Is Cloud Computing a Boondoggle for China?
Europe’s top 25 cloud start-ups battle it out in VC beauty contest
Twenty five of Europe’s most innovative cloud computing companies will be pitching to an audience of elite venture capital firms and tech industry executives for the next two days at the European Tech Tour Association (ETT) Cloud and ICT 2.0 in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The Summit aims to be a catalyst for the cloud computing industry in Europe, and aims to assist high-growth start-ups to expand globally by introducing them to potential investors and partners.
The 25 companies presenting were whittled down from an initial list of 234 rapidly growing cloud computing companies across Europe.
Effective data management ‘requires several strategies’
Companies looking to improve their data management standards in terms of business intelligence need to pursue several different strategies, it has been advised.
According to IT Business Edge blogger Loraine Lawson, organisations are gradually beginning to realise that they will not be able to make use of clean and integrated data without putting in some hard work first.
She said the messages that have been put across by data management experts appear to be getting through to businesses.
Sky’s the limit for TechnologyOne software rebuild
Announcing the complete re-engineering of the company’s software ‘from the ground up’, TechnologyOne chairman, Adrian Di Marco, said today the new cloud computing strategy would help its customers “migrate to realise major operating and capital expenditure savings.”
Forrester: Many cloud projects will fail, and this is good
Forty percent of companies are still to be convinced of the benefits of cloud and have no plans to adopt such a service. That’s according to a survey from Quest Software, which also found that the need to reduce costs was still the main driver for those companies that have adopted cloud services.
Cloud market triples in four years
While previously most cost saving debate about the cloud has focussed on the ability to cut capital expenditure by using a cloud service, Gartner vice president Nick Jones, today said that some organisations were “saving 50 per cent of their operational costs,” by moving to the cloud.
This saving he said was increasingly being seen as a source of innovation funding for CIOs who were still strapped for cash.
As a result demand for cloud computing services will grow at more than 20 per cent over the next four years, reaching $US150 billion by 2014 – three times the market’s current size – according to Gartner.
Amazon Gets Graphic With Cloud GPU Instances
IBM & Friends Tackle Future Of Cloud Storage
IBM has announced plans to develop a smart cloud storage architecture over the next three years. The EU-funded joint research initiative, estimated at $21.5M, involves 15 European partners. Called VISION Cloud — Virtualized Storage Services for the Future Internet – the group plans to develop a new approach, where data is represented by smart objects that include rich information describing the content of the data and how the object should be handled, replicated, or backed up.
Abiquo Gives CIOs More Control Over Cloud Computing
Abiquo, which bills itself as an enterprise cloud management software company, has released version 1.7 of its flagship software for a company to set IT business policy and apply that policy to physical or virtual data centers and even to third party hosting providers. Abiquo 1.7 overcomes some of the major impediments to wider adoption of cloud computing, which is the inability of a company to decide what IT resources are available to them, said Peter Malcolm, CEO of Abiquo.
"Today that decision is made almost exclusively by humans, and that is the barrier to cloud adoption," Malcolm said.