The cloud is having a major impact on how organizations manage their IT organizations, ranging from personnel to vendor management. The latest evidence of that is documented in a study released this week.
According to the report conducted by IDG Research Services and funded by CA Technologies, 60 percent of those surveyed said demand for personnel with cloud computing expertise has risen over the past five years, while 63 percent anticipate demand will continue to grow over the next two years. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 10, 20110 comments
In a departure from its traditional cloud hosting business, Rackspace today launched a new service that will help those who want to build their own clouds.
The company's new Rackspace Cloud Builders program is a training, certification and deployment offering based on the OpenStack cloud compute and storage platform. As I recently wrote, the open source OpenStack effort is gaining momentum with more than 50 members now supporting it since the project was formed eight months ago. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 08, 20110 comments
A survey by cloud migration services consultancy White Stratus suggests that nearly 20 percent of enterprises have, to some degree, deployed Google Apps.
It's an interesting finding because the percentage of Google's 3 million enterprises and 30 million customers that are using Google Apps in actual deployments is still an open question. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 07, 20111 comments
Count Cisco Systems as the latest major IT provider to launch a cloud partner program.
The networking giant rolled out its Cisco Cloud Partner Program (CPP) at the company's annual Cisco Partner Summit, taking place this week in New Orleans. Cisco has established three tracks for partners: Cloud Builder, Cloud Provider and Cloud Reseller.
"Cloud Computing is transforming the way organizations consume and deploy IT resources. For our channel partners, cloud computing opens up additional market opportunities for them to design and build clouds or offer cloud services to the market," said Ralph Nimergood, vice president of datacenter and cloud for Cisco's Worldwide Partner Organization, in a pre-recorded video statement. "Our program provides a well defined roadmap to assist partners in determining what roles they want to play with Cisco in the cloud market."
Here's a description of the three tracks:
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 03, 20110 comments
Rackspace Hosting on Tuesday launched a new partner program that combined four separate programs into one. The company hopes the revamped program will incent partners to offer a broader range of Rackspace's hosted and cloud offerings.
Once a dedicated sales organization, the company now boasts 4,500 channel partners. CEO Lanham Napier said on the company's most recent earnings call last month that channel-influenced sales have more than doubled in 2010. "We will continue to invest in the channel and think there is a whole lot more performance and upside that we can get there," Napier told investors. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 03, 20110 comments
When Hewlett-Packard dropped a jaw-dropping $2.4 billion for cloud storage provider 3PAR, it left many scratching their heads.
HP paid so much for 3PAR, a company with about $200 million in revenues, after a protracted and very public bidding war against Dell as the two companies looked to shore up their cloud storage offerings. Now the company is making the 3PAR technology available with HP's new CloudSystem. More
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 03, 20110 comments
Axcient is the latest provider of data protection technology that lets small and medium-sized enterprises use the cloud for disaster recovery and business continuity.
Though not a well-known company, Axcient supplies appliances that offer multiple levels of backup and recovery. Here's how it works: The customer pays a monthly fee for the appliances that consist of servers loaded with Axcient's software, storage and network infrastructure and are controlled by a Web-based interface. Files and data from both clients and servers can be backed up to the appliance, which also provides backup to the vendor's cloud-based facilities.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 24, 20110 comments
IBM is kicking off a new program intended to make it easier for partners to sell the company's cloud-based products.
Big Blue unveiled the new Cloud Computing Specialty at its PartnerWorld Leadership Conference in Orlando last week. Up until now, the company lacked a cohesive go-to-market strategy for its various cloud initiatives.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 24, 20110 comments
Citrix Systems has acquired EMS-Cortex, a company that provides cloud services provisioning and management software.
It was the first move made by the company's newly formed Cloud App Delivery Group, which is tasked with delivering products and programs for cloud services providers. Citrix said it has 800 cloud services providers certified to use the company's products to offer apps that are delivered from the cloud.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 24, 20111 comments
The information technology portion of the 2012 federal budget proposal submitted by President Barak Obama this week calls for a "Cloud-First" policy, meaning agencies are being encouraged to use cloud-based solution when such an option exists.
The shift is outlined in a report released last week by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra. "This policy is intended to accelerate the pace at which the government will realize the value of cloud computing by requiring agencies to evaluate safe, secure cloud computing options before making any new investments," according to the report.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 17, 20110 comments
Need to use 10,000 servers just for an hour or two? Or perhaps you have excess capacity that you'll never use or sell? If you are in either camp, now there's a marketplace aimed at matching buyers and sellers of cloud computing capacity.
Enter SpotCloud. Enomaly, a longtime provider of cloud computing infrastructure software, launched the public beta of SpotCloud on Monday. Cloud service providers can make unused capacity available on the exchange.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 17, 20110 comments
With Verizon Communications agreeing to acquire Terremark for $1.4 billion last month and Time Warner Cable following up with a deal to buy NaviSite for $230 million, it begs the question: are we going to see a wave of consolidation in the cloud computing industry? The obvious answer is: of course.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on February 17, 20110 comments