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Salesforce.com Pumps Up Volume of Workplace Chatter November 19, 2009
Salesforce.com is marrying its cloud computing bona fides with its growing expertise in collaboration in Salesforce Chatter, a new application and development platform. The company introduced the product at its Dreamforce tradeshow and conference under way in San Francisco.
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Microsoft Forecasts Azure Skies for Jan. 1 November 18, 2009
After more than two years of crowing about "software plus service" rather than Software as a Service for its cloud computing strategy, the finish line is finally in sight for Microsoft's Azure. The company announced Tuesday at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles that Azure will officially be available for all customers on Jan. 1, 2010.
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PaaS and the Democratization of Innovation November 18, 2009
I was re-reading Eric von Hippel's excellent book Democratizing Innovation and found something in it that might help explain the popularity of cloud computing and Platform as a Service. I am on the way to Dreamforce and have little visibility into what Salesforce.com might announce in the next day or two, but no doubt there will be a lot about the cloud, so this might be a good opportunity to make my point.
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Cloud Security's Silver Lining: Q&A With ISF President Howard Schmidt November 18, 2009
The Information Security Forum may bill itself as the world's leading independent authority on IT security, but the companies and agencies that its members work for are finding themselves more dependent than ever on its computer security expertise. Current trends that are expanding access to networks for companies and consumers are also providing more potential opportunities for IT's "bad guys."
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Text Analysis and the Next Generation of BI November 15, 2009
Text-based content and information from across the Web are growing in importance to businesses. The need to analyze Web-based text in real-time is rising to where structured data was in importance just several years ago. Indeed, for businesses looking to do even more commerce and community building across the Web, text access and analytics forms a new mother lode of valuable insights to mine.
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IT's Perfect Storm: Managed Services, SaaS and Cloud Computing November 13, 2009
In a previous column, I described why many IT professionals within small- and medium-sized businesses, as well as in large-scale enterprises, are beginning to embrace Software as a Service, and why managed service providers can't afford to ignore SaaS. A recent industry event brought my previous observations to life and added a new dimension -- cloud computing -- to these dynamics.
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FOSS' Sunny Place in the Cloud November 12, 2009
Richard Stallman's now-famous warnings about cloud computing (his verdict in a nutshell: It's "marketing hype") sparked a fresh round of debate in the blogosphere this week, along with some outbursts of incredulity. Stallman "is a few bubbles off of plumb and gets weirder every year," Slashdot blogger hairyfeet told LinuxInsider.
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A Tale of Two Sages November 11, 2009
Sage convened its fall user group meeting in Atlanta this week. The event was set in the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center, a complex of three starship hangars left over from the Intergalactic Olympics. The facility is beautiful and very big. Sage estimated attendance at between 2,500 and 3,000 people, but despite that number of people, the place looked underused.
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From Mainframes to I-Frames November 11, 2009
I got a dose of reality last week when I took a briefing from TmaxSoft, a Korean company that specializes in mainframe conversions. I hadn't thought about a mainframe in a long time and assumed they were no longer an issue, but it turns out that they continue to live on. There are still 6,600 mainframes in operation in the U.S., according to TmaxSoft.
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Mobile CRM User, Know Thyself November 10, 2009
With the proliferation of smartphones and similar handheld devices, it only makes sense that data -- especially customer data -- is following these devices into the field. The scenarios in which sales and field service people can use the data collected by CRM are many and, in a lot of cases, obvious. However, there are also many ways for CRM to go into the field.
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Pumping Up Performance in Densely Packed Data Centers November 08, 2009
Data center consolidation and modernization of IT systems help enterprises reduce cost, cut labor, slash energy use, and become more agile. Infrastructure advancements, standardization, performance density, and network services efficiencies are all allowing for bigger and fewer data centers and strategically architected and located facilities that can efficiently carry more of the total IT requirements load.
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Droid Lurches to Life November 06, 2009
Today is the day of the Droid. The Motorola smartphone touches down today in what's shaping up to be one of the biggest handset launches in recent memory. Of course Verizon is going all-in as far as advertising is concerned, but there's more to the Droid's story than a marketing campaign.
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Headed for the Clouds - Cisco, EMC and VMware Launch VCE Coalition November 05, 2009
By and large, IT favors grand pronouncements and overheated rhetoric, and the industry abounds with "unprecedented" efforts firmly rooted in precedent and "unique" solutions fashioned from the commonest clay. Is that the case with Cisco, EMC and VMware's new Virtual Computing Environment coalition? Decidedly not.
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Pre-integration is the Ticket With Cisco-EMC Cloud Venture November 04, 2009
Cisco is broadening its footprint with a major move into the cloud computing space. The company has formed a far-reaching partnership with EMC -- a joint venture in which VMware, a majority owned subsidiary of EMC, will also play a large role. Called "Acadia," the new entity is marketing vBlock infrastructure packages, aka "vBlocks."
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Yahoo Lets FOSS Community Drive Its Traffic Server November 04, 2009
In a move that resembles a major food vendor giving away its prize recipe -- minus the secret sauce -- to all of its customers and competitors, Yahoo on Monday donated the source code for its Traffic Server software to the Apache Software Foundation through the Apache Incubator Project.
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Where SOA Meets the Cloud November 01, 2009
Dave Linthicum's new book, Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide, has just arrived and digs into the conflation of SOA and cloud computing. We're here with Dave, and just Dave this time, to dig into the conflation of SOA and cloud computing. "SOA is the way to do cloud," he said.
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