Thursday 11 March 2010
NetSuite Inc., a leading vendor of cloud computing business management software suites, today announced that technology advisory firm Nucleus Research has completed a survey of NetSuite customers and concluded that NetSuite customers are highly satisfied, loyal, and enjoying substantial business value from using NetSuite. The survey was conducted independently by Nucleus in late 2009 from its own due diligence and without NetSuite’s involvement, and the findings are available in Nucleus Research Note J96, “NetSuite’s Resilient Subscriber Base.” To read the Nucleus Research Note J96, visit www.netsuite.com/nucleusresearch. For more information about NetSuite customers, visit www.netsuite.com/customers.
Nucleus polled NetSuite customers to gauge their success and satisfaction with their decision to entrust mission-critical business functionality to cloud computing. Ninety percent of the customers surveyed rated their satisfaction as four or five out of five — satisfied or very satisfied, and no company rated their satisfaction below three. When asked to elaborate on the reasons for their satisfaction, NetSuite’s ability to drive cost reduction was mentioned as a key driver. By offering tremendous scalability and breadth of functionality, with little to no IT expertise required to install and manage, NetSuite has earned long-term satisfaction and loyalty. “Because the application has been validated by users as an effective tool in cost reduction, deployment footprints at existing customers are more likely to increase rather than decrease,” wrote Nucleus in the report.
“It’s wonderful to hear Nucleus Research confirm that NetSuite’s world-class functionality using a cost effective, customer-empowering cloud computing suite is appreciated by our more than 6,600 corporate clients,” said Stephen Wolfe, SVP of Worldwide Support at NetSuite.
By providing efficient, intuitive, and powerful enterprise suite applications without the overhead of on-premise solutions, NetSuite enables companies to avoid best-of-breed integration hassles as well as interoperability conflicts. The lack of high up-front costs enables companies to deploy NetSuite more quickly, often without a major capital expenditures process. Nucleus credits this customer-friendly approach with much of NetSuite’s success in attracting and retaining customers, and notes that it bodes poorly for legacy rivals. “The findings are bad news for traditional on-premise suites such as SAP,” Nucleus wrote. “It is one thing for SAP or Oracle to have SaaS-based rivals. But a SaaS-based rival that also provides integration-friendly enterprise applications such as CRM or financials is an even bigger threat.”
The Nucleus survey findings are the perfect punctuation to conclude 2009 – a year full of accolades for NetSuite. In the summer of 2009, Gartner Dataquest released figures showing that NetSuite has joined the ranks of North America’s top ten ERP vendors by revenue. In November, IDC awarded NetSuite its SMB Excellence Award in Software as a Service and Cloud Computing. Strategic advisory service ISM Inc. recognized NetSuite and NetSuite CRM with a Top 15 CRM Small & Medium Business Software Award for 2009. Customer Interaction Solutions magazine named NetSuite CRM as a recipient of a 2009 CRM Excellence Award. And in October, British businesses named NetSuite the top Enterprise Accounting Software vendor in Sift Media’s Software Satisfaction Awards 2009.
The reputation for satisfaction and customer loyalty is another compelling reason why companies of all sizes looking for a powerful, integrated cloud computing business management software solution are turning to NetSuite.
For more information about NetSuite Inc., please visit www.netsuite.com.
Enterprise communications and networking have become increasingly complicated with accelerated demand for cloud computing, virtualization, mobility, and unified communications. To understand how companies have managed their IT departments to prepare for these challenges, Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company (NYSE: HHS) has just released a new report entitled “Recovering with Telecom Lifecycle Management: Transforming Communications for Top-Line Growth in 2010.”
This research explored the telecom lifecycle management strategies of over 750 organizations throughout 2009. Telecom lifecycle management is defined as the cradle-to-grave management of network and telecom infrastructure starting with strategic planning and business alignment to the eventual disconnection, replacement, and recycling of used assets and services.
The top 20% of respondents to this study were able to reduce costs by 16%, meet 87% of their service level agreements, and provide advanced communications capabilities to 45% of their organization. In short, they reduced costs, achieved superior support, and had greater propagation of advanced technologies such as video, unified communications, and mobility compared to their counterparts. Companies that defined best practices were also twice as likely as lower performing firms to focus on communications deployments that supported top-line revenue growth, rather than focus specifically on cost reduction.
“As companies make strategic investments in their computing and communications infrastructure, they must make sure that they can actually manage the technologies deployed,” said Hyoun Park, research analyst, Aberdeen Group. “If organizations don’t know what they have now and how they are using their communications assets and services, they have no chance of fully utilizing new technologies to get the value and productivity that they expect.”
Top-achieving companies adopted a number of capabilities and technologies that prepared them for new communications investments, including complete archived records of communications usage, visibility to asset depreciation and disputed services, and adoption of a consolidated telecom expense management solution that provided a complete view to telecom and network spend and inventory. By showing how organizations successfully integrated telecom lifecycle management into their IT and operational departments, this report will show the enterprise how telecom and network departments must prepare for future communications deployments.
A complimentary copy of this report is made available due in part by the following underwriters: AnchorPoint, a division of MTS and Tangoe. To obtain a complimentary copy of the report, visit: http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?cid=6013
Visit Research.Aberdeen.com for additional access to complimentary Information Technology Research.
About Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company
Aberdeen provides fact-based research and market intelligence that delivers demonstrable results. Having queried more than 30,000 companies in the past two years, Aberdeen is positioned to educate users to action: driving market awareness, creating demand, enabling sales, and delivering meaningful return-on-investment analysis. As the trusted advisor to the global technology markets, corporations turn to Aberdeen for insights that drive decisions.
As a Harte-Hanks Company, Aberdeen plays a key role of putting content in context for the global direct and targeted marketing company. Aberdeen’s analytical and independent view of the “customer optimization” process of Harte-Hanks (Information - Opportunity - Insight - Engagement - Interaction) extends the client value and accentuates the strategic role Harte-Hanks brings to the market. For additional information, visit Aberdeen or call (617) 854-5200, or to learn more about Harte-Hanks, call (800) 456-9748.
© 2010 Aberdeen Group, Inc., a Harte-Hanks Company
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Hosting.com, the leading provider of managed hosting, cloud hosting and colocation solutions and a strategic VMware vCloud(TM) partner, today announced multiple enhancements to the Cloud Enterprise environment driven by significant market demand. Access to high performance SAN (EMC) storage, increased computer resources (8GB of RAM now 32 and 4vCPU now 
and support for seven additional operating systems (including RedHat and Windows Datacenter 2008 R2) highlight the enhancements.
Cloud Enterprise customers can now increase their virtual machine resources to 32 GB of RAM and 8 virtual CPUs via the Hosting.com portal. Companies deploying demanding applications can use Hosting.com’s secure cloud solutions for their test, development and production needs.
In addition, Cloud Enterprise customers pushing upper disk i/o rates have the ability to move data to high performance storage on Hosting.com’s EMC SAN. SAN storage is ideal for customers seeking security, functionality and enterprise-class reliability from the latest storage technologies at mid-market prices.
“Our cloud solutions are frequently used to host robust applications, databases and web servers that require additional resources and storage,” noted Hosting.com Cloud Product Manager Fred Strelzoff. “Increasingly, Hosting.com clients want to migrate their dedicated hosting or colocation solutions into a cloud hosting environment. The support of nine total operating systems eliminates the need to migrate operating systems and makes the migration process less costly and painful.”
Last week, Hosting.com announced VMware Virtual Machine upload availability for customers to migrate their own virtual machines or VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk Format) files to Hosting.com’s Cloud Enterprise and Cloud Dedicated solutions. Customers now have the flexibility and portability to move their virtual machines, either from their own environment or another host, into one of Hosting.com’s Cloud Super Sites.
Hosting.com’s portfolio of Cloud Hosting Solutions include Cloud Enterprise, Cloud Dedicated, Cloud VPS, and vCloud Express - solutions that reduce costs, improve efficiency and provide extreme flexibility to businesses of all sizes. Hosting.com has made significant investments in enterprise-class technologies such as VMware, EMC, Dell, Juniper, F5, and Intel to deliver a robust, standards-based cloud infrastructure to clients demanding unparalleled performance and security.
Operating Systems now supported include Windows 2003 Enterprise 32-Bit and 64-Bit, Windows 2008 Data Center R1 32-Bit, Windows 2008 Data Center R2 64-Bit, Windows 2008 Data Center 64-Bit, Cent OS 32-Bit and 64-Bit, Redhat Enterprise 32-Bit and Redhat Enterprise 64-Bit.
About Hosting.com
Hosting.com provides enterprise colocation, cloud computing, dedicated hosting, managed hosting, disaster recovery, and business continuance services to a global customer base demanding a high level of security, reliability, and responsiveness. Hosting.com monitors, manages, and enhances the Web-based platforms of Web 2.0 companies, software as a service (SaaS) providers, content distribution networks (CDN), and medium to large enterprises whose Web presence is crucial and high availability mandatory.
Hosting.com currently operates SAS 70 Type II certified datacenters in Irvine, CA; Louisville, KY; Newark, DE; San Francisco, CA; and Denver, CO.
All Hosting.com products and services are supported by 24×7x365 live expert technical support through toll-free telephone, email, and online chat.
VMware and VMware vSphere are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.
SOURCE Hosting.com
Cloud Slam 10
TORONTO–(BW)– The Cloud Slam Conference, which brings together leading companies and visionaries in business, technology, and cloud computing to showcase the hottest opportunities for driving profitability through sustainability, today announced call for proposals. Taking place March 23-25, 2010 as virtual event , the conference is also proud to announce it has gathered more than 700 attendees passionate about cloud computing. These announcements reflect a growing trend involving companies that have committed to developing best practice cloud strategies for the emerging global economy that requires innovative, viable and profitable models for business success.
You are cordially invited to participate in Cloud Slam 2010 through paper submission, a workshop or a special session organization, a tutorial, an invited speech, a demo, a poster, an exhibit, a panel discussion, whichever sounds more appropriate and convenient to you. To get more information visit http://cloudslam10.com/content/call-proposals.
The conference will include invited presentations by experts from academia, industry, and government as well as contributed paper presentations describing original work on the current state of research cloud computing, their use in business, their design, performance and use, and their applications.
There will also be tutorial sessions, workshops, special sessions, demos, posters, panel discussions. Conference sponsorships are welcomed. To sponsor Cloud Slam or get additional information about event, contact Khazret Sapenov at 510-984-2312 or at sponsors@cloudslam.org.
Follow the latest news and updates related to Cloud Slam 2010 on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/cloudslam.
About Cloud Slam
The Cloud Slam Conference, which brings together leading companies and visionaries in business, technology, and cloud computing to showcase the hottest opportunities for driving profitability through sustainability, today announced call for proposals. Taking place March 23-25, 2010 as virtual event , the conference is also proud to announce it has gathered more than 700 attendees passionate about cloud computing. These announcements reflect a growing trend involving companies that have committed to developing best practice cloud strategies for the emerging global economy that requires innovative, viable and profitable models for business success.
The latest in enterprise 2.0 software, building a collaborative workplace, social software tools, employee engagement in collaborative workplaces to discussing the latest state of cloud computing, its benefits, technical and security challenges, how the applications can be build, controlled and managed in a cloud-based environment are key issues debated at the Cloud Computing Congress Europe (http://www.cloudcomputingcongress.com) & Enterprise Social Media Europe (http://www.enterprisesocialmedia.net ) on the 15/16 March, Olympia, London.
It is a conference designed for the CIO, CTO, Head of Internal Communications, Enterprise architect, Data Storage managers, Head of IT, Government IT decision makers and more, allowing businesses to learn about the latest in enterprise social media apps, and cloud computing deployments – their successes and failures, and how far the market has come so far.
You can join the Linkedin group on the event web site http://tinyurl.com/ydll8q2 to network with other attendees, or follow the latest event activity on the Cloud Computing Congress Twitter account – http://twitter.com/cloud_comp_news
The 2 days of conference will feature industry leading speakers, including:
• David Wilde, CIO, Westminster City Council
• Dominic Burch, Head of Corporate Comms and New Media, ASDA
• Paul James, CIO, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, MOD
• Anthony Frost, Head of Corporate Communications, Santander
• Evangelos Kotsovinos, Vice President, Morgan Stanley
• Kostas Tsatsaris, CTO and Director, Strategy and Architecture, HM Revenue and Customs
• Robert Johnson, Strategic Consultant, COI Strategic Consultancy
• Henri Reinbolt, CIO, Greenwich Council
The Cloud Computing Congress & Enterprise Social Media are just two of the conference streams at the Social Media World Forum event http://www.socialmedia-forum.com, a leading social media event that brings together all facets of industry connected to social media. The event features 4 conference streams: Social Media, Mobile Social Media, Enterprise Social Media and Social TV.
“In a market such as Cloud Computing & Enterprise building trust and relationships between leading technology providers and clients is key to moving the cloud debate forward” comments Ian Johnson, MD Six Degrees Events. “By integrating the Cloud Computing Congress with Enterprise Social Media (http://www.enterpriseseries.com ), we build a networking environment that not only focuses on application building and we 2.0 in the workplace, but how services can be managed in a cloud environment.”
The Cloud Computing Series (http://www.cloudcomputingseries.com ) will offer the Enterprise market the chance to come along to free exhibitions and meet the various people at the show, and interact with an event with 4 conference streams. One large connected exhibition is running alongside this conference, which will be open over the 15th/16th March 2010.
Future events are being held in New York in June, and Singapore in September.
Industry tracker Gartner forecast on Monday that revenue from Internet-based “cloud computing” will top 14 billion dollars annually by the end of 2013.
Revenue from businesses using software programs hosted online as services in the Internet “cloud” should tally 7.5 billion dollars this year, a 17.7 percent leap from 2008, according to Gartner.
The trend toward cloud computing, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), has accelerated during the economic crisis.
Cloud computing lets firms essentially rent text, spreadsheet, calendar or other programs as needed and avoid the cost or buying, installing, updating and maintaining software on workplace machines.
“The adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve within the enterprise application markets,” Gartner research director Sharon Mertz said, referring to business computer networks.
Vendors are responding to the growing market by expanding the kinds of business computing services hosted online, according to Mertz.
Microsoft on Monday announced a pact with Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom Co. (CHT) to collaborate on cloud computing services.
The companies will work together to “deliver a new generation of seamless, connected experiences that bring the power of cloud computing to consumers and to business” in Taiwan, said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.
Joint efforts will include a datacenter optimized to host online services for businesses and new cloud offerings for users of personal computers, smartphones, and televisions, Ballmer said in a statement.
“We hope that our strategic alliance with Microsoft will result in a more convenient mobile experience for consumers,” said CHT chief executive Shyue-Ching Lu.
“The combination of Microsoft’s innovative technologies and CHT’s resources is intended to accelerate the application of cloud technologies on actual services, bringing consumers convenient services and fresh user experiences.”
Microsoft’s fortunes were built on selling packaged software such as Windows operating systems and Office work programs but the US technology colossus has been gradually adapting to an inexorable market shift to the cloud.
Amazon and danish ComArchive have entered into a unique partnership. The deal makes it easier, safer and cheaper than ever before for companies of all sizes to get a highly professional e-mail archiving solution. This is facilitated by combining the market’s best e-mail archiving software with Amazon Web Services’ groundbreaking Cloud Computing.
Amazon Web Services is the world’s leading provider of cloud computing, EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), - a solution seeing rocketing growth in these years. Cloud computing gives the customer processing power, bandwidth and data storage at Amazon on a needs basis, and you only pay for what you use.
Danish ComArchive in partnership with Amazon Web Services is now offering a turnkey answer to companies’ e-mail archiving needs. This will help companies all over the globe quickly retrieve their old e-mail correspondence and generally keep tabs on large volumes of business-critical e-mails.
Installed in just 10 minutes
”The smart thing is that you can log on to Amazon, create a server and have a comprehensive and safe archiving solution up and running in the space of 10 minutes,” says Svend Frandsen, CEO, ComArchive.
Amazon offers a vast array of server configurations with software that has already been defined and is ready for use. As a user, you just purchase access and from there on, it is very simple to start up a server using an image that you choose on the basis of your own needs.
ComArchive’s new solution consists of a total of six ready server images. Which of the six virtual servers you decide to start up at Amazon as a customer is determined by your need for security and computing power. A common feature of the six server images is that they contain fully operational version of ComArchive\’s e-mail archiving software which is identical to the solution you can download from www.ComArchive.com
Natural consequence of the virtualisation wave
The advantage of e-mail archiving on a virtual Amazon EC2 server is the installation speed, the security and the low price:
”Over the past few years, companies have opened their eyes to the fact that virtualisation holds great potential. We have been at the forefront of this trend, and we can now see that virtualisation is followed by a migration of servers to safer and less expensive providers - and Amazon\’s EC2 concept is second to none in this field,\” says Svend Frandsen. The CEO is pleased with the great interest in the concept, because the solution is already in use at several companies, including Balslev A/S.
”Security gets top priority at Amazon and with the help of ComArchive, we have added the Amazon server to our corporate network with high security and VPN accessibility\”, says CIO Michael Frendorff, Balslev A/S.
Great financial potential for everyone involved
”Balslev has obtained a server-based archiving solution which can be operated for less than a dollar per employee and month. If we compare this cost with the expenses of hosting your own e-mail archiving, it becomes clear that we’re looking at a highly competitive product,” says Svend Frandsen.
The potential inherent in the collaboration with Amazon is very great indeed for ComArchive, according to the company’s CEO. The market for e-mail archiving solutions is expected to reach USD 1 billion in 2011, and ComArchive\’s partnership with Amazon gives the company a considerable technological edge.
Related Searches:
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Press contact:
CEO, Svend Frandsen
+45 70 20 10 50
+45 21 92 93 74
sf@comarchive.com
Web hosting company Rackspace Hosting Inc plans to continue investing in cloud computing and is closing the gap with Amazon.com, its top executive said.
“Cloud computing” — one of the hottest buzz words in Silicon Valley — refers to a variety of ways in which technology companies offer computing services over the Web from remote data centers, seemingly from the cloud of the Internet.
Rackspace manages customer hardware and software with its managed hosting service, its biggest segment, and lets customers host websites and rent “virtual” servers through its cloud business.
“We believe that the cloud is a game-changing paradigm shift,” Chief Executive Lanham Napier said in an interview with Reuters.
The cloud business, which contributed 10 % to revenue in the third quarter, has been growing in excess of 100 % per year.
“Anytime we are having that kind of a growth rate I suspect we will be making outsize investments, trying to get ahead of that growth, which will put pressure on margins,” he said.
“This year we have made significant investments in the cloud business while increasing our aggregate margin by 500 basis points,” Napier said.
“As cloud grows at a high rate there is naturally some pressure on margin, but we’ve been able to offset that with higher levels of profitability from our traditional hosting business,” he said.
In the third quarter, Rackspace recorded adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization margins of 31.7 %, flat quarter over quarter. Its cloud business grew 17 % from the second quarter.
Another area of growth for the company, which has historically focussed on small and medium-sized business, has been the large enterprise managed hosting segment, where its rivals include IBM and Hewlett-Packard.
Napier said the impact of more business from large enterprises on its margins was likely positive.
The company, which competes with Amazon.com, Joyent and GoGrid in the cloud market, has been faring well against rivals, Napier said.
“We have increased our competitiveness in 2009. Relative to certain competitors, we’re absolutely gaining market share,” Napier said.
“A year ago, Amazon was incredibly far ahead of us,” Napier said. “This year we’ve closed the gap.”
Shares of the San Antonio, Texas-based company closed down 4 % on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday. The shares have risen 233 % since the start of the year.
Related Searches:
cloud computing platform, clouds computing, hp cloud computing, windows cloud computing, cloud computing application, cloud computing providers, cloud computing center
Platform Computing, the leader in cluster,
grid and cloud management software, is expanding cloud computing capabilities
for high performance computing (HPC) with two new offerings. The company today
announced the release of Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster, a product that
dynamically changes the operating systems and personalities of compute nodes
managed by Platform LSF and Platform Symphony. It effectively increases
application capacity and resource utilization by consolidating heterogeneous
application clusters and allows organizations to build an internal cloud for
HPC. Platform Computing also announced new cloud bursting capabilities that
will permit Platform HPC customers to seamlessly redirect peak workloads from
their internal HPC infrastructure to external cloud resources on a pay-per-use
basis in order to optimally meet service levels. Together, these offerings
let HPC users take advantage of cloud computing by utilizing both internal
private resources and external public cloud offerings.
“Our 17 years in the HPC industry have proven to us that the demand for
compute resources will continue to grow exponentially, driving organizations
to seek ways to maximize their existing infrastructures to meet increasing
capacity needs,” said Peter Nichol, General Manager, HPC Business Unit,
Platform Computing. “It’s clear that the future of HPC lies in cloud
computing, which is why Platform is partnering with cloud leaders and
developing its solution set to allow organizations to take full advantage of
their existing infrastructure investments while capitalizing on the endless
capacity of the cloud.”
Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster
Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster is a new product offering in the Platform ISF
family that enables organizations to create an internal cloud for running HPC
applications and is integrated with Platform LSF and Platform Symphony. The
product dynamically changes the operating system and associated application
stack on demand thereby maximizing resource usage and service levels based on
workload. It does this by automatically provisioning Linux and Windows
operating systems from bare metal or initiating the right guest operating
system within a virtual machine container on the compute nodes upon
application demand.
To ensure application availability and guaranteed performance, many
enterprises employ multiple HPC clusters, each assigned to run a specific
application that requires either a Linux or Windows environment. Inevitably
this results in cluster silos and “cluster sprawls” with low utilization and
high management costs. Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster consolidates the
previous application silos into an internal cloud environment that dynamically
provisions Linux and Windows operating systems based on application demand to
maximize resource usage and service levels. Utilization rates of separate
server clusters typically ranging between 40 - 50 percent - can be increased
to 80 - 90 percent.
“While the 30 - 50 percent improvement in cluster utilization rates speaks for
itself, it’s the fact that we’re leveraging concepts from cloud computing and
applying them to HPC cluster silos for optimization, that really demonstrates
Platform’s commitment to driving the next wave of HPC management software,”
said Jingwen Wang, Vice President Products, Platform Computing. “Our HPC
customers in industries such as research, oil and gas, industrial
manufacturing, and financial services will benefit dramatically from the
improved HPC infrastructure agility by saving on hardware and operational
costs, maximizing HPC resource utilization and improving their end-user
productivity.”
The Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster is available immediately and can be
purchased directly from Platform or its resellers. For additional information
please visit
http://www.platform.com/Products/platform-isf/platform-isf-adaptive-cluster.
Cloud Bursting Capability
Delivered as a solution in the Platform ISF family, the new cloud bursting
capability allows Platform HPC customers to access external cloud resources to
offload peak workloads from internal HPC infrastructure on a pay-per-use
basis. The new solution allows HPC users to use external resources while
operating in a managed, private cloud environment as required by enterprise
governance and compliance regulations. Platform is working with external cloud
service providers to publish a machine image of the Platform HPC management
software stack, which includes Platform LSF, Platform Symphony, Platform
Cluster Manager and the new Platform MPI, to ensure Platform customers have a
single, user-friendly interface to transparently leverage both their internal
enterprise infrastructure for HPC and the external cloud for overflow.
With economic pressure forcing existing infrastructure to handle workload
demands that often exceed capacity, many Platform customers are investigating
alternative infrastructure models, such as cloud, to more effectively
provision for peak workload spikes.
About Platform Computing
Platform Computing is the leader in cluster, grid and cloud management
software - serving more than 2,000 of the world’s most demanding
organizations. For 17 years, our workload and resource management solutions
have delivered IT responsiveness and lower costs for enterprise and HPC
applications. Platform has strategic relationships with Cray, Dell, HP, IBM,
Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, and SAS. Visit www.platform.com.
IBM today launched the
IBM Cloud Academy, a global forum for educators, researchers and information
technology (IT) personnel from the education industry to pursue cloud
computing initiatives, develop skills and share best practices for reducing
operating costs while improving quality and access to education.
IBM announced at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference that 17 educational
institutions worldwide are the first to participate in the Cloud Academy.
United States-based institutions include George Mason University; Georgia
State University; Gwinnett County Public Schools; Marist College; New York
University; North Carolina State University; Pike County Schools; The
Executive Leadership Foundation’s Technology Transfer Project - a
collaborative effort for Historically Black Colleges and Universities; and the
University of Maryland, Baltimore County. International institutions include
Beijing University of Technology in China; Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar
(CMU-Q), Qatar University (QU) and Texas A&M University at Qatar (TAMUQ) in
Qatar; Ecole normale superieure de Lyon in France; Ozyegin University in
Turkey; Nanyang Technical University in Singapore; and Victoria University in
Australia.
“Cloud computing makes it easier for those in the education industry,
including students, faculty and administrators, to gain immediate access to a
wide range of new educational resources and research applications and tools,”
said Michael King, vice president, IBM Global Education Industry. “The IBM
Cloud Academy will advance awareness and adoption of cloud computing,
including best practices for education and research institutions.”
IBM Cloud Academy Advocates Collaboration and Innovation
The IBM Cloud Academy will enable these institutions and other participants to
collaborate using an IBM-managed cloud, available via the Internet, lowering
barriers to entry for the development and contribution of subject matter
expertise. Through the Academy, members can create working groups on areas of
interest to the education industry, “jam” on new innovations for clouds in
education-related areas with IBM developers, work jointly on technical
projects across institutions, share research findings, and exchange new ideas
for research. Participants are also encouraged to innovate to further advance
cloud computing by preparing education-focused open source software for
clouds, integrating cloud provisioning and de-provisioning services,
validating content for compliance with accessibility standard, and leveraging
IBM cloud offerings for teaching, learning, research and administration.
A vital aspect of the IBM Cloud Academy will be the development of new
technologies and research methods. The IBM Cloud Academy gives participants
the ability to work with elite researchers in IBM labs throughout the world,
many of whom are working on cloud initiatives in education, to extend the
boundaries of cloud computing in education.
IBM will also collaborate with participants of the IBM Cloud Academy on
integrating cloud technologies into their campus and district infrastructures,
including IBM’s virtualized server and storage hardware, Tivoli Provisioning
and Automation software for management of cloud environments, campus and
student computer lab management with the Virtual Computing Laboratory project,
and cloud integration services from IBM’s global services organizations.
IBM’s Cloud Academy leverages IBM’s Academy of Technology, whose membership
consists of IBM top technical leaders from around the world who are working in
research, hardware and software development, manufacturing, and services.
Participants will have access to IBM’s public cloud services, including
LotusLive for administration collaboration, IBM Desktop Cloud Services,
delivery services for Virtual Computing Labs, and Corporate Citizenship
Education Projects, such as PowerUp, Forbidden City and TryScience.
One of the tools hosted by LotusLive is the online version of Innov8 2.0,
IBM’s flagship ’serious game,’ which is integrated with BPM BlueWorks. Shown
at EDUCAUSE, Innov8 2.0 is being used by more than 100 universities worldwide
and features real-world business scenarios where the goals are to maximize
profitability and customer satisfaction while minimizing carbon emissions.
Challenges in the game include managing a supply chain, reducing congestion in
a city, and optimizing call center queues.
IBM’s Cloud Computing and Education Initiatives
The IBM Cloud Academy represents a continuation of the cloud computing
projects that IBM has initiated over the past two years. These programs
provide a forum for collaboration, research and innovation, as well as a
showcase for the work and projects IBM has completed with the education
industry. Some highlights include:
– In October of 2007, IBM and Google teamed up to help university
students
gain the skills needed to program cloud applications.
– The two companies have since joined forces with the National Science
Foundation (NSF) to enable more students to participate in the
IBM/Google Cloud Computing University Initiative through grants
provided
from NSF through its Cluster Exploratory (CLuE) program.
– IBM continues to work with universities and educational institutions
worldwide, giving students access to cloud computing technologies to
help them complete research projects that aid in the development of
remote regions and socio-economic conditions all over the globe.
The charter members of the IBM Cloud Academy will work with IBM to define the
final structure of the academy, which will open for general membership early
in 2010.
For more information on IBM’s cloud computing university initiatives, please
visit www.ibm.com/university/cloud.
For more information on IBM cloud computing, please visit www.ibm.com/cloud.
Media Contact(s):
Theo Chisholm Hanna Smigala
IBM Media Relations IBM Media Relations
(914) 765-6144 (914) 766-4439
theoc@us.ibm.com smigala@us.ibm.com
SOURCE IBM
Theo Chisholm, +1-914-765-6144, theoc@us.ibm.com; or Hanna Smigala,
+1-914-766-4439, smigala@us.ibm.com, both of IBM Media Relations
