April 15, 2013 Off

Investment Firm Expects AWS Will Hit $20 Billion In Revenues By 2020

By David

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Alex Williams.

Bernstein Research has issued a research report saying it expects AWS will have an estimated $20 billion in revenues by the end of the decade. In a separate report, RW Baird & Co. projects $10 billion in revenue for AWS by 2016 and up to $40 billion in losses from the traditional IT market.

The estimates reflect Wall Street’s growing confidence in cloud services and the need that analysts see in letting their customers know that a shift is underway that will lead to continued flat revenues or even losses for enterprise companies and systems integrators. In times of disruption, something like AWS may actually exceed investment analyst projections. Conversely, AWS success is not a certainty…

April 14, 2013 Off

Can Cloud Computing Save Hewlett-Packard?

By David

Grazed from Motley Fool.  Author: Andrew Tonner.

Hewlett-Packard stock has suffered greatly over the past five years. But in this video, Andrew Tonner reviews some good news about the company, including its new line of energy- and space-saving servers that should help turn the company around. As mobile computing increases demand for servers, Andrew says this new product line should pay off for HP as it diversifies away from its dependence on the declining PC market.  Check out the video for more details.

The massive wave of mobile computing has done much to unseat the major players in the PC market, including venerable technology names like Hewlett-Packard. However, HP’s rapidly shifting its strategy under the new leadership of CEO Meg Whitman…

April 14, 2013 Off

Cloud Computing: Salesforce.com’s Going Mobile, Just in Time

By David

Grazed from Motley Fool.  Author: Tim Brugger.

If timing is everything, the unveiling of salesforce.com‘s (NYSE: CRM  ) mobile services application development platform April 9 was spot-on. The service aims to tap the skills of third-party developers, much as smartphone manufacturers do, to expand and personalize the mobile customer relationship management, or CRM, experience. Salesforce says its new platform is "the latest in a series of innovations to empower customer companies to transform for the mobile era."

Just how big a deal is it? According to a Gartner study released April 11, mobile applications for the CRM industry, both in number and the revenue they generate, will explode in the next several years. The CRM landscape is changing, and Salesforce is in the right place at the right time…

April 13, 2013 Off

Cloud Computing: Rackspace fights patent troll in the name of every mobile developer everywhere

By David

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

Say what you will about Rackspace as a cloud computing provider and OpenStack steward, but don’t say the company isn’t fighting the good fight against patent trolls. Its latest effort is a challenge to the validity of a patent that an entity called Rotatable Technologies is using to sue, well, just about anyone developing mobile applications that take advantage of a rotating screen display. Yes, the same rotating screen display that’s been a staple of smartphones since the iPhone first graced consumers in 2007.

Rackspace General Counsel Alan Schoenbaum detailed the legal challenge in a blog post on Friday. You can read the details there and in its petition to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, but the gist is that Rotatable sued Rackspace (as well as Apple, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Target, Whole Foods Market and numerous other large companies) and then told Rackspace it was ready to settle the claim for $75,000, possibly less. Classic troll behavior…

April 13, 2013 Off

Who’s killing the PC? Blame the cloud

By David

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Jason Perlow.

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’d think it was the beginning of the end for the Personal Computer industry.  According to a report recently released by Gartner, sales of PCs in the first quarter of 2013, regardless of manufacturer and operating system platform, are the worst since an all-time low in the second quarter of 2009.

IDC presented similar results in another study that indicates sales are down 14 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012.This is not just bad news, it’s awful news for no matter who you are, whether you produce PC software and operating systems, or PCs and PC components themselves…

April 13, 2013 Off

Cloud Computing: Extreme Networks Brings Open Fabric to the Edge

By David

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Jeffrey Burt.

Extreme Networks officials more than a year ago launched their Open Fabric network architecture in the data center to help businesses deal with such trends as cloud computing, virtualization and mobility. Now the company is extending its Open Fabric capabilities to enterprise campuses. With Open Fabric,

Extreme brought such features as high availability and low latency, low power, automation and open standards to the data center, according to Jake Howering, senior director of marketing for Extreme. The next natural step for Open Fabric is the enterprise, where the influx of mobile devices, virtualization, cloud computing, wireless LANs and software-defined networks (SDNs) is putting new pressures on the network, Howering told eWEEK. And right now, IT administrators are having to manage multiple networks for workloads like unified communications (UC), physical security and WiFi, he said. Such situations are expensive and inefficient. “That isn’t going to scale and let you grow,” he said…

April 13, 2013 Off

Cloud Computing: Google Gives Users ‘Digital Wills’ For Data

By David

Grazed from Sky.com.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Search giant Google has decided to give its users a ‘digital will’ option for their online data.  The new facility allows consumers to decide what happens with their online account data after they die.  The cyber-stored information may also be wiped with approval if they become inactive online for any other reason.

According to Goldsmiths PhD student Stacey Pitsillides, who has focused her research on the issue of data and death, the Google strategy breaks new ground.  Ms Pitsillides, 26, told Sky News: "Google is one of the first major players to develop a clear opening strategy to deal with this issue and it is hoped that this will encourage others in the industry to follow suit."…

April 13, 2013 Off

Cloud Computing: The next phase of enterprise mobility – from productivity to customer engagement

By David

Grazed from Appirio.  Author: Balakrishna Narasimhan.

This week, Gartner released three stunning pieces of data that demonstrate that enterprise IT is going through another dramatic shift (via @alexwilliams). First, Gartner reported that PC shipments were down 11% since the same quarter in 2012. We knew we were moving into the post-PC era, but the speed with which the shift is happening is surprising. Second, Gartner reported that in 2012, 39% of all CRM was delivered through SaaS and that Salesforce was the leading CRM vendor overall. Third, they projected that mobile CRM apps are set to explode from about 200 apps today to 1200 apps by 2014.

Put all that together and there are three clear implications:

  • Customer information increasingly lives in the cloud, mostly within Salesforce
  • Most business’ internal and external customers will access customer information on mobile devices
  • People much prefer task-specific mobile apps rather than all-purpose desktop-style apps…
April 13, 2013 Off

HP’s enterprise customer experience gives edge over Amazon’s ‘consumer’ cloud

By David

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Matthew Finnegan.

HP can stake a bigger claim in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market by creating an enterprise-friendly rival to Amazon’s ‘consumer’ cloud, according to the head of the firm’s Converged Cloud unit, Saar Gillai.  HP is in the process of reimagining itself in what it terms the ‘new style of IT’, with its traditional businesses are coming under threat while attempts to move into new areas such as the Autonomy acquisition have proved problematic.

Targeting cloud revenues is top priority for CEO Meg Whitman, as the company attempts to find other avenues of growth says Gillai. According to HP figures, total cloud-related revenues, including sales of cloud services and hardware used to setup clouds, were almost $4 billion for 2012, and this is targeted to double by 2015…

April 13, 2013 Off

3 Stocks To Consider For The Cloud Computing Bubble

By David

Grazed from SeekingAlpha.  Author: Editorial Staff.

The cloud computing market is expected to grow to $177 billion over the next two years, and in turn, many companies will be looking to capitalize from this bubble. For those unfamiliar, cloud computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet). Mainframe computing from around the 1970s was replaced by client-server computing architecture in the 1980s and 90s, but by the time the Internet flourished, the world found a need to centralize the storage of data again. In recent years, this necessity of centralization has created a cloud computing bubble.

Consumers may be more familiar with cloud service offerings. This includes Google Drive, offered by Google (GOOG), SkyDrive by Microsoft (MSFT), Box.com, and Dropbox.  Here are some other ideas for investing in cloud computing that investors should consider:..