Grazed from Destination CRM.  Author: Brittany Farb.

The cloud just got hotter. According to a forecast by Gartner, worldwide software as a service (SaaS) revenue will reach $12.1 billion by the end of the year—a 20.7 percent increase from 2010 revenue of $10 billion—and $21.3 billion by 2015.

“After more than a decade of use, adoption of SaaS continues to grow and evolve within the enterprise application markets,” explained Tom Eid, research vice president at Gartner, in a report.  “This is occurring as tighter capital budgets demand leaner alternatives, popularity and familiarity with the model increases, and interest in platform as a service and cloud computing grows.”…

Grazed from The Register.  Author:   Lucy Sherriff.

“The cloud agenda has to move beyond the security field and into business,” says Jacqui Taylor, freshly minted director of communications for the UK and Ireland wing of the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA).

“There is an education process that has to be done, and it needs an independent voice. That is where we come in.”

Grazed from Destination CRM.  Author: Leonard Klie.

Salesforce.com and its leader, chairman and CEO Marc Benioff, have both staked their reputations on cloud computing, so it comes as no surprise that Benioff is a big proponent of software-as-a-service.

"The idea of applications and platforms as separate entities is antiquated," he said during a press conference on the final day of this year’s Salesforce.com user conference. "We can’t think of applications and platforms as separate any more. We need one integrated offering."…

Grazed from Host Review.  Author: Dave Davies.

When cloud computing arrived at center stage back in the late 1990’s, it was the future.  It was the invention of the microchip all over again.  IT departments and CFO’s everywhere were breathing a sigh of relief.  They saw the cloud as a means to ending budget overages, pesky support tickets and reducing hardware costs.  As soon as the media got wind of this nifty cloud thingy, well, the cloud metaphors were more prolific than Captain America cosplayers at a Comic-on.  In fact, one could even say the media was largely responsible for the cloud’s success.  After all, we know the media is built on driving the rise of a trend and then greedily exposing its crash and burn.  That begs the question, is cloud computing really as fabulous as we think it is?  Is the cloud a victim of commercialism or a suspect in the breakdown of data security?…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: J. Nicholas Hoover.

Amazon Web Services is a market leader in cloud computing, but it’s been a latecomer to the federal cloud market. The company is now pushing hard into the government market, releasing a government-focused cloud earlier this month and continuing to increase the size of its public sector group.

While Amazon has had government customers since the early days of its S3 storage service and EC2 infrastructure service (NASA was a launch partner for S3), the company didn’t begin to build its government-focused business until 2009, and didn’t have a formalized public sector business unit until late 2010, when it brought in former Microsoft federal sector VP Teresa Carlson…

Grazed from The Register.  Author: John Leyden.

Diebold has taken the wraps off a prototype for a bank ATM that uses virtualisation technology.

Relying on remote servers instead of in-built computing resources reduces complexity while offering greater reliability and security. Diebold described the prototype as a "game changer" and part of its roadmap to make greater use of cloud-based technologies in cash machines and self-service kiosks…

Grazed from International Business Times.  Author:  Editorial Staff.

China’s top search engine Baidu Inc is on the lookout for potential acquisitions and investment opportunities in the mobile and cloud computing spaces, its chief financial officer said on Friday.

"We constantly assess our business needs and are on the lookout in the industry space for what will be a good fit for us," Jennifer Li also told Reuters in an interview…

Grazed from Technology Spectator.   Author: Charis Palmer.

Taking to the stage to deliver the closing keynote of Salesfore.com’s Dreamforce conference, Schmidt said the tech leaders of the future will embrace the three key trends of mobile, local and social, with the top programmers today building mobile applications. 

"The best vendors will offer mobile services and the next generation of startups will be based on that," Schmidt told the audience.

With the phones of the future able to tell where you’ve been, what you did and the people you met (with your permission, Schmidt hastened to add), it’s only a matter of time before they will be suggesting places to go, and people to meet…

 

Grazed from CloudPro.  Author:  Jennifer Scott.

Grazed from Bloomberg Businessweek.  Author:  Olga Kharif and Ashlee Vance.

Organizations as diverse as Northrop Grumman (NOC), Harvard University, Zynga, and the New York Stock Exchange (NYX) have filled job websites with requests for talented puppeteers and master chefs. A quick dig into the job listings reveals that these positions have nothing to do with office entertainment or gourmet meals. Instead, the companies want people who have mastered Puppet or Chef, competing software tools that sit at the heart of the cloud computing revolution…