Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

As reported by my friend and Forbes writer Joe McKendrick, "A new survey finds that roughly one out of four organizations are heavily into cloud computing, and they are providing lessons from which everyone else can benefit." The lessons come from having two or three years of real experience, enough time to see the real benefits and issues.

Keep in mind the study is sponsored by RightScale, a cloud vendor, and it was done in a way to discover the positive, not the negative. It’s as if Dunkin’ Donuts sponsored a study on breakfast foods. You wouldn’t expect to find results related to obesity or diabetes…

Grazed from MSPMentor. Author: Joe Panettieri.

Logicalis, Rackspace and Savvis were among the big MSPs and cloud services providers (CSPs) on hand at CA World last week in Las Vegas. Each of those companies said CA Technologies plays a critical role in their revenue-generating platforms. So what will it take for CA Technologies to thrive against potential rivals like VMware, SolarWinds and OpenStack? Here are some educated guesses.

First the good news: CA World attracted roughly 5,000 partners and customers. That’s a solid showing, especially since CA Technologies has been in transition mode over the past few years. Still best-known for its enterprise IT management tools, the company:…

Grazed from CRN. Author: Joshua Gliddon.

Salesforce.com, which introduced the idea of cloud computing to many organisations, has leapt past SAP as the leading CRM vendor, a report from Gartner has found. While SAP enjoyed 12.9 percent of the CRM market, Salesforce jumped past with 14.9 percent. Revenues for Salesforce.com in the CRM space were $US2.5 billion, marginally ahead of SAP’s $US2.3 billion.

Worldwide, total CRM revenue totalled $US18 billion, a rise of 12.5 percent on the previous year’s figure of $US16 billion. Third place in the CRM stakes was Oracle, with sales of just over $US2 billion, Microsoft with sales of $US1.1 billion, and IBM an also-ran, with sales in the region of $US650 million…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Jordan Novet.

While benchmarks on cloud-computing performance come with their share of caveats, new data from Compuware show smaller cloud service providers such as Layered Tech coming out ahead of the big dogs.  Big-name cloud service providers capture the tech-press headlines day after day, but lesser-known players might deserve more recognition, at least based on new benchmarks out from Compuware.

The company found that, although Rackspace and Windows Azure were consistently fast in taking an application request, processing it and delivering it back, a handful of competitors are actually faster and more consistently so, while other providers are available more often. The figures from Compuware represent the average response times over a year of monitoring performance on 38 cloud facilities, as part of Compuware’s normal Global Provider View cloud-benchmarking application…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Steve Pate.

Through a great deal of research on enterprise cloud adoption and security, I’ve learned something telling. As you would expect, CISOs’ opinions about cloud strategy are quite varied. While many folks recognize their company’s use of SaaS for HR, sales, communication, and other applications, they are fairly divided about the use of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and how secure these environments are in keeping company data safeguarded. After many talks with these technology leaders, I’ve determined that each fall into three distinct categories.

The "Server Huggers"
The first group is the server huggers and they make up a very small percentage of the respondents. They simply have no reason to leverage IaaS. Their applications are very resource intensive and expensive, and their businesses are highly predictable, so the need for scalable capacity just doesn’t exist. However, the time may come where they have company needs to bring the cloud into the mix. If so, they should be well informed on how to take advantage of cloud services and realize the ways to protect data during and after that migration…

Grazed from Forbes.  Author: Bob Evans.

No, it’s not security, and it’s not privacy. It’s not speed of provisioning, rogue credit-card purchases for skunk-works projects, or even integration hairballs.  No, the biggest threat to cloud-computing companies today is customer fatigue.  Businesses are tired of hearing the tech industry squawk about whether this or that is a managed service or a faux cloud or a virtualized cumulonimbus cluster or a passing shower or black cloud of doom.

They are tired of hearing what the NIST’s definition of a cloud is or isn’t, and whether the solution that’s best for their global systems does or does not comply with the definitions of some self-appointed experts whose only certainty is that they’ll capriciously change their definitions to match the prevailing winds…

Grazed from The Register. Author: Jack Clark.

Platform-as-a-service provider AppFog is evaporating its cloudy bridge to Rackspace due to poor customer demand, in yet another case of the fluffy industry coming to terms with hard business realities. AppFog provides an application infrastructure automation service – otherwise known as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) – that lets devs choose the infrastructure upon which their apps run. The company has decided to curtail support for Rackspace’s OpenStack-based cloud due to "low adoption rates," according to an email seen by The Register that was circulated to AppFog customers last week.

"While we believe [multi-cloud support] to be one of our main selling points, it’s also become increasingly resource intensive to maintain so many instances of our infrastructure," AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson wrote in the email. "In an effort to keep our service affordable and reliable, we’ll be discontinuing support of the Rackspace public cloud due to low adoption rates."…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Michael Endler.

For avid tech industry followers, it’s hard to go more than a few days without seeing another article about the benefits companies can gain by taking business into the cloud. These benefits, such as the ability to better connect remote or mobile workers, can lead to legitimate gains in an organization’s efficiency and bottom line. Nevertheless, cloud resources often demand that sensitive data be housed on an outside party’s servers, so many institutions and enterprises are cautious about, if not prohibited from, adopting the new technology.

Teambox believes its newest offering, Teambox On-Premise, can help more businesses climb onto the cloud bandwagon. Released earlier this month, the product brings the capabilities of the Barcelona-based company’s cloud platform behind the corporate firewall, allowing users to harness the file-sharing and collaboration advantages of the cloud while still meeting internal security and compliance requirements. The enterprise-oriented cloud market grows more competitive every week, but for organizations in highly regulated industries, Teambox On-Premise could offer the secure ladder into the cloud that they’ve been looking for…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Reuven Cohen.

I was just reading an interesting post over at Information Age which outlines Accenture ACN +3.14%’s ambitious plan to position itself as the IT industry’s “cloud broker.” The strategy is part of a broader plan that sees the consulting company investing upwards of $400 million in new cloud computing capabilities. According to the story, the Accenture Cloud Platform will be part of what the company describes as a plan to grow its more than 6,700 cloud focused experts and related cloud services.

The term cloud broker seems to be thrown around a lot lately. TechTarget defines it as “a third-party individual or business that acts as an intermediary between the purchaser of a cloud computing service and the sellers of that service. The broker’s role may simply be to save the purchaser time by researching services from different vendors and providing the customer with information about how to use cloud computing to support business goals. In such a scenario, the broker works with the customer to understand work processes, provisioning needs, budgeting and data management requirements. After the research has been completed, the broker presents the customer with a short list of recommended cloud providers and the customer contacts the vendor(s) of choice to arrange service.”…

Grazed from Windows IT Pro. Author: BK Winstead.

Whether your organization is jumping full force into cloud computing or hanging back and assessing options carefully before deciding if the cloud can benefit your organization, there’s no question that IT shops are being changed by the industry’s drive toward cloud delivery. However, it’s equally clear that not every change is for the best. The challenge for IT pros is to find the cloud computing models that can aid your organization without sacrificing data security, organizational efficiency, and business productivity.

Dark Clouds

You’ve probably heard all the standard complaints against the cloud: can’t guarantee security; can’t access data or applications if the service or your connection goes down; no visibility into where your data is stored. Of course, these problems are real, and not something you can just gloss over. Yes, you do need to consider your back up plans, your legal obligations, and everything else very carefully—just as you do for your on-premises deployments…