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…

Grazed from Network World.  Author:  Robert Mullins.

Across IT, many observers have identified three broad trends going forward — mobility, cloud computing and the consumerization of IT. When it comes to networking, these trends are expected to drive demand for more bandwidth capacity and, increasingly, wireless network architecture. In addition, 2012 is expected to see a continuation of the intense rivalry between industry leaders Cisco Systems and HP, as the latter tries to chip away market share from the former.

The combined trends of mobility and consumerization will force network administrators to invest more in wireless networks and less in wired networks because of the simple fact that tablet computers don’t have Ethernet ports, noted Saar Gillai, chief technology officer of HP’s networking business. “Tablets don’t have cable,” Gillai said, adding that younger workers, in particular, are increasingly bringing their tablets, to work with them. “A tablet is something they expect, not something that’s new and exciting. If their primary tool is something they can’t connect to the network, it’s going to be a problem for them.”…

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Tom Nolle.

For the past two years, enterprises have been asking themselves one of the most important questions in IT: “What role can cloud computing play in my business?” While most enterprises believe they’ve come to better understand cloud, few can confidently answer the question of its role.

With surveys showing that enterprises have rejected more cloud installments than they’ve accepted, it seems that more IT admins can more easily explain what cloud can’t do.

It’s not that enterprises want the cloud to fail; evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. However, cloud hasn’t met expectations in several areas and enterprises still don’t have all the answers they need…

Grazed from The Data Center Journal.  Author: Rakesh Dogra.

In the year that has just gone by, cloud computing seems to have made a huge impact in the data center world. One of the more noteworthy impacts was that of OpenStack. Rackspace and NASA launched OpenStack towards the end of 2010. The open source project is assembling a private cloud operating system for data center and one of the biggest deliverableS from this project is increased operational efficiency. Big names like Dell, Intel, Citrix and Cisco have thrown their weight behind the project.

OpenStack follows a Linux like open source model. It has three components – compute, object storage and image service…

Grazed from ITWorld.  Author: Brian Proffitt.

According to Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, the biggest commercial Linux vendor is planning on hiring at least 1,000 new employees in 2012–increasing the size of its staff by 24 percent.

This interesting data was revealed in a recent interview in Investor’s Business Daily, where Whitehurst cites cloud computing as the big reason for Red Hat’s explosive growth.

Ironically, Whitehurst sees the success of Red Hat and companies like Amazon in the cloud as a factor in actually slowing overall economic growth:…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge.  Author:  Rich Miller.

Internap Network Services has acquired hosting provider Voxel Holdings in a deal that will boost the company’s cloud computing offerings and expand its base of small business customers. The all-cash transaction, which closed Dec. 30, is valued at $30 million, with an additional $5 million in sweeteners tied to the delivery of specific objectives during the next two years.

Voxel is backed by Seaport Capital, which invested $5.5 million in the company earlier this year. Voxel is based in New York and offers hosting services atop an automation platform called VoxSTRUCTURE. Its services include on-demand physical and virtual cloud servers, a global content delivery network (CDN), and a full suite of managed services.  The company hass more than 1,000 customers and 50 employees…

Grazed from Minyanville.com.  Author:  Conor Sen.

Many years ago, Sun Microsystems coined the phrase “the network is the computer.” Sun was way ahead of its time in making this call, and despite being right in its vision didn’t survive to be a part of what we now know as cloud computing. Increasingly, it appears that we’re transitioning to a world where, to use a somewhat clumsy analogy, the network is the consumer.

A couple of pieces served as inspiration for this. First, Leigh Drogen had a post a year ago titled Social Capital and Collaborative Consumption with which I generally agree. But it was this New Year’s resolution from Leah Culver to “live in the cloud” that made the connection for me. Because while cloud computing companies like Salesforce.com (CRM), VMware (VMW), and Citrix Systems (CTXS) are changing the lives of IT professionals and systems administrators everywhere, cloud consumption has the potential to change the lives of everyone…