LogMeIn’s Xively is ready to connect “The Internet of Things” as a brand new PaaS (platform as a service) offering APIs for interacting with real world objects, along with real-time messaging thrown into the mix for good measure.

The cloud-based service originates from Cosm, the IoT (Internet of Things) platform by Pachube, which LogMeIn purchased back in July 2011.

LogMeIn secured another huge partner for this venture, ARM, whose technology forms the basis of many popular devices including the iPhone. Offering the first development kit for Xively, known as the “Xively Jumpstart Kit,” this will get any budding developer on the platform going.

Included in the kit is a Cortex-M3 processor, USB connector, Ethernet port, flash storage, and application board. Interest from ARM is quite a clear sign of the potential Xively has, and the future of the “Internet of Things” it provisions.

The Internet of Things is an …

Dell’s board has again asked billionaire Carl Icahn and his buddy Southeastern Asset Management for more information about their proposal to take over the company.

Icahn asked Dell for more information after Dell posted its quarterly results last week and Dell flatly said “no.” It wants to scope out Icahn’s intentions and see if they’re better than founder Michael Dell’s.

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Online collaboration has evolved during the last decade, delivering even greater value – thanks to a new generation of business technology applications.

Forbes Insights released “Collaborating in the Cloud,” a Cisco-sponsored study examining the ways business leaders increasingly look at cloud collaboration as a way to increase productivity, accelerate business results and enhance innovation across borders and functions.

The research combines a global survey of more than 500 executives with 15 executive interviews.

“The ability to collaborate in the cloud is becoming a key driver of competitive advantage,” says Bruce Rogers, Chief Insights Officer of Forbes Media. “Leading companies are doing more to foster cloud-based collaboration – not only internally, but also with an ever-wider swath of external groups including customers, suppliers, partners, and even regulators.”

The benefits of cloud-based collaboration, Rogers continues, include “greater efficiency, organizational dexterity, and innovation,” to name only a few.

Key findings from the market study include …

Among the hive of activity at Google I/O, one of the search giant’s more interesting announcements has come in the form of a general release of Google Compute Engine (GCE), giving developers increased access to Google infrastructure.

Google’s latest push is a further move into the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, and culminates in the Silicon Valley company finding itself jockeying for position in a three horse race alongside Amazon and Microsoft.

Last month Microsoft ramped up its IaaS portfolio with the release of Infrastructure Services, enabling Windows Azure customers to migrate apps into the cloud, pricing it in direct competition with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon, in comparison, announced later that week that its S3 cloud had broken the two trillion object mark – in other words, 20 objects for every person ever born on planet Earth.

So Google’s announcement was hotly anticipated. Yet anyone …

Compuware Corporation has announced the convergence of dynaTrace PurePath® Technology and the Gomez Performance Network, creating a powerful User Experience Management (UEM) solution. Compuware now offers a APMaaS solution that provides a complete UEM offering, including real-user, synthetic, third-party service monitoring and business impact analysis. Compuware’s APMaaS delivery model, auto-instrumentation and single-click to root cause diagnostics for both real user and synthetic transactions provides a deep and broad insight into application performance with a fast time-to-value.
Compuware APMaaS enables organizations to optimize user experience, manage performance, availability and service levels from a unified real-user and synthetic perspective, all within a single on-demand platform.

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Fancy that. Dell said Monday that its “current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the US in favor of best-in-class partner offerings” that it’ll deliver as a single-source supplier.
While it’s preaching the gospel of customer choice, it’s saving badly needed money in the guise of freedom from vendor lock-in and a single point of control.
It calls the concept the Cloud Partners Program. Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag have signed up. Dell expects to add more clouds and go beyond IaaS depending on customer reaction.

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“Open source has always provided a number of benefits, including easing adoption costs, propagating a better understanding of the technology, and allowing for faster evolution and commercialization of products and services based on it,” noted Terry Woloszyn, Founder & CEO, Leeward Security Ltd., in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This is clearly evident with the OpenStack and CloudStack,” Woloszyn continued, “and others that have been quickly commercialized as offerings such as Rackspace.”
Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?
Terry Woloszyn: It’s actually both. Depending on the type of cloud – SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS, and whether it is private or public – the metrics that are used to determine the savings vary in weighting and importance. For example, the total cost of ownership in selecting, installing, configuring, managing, and ultimately replacing enterprise applications is quite large when compared to utilizing a public cloud SaaS equivalent. In this case, it’s about saving time and money. On the other hand, utilizing a private cloud infrastructure as a host platform for enterprise applications is much more about saving time in provisioning, as the money difference is small, realized only in hardware utilization and platform management cost savings.

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Cloud computing must have been brushing up on its bedside manner.
HIPAA requirements now stipulate everyone in the health-care industry must begin migrating patient records and other data to cloud computing. By 2015, all medical professionals with access to patient records must utilize electronic medical and health records (EMR and EHR), or face penalties.
A recent study by MarketsandMarkets revealed the health-care cloud computing market, which is only currently about 4% of the industry, is expected to grow to nearly $5.4 billion by 2017. The cloud migration process, however, can be daunting for health-care organizations since they have to move an incredible amount of data, according to an article on Forbes.com.
Cloud service providers are now offering a variety of new ways to access information via cloud applications and microsites designed for mobile devices. To specifically address the needs of the health-care industry, cloud service providers continue to improve technology platforms to improve lab order entry, pharmacy records management, medical billing, imaging service requests and more.

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Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst Ovum IT

Even today’s most successful organizations will not survive the converged business future by merely doing the same things they currently do only differently. What is needed is a shift to do different things.

Ovum believes that rapid, assured, and sustained business innovation is imperative to an organization’s success. IT leaders therefore need to effectively harness technological advances, cut time to market, and improve quality and performance.

Many organizations are facing significant changes in the application development process, particularly with intelligent computing now in nearly every piece of equipment shipped. This is driving the world toward environments that are becoming so complex that operations needs to be taken into consideration before the first line of code is written.

The need to build and deploy applications quickly is significantly blurring the traditional boundaries between development and operations. Ovum believes that the move to agile …