Grazed from ExpertClick.  Author: Allen Falcon.

In response to the growing number of small and mid-size businesses frustrated with "Big Tech" solutions, Cumulus Global announced it is formally and actively supporting the Occupy Google Apps Movement. Small businesses throughout New England and across the United States are joining a new branch of the Occupy movement focused on protesting against "Big Tech". Big Tech vendors burden small and mid-size businesses with extra features and extra costs without delivering additional value. Occupy Google Apps encourages small and mid-size businesses to shed their "Big Tech" burden and move to Google Apps for Business and other cloud computing solutions.

"Small and mid-size businesses drive the economy and job creation, yet the big IT vendors treat small business like unwanted pets", notes Allen Falcon, CEO of Cumulus Global and support of the Occupy Google Apps movement. "These vendors punish SMBs with unnecessary complexity and costs." …

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Cloud Ventures.

Another of our upcoming webinars is ‘Cloud BCP‘ – Next Generation Business Continuity Planning.

This is one of the more immediate and powerful business benefits of Cloud Computing, and also it highlights one of its most significant upcoming milestones, the shift to an era ‘Cloud Aware Applications‘.

As the name suggests this refers to applications that are now engineered for Cloud environments, rather than hardware platforms, more specifically swapping ‘PaaS’ for ‘Platform’. Rather than engineering your apps for running on a Unix XYZ for example, you now design them to run on Amazon or Azure…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Dave Jilk.

Despite my shaky prediction performance in 2011, I’m going to try again.

Last year, my best predictions were based on some sort of specialized knowledge or insight, and the worst came from looking into the macro environment and making guesses. So, this year’s predictions emphasize the former approach, yet hopefully avoid sounding like claims such as "the market will fluctuate."

1. 2012 will be the Year of the Storefront in the cloud.
Admittedly, this is a somewhat self-serving prediction, since Standing Cloud is (among other things) a storefront. But based on the variety of offerings, rumors, customer behaviors, and other sources I have, it seems that the confluence of forces that helped drive the popularity of App Stores in the mobile world are now propelling the storefront concept ahead in the cloud world…

Grazed from Investors.com.  Author:  Donna Howell.

Companies expect a continuing data deluge, yet no rainmaking for their IT budgets. So to cope and save, some are considering cloud backup and archiving.

That’s a good trend for backup-software providers such as CommVault Systems (CVLT), EMC (EMC), Symantec (SYMC) and IBM (IBM).

These firms and others have been tailoring their software to work with the cloud, and courting cloud-oriented customers…

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Callidus Software Inc. CALD +0.93% , the leader in sales effectiveness and cloud computing, today announced it has acquired the leader in next-generation marketing automation and lead management, LeadFormix.

"Every CEO on the planet wants more, faster, and better quality sales leads. Investment in the best, most innovative sales and marketing tools is a number one priority for all businesses. More qualified leads means more deals, and more deals means better Sales Performance," said Leslie Stretch, President and CEO, CallidusCloud…

Grazed from SeekingAlpha.  Author: Editorial Staff.

There are two things we know will happen during the coming year. First, the sun will come up in the morning and next, the media drumbeat will continue for a Facebook IPO. But there are some happy clouds floating in the IPO skies that are being overlooked.

They are called cloud-computing companies.

This industrial sector has been hot – ultra hot – in the Land of IPOs…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

With the New Year upon us, Skygone reflects on 2011, a year full of accomplishments, awards and a prelude to an even brighter 2012.   The growth and technological advances that Skygone experienced in 2011 has solidified Skygone as a thought-leader and fast-mover in the cloud computing and geospatial markets.

"Customers that we started talking to and educating years ago are coming back to us now and acting on their cloud initiatives in an aggressive manner," says Ryan Hughes, co-founder of Skygone.  "I think everyone wanted to make sure this cloud movement wasn’t another dot com-like bubble. We’ve been successful putting even extremely complex enterprise applications in the cloud for about five years now, so most customers are past that fear.” …

Grazed from MSP Alliance.  Author:  Erin Harrison.

Now that 2012 is upon us, we can reflect on the past year, the cloud computing trends that took place, and determine what will be required this year as the market continues to accelerate.

According to Gartner estimates, worldwide software-as-a-service growth was on track to reach $12.1 billion in 2011, representing a 20.7 percent increase from $10 billion in 2010. This growth has been far and wide across enterprise level and at SME level, a recent industry blogger points out, noting that businesses have either begun consuming cloud services, with SaaS the most popular – or they have shifted their overall business plans to migrate to the cloud…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Derrick Harris.

If you’re tired of hearing about cloud computing and big data, you might want to wear earplugs for the next year or so. These two trends are only going to get hotter, in large part because they’re also becoming ideal bedfellows. This is especially true in the world of science, where the cloud provides an ideal platform for crowdsourcing scientific problems across the whole world of researchers, giving them access to data sets and the computing resources to analyze them.

Generally speaking, we’ve already seen how crowdsourcing can be an effective method for solving big data problems. The Netflix Prize challenge in 2009 attracted more than 50,000 participants trying to improve Netflix’s Cinematch algorithm, and today we have Kaggle — an entire company dedicated to hosting competitions for companies trying to crowdsource their own analytical challenges. And it’s the cloud, with its centralized nature, virtually unlimited and on-demand resources, that makes it possible to have so many people access and work with the same data sets at the same time…

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Loraine Lawson.

Darren Cunningham, vice president of marketing for Informatica Cloud, told IT Business Edge’s Loraine Lawson that private clouds are unusual and likely to stay that way as companies continue to focus on connecting internal resources with the public cloud. That will make hybrid clouds the most common type of deployment. To deal with this shift, CIOs need to think about offering what Cunningham calls "hybrid IT."

Lawson: What’s Informatica doing in terms of hybrid cloud?

Cunningham: We’re going to be talking more about hybrid IT, because if you start talking about hybrid cloud, you’re getting into the specific definition of public-private hybrid, community, some of the NIST definition of cloud computing. This is part of the whole cloud-first initiative when the U.S. government talked about how they were going to go cloud first…