When tech people talk about "the cloud," it often comes across as an abstract computer concept. But a visit to a village in India shows how cloud computing can bring about enormous change in far-flung places, and quite literally save lives.

On Wednesday, at the Fortune Brainstorm Health summit in San Diego, cardiologist Charit Bhograj spoke to a medical counterpart in India who was in the course of treating a rural man with chest pains.

As the doctors explained, it was recently impossible to offer advanced heart treatment in poor villages: It cost too much to administer an Electrocardiogram (EKG) and, even if you could get an EKG, the local physician was not in a position to interpret it.

This situation has changed dramatically, however, with the advent of portable EKG devices, specialized software and cloud computing.

In the course of a 10-minute presentation, the audience watched as the physician in India took an EKG reading from the man with chest pains, and relayed the results to Bhograj in San Diego. Bhograj then assessed the results and typed his advice into a tool called Tricog, which the Indian doctor then downloaded via a smartphone app.

This arrangement, which relied on a EKG device supplied by GE Health, represents a striking advancement in technology. But it also has huge health implications.

"It will change the odds of a heart attack taking your life from 80% to an 80% chance you will survive," said Bhograj, explaining how cloud-based medical services are transforming cardiac health in rural areas.

And according to Vikram Damodaran, the chief product officer of Sustainable Health Solutions at GE Healthcare, the transformation is only beginning. He explained that GE has made investments worth $300 million in the public health system in recent years, and that the sort of services appearing in rural India are also expanding to Southeast Asia and Africa.

All of this confirms an observation this morning by Fortune President Alan Murraythat there's an incredible burst of innovation taking place in the health care industry right now.

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How Cloud Computing Is Turning the Tide on Heart Attacks - Fortune

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May 2017, Vol. 5, No. 3

In healthcare, some illnesses can be cured quickly; some can't. But before applying a proper antidote, several factors need to be considered about the patient in question. The same can be said when hospital CIOs and IT pros work to formulate a strategy for moving their computing processes to the cloud, sometimes by choice and sometimes out of necessity. Critical issues need to be weighed, such as security of patient records, the cost to vacate the premises, how much information really needs to be stored in the cloud and actual savings to hospitals as a result of the move.

Our cover story examines these issues through the eyes of hospital CIOs, who see healthcare cloud computing delivering noticeable improvements in security, patient care and cost savings. They're learning to embrace the benefits of moving in part or whole to the cloud as they choose from among the various private, public and hybrid options.

In another feature, we look at the prevalence of mobile devices throughout the hospital community. They can cause migraines for CIOs and IT departments trying to maintain security with healthcare cloud computing safeguards. That's not to mention the inherent resistance IT departments can encounter from doctors, nurses and other hospital staff who share patient healthcare information over their personal smartphones and tablets.

Also in this issue, we look at some steps hospitals will need to take, including revamping IT teams, to gain full advantage of the cloud's benefits. Sometimes baby steps can go a lot farther than giant steps.

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Hospital CIOs see benefits of healthcare cloud computing - TechTarget

Verizon has announced it is selling its cloud and managed hosting service to IBM, alongside working with the Armonk giant on a number of strategic initiatives involving networking and cloud services.

This is a unique cooperation between two tech leaders to support global organisations as they look to fully realise the benefits of their cloud computing investments, said George Fischer, SVP and group president of Verizon Enterprise Solutions (VES) in a statement.

Last February, Verizon told customers in an email that it was shutting down any virtual servers running on Public Cloud or Reserved Performance Cloud Spaces on April 12. The company clarified in a statement to CloudTech that it was discontinuing its cloud service that accepts credit card payments, however John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research, saw things differently.

Telcos generally are having to take a back seat on cloud and especially on public cloud services, he told this publication last year. They do not have the focus and the data centre footprint to compete effectively with the hyperscale cloud providers, so they are tending to drop back into subsidiary roles as partners or on-ramps to the leading cloud companies.

How prescient that statement is now. IBM would certainly be classified as one of the hyperscale operators; alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google, the four leading players continue to grow more quickly than the overall market, according to Synergys figures.

Whats more, various links between the two companies means this move makes sense. John Considine, general manager at IBM Cloud Infrastructure Services, was previously CTO of Verizon Terremark. The companies have also partnered on various initiatives, including in the creation of Verizons cognitive customer experience platform, built using IBMs cloud and infrastructure as a service offerings.

Our customers want to improve application performance while streamlining operations and securing information in the cloud, Fischer added. VES is now well positioned to provide those solutions through intelligent networking, managed IT services and business communications.

Verizon said it was notifying affected customers directly, though adding it did not expect any immediate impact to their services. The transaction is expected to close later this year.

Excerpt from:

Verizon sells cloud services to IBM in 'unique cooperation between ... - Cloud Tech

Dan's Take

The company made a barrage of announcements at its recent Summit show.

Red Hat has made a number of announcements at its user group conference, Red Hat Summit. The announcements ranged from the announcement of OpenShift.io to facilitate the creation of software as a service applications, pre-built application runtimes to facilitate creation of OpenShift-based workloads, an index to help enterprises build more reliable container-based computing environments, an update to the Red Hat Gluster storage virtualization platform allowing it to be used in an AWS computing environment, and, of course, an announcement of a Red Hat/Amazon Web Services partnership.

Red Hat summarized the announcements as follows:

The announcements targeted a number of industry hot buttons, including containers, rapid application development, storage virtualization and cloud computing. As with other announcements in the recent past, the company is integrating multiple open source projects and creating commercial-grade software products designed to provide an easy-to-use, reliable and maintainable enterprise computing environment.

In previous announcements, Red Hat has pointed out that it has certified Red Hat software executing in both Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure cloud computing environments. So, the company can claim to support a broad portfolio of enterprise computing environments.

These announcements will be of the most interest to large enterprises since they are the ones most likely to adopt these products. These tools might be used by independent software vendors (ISVs) to create IT solutions for smaller firms as well, leading to potential impact on some small to medium size business.

About the Author

Daniel Kusnetzky, a reformed software engineer and product manager, founded Kusnetzky Group LLC in 2006. He's literally written the book on virtualization and often comments on cloud computing, mobility and systems software. He has been a business unit manager at a hardware company and head of corporate marketing and strategy at a software company.

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Red Hat's New Products Centered Around Cloud Computing, Containers - Virtualization Review

Mumbai: Known for its Photoshop and Illustrator software packages used primarily by design professionals, Adobe Systems Inc. is now betting big on providing creative and marketing professionals solutions that reside in the cloud.

Cloud computing typically allows companies to use software as a service (SaaS) rather than pay for it upfront.

Adobes solutions broadly cover three areasthe Document Cloud (to help create and manage documents), Creative Cloud (for designing purposes) and Experience Cloud (to monitor and analyse customer behaviour).

We couldnt have been more pleased with what we have done with (our) Creative Cloud, Shantanu Narayen, chairman, president and CEO, Adobe told a media gathering in Mumbai on Wednesday.

Narayen insisted that there is a massive tailwind of digital globally, and consumer expectations have risen dramatically. The next generation of software will be consumer-in, he said, implying that companies need to sharpen their focus on customer satisfaction in todays digital world.

The companys senior executives are also bullish about Adobes prospects in India. In India, we are just starting to ride the (customer) experience wave, said Kulmeet Bawa, Adobes managing director for South Asia. He added that there is a lot of headroom for growth for Adobe in India, which employs about 5,200 people in the country30% of the global headcount.

In this context, Narayen also underscored Adobes reliance on partnerships.

Citing the example of the companys long-term partnership with Microsoft Corp., he said, While we currently have our Experience Cloud running on Microsofts Azure platform, the vision, going forward, is to have all our clouds on Azure.

ALSO READ: Despite Trumps protectionism, India to remain Adobes innovation hub

Speaking about trends, Narayen pointed out that chief marketing officers (CMOs) and chief digital officers (CDOs) and other C-suite executives are increasingly asking how they can also figure out digital transformation for their organizations.

Analysts concur that as customers become central to how enterprises transform themselves digitally, CMOs and CDOs are having more say in how advertising campaigns are devised and runand how the tech tools needed to create, run, manage and analyse those campaigns are bought and implemented.

Research firm Gartner Inc. noted in its CMO Spend Survey 2016-17 that CMOs now oversee or heavily influence customer experience, technology spending, and profit and loss performance as means to deliver growth. A report from research firm International Data Corp. (IDC), too, forecasts that spending on marketing technology will increase from $20.2 billion in 2014 to $32.4 billion in 2018.

Gartner uses the term digital marketing hub that can be likened to the so-called marketing clouds that consolidate and simplify the use of multiple marketing technology tools.

In its February 2017 report, Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs, Gartner lists 22 companies. Adobe, Salesforce.com Inc. and Oracle Corp. dominate this market, according to the report.

There are a few challenges, though, in expanding this market, analysts say. For instance, Sujit Janardanan, vice-president of marketing at Aranca, a global research and advisory firm, believes that many of the tools that are part of the marketing clouds do not work smoothly.

There are integration and skills-availability issues, he said. Whats more, he added, is that the cloud offerings from large companies such as Adobe and Oracle are super-expensive, costing many times more than what smaller providers such as HubSpot Inc. would charge.

First Published: Thu, May 04 2017. 02 11 AM IST

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Adobe bets big on cloud computing for marketing, creative professionals - Livemint

President Trump's proposed tax reforms may incentivize U.S. multinational companies to bring cash back to the U.S., potentially setting off a frenzy of mergers and share buybacks. However, it may also increasespending on some of the biggest trends in technology.

Cloud computing is one such area where companies are likely to increase spending over the next several years, as companies look to reduce operating costs and increase flexibility. Research firm IDC recently noted that worldwide spending on the public cloud -- the areas where the largest tech conglomerates mostly reside -- is expected to reach $122.5 billion this year, an increase of nearly 25% over 2016 spending levels.

By 2020, IDC expects that spending to reach $203.4 billion worldwide, indicating there is much more room to run as companies shift their computing habits, leaving opportunities for investors.

"Some offorecasts we've seen -- for example, Goldman -- shows cloud spending from 2016 to 2020 will quadruple," said Exencial Wealth Advisors senior analyst Rich Erwin, who helps handle$1.6 billion in assets under management. "Last year, overall spending was around $32 billion and maybe $135 billion or so is devoted to the public cloud, which is the real growth vehicle."

That growth is expected to largely be captured by the largest companies, giving an opportunity to investors to concentrate their bets and generate outsized returns if it comes to fruition.

"I've seen numbers that in roughly tenyears, Microsoft will have between 25% and 30% of its revenue and operating income from cloud services business," Erwin added. "It's a $3 billion business now, but it has the potential to be really big. It's the biggest trend in technology now and will be for the next decade."

What follows below is a Q&A with Erwin about where investors should look for cloud computing stocks to buy.It has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

TheStreet: How much money can we expect to come back from overseas if we get a repatriation holiday?

Erwin: At Exencial, we're expecting about $200 billion to come back in the first year of the holiday. Much of that is in companies like Apple (AAPL) , Cisco (CSCO) , Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) .

TheStreet: Where does that money go?

Erwin: The money will likely go to stock buybacks and M&A deals -- we think the majority of that cash will be targeted for those activities.

TheStreet: Then what makes you bullish on some of these companies that are tied to cloud computing?

Erwin: Alphabet, or Google, has around $26 billion in free cash flow and they spend $14 billion in research and development spending, so they're not really dependent upon the money coming back -- they're already highly profitable.

TheStreet: What do you like about each of these companies?

The rest is here:

5 Cloud Computing Stocks to Buy - TheStreet.com

This is the second entry in an insideHPC series that explores the HPC transition to the cloud, and what your business needs to know about this evolution. This series, compiled in a complete Guideavailable here, covers cloud computing for HPC, industry examples, IaaS components, OpenStack fundamentals and more.

Cloud technologies are influencing HPC just as it is the rest of enterprise IT. The main drivers of this transformation are the reduction of cost and the increase in accessibility and availability to users within an organization.

Traditionally, HPC applications have been run on special-purpose hardware, managed by staff with specialized skills. Additionally, most HPC software stacks are rigid and distinct from other more widely adopted environments, and require a special skillset by the researchers that want to run the applications, often needing to become programmers themselves. The adoption of cloud technologies increases the productivity of your research organization by making its activities more efficient and portable. Cloud platforms such as OpenStack provide a way to collapse multiple silos into a single private cloud while making those resources more accessible through self-service portales and APIs. Using OpenStack, multiple workloads can be distributed among the resources in a granular fashion that increases overall utilization and reduces cost.

While traditional HPC systems are better for a certain workload, cloud infrastructures can accommodate many.

Another benefit of breaking down computation siloes is the ability to accommodate multidisciplinary workloads and collaboration. While traditional HPC systems are better for a certain workload, cloud infrastructures can accommodate many. For example, they can be used to teach computation techniques to students as well as provide a resource for researchers to make scientific discoveries. Traditional HPC infrastructures are great at solving a particular problem, but they are not very good at the kind of collaboration that modern research requires. A multidisciplinary cloud can make life-changing discoveries and provide a platform to deliver those discoveries to other researchers, practitioners or even directly to patients on mobile devices.

Definitions of cloud computing vary, but the National Institute of Standards and Technologies(NIST) has defined it as having the following characteristics:

Applied to HPC workloads, the service and delivery model is generally understood to include the following buckets, either individually or combined (derived from NIST definition):

Public clouds will contain sufficient compute servers, storage amounts and the networking necessary for many HPC applications.

The various types of infrastructure described here can physically reside or be deployed over the following types of clouds:

The various types of infrastructure can physically reside or be deployed over the above three types of clouds.

Over the next few weeks this series on the HPC transition to the cloud will cover the following additional topics:

You can also download the complete report, insideHPC Research Report onHPC Moves to the Cloud What You Need to Know, courtesy of Red Hat.

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Cloud Computing Continues to Influence HPC - insideHPC

Forbes

Roundup Of Cloud Computing Forecasts, 2017 Forbes Cloud platforms are enabling new, complex business models and orchestrating more globally-based integration networks in 2017 than many analyst and advisory firms predicted. Combined with Cloud Services adoption increasing in the mid-tier and small ...

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Roundup Of Cloud Computing Forecasts, 2017 - Forbes

Reliance Communications undersea cable arm Global Cloud Xchange has entered into an agreement with two other companies to provide cloud computing services.

Under the agreement, data centre company Aegis Data will host cloud solutions of vScaler within its data centre and GCX will connect customers to access cloud solution through its network.

"As part of this strategic partnership, Aegis will provide vScaler with the necessary power and infrastructure requirements that will allow both organisations to capture the increasing demand for scalable HPC (high power compute)-on- demand services from enterprises in the region," a joint statement from the three firms said.

The partnership supported by Global Cloud Xchange (GCX) will enable direct access to vScaler's Cloud Services platform, it added.

Industry findings have projected that the HPC market is expected to grow up to USD 36.62 billion by 2020, at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.45 percent.

"This triangulated partnership supports these demands in perfect harmony, meaning that those organisations looking for HPC requirements can have their demands serviced all under one roof," vScaler Chief Technology Officer David Power said.

Read more:

RCom arm in tie-up for cloud computing - Moneycontrol.com

Steve Lack is Vice President of Cloud Solutions for Astadia.

New technology that experiences high growth rates will inevitably attract hyperbole. Cloud computing is no exception, and almost everyone has his or her own definition of cloud from its on the internet to a full-blown technical explanation of the myriad compute options available from a given cloud service provider.

Knowing what is and what is not a cloud service can be confusing. Fortunately, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has provided us with a cloud computing definition that identifies five essential characteristics.

On-demand self-service. A consumer [of cloud services] can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed, automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.

Read: Get what you want, when you want it, with little fuss.

Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops and workstations).

Read: Anyone, anywhere can access anything you build for them.

Resource pooling. The providers computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand.

Read: Economies of scale on galactic proportions.

Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.

Read: Get what you want, when you want it then give it back.

Measured service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource usage by providing a metering capability as appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.

Read: Get what you want, when you want it, then give it back and only pay for what you use.

Each of these five characteristics must be present, or it is just not a cloud service, regardless of what a vendor may claim. Now that public cloud services exist that fully meet this cloud computing definition, you the consumer of cloud services can log onto one of the cloud service providers dashboards and order up X units of compute capacity, Y units of storage capacity and toss in other services and capabilities as needed. Your IT team is not provisioning any of the hardware, building images, etc., and this all happens within minutes vs. the weeks it would normally take in a conventional on-premise scenario.

Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Penton.

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How Do You Define Cloud Computing? - Data Center Knowledge