Cloud computing will be a part of the 2012 Olympic legacy when the dedicated media centre is turned into a London City cloud hub following the games.

The £295m ($461m) Main Press Centre and International Broadcasting Centre at the Olympic Park in East London contains over 31,000 square metres of office space and includes a number of hi-tech facilities such as 1,300 internet ports with fibre optic cabling.

The highly connected building is in close proximity to the key business district of Canary Warf.

iCITY, a joint venture between data centre firm Infinity and property company Delances, has emerged as preferred bidder for the project, and says it will turn the site into  a world-class centre of innovation and enterprise to deliver a lasting legacy, creating over 6600 new jobs in and around the area.

The bidding process, in which there was one other final contender, came to …

As digital marketing technologies and cloud-based marketing automation push IT systems from the back office to the front office, CIOs and IT Directors must start educating themselves about sophisticated new marketing tools, techniques and analytics, according to to Marketo, the fastest-growing provider of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) solutions.
Ten years ago, the marketing department was mainly seen as a cost centre that created the brochures. Thanks to new technologies, marketing departments today create sophisticated, analytics-based forecasts and measureable marketing-driven revenue that empowers organisations to better engage with their customers across the entire revenue cycle. However, many CIOs and IT Directors are used to internal, back office systems.

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Business management and ERP have undergone huge technological, social and economic shifts. The explosion of cloud computing, mobility of business users, Big Data demands and microscopic focus on cost cutting are changing the pace and direction of every company’s IT strategy.
Five years ago cloud computing was more expensive than on-premise, analytical data was difficult to curate and the benchmark in usability, especially on mobile devices, was set extremely low. Today’s advances in these areas create massive opportunities for large and small businesses to take advantage of the best tools, infrastructure and user interfaces modern technology has to offer.
Previously, reliable business management systems often resulted from massively complex and expensive ERP systems supported through in-house or custom developed “front-line worker” tools. Mobile technology and the impact of Big Data has not only leveled the playing field, but shifted the balance of power to the cloud. Companies such as Amazon and Google have led the way in reducing cost of and building confidence in the cloud, to such an extent that those arguments in favor of running in-house vs. cloud no longer apply.

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Racemi has closed a $7 million Series B round of venture financing to further develop and market its software for migrating workloads to cloud computing.
Racemi’s software automates migration of existing workloads to all the major cloud platforms. This means it is no longer necessary to rebuild servers from scratch in the cloud, which translates to significant time and cost savings.

The Racemi software provides flexibility to move workloads between dissimilar physical, virtual and cloud platforms in any combination or direction. For customers, this minimizes any unease over vendor lock-in, while enabling high availability or disaster recovery strategies that span providers. Racemi’s software supports both Linux and Windows, all of the major hypervisor platforms and major cloud platforms including Amazon EC2, CloudStack, GoGrid, OpenStack, Rackspace and Terremark.

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It’s finally summer, time to slow down, to plan, to learn and to discover your inner data geek!
Summer is also the time for blue skies and clouds. And although you may know everything you want to know about the white fluffy clouds that dot the sky, do you know enough about getting your data into and out of Salesforce.com – the most widely adopted cloud-based CRM?
Cloud applications like Salesforce.com have fundamentally changed how we think about and work with our customer data. However, these systems have also significantly complicated getting real-time reports that we rely on to make sound business decisions.
What is really needed is a solution that enables real-time reporting across Salesforce and your SQL-based on-premise systems.

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IT departments are struggling to adapt to new economic realities and a rapidly changing technology environment that includes fundamental shifts in mobile, social, and cloud computing technologies.
The lingering effects of the downturn marked by flat-to-negative IT budgets are forcing IT departments to reassess and more accurately measure the real business value delivered by both existing and future IT investments. No system or project is out of scope as IT looks for any opportunity to squeeze additional productivity from an aging portfolio and map it to a more demanding and collaborative business environment. Organizations are rethinking traditional development platforms and architectural models in favor of solutions that offer speed, economy, and agility.

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As hype dies down, companies are seeing real success in their cloud deployments, and money is pouring in, according to a recent post on InfoWorld.com.
The cloud is in the process of crossing from the experimental phase to production systems that businesses can rely upon. Yet his has not been an overnight occurrence: Enterprises have been quietly getting smart about cloud computing technology and applying it where appropriate, according to InfoWorld’s David Linthicum.
Companies both big and small are making a move to the cloud.
“There are now careers, share prices and bonuses tied to the success of cloud computing in a big way. Those vested in it will hustle like hell to make cloud computing work for them. Some will fail, but the sheer amount of money riding on this technology will ensure that it functions well in the longer term,” Linthicum writes.

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