A recent post on the Google Green Blog has revealed that the US General Services Administration saved $285,000 in energy consumption after switching to cloud based apps.

Even though most IT decision makers would freely want to admit they’re doing their bit for the environment by migrating to the cloud, the most prominent reason companies migrate would be convenience and, above all, money.

But Google claims the cloud is more energy efficient than people think, and Urs Hoelzle, Google senior vice president for technical infrastructure, explains why.

The reason moving to the cloud would be both cost and energy efficient, Hoelzle notes, is that servers’ energy is vastly reduced. As the cloud-based solution has fewer servers at better optimisation, the energy levels are decreased.

Google found that, using Google Apps, organisations could decrease their energy costs by anything from 65% to 85% on average.

But what energy sources …

Don’t put all eggs in one basket! June 14, 2012 outage at Amazon Web Services affected many customers and other clouds that rely on AWS (e.g. Heroku). Instead of going back to the “is cloud reliable” debate, we need to acknowledge that no single service will ever be 100% reliable, and only real solution is […]

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Xeround, the Cloud Database company, today announced that their cloud database for MySQL applications is now available on Joyent Cloud, the public cloud designed for real-time, high-performance applications. Joyent Cloud provides public and private cloud computing software and services to popular Web applications including LinkedIn, Voxer, Gilt Groupe and TaskRabbit.

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Tulsa, OK, June 19, 2012 –(PR.com)– CS3 Technology, a professional knowledge firm specializing in the sales, installation, and support of ERP and HRMS solutions, is pleased to announce their partnership with Intacct, a leading provider of cloud financial management and accounting software. As an Intacct Business Partner, CS3 Technology will recommend, implement and support Intacct’s award-winning cloud financial applications.

CS3 Technology selected Intacct after carefully considering other cloud financial systems. “Nearly every company we talk to now asks about cloud computing options,” said Gary Crouch, CS3’s president. “Intacct fits very well for companies that want to reduce their infrastructure costs and for companies with multiple locations that need access to the same data. Plus we like that it was built from the ground up for the cloud.”

Intacct’s project accounting and service resource planning capabilities will help CS3 Technology’s customers that are project and services-based businesses to optimize operations and gain real-time visibility throughout the entire project life-cycle. CS3 is also excited about the web-based dashboards, reporting and business intelligence capabilities built into Intacct. Intacct provides a powerful set of analytics and reporting tools that empower users with real-time, accurate and consistent visibility into financial and operational data.

“We continue to attract top Sage and Microsoft partners to the Intacct Business Partner Program,” said Taylor Macdonald, vice president of Channels for Intacct. “Our offerings are ideally suited for service and project-based companies, which CS3 has served for more than 20 years. Gary and his team have extensive experience in ERP and financial software, and we look forward to tapping that knowledge to build a strong long-term partnership to benefit our mutual customers.”

“Having Intacct as part of our solution offering will help us extend our reach to new customers and provide new options for our current customers,” said Crouch. “We are excited to be partnering with Intacct to provide additional answers to our customer’s questions.”

About CS3 Technology
CS3 Technology offers complete business management consulting services to companies wanting to increase internal efficiencies through proven technology applications. CS3’s two-pronged approach features up front due diligence ensuring a proper recommendation and a detailed methodology ensuring a successful implementation. CS3’s background spans several decades of experience centered on accounting processes, tax compliance, employee benefits, payroll, human resources and information technology. Our consultants have a shared skill set of relevant experience spanning the accounting, distribution, professional services and manufacturing industries along with product expertise. CS3 has selected to work with products developed by the leading software publishers. Most recently CS3 has been recognized with the elite President’s Circle recognition from Sage and recognized nationally as a Technology Pacesetter. CS3 is committed to maintaining the highest ethical standards and professional growth through its active involvement in the American Institute of CPAs, the Information Technology Alliance, the Sage Software Leadership Academy’s Alumni Association, the HRMS Group and the Oklahoma Society of CPAs. For more information please visit www.cs3technology.com.

About Intacct
Intacct is the cloud financial management company. Bringing cloud computing to finance and accounting, Intacct’s award-winning applications are the preferred financial applications for AICPA business solutions. Intacct applications are used by more than 5,000 organizations from startups to public companies and are designed to improve company performance and make finance more productive. Hundreds of leading CPA firms and Value Added Resellers offer Intacct to their clients. The Intacct system includes accounting, contract management, revenue management, project and fund accounting, inventory management, purchasing, vendor management, financial consolidation and financial reporting applications, all delivered over the Internet via cloud computing. Intacct is headquartered in San Jose, California. For more information, please visit www.intacct.com.

Intacct and the Intacct logo are trademarks of Intacct Corporation. All other company and product names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Contact Information:
CS3 Technology
Gary Crouch
877-496-1600
Contact via Email
www.cs3technology.com

Click here to read the full story: CS3 Technology Adds Intacct Cloud Financial Applications to Their Solution Offerings

Press Release Distributed by PR.com

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Gladinet Cloud was designed from scratch for team account, with many team users. As such, more and more team-oriented features are moving into the Gladinet Cloud as teams grow bigger and bigger within Gladinet Cloud.
In the past, there are two types of users, the administrator and the normal team user. Now there is a delegate administrator that can help administrator to setup team folder, manage users in the team and all these administrative works.

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I’ve recently written a bit about the job opportunities with PaaS taking over the software development world. One of the great promises of PaaS is the same as one of cloud’s big benefits – the illusion of infinite scalability and elasticity.

Configure a PaaS platform with a cloud infrastructure service (an IaaS) and you now have the ability to dream as big as you want, without having to pay for (or deploy manage) all the hardware and software you would normally need.

But what if you don’t want to dream infinitely big? What if you need to create a neat little business-side service and you are, in fact, a business-side person?

PaaS comes to the rescue here as well, with application platforms rather than integration platforms. Further, there is a distinction here between PaaS software for programmers and software built for the business side, which is visual in nature and uses a “metadata” approach to launch your neat little idea on the fly, as it were.

The irony is that business-side software development may be one of the keys to the kingdom in coming years. If the business side is able to execute its ideas without being bogged down (in its view) by IT and deploy on metered, third-party cloud infrastructures that also bypass IT, then the way we think of enterprise IT and the role of enterprise IT management may be altered, perhaps transformed, forever.

No reason to get carried away with this vision just yet. Security issues will always be waved as red flags by IT management, it may turn out that business-side people may unwittingly end up creating their own little app production departments (which they’ll have to manage), and the entire notion of business-side-driven IT is quite a different concept than simply business-driven IT.

But as I ponder PaaS, I can see that this is not a monolithic part of the computing landscape, not just a single type of cloud. I welcome tweets and emails about any and all business-side PaaS journeys that you’ve already embarked upon.

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Hadoop remains a difficult platform for most enterprises to master. For now skills are still hard to come by – both for data architect or engineer, and especially for data scientists. It still takes too much skill, tape, and baling wire to get a Hadoop cluster together. Not every enterprise is Google or Facebook, with armies of software engineers that they can throw at a problem. With some exceptions, most enterprises don’t deal with data on the scale of Google or Facebook either – but the bar is rising.

If 2011 was the year that the big IT data warehouse and analytic platform brand names discovered Hadoop, 2012 becomes the year where a tooling ecosystem starts emerging to make Hadoop more consumable for the enterprise. Let’s amend that – along with tools, Hadoop must also become a first-class citizen with enterprise IT infrastructure. Hadoop won’t cross over to the enterprise if it has to be treated as some special island. That means meshing with the practices and technology approaches that enterprises are using to manage their data centers or cloud deployments. Like SQL, data integration, virtualization, storage strategy, and so on.

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Between cloud computing, big data and consumer IT, executives feeling capable of making more of their own technology decisions. And with the ongoing business pressures for speed, agility and innovation, executives are eager to rethink and reinvent the IT department, according to a column in the Wall Street Journal.
“Planning the future of IT by projecting today’s technology trends into the future is at best naïve and at worst dangerously myopic. The future that technologists expect and want may not be the world that CIOs get. Shifting social, economic and political forces will influence what businesses will require from IT,” writes guest contributors Jeanne G. Harris and Allan E. Alter.
The article digs into issues faced by CIOs and some of the difficulties technologists face in an uncertain future.
Today’s technology transition is taking place at a moment of geopolitical, macroeconomic and legal uncertainty. Add the joker lurking in the deck – the potential downsides of our dependence on the Internet – and the uncertainty for enterprise IT grows even more, they wrote.

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It must be getting competitive out there. Amazon Web Services has cut its support prices, expanded free support and added new support features like chat and proactive alerts.
Now all customers will automatically get free support and enterprise support will be based on usage rather than a flat fee, a potential cost saver.
Support levels have been renamed. Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum are now Basic, Developer, Business and Enterprise. All plans cover an unlimited number of cases and can be cancelled at any time. There are no long-term contracts. All plans are available worldwide.

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Though expected as part of the enterprise transformation, we are seeing a much faster adoption of Business Process as a Service aka industry SaaS model into large and medium-sized enterprises.
We are seeing that most enterprises looking for cloud-based solutions for the new business process areas, while looking for options to migrate on-premise packaged software into their cloud equivalent.
The following players and their products have already marked their presence as a de-facto choice for many enterprises when they think of modernizing their existing IT operations. While some of these players call their offeringa mere SaaS (Software as a Service), they in fact cover end-to-end business process to be considered as BpaaS.

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