It’s a fairly well known truth that EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) isn’t as up to speed as North America in utilising cloud technologies. It is being addressed, if the EU’s cloud strategy launched last September is anything to go by – yet the gap is still there. So what can be done?

Duncan Greenwood, sales director at CA Technologies, believes that EMEA CIOs, in these belt-tightening times, have pressures built on them borne out of survival rather than growth; and as a result, cloud is the only way to go.

“They’ve got this innovation agenda that the business is demanding – faster, cheaper, we want it more, we want it now,” Greenwood explains in a call to CloudTech. “That’s the difference in mentality between the US and Europe.

“The lack of investment innovation in technology is absolutely driving them to the cloud, and that’s why …

Boxee, the Israel-based media streaming provider, has been bought out by Samsung Electronics – and has immediately announced the removal of its cloud-based digital video recorder (DVR) software.

The bad news for Boxee customers is that the switch off for the cloud DVR comes on July 10, with all recordings being wiped after that date. Expect many Boxee viewers to be bleary-eyed for work in the coming days having ploughed through the recordings they still have.

“We believe that over the next few years the video market will change even more than it has in the past few decades,” a statement on the Boxee site reads.

“Joining Samsung means we will be able to work on products that marry the best hardware and software in the TV space, products that will be used by tens of millions of people and will help to shape the future of TV,” it adds.

According …

IT has more opportunities than ever before with the growth in users, devices, data and secure cloud services. This creates not only a more enriching experience for users, but more opportunities for businesses. The key to capitalizing on these opportunities is to have the right tools in place to help scale operations.
In his Day 3 Keynote at 12th Cloud Expo, Robert Crooke, corporate VP and general manager of the Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Solutions Group at Intel Corp, describes the range of products that Intel provides to support different usage models faced by IT with a specific emphasis on the advancement in SSDs.

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In September 2012 Netcraft reported that Amazon had become the largest hosting company in the world based on the number of web-facing computers. In the last eight months, the e-commerce company’s tally of web-facing computers has grown by more than a third, reaching 158k. The number of websites hosted on these computers has also increased, from 6.8M in September 2012 to 11.6M in May 2013, a 71% increase.

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“We have been partnering with salesforce.com for over 10 years and we’ve deployed over 1,800 different projects on their platforms or in one of their clouds. We help customers not only build and design the right systems for their companies, but we stick with them right through launch,” stated Joan Rothman, VP of Marketing at CoreMatrix, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Businesses look to resellers for expertise on emerging technology trends and solutions that can help their organizations stay competitive. Lately, there’s been an onslaught of these trends, from virtualization to hybrid clouds and the performance and uptime challenges of complex mission-critical applications.
Unfortunately, most of the tools with which IT maintains application performance were created before these trends emerged and are struggling to keep up. “The tools of the past twenty years are just too monolithic, static, and difficult to help solve today’s performance problems quickly,” says Giulio Covass, CEO of Italian reseller Kiratech.

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“There are a lot of new things happening with Stackato and Private PaaS, and we acquired Appsecute that focused on multi-cloud management and we will be drawing those features into Stackato later on in the year,” explained Jeff Hobbs, CTO & VP, Engineering at ActiveState, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Carter Lusher, Research Fellow & Chief Analyst: Enterprise Applications Ecosystem

On June 25, 2013, Oracle and Salesforce.com sent out press releases about how they had agreed to a strategic partnership to integrate their Salesforce.com and Oracle clouds. The press release was followed up on June 27 with a press conference held by both CEOs. The announcement generated a considerable amount of press and blogosphere buzz, with the general tone being that it is game-changing.

However, nothing in the announcement amounted to a significant change in either company’s strategy. Instead, what was offered was only just above “press release-ware” level, because no proof points were provided. In addition, the cross-vendor application integrations, Salesforce’s commitment to Oracle technology such as Database 12c, and internal usage of each other’s applications, are not unique or surprising.

It is Ovum’s opinion that this announcement neither shifts the dynamics of the …

“When it comes to cloud, C-level people want to be thinking what it can do for their business and what type of efficiencies it can bring,” stated Chris Kivlehan, VP of Account Management at INetU, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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“We’re analytic software. We’re designed to analyze all the supply and demand in an IT environment – virtual environments, clouds,” explained Andrew Hillier, Co-founder & CTO of CiRBA, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 12th International Cloud Expo, held June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4–7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

read more