Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Aaron Ricadela.

Salesforce.com (CRM), No. 2 in this year’s Bloomberg Businessweek 50 ranking, has been outpacing rivals Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), and SAP (SAP) in the business software market by exploiting companies’ desire to stop managing programs for thousands of their employees and outsource the job instead. The company’s stock has climbed more than 170 percent in the past three years and Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff is expanding his portfolio of cloud computing software for sales, customer service, and online marketing by branching into new areas like human resources. Benioff spoke with Bloomberg News reporter Aaron Ricadela from his home in San Francisco about the competitive landscape and his plans for the coming year.

Why are competitors like Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP having a hard time catching you in cloud computing?
Well, they’re not really in cloud computing. We’ve defined a market and we’ve executed it. What we have continued to focus on is defining our space within that market. You don’t buy hardware and software and hook it all up—you use our preconfigured services over the Internet. We picked our place in that market for sales force automation, then customer service and support, now marketing. Each of those product lines had been growing very aggressively. We also only do business in eight countries in the world. By focusing on that, we have had our growth trajectory…

Grazed from Tempo. Author: Editorial Staff.

VMware, Inc. has outlined the trends in 2013 that will transform for businesses in the Philippines. “We’ve seen growing adoption of our leading technologies amongst the country’s largest private and public sector organization, and expect to see more companies leverage cloud to significantly lower the total cost of ownershipand speed up their ability to deploy new applications,” said Emmanuel Portugal, country manager, VMware in the Philippines.

“Specifically, we see the adaptability of CIOs, the emergence of the Software-Defined Datacenter, mobility and adoption for greater disaster preparedness to drive cloud adoption at scale and make 2013 a year of transformation for IT and businesses.” The role of the CIO is evolving as companies require them to be IT leaders who drive substantive change throughout the entire organization. This means the latter can no longer operate as cost centers, but must employ service-based IT thinking to positively impact their organization’s productivity, competitiveness, and agility…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Emma Byrne.

Many organizations are adopting a “wait and see” approach to cloud computing: They’re concerned about the risks of data security. But that means they’re missing out on the benefits of the cloud. Let’s square that circle…

In part one of this series, I outlined some of the fears you might encounter when you talk to cloud naysayers. The truth is that the risks that come with cloud computing are like any other business risk: The more you understand them, the easier they are to control. Thankfully, assessing cloud-based risks has plenty in common with risk assessments of your existing business processes. Analyzing those risks doesn’t require any special magic. Business in the cloud is business as usual…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: Wieland Alge.

Firewalls will always be required as they are the sole devices that analyse and control communication of data and applications. Firewall technology ensures networks are running the way we want them to. As a result I came to the conclusion that the question is not ‘will on-premise firewalls disappear’, but ‘how will firewalls be influenced by cloud technologies?’. In order to address this we have to look at some of the history.

Enter Unified Threat Management

10 years ago the first perimeter architectures consisted of a fast packet processor (the firewall) and a battery of content scanning servers. Each server was dedicated to a specific task (a duty) such as locating spyware or virus scanning. Each was from a different vendor and each was managed separately – it was genuinely best of breed and from a pure performance perspective it was ideal…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Dimension Data has implemented WAN optimization technology across its entire global cloud data center to speed up application performance for its customers. According to the ICT solutions and services provider, the deployment of WAN optimization controller appliances across its Managed Cloud Platform cloud data centers, the company has "significantly" increased application performance across its entire cloud around the world. Customers use Dimension Data’s cloud for database replication, file synchronization, and backup and disaster recovery between data centers, and the company noted improved performance across the cloud.

The appliances were rolled out in the cloud data centers in San Jose, California and Ashburn, Virginia in the U.S.; Amsterstam in The Netherlands; Sydney, Australia; and Johannesburg, South Africa. To keep things secure, Dimension Data set up the system to encrypt data over a VPN tunnel and optimized for delivery using deduplication and application-specific protocol optimization…

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Editorial Staff.

While software has been “eating the world” for years in the consumer world, now start-up software is infiltrating even the largest of enterprises at an ever increasing rate. Today’s enterprise-grade datacenter infrastructure makes it easier than ever for startups to rapidly build and deploy disruptive software. This is the basis for applications like Box.net, Marketo, and Nimble that quickly emerged as “must-have” software.

I’ve been in the software and infrastructure business long enough to have seen everything – from the fall of the VAX to rise of fall of client/server architectures – but it’s within the last 3 years that rapid displacement of enterprise software has taken place. It’s a mix of “must have” and “good enough” that drive the growth of these start-ups and it’s Cloud computing that is “greasing the wheels.” Gartner says the worldwide market for Software as a Service (SaaS) will be $14.4 billion in 2012. Much of that is from companies and products created in the Cloud…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Nathon Eddy.

Nearly three-quarters of IT professionals believe that employees’ personal use of cloud applications and mobile devices has significantly influenced their organizations’ decisions to adopt cloud computing, with 68 percent stating that employee requests for cloud services have increased in the last two years, according to CDW’s "2013 State of the Cloud Report." Based on CDW’s survey of 1,242 IT professionals, the report indicated cloud computing is on the rise within organizations, as 39 percent of organizations reported they are implementing or maintaining cloud solutions—up from 28 percent in 2011.

Two-thirds of the IT professionals surveyed said that their use of cloud applications and services in their non-work lives directly influences their cloud-related recommendations at work. "Organizations’ adoption of cloud computing has steadily increased, which comes as no surprise given the growth of mobility and the consumerization of IT," Stephen Braat, CDW’s general manager of cloud solutions, said in a statement. "By aligning cloud services with critical applications and preferences of employees that use mobile devices, organizations can better capture business value that includes cost savings, increased efficiency, improved employee mobility, and an increased ability to create innovative new products and services."…

Grazed from BillingWorld. Author: Craig Galbraith.

A new year brings new opportunities and seven key challenges for IT managers. While this new white paper discusses "Seven communications trends for 2013," today we will focus on just one: the cloud! According to a recent Gartner study, cloud computing was expected to grow 19 percent, from $91 billion in 2011 to $109 billion in 2012. By 2016, the 2012 number will nearly double to $207 billion. Forrester Research’s The Cloud Computing Playbook suggests that "Cloud computing has reached an inflection point for enterprises — a comprehensive strategy for its use is now required.

Until now, most companies ha[ve] adopted cloud services in an ad hoc fashion, driven mostly by business leaders and developers looking to deliver new systems of engagement they felt could not be delivered by corporate IT — or in the time frame required. These ad hoc experiences prove that cloud solutions are now ready to be strategic resources in your business technology portfolio."…

Grazed from CIO. Author: David Taber.

The promise of cloud computing is that you, the customer, don’t ever have to buy another server, back up another disk drive or worry about another software upgrade. All those promises are true-and now there are multimillion-dollar companies without a single server closet. Cool.

Unfortunately, too often cloud applications and services are bought by people who really shouldn’t be buying. Sure, they may have the budget-did you hear Gartner’s prediction that the CMO will spend more on tech than the CIO by 2017?-but that doesn’t mean they necessarily have the training to make good IT decisions, let alone the discipline or skills in their underlings to actually execute a coordinated technology strategy…

Grazed from Investors Daily. Author: Reinhardt Krause.

Rackspace Hosting (RAX) late Tuesday reported fourth-quarter sales below estimates, as cloud computing growth slowed, sending shares down in after-hours trading. Rackspace said Q4 revenue rose 24.5% to $352.9 million. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected sales of $355.4 million. Rackspace posted Q4 profit, minus items, of 21 cents a share, up 17% from a year earlier, in-line with estimates.

Rackspace garnered 24.7% of Q4 sales from cloud computing products, up from 20.6% in the year-earlier period. Rackspace said cloud sales rose to $87.3 million in Q4, up 49% from the year-earlier quarter. But Q4 marked more slowing in cloud growth. Cloud revenue rose 69% in Q2 and 57% in Q3 year over year. Adjusted earnings rose 27% to $130 million, Rackspace said…