business demands of better, faster and cheaper may just be three of the best reasons to consider infrastructure virtualization. Today’s virtualization technologies, properly architected and deployed, can provide significant benefit to organizations working to evolve their IT infrastructure from an inflexible collection of individual assets into a system capable of rapidly adapting to meet business demands.

The Intersection of Data Virtualization and Enterprise Data Warehouses

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:00:00 EST

Large enterprises and government agencies are drowning in data. IT teams deploy a myriad of data warehouse-centric solutions – BI, predictive analytics, data and content mining, portals and dashboards – to harness and deliver data for intelligent decision-making. Yet, large enterprises are also expected to act like start-ups: nimble, agile and flexible to adapt to ever-changing market conditions.

Adobe Fiddles with its Web Apps

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST

Adobe put out this press release - well, kinda, it was released at 6am Saturday morning and the company didn't bother to tell its staff about it, least of all its sales people. Anyway, it's about how Acrobat.com, Adobe's contribution to the flock of Office-challenging web apps, has hit its first upgrade, adding a bunch of reportedly user-requested features - like a prettier interface - as well as smartphone integration. Since Acrobat.com is based on Flash, guess that's a way to get a hint of Flash on the forbidden iPhone. Maybe Adobe hopes Steve Jobs won't notice.

CSC Signs Record Cloud Deal with Royal Mail

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Britain's hidebound state-owned Royal Mail is getting a cloud. Yup, CSC is supposed to provide 30,000 of its employees with access to newfangled web-based services using Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), part of Microsoft Online Services. CSC will also provide first line helpdesk support. The new contract is described as an industry first: CSC is the first Microsoft service provider to win a cloud deal of this size.

OpenAir Powers Business Systems Consolidation

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST

OpenAir, Inc., a NetSuite Inc. company and a provider of cloud computing professional services automation (PSA) and services resource planning (SRP) software announced that BearingPoint, a provider of management and technology consulting, has gone live with OpenAir to streamline services delivery processes and consolidate multiple point solutions into one, unified business system. With OpenAir, BearingPoint is already realizing significant benefits through more accurate and timely visibility of staff utilization and its opportunity pipeline. BearingPoint joins a growing list of OpenAir customers recently added in the Asia-Pacific region, including AIPEX, ClearPoint, Assurity, and Fronde. These customer wins are a testament to OpenAir's global expansion initiative as well as its unparalleled customer support infrastructure. By selecting OpenAir for its professional services automation needs, BearingPoint has reduced its dependency on Microsoft Project and Excel, and replaced its legacy timesheet application.

Merge Healthcare and InSite Use New Archiving Technology

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:30:00 EST

“Our continued innovation in imaging software allows us to change the healthcare information distribution paradigm by the intuitive inclusion of images and radiology reports. We are thrilled to work with InSite One, a long-time partner, to bring this innovative solution to the market,” said Antonia Wells, President of Merge’s OEM division. The new zero-footprint technology provides clinicians and CIOs with a solution that overcomes the challenges associated with the distribution of images over a wide area network. Image distribution solutions typically involve expensive hardware, high IT support/deployment costs, platform compatibility issues and high bandwidth requirements. Using InDex Web, with integrated Cedara WebAccess technology from Merge, physicians are able to obtain patient information via a web browser at the point-of-care through their laptops, tablets and smart phones such as Apple iPhone and Blackberry Bold.

Tecan Integrates SAP R/3 and Salesforce.com

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

With their CRM and ERP data systems integrated, Tecan AG's staff and management will benefit from a real-time view of their corporate and customer information. The iBOLT business integration suite integrates and orchestrates the data between diverse business processes and applications. Featuring a code-free approach, iBOLT enables simple and complex business processes to be designed and implemented easily, without working through pages of hard code.

The Next Sea Change Is Cloud Computing

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 14:30:00 EST

I've been at this 35 years and I've seen sea changes come and go. If you step back for a moment and look from a broad perspective, we've lived through the mainframeclient/server world and the Internet world. And now, the next sea change is cloud computing. The reality is that visionaries talk about sea changes before things change at the enterprise or SMB level. The way we look at the cloud is there's potential for sea change there, centralizing the capacity to lower costs and improved efficiencies. Yes, there will be change there. Is it going to happen overnight; that today we're in a world of data center solutions and tomorrow we're in the cloud? It's not going to work that way.

Cloud Expo New York Show Prospectus Mailed to More Than 100 Exhibitors

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 04:30:00 EST

SYS-CON Events (http://events.sys-con.com) announced today that the "show prospectus" for the 5th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (www.CloudComputingExpo.com) is now shipping. 5th International Cloud Expo will take place April 19-21, 2010, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City with more than 5,000 delegates and over 100 sponsors and exhibitors participating in the conference. Cloud Expo is the world's leading Cloud-focused event and is held five times a year, in New York, Silicon Valley, Europe, Japan, and Brazil. Over 200 corporate sponsors and 10,000 industry professionals became part of Cloud Expo since its inception, more than all other Cloud-related events put together worldwide. "Cloud Expo was announced on February 24, 2007, the day the term ‘cloud computing' was coined," said Fuat Kircaali, founder and CEO of SYS-CON Events. "Cloud has become synonymous with ‘computing' and ‘software' in two short years, and this event has become the new PC Expo, Comdex, and InternetWorld of our decade. By 2012, more than 50,000 delegates per year will participate in the Cloud Expo."

Down-to-Earth Contracts that Keep the Cloud Aloft

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:45:00 EST

This article looks at the basic interoperability requirements when communicating with the Cloud, and in particular at techniques and standards used to express and enforce wire-level contracts between communicating parties, as these parties are increasingly also contracting parties in a Cloud environment. Many standards already developed for Web services and service-oriented architectures provide to the communicating parties a good understanding and control of the expected quality of service at the most basic level of the interaction.

NIIT Technologies Partners with Kaavo to Offer Cloud Computing Services

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:30:00 EST

NIIT Technologies announced its partnership with Kaavo. The partnership will provide secure cloud infrastructure management services to all of NIIT Technologies’ current and future clients. While enterprises want to take advantage of the benefits of on-demand infrastructure offered by cloud computing, they have questions concerning security, control and reliability of infrastructure and applications deployed in the cloud.

The First Full-Function, Cloud-Based Desktop as a Service

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

Sun Microsystems today announced the availability of a new cloud-based Desktop as a Service for educational institutions. Sun and Ashbourne Technology Group are now offering a secure, cost-effective computing solution delivered anytime, anywhere via the Internet that provides a rich, virtual desktop experience for all leading Operating Systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris to nearly any client device, including Sun Ray thin clients and other platforms with Java-based browsers.

NTT Uses OpSource to Compete with AT&T’s Cloud

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:00:00 EST

When Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), the world’s biggest telco, took a piece of the $10 million E series funding going into OpSource earlier this year, the pair reportedly didn’t know they would be going into the cloud business together – or that it would be on the same day that AT&T told people to stand by because it was about to launch an Infrastructure-as-a-Service that looks a lot like Amazon.

New Approach to Cloud Security Needed

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 04:15:00 EST

Arguably the greatest barrier to businesses taking full advantage of cloud computing is the issue of security. Recent high-profile breaches of the cloud (the attack on Twitter being perhaps the most publicized) have only served to heighten concerns. It’s true; the potential consequences of a breach of cloud security are catastrophic, and this knowledge has served to make the debate rage even more fiercely. A cloud security issue within an organization has the potential to be a major business crisis, and against a backdrop of heightened public awareness of data loss and privacy issues such as ID theft, it’s understandable.

IBM Offers a Little Blue Insight

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:15:00 EST

In the interest of selling more widgetry to more people, IBM has transformed one of its mainframes into what it calls Blue Insight, a private cloud packed initially with a petabyte of structured and unstructured data that 200,000 of its sales, product development and manufacturing people can access to make a sale.

Intel Invests in Joyent’s Cloud

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Joyent, whose customers include ABC Disney, CNN, The Gap, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo, developed its own custom OS and data center virtualization technology, which creates a multi-tenant cloud. It’s supposed to deliver more than 70% utilization, which is eight times more than industry averages according to Gartner.

Salesforce To Let Companies Chatter Away

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Salesforce.com is going the way of Facebook and Twitter with a reportedly secure private social networking application called Chatter that companies are supposed to use internally so their people can “collaborate” in real-time, but potentially the techzoid equivalent of the old-fashioned water cooler. In a statement trying to explain Chatter’s aetiology, CEO Marc Benioff said, “Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees? Now, through Salesforce Chatter, my business is tweeting me.”

RightScale To Support Azure

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

RightScale, the cloud manager, plans to support Windows Azure and let customers deploy RightScale-managed applications and take advantage of Azure’s particular properties. It said it would support Azure infrastructure-level services through its new Service Management API like it does Amazon and Rackspace and give Azure users access to other cloud platforms. It didn’t say when.

Google Apps Gets Power Panel, Single Sign-On

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

LTech, a little friend of Google’s, has spun up the first Power Panel for Google Apps to give enterprises moving to the cloud central administrative functionality. It’s also announced Single Sign-On for Google Apps now that Google Apps are pushing deeper into the enterprise. The Power Panel add-on, which LTech already know is gonna be popular, offers features such as Contact Journal, Shared Contact Search, Quick Links and an integration framework for CRM and enterprise data.

Infobright & Talend Combine on Free Virtual Data Warehouse

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:15:00 EST

They say nobody else can hand you everything you need in minutes. There’s nothing comparable. Still they’re expecting only the usual single-digit percentage upgrades to their paid software. Infobright’s self-managing software is supposed to reduce administrative effort by up to 90%, leverages standard servers, and reportedly needs less storage than rival products because of data compression and the elimination of indexes, data partitioning or data duplication.

Intel & AMD Called in a Mediator

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:15:00 EST

AMD wanted to be paid for its antitrust claims. Intel wanted to be paid to let AMD’s joint venture make x86 chips. Months of negotiation had been futile. Intel’s former CFO, now chief administrative officer Andy Bryant, who was recruited in September to fill in for general counsel Bruce Sewell – who disappeared in the middle of things first to go on sabbatical then to become Apple’s general counsel – reportedly persuaded the negotiators to bring in a mediator.

No Intel License for Globalfoundries

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST

Turns out Intel apparently didn’t give Globalfoundries, the AMD-Arab joint venture now making all of AMD’s processors, an x86 license when Intel and AMD settled their outstanding litigation last week. Nope. What Intel and Globalfoundaries have is an “agreement” that nobody will explain past Intel saying “it protects our IP” because it’s “confidential.”

Nexsan Expands Highly Efficient Storage with 84TB SATABeast

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:27:00 EST

The Nexsan SATABeast is an enterprise-class RAID system designed to deliver exceptional performance, reliability and simplified operation in a very dense storage footprint. With a customer reported system reliability rating of more than 99.9%, the high density SATABeast is the premier option for both primary and secondary storage applications, including content archiving, disaster recovery and disk-based backup. The system's chassis design reduces hard drive stress with unique anti-accumulative rotational vibration and horizontal midplane cooling technology supporting one of the lowest storage system maintenance rates in the industry. As with all of the company's storage systems, the Nexsan SATABeast features AutoMAID (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology for policy-based power management that cuts energy demands up to 70% without impacting storage performance.

Azure Goes Live Next Year

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:30:00 EST

Except for a few companies that are clearly teacher’s pet, nobody will be going into production on Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud, until January 1. Until then it remains a technology preview, with tens of thousands of developers already using it according to Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie.