Author: David

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Jiten Patil.

The world of software applications and products is moving from on-premise to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Perpetual licence earnings are shrinking, while subscription revenue including SaaS is growing increasingly fast and at a steady pace. According to a recent PWC report, subscription revenue (including SaaS) is set to grow at a 17.5% compounded annual rate, reaching 24% of total software revenue by 2016. Approximately 40% of the turnover of 10 of the top 100 software companies globally is generated by the SaaS service.

Gartner predicts that 77% of companies plan to increase their spending on SaaS in the next two years. So the big question is, how can you (as a software application or product vendor) quickly move to SaaS, test it and ride the wave of opportunity before losing your specific competitive advantage to some of the fast-progressing SaaS vendors like Workday, Oracle, Saleforce.com, SAP, Microsoft, Intuit, and Zuora…

Grazed from TechCrunch. Author: Alex Williams.

Startup AppScale has launched its open-source backup up service for Google App Engine (GAE), which is compatible with standard cloud services that developers use when building apps. The company, which was one of six startups that presented at the Structure conference last week, stood out even if it did not win an award for overall best startup and even though it wasn’t the audience award winner. Here’ why: It is a backup Platform as a Service (PaaS) for a PaaS and infrastructure services.

ScaleSafe, the company’s first product, automates the failover and migration of cloud apps and data from GAE. Company Co-founder and CTO Chandra Krintz calls the service a portability layer between a developer’s app and cloud services…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

Nervous about the NSA, PRISM and your public cloud? Not sure you want to put all your data eggs in one Amazon Web Services zone basket? Then, maybe ownCloud’s just released enterprise version of its open-source cloud program, ownCloud 5.0 Enterprise Edition, is what you want need.

OwnCloud is as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud service. With it you can store your files, folders, contacts, photo galleries, calendars and more on your own servers. You can then access that storage from your mobile device, your desktop, or a Web browser. You can also sync your data with local devices and share your data either with the world at large or specific, approved users…

Grazed from PR NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Italtel announced today that it is the recipient of the Cisco Cloud Builder Partner of the Year award in the South Region of EMEAR. Cisco unveiled the winners during its annual partner conference which took place in Boston. The Cisco Partner Summit award recognizes exemplary partners who demonstrate best-in-class business practices and serve as a model to the industry within their respective region.

"Cisco values the efforts and contributions of its partners, and for this reason we are particularly pleased that Italtel has reached this important achievement," said Eric Moyal, Partner and Commercial Segment Director at Cisco. "The Cloud Builder award presented to Italtel recognizes its stellar performance and extensive expertise as a Cisco partner in EMEAR."…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Hilary Kramer.

The buzz around cloud computing has been a boon for the companies that deliver the enterprise services and run the server farms where the processing power and the data actually reside. But as the theme matures, the list of opportunities may be broader than you think.

To find them, it helps to cut through a little of the hype. Migrating to the “cloud” may be worth $35 billion to enterprise IT this year alone, but the move only passes the headache of having to host the software back up to the cloud vendor. Bigger clouds still need faster servers, more direct pipes to the Internet backbone and above all more storage space to hold all the data clients formerly kept on in-house drives…

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge. Author: Rich Miller.

Private and hybrid clouds are all the rage right now, and one of the companies most keenly focused on this space is Cloudscaling, which specializes in private clouds built atop the open source OpenStack platform. Cloudscaling focuses on making its private clouds compatible with the Amazon Web Services platform, giving customers the option of easily moving workloads between the Cloudscaling infrastructure in their data center and the AWS public cloud.

The company just received $10 million in funding from Seagate and Juniper, among others. At last week’s GigaOm Structure conference, we caught up with Cloudscaling co-founder and CTO Randy Bias, who provided an update on the company’s progress and outlook on the cloud market. This video runs about 6 minutes, 30 seconds…

Watch video and read more from the source @ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/06/24/cloudscaling/

Grazed from LinkedIn. Author: Michael Skok.

We don’t often see opportunities as clearly as this. Cloud computing is literally reinventing what we know as the computer industry and there’s a $220 billion TAM to be addressed by 2020. I’ve written in the past about Open Source eating the software world. Well the corollary is that Cloud is growing the software industry as Everything becomes available as a cloud Service (Eaase). In fact, according to industry analysts, this opportunity has nearly doubled in size in the last year and we’ve seen that in our own portfolio, which has more than doubled in value to over $2bn+ as of today. And it’s clear to us that it’s still early enough and there are enough drivers and inhibitors that present real opportunity to invest, so long as you read carefully between the clouds.

So as an entrepreneur, where might you invest? To find out, we are now in the third year of running what has now become the industry’s broadest independent survey with 57 vendors, ranging from established players like Amazon, Citrix and Microsoft, to challengers like Rackspace, RedHat and CA. Not to mention important growth players like Acquia, CloudBees, Couchbase, Demandware, Eucalyptus and dozens of others listed below…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Nick Heath.

Cloud service contracts are still too complex for many businesses to grasp the potential risks and liabilities, according to Europe’s digital agenda commissioner, Neelie Kroes. Businesses are buying into cloud services without fully understanding what they’re paying for and what they can expect from the service, Kroes wrote in a blogpost on Friday.

"One of the big barriers to using cloud computing is a lack of trust. I think you should be able to know what you’re getting and what it means — and it should be easy to ensure that the terms in your contract are reasonable: open, transparent, safe and fair. Even if you don’t have a law degree," she said…

Grazed from ScienceOmega. Author: James Morgan.

Laptops, tablets and smartphones have altered the daily lives of countless citizens. Accessing the internet whilst on the move has become second nature to many, and users have grown accustomed to working with the same media across multiple devices. Cloud computing is a term widely used to denote the ability to connect and to synchronise multiple devices over a network. In combination with the advent of smart devices, ‘the cloud’ has transformed the way in which we utilise and interact with computers.

Not only has this new level of connectivity altered how we use technology for social purposes, but it has also transformed how we work professionally. In the current era of austerity, companies are looking to get the most out of their workforces, and in the interests of increased productivity, many have allowed a ‘bring-your-own-device’ (BYOD) culture to emerge…

Grazed from CloudTweaks. Author: Abdul Salam.

Google Glass has been generating a lot of hype because of its capabilities which is an indication that technology is finally heading towards the direction of science fiction; a move that a lot of people growing up in the 70’s and 80’s have been anticipating for a long time. Google Glass is a wearable computer which opens up a lot of multimedia possibilities, not just for sharing and recording, but for consumption as well. The biggest possibility would be augmented reality. This brings a totally new piece to the board which will change the game once again. And this alone will already make Google Glass a worthy purchase.

Imagine the possibilities of augmented reality. The way we view the world will be totally changed, it will probably look like the interface of a game with different heads-up display (HUD) elements being shown. When can set up a waypoint of your destination on your map and get a visual cue on where it is exactly so you can just follow that barring a turn-by-turn system which will not be feasible for small streets and crowded market areas. You can set up reminders and checklists of things to do or buy and all of them visible in the corner of your eye, and it can even tell you which isle these products are located. The practical application of Google Glass is practically limited only by our imagination, and of course the infrastructure…