Verizon to Help U.S.D.A. Move to the Cloud

News from the cloud computing sector includes developments from Verizon, HP and Dell:

Verizon to Help U.S. Department of Agriculture Move to the Cloud. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently awarded the department’s Enterprise Data Center cloud blanket purchase agreement to Verizon under the company’s GSA Schedule 70 program. With its Federal Edition enterprise cloud, Verizon will present its infrastructure-as-a-service offering to 34 USDA agencies and offices. Under the blanket purchase agreement, the Verizon cloud product addresses the stringent security and reliability requirements of federal agencies. It is designed to meet the risk management framework outlined in NIST 800-53, a set of recommended security controls for federal information systems. In addition, the Verizon-Terremark purpose-built Tier III federal data centers in Culpeper, Virginia, and Miami feature multiple layers of redundancy – facility, power, HVAC – and meet or exceed FISMA High criteria for physical and environmental controls. “My cloud-computing conversations with federal IT leaders have definitely changed over the past couple of years,” said Susan Zeleniak, senior vice president – public sector markets, Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “It’s no longer a question if cloud initiatives will be successful, but how can they determine the best applications to move to the cloud and quicken the pace of cloud migrations and data center consolidation programs.”

HP Selected by Molson Coors.  HP (HPQ) announced that Molson Coors Brewing Company is working with HP to transform some of the brewer’s finance and human resources processes and systems in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency and improve access to critical information. The move to a cloud hosting environment via the new HP Business Process Outsourcing platform will standardize HR and finance processes globally for Coors to their corresponding business applications. Molson Coors will receive BPO services from a blend of HP global centers of excellence located in Canada, Costa Rica, India, Poland and the United States. “With top brewers joining forces to compete, it’s critical for Molson Coors to use the latest processes and technologies to drive even more operational efficiency,” said Dennis Stolkey, senior vice president and general manager, Americas, HP Enterprise Services. “Under these market conditions, Molson Coors will depend on HP as a trusted advisor to lead its transformation to deliver world-class finance and HR services, allowing the Molson Coors team to focus on what they do best.”

Dell Expands Master Data Management Cloud Solution. Dell launched its next-generation Dell Boomi Master Data Management (MDM) that delivers a comprehensive set of features and capabilities in a single cloud-managed solution. This allows mid-sized companies to take advantage of an MDM solution that simplifies data management, data integration and assurance of data quality - at a fraction of the traditional big vendor cost.  Delivered as a 100 percent cloud-based offering, it offers multi-domain support, near real-time synchronization, bi-directional data flow and includes web service calls that support enriching and validating data. “MDM tools based on software as a service (SaaS) and/or clouds are still relatively new,” said Philip Russom, research director for data management, The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI). “Even so, there is a growing demand for and trust in cloud-based MDM tools and solutions. For example, a TDWI survey run in 2012 showed that 25 percent of organizations are planning to adopt cloud-based MDM within three years. This amounts to a potential growth rate of 20 percent, which is quite healthy given the current economy. So we can expect cloud-based MDM solutions to be in use by more organizations soon.”

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