Grazed from RedOrbit. Author: Enid Burns.

Worldwide spending on cloud services is set to take off. According to a report, “Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2012-2016 Forecast” released by IDC this week, cloud services will see as much as 41% growth over the next four years.

Spending on IT cloud services worldwide will exceed 40 billion this year and will edge toward $100 billion by 2016. The report states that between 2012 and 2016, public IT cloud services will observe a compound annual growth rate of 26.4%. That’s five times the IT industry overall…

Grazed from DataCenterKnowledge. Author: Rich Miller.

Cloud computing service provider Vazata (formerly Horizon Data Center Solutions) has raised $13 million in growth equity, and will use the money to expand into new markets and built its sales operation, the company said today. The funding includes a lead investment from Altpoint Capital Partners LLC and follow-on investments from existing investors Ballast Point Ventures and Lance Black, the CEO of Vazata.

“This investment allows for further expansion of our vStructure IaaS platform, geographic presence and professional resource pool,” said Black. “We’ve realized steady growth in all lines of our business including managed services, virtualization solutions and traditional colocation, and we’ve been able to secure new customer engagements in both the government and enterprise sectors…

Grazed from MoneyManagement. Author: Editorial Staff.

New research from specialist accounting software firm, MYOB suggests small to medium-sized businesses (SMEs) that use cloud computing are more likely to experience positive financial and operational results.

The research, released this week, found that those using cloud technologies for business were 53 per cent more likely to see a revenue rise in the past year – something the company claims indicates that rewards are waiting for those who are ready to embrace cloud computing…

Grazed from FierceBIOTechIT. Author: Ryan McBride.

Pfizer has treated the complications of its supply chain with doses of cloud computing, virtualization and other tools, enabling the drug giant to track shipments from a large network of internal and external sources with improved efficiency and accuracy, The Financial Times reports.

As the FT reports, Pfizer has reconfigured the IT systems for managing its supply chain over the past year and a half in response to a variety of challenges. For instance, the company’s megamerger with Wyeth in 2009 brought its own integration challenges. More recently, the company’s top selling cholesterol drug Lipitor faces pricing pressure because of new generic competition, forcing Pfizer to adopt measures to supply the pill as efficiently as possible…

Grazed from ARS Technica. Author: Jon Brodkin.

Amazon’s omnipresent cloud computing service has a new rival with an interesting take on how to provide virtual servers. Instead of offering several types of pre-defined instances—each with a certain amount of memory, storage, and CPU power—an infrastructure-as-a-service company called ProfitBricks lets customers spec out their own virtual machines.

A ProfitBricks virtual machine can have up to 48 CPU cores, up to 196GB in RAM, and storage of up to 256TB. Whereas Amazon offers a set number of instance types at fixed prices, ProfitBricks lets users build their virtual machines by plugging their desired RAM, cores, and storage into a handy calculator. The company touts fast connectivity, with up to 80Gbps network speed using InfiniBand and four 10Gbps Internet connections for each instance, and "as many network ports to servers, firewalls and load balancers as you need." Previously available in Europe, the ProfitBricks service became generally available in North America this week with a data center in Las Vegas. (Amazon has data centers on both US coasts.)…

Layered Technologies, Inc. (Layered Tech), a leading global provider of compliant and secure cloud and hosting services supporting mission-critical e-business applications, today launched the Layered Tech Cloud Data Center, a next-generation cloud platform that combines Layered Tech’s complete management, security and compliance capabilities with self-service functionality, creating a more agile and secure cloud.

“Layered Tech’s next-gen cloud allows enterprises to run their critical workloads in a cloud environment to accommodate complex security needs and meet PCI-DSS and HIPAA compliance requirements,” said Kevin Van Mondfrans, Vice President of Product Management at Layered Tech. “Security and transparency are Layered Tech tenets, and our new Cloud Data Center includes the security and compliance management capabilities for which we are known.”

Secure, Controlled, Connected Available as a "bring your own network" (BYON) deployable to all major clouds and virtual formats, VNS3 3.0 makes it easy for enterprises to securely capitalize on the cloud, support application innovation and control every aspect of enterprise-to-cloud connectivity. VNS3 is a component of CFT’s family of cloud migration solutions and partner solutions, called the Cloud Container.

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: David Meyer.

The cloud-based customer service suite now has a simplified and more unified UI, and has also pulled in major funding from big names such as Index and Goldman Sachs.

Zendesk, one of the poster children for the recent wave of enterprise cloud services, has just raked in $60m in fresh funding. And the timing for that could be most opportune – the news coincides with a significant revamp of the browser-based user interface for the customer support suite, and the revelation of significant European expansion plans…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Amazon — which knows a thing or two about online marketplaces — is launching one for Amazon Web Services customers who may have over-provisioned their EC2 reserved instances. Now they can buy or sell those instances with other AWS customers.

Amazon is sticking its toe into tricky new waters: It’s building a spot market for cloud computing resources with a new plan to let users buy and sell their Amazon cloud resources. This is tricky because previous attempts to navigate these waters haven’t done much. Enomoly tried a variation of this plan and Verizon has a patent for it, but there’s not been much traction…