Microsoft has announced a series of changes to its certification program, designed to prepare today’s IT pros for the new challenges of the cloud and close the skills gap. And rather than correspond to specific products – an uphill struggle in a world where cloud apps can change from day-to-day – Microsoft is aiming more ...

Money doesn’t grow on trees, as parents everywhere are fond of saying, and all this cash apparently flowing into the cloud services market has to come from somewhere – namely, internal IT funding. Enter the emerging converged infrastructure (CI) market, as the big vendors trip over each other to simplify IT architectures. And the channel ...

Cloud application management solution provider ServiceMesh took today’s VMware Cloud Foundry one-year anniversary event as an opportunity to announce that it now supports the open source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and the VMware vFabric application platform. The end goal: Helping enterprises leverage DevOps methodologies to reap the benefits of a shorter development cycle and lower management costs. ...

Accenture has announced that it had become the first global IT service provider to launch a public cloud solution based on the Microsoft Windows Azure platform. Short version: Customers can now hire Accenture to design, build, deploy and manage cloud-hosted applications from one source. This deal covers both Accenture and Avanade, its Microsoft-focused systems integration ...

The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) is relying on Atos, Europe’s largest IT services firm, to make sure that everything at the 2012 Summer Olympics goes off without a hitch – at least when it comes to technology. And just like an athlete preparing for the games,  Atos is practicing and ...

Amazon S3, the storage offering from cloud industry giant Amazon Web Services, continues to show staggering growth with the announcement that at the end of the first quarter of 2012, it was storing no less than 905 billion objects. It’s an impressive feat – and it turns up the pressure on competitors and ecosystem partners ...

Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) isn’t just my new band name – it’s both the name of and concept behind Canonical’s new physical server provisioning tool, bringing “cloud-like semantics for on-demand capacity” and simplifying the deployment of big data and cloud services even as data center design reaches “hyperscale” density. MAAS, available for testing in the forthcoming Ubuntu ...

Analytics startup Kontagent is breaking the mold with the availability of kSuite DataMine, a SaaS offering that enables analysts to use Hive-powered, SQL-like queries to get data out of a Hadoop deployment. It’s meant to give insights that can help monetize mobile gaming – but if the idea catches on, it could change everything. In ...

Call it fate, call it synchronicity, call it well-planned, but whatever you do, don’t call it a comeback. Just as Citrix gave its CloudStack platform to Apache and left the still-fledgling OpenStack Foundation in the lurch, OpenStack has shown it’s far from defeated with the launch of Essex, the fifth major release of the open ...

A new Forrester survey of IT pros suggests that there’s a clean split in the social enterprise space between “haves” and “have-nots” – 49 percent of respondents say that 2012 will see investments in social business tools. And of those who are going social, only 19 percent say that they’re not expanding their use. Enter ...