Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: Chris Kanaracus.

As 2013 begins, the SaaS (software as a service) market is set to heat up even more, as well as potentially undergo a number of key shifts. Here’s a look at a series of key SaaS vendors and trends to watch as the year unfolds.

Salesforce.com: No discussion of the SaaS market is complete without covering Salesforce.com, the largest independent player. While the company should generate plenty of news for its social collaboration, CRM (customer relationship management), customer service and application development software, it’s also possible that Salesforce.com will come up with a brand-new application that touches on an area it hasn’t directly been involved with until now…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

A recent whitepaper from IDC sponsored by Microsoft has suggested a widening skills gap for cloud computing, and the trend will continue further through 2013. In particular the research, of over 600 organisations, showed that as the cloud evolves, cloud-specific skills will grow at six times the rate of overall IT skills, noting that cloud-related skills “represent virtually all of the growth opportunities in IT worldwide”.

According to the paper, worldwide IT jobs will hit just under 30m by the end of 2015; however the 22.3m non-cloud jobs represent a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 0% from 2011, as opposed to the 7m cloud-related jobs having a 26% CAGR, going up from 2.7m in 2011…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Alistair Maughan.

Hey, EU, get off my cloud! Most people wouldn’t include the European Union on a list of growth drivers for the ICT sector. And with good reason if the EU’s recently-announced policy approach to cloud computing is anything to go by. In the past, the EU has been less a facilitator and more a barrier to adoption of cloud computing. This is because the ubiquity of cloud computing is threatened by the need to comply with the EU’s rules on data privacy and transfer. But, in a recent communication, the European Commission has said it aims to “unleash the potential of cloud computing in Europe”.

Unfortunately, the Commission seems to believe that the way to promote the growth of cloud computing is to regulate it. In doing so it has missed the opportunity to do something meaningful for companies seeking to implement cloud services across their organisations by reducing the data privacy burden…

Grazed from Engadget. Author: Ben Gilbert.

NVIDIA’s CES 2013 press conference is still ongoing, but the chipmaker is already unveiling something we’ve only seen teased before: the NVIDIA Grid, a card used for cloud computing across PCs, smart TVs, and smartphones. CEO and founder Jen-Hsun Huang detailed the new card on-stage, which you can see above in a rack of 20 grid servers. Huang says the rack pushes out roughly 240 NVIDIA GPUs worth of power, or about 200 teraflops — equivalent to approximately 700 Xbox 360s.

The Grid was given a tease earlier this year; the card will assist in pushing serious horsepower to the cloud, so that gaming over the air, across multiple devices becomes a less complicated reality…

Grazed from The National.  Author: Tony Glover.

This year, prices of IT devices such as tablet computers and smartphones are set to fall as Asian manufacturers undercut western IT companies.  At the end of last year, even top-of-the-range Apple products such as the iPhone 5 were being heavily discounted by electronics retailers in the United States such as Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Radio Shack and Target.

Wall Street analysts from Pacific Crest, Canaccord Genuity, Mizuho Securities, UBS and Jeffries & Co swiftly sliced between US$50 (Dh183) and $100 from their Apple share targets, believing this to be the start of an inexorable drop in IT prices. The US technology investment bank Pacific Crest cut its sales expectations for Apple from 174 million devices to 151 million for this year, and from 181 million to 161 million for 2014…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

Gartner lists Amazon, AT&T, Google, HP, IBM and Microsoft among what it says are the top 10 cloud storage providers.  According to its survey, about 19% of organisations are using the cloud for production computing, while 20% are using public cloud storage services.  That means there’s a pretty good sized market for the cloud, and specifically cloud storage. Gartner predicted in 2012 $109 billion was spent on cloud computing, a 20% increase from the year before.

But the cloud is a big industry too, with a lot of vendors seemingly having a cloud strategy today. So where do potential customers start? Recently, Gartner released a list of the top 10 cloud storage providers, based on enterprise capabilities. Below is a description of each, based on pros, cons, strengths and weaknesses…

Grazed from NextGov.  Author: Aliya Sternstein.

The U.S. Postal Service has been tapped to manage a yearlong trial of technology that ultimately should allow citizens to securely register for online services at multiple agencies — without obtaining multiple passwords and other digital identification for each service. Within days USPS is expected to begin hiring one or more cloud companies to host the simplified access network, according to a government notice.

The so-called Federal Cloud Credentialing Exchange, or FCCX, will act as a middleman between agencies and approved popular ID providers, such as Verizon and PayPal, that already have verified the identities of many citizens for e-commerce transactions, federal officials said this week…

Grazed from Financial Times.  Author: James Kaplan and Chris Rezek and Kara Sprague.

The use of very large, shared, and automated IT platforms – known as cloud computing – is growing rapidly, driven by the prospects of increasing agility and gaining access to more computing resources for less money.

Large institutions are building and managing private-cloud environments internally (and, in some cases, procuring access to external public clouds) for basic infrastructure services, development platforms, and whole applications. Smaller businesses are primarily buying public-cloud offerings, as they generally lack the scale to set up their own clouds…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Brandon Butler.

Storing information in the public cloud from a growing market of vendors is a viable alternative to on-premise, traditional storage options for some use cases, research firm Gartner says.  But cloud-based storage providers vary widely in their ability to meet the requirements of enterprise IT, which is why customers should rigorously plan and vet vendors before first engaging in a pilot and then deciding if mission-critical data should be moved into the cloud-based storage service.

The benefits of cloud-based storage are similar to those offered by other forms of cloud computing: It can provide significant cost and agility benefits to end user customers. Concerns around security, privacy and accessibility – which are common concerns for other cloud use cases as well – also exist in the cloud storage market, however…