Grazed from NetworkComputing. Author: Michael Finneran.

Cloud computing is all the rage in the IT industry, and UC is no exception. While it’s hard to find a concise market projection on the UC as a Service (UCaaS) market, there are a number of telling signs regarding its health.

For instance, UCaaS provider 8×8 saw its revenue increase 33% year-over-year. ShoreTel Sky (formerly M5) saw its revenue go up 27% while seat count increased 36%. The company is carrying a backlog worth $550,000 in revenue because it can’t keep up with installations. Broadsoft, which makes the UCaaS platform used by a number of providers including Comcast, Megapath and Verizon (which also sells Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution or HCS) saw its revenues increase by 13%…

Grazed from Asus. Author: PR Announcement.

Asustek Computer on December 19 formed a health cloud computing alliance through cooperation with Taiwan-based Show Chwan Health Care System to establish a cloud computing ecosystem for health care management. The alliance will set up three cloud platforms: personal health management, health care and medical research.

The personal health management platform will provide personal cloud storage capacity of at least 5GB for individuals to store medical records and health-related measurements such as blood pressure, blood glucose and weight, and access the information via smartphones, tablets and other terminal devices…

Grazed from SFGate. Author: Editorial Staff.

GreenButton™, the leading provider of compute intensive and integrated on-demand cloud solutions, today announced the company’s predictions for cloud computing in 2013. GreenButton has identified the top trends covering technology and business innovation to include Big Data, Cloud Bursting, Cloud Governance, On Demand and HPC computing, and License Management for ISVs.

The year 2012 has proven to be a pivotal year for cloud computing, marked by one key takeaway: adoption of cloud computing for the enterprise has finally gone mainstream. No longer hidden from plain sight, IT departments are now very upfront about their company’s use of cloud computing, resulting in legitimate cloud budgeting taking place. In fact, a recent survey conducted by Forrester Research found half of all enterprises in North America and Europe are planning to create budgets for cloud-related investments in 2013…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Fernanda Aspe.

The BYOD trend finds itself at a tech crossroads. While end users are the first to embrace it, business managers and IT administrators remain skeptical about security and compliance implications. Since the benefits of BYOD are too tempting to ignore, IT teams must implement protocols to protect against problems mobile devices can cause and to reap the full advantages of cloud computing in the enterprise.

But how can enterprise IT make two new technology forces — cloud computing and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trends — exist without disruption in companies? These frequently asked questions offer expert insight and answers to give you a better understanding of how BYOD works with cloud, how to manage mobile devices in the enterprise and how to secure enterprise data. We also provide ideas on ways to tweak your corporate program and optimize your cloud environment to ease tensions in what is becoming a BYOD world — whether IT departments want it to or not…

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…