Edison is believed to have said “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”, and nine out of ten times “implementation trumps innovation” when it comes to achieving commercial success, but is it just me, or has the well of new ideas around cloud computing run a bit dry recently?

Big Data is rapidly gaining ground on cloud computing when it comes to search popularity on gartner.com. And SDN (Software Defined Networking) may be flavour of the month in cloud blogs, but although there is a succinct impact on cloud computing, this is really more a networking idea.

Now of course,  cloud computing is only one force – and mainly an enabling one – in the nexus of cloud, information, social and mobile, but when monitoring the various publicly available industry news feeds, I get a bit of a Groundhog Day (the movie) feeling.

You might even say we have taken a …

A popular application that you can source from your Cloud provider is Microsoft Sharepoint, which you can also of course obtain from Office 365.
The key way to approach these tools is with ‘Social Computing’ in mind, simply meaning the use of social media web sites, like those of Facebook or Linkedin, for your own corporate purposes.
These are faster and more popular than any other IT tool and so can greatly improve internal staff collaboration and productivity, that overall can be described as ‘Agile Cloud Working‘ best practices.

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Since Google, Motorola Mobility and Samsung have gone and put the spotlight back on unreasonable licensing demands, it’s at least timely that Europe’s second-highest court, the General Court, is going to decide on June 27 whether a Microsoft appeal has any merit.
Back in 2008, the European Commission fined Microsoft $1.14 billion (€899 million) ostensibly for not complying with a 2004 antitrust decision, the first time it ever did such a thing.
What it was really all about was Microsoft asking too much for patent licenses and interface documentation to connect Linux servers to Windows although the EC offered Microsoft no pricing guidelines even when asked.

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In the current fashion of pretty sizeable rounds, Huddle, the cloud-based enterprise content management start-up, has picked up a check for $24 million in Series C funding. That makes $38.2 million altogether.
The new capital comes from Jafco Ventures, with participation from DAG Ventures and existing investors Matrix Partners and Eden Ventures. Subrah Iyar, the founder of WebEx, and venture investor Herb Madan also kicked in.
The idea is to press its advantage. Huddle’s looking to triple its business again like it reportedly has every year since it started. Sales to the enterprise were up 5x last year and now the British firm, with co-headquarters in London and San Francisco, has opened an office in New York City.

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While the cloud offers many benefits, it’s more like a black box when it comes to deploying software. If you are running your application in the cloud, there is less visibility than you might have in your own data center. That puts software quality at risk.
How do you manage a black box? You manage the inputs and outputs. To do this you need an end-to-end testing and monitoring framework for your cloud-dependent application. This framework needs to measure functional accuracy, as well as application response time, both in the lab during development and test, and at the end user after deployment. A complete software quality management approach must include activities both before and after deployment.

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As an exhibitor at Cloud Expo New York, Dome9 Security is offering special passes to SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Dome9 Security, the leader in cloud security management, automates and centralizes cloud firewall management across all servers and clouds. Available for both enterprises and hosting providers, Dome9 supports clouds, VPS, dedicated servers, and Amazon’s EC2 Security Groups, across all major operating systems and service providers. Dome9 is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, and is venture backed by Opus Capital Ventures.

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As an exhibitor at Cloud Expo New York, Dome9 Security is offering special passes to SYS-CON’s 10th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York.
Dome9 Security, the leader in cloud security management, automates and centralizes cloud firewall management across all servers and clouds. Available for both enterprises and hosting providers, Dome9 supports clouds, VPS, dedicated servers, and Amazon’s EC2 Security Groups, across all major operating systems and service providers. Dome9 is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, and is venture backed by Opus Capital Ventures.

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