Hewlett Packard used its Discover event in Frankfurt last week to reassert the company’s cloud credentials. Public, private, hybrid; HP is painting pictures that encompass them all, whilst seeking to protect hardware revenues and reassure conservative executives at some of its largest and most profitable customers. But HP has been here before, making bold claims and telling people what they wanted to hear about an HP cloud upon which enterprises could depend. This time, will the company deliver? Earlier this year, satirical news site The Onion took a cruel but funny swipe at HP’s cloud pretensions. HP, the sketch suggested, had the answers, the technology, and a lot of cloud. The company has done — and continues to do — a lot right in this space, but it really did bring this derision upon itself. Mixed messaging, repeated announcements of amazing new cloud services that never quite saw the light of day, an endless stream of apparent strategy U-turns that must surely have left long-time HP executives as dizzy as those trying to understand their intentions? None of this helped HP. But now, Windows Azure is apparently behind us. PalmOS (or whatever it’s called these days) is no longer a glue to […]

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With all the talk of fiscal cliffs, financial binds and “next year’s budget,” I started thinking about cloud security in more tangible ways. Specifically returns on investment, economic impact and total costs of ownership.

Just like death and taxes, businesses can add intrusion and attack to the list of sureties. I can hear CFOs all over the world sigh in exasperation as they feel pressured to add another expense line item to minimise the building security threats to their enterprises.

Before you add another decimal place to security budgets, maybe it’s time you consider the how cloud-deployed security options can not only address the complexities of enterprise security ably, but do so at considerable savings.

Study after study promotes that a cloud computing model saves a organisation money. We know that more and more functionality is moving to the cloud. For things like CRM or other standard business …

Dell just released a technical preview of its private cloud widgetry, Dell
Cloud Dedicated with OpenStack, and while it was at said OpenStack is
going to be its primary cloud platform, used for both public and private
clouds.

The company intends to continue to offer overall solutions for any type of
cloud that customers want to run, but it “believes the open and compatible
nature of OpenStack allows customers to take advantage of hybrid
capabilities to move workloads between private and public clouds.”

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“We provide a cloud-based subscription commerce platform that covers every single aspect of a recurring revenue model end to end,” explained Tom Dibble, President and CEO of Aria Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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They’re dropping like flies to OpenStack’s siren song.
The open source cloud platform’s latest conquest is EMC, whose VMware subsidiary already did a seemingly unthinkable thing a few months ago and joined the rival band as a gold member.
EMC is only joining as a corporate-level sponsor.
To explain why EMC, a born street fighter, would tie up at all with a movement pledged to destroy VMware, the company wheeled out its global marketing CTO Chuck Hollis who blogged that OpenStack is catching on like Linux did and even though it may still be immature customers are asking about it.

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“We are in the center of everything that’s happening on the Internet today. We develop a lot of the capabilities that help address a lot of the challenges that companies may face when leveraging the cloud,” stated Gary Ballabio, Product Line Director for Akamai, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 11th International Cloud Expo, held November 5-8, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo 2013 New York, June 10–13, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Cloud computing and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) may seem like something only for the IT guys to get excited about, but the ultimate benefit is accruing to ordinary users. While most day-to-day non-tech folks don’t understand the inner workings of PaaS (nor should they have to), this disruptive system is bringing in changes that are on the same scale as the early shift from command-line to GUI.
In the 1996 documentary, «Triumph of the Nerds,» Steve Jobs described his early vision to take the desktop to the masses: «It was very clear to me that while there were a bunch of hardware hobbyists that could assemble their own computers… for every one of those, there were a thousand people that couldn’t do that, but wanted to mess around with programming – software hobbyists.» Steve Jobs was a visionary. He knew that his computer needed a graphical, easy-to-use operating system so that millions of non-tech people could use it. Then, operating systems offered by Apple and Microsoft, and easy-to-use tools like VisiCalc and later MS Access brought personal computing to the masses.

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Oracle said Thursday that it’s buying California-based DataRaker for its cloud-based analytics platform, which pulls Big Data off utilities’ sensors and smart meters.
It’s supposed to help electric, gas and water utilities improve their operations and efficiency.
Oracle didn’t say what it’s paying.
It said, “Leading-edge utilities are investing in infrastructure to collect massive amounts of data from millions of distributed smart meters and sensors, and they require modern technologies to analyze and understand the insights provided by this data.”

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Recent evidence suggests that cloud competition in Australia is about to intensify. Australia’s high-tech population and its concern about cloud-hosting outside of the country should prove very tempting for cloud companies to set up domestically.

Technology research firm, Gartner believes that the cloud market spending will reach $2.4 billion this year, which is an increase of about 20% from last year. It is predicted that there will then be continual increases of around 16% per year until 1016.

Amazon Web Services has just set up in Sydney, with two ‘availability zones’ and Rackspace is launching its cloud data centre in Sydney, also. This should open up a number of cloud services to the Australian consumer.

Gartner says that they have “seen a lot of interest in cloud services, both public cloud and private cloud services, in Australia…so even when Amazon did not have a direct presence in …