As already described in the previous few articles NIST defines three different service models for the cloud – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. However if you look at the Wikipedia article about cloud computing you will notice that there are quite a few more “as-a-service” models mentioned there. Lot of vendors are using those to differentiate their offerings but there are two problems that arise.

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Carl Icahn, the famous “gangsta”-style activist investor, has stepped into the middle of Dell’s $24.4 billion leveraged buy-out, threatening “years of litigation” if he doesn’t get his way.
He has apparently amassed a 6% position in Dell, making him the company’s second-largest outside stockholder, and he wants a $9-a-share special dividend paid out instead of letting Dell founder Michael Dell take the company private.
In a letter to Dell’s board Thursday Icahn proposed that the dividend be paid if shareholders voted down the LBO and wants the vote combined with the company annual stockholders meeting so stockholders also vote on the board.
If they don’t do that – that’s where he’s promising “years of litigation” challenging the LBO.

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Carl Icahn, the famous “gangsta”-style activist investor, has stepped into the middle of Dell’s $24.4 billion leveraged buy-out, threatening “years of litigation” if he doesn’t get his way.
He has apparently amassed a 6% position in Dell, making him the company’s second-largest outside stockholder, and he wants a $9-a-share special dividend paid out instead of letting Dell founder Michael Dell take the company private.
In a letter to Dell’s board Thursday Icahn proposed that the dividend be paid if shareholders voted down the LBO and wants the vote combined with the company annual stockholders meeting so stockholders also vote on the board.
If they don’t do that – that’s where he’s promising “years of litigation” challenging the LBO.

read more

As already described in the previous few articles NIST defines three different service models for the cloud – IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. However if you look at the Wikipedia article about cloud computing you will notice that there are quite a few more “as-a-service” models mentioned there. Lot of vendors are using those to differentiate their offerings but there are two problems that arise.

read more

Using analytics to better understand the cloud computing job market is fascinating.

One of the most advanced companies in this area is Wanted Analytics, who aggregates job postings from over 500 job boards and maintains a database of over 600 million unique job listings. 

They specialise in business intelligence for the talent marketplace, providing insights into how one company’s salary range compares to competitors for the same position, also calculating the difficulty to hire a given type of candidate. They’ve 
developed a unique Hiring Scale to accomplish this.

I recently had a chance to test-drive their analytics applications.  Using the parameters to analyse all cloud computing jobs that pay $100,000 a year or more for the analysis, I ran several queries.  Key takeaways include the following:

•  San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA leads the MSAs with a salary range $118K to $144K and one of the highest Hiring Score …

by Darren Bibby, VP of Software Channels and Ecosystem, IDC Link

IDC Link’s VP of Software Channels and Ecosystem, Darren Bibby, enjoyed what he heard at Parallels Summit 2013 and has written a glowing review of the direction Parallels is headed in. Bibby was most impressed with APS 2.0 and its ability to create an ecosystem for ISVs that is easy to plug into. He likens APS to the Ikea Allen key as a tool that can put everything together. APS makes it easier for smaller service providers to find opportunity to grow by enabling them to easily add new software products to their infrastructure. Read for yourself this great review of Parallels plans and products, Parallels Software: A Growing Ecosystem.

For everything cloud computing offers – speed, convenience, simplicity, offsite backups – its “public” nature remains a touchy subject for enterprise.

This simple fact explains why many organisations have been slow to embrace the cloud. In business, data security is everything. And for decision makers at big firms, trusting all mission-critical data into the care of a third-party IT vendor sounds just a bit too risky.

But with the arrival of the private cloud, organizations can enjoy the conveniences of cloud computing without a lot of the tradeoffs. Here’s why they might want to give it a shot:

1. Data security and compliance

“A virtual infrastructure that offers on-the-go, anytime data access may sound great, but how can we be sure our data is safe?”

This was – and still is – the big question for enterprise when confronted with cloud computing. The public cloud, they reason, is simply more vulnerable to misuse …

Software as a service (SaaS) has traditionally been the strongest and most valuable cloud computing market.

Figures from Gartner in November show this: SaaS was valued at $14.4bn (£9.57bn) by the end of 2012; infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was a $6.2bn (£4.12bn) global market; whilst platform as a service (PaaS) was forecast to hit $1.2bn (£754m).

With this in mind, Staff.com has published an infographic looking at the current SaaS ecosystem. The employment site has its own productivity tool, Time Doctor, which is built on SaaS.

According to Staff Salesforce.com, the “founder of the industry”, is still ranked as the number one SaaS company, with almost double the numbers of SAP ($2.27 bn, $1.14bn) and Oracle ($1bn) in positions two and three.

The graphic also looks at large acquisitions of SaaS companies, with billions of dollars at stake. Check it …

Today’s applications need fast access to data for maximum performance.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dr. William L. Bain, founder and CEO of ScaleOut Software, will discuss how in-memory data grids combine distributed caching with powerful in-memory analysis and management tools to give you a complete solution for managing fast-changing data in a server farm, compute grid, or in the cloud.
Dr. William L. Bain is founder and CEO of ScaleOut Software, Inc. He has a PhD in electrical engineering / parallel computing from Rice University, and he has worked at Bell Labs research, Intel, and Microsoft. Bill founded and ran three start-up companies prior to joining Microsoft. In the most recent company (Valence Research), he developed a distributed Web load-balancing software solution that was acquired by Microsoft and is now called Network Load Balancing within the Windows Server operating system. Dr. Bain holds several patents in computer architecture and distributed computing. As a member of the Seattle-based Alliance of Angels, Dr. Bain is actively involved in entrepreneurship and the angel community.

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Today’s applications need fast access to data for maximum performance.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dr. William L. Bain, founder and CEO of ScaleOut Software, will discuss how in-memory data grids combine distributed caching with powerful in-memory analysis and management tools to give you a complete solution for managing fast-changing data in a server farm, compute grid, or in the cloud.
Dr. William L. Bain is founder and CEO of ScaleOut Software, Inc. He has a PhD in electrical engineering / parallel computing from Rice University, and he has worked at Bell Labs research, Intel, and Microsoft. Bill founded and ran three start-up companies prior to joining Microsoft. In the most recent company (Valence Research), he developed a distributed Web load-balancing software solution that was acquired by Microsoft and is now called Network Load Balancing within the Windows Server operating system. Dr. Bain holds several patents in computer architecture and distributed computing. As a member of the Seattle-based Alliance of Angels, Dr. Bain is actively involved in entrepreneurship and the angel community.

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