Category: News

Grazed from Wall Street Journal. Author: Clint Boulton.

Gartner said IT spending is expected to rise 3% to $3.6 trillion in 2012, largely on the strength of increased spending on cloud computing. The outlook for this year was raised from an earlier forecast of 2.5% growth. Nonetheless, the growth for this year will be much slower than the 7.9% gain in 2011, as economic turmoil in Europe, and slowdowns in China and the U.S. put pressure on IT budgets.

Cloud computing, which lets CIOs offload their hardware hosting and maintenance to a vendor, is one of the “bright spots” in IT spending, said Gartner analyst Richard Moore. Spending on the cloud is expected to rise to $109 billion this year from $91 billion last year. Moore said cloud-based business process software accounts for the bulk of cloud spending by enterprises, followed by platform as a service, software as a service and infrastructure as a service. Moore said cloud spending could nearly double to $207 billion by 2016…

Grazed from Wall Street Journal. Author: Clint Boulton.

CIOs are focusing the bulk of the growth in their IT spending on cloud computing and mobile technologies, which squares with the findings of Gartner’s new report on global IT spending.

Dominion Enterprise CIO Joe Fuller said mobile application development currently accounts for 26% of his total budget for the marketing services firm, but will rise to 40% by the end of the year as the company seeks to better compete with Zillow and other online brands.

He and his team developed roughly 29 mobile applications to enable customers to access brand websites such as ForRent.com and Homes.com from the iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone handsets. “We want to have the best mobile offerings out there,” Fuller said. “So we’ve got to step it up a notch.” Fuller is also on the process of testing hybrid cloud computing using virtualization software from VMware with the notion to gradually move away from locally-stored software to a complete cloud for its brands…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Editorial Staff.

Rumors keep swirling about for the next-generation of video game consoles.

What sort of specs will the Xbox 720 and PlayStation 4 have? How will these systems compare to the current-gen consoles? To gaming PCs? And how will cloud-computing figure in to the next generation of games, both in terms of processing power and distribution?

There’s no clear or certain answer to any of this, and likely won’t be for some time…

Grazed from HealthTech Zone. Author: Deborah Hirsch.

For a long time, healthcare organizations shied away from cloud computing, rightfully worried about privacy issues and security when confidential data was stored and managed on the Web.

But all that seems to have dissolved. A recent report by Dallas-based research firm MarketsandMarkets predicts the market will grow to $5.4 billion worldwide by 2017, according to a story by James Ritchie. In 2011, market penetration for cloud computing in healthcare was apparently 4 percent, representing only a $1.7-billion market.

Cloud computing allows organizations to rely on remote machines owned by another firm for software and data storage via a Web-based service for such functions as electronic medical records and for back-office functions, including billing and payroll, according to the study…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Michael Vizard.

As the presidential campaign gets into full swing in advance of the November election, there’s obviously a lot of focus on the employment outlook. While the accuracy of the numbers that the Department of Labor posts are dubious at best, there’s no doubt that the employment picture could be better. A lot of factors go into determining what the employment picture actually winds up being. But one factor that a lot of folks don’t seem to be appreciating is the role IT and cloud computing are about to play in reshaping in the economy.

While most of the employment chatter these days about cloud computing centers around the impact this shift will have on people working inside IT, the reality is that the impact on people working outside of IT is going to be exponentially greater. Once a company starts moving IT into a third-party data center, it’s only a matter of time before entire business processes start heading in that same direction. Once business process outsourcing starts to occur in volume, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that one smaller group of people in the cloud can automate a process or task that used to be performed by 10 times as many people working in 10 different companies. As that trend continues, it’s not like those jobs moved somewhere and will come back one day; they just simply disappeared into the cloud…

Grazed from IT Business Edge. Author: Arthur Cole.

Now that enterprises are becoming more comfortable with the cloud computing model for basic applications like backup and recovery, attention is starting to shift toward some of the more advanced possibilities.

Key among them is Infrastructure-as-a-Service, which promises not only software and operating instances on-demand, but entire data environments. While a number of high-profile services are up and running (most of the time, anyway) the question remains how close we are from making the transition from ad hoc service-based infrastructure to full utility computing.

At the moment, implementing a working IaaS architecture is a bit more complicated than switching the lights on. Hardware and software integration, network pathways, usage and governance policies and a range of other items generally mark the "to-do" list when it comes to establishing cloud infrastructure. However, it seems the process is becoming more streamlined, particularly as enterprises transition to more cloud-like architecture within their own data centers…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Microsoft is buying Perceptive Pixel Inc. (PPI), which makes large-scale, multi-touch displays, a new hardware line for the software giant.

Terms were not disclosed. 3M is understood to be an investor in PPI.

Kurt DelBene, president of Microsoft’s Office Division, said in a statement Monday that "PPI’s large touch displays, when combined with hardware from our OEMs, will become powerful Windows 8-based PCs and open new possibilities for productivity and collaboration."…

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: Steven D. Jones.

Cloud computing is lifting the cloud over software mergers.

Recently SAP AG SAP -1.15% bid $4.3 billion for Ariba Inc. ARBA -0.08% , a manager of online purchasing networks. A day after that announcement, Oracle Corp. ORCL -0.31% said it was buying privately held Vitrue Inc., a maker of cloud-based social marketing software, for an undisclosed sum. A couple of weeks later, Microsoft Corp. MSFT -0.93% announced it would acquire social networking provider Yammer Inc. for $1.2 billion.

Even cloud companies are buying cloud companies. Salesforce.com Inc. CRM -3.34% announced it would purchase Buddy Media Inc. for $689 million. The company makes software that manages ad campaigns on social media such as Facebook FB +1.58% , Twitter and YouTube…

Grazed from TechTarget. Author: Clive Longbottom.

The advantages of private cloud services are plentiful. But so are its hurdles. Understanding its promises and problems right at the beginning is crucial to use cloud effectively. Otherwise, IT is just replacing one chaotic infrastructure with another.

Cloud computing services may be less fuzzy now for some IT pros who have worked out what it actually means and how it could work for them. But, for many, cloud computing is still a confusing term because of the conflicting messages from vendors, users and analysts. Your best bet is to learn all you can about private cloud services and its problems.

The promise of private cloud is reasonably simple: It has to do with moving from a one-application-per-physical-server (OAPPS) approach to a shared-resources model. This means that IT will be investing in fewer servers, storage systems and network equipment, and will improve business flexibility by reducing functional redundancy…

Grazed from GigaOM. Author: Barb Darrow.

The database category hasn’t been all that exciting over the past 20 years, with market leaders Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Sybase (now SAP trading off incremental updates every year or so. But that period of stasis ended with the advent of cloud computing, open source software and big data — a perfect storm that reinvigorated the field.

Now NuoDB, a new-look database company that seeks to take advantage of that convergence is taking in $10 million in Series B funding, led by Morgenthaler Ventures with additional contributions from existing backers Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Longworth Venture Partners. The company also added database pioneer Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, to its board, joining another database luminary, Hummer Winblad partner Mitchell Kertzman…