Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tim Worstall.

An interesting little report here about how Amazon’s AWS cloud computing services are a serious threat to a certain segment of the enterprise computing market. The specifics of it aren’t quite what I want to talk about it, rather, to use this as an example of how economies advance. The moneymen have finally looked up from beneath their golden canopies and noticed, hovering above them, a cloud named Amazon that is putting traditional IT companies in the shade.

Amazon’s cloud poses a major threat to most of the traditional IT ecosystem, a team of 25 Morgan Stanley MS +1.7% analysts write in a report, Amazon Web Services: Making Waves in the IT Pond, that was released on Wednesday. Brocade, NetApp NTAP -0.63%, QLogic, EMC EMC -0.2% and VMware VMW +1.37% are said to face the greatest “challenges” from the growth of AWS…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

The latest cloud computing report this time comes from Microsoft in collaboration with 451 Research, and again looks towards the hybrid as the tangible future of cloud computing. The study, ‘The New Era of Hosted Services’, took responses from more than 1500 organisations and revealed that in two years’ time 68% of organisations will adopt the hybrid cloud model, up from 49% currently. “The next two years will be the era of the hybrid cloud”, trumpeted Marco Limena, Microsoft VP hosting service providers business.

This is simply the latest in a series of reports examining the importance of the hybrid cloud, utilising the best elements of private and public clouds. Earlier this month CloudTech reported that hybrid cloud was the “wave of the future”, according to seven in 10 IT executives, with the primary reason for adoption being that cloud apps were deployed faster; whilst back in April Virtustream research revealed that 86% of companies in the study with more than 1000 employees used hybrid clouds. Similarly, a recent research study from PEER 1 outlined that 78% of those surveyed preferred a hybrid solution…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Karsten Strauss.

We knew this was going to happen. We’d heard about the “forthcoming era of cloud computing” as Bill Gates stepped away from Microsoft MSFT +0.46% in 2008 and the company’s then mission seemed to be to adjust to post-PC realities. Steve Jobs tried to sucker Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston into selling him the cloud-sharing company in 2009 prior to Apple AAPL +1.47%’s eventual release of iCloud.

Now that we’re knee-deep in the cloud, some users are getting a little bit nervous about having their data stored somewhere else, overseen by who knows who. It’s this uncertainty and nervousness that StoAmigo’s CloudLocker is built on. For those for whom Google GOOG +0.27%, Amazon, Microsoft and Dropbox’s server farms are too far away for comfort, CloudLocker gives you your own private cloud…

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Bill Kleyman.

The technology landscape has truly evolved over the past few years – and with that evolution comes a new demand for the future of IT administration. IT managers and engineers are tasked with knowing more, understanding further components within their own environments and must have the ability to truly be creative. The old days of IT saw engineering dedicated to one process. Rare interaction between teams was seen as an exception rather than norm. Cross-IT team collaboration would be usually done at the management level, and even then it wasn’t always successful.

There is a new breed of engineers being born from the era of cloud computing. New job titles are being created with demands being placed on engineers who are unique and have the ability to communicate. In this post, we’ll outline some of the traits which are in high demand from this new type of IT professional. Among many new traits and personality qualities that an engineer may have, the following are beginning to emerge as truly defining characteristics of the new IT pro:..

Grazed from The Register. Author: Jack Clark.

Heroku has released the public beta of a platform API to help its developers build apps and services that sit on top of its PaaS, which in turn sits on Amazon Web Services. With the platform API, Heroku is letting developers "automate, extend and combine Heroku with other services," the company wrote on Thursday. This lets you build a service which sits on a platform (Heroku) that sits on a virtualized infrastructure cloud (Amazon).

Potential use cases include automating workloads, combining Heroku with other services, and building apps for controlling Heroku environments from smartphones and tablets. A handy way of thinking about this is that Heroku is a pilot fish to Amazon’s great big shark, and now Heroku has made an API available that could let developers build little complementary Heroku fish…

Grazed from Business News Daily. Author: Chad Brooks.

Businesses looking for a leg up on the competition need to look more to cloud solutions, new research shows. A study by Forbes Insights, the strategic research practice of Forbes Media, revealed that cloud solutions accelerate business results, enable more efficient business processes and spur innovation.

Specifically, the research found that more than 60 percent of executives believe cloud-based collaboration tools help businesses execute faster than would be possible otherwise, which can lead to faster responses to competitive challenges, as well as the ability to get products to market faster and speed up product upgrade cycles. In addition, 58 percent of those surveyed think cloud computing has the potential to improve business processes, including purchasing, manufacturing, marketing, sales and technical support…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Dr. Jeff Jaffe, the CEO for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), has highlighted the need for more control on global cloud computing standards, in the build-up to this year’s Cloud World Forum – http://www.cloudwf.com – at Olympia National Hall, London.

As Chief Executive for W3C, Dr. Jaffe, who is set to give a keynote address at the event on 26th and 27th June, plays a key role alongside World Wide Web inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, in the development of web standards, and has seen the rise of cloud computing lead to changes in the landscape and a variety of issues surrounding global regulations…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

Mobile apps will be more dependent on cloud computing in the near future. According to a new report by Gartner, by 2016, about 40 percent of mobile application development projects will take on the cloud to function. This is a big consideration for midsize firm IT pros, who are responsible for the security of mobile applications.

The Back-End Services

Gartner’s findings, recently featured in Telecomasia, showed that companies will be using cloud mobile back-end services, which use platform as a service (PaaS) technology. Today, successful mobile applications must work well with a set of back-end services that include user management, data storage, and social business functions. However, many mobile application developers may only really understand front-end development on the client side. Through cloud mobile hosted platforms both front and back end development is linked, creating the best type of integration and scalability possible. In fact, some cloud mobile back-end services enable developers to deploy server-side code…

Grazed from CloudPro. Author: Jane McCallion.

CRM Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) giant Salesforce has debuted a new product that it claims will “reinvent the intranet for the mobile world”. Dubbed Company Communities, the organisation claims it will give businesses the power to connect employees to a custom intranet, featuring apps, people and content, anywhere and from any device. Like many other SaaS providers, Salesforce claims employees want to bring the experience they gain from apps as consumers into the workplace, but that legacy intranets fail to deliver this.

“Companies invest more than $2 billion (£1.32 billion) every year maintaining intranets that were created more than a decade ago. “Optimised for desktops, these intranets are not designed for today’s real-time business environment, where employees need instant access to company information and people to be successful,” the company said…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Editorial Staff.

Red Hat (RHT) is making bold statements about its IaaS Open Hybrid Cloud strategy — only a few days after VMware (VMW) launched its vCloud Hybrid Service. So what’s the reality check? It goes something like this…

VMware has a massive installed base of on-premises virtualization software. That’s a natural springboard toward building private clouds or for migrating customers to VMware’s forthcoming vCloud Hybrid Service (expected for Q3 2013). If you missed details about the VMware strategy, you can find a launch replay featuring CEO Pat Gelsinger here…