Cloud Computing

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. Intel's Xeon processors and other data center technology...

The Los Angeles City Council voted 12-0 on Tuesday to adopt Google Apps, which include Gmail and other office software tools, for its 30,000 employees. The deal places Los Angeles among the vanguard of public sector operations relying on cloud-based productivity software. Plans call for installation...

Cloud computing is perhaps the most talked-about shift in the technology industry today. The concept of running applications from the cloud is quickly evolving from a futuristic vision to a commercially viable alternative for mainstream business. A recent survey of global 2,000 companies revealed th...

One of the biggest challenges in today's rapidly evolving cloud computing market, if you're an aspiring vendor, is how to clearly differentiate your offerings in an increasingly competitive environment. This is especially difficult because of the Web's knack for sucking the value out of everything i...

The free market is a wonderful thing. With regard to IT, I've always been impressed by the ability of vendors to rapidly identify and respond to market trends and customer demands. Whenever a new concept emerges onto the scene and a glimmer of interest begins to take hold, it's not long before we'...

In our global economy, where outsourcing is common and the Internet makes it possible to work from almost any location under the sun, it's not unusual for a company to find itself in the position of having a large portion of its staff in various locations outside the main offices. Particularly in th...

Innovations of the past few years provide an interesting hint at the future of e-commerce. Consider the following scenario: A CIO of a retail company gets off the phone, sits back, and begins to read his new monthly retail systems contract. The days of dealing with large development teams, countless...

Like every new generation, today's youth are unlike their predecessors, and they are poised to make a significant impact on society and business as they enter the workforce. While this may not seem like a revelation, what is important to keep in mind is who is pulling some of the strings that are al...

Today's volatile economy is pushing more companies to consider the merits of a virtual workplace for some or all of their employees. Often, however, the idea fails to go anywhere because neither managers nor their workers are sure how to get started. Also, attitudes among some old-school managers po...

If you ask anyone today to define "cloud computing," there is slim chance you will get agreement on an exact definition. It is one of those emerging technologies that everyone knows they want to get into, but no one seems to know why or what the real benefit is. There is a lot of promise, but very ...

Gmail's 100-minute outage Tuesday was the result of a cascading series of router failures caused by a combination of hardware maintenance and traffic policies, Google said. The failure of the third-most popular Web mail service left users around the world who access the system online instead of thro...

IBM is rolling out a public desktop cloud offering that it claims is the first subscription service of its kind. IBM Smart Business Desktop on the IBM Cloud "enables end-users to have the same capabilities of the traditional desktop, but with a thin client and delivered from the data center," said A...

One of my predictions for 2009 was that many of the new Obama administration's initiatives would promote and accelerate the growth of Software as a Service and cloud computing. What I underestimated at that time was how quickly government itself would embrace SaaS and cloud computing to improve its ...

Cloud computing and Software as a Service have emerged as the hot new technology trends in 2009. Companies from Microsoft to Big Blue to Oracle have announced their intentions to move away from their lucrative and proprietary models to address this fundamental shift in how software is delivered. The...

Microsoft is taking a new pricing approach with its upcoming Windows Azure cloud operating system: It will allow customers to pay on a per-use basis rather than calculating license fees according to number of processors or some other traditional measure. Microsoft reportedly will charge for the serv...