The Wi-Fi Alliance is finally kicking off a certification program for routers, adapters, and other wireless networking gear based on the IEEE 802.11ac draft standard. The organization has a strong track record when it comes to ensuring that networking products will be interoperable even when the standards they’re based on have yet to be finalized, so this is a positive development.

As it did with the 802.11n wireless networking standard, the IEEE is taking its sweet time to ratify the 802.11ac standard. In fact, the responsible working group isn’t expected to finish its work until November, and final ratification isn’t expected until February 2014. That lengthy timeline hasn’t stopped manufacturers from shipping 802.11ac gear, of course; products based on the draft standard have been on store shelves since August 2012. But buyers haven’t had any assurances that those products will work together.

So why is the certification program launching now? “We want to ensure that the standard is substantially mature,” said Wi-Fi Alliance senior marketing manager Kevin Robinson in an embargoed interview last week. “There is work that we have to go through to ensure interoperability, and [we’re] fielding a test bed to certify that.”

The Wi-Fi Alliance launched a similar certification program back in 2007 for networking equipment based on the draft 802.11n standard. Unlike that effort, however, the 802.11ac certification program will not acknowledge the standard’s draft status and is being described as simply “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ ac.”

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Hewlett-Packard and Samsung Electronics will now ensure that their PCs in China are installed with licensed Windows and Office software as part of new agreements signed with Microsoft meant to fight piracy.

Microsoft announced the agreements Wednesday as the company brought its latest anti-piracy campaign to the Chinese city of Nanjing. Since December, Microsoft's "Keep it Real" campaign has been educating the Chinese public on security risks of using unlicensed Windows software. In addition, the U.S. software giant has been warning dozens of PC resellers in China to stop dealing in pirated copies of its software products.

Wednesday's agreements call for the two companies to also require their direct channel partners to promote genuine Microsoft software.

In March, Microsoft signed a similar agreement with Lenovo, China's largest PC maker. At the time, Microsoft said the deal would help limit and prevent PCs, moving "downstream" through China's channels, from being installed with pirated versions of Windows.

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You adore your laptop. It lets you get down to business wherever you happen to be—airport lounge, coffee shop, your home office. It’s the key to your competitive edge.

That is, until its battery croaks. Just as you’re putting the final details on your PowerPoint presentation. At the airport. Two hours before takeoff. And with no power outlet in sight. At that instant, you begin to wonder why you ever bought the ever-lovin’ boat anchor in the first place.

But love will bloom anew as soon as you recharge. Avoid the heartache, however temporary: Follow these five tips for maximizing your laptop’s run time.

1. Plug in whenever possible

One surefire way to ensure that your laptop is always ready for action is to plug it into an AC outlet whenever possible. Keeping the machine fully charged makes it far more likely that you will always have the juice you need to complete your work. Purchase at least one extra AC adapter, so you’ll always have one in your office and one in your laptop bag for travel. If you work at home frequently, consider buying a third adapter to leave there.

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Alcatel-Lucent will refocus on IP networking and ultra-broadband access in mobile and fixed-line networks as it seeks to return to profitability by 2015.

Announcing the company's "Shift Plan" in Paris on Wednesday, CEO Michel Combes said the company now recognized that the markets for core networking equipment and access networks are very different, and will in future manage its activities accordingly.

In core IP networking, where an explosion in data traffic and the move to cloud computing is driving purchases, Alcatel-Lucent will pursue a revenue growth strategy, he said. On the other hand, the company will aim to maximize cash and profitability in access networks, where customers are upgrading or replacing existing equipment and sales are flat, he said.

Combes said he aims to sell off €1 billion in assets and to cut annual operating costs by €1 billion. However, he refused to say whether that will result in further job cuts.

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A Dell special committee has rejected a new proposal from a key shareholder Carl C. Icahn, and said it will continue to support the proposal by founder Michael Dell and private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners to take the company private.

Icahn's proposal in its present state is not a transaction that the committee could endorse and execute as "there is neither financing, nor any commitment from any party to participate, nor any remedy for the company and its shareholders if the transaction is not consummated," the special committee of the board said in a statement Tuesday. The committee was set up in August 2012 after the plans for taking the company private were revealed.

The proposal from Icahn does not adequately address the liquidity issues and other risks that were previously highlighted by the committee, it said.

Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners made an offer for Dell in February that aims to take the computers and services company private in a US$24.4 billion deal. The proposal offers to pay $13.65 per share in cash.

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An email composed, but never sent, by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs may prove instrumental in the Justice Department's case that Apple, along with the five largest book publishers, colluded to fix prices for electronic books.

In a draft email intended for Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue about negotiations with one publisher, Jobs wrote of the potential deal that "I can live with this as long as they move Amazon to the agent model too for new releases for the first year. If they don't, I'm not sure we can be competitive."

For the Justice Department, Jobs' reference to Amazon showed that the company was trying to end retail price competition among electronic book vendors. However, Orin Snyder, an attorney representing Apple in the case, dismissed the significance of the email in court, noting that it was never even sent to Cue.

As the three-week trial has started to wind down, the DOJ has released a copious set of emails and other electronic documentation between Jobs, Cue -- who was in charge of the negotiations with the book publishers -- and a number of publisher executives. Judge Denise Cote for the U.S. Southern District Court of New York is presiding over the non-jury trial.

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Your current smartphone’s processor may be fast, but Qualcomm is hoping to show you a whole new definition of mobile performance. On Tuesday, the company staged a benchmarking exhibition in San Francisco to demonstrate the raw speed of its Snapdragon 800 chip, designated for “premium” smartphone deployment later this year.

Qualcomm already has a footprint in many of the top handsets. The 400 series of chips is included in both the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4, for example. Qualcomm hasn’t announced which phones and tablets will use the 800 series, but, for what it’s worth, the company showed off the new chip using the 700MHz LTE band that’s specific to AT&T—although that means little at this point.

When Qualcomm first announced the Snapdragon 400 and 800 chips at the Consumer Electronics Show this past January, the company said the 800 series will appear in “premium” mobile devices in the second half of the year and provide as much as a 75 percent performance boost over Qualcomm’s current Snapdragon S4 chip.

The 800-series chips include a quad-core CPU, known as the 28-nm Krait 400, with each core running at up to 2.3 GHz. It has a new Adreno 330 GPU, integrates a 4G LTE modem for data rates of up to 150 Mbps, and supports the 802.11ac WiFi standard.

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Internet tools are just starting to be applied to industrial tasks such as maintaining equipment and optimizing operations, but the wealth of data being produced by industrial systems could make this a major focus of development in the coming years.

On Tuesday, General Electric increased its bet on this proposition by introducing a cloud platform for data management and recruiting partners to help it serve industrial customers. At an event in San Francisco, GE and its partners, including Pivotal, Accenture and Amazon Web Services, laid out what they see as the opportunities and challenges.

The cutting edge of innovation in using data has shifted from the financial services sector to the consumer realm, and it’s about to move again to the industrial sector, said Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal.

Stephen Lawson

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Microsoft is upping the stakes in the growing market for cloud-based ERP, with its Dynamics GP 2013 and NAV 2013 products now available for deployment on its Azure service.

The launch, announced Tuesday, gives customers another option for cloud-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) services besides NetSuite, SAP Business ByDesign and others. It’s a bit late in coming, as Microsoft originally said availability would be toward the end of last year.

Microsoft was apparently intent on making sure the Dynamics applications ran well on Azure before scaling up the business.

“Over the past several months we’ve been working closely with our first ‘go-live’ customers and partners, as well as with the Windows Azure team, to develop guidance and tooling to ensure a great experience deploying on Azure,” wrote Paul White, senior director of Dynamics, in a blog post. “That work is now complete.”

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Carl Icahn has acquired a larger stake in Dell and called for a better buyout offer than the proposal of $13.65 per share from Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners.

Icahn has proposed that Dell commence a tender offer for around 1.1 billion shares at $14 per share, with a maximum value of $16 billion.

“Our proposal allows those who believe, like us, that the $13.65 price being offered in the Michael Dell/Silver Lake going private transaction significantly undervalues Dell, to continue to hold Dell shares,” wrote Icahn in an open letter to Dell.

Dell announced in February that Michael Dell and investment firm Silver Lake had offered $24.4 billion, or $13.65 per share, to buy out the company. Icahn, along with Southeastern Asset Management, made several counteroffers, with the most recent involving a payout of $12 a share in cash or stock to shareholders, and $5.2 billion in debt financing. Dell’s board of directors has recommended shareholders vote for the Michael Dell-Silver Lake offer.

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Google has asked the court overseeing terrorism-related surveillance programs at the National Security Agency to allow the company to publish information on the number of surveillance requests it receives.

The Internet company, in a Tuesday filing with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court , asked the court to allow it to publish the number of surveillance requests it gets from the NSA and other federal agencies and the number of users or accounts affected by those requests. The U.S. Department of Justice contends that publishing the information would be illegal.

Google’s lawyers argued the company has the right, under free speech guarantees in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to publish aggregate data about surveillance requests.

Google’s request comes in the wake of allegations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that Google and eight other Internet companies have given the NSA direct access to their servers, allowing the spy agency to read email and other Internet communications.

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The attorneys general of several states are turning up the heat on Google, concerned that the search engine giant makes it easier for criminals to sell illegal drugs online, engage in human trafficking and peddle pirated intellectual property.

At the summer meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General in Boston Tuesday, Mississippi’s Attorney General Jim Hood said that he is ramping up the pressure on the Internet behemoth, to which he had earlier this month sent litigation hold letters that should compel the company to preserve emails and other possible evidence in case of a lawsuit.

Hood is now sending a civil investigative demand, or subpoena, for records relevant to how the company’s search business may facilitate the sale of pharmaceuticals without prescriptions. He said Google had “lawyered up” after failing to respond to a number of written queries.

At the same time, Hood said, he does not want a legal battle with Google. “I don’t want to have a fight, we want to work together,” he said.

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A year ago, Google constructed a “neural network” of servers that eventually learned how to recognize cats. On Tuesday, Nvidia said that a team of Stanford researchers had used its own graphics cores to create another approximately 6.5 times more powerful, using just 16 servers.

The Stanford and Nvidia researchers showed off their work at the International Supercomputing Conference this week in Leipzig, Germany, where the list of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers was unveiled.

Neural networks attempt to re-create the brain’s structure by approximating not only the millions of neurons within it, but also how the brain itself learns. The overarching principle is to create a framework by which the network can teach itself. That process can lead in unexpected directions, such as the Google network teaching itself to identify images of a cat inside a number of YouTube videos that Google exposed it to. Japanese researchers also developed a neural network that taught a robot how to pour a glass of water.

While Google’s efforts to create a neural network most likely attracted attention because of its whimsical results, neural networks are a serious endeavor. In March, Google acquired DNNresearch for its work on layered, “deep neural networks,” which it will apply to a variety of services. Although Google did not say to what purpose it would put DNNresearch, it’s likely that its intelligence could be applied to everything from translation to Google Now, the service that Google uses to parse a user’s data and to show him or her relevant information, such as the time to leave to arrive in time for the next appointment.

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U.S. law enforcement agencies have disrupted more than 50 terrorist plots in the United States and other countries with the help of controversial surveillance efforts at the U.S. National Security Agency, government officials said Tuesday.

NSA surveillance programs recently exposed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden have played a key role in disrupting terrorist activity in more than 20 countries, including 10 terrorist plots in the U.S., since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., NSA director General Keith Alexander told U.S. lawmakers.

“In the 12 years since the attacks on Sept. 11, we have lived in relative safety and security as a nation,” Alexander told the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. “That security is a direct result of the intelligence community’s quiet efforts to better connect the dots and learn from the mistakes that permitted those attacks to occur on 9/11.”

Officials with the NSA and the U.S. Department of Justice defended the surveillance programs during Tuesday’s hearing, saying the programs are subject of rigorous oversight by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Congress. Officials contradicted allegations by Snowden, who has said the few controls at the NSA are easily circumvented by NSA analysts.

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Consumers may not be buying Surface RT tablets, but that isn’t stopping Microsoft. The company will offer $199 Surface tablets for K-12 schools and higher-education institutions, according to the company.

The deal isn’t live yet, though, according to Microsoft. It will be offered on June 24. Educators will need to sign up via a form supplied by Microsoft, and then presumably buy in bulk. The announcement was originally released by Ryan Lowdermilk, Microsoft's technology evangelist, who apparently released the information early. Lowdermilk subsequently pulled the blog post announcing the deal.

"It's true," a Microsoft spokeswoman said in an email. "It’s important Microsoft does its part to help get devices into the hands of educators that help prepare today’s students with skills modern businesses demand. We will be discussing this more in greater detail on June 24, both from the ISTE [International Society for Technology in Education] showroom floor and on our Education Newsroom [at ISTE's annual conference June 23-26]. Please join us then!"

Educators interested in buying a Surface should send an email to Surfaceedu@microsoft.com, according to ZDnet, which reported the story earlier.

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AT&T kicked off their Street Charge program today, opening solar-powered public charging stations across New York’s five boroughs. The Street Charge program grew out of the aftermath Hurricane Sandy, which devastated a huge chunk of the East Coast last fall.  Many New Yorkers were left without power, and when their smartphones died, they had no way to contact loved ones.

The Street Charge stations have a variety of connectors to accommodate most smartphones, including USB, Micro USB, 30-pin, and lightning connectors. They draw power from solar panels at the base of the kiosk and store it in lithium batteries at the top, continuing to deliver power throughout the night.  Goal Zero, a leading provider of creative solar power solutions, worked with AT&T to develop the design.

Power efficient processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon have led the charge in extending battery life, but batteries still have physical limits.  For travelers especially, public charging stations will be essential for staying connected.

According to AT&T’s press release, the power is free to the public as part of an effort to “keep New Yorkers connected.”  This isn’t the first time AT&T has forged a path on behalf of smartphone users.   In NYC, they were one of the first companies to provide cellular service on subway platforms, and they also provide free WiFi at more than two dozen public parks in the region.

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The source code for the Carberp banking Trojan program is being offered for sale on the underground market at a very affordable price, which could result in additional Carberp-based financial malware being developed in the future, according to researchers from Russian cybercrime investigations firm Group-IB.

A person believed to be a member of the Carberp gang announced on an underground forum that he’s willing to sell the source code for the Trojan program and its additional components for US$5,000, Andrey Komarov, Group-IB’s head of international projects, said Tuesday via email.

That’s a very low price, considering that earlier this year the Carberp gang was offering the builder application that can be used to generate customized copies of the Trojan program for $40,000. Compiled-to-order variants of the malware were also being offered on a monthly subscription-based model with prices ranging between $2000 and $10,000 depending on the number of additional modules included.

Komarov estimates that the source code itself would normally be worth between $50,000 and $70,000.

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Hewlett-Packard has shuffled the management of its PC division as it tries to sharpen its focus on growth markets.

HP

HP said that top executive Todd Bradley will step down from his role as executive vice president of the Printing and Personal Systems (PPS) group to become executive vice president of Strategic Growth Initiatives, where his first order of business will be “enhancing HP’s business in China.”

Bradley will be replaced by Dion Weisler, who is currently the senior vice president for HP’s PPS division in Asia Pacific and Japan. Weisler previously worked at Lenovo as vice president and chief operating officer of the company’s Product and Mobile Internet Digital Home Groups.

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Acer has announced that a new version of its C7 Chromebook will be available at Walmart stores and online at Walmart.com for $199. The refreshed model includes a 16GB SSD.

The model C710-2856 Chromebook has an 11.6-inch LED-backlit LCD panel with native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels. It's powered by a 1.1GHz Intel Celeron 847 processor and 2GB of DDR3 memory. Apart from swapping a 320GB mechanical hard drive for an SSD, this computer's specifications are the same as the earlier $199 Chromebook that Acer announced in November 2012.

Acer

“The expansion of our Acer C7 Chromebook line to Walmart is a clear indication of its growing popularity for anyone who wants a new or second mobile PC for web-based computing,” said Sumit Agnihotry, vice president of product marketing, Acer America. “The new configuration with a speedy and responsive SSD at only $199 is an especially notable value.”

Acer is positioning the Chromebook as an inexpensive secondary laptop for families and professionals who want to use cloud-based services and social networks and shop online, and for students preparing to go back to school in the fall.

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Europe’s top law-making body is working to bring its websites into line with the cookie-tracking laws it enforces on other entities.

Legally, the European Commission and the other European Union institutions, such as the Parliament, are not bound by the same data protection rules that apply to commercial companies.

Under the ePrivacy Directive, which was updated in 2009, Web companies must obtain “explicit consent” from Internet users before installing cookies on a computer to remember log­in details and other preferences relating to a particular website.

The only exception from the consent rule is if cookies are “strictly necessary” for a service explicitly requested by the user, for example, when a user clicks the “add to basket” button to buy goods from a website or asks it to remember language preferences.

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The Canadian privacy commissioner and 36 other data protection authorities on Tuesday raised privacy concerns about Google Glass in an open letter to CEO Larry Page.

Jennifer Stoddart, Canada’s privacy commissioner, signed the letter. Co-signers include Europe’s privacy watchdog the Article 29 Working Party and as well as the privacy commissioners of New Zealand and Australia and their counterparts in Mexico, Israel, and Switzerland, among others.

“We are writing to you as data protection authorities to raise questions from a privacy perspective about the development of Google Glass,” the authorities wrote.

One of their main concerns with Google Glass is that people can use the frames to film and record others, the letter said.

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As a password manager, Keeper has the basics covered. It captures login info and passwords for you as you browse the Web, securely stores them in a neatly organized vault that's easy to access, and generates passwords for you on the fly.

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The Swedish Nacka District Court has ruled that Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg may be extradited to Denmark to face hacking charges, the court confirmed Tuesday.

The green light to extradite Svartholm Warg was given Monday, said Josefin Holmgren, a law clerk at the Nacka District Court. The extradition approval is not final yet though. Svartholm Warg can appeal the decision within a week, Holmgren said.

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Google's Chromebook laptop will be carried by more than 6600 stores around the world, as the company signs on more retailers.

Starting Monday, Walmart is offering an Acer Chromebook, which has a 16GB Solid State Drive, in about 2800 stores across the U.S. for $199, while from this weekend, Staples will offer Chromebooks from Acer, Hewlett-Packard and Samsung Electronics in its over 1500 stores in the country.

Staples will also sell the products online. The laptop running the Chrome OS is an attempt by Google to attract users to cloud computing, but it has as yet to make a significant impact in the market.

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Yahoo has received between 12,000 to 13,000 requests for user data from law enforcement agencies in the U.S. between Dec. 1 and May 31 this year, the company said Monday.

The most common of these requests concerned fraud, homicides, kidnappings, and other criminal investigations, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and General Counsel Ron Bell wrote in a blog post.

The company did not disclose how many of the requests for customer data were under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has been at the center of a controversy after reports surfaced that the government was collecting data from a large number of users under the Act, including call metadata from telephone customers of Verizon.

“Like all companies, Yahoo! cannot lawfully break out FISA request numbers at this time because those numbers are classified; however, we strongly urge the federal government to reconsider its stance on this issue,” the executives wrote.

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Lean storage techniques will keep a lid on storage investments over the next few years, though the world’s enterprises still are on track to buy 138 exabytes of storage system capacity in 2017, IDC said.

Annual sales of storage capacity will grow by more than 30 percent every year between 2013 and 2017, according to a forecast the research company announced on Monday. But that growth will be slower than the steep pace recorded a few years ago because organizations have adopted ways of using storage more efficiently, including cloud storage services, IDC analyst Natalya Yezhkova said.

Data deduplication, data compression, thin provisioning and storage virtualization all will help enterprises limit their purchases of new storage capacity, Yezhkova said. Those techniques can reduce the amount of space consumed by a given bit of information or help companies allocate new storage as needed instead of overbuying.

IDC estimates more than 102 exabytes of external and 36 exabytes of internal storage system capacity will be sold in 2017, up from just 20 exabytes of external and 8 exabytes of internal capacity in 2012. External storage sits outside of servers, while internal goes inside them.

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Jive Software is making a mobile push with new and enhanced mobile applications that have an emphasis on helping users of the enterprise social networking (ESN) suite create, not just view, content from their tablets and smartphones.

Responding to a significant increase in mobile usage of its product, Jive has developed its first native iPad application, enhanced its existing iPhone application and upgraded its iOS software development kit.

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AMD plans to sample its first ARM-based processors for servers early next year, alongside paired CPUs and integrated graphics cores in an attempt to oust Intel's Xeon from its dominance in the server market.

Specifically, AMD's ARM core will be code-named "Seattle," and will ship in volume during the second half of 2014, AMD executives said. In 2014, AMD will also ship "Berlin," a core available in both a CPU form factor as well as an APU, which integrates the processor with an integrated graphics coprocessor. Finally, there's the "Warsaw," which will compete with in high-performance computing (HPC) applications with the Xeon.

Seattle is of interest to both AMD and to other industry watchers because it represents one of the more interesting opportunities for AMD to regain share in the server market. Last year, AMD said last year that it had agreed to license ARM 64-bit technology, and would combine it with its Freedom Fabric, the name given to its high-speed networking technology it acquired via SeaMicro.

Intel sells more than 80 percent of all microprocessors by unit volume, but in servers it's a virtual dictatorship; during the fourth quarter of 2012, Mercury Research estimated that Intel sold about 95.7 percent of all server microprocessors sold. To compete, AMD needs something different, and it's hoping ARM represents that edge.

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The Open Data Center Alliance, a customer group that shares tips about cloud deployments and tries to nudge vendors into supplying the products they want, has added big data to the list of IT topics it covers.

The alliance was set up in 2010 to provide a collective voice for enterprise customers, who use their buying power to try to influence the data center products vendors sell, with an emphasis on interoperability and open standards.

The alliance defines technology requirements and usage models for various aspects of cloud computing, such as identity management and data security. Its members agree to follow those usage models, giving vendors a greater incentive to provide the products and capabilities they ask for.

The ODCA has more than 300 members, including big firms like BMW, JP Morgan Chase, Lockheed Martin and Capgemini. It’s holding its annual Forecast event in San Francisco this week, where it announced the completion of three new usage models, for software defined networking, scale-out storage, and information as a service, or basically big data analysis.

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