Grazed from Xactly Corporation.  Author: PR Announcement.

Grazed from TodayOnline.  Author: Damien Wong.

Last December research company International Data Corporation (IDC) noted that spending on the IT industry’s next dominant platform – built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies – grew at about 18 per cent per year and is expected to account for at least 80 per cent of IT spending growth through 2020.

This is compelling evidence that a fundamental transformation is ongoing, where information is becoming the primary raw material in organisations and maximising the value created from that information is the increasingly strategic role of IT. Companies now have enormous opportunities to find and exploit previously non-existent market niches…

Grazed from CloudTimes.  Author: Xath Cruz.

Google’s new IaaS offering, called Compute Engine, is one of the biggest things that has happened to the cloud computing industry in such a long time and here are five reasons why:

PaaS is still to ambitious to work on a large scale

Microsoft’s failure to create a successful business out of Windows Azure as it was originally built and Google’s similar lack of success with the App Engine is any indication, it’s that Platform as a Service is still not ready, and is currently way behind Amazon Web Services. MS and Google still back PaaS, but they already know that IaaS is the way to go if they want to be competitive in the industry…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Dave Roberts.

Good job, Mr. IT Director! You developed a great cloud computing strategy and executed brilliantly. You created a hybrid cloud architecture and incorporated contestability at multiple points in your technology stack to help you achieve the best service levels at the lowest cost. You’re ready to launch your cloud service to the rest of the enterprise and migrate applications at a rapid clip. Unfortunately, your enterprise software vendor has a gun pointed at your head and is threatening to derail the whole initiative. This could get ugly.

No software = No cloud

The cloud promises to help enterprises become more agile and reduce cost (at least for individual applications, if not in aggregate). But not everybody is happy about this…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Mike Miller.

Hadoop is everywhere. For better or worse, it has become synonymous with big data. In just a few years it has gone from a fringe technology to the de facto standard. Want to be big bata or enterprise analytics or BI-compliant?  You better play well with Hadoop.

It’s therefore far from controversial to say that Hadoop is firmly planted in the enterprise as the big data standard and will likely remain firmly entrenched for at least another decade. But, building on some previous discussion, I’m going to go out on a limb and ask, “Is the enterprise buying into a technology whose best day has already passed?”

First, there were Google File System and Google MapReduce

To study this question we need to return to Hadoop’s inspiration – Google’s MapReduce. Confronted with a data explosion, Google engineers Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat architected (and published!) two seminal systems: the Google File System (GFS) and Google MapReduce (GMR). The former was a brilliantly pragmatic solution to exabyte-scale data management using commodity hardware. The latter was an equally brilliant implementation of a long-standing design pattern applied to massively parallel processing of said data on said commodity machines…

Grazed from NetworkComputing.  Author: Joe Onisick.

You can’t fix, manage or justify what you don’t understand. IT chargeback/trackback not only helps end users understand their service utilization, but it also helps IT justify and prioritize spend. Measured service is a requirement of NIST’s cloud definition:

"Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service."…

Grazed from The Chicago Herald.  Author:  Will Oremus.

Thanks to the cloud, websites and apps around the world can tap into vast, remote stores of data and computing power.

And thanks to the cloud, one good blow to one of those vast, remote storage centers can take down websites and apps around the world.

That’s what happened this past weekend. A ferocious lightning storm in Northern Virginia took down Netflix, Instagram, Pinterest, Heroku and more — not because any of those companies are based in Northern Virginia, but because they all apparently rely heavily on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud facility there. Amazon said the storm, for reasons not immediately explained, took out both its main power supply and its backup generator…

Grazed from CloudTweaks.  Author: Rick Blaisdell.

lthough estimates of the overall cloud market size vary considerably, the consensus is that cloud computing is growing rapidly. I came across interesting statistics while reading about this topic. Market Research Media, cited in the Bloomberg report, says the cloud market will reach $270 billion in 2020 while Forrester is not that optimistic, predicting last year that the market will hit $241 billion by that time and says the market will hit about $55 billion by 2014.

So, what are the trends in the cloud market?

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offers more growth opportunities than any other segment.   SaaS will retain its position as a leading segment in cloud computing. Gartner tracks ten different categories of SaaS applications in this latest forecast with CRM, ERP, and Web Conferencing, Teaming Platforms, and Social Software Suites being the three largest in terms of global revenue growth…