Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

If you’ve attended a technology conference over the last couple years it’s hard to avoid the obvious buzz around cloud computing. Almost every vendor has applied the term to anything and everything imaginable. During this time there has been some debate over the level of adoption outside of the startup scene, specifically within the larger “enterprise class” of companies. We’re now at a point where most “new software” created, is created with the Internet as a central tenant. It’s how modern software is developed, deployed and consumed. Yes. The cloud has gone mainstream.

New research sponsored by enterprise focused cloud computing firm, Virtustream, sheds new light on the adoption of cloud computing. The report findings indicate that the majority of U.S. businesses are now using some form of cloud computing for IT. The report notes that increasingly most of these businesses use multiple cloud providers leading to potential problems with interoperability and, so called, “Cloud Sprawl”...

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Loraine Lawson.

Integration continues to frustrate organizations trying to use SaaS applications. TechTarget reports that application integration showed up as a top cloud problem in two surveys it recently conducted. You may recall earlier this year a KPGM survey that found 31 percent said integrating cloud services with their on-premise applications and systems was more complex than expected.

TechTarget’s Cloud Pulse survey found similar results: 34 percent said SaaS programs can’t interoperate with other programs from the cloud or in house. “And once again, customization was tied with integration: Even with customization, 34 percent of Cloud Pulse respondents said SaaS apps can be inadequate for the client's business needs,” reports SearchEnterpriseLinux.com Site Editor Jan Stafford...

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Nick Heath.

Microsoft challenged AWS today by making its infrastructure–as-a-service (IaaS) offering generally available and committing to match AWS for the price of storage and compute in the cloud. The Redmond-based software giant said its IaaS offering will allow businesses to migrate virtual machines running on Hyper-V from their internal datacentre to Windows Azure public cloud.

Microsoft has offered the service since last year, but today's general availability means the introduction of monthly SLAs guaranteeing 99.95 percent availability for the service and 24/7 support, as well as the ability to run VMs on Azure servers with 28GB and 56GB of memory, compared to the previous limit of 14GB...

Grazed from ArsTechnica. Author: Jon Brodkin.

The Linux Foundation has taken control of the open source Xen virtualization platform and enlisted a dozen industry giants in a quest to be the leading software for building cloud networks. The 10-year-old Xen hypervisor was formerly a community project sponsored by Citrix, much as the Fedora operating system is a community project sponsored by Red Hat. Citrix was looking to place Xen into a vendor-neutral organization, however, and the Linux Foundation move was announced today. The list of companies that will "contribute to and guide the Xen Project" is impressive, including Amazon Web Services, AMD, Bromium, Calxeda, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, Google, Intel, Oracle, Samsung, and Verizon.

Amazon is perhaps the most significant name on that list in regard to Xen. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is likely the most widely used public infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud, and it is built on Xen virtualization. Rackspace's public cloud also uses Xen. Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin noted in his blog that Xen "is being deployed in public IaaS environments by some of the world's largest companies."...

Grazed from SiliconAngle. Author: Ryan Cox.

Cloud Foundry wants to help your developers to spend more time on code, and less time on middleware. Dekel Tankel – Director of Product Marketing, Cloud Foundry & Pivotal, stopped by to talk with John Furrier – Founder, SiliconANGLE and Jeff Frick – team member of theCUBE. The one takeaway if you didn’t get to catch his interview, agility.

Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service, providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. It was initiated by VMware, and the goal of Cloud Foundry is to make it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. Cloud Foundry wants you to have more productive developers, plain and simple. Over and over Tankel drove home the message of “more time coding, less time dealing with middlewear.”...

Grazed from CIO. Author: Thor Olavsrud.

OpenStack is an open source framework for building and managing private, public and hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds. RDO, the name for Red Hat's OpenStack distribution (which stands for Red Hat Distribution of OpenStack), may not have a name as catchy as the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, but its function will be similar.

The Fedora community adds new features upstream before they become incorporated in the Linux-based operating system and eventually make their way into Red Hat's commercially available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RDO will be a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on RHEL, Fedora and their derivatives and offers a pure upstream OpenStack experience...

Grazed from Business2Community. Author: Sylvia Lehnan.

Much has been said about the benefits of the SaaS model for its customers, including freedom from installation and maintenance hassles and – for many companies – being able to account for the purchase as an operating rather than a capital expense. But what does a software company that wants to start offering cloud products have to consider?

Vendors who want to develop cloud-based applications need to make decisions around technical infrastructure and adjust to a financial model that’s based on recurring income rather than one-time sales and on-going maintenance contracts. However, they also need to consider how the model affects all other areas of the business...

Grazed from PRNewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Canada-based infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) leader iWeb has joined the OpenStack® Foundation as a corporate sponsor with a commitment to developing open cloud standards and technologies.

The OpenStack Foundation supports a global community of more than 8,800 members representing 850 unique organizations across 114 countries and is responsible for continuing to promote the development, distribution and adoption of OpenStack cloud software...

Grazed from CBR. Author: Editorial Staff.

Despite deals increasing 3% in the quarter The transaction value of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the online and mobile industry decreased 50% in the first quarter of 2013 to $7.9bn, according to the latest report from Berkery Noyes. According to the report, the deal volume however increased 3% during the quarter compared to the corresponding quarter a year earlier.

Berkery Noyes said that the SaaS/ASP segment experienced the largest quarterly rise in volume, improving 16%. The transaction volume in the e-commerce segment increased 6% in Q1 2013 with Google's acquisition of Channel Intelligence for $125m being the segment's highest value deal. M&A involving transactions with a large mobile component grew 33% over the past three months...

Grazed from DZone. Author: Omri Erel.

Many people are becoming curious, with the increasing popularity of cloud topology, as to what cloud computing deployment models exist, and which ones are popular. While cloud is a big buzzword right now, a lot of people are kind of mystified in regards to what it really is. That’s ok, that’s what I’m here for.

So, today, I’m going to clarify once more, for those new here, what cloud computing is, then go over some cloud computing deployment models which are popular, and maybe talk a little bit about how they work. First off, cloud just means that it exists off location, and is being stored, processed and/or served by an outside machine or machines...