SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) plans to use its testing methodology to benchmark cloud deployments. The company is well known in the industry because of its benchmarks on computer systems. It maintains and develops benchmarks which are standardized to evaluate enterprise computing systems. A not-for-profit organization, SPEC recently formed a working group to create standards…

Terremark, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications Inc. and EMC join forces in a strategic global support for clients on cloud computing. This initiative aims to develop and distribute all products and services by cloud optimized storage technologies, backup and replication of EMC. In this context, Terremark intends to standardize its business on the private cloud…

After being criticized for locking developers into an ever rising cloud stack, retail giant Amazon has launched a brand new managed database services that include Elastic Beanstalk support, which is a boon to the large number of Microsoft-centric developers out there. It was only a few days ago that Amazon announced on their AWS blog…

Over the past five years, the cloud strategy of SAP revolved around Business ByDesign, a suite of management applications designed for medium-sized companies which offer demand oriented packages including financial solutions, human resources, supply chain management, business analysis and compliance management. When SAP announced the decision to buy SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion in December last…

Last February, the person responsible for VMware’s Cloud Foundry service, Derek Collison, has left the virtualization giant in order to start his own venture, with the main goal of further improving the service of making platforms. The idea behind his new project is to approach platforms not as tools meant for developers, but as proper…

One of the most contentious problems in the IT industry is the fact that applications have always been the driving force behind infrastructure. The advancements in hardware or infrastructure have always been held back or limited by the desire to be backwards compatible; from batch processing to web applications and even LAMP stack, all the…

The Gartner Executive Programs (EXP) survey shows that CIOs’ top two technology priorities are implementing virtualization and cloud computing technologies to reduce capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operating expenditures (OPEX) and increase agility and flexibility. Two-thirds of organizations have virtualized 50% or less of their infrastructure, and 29% say the primary roadblock is the lack of…

Aside from focusing on tablet computers for the corporate sector, Dell is moving towards cloud computing. For $1B, Dell has acquired Wyse Technology, a specialist in desktop virtualization. Wyse creates “thin clients” devices which are like virtual desktops connected to cloud servers. With this new acquisition, Dell can provide virtualized desktop environment for its customers…