Lucena Research, a leading provider of investment decision support technology, today announced the launch of QuantDesk™ Back Tester, the trading strategy simulator component of QuantDesk™. QuantDesk™ Back Tester is a realistic market simulator that allows investors to test trading strategies over critical market periods. Back Tester represents a fourth component of Lucena’s flagship QuantDesk™ cloud-based platform, which allows users to build a strategy using Lucena’s modular algorithms such as scanning, forecasting, optimizing and hedging to help investment professionals validate and refine quantitative investment strategies. Read more

TORONTO, April 24, 2013 /PRNewswire/ - Forrester Research Inc. has highlighted Flybits, a Toronto-based startup company, as the number one context-aware tool for its emerging cloud and context-aware middleware solution.

Anthony Mullen’s report, “Emerging Touchpoints Require a Marketing Mind Shift,” encourages marketing professionals to increase corporate investments in innovative practices and procedures in areas such as customer experience, analytics, IT and product design — all of which the Flybits framework addresses. Read more

fluid Operations, leading provider of cloud and data management solutions based on semantic technologies, today announced fluidOps eCloudManager has successfully completed testing to become VSPEX™ Labs Validated.

The inclusion of eCloudManager as a part of an EMC® VSPEX solution enables users to automate and simplify daily IT operations and speed up their cloud adoption and automation. Joint customers benefit from an automated VSPEX solution right from the start, being able to set up ‘IT as a Service’ offerings (including Infrastructure as a Service, Storage as a Service and Landscape as a Service™) in their own data centers, without having to resort to public cloud options. Read more

David Siegel, author of Pull and a former SemTechBiz keynote speaker, recently shared his thoughts regarding the future of Apple, the cloud, and data in general. Siegel states, “The consumer’s electronic world as we know it today is shared between Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a handful of other popular brands. Most offerings must ride on these platforms and play by their rules. Yet I believe our current interest in—and use of—this ecosystem will peak in 3-6 years, and what awaits each of these companies on the other side must be a completely different business.”

He continues, “We have spent the last twenty years making everything digital, and now that transformation is 99 percent complete. Read more

A recent article looks at the growing importance of cloud computing: “One of the problems with ‘cloud computing’ is that it can work a bit like the Hotel California: you can check your data in OK, but will you ever get it out? Google is very well aware of the problem and with its Data Liberation commitment, wants to make sure people can retrieve their data. Ideally, of course, users should be able to move stuff from one cloud to another — from Google to Amazon or Microsoft or any similar service — but that’s not possible at the moment.” Read more