Grazed from ZDNet. Author: John Fontana.

Identity and Access as a Service is poised for a strong run at enterprises of all size, and those who have done their homework will dodge the hype and know what's right for them and what's not. By the end of 2015, Identity and Access as a Service (IDaaS) will account for 25% of all new identity and access management sales, compared with 5% in 2012, according to recent Gartner research "Are You and the IDaaS Market Ready for Each Other?"

At the end of 2012, the market was $180 million. By the end of this year, that number is expected to jump to $265 million. Small and medium-sized companies are helping drive interest. They are extending their current IAM architectures and providing access to SaaS services or internal Web-apps. Larger companies in general are looking to support both cloud and on-premises applications with IDaaS offerings...

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Matt Quin.

We’re well beyond any question about whether cloud computing is the future. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) paved the way for the idea that organizations can operate some of their most important systems in an on-premise or off-premise cloud. Small, medium and even large businesses accept that cloud computing delivers flexibility, cost and scalability that business has never had before. Companies are gravitating to cloud because it brings very short time to value and doesn’t impact the current business model.

Lower cost and less risk are very attractive propositions. How big is this move? Forrester estimates that the average company has 9.3 different SaaS applications in use. Consulting firm Cap Gemini reports that 78% of new applications are deployed into the cloud. And that’s just the applications that are being tracked. In reality, workers today are practicing BYOS (Bring Your Own Service) as they experiment with SaaS in broad ways that IT and even business managers may not know about...

Grazed from ITBusinessEdge. Author: Michael Vizard.

The current fascination with deployment models in the cloud will soon give way to more practical approaches to managing tiers of private and public cloud computing resources. According to Saar Gillai, senior vice president and general manager for converged cloud at Hewlett-Packard, as cloud computing becomes more unified in the months ahead, thanks largely to open standards and APIs, hybrid clouds will simply become the new enterprise IT norm.

Gillai says all this fascination with deployment models is a temporary thing. In fact, Gillai says the deployment model is not the relevant discussion. It’s the ability to support multiple deployment models, ranging from public clouds to private clouds running on premise and every type of cloud in between, adds Gillai, which will ultimately distinguish HP from larger cloud rivals such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft...

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

TIBCO Software Inc. today announced the launch of TIBCO Cloud Bus(TM), its new subscription-based Integration Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) offering that leverages the company's extensive integration expertise and presents users with the ability to drastically shorten time to market and lower costs as they migrate applications and workloads to the cloud.

"With Cloud Bus(TM), TIBCO is combining the deployment flexibility of the cloud with enterprise-class integration features in a single subscription service that customers can run anywhere -- on-premise, in the cloud, in bare metal or virtualized environments," said Matt Quinn, CTO for TIBCO Software. "TIBCO Cloud Bus provides ready-made integrations across popular SaaS and critical on-premise applications, while allowing subscribers the ability to identify, configure and extend integration templates for their own business context with ease. Finally, and as you would expect from TIBCO, Cloud Bus includes extensive capabilities for real-time integration, meaning changes are reflected in all connected applications as they happen, without waiting for the next batch update."...

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Phillip Spies.

The public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market is booming and expected to grow by 47 percent, from $6 billion in 2012 to $9 billion in 2013, according to Gartner’s Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, 4Q Update. Additionally, the overall public cloud computing market, including software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), IaaS and other related services, will grow from $110 to $131 billion over the same period with a CAGR of 41.3 percent through 2016. While this projected growth is significant, cloud computing still represents less than three percent of the $3.7 trillion spent on IT per year. This begs the question, If cloud computing is so hot, why is it still just three percent of the overall IT industry?

It might be helpful to look back to when cloud IaaS was introduced to the market more than eight years ago by Amazon.com. The primary goal was to provide computing capacity at a lower cost than actual physical servers. Since then, many other cloud service providers have jumped on the bandwagon to offer low-cost, best-effort cloud services. Yet, while a market for these services clearly exists, most don’t meet the enterprise requirements for a more reliable and secure computing platform. The problem lies in the fundamental challenge that end users have in using a server-centric cloud approach to solve problems better addressed by networks...

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Brandon Butler.

Dell has dramatically shifted its cloud computing strategy, canceling plans it once had to launch a public cloud service based on the OpenStack open source platform, and discontinuing a VMware-based public cloud it already has on the market.

Instead, the company will focus on selling OpenStack-powered private clouds that run on Dell hardware and software. Using technology it acquired from cloud-management company Enstratius, Dell says its customers will be able to deploy resources to more than 20 public cloud providers. In announcing this change in strategy, Dell also said it has a new "partner ecosystem," consisting of just three providers now, but with plans to increase that number, which will provide integrations between those partner public cloud services and Dell customers' private clouds...

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Amanda Kondolojy.

When you think of high cloud energy consumption, the image of the crowded and stuffy data center likely comes to mind. However, new research from AT&T's Bell Labs and the University of Melbourne has revealed that traditional data centers only account for 9 percent of the cloud's overall energy consumption, which is in stark contrast to conventional wisdom and the push by some environmental groups to minimize data centers because of their energy consumption. However, looking at the whole picture of cloud computing energy consumption, data centers definitely are not the energy beasts they were once thought to be.

So where is all the cloud energy going? ZDNet Reports that 90 percent of the overall cloud energy consumption is taken by wireless access network technologies. In fact, on average, wireless networking, including Wi-Fi access and 4G connections, takes up a whopping ten times more power than data centers...

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Editorial Staff.

The VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (an IaaS cloud alternative to Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure and Google Compute Engine) launches May 21. For VMware (NYSE:VMW) channel partners, there are at least five timely questions worth asking. Here's a preview plus some perspective from The VAR Guy.

First, the background: VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled the IaaS cloud plan back on March 13 during an EMC-VMware Strategic Forum. Fast forward to this week: Gelsinger and Bill Fathers (GM, Hybrid Cloud Services) will unwrap the new IaaS cloud for partners and customers. The big questions?...

Grazed from ReadWriteWeb. Author: Matt Asay.

While both Google and SAP shared a 1980's music sensibility at their respective conferences this week - Billy Idol performed at Google I/O and U2's Bono walked the floor at SAPPHIRE - the two companies see the future of computing very differently. Even when the two companies agree on the importance of cloud computing, their strategies couldn't be more different. For one thing, SAP's new cloud isn't even a cloud. But then, SAP's Bono wasn't really Bono, either, but merely an impersonator.

Forrester analyst Stefan Ried takes SAP to task for getting cloud wrong in its new HANA Enterprise Cloud: "The Hana Cloud is a very careful move to a new business model. It is not disruptive and will NOT accelerate Hana usage to the many more customers who have been struggling with Hana on-premises because of its licensing. "The announced Hana Enterprise Cloud follows the 'Bring Your Own License' paradigm. While this is great for customers that already have a Hana license and would like to relocate it into the cloud, it is useless for customers that might have largely fluctuating data volumes or user numbers and might specifically use a cloud because of its elastic business model."...

Grazed from VisualStudioMagazin. Author: Katrina Carrasco.

Rackspace US Inc. recently released its Rackspace Cloud SDK for Microsoft .NET, a suite of tools that enables .NET developers to work with the OpenStack cloud OS. OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform created by Rackspace and NASA. The Rackspace Cloud SDK for .NET "lets the .NET community develop and consume cloud features or services," according to a blog post by Rackspace Product Marketing Manager Cole Humphreys.

The product can be used to manage "production environments using Windows Server platforms running on a Rackspace hosted infrastructure," Humphreys notes. The Rackspace Cloud SDK for .NET includes a language API and API reference manual, a Getting Started Guide, release notes and sample code, according to Humphreys' blog post. The Rackspace Cloud SDK is free and can be downloaded from GitHub or from within Visual Studio using the NuGet extension manager...