Grazed from ScienceLogic. Author: PR Announcement.

Dedicated to delivering smart IT solutions to help manage and monitor its customers’ increasingly complex physical, virtual, and cloud environments, ScienceLogic knows a thing or two (or ten!) about technology trends on the horizon in 2013. As cloud computing continues to shape the way enterprises, service providers, and government agencies operate, ScienceLogic predicts what to look out for in the coming year in its latest blog post titled, "2013 Cloud Computing Predictions."

Here are a few of ScienceLogic’s 2013 predictions:

The Cloud Wars Are Picking Up Speed: Last year, we predicted cloud computing would become more mature, and as a result, consumer cloud environments at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com would begin cut-throat competition for consumer and business dollars. This prediction will continue to play out in 2013 in a number of news ways as the cloud wars really begin to pick up speed…

Grazed from Information-Management. Author: Justin Kern.

Enterprise cloud applications are scoring some anticipated victories with modernization and business value, but are frequently used in a compliance gray area, according to results of a new survey. The report, entitled “Drivers of Cloud Adoption,” surveyed 327 CIOs, IT professionals and business executives involved in cloud adoption at their companies. It was conducted by industry analyst firm Dimensional Research and sponsored by software and on-demand performance management vendor Host Analytics.

When asked the driving factors for choosing a cloud application over an on-premise option, there was little surprise that 80 percent of business executives picked “value” as the top reason. CIOs, on the other hand, were split among a range of reasons: cloud better met compliance requirements (58 percent), perception of cloud holding competitive advantage (51 percent), turning to cloud applications as part of a wider cloud strategy (42 percent), along with, of course, value (53 percent)…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Examining Amazon Web Services usage is a cottage industry for a dozen or so startups. One of them, Newvem, has offered its service free to select customers. Now that the service is broadly available, it’s time to monetize. Newvem, which promises to watch your Amazon Web Services usage for you and recommend ways to get the most mileage out of rented compute and storage, is now ready to charge for its services.

Large enterprises will negotiate their own deals, but for smaller accounts the company will offer free services until the customer goes over 50,000 AWS resource hours per month. Then it charges a cent or two per additional resource hour depending on usage. According to Newvem’s price list, there are additional fixed-rate charges for more advanced analytics of S3 storage or EC2 reserved instance use…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Despite the hype around its high-end engineered “Exa” systems, Oracle hardware revenue continued to swoon in the second quarter when it was off 23 percent year over year. But, CEO Larry Ellison said that the company has just about turned the corner.

Oracle must be really worried about its hardware business. In its second quarter earnings release, the company trotted out a canned quote from CEO Larry Ellison to defend hardware’s honor. Said Ellison: Sun has proven to be “one of the most strategic and profitable acquisitions we have ever made.” Oracle bought Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion three years ago…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

How low can PaaS pricing go? AppFog says it’s cutting the price of the paid version of its polyglot, multi-cloud PaaS in half for developers. That’s great for developers, but will it boost corporate adoption? Developers love PaaSes but no one likes to spend money. So AppFog, which offers a multi-language, multi-cloud PaaS built atop a Cloud Foundry foundation, is cutting its list price in half to lure more developers to the platform.

The new option, available from AppFog’s site, costs $50 per user for 500MB to 4GB of database storage and 50GB of data transfer. In July, Portland, Ore.-based AppFog launched its ambitious cross-cloud PaaS effort including a free version for up to 2GB of RAM. Additional monthly plans with more memory started at $100 for 4G, $380 for 16GB and $720 for 32GB. The free version is still available…

Grazed from CIO. Author: Bernard Golden.

This has been a curious year for cloud computing. The technology has moved into mainstream consciousness, but many vendors remain frustrated with the pace of enterprise adoption. While widespread agreement about the importance of cloud computing is present, many vendors see enterprises pursuing internal cloud implementation projects with a slow pace. As you can imagine, vendors are impatient with this pace—but not as frustrated as early-stage investors in those vendors.

Notwithstanding, I expect 2013 to be an inflection point for cloud computing, although not in the way many IT organizations or vendors do. You can expect that cloud computing trends of 2012 will become more vivid in 2013 and will prove disconcerting to incumbents, no matter which side of the vendor/buyer table they sit on. Cloud computing will prove more disruptive to the established order of things than almost anyone anticipates, and it will prove to be extremely uncomfortable for many. Here are five things to look for in 2013…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Charles Babcock.

With KPMG predicting a doubling of cloud services revenue over the next two years, it’s a good time to point out where cloud computing has gained strength over the past year in capabilities and services. At the same time, we should look at the cloud’s weaknesses, as a cautionary tale for those IT teams whom KPMG says are about to migrate production applications to the cloud.
Here are the top seven developments we saw in public cloud computing in 2012: The three biggest setbacks, and the four biggest wins. We’ll start with the setbacks.

Setback #1: Outages Plague Amazon And Others.

When you’re trying to convince big companies to bet their business on cloud operations, the worst thing that can happen is for the cloud infrastructure you’re thinking of using to suffer an unplanned outage. Amazon Web Services didn’t have an outage in 2012 that rivaled the hit it took over the Easter weekend in April 2011, when multi-availability zones in one of its data centers went down. However, Amazon was nevertheless buffeted at its big East Coast complex by service outages on June 14 and June 29, due to power outages…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Five9, the leader in cloud contact center software, was honored with a Cloud Computing Excellence Award. Cloud Computing Magazine recognized the Five9 Virtual Contact Center solution for helping advance a significant, growing technology market.

Five9 pioneered the cloud contact center software market and continues to grow and enhance its solutions to deliver scalable cloud contact centers quickly, at a cost of ownership far lower than traditional premise-based solutions. The Five9 Virtual Contact Center, built on a fully multi-tenant cloud platform, has all of the features necessary to effectively run contact center operations, including inbound, outbound and blended call center capabilities, interactive voice response with speech recognition and workforce management.

"It’s exciting to see Five9 recognized for innovation in the cloud. Five9 delivers next generation cloud contact center solutions that help organizations eliminate the hassle and expense of outdated premise-based solutions." – Mike Burkland, president and CEO, Five9.

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

New research from Host Analytics and conducted by Dimensional Research has found that for four out of five business execs, the cloud is chosen for its value over anything else. A similar number of employees surveyed said that it’s beneficial for them to use cloud applications. The research, which covered over 300 CIOs and business executives, again found various benefits to cloud adoption, which may perhaps shift the balance as IT budgets are being prepared for 2013.

When asked for the reasons a cloud app was chosen over other, on-premise options, the disparity between business executives and CIOs was stark. Value was the obvious factor for execs (80%), whereas compliance was the most important component for CIOs (58%); value (53%) and greater competitive advantage (51%) completed the top three. Compliance is a vital, perhaps underrated reason for utilising the cloud. 61% of survey respondents said they have out of date business critical software, and 14% said their on-premise software hadn’t been upgraded in four or more years…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Ayushman Baruah.

Software developers now have a chance at focusing on doing what they are best at – coding, for, they can leave the rest to Seattle-incorporated and Bangalore-based startup CloudMunch. The 15-member startup offers developers with a cloud-based platform that claims to take care of the entire software development lifecycle, enabling them to build, test, run and manage their applications in an automated environment. In the words of the company’s founders, developers can now “Focus on the code, CloudMunch the rest.”

Pradeep Prabhu and Prasanna Raghavendra, both long-term Infosys executives started CloudMunch in September 2011 with the aim of delivering better software faster in the cloud. “We do so by providing early and instant feedback; automating the entire process with one click; and enabling ‘dev’ and ‘run’ seamlessly in the cloud,” Raghavendra, the company’s co-founder and CTO said…