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Cloud Computing

Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and Hybrid Cloud approaches as well as services such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) are being embraced for cost efficiency, scalability, and consolidation. Hypervisor technologies, Open Source versus Proprietary Hypervisor technologies, Security, Open Standards, Interoperability, High Availability, and Backup & Recovery are among the issues that are critical to consider when evaluating a move to the cloud.



Cloud Computing Articles

Informatica Corporation, a provider of data integration software and services, has announced the latest release of its Informatica Cloud solution. Offered as an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), the latest release from Informatica features the Cloud Connector Toolkit, Cloud Integration Templates, and new enterprise features, all of which are part of the new Informatica Cloud Developer Edition and allow developers to rapidly embed end-user customizable integration logic and connectivity into cloud applications.

Posted May 01, 2012

Organizations are struggling with big data, which they define as any large-size data store that becomes unmanageable by standard technologies or methods, according to a new survey of 264 data managers and professionals who are subscribers to Database Trends and Applications. The survey was conducted by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., in partnership with MarkLogic in January 2012. Among the key findings uncovered by the survey is the fact that unstructured data is on the rise, and ready to engulf current data management systems. Added to that concern, say respondents, is their belief that management does not understand the challenge that is looming, and is failing to recognize the significance of unstructured data assets to the business.

Posted May 01, 2012

SAP unveiled its roadmap for the database and mobile markets. At a press conference in San Francisco that was also made available online, Dr. Vishal Sikka, a member of the SAP executive Board, Technology & Innovation, said the company's vision for the SAP real-time data platform includes the SAP HANA platform, Sybase data management offerings, and SAP solutions for enterprise information management (EIM). "In our minds, and in our customers' minds there is now absolutely no doubt that HANA represents the database architecture for the future, for OLTP and OLAP, for analyzing structured and unstructured data, for legacy applications and for new applications," Sikka told the audience.

Posted April 25, 2012

Basho Technologies, a provider of distributed database technologies, has released Riak CS, a scalable software solution designed to provide distributed public and private cloud storage. This release marks Basho's entrance into the cloud storage market. Riak CS is "designed to help a company build a very large, scalable but inexpensive cloud storage platform either in their cloud computing stack or as a private/public storage platform," Bobby Patrick, CMO of Basho Technologies explains to 5 Minute Briefing.

Posted April 19, 2012

Continuent, Inc., a provider of replication and clustering solutions for MySQL and Oracle, has introduced Continuent Tungsten Enterprise 1.5 to help manage increasing data volume, complexity, speed, and concurrency in the cloud or on-premise. "Tungsten Enterprise consolidates geo-clustering, archive, backup and disaster recovery through seamless integration with the cloud," says Robert Hodges, CEO at Continuent. "By combining multi-master, multi-site clustering with Amazon EC2, Tungsten Enterprise enables new levels of speed, simplicity and reliability for database clustering, backup and recovery while reducing costs."

Posted April 12, 2012

IBM introduced PureSystems, a new family of "expert integrated systems," with built-in expertise based on IBM's decades of experience running IT operations for tens of thousands of clients in 170 countries. With the aim of integrating all IT elements, both physical and virtual, IBM says the new systems offer clients an alternative to today's enterprise computing model, where multiple and disparate systems require significant resources to set up and maintain. According to IBM, PureSystems is the result of $2 billion in R&D and acquisitions over 4 years.

Posted April 11, 2012

There's no question that cloud computing is a hot commodity these days. Companies of all types and sizes are embracing cloud computing-both internally and from external service providers - as a way to cost-effectively build new capabilities. With the rapid growth of cloud comes new questions about responsibility within organizations, in terms of how services will be paid for, who has ultimate say over cloud decisions, and how cloud fits into the overall strategic direction of the business.

Posted March 28, 2012

IBM has announced new software to beef up its SmartCloud line of management and monitoring tools for cloud deployments. IBM's new SmartCloud Foundation offerings enable organizations to install, manage, configure and automate the creation of cloud services in private, public or hybrid environments with enhanced levels of control, the vendor says.

Posted March 19, 2012

Quest Software said it has entered into definitive agreements with affiliates of Insight Venture Partners to become a private company. In the deal, stockholders would receive $23 per share in cash, valuing the company at approximately $2.0 billion. Upon closing, Quest will be a privately held company and will continue to be led by chairman and CEO Vinny Smith and the existing senior management team. "As a private company, we will have increased flexibility to drive innovation across our product lines and execute our long-term strategy," said Smith in a statement released by the company.

Posted March 09, 2012

BMC Software, a provider of enterprise systems tools, announced the availability of the winter release of its cloud-based Remedyforce Service Desk solution, which includes new capabilities for service request management and the integration of social media and external sources. BMC Remedyforce Service Desk solution is intended to help organizations manage the "consumerization of IT" phenomenon. Through the capabilities of Salesforce Chatter, a leading enterprise social network, BMC Remedyforce Service Desk helps IT professionals interact with each other, and archives Chatter feeds and other sources in the solution's knowledge management system.

Posted March 05, 2012

In celebration of ODBC's 20th anniversary this year, Progress Software Corporation has unveiled its Platinum ODBC drivers, Progress DataDirect Connect for ODBC 7.0. The standards-based, fully interoperable Progress DataDirect Connect for ODBC 7.0 driver allows application developers to reliably exchange data between cloud data and disparate data sources.

Posted February 23, 2012

The challenges of maintaining security and regulatory compliance as applications increasingly move to the cloud - whether public, private or hybrid - will come into greater focus in 2012, says Ryan Berg, cloud security strategy lead for IBM. The need to manage security among an increasingly mobile workforce, with many employees choosing to use their own personal devices, will also be a key concern in 2012, says Berg.

Posted February 23, 2012

The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) has announced new programs in the 2012 OAUG Educational Series, a virtual learning series of webinars offered exclusively to OAUG members. "OAUG members consistently report that education is one of the primary reasons for being a member," said Mark Clark, president of the OAUG. "The OAUG Educational Series is a prime example of how our organization continually serves its members by offering informative training events throughout the year to help them reap the most benefit from their Oracle investment."

Posted February 21, 2012

Oracle has entered into an agreement to acquire Taleo Corporation, a provider of cloud-based talent management. Together, Oracle and Taleo intend to create a comprehensive cloud offering for organizations to manage their Human Resource operations and employee careers.

Posted February 15, 2012

Ntirety, Inc. announced that it has been successfully audited and certified under the MSPAlliance's (MSPA) Unified Certification Standard for Cloud and Managed Service Providers (UCS). The certification is specifically designed to provide business consumers of cloud and managed services with the assurance that the service provider they hire will meet or exceed the highest principles of quality in areas such as financial stability, facilities, managed services practices, and customer satisfaction.

Posted February 07, 2012

Oracle will be holding cloud computing conferences throughout North America, and around the globe, to share practical strategies for moving to the cloud.

Posted February 01, 2012

Savvis, a provider of cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions for enterprises, has expanded its application performance management (APM) partnership with Compuware. Savvis joined the Compuware Partner Network in 2009 through an agreement to resell the Gomez SaaS Web performance management solution and offer it as part of its hosting platform to its clients. Savvis has now extended this partnership to include the Gomez on-premises APM product suite.

Posted January 23, 2012

Jaspersoft, a BI software provider, has announced the development of what it describes as the first BI architected for platform-as-a-service, with the planned integration of Jaspersoft BI with Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS. "With Jaspersoft's suite of reporting and analysis capabilities now available on OpenShift, organizations can quickly realize the benefits of the cloud while gaining deep insights from the data that powers these applications," says Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat.

Posted January 17, 2012

The argument that "everyone is doing it and you should too" holds no value for strategic decision-making in IT. Yet critical thinking often goes by the wayside when a hot, new trend catches on and it seems like the masses are following along. Cloud computing is certainly in vogue - most industry analysts are bullish on cloud computing adoption and anticipate enterprise spending to increase - but organizations need to steer clear of falling into the trap that moving to the cloud always delivers cost savings.

Posted January 11, 2012

Along with thousands of IT professionals, I was in the San Francisco Moscone Center main hall last October listening to Larry Ellison's 2011 Oracle Open world keynote. Larry can always be relied upon to give an entertaining presentation, a unique blend of both technology insights and amusingly disparaging remarks about competitors.

Posted January 11, 2012

IBM has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Green Hat, a provider of software quality and testing solutions for the cloud and other environments. Financial terms were not disclosed. Founded in 1996, Green Hat is jointly headquartered in London, England and Wilmington, Delaware. Upon the acquisition close, Green Hat will join IBM's Rational Software business.

Posted January 04, 2012

Oracle has announced the availability of Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3, a C, C++, and Fortran development platform for building fast, scalable enterprise applications for Oracle Solaris systems. According to Oracle, the new release accelerates performance of SPARC T4 and x86-based applications up to 300% by leveraging Oracle's advanced compiler technology.

Posted January 04, 2012

The first calendar year following SAP's acquisition of Sybase is coming to a close. David Jonker, director, product marketing - Data Management & Analytics, Sybase, discusses key product integrations, IT trends that loom large in Sybase's data management strategies, and the emergence of what Sybase describes as DW 2.0. 2011 has been "a foundational year," with effort focused on making Sybase technologies work with SAP and setting the stage for 2012, says Jonker. "We believe 2012 is going to be a big year for us on the database side."

Posted December 21, 2011

Until recently, companies were only warming up to the possibilities of cloud computing. Lately, however, for many enterprise-IT decision makers, cloud is hot, hot, hot. The sea change now underway means many companies are quickly moving from "dipping their toes into cloud computing" to a full-fledged immersion, says Thom VanHorn, vice president of marketing for Application Security, Inc. In 2012, expect to see those same companies dive right in. "The move will only accelerate," he tells DBTA.

Posted December 21, 2011

At HP Discover 2011 in Vienna, HP announced new cloud solutions that advance deployment of private, public and hybrid clouds, enabling enterprises, service providers and governments to capitalize on emerging market opportunities. Fundamentally, the solutions are aimed at helping IT organizations move from a technology-centric view to a service-centric view, and how they can deliver the right services to the right customers with the right parameters, costs, flexibility, and service levels at the right time, Frances Guida, manager of HP Cloud Solutions and Infrastructure, Enterprise Servers, Storage, and Networking, tells 5 Minute Briefing.

Posted December 12, 2011

Unisys Corporation has announced Version 2 of its Unisys Secure Private Cloud Solution, its flagship cloud solution for clients' and cloud service providers' data centers. The solution incorporates improvements to the core software stack, as well as expanded management, security and infrastructure automation capabilities.

Posted December 11, 2011

Half of the respondents to a recent Unisys Corporation online poll said that cloud computing is their top IT investment priority for 2012. The poll, which drew 300 responses, was conducted on the unisys.com web site in September and October 2011. This is the second straight year in which respondents to a Unisys poll named cloud as the chief priority for IT investments in the coming year.

Posted December 11, 2011

IBM and DemandTec have entered into a definitive merger agreement for IBM to acquire DemandTec in an all cash transaction for approximately $440 million. DemandTec delivers cloud-based analytics software that enables businesses to examine different customer buying scenarios, both online and in-store, so they can spot trends and shopper insights to make better price, promotion, and assortment decisions that increase revenue and profitability.

Posted December 08, 2011

A new blog on the SHARE website places the focus on the mainframe as a big data workhorse and the reigning alternative to internal (or external) cloud provision. Pedro Pereira, authoring the blog in SHARE's "President's Corner," makes several astute observations including identifying security and availability as unknowns in a cloud environment.

Posted December 06, 2011

Join Oracle and Unisphere for a live webcast to learn more about common practices that are most vulnerable to fraud and error, and the best practices and technologies used by leading vs. laggard organizations to drive the hidden costs out of operations and enforce process controls. Speakers will include Thomas J. Wilson, president, Unisphere Research; Joseph McKendrick, analyst, Unisphere Research; and Stephanie Maziol, director GRC Applications, Oracle.

Posted December 06, 2011

Three columns ago, I started a series of articles pointing out that tough times are a-comin' for the DBA profession due to major disruptive changes in the wider IT world (see "2012 Might Really Be the End of the World as We Know It"). In previous columns, I have told you about how our lives will change due to major technological changes caused by things such as Solid State Disks (SSD) and massively multicore CPUs.

Posted December 06, 2011

Talend plans to announce version 5 of its unified platform for integration tomorrow. With the new release, Talend says, it becomes the only open source vendor to offer a comprehensive technology portfolio that spans all enterprise integration needs, including data, applications and business processes. With Talend v5, Talend aims to bring a holistic approach to integration, enabling IT organizations to converge traditionally disparate integration efforts and practices through a common set of products, tools and best practices. The Talend Unified Platform provides a common foundation for the products to be used individually or in concert depending on the needs of the organization.

Posted November 29, 2011

Private clouds offer all the advantages of public clouds but with less perceived risk and greater security and accountability. Learn why private cloud adoption has increased more than 60% from last year. Attend this webcast and you'll also receive a complimentary copy of the results of the 2011 IOUG Survey on Cloud Computing, produced by Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., and sponsored by Oracle.

Posted November 09, 2011

Unisys Corporation recently reported third-quarter 2011 net income from continuing operations of $78.6 million, compared with third-quarter 2010 net income from continuing operations of $21.8 million. Revenue in the third quarter of 2011 grew 6% to $1.02 billion compared with $961 million in the year-ago quarter. Foreign currency fluctuations had a positive impact on revenue in the quarter of almost 6 percentage points, the company said. "This was a strong quarter for Unisys," said Unisys chairman and CEO Ed Coleman during a Unisys webcast announcing the quarter results. "We grew our revenue and tripled EPS from continuing operations as we benefited from the foundational work we've been doing to strengthening our competitive and financial profile."

Posted November 08, 2011

UC4, a provider of IT process automation solutions, announced its is shipping a new version of its Application Release Automation (ARA) solution, intended to provide greater visibility into the end-to-end release processes through cross-functional planning, tracking and reporting. The solution is designed to automate the deployment of complex applications from development through production.

Posted October 26, 2011

CA Technologies announced a new solution intended to help companies manage and integrate their database infrastructure with Microsoft's SQL Azure cloud database environment. The new product, CA ERwin Data Modeler for SQL Azure, is designed to enable data managers to make fact-based decisions about which data to move to the cloud and which to keep on premise. This new release of Erwin Data Modeler will also enable data transfer from other databases beyond SQL Server, Donna Burbank, senior director of product marketing for the Data Management business at CA Technologies, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "This solution will enable data transfer from other databases in addition to SQL Server, such as Oracle, Sybase, Teradata, or DB2."

Posted October 26, 2011

At IBM's 2011 Business Analytics Forum, IBM unveiled new software that brings the power of managing and analyzing big data to the workplace. The new offerings span a variety of big data and business analytics technologies across multiple platforms from mobile devices to the data center to IBM's SmartCloud, enabling employees from any department inside an organization to explore unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, weather data, log files, genomic data and video, as part of their everyday work experience.

Posted October 24, 2011

Oracle has entered into an agreement to acquire RightNow Technologies, Inc., a provider of cloud-based customer service, for $43 per share or approximately $1.5 billion net of RightNow's cash and debt. "Oracle is moving aggressively to offer customers a full range of Cloud Solutions including sales force automation, human resources, talent management, social networking, databases and Java as part of the Oracle Public Cloud," said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president, Oracle Development.

Posted October 24, 2011

At OpenWorld, Oracle's annual week-long conference in San Francisco for customers and partners, Andy Flower, president of the Independent Oracle Users Group, spoke with 5 Minute Briefing about the emerging challenges facing IOUG members, the group's plans for the year ahead, including additional training and certification around Exadata, and how Oracle's engineered systems approach is being received. "The overall need for analytics, the growth of data, and the managing and processing of more and more data - those areas are the central themes for us," Flower noted.

Posted October 19, 2011

Cloud computing has taken the enterprise IT world by force. IT managers and CIOs are evaluating private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures for running corporate applications and services. Many are doing pilots and evaluating large-scale migrations to the cloud, with the hope of not only saving money but increasing services for users.

Posted October 19, 2011

The Oracle Applications Users Group is continuing its Back to Basics theme, Mark C. Clark, president of the OAUG, told 5 Minute Briefing during Oracle OpenWorld, with education and networking, enabled by smaller regional events and online learning opportunities, in addition to its continued participation in larger events such as OpenWorld and COLLABORATE. Upcoming Connection Point events include the "OAUG Connection Point-EPM/BI/R12.1 Upgrade" which will be held November 15-16, 2011, in Atlanta; and the "OAUG Connection Point-Dubai 2012" will be held March 14-15, 2012, in Dubai, UAE.

Posted October 18, 2011

Savvis, a CenturyLink company, launched Savvis Symphony Database, a cloud-based database platform, at Oracle OpenWorld. Symphony Database provisions everything needed for a complete, secure database solution, with just a few clicks. According to the vendor, client advantages include no software licensing or hardware provisioning, and performance levels can be scaled - both up and down - based on business needs, without any downtime, providing performance guarantees and reduced costs compared to hosted database solutions. Users can select from Oracle Enterprise 11G RAC or Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 for the underlying technology.

Posted October 18, 2011

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