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"Salesforce.com now has the number one players in social listening and marketing – Radian6 and Buddy Media," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "With CMOs surpassing CIOs in spend on technology within the next five years, our Marketing Cloud leadership will allow us to capitalize on this massive opportunity."…

There’s no magic potion for stamping out cloud computing’s copious hidden costs. Rather, the answer lies with getting serious about tried-and-true best practices to deliver enough real-time visibility so there are no surprises when the bill arrives.

"Transparency is really the challenge, especially when you’re looking at costs across various public clouds," notes Dave Zabrowski, founder and CEO of CloudCruiser, a cloud cost-management platform. "There are very tangible hidden costs that can be eliminated just with transparency of knowledge."

For example, consider the simple problem of over-allocation. Companies typically sign up for public cloud computing power or storage capacity with the assumption that their workloads command a specific instance–therefore, they err on the side of over-provisioning and lock in at a higher price just to make sure they are covered. "But what happens is a lot is the workloads in real life aren’t as demanding as people think," Zabrowski explains. "By having transparency into usage vs. allocation, for example, companies within hours can downgrade to a cheaper instance."…

Improvements in technology and the need for greater efficiency have led to heightened interest in cloud computing–the delivery of information technology services, data storage, and/or software applications using the Internet and central remote servers…

CDW’s HP Cloud Center of Excellence features HP CloudSystem, a complete and integrated solution to build and manage services across private, public and hybrid cloud environments. In addition to HP servers, the center also includes HP storage and networking solutions, including HP Tipping Point network security offerings…

On the enterprise customer side, there is an increasing familiarity with the SaaS delivery model; continued pressure on IT budgets; and a growing comfort level with the security and performance parameters of cloud computing.

So, why isn’t the SaaS market bigger? What’s holding it back?…

Between cloud computing, big data, consumer IT, executives feeling capable of making more of their own technology decisions, and the ongoing business pressures for speed, agility and innovation, executives are eager to rethink and reinvent the IT department.

In our survey of 152 senior business executives and 162 IT executives, more executives singled out the IT organization than any other as the function they wanted to rebuild from scratch.  Half will revamp their IT organization in the next 12 months…

A couple of weeks ago, I attended IBM’s Cloud Innovation Analyst Forum in Chicago. The event kicked off with a panel discussion where company customers, including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Top Coder and Colleagues in Care, discussed their experiences with solutions powered by IBM cloud technologies. The benefits that the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee gained in reducing SAP client set-up time by 90% was especially impressive and went right into the heart of the problem of supporting 80,000 students in multiple campus settings. Reducing backup time by 99% overcame time constraints and helped reduce their risk as well.

Interestingly, some of the analysts in the audience expressed concern about whether this was really a cloud solution. In fact, we often hear that using virtualization and application service provider (ASP) or other hosting models does not qualify as a cloud solution. To an extent, these concerns are right as SaaS providers do utilize different architecture models, like web services fine-tuned to provide multi-tenancy applications with a low entry point for consumers. As an example, SalesForce has entry points as low as $50 a year for basic contact management capability that can be enhanced with full web service capabilities for approximately $300 a year…

A while back, mashups were all the rage. The idea was to compose solutions that provided aggregation and integration across applications and services to make information more available, useful, and personal. Mashups ushered in the era of Web 2.0 in all it’s socially connected goodness. They taught us that to be successful, we needed to add web service APIs to our web applications.

Web and client based mashups met with great success and have evolved even further with the introduction of the internet connected smartphone. Nothing is more available, useful, or personal than our smartphones. The current generation of cloud connected mobile computing mashups allow our mobilized workforces to receive, process, and react to information from disparate sources faster than ever before…

The combination of European privacy rules, multi-country business processes, the Euro crisis and a lingering recession will continue to delay cloud computing adoption in Europe by at least two years compared to the U.S., according to the IT research firm Gartner (News – Alert).

Although interest in the cloud is high in Europe, the diversity of Europe’s 44 different nations will result in slow cloud adoption this region of the world, according to Paolo Malinverno, vice president at Gartner.

“The opportunities for cloud computing value are valid all over the world, and the same is true for some of the risks and costs,” Malinverno said. “However, some of cloud computing’s potential risks and costs – namely security, transparency and integration – which are generally applicable worldwide, take on a different meaning in Europe.”…