We talked about cloud computing and his vision for a hybrid model, the role that converged infrastructure and automation from the compute resources all the way to VM provisioning, Steve agreed that is what would ultimately be needed to enable private cloud.

FORBES: VMware��s ��Elegant Speaker��

Symantec is very strong in security, data protection, and a small bit of management and automation, but it lacks a significant number of capabilities Dell needs to enable truly converged infrastructure and cloud automation.

FORBES: Dell Is On A Quest For Software

Public cloud platforms achieve a lower cost basis by leveraging commodity infrastructure and economies of scale that come through multitenancy, automation, and standardization, he writes in a new post and report.

FORBES: Think Twice, Three Times, Before Moving Existing Apps to the Cloud

The forum's founding members are all involved in advanced technology and solutions associated with the Internet of Things, including commercial infrastructure monitoring, energy-saving street lighting, home automation, energy monitoring and low power radio technology for sensors.

ENGADGET: ARM forms UK group to foster an Internet of Things, put 50 billion devices online by 2020

Traditional automation follows a pre-programmed formula based on set conditions and infrastructure settings.

FORBES: Outage Prevention: Taking Humans Out Of The IT Equation

Companies surveyed said building an infrastructure to support e-business is their top priority for next year, followed by ERP implementation, sales force automation, customer relationship management and applications management.

CNN: 8 of 10 companies expect no major Y2K woes