By Steven Burke, ChannelWeb

CIOs are looking at making major strategic shifts toward the cloud this year as they grapple with continued pressure on IT budgets.

Several IT executives attending the annual North American Conference Wednesday in Boston of the Innovation Value Institute (IVI), an organization aimed at establishing IT investment benchmarks, said they are embracing private and public clouds.

Peter Forte, CIO of Analog Devices (NYSE:ADI), said the electronics manufacturer is moving to the cloud in the wake of a 25 percent IT budget cut last year. Over the last 45 years, he said, Analog simply built up too many resources around maintaining IT infrastructure.

Now, Forte said, Analog is looking at moving applications to the public cloud embracing applications like Salesforce.com and at the same time building an internal private cloud as part of a move toward virtualizing 300 Windows Servers and scores of Unix servers.

“This is a matter of survival,” Forte said. “In the last 20 years, I haven’t seen this kind of dramatic cost cutting. Luckily, the good news here is technology has evolved to the point where it is helping us make this transition. We would never have been able to make a 25-30 percent budget reduction 10 years ago without an incredible fall off in service.”

Forte cautioned that he does not see applications like e-mail or even Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT)’s Office product line as ready to move to the public cloud. Almost to underscore that point, Microsoft revealed last week that customers of its Business Productivity Online Standard Suite may have experienced on January 28 “intermittent access to services.”

“We understand that any disruption in service may result in a disruption to your business,” said Michael Ziock, senior director, Business Productivity Online Service Operations for The Microsoft Online Services Team in a posting on the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog.

That Microsoft outage underscores the critical service level agreement issue (SLA) that businesses face as they move to the cloud. IT executives at the conference said that is one of the reasons it is critical that companies embrace IVI’s IT-CMF (Capability Maturity Framework) as a standard for making IT investment and operating decisions.

The IT-CMF consists of a five-stage maturity model used to organize and structure a framework for mapping IT improvement efforts.

Gregg Wyant, Intel (NSDQ:INTC)’s IT CTO, who spoke at the conference, said the entire industry needs to look at frameworks like IT CMF in order to assure cloud computing is successful. “If you don’t have standard business processes or standard ways to outsource some of your IT responsibilities you will never be able to utilize cloud effectively,” he said.

Wyant said one of the biggest dangers in moving to the cloud is the lack of industry standards to connect various cloud platforms whether they are public or private. “The catch 22 is there are no inter-structure standards that exist,” he said. That means significant integration challenges for companies that want to adopt various cloud offerings. “Those shortcomings need to be addressed by the industry for cloud to be more viable,” he said.

Wyant said Intel currently has only about five percent of its IT operations in the cloud in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. He said because of its scale Intel is unlikely to take more than 10 to 15 percent of its IT operations to external cloud offerings. He said the cloud model is likely to appeal more to small medium busineses (SMBs).

Since I haven’t held one of these in my hands yet, or got to play with it, I felt that I should find one of the best write ups to share with someone who had. Check out the video below too. - Harvey

By Tim Gideon After what felt like years of waiting and tons of speculation, Steve Jobs finally unveiled Apple’s long-rumored tablet, the iPad, yesterday in San Francisco and PCMag was there. The event was more heavily attended than any Apple press meeting we’ve attended in the same theater. After Jobs’ keynote, a showroom with several iPads (and at least one person guarding each one of them) was swarming with camera crews. Still, I was able to log considerable time with the device. Until we get the iPad into the lab for a full review, which could be several weeks, here are my initial impressions:

Hands on with the Apple iPad

By Kevin McLaughlin, ChannelWeb  As next month’s Mobile World Congress looms, Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) is believed to be preparing some bold and risky moves in an effort to climb back to a meaningful position in the mobile market.In a Tuesday note to clients, Jefferies & Company analyst Katherine Egbert predicted that Microsoft will release its own branded Windows Mobile 7smartphone within the next two months. “We expect the new phone to debut soon, at either the Feb 15-18 Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona Spain, or possibly at CTIA in Las Vegas one month later,” Egbert said in the note.

Egbert described the device as “a Zune-like phone,” which suggests it may bear some resemblance to Microsoft’s ‘Pink’ smartphone. Pink is believed to be Microsoft’s attempt to leverage the talent from its 2008 acquisition of Danger into a consumer oriented device, but repeated Windows Mobile 7 delays and other problems have reportedly doomed the project.

Microsoft often says it has no intention of getting into mobile hardware and that its partner ecosystem is best suited for that task. But while Windows Mobile still has a decent share of the business market, Microsoft simply hasn’t been able to get consumers excited about Windows Mobile devices. Windows Mobile’s declining market share, combined with the buzz that Google generated in its Nexus One release earlier this month, may prompt Microsoft to re-evaluate its strategy.

There are signs that Microsoft may have figured out a way to broaden the market for Windows Mobile. According to the enthusiast blog WMExperts, the next version of Windows Mobile — which Microsoft is calling “Seven” – will come in two versions, one for business users and the other for consumers.

For more on the story click on:

http://www.crn.com/software/222301509;jsessionid=CCO0BIE1E0KWPQE1GHOSKHWATMY32JVN?cid=nl_vi

LG has announced that it has developed the world’s thinnest LCD TV panel measuring 2.6mm. The secret is an Edge LED backlight. The new ultra-slim model will be exhibited on CES 2010.

Breaking the 3mm barrier in large LCD TV panels

The development of extremely slim LCD panel was possible for LG by applying an ultra-slim, edge-lit LED backlight system and a new optical film technology.

The 42-inch panel weighs less than 4 kilograms - making it ideal for wall mounted TVs. Moreover, the new product offers 120 Hz and a Full HD (1920 x 1080) panel.

External box and no speakers

LG has also placed most of the TV electronics and the TV tuners in a separate media box making the TV even slimmer.

Also, no speakers are integrated so if you want sound – any sound – you need a loudspeaker system. LG says that it was almost impossible to incorporate a sound system in the very slim TV.

Down from 5.9 mm

In May, LG broke the record by unveiling 42- and 47 inch LCD TV panels measuring just 5.9mm. These TVs were the world’s thinnest panels at the time.

Now LG has nearly halved its record in just seven months.

Dr. In Jae Chung, LG Display’s CTO and Executive Vice President noted,
- “With the development of the world’s thinnest LED LCD TV panel that is only 2.6mm thick, LG Display has once again demonstrated its technical prowess to satisfy customer demand for high resolution and slim design products. We will continue to spur R&D activities in order to provide our customers and the market with the differentiated products that they desire.”