Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Larry Dignan.

The enterprise application landscape is shifting, but Microsoft and Adobe appear to have momentum as the entrenched players stay strong, but technology buyers are looking to date around and pick new winners.  Here’s a graph that shows a quick look at the prime enterprise software vendors surfaced in our TechPro Research survey.  Now let’s take a deeper dive;

Microsoft takes a lot of hits for Windows 8 and its mobile strategy, but the company’s enterprise division is humming. In fact, Microsoft may be one of the better positioned enterprise software vendors in the stack. The company has moved to the cloud in good measure, has a strong installed base and is showing double-digit growth for Windows Server, Lync, SharePoint and Exchange. Commercial "other" revenue—largely comprised of cloud offering such as Office 365 and Microsoft Azure—was up 31 percent in the most recent quarter to $1.9 billion…

Grazed from Wall Street Journal.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The cloud offers people the chance to unload their data-storage and computing chores onto somebody else’s machines.  But is doing all of that unloading a good idea?  In recent years, more people have been taking advantage of systems that let them store and share files online, or run common software applications over the Web instead of on their local computer.

For an idea of the size of the cloud market, and how much it has expanded over the past few years, consider some numbers from a recent survey by comScore Inc…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: 

The recent executive shakeups at enterprise software giant SAP hit the company’s cloud computing business particularly hard, with some of the top people in that unit exiting.  Vishal Sikka, SAP’s CTO in charge of products and innovation and a key developer the company’s HANA in-memory database, resigned May 4. HANA has proved to be a highly successful product for the company and has become the primary platform for SAP’s cloud computing ambitions.

Days later, it was announced that Shawn Price, who in January took over as head of SAP’s cloud unit, was ousted, continuing a trend at the company of instability in a key business for SAP as it looks to compete with the likes of Salesforce.com, Oracle and Microsoft in the all-important cloud arena…

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Todd R. Weiss.

Since April, Google has acquired at least four companies—Stackdriver, Appetas, Adometry and Titan Aerospace. For most acquirers, that might be enough for a year or even five years, but for Google, it’s just its way of doing business.  On May 7, Google announced the purchase of Stackdriver, a Boston-based company that was started in 2012 to provide cloud application monitoring services to users.

In a post on the Stackdriver blog, the company’s leaders wrote that they had started it to help businesses use data visualization and analytics to better monitor their cloud applications. Neither company commented on the deal after being contacted by eWEEK…

Grazed from VaultNetworks.  Author: Veronica Santana.

For many companies, moving to the cloud is a great way to manage infrastructure in a more effective manner.  However, if there is no plan in place to prepare for the shift to the cloud, then there may be some hiccups along the way that can be prevented.  It is important to know what the cloud can and cannot do, as well as what are tasks that are best suited to a cloud environment.

The absolute first thing you must do is to prepare to move to the cloud.  This might sound basic, but this involved more than just deciding to be on the cloud.  You need to review the applications you will be placing in the cloud, as certain applications (typically older ones) do not take advantage of the benefits the cloud brings, and may even perform less effectively in a cloud environment…

Grazed from BDLive.  Author: Arthur Goldstuck.

NEXT year it will be 50 years since the Rolling Stones told the world: Hey, you, get off of my cloud. That protest against society being overly ordered would not be out of place today, except it would refer to cloud computing and the privacy challenge it poses to personal data.

The bad news is that we cannot escape the cloud — any time we connect to the internet, make a credit card transaction or use our phones, we are adding to the vast volume of activity-based information being collected and collated somewhere. The concept is generally referred to as “big data”, a buzz phrase that really means we have more data floating about than we had ever imagined possible…

Grazed from The Next Web.  Author: Sean Jennings.

It’s no secret that most new industries consolidate as they mature, and the enterprise cloud market is no exception. In the last few years, mergers and acquisitions have made headlines as cloud vendors battle it out for a top spot in the relatively new and rapidly growing enterprise cloud market.

According to Gartner, by 2016, most of new IT spending will be in the cloud, so the choice behind cloud acquisition targets will be key for cloud vendors looking to boost their offerings…

Grazed from Fool.  Author: Dan Caplinger.

On Monday, Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX  ) will release its quarterly report, and shareholders have seen the stock plunge in response to new competitive pressures. With Google (NASDAQ: GOOG  ) (NASDAQ: GOOGL  ) and Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN  ) among many companies vying for dominance in the cloud-computing arena, Rackspace will have to work harder to cement its place in the industry and keep from getting squeezed out by its rivals.

Rackspace’s business strategy has been to provide premium services for customers looking to take advantage of the power of cloud computing. Yet cost-conscious enterprise customers can be notoriously disloyal when bargains come around, and as Amazon, Google, and other players have recently started a race to the bottom in terms of pricing, Rackspace’s shareholders have started to lose confidence in the company’s ability to compete…

Grazed from OpEdNews.  Author: David Solomonoff.

Now that marketers use cloud computing to offer everything as a service: infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and software as a service, what’s left?  Cognitive computing, of course.

Cognition as a service (CaaS) is the next buzzword you’ll be hearing. Going from the top of the stack to directly inside the head, AI in the cloud will power mobile and embedded devices to do things they don’t have the on-board capabilities for, such as speech recognition, image recognition, and natural-language processing (NLP). Apple’s Siri cloud-based voice recognition was one of the first out of the gate but a stampede is joining the fray including Wolfram Alpha, IBM’s Watson, Google Now, and Cortana, as well as newer players like Ginger, ReKognition, and Jetlore…

Grazed from EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet.  Author: Arthur Cole.

Software defined networking (SDN) is the last step toward creating the fully virtual data center. In the age of the cloud and Big Data, however, a single data center is no longer enough for most organizations.  What they need is a virtual, multisite data ecosystem that can be parsed into very finite instances or harnessed into massive computing environments.  But to do that, the enterprise needs to start pushing SDN over the wide area network (WAN).

The need for the software defined WAN

The subject was front and center at the most recent gathering of the Open Network User Group (ONUG), where, according to IT Connection’s Mike Fratto, the general consensus was that the telecom service provider market has been too slow in the uptake of dynamic WAN connectivity…