• HP moves load testing software to the cloud

  With the release of its new LoadRunner in the Cloud application load testing solution, HP aims to provide the flexibility of software-as-a-service in tools that traditionally entailed substantial investments to implement.

• OnLive's train wreck: Office on the iPad

  Demos, like appearances, can be deceiving. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, one of the media hits was OnLive Desktop, a service that provisions a Windows 7 desktop environment that includes Microsoft Office 2010 to the iPad over an Internet connection. For many, the idea of being able to run the full Office suite is very appealing, given some of the limitations of the iPad's native office productivity tools such as Apple iWork suite (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers), Quickoffice, and Documents to Go.

• New ASX data centre to open in February

  The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) has announced that its Sydney-based data centre will be open for equity trading from 6 February 2012.

• LAPD Drops Google Apps Plan

  After more than two years of work, the city of Los Angeles last month abandoned plans to migrate its police operations to Google's hosted email and office applications because it says the service can't meet FBI security requirements.

• LAPD Drops Google Apps Plan

  After more than two years of work, the city of Los Angeles last month abandoned plans to migrate its police operations to Google's hosted email and office applications because it says the service can't meet FBI security requirements.

• Are you ready for networking in the cloud?

  The two primary forms of public cloud computing, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), are both growing dramatically in popularity. Over the last few years, the primary focus of the IaaS providers has been on offering the basic compute and storage resources required to run applications.

• Open source helps Facebook achieve massive app scalability

  People all over the world spend a total of eight billion minutes a day on Facebook. Some 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared every week, 400 billion Web pages are viewed every month and the site logs a staggering 25TB of data every day. David Recordon, senior open programs manager at Facebook, talks about how the social networking giant uses open source tools to achieve its massive app scalablilty.

• What Microsoft Azure means to SMBs: not much, yet

  Small and medium-sized businesses have more important things to worry about than Microsoft's new Azure, a cloud-resident platform for building applications served to users online.

• SaaS An Easy Sell For This CIO

  The tasks in Laef Olson’s working hours can be rather varied. Olson, who is the CIO at Software-as-a-Service vendor RightNow Technologies is on the one hand responsible for IT security and the organisation’s information systems, while on the other he spruiks the strategy and vision for the company's on-demand hosting platform. On many occasions Olson gets a direct audience with company CIOs. What makes it easier for Olson to get traction to the upper levels of management is his past. He has been group vice president of global technology operations of Travelport and Orbitz Worldwide. And before that CTO of cars.com. In these roles he was also a consumer of SaaS products. It is that experience that he uses to relate to customers when on the road. Olson briefly stopped over in Australia last month where CIO Magazine asked him about the maturity of SaaS.

• Corporate SaaS considerations myriad, complex

  Amid the growing popularity of software-as-a-service, IT managers are faced with a sometimes monumental task of developing big-picture strategies and policies to govern service-based applications as well as defining performance metrics and support.

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