Grazed from Information Week. Author: Thomas Claburn.

Google I/O 2013 has come and gone without major developments affecting the company’s two primary platforms, Android and Chrome, but the developer conference nonetheless demonstrated how Google is outpacing its competitors. Certainly, that’s evident in the numbers Google provided, 900 million Android activations to date and 750 million users of Chrome worldwide. But such statistics only sketch the outline of Google’s success.

Google began as a search company and seventeen years later, the head of the company’s search technology, Amit Singhal opened his portion of the Google I/O keynote by taking about the end of search as we know it. Even if that’s more rhetoric than reality — Google will still be in the search ad business no matter how search changes for the foreseeable future — it reveals a willingness to take risks that Apple and Microsoft seem to be unwilling or unable to match…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

SaaS-based CRM is in demand. A new survey by Gartner shows that one out of every four customer relationship management software tools sold were SaaS based. As midsize firms consider new CRM software or seek to upgrade their current systems, this growing trend could be of interest in their decision.

Market Share

The report by Gartner, called Market Share Analysis: Customer Relationship Management Software, was recently featured in Cloud Tech, and found that customer relationship management software sales grew last year at an impressive rate from $16B to $18B. With an increase of 12.5 percent, the category scored three times the average of other software categories. According to the results, clients are mostly turning to CRM software to improve customer service and support as well as sales. Gartner also found the majority of customer relationship management software (80 percent) is being sold in North America and western Europe. Growth markets include China and Latin America. Top customer relationship management software vendors include Salesforce.com, SAP, and IBM…

Grazed from MarketWired. Author: PR Announcement.

Metamarkets, the leader in real-time analytics for online advertising, today announced that it has been named by AlwaysOn as one of the 2013 OnDemand Companies to Watch. Inclusion in this distinguished list signifies leadership amongst its peers and game-changing approaches and technologies that are likely to disrupt existing markets and entrenched players. Metamarkets was specially selected by the AlwaysOn editorial team and industry experts spanning the globe based on a set of five criteria: innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value, and media buzz.

"Metamarkets is honored to be named as an OnDemand Company to Watch. We’ve experienced significant market traction and are constantly innovating to exceed our customers’ expectations. We recently added Executive Chair Deb Rieman and VP of Engineering Steven Harris to our leadership bench and will continue to strengthen our position within the digital and mobile advertising analytics space," said Michael Driscoll, CEO, Metamarkets. "We are very pleased to be recognized by AlwaysOn for our accomplishments in Big Data analytics with our cloud offering in the online advertising space."…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Omri Erel.

The presence of cloud computing as a tool in business is getting a reaction almost as though it’s something new. There’s a lot of attention being paid to advances mostly as a result of affordable, scalable SaaS solutions. These solutions allow for a mobility and ease of access for which older systems didn’t allow. Given that they’re a symptom of the newer cloud computing push, they’re of course serving to earn accolades for the cloud that it did not have previously.

Of course, cloud computing in business is not brand new. It largely went unrecognized for what it was for such a long time, largely due to the fact that it wasn’t referred to as ‘cloud computing’. As a result, people often fail to make the proper connection between the present and the past, and to realize, in retrospect, that it’s always been around…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Editorial Staff.

The VMware vCloud Hybrid Service (an IaaS cloud alternative to Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure and Google Compute Engine) launches May 21. For VMware (NYSE:VMW) channel partners, there are at least five timely questions worth asking. Here’s a preview plus some perspective from The VAR Guy.

First, the background: VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger unveiled the IaaS cloud plan back on March 13 during an EMC-VMware Strategic Forum. Fast forward to this week: Gelsinger and Bill Fathers (GM, Hybrid Cloud Services) will unwrap the new IaaS cloud for partners and customers. The big questions?…

Grazed from MarketWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

Powering its market leadership in cloud computing, business continuity, and battle-tested data recovery solutions, Venyu today announced the company has secured two premier honors in the "2013 Hot Companies and Best Products Awards," sponsored by Network Products Guide (NPG). The industry’s leading technology research and advisory guide is the world’s premier IT honors recognizing achievements in every facet of the industry.

Driving the company to victory are Venyu’s primary solutions which include cloud services, data center services and cloud backup. The VenyuCloud offering delivers leading cloud servers and data centers powered by VMware. Through its data center offerings, Venyu provides such critical services as managed hosting and collocation hosting. The company’s RestartIT is a battle-tested cloud backup and recovery platform specifically designed to meet the needs of today’s businesses…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Liz McMillan.

"Trust is an ongoing journey and sits at the foundation of any vendor relationship – the companies that don’t consistently earn trust won’t be around long," noted Henrik Rosendahl, Senior VP of Cloud Solutions at Quantum, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. "As they do more with cloud, trust will organically grow – maybe it’s just about meeting SLAs or seeing firsthand that data is there when you need it," Rosendahl continued.

Cloud Computing Journal: The move to cloud isn’t about saving money, it is about saving time. – Agree or disagree?

Henrik Rosendahl: I believe it is actually both. Time is money, as they say. I typically think in terms of efficiency, which encompasses economics as well as the positive impact on administrative workflows. This is certainly true when we talk about cloud-based backup as a service (BaaS). Typically with BaaS customers, the first question is "How much is this going to cost?"…

Grazed from TelecomPaper.  Author: PR Announcement.

Romtelecom will launch in the second part of 2013 a virtual store that will offer online applications (software as a service) and cloud computing services, writes local publication Hotnews.ro citing Romtelecom CCO (Business) Mihai Tudor. Tudor said that providing cloud computing services bundled with communications services and hardware is essentially the business model for Romtelecom’s business division in 2013. The shop will be developped together with Romtelecom partners and will include all the applications developped so far by Romtelecom as well as new ones.

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeffrey Burt.

ARM will take significant market share from Intel in the server chip space over the next few years, and Advanced Micro Devices will be a key vendor benefiting from the shift, according to the head of AMD’s server business. In an interview with eWEEK here, Andrew Feldman, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD’s Server Business Unit, said the rapidly changing compute demands and decades of tech industry history are creating an environment that’s ideal for ARM’s strong ascent into the data center.

The rise of cloud computing, the rapid growth in the number of connected mobile devices hitting the Internet, and the demands of massive Web 2.0 companies like Google and Facebook are quickly changing the kinds of workloads that are running on servers, Feldman said. Data centers increasingly are supporting millions of users with servers running massive numbers of parallel workloads that need the type of small-core chips that ARM and its partners are manufacturing to power the bulk of the world’s smartphones and tablets. And that trend will only continue, he said…