“Cloud first” markets — those where companies’ first serious engagements with information technology are in the form of cloud computing — are beginning to emerge. For the BRIC economies in particular, this might mean a chance to adopt low-cost solutions that will give companies a clear …
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Paul Miller
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A recent survey suggests that “mobile computing appears to be a driving force behind cloud adoption in enterprises.” While the cloud clearly plays a role in making mobile devices as valuable to the enterprise as they are, it may be too much to suggest that mobiles …
There has been a remarkable flowering of companies over the past year or two, all riding a wave of developer and investor enthusiasm for the loosely defined concept of “big data.” But given that the big data startup market is probably overvalued and headed for a …
Advocates of the public cloud tend to dismiss private cloud deployments within individual companies, arguing that they are too small to deliver the cost or flexibility advantages of the public cloud. But recent developments in the UK refute that argument. The University Modernization Fund’s Cloud Pilot, …
A long-running clash of legal approaches to the handling of personal data is coming to a head, as European countries begin to act. In Germany, Deutsche Telekom is calling for more stringent regulation of cloud providers, and in the Netherlands a government minister suggests that U.S. companies could be …
This week UK Ministry of Justice official Martin Bellamy addressed concerns that the UK government has become less enthusiastic about a government cloud, saying, ”We are expecting to be able to demonstrate that moving to a cloud model is going to allow us to save substantial amounts …
At the end of last month Verizon acquired CloudSwitch, adding value to Verizon’s January acquisition of cloud data center provider Terremark. Around the world, big telecommunications providers such as AT&T, BT, Telstra and Verizon have been hard at work, diversifying and seeking new business opportunities as …
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Despite OpenStack’s continued growth, a combination of product updates and acquisitions from Citrix, Eucalyptus, Red Hat and VMware over the past week demonstrate that the race to become the dominant private cloud provider, as well as win over the enterprise, is far from over. Is one of …
Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola this week has been widely interpreted as a bid to control the mobile phone company’s portfolio of 17,000 mobile patents. As Colin Gibbs noted last week, handset manufacturers such as Apple, Samsung and HTC appear increasingly willing to claim patent infringement in order …
Alistair Croll’s post on O’Reilly Radar this week may have been titled “There’s no such thing as big data,” but Croll believes the exact opposite. Rather than just collecting data, he argues, you have to ask the right questions of it. Coincidentally, DJ Patil joined Greylock …
A new way of thinking about data and data scientists illustrates the broader shift that is slowly under way in the economy, a shift from simply collecting big data toward gathering and using data in order to make businesses better informed. Read More »
In addition to enhancing privacy, dedicated circuits will generally result in more predictable data transfer performance and will also increase bandwidth between your data center and AWS. Jeff Barr, evangelist for Amazon Web Services, sees plenty in the company’s new Direct Connect product that will interest … Read More »
On Thursday Amazon announced three enhancements to its cloud computing offering. These include improvements to existing virtual private cloud and identity management solutions as well as a new option to directly connect enterprise networks to machines in Amazon’s Virginia data center, as Derrick Harris recounts and Amazon’s Jeff Barr …
Web companies like Google and Facebook gain business advantage by analyzing large volumes of rapidly changing data about their users, but they are far from alone. A recent infographic from Get Satisfaction charts the volume of data stored in 17 key industry sectors, illustrating that most …
Big data has the potential to cut operating costs by nearly 50% across all sectors of manufacturing. Get Satisfaction makes several interesting claims about opportunities for big data in an infographic released this month. Market segments such as manufacturing are generating far more data (966 petabytes … Read More »
Open-source cloud computing project OpenStack turned one this week, and cloud backup provider Backblaze freely shared detailed specifications for a storage device capable of holding 135 terabytes of data. Open-source options for everything from servers and data centers to clouds and application platforms are growing more robust. …
[OpenStack] looks not only like an open-source alternative to Amazon Web Services and VMware vCloud in the public Infrastructure as a Service space, but also a democratizing force in the private-cloud software space. As my colleague Derrick Harris suggests, the open-source cloud-computing project OpenStack has come … Read More »
There’s little doubt that VMware will continue to maintain its lead as a virtualization supplier in the short run, but doing so over the long run is tricky business. So says Art Wittmann at InformationWeek about VMware’s vSphere 5 offering, updated this week. Despite the … Read More »
IDC’s latest snapshot of the digital universe suggests that data volumes continue to grow at a dramatic pace that shows little signs of slowing down. The sheer scale of the problem suggests that simply adding more storage is not a sustainable strategy. What is the solution? … Read More »
This week, the Open Data Center Alliance released its first deliverables to the world, with the aim to make it easier to compare and contrast commercial solutions and increase technical interoperability between clouds. But to reach new standards, the alliance must overcome significant challenges. Read More »
This week’s announcement of VMware’s Horizon App Manager is the latest addition to the company’s increasingly rich portfolio, but the company is not alone in wanting to strengthen its market position by expanding far beyond its original offering. Where, then, does that leave the competition? Read More »
Opinion on Amazon Web Services recent outage remains somewhat divided: One side blames Amazon for its technical failings; the other holds the cloud giant’s customers responsible for their bad judgment. But the answer to where the primary responsibility lies is a little less black and white. Read More »
A battle rages for the hearts, minds and wallets of cloud computing’s users. Public, hybrid and private clouds each deliver clear value for today’s enterprise customers, but it can’t be many more years before the public cloud’s ubiquity and economies of scale win over alternative models. Read More »
Data marketplaces add value when they combine facts drawn from different data sets. However, as new products are created to accomplish this, the relationship between suppliers, the original data and those who download or buy it changes, with trust becoming a critical part of that relationship. Read More »
Google this week announced that its Public Data Explorer now lets end users upload and visualize their own data. With that move, the company appears to be making a move toward the increasingly crowded data marketplace, which is now growing increasingly more complex. Read More »
Consolidation and convergence mean many things in this industry, and impact everything from technical minutiae to broad-brush business decisions. Monopolies are undesirable, but the opposite extreme of an unbounded set of companies may also be unhelpful in a maturing market. Read More »
This week brought several examples of existing software and on-premise cloud solutions becoming a little easier to use or more widely available. While none were individually significant enough to spark dramatic transformation of the industry, these new tools, when put together, signify a maturing market. Read More »
Big media events don’t come along every day, so when you’re betting the company’s growth on driving traffic to your web site from a single exorbitantly priced Super Bowl ad or a trail in a popular TV program, it pays to make sure that your IT …
Cloud computing solutions of various flavors continue to grow in popularity, as individuals, small startups and global corporations turn to the cloud in order to store data, distribute computing tasks, or deliver applications from email and calendaring to customer relationship management and gene sequencing. While cloud …
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