Oracle will tour EMEA cities this year, starting off from Bratislava on the 25th of January. 

Cloud experts should be sharing their best practices, reference architectures and customer care cases during the full-day event. 

The company did a similar tour last year, if on a much smaller scale. 

Oracle's Exalogic application server appliance should feature at the events, alongside information on the upcoming Fusion Applications. 

Go Oracle Enterprise Cloud Summit 

A workshop at Channel Focus Europe explored the topic, "Is Cloud an Opportunity or Threat?"

Experienced industry channel managers concluded: no matter if it's an opportunity or a threat, the channel faces transformation in either case. Channel might be dragged into the transformation kicking and screaming.. or channel can face the cloud head-on..But like it or not, the computer industry is facing a major overhaul in the way we do business.

One value-added distributor declares cloud an opportunity in change management, insisting his company and Read more...

EMC plans to shorten the time cloud storage platforms take to be set up through its Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform.

The company says its solution-- a software-only system working only on Atmos software and hardware-- deploys cloud storage platforms in days, not months.

The Atmos platform allows customers to create and monitor accounts without any IT personell or service provider intervention. It also enables user identity provisioning, chargeback (for private clouds) and billing integration (for private and public clouds). 

Meanwhile a metering module Read more...

The Centre of Economics and Business Research (CEBR) reports the EU's top 5 economies could save up to €763B over the next 5 years-- through widespread cloud computing adoption. 

It also estimates the switch to cloud could create around 2.4 million jobs-- however some traditional IT staff may be redeployed to bolster cloud service support. 

The findings say rapid cloud computing uptake will make services cheaper as offerings mature and the economies of scale take hold. 

Gartner backs the findings and predicts 20% of companies won't be owning their Read more...