Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Within the next four years, 76 percent of the traffic through the world’s data centers will be cloud-based traffic. Increasingly, this traffic will consist of public cloud services, as more enterprises become more comfortable with this model. Software as a Service will also dominate.

That’s the latest prediction from Cisco, which crunched the numbers in its latest Cisco Global Cloud Index (2013 – 2018). The Cisco report also forecasts that overall data center traffic will triple in volume, growing from 3.1 zettabytes a year in 2013 to 8.6 zettabytes in 2018. (A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes.) The growth will be at least 23 percent annually…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Neil Patel.

Do a few minutes of research, and you’ll come up with a load of conversion advice. “Make CTA buttons bigger! Create killer headlines! Streamline your checkout process!” Ad infinitum. Ad nauseum. Don’t get me wrong. All those things are important, but they will only take you so far. The very best conversion optimization is tailored to specific industries. The more specific and focused the conversion tips, the bigger impact you’ll see.

If you are in the SaaS industry, there are at least eight industry-specific tips that you should follow that will help you to improve conversions.

1. Make it free…

Grazed from Diginomica. Author: Chris Middleton.

The rise of the Chinese computing and telecoms giants has been the subject of considerable attention in the West in recent years and in particular the potential impact they will have on what has been a US dominated tech sector. An interesting perspective was cast on this this week at the OpenStack Summit in Paris where Huawei, staking a claim to be China’s leading IT company (by sales) at the event, announced its intention to be a cloud provider of choice in Europe.

In particular the firm sees the UK higher education sector as a key target, and named Northumberland University as its first client in that space. Telefonica UK (O2) already uses Huawei cloud services. The company sees its mission as being to fill a gap, according to Ren Zhipeng, president, cloud computing product line, with that gap being the operational gulf between legacy systems and new cloud deployments…

Read more from the source @ http://diginomica.com/2014/11/04/can-openstack-open-europe-huaweis-cloud-computing-ambitions/#.VFjD2fTF91Y

Grazed from MarketWatch.  Author: PR Announcement.

Today at the OpenStack Summit, HP announced a partnership with Wind River to develop solutions with HP Helion OpenStack(R) technology to enable carrier grade network functions virtualization (NFV) capabilities.

The addition of proven carrier grade technologies from Wind River into HP Helion OpenStack is designed to provide communications service providers (CSPs) with an open source based cloud platform that meets their demanding reliability requirements and accelerates their transition to NFV deployments…

Grazed from MarketWired. Author: PR Announcement.

Fusion (NASDAQ: FSNN), a leading provider of cloud communications, cloud connectivity and cloud computing services, announced today that it has closed on the purchase of all of the outstanding shares of stock of PingTone Communications, Inc., a provider of integrated cloud-based communications services headquartered in Herndon, Virginia. Founded in January 2001, PingTone generated LTM revenue of $8.1 million as of June 30, 2014 and pro forma adjusted EBITDA of $2.1 million, giving effect to anticipated cost synergies.

The PingTone transaction is Fusion’s third acquisition in twenty-four months. It reflects the success of the company’s strategy to grow through acquisition as well as organically, and meets its acquisition criteria in several significant ways. The acquisition will be immediately accretive to Fusion’s EBITDA. In addition, it adds a loyal and growing enterprise customer base with high ARPU, positions the company to impact organic growth with a talented team of managers and staff to further help the company scale, provides a strong cross-sale and up-sale opportunity and can be tightly integrated into the company’s existing infrastructure…

Read more from the source @ http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/fusion-acquires-cloud-services-provider-pingtone-nasdaq-fsnn-1963656.htm

Grazed from MacRumors. Author: Juli Clover.

Apple acquired Seattle-based cloud networking startup Union Bay Networks sometime in the last couple of months and has opened an office in the city that houses more than 30 engineers, reports GeekWire. The site uncovered Apple’s acquisition and Seattle office after former Union Bay Networks co-founder Benn Bollay posted a job opening for a Systems Software Engineer that read "Ever wanted to work at Apple, but didn’t want to live in Cupertino?"

Apple later confirmed the acquisition of Union Bay Networks to The Seattle Times, providing its standard acquisition statement: Apple "buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." Union Bay Networks was a stealth startup focused on "enabling the next generation of networking for cloud computing and software defined datacenters," and seven out of nine former employees are said to have been hired by Apple, moving to an unknown office location…

Read more from the source @ http://www.macrumors.com/2014/11/03/apple-union-bay-networks-seattle/

Grazed from WSJ. Author: Alistair Barr.

Google Inc. built one of the world’s most powerful networks of data centers, able to handle more than three billion search queries a day. But it fell behind Amazon.com Inc. in the fast-growing business of renting out computing horsepower to others. Now, Google is making a renewed effort to catch Amazon. At a conference on Tuesday, Google will highlight new offerings that make it easier for customers to set up so-called cloud services more quickly.

Google executives say they’ve learned from past mistakes and are adapting the company’s offerings. It will be a tough sell. “Five years ago, when we were starting, Google’s service didn’t really exist and Amazon was the only complete option,” said Adam D’Amico, director of technical operations at Okta Inc., an identity-management startup that runs its business on Amazon’s computers…

Grazed from Barrons. Author: Grace L. Williams.

From Oct. 27 to 29, three Microsoft (ticker: MSFT ) insiders including iconic co-founder Bill Gates sold 12,525,000 shares for $578,746,953, an average of $46.21 each. Gates’ transaction was the largest, a 10b5-1 planned sale of 12,500,000 shares for $577,601,150. Gates now directly holds 285,492,934 shares, a stake of 3.4% in Microsoft, down from 3.6%. His most recent previous transaction was on July 30 when he sold 7,589,200 shares for $331,000,000, an average of $43.62 each, also through a 10b5-1 planned sale.

Frank H. Brod, corporate vice president, finance and administration, and chief accounting officer, sold 22,000 shares for $1,007,980. Brod now directly holds 115,708 Microsoft shares. His most recent previous transaction was on July 28 when he sold 1,500 shares for $66,100, an average of $44.04 each. Maria M. Klawe, a director, sold 3,000 shares for $137,895 in her first open-market transaction. Klawe now directly holds 23,105 Microsoft shares…

Read more from the source @ http://online.barrons.com/articles/bill-gates-578m-planned-microsoft-stock-sale-1415051937?mod=rss_barrons_inside_scoop

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Frederic Lardinois.

OpenStack, the fast-growing open source cloud computing platform that now has the backing of more than 200 companies, is holding its semiannual developer conference in Paris this week. With over 4,500 attendees, it’s the organization’s largest event so far. While this illustrates the interest in the platform, the project is also facing a set of new challenges with its growing popularity.

During today’s keynote a number of speakers noted that the project’s six-month release cycle makes it harder for large organizations to adopt the platform. The head of BMW’s datacenter Stefan Lenz, for example, noted that too many big changes happen from release to release. "We need more stability in the future," he noted. "But that doesn’t prevent us from using it right now as it is."…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Human error is responsible for one in five data loss errors, according to the latest study from cloud provider Databarracks. The study, the fifth annual Data Health Check report, found that employee idiocy was the third most popular reason for data going missing with 18% of the vote, behind software failure (19%) and hardware failure (21%). Interestingly, corruption and theft were responsible for 15% and 7% of the poll respectively.

Yet it’s the larger companies who continue to foul up. 22% of large organisations listed human error as the main cause of data loss over the last 12 months, compared to 6% of small organisations. The report examines the cost of backup and disaster recovery. While a third (32%) of respondents spend less than half an hour on backup, a similar number (33%) take more than two hours or employ dedicated staff…