SYS-CON Events announced today that Plexxi, provider of the first and only affinity-driven networking solution, will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 13th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Plexxi is the creator of the industry’s first affinity-driven networking solution. Plexxi’s products – Plexxi Control and the Plexxi Switch – create an optimized network that dynamically helps applications perform better. The company has raised $48+ million in venture financing from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Northbridge Venture Partners. Headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., Plexxi also has offices in Nashua, N.H. and San Francisco.

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Around the world, market leaders in all industries have already deployed managed cloud services. Seeking to use business technology as a strategic lever to advance past their competition on multiple fronts, the senior executives at these leading companies are eager to learn about the next phase of cloud service development.
Worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will reach $47.4 billion in 2013 and will reach more than $107 billion by 2017, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC). Over the 2013–2017 forecast period, public cloud services will have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.5 percent, that’s five times the IT industry growth as a whole.
As one of the key technologies enabling the industry-wide shift, cloud computing has played a crucial role in changing the way companies consume and use business technology. IDC believes that there are signs that cloud services are starting to shift into a the next phase — where the scale of cloud adoption will be much bigger and more user and solution driven.
In this phase of growth, cloud and the other 3rd Platform technologies — mobile internet, social, and Big Data — will become even more interdependent as they continue to drive growth and innovation across all industries that depend on business technology.

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The Google Cloud Platform lets you build applications and websites, store data, and analyze data on Google’s infrastructure. In his session at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, William Vambenepe, Sr. Product Manager for Big Data on Google Cloud Platform, will discuss Big Data Analytics with the Google Cloud Platform.
William Vambenepe is Sr. Product Manager for Big Data on Google Cloud Platform. Prior to joining Google he was an Architect at Oracle, and before Oracle he was a Distinguished Technologist at HP. Follow him on Twitter: @vambenepe
Cloud Expo® 2013 Silicon Valley, November 4-7, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Today marks the opening of the online enrollment of government-approved health exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.

As we previously explored, though the law has been a lightning rod for partisan controversy and bickering, one undeniably positive impact of the law has been its emphasis on utilizing burgeoning IT approaches for healthcare, including cloud computing, to enable more people to access insurance coverage.

As Andrea Tse of TheStreet.com reports:

“Within this budding area of lucrative business opportunities is a sweet spot garnering more and more attention thanks in part to a key, fast-approaching October healthcare implementation deadline mandated under President Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA): healthcare cloud computing.”

Through the extension of insurance promised under Obamacare, healthcare IT innovation is set to accelerate, through the exchanges themselves, as well as the digitization of patient data for advanced levels of information sharing and collaboration between …

Microsoft has announced that its Windows Azure cloud infrastructure has been given the sought after FedRAMP accreditation for US federal cloud computing.

As the American government is trying to go ‘cloud first’, this represents an important milestone for Redmond – if perhaps a little late.

Back in June, competitors HP and Amazon announced that their clouds were secure after gaining federal approval, joining the likes of Akamai, AT&T and Lockheed Martin, with the first accreditation coming from Autonomic Resources back in December 2012.

Yet Microsoft claims that, unlike those other vendors, theirs is the first public cloud platform to be credited with the more specific JAB P-ATO (Joint Authorisation Board Provisional Authority to Operate) – in other words, attaining competency for both IaaS and PaaS.

“This not only opens the door for faster cloud adoption, but helps agencies move to the cloud in a more streamlined, cost-effective way,” wrote Susie Adams …

Sixty-seven percent of respondents tell Accenture/UN survey their organizations lack initiatives to align sustainability with their business goals.
Accenture and the United Nations Global Compact have released a study that shows majority of CEOs worldwide view businesses as falling short of strategies to meet sustainability requirements.

Accenture polled 1,000 CEOs and the triennial study contains interviews with 75 CEOs as well as analysis of how companies integrated sustainability into their business performance, Accenture said Friday.

Sixty-seven percent of respondents say organizations lack initiatives to align sustainability with their business goals, according to the survey.
Seventy-eight percent of responding CEOs also say sustainability leads to business growth and development of new technologies and 79 percent consider it a competitive edge.
Insufficient financial resources and tough economic conditions are among the barriers that 51 percent and 40 percent of the surveyed chief executives, respectively, say hinder their efforts to embed sustainability into their businesses.

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Zetta.net, a provider of enterprise-grade cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions, has announced two new executive appointments.

Kevin J. Laughlin has joined the company as chief financial officer (CFO), and Glenn Rawlinson as vice president of business development. The addition of Laughlin and Rawlinson to the Zetta.net management team was a direct response to the dramatic growth the company has seen as it delivers a cloud backup and disaster recovery solution with enterprise-class features to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and managed service providers (MSPs).

With three decades of experience in finance and operations, Laughlin joins Zetta.net from Sensa Products, a $150 million in revenue consumer product company where he was CFO. In this position, Laughlin transitioned Sensa to an independent operating subsidiary and built the finance function previously performed by parent company Intelligent Beauty. Prior to his position at Sensa, Laughlin held CFO positions with IT services company All Covered, and management software company International Network Services.

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“The Data Center operators do understand that quality does matter,” noted Barbara P. Aichinger, co-founder of FuturePlus Systems and VP of New Business Development, in this exclusive interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “When they experience failures they call the supplier and the Tier 2 and 3 vendors just blame somebody else, like the DIMM vendor or the software.”
Cloud Computing Journal: You seem to have some concerns about the actual cloud hardware can you explain?
Barbara P. Aichinger: Sure, my company FuturePlus Systems makes memory design validation equipment used by the engineers that design cloud hardware. These server and network equipment have technology standards that govern their design. The advantage of using standards is that you can buy one part from vendor A and another from vendor B and because they are all designed to the same standard they work together. The standards organizations that write these standards are international in nature and in most cases have a Compliance Standard associated with the technology standard. Vendors have to not only obey the standard itself but pass a test, specified by the compliance portion of the standard, that proves that their design meets the specification. This is a stamp of quality and interoperability. The problem we have today with cloud hardware is that at the very heart of all of this hardware is the JEDEC DDR Memory standard but this standard has no compliance specification per se. Thus there is no third party checking this very critical portion of the design for quality and compliance.

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