Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

The hypergrowth that the SaaS category saw last year has leveled off, but these companies are still outperforming traditional software rivals and legacy IT providers who are mired in a hardware-oriented world, according to new research from martinwolf Global M&A Advisors.

The growth in value of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies may not be white hot anymore, but the sector as measured still showed not-too-shabby double-digit growth last year — according to new data that measure enterprise value of tech companies. The SaaS numbers for 2012 looked particularly robust compared to enterprise value of traditional IT vendors which are trying to negotiate a tricky transition from hardware providers to more well-rounded IT services companies, said Marty Wolf, president of martinwolf Global M&A Advisors, a company that consults on merger and acquisition strategies…

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Thomas Claburn.

As 2012 winds down, Google is shutting down more of its services, this time calling the closures "winter cleaning" rather than the usual "spring cleaning."
Venkat Panchapakesan, VP of engineering, said in a blog post that difficult decisions are necessary for Google to maximize its impact.

Eleven services are being discontinued, although few are likely to be widely missed — none of these offerings have a particularly high profile. Five affect Google Calendar. On Jan. 4, 2013, Google plans to:
— shut down the ability to create new time reservations through Calendar Appointment slots;
— discontinue Calendar Labs experiments Smart Rescheduler and Add gadget by URL; and
— terminate two U.S.-only features: Check your calendar via SMS, and Create Event via SMS…

Grazed from CXOToday. Author: Sharon Lobo.

Undoubtedly, cloud computing can be counted amongst the most hyped technologies ever. And the last 5 years bear witness to this fact. In the last half decade, every IT vendor or analyst has prophesied how this technology will change the way we perceive and consume technology. However, the irony is that we were users of cloud even before we were made aware of the tag. Services like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Skype etc. were all delivered via cloud. Even today, cloud continues to remain hyped, according to Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle Report, with a probability of achieving a plateau of productivity in 2 to 5 years. So has all this hype helped in the adoption of the cloud? In this first of a two part article, let’s take a look how businesses perceived and adopted cloud in 2012.

The story so far…
Ever since, cloud took shape of hype, IT vendors on various forums have always endorsed it to be the solution for every enterprise regardless of the industry or category it belonged to. It was mainly large enterprises who were early adopters of the cloud and too private cloud. Now, private cloud kills the whole concept of cloud, since the entire infrastructure is now managed by a third-party instead of the business to which it belongs. However, this was a positive step towards cloud’s adoption. Surprisingly, public cloud, which was primarily targeted towards SMEs, never saw an substantial uptake in this segment, with security concerns and weak SLAs being the key concerns…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

Akamai’s 8-month search for a new CEO didn’t take it too far: It tapped co-founder and chief scientist Tom Leighton to succeed Paul Sagan, who announced his intention to leave last April. Now Sagan will cede the CEO slot on January 1. Eight months after launching an executive search for a successor to Akamai CEO Paul Sagan, the company tapped its c0-founder Tom Leighton for that role.

Leighton, who is also chief scientist for the Cambridge, Mass. content delivery network (CDN) provider, will start his new gig January 1, 2013. Last spring, Sagan announced his plans to step down as CEO at the end of 2013. Both Leighton and Sagan will remain on the board and Sagan will stay on as a senior strategy advisor, the company said…

Relational database vs non-relational database: All you need to know

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Stacey Higginbotham.

Google’s webmail service Gmail was down for 18 minutes last week after a “routine update” broke the service for a few minutes. The search giant reported that it conducted a routine update of its load balancing software between 8:45 AM PT and 9:13 AM PT and after the problems were detected managed to quickly roll back the buggy code. But this didn’t stop some people from questioning why Google would roll out a software update at what are peak email-checking hours on the West Coast…

Grazed from TalkinCloud.  Author: Chris Talbot.

Inktank, which specializes in providing enterprise-level support for Ceph Distributed Storage System, announced at Dell World 2012 it has joined Dell‘s (NASDAQ: DELL) Emerging Solutions Ecosystem.

Through the partner ecosystem, Inktank plans to offer Ceph storage software, professional services and support as part of the Dell ecosystem, designed as a partnership program to deliver complementary and interoperable hardware, software and services components via Dell’s OpenStack-powered cloud. Ceph, on the other hand, was designed to be a highly scalable and flexible platform that enables object, block and file storage in a universal storage system, enabling enterprises in the cloud…

Grazed from FutureGov.  Author: Rob Livingstone.

The whole topic of cloud computing has been dominating the IT agenda. Conversations have been very intense in 2012 – we were barraged by new opinions, fuelled by new cloud product offerings and innovative, compelling solutions.  Given the inconsistency in the maturity of understanding across industry as to the intrinsic value of cloud technologies, I expected 2012 to be an interesting year indeed as organisations struggle with balancing the promise of significant benefits with the perceived (or actual) concerns such as risk and security.

In my view, the cloud hype cycle differs from almost all the previous hype cycles as it is turbo-charged by the consumerisation of IT technology, where anyone can access immediately, at minimal to zero cost, powerful IT systems previously only available within organisations…

Grazed from Datamation.  Author: Jeffrey Kaplan.

If you’ve been holding back about moving to the ‘Cloud, it is time to get onboard the Cloud Computing express.  Not only has every major research firm published market forecasts indicating that Cloud services are growing exponentially, but we see multiplying customer success stories that clearly illustrate the immediate and measurable business benefits of moving to the Cloud.

Here are some simple rules you should follow to help you move ahead in the coming year and successfully leverage today’s rapidly evolving Cloud alternatives:…