Hong Kong SoftLayer facility will open April 14 and offer Watson, BlueMix, and other cloud services. 8 Datacenters For Cloud’s Toughest Jobs (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) IBM’s SoftLayer unit has expanded a slender cloud foothold in Asia with the addition of a datacenter in Hong Kong, as a result of offer its cloud services starting April 14. Hong Kong is the primary of 15 datacenters that IBM plans to feature this year to finish a sequence of 40 all over the world, all connected by a personal network. Firstly of March, its SoftLayer cloud services unit had 150,000 servers in operation and it was adding 4,000 to five,000 a month. The Hong Kong site can have the capacity for 15,000 servers. SoftLayer already operates a datacenter in Singapore. Workloads for SoftLayer’s Asian sites may be sent via IBM/SoftLayer points of presence in Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The POPs bring different network carriers together to offer a shared Internet access point. The... Read More »

Google tightens app store rules for developers to enhance Android app security, integrity, and quality. 10 Great Google Apps Tips (Click image for larger view.) In an effort to enhance Android app security, integrity, and quality, Google notified Android developers on Friday that this is revising its Google Play Developer Program Policies to discourage abusive practices. The corporate has given developers offering apps through Google Play 15 days to revise apps that fail to fulfill its requirements. More oversight must be beneficial. The collection of malicious Android apps available in the course of the Google Play grew 388% from 2011 to 2013, the protection firm RiskIQ said in February. In this period, the proportion of malicious apps removed by Google annually declined from 60% in 2011 to 23% in 2013. All new apps submitted to Google Play are subject to Google’s new policy. Developers with apps found to violate the foundations might receive a warning to mend the difficulty, or they may have their noncompliant... Read More »

Is Office for iPad a fair fit for you? We go hands-on and answer seven key inquiries to enable you to decide. Microsoft Office for iPad arrived this week, two years overdue, and with millions of tablet users already entrenched in Google Docs, iWork, and other alternatives. But now that the desktop era’s top productivity software has finally landed at the world’s preferable mobile device, here’s the worst thing i’m able to say: Office for iPad is the most convenient tablet work software to this point.   No, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for iPad aren’t perfect. Wish to use the hot apps to print a document? Too bad. You want to edit documents without signing up for Office 365? Sorry, you will have to use Office Online, the browser-based version. Office for iPad won’t change the market. The apps might set the quality of their category, but it is not clear what number of people care about that category firstly. For millions of pro users,... Read More »

Interop 2014 kicks off Monday in Las Vegas. Here is a sneak peek of technologies to monitor. Interop Las Vegas opens Monday on the Mandalay Bay Convention Center amid a time of increasing change. Change was a continuing inside the technology industry, however the pace of change seems to maintain getting faster, as futurist Ray Kurzweil argued in 2001. Much of the hot change have been driven by IT trends just like the shift toward mobile devices, cloud computing, and the networking of everything. That and the necessity to store petabytes of cat videos, if you’ll pardon the pun. Then there’s the truth that software, as Marc Andreessen once put it, is eating the arena. In his keynote presentation on the conference, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, plans to spotlight how virtualization and cloud computing have led software-defined datacenters to overshadow hardware-defined facilities, a shift he characterizes as “tectonic.” Alan Hase, Avaya’s VP of networking, points to software-defined networking (SDN) as a neighborhood of vibrant... Read More »

After years of anticipation, Microsoft Office for iPad arrives — and it’s only the start of a brand new push toward apps across all mobile devices, says new CEO Satya Nadella. 7 Mistakes Microsoft Made In 2013 (Click image for larger view and slideshow.) Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday announced Microsoft Office for iPad. However the product, which some argue is 2 years overdue, was only portion of Nadella’s appearance, his first since succeeding Steve Ballmer last month. Microsoft also debuted a brand new Enterprise Mobility Suite to assist IT professionals manage the barrage of devices and services employees now use for work. Nadella also promised that Microsoft would embrace cross-platform opportunities while continuing to sell its own devices. Microsoft Office for iPad includes native versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. They’re available at no cost immediately through Apple’s app store, though to do greater than review documents, users will need an Office 365 subscription. The recently-announced Office 365 Personal, a low-cost option that... Read More »