The week in cloud: FUD and loathing edition

Cloud vendors have a tough row to hoe convincing enterprise accounts to put mission critical data or apps on their infrastructure. A new U.S. government report may not help things. Read more »

Cloud vendors have a tough row to hoe convincing enterprise accounts to put mission critical data or apps on their infrastructure. A new U.S. government report may not help things. Read more »
The mobile platform wars escalated once again in the first quarter of 2012 as BlackBerry finally took the wraps off its much-anticipated new operating system. Meanwhile Android continued to build on its dominance both worldwide and in the U.S., cementing a two-horse race with Apple. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Flexiant targets service providers – particularly telcos – that want to become infrastructure-as-a-service wholesalers. It’s just starting to gain traction in Europe, and now it wants to push into the U.S. as well. Read more »
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The private cloud world hasn’t been the same since OpenStack sucked the air out of the room. Here’s a look at the companies doing private cloud before OpenStack and how they’ve fared. Read more »
Worldwide IT spending finished out 2012 with a growth rate of 3.8 percent over 2011, the lowest growth rate since 2009. Fourth-quarter 2012 earnings reports and guidance were notable in their lack of any decisively positive news to raise 2013 spending expectations much. Those optimistic about […] Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With investment souring on consumer-focused companies, 2013 will be more about the social enterprise, with a different set of companies driving innovation and perhaps a little disruption. Look for the likes of Salesforce.com, Jive Software, and other enterprise players to make headlines in the new year. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The way the industry will use cloud-computing technology in 2013 will require following the existing adoption patterns and trends into the New Year. Those trends include the rise of standards, big data’s role in the cloud, industry-specific clouds, security, and more. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
With the storage leader now formally aboard the OpenStack Foundation, it’s almost easier to count the IT vendors who have not climbed aboard this open-source cloud bandwagon. Read more »
Credit the BYOD boom with this one: Citrix is buying Zenprise for its mobile device management expertise. Citrix launched a new push on enterprise mobility at its Synergy conference last spring. Read more »
Many factors have driven the recent high demand for IT products and services. However, relentless global economic weakness and uncertainty have resulted in a deterioration of worldwide IT spending through the third quarter and will continue to be an anchor in the fourth quarter. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Cisco and CA are working with Citrix to support its CloudPlatform implementation of CloudStack. The news, out of Citrix Synergy in Barcelona, comes as a raft of OpenStack news hits the wire. Read more »
Dublin-based Cloud Vertical, which wants to help companies get the most bang for their cloud computing buck, now has cash and backing from the Citrix Startup Accelerator to build its business, says Cloud Vertical CEO Ed Byrne. Read more »

Mobile data will grow 18 times over the next five years. To successfully address the shift from voice-to data-centric usage models, operators need to act on multiple fronts, because no single solution will be sufficient in isolation. Read more at GigaOM Pro »

Buyer beware when it comes to adopting OpenStack — or any open-source cloud — according to a newly released Gartner report. Long story short: evaluate OpenStack just like you’d assess a commercial offering, cautions analyst Lydia Leong. Read more »
Welcome to the fast-growing world of work media, a class of social tools oriented toward the needs of enterprises. Their emergence is due to the shifting expectations of an increasingly social workforce and the sense that older approaches to work like email are arguably approaching obsolescence. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
It’s hurry up and wait when it comes to VMware’s bid to become part of OpenStack’s inner circle. Its application for Gold membership status — along with applications from Intel and NEC — will have to wait for the next Open Stack Foundation meeting. Read more »
Already, workplaces are changing because of trends like BYOD and gamification. But other emerging technologies are also altering what our workspace looks like and how we collaborate. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Nearly all the news out of VMworld 2012 shows a company in flux. With a new CEO and its core server virtualization market commoditizing, VMware continues to push into new areas — end user computing, open source — where it is not a leader. Read more »
VMware’s decision to join the OpenStack Foundation could be a huge or not-so-huge deal. Some see the move as a way to outflank Citrix, others say VMware’s Nicira, DynamicOps buys signaled a desire to at least appear more open in the era of cloud computing. Read more »
The software-defined networking (SDN) market is expected to soar in size to $2 billion by 2016, according to IDC. Growth this fast may very well signify that SDN is the third epoch of computer networking, creating vendor discontinuities and a new IT order. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Citrix aims to remake an old steel warehouse in Raleigh, N.C. into a LEED Gold certified headquarters for its Data Sharing Product Group. The group, rooted in Citrix’s purchase of ShareFile, will also add 337 new jobs, said GM and VP Jesse Lipson. Read more »
Productivity startup 6Wunderkinder made a big noise on the Berlin scene when it launched, but it’s been quiet for a few months. Now CEO Christian Reber explains why other German startups should follow suit and focus on their product — and why he’s worried about Windows 8. Read more »
For the last two, three maybe more years, various pundits have said that the year of desktop virtualization is just around the corner. And each year, they were wrong. Still, we gotta ask, will 2012 be the year of desktop virtualization? Read more »
Amid all the OpenStack news this week, there is a feeling in some quarters that two years after Rackspace and NASA launched this attempt to counter Amazon Web Services and VMware, it may be too late for the effort to take hold. Read more »
OpenStack filled in some important checkmarks this week by adding IBM and Red Hat to its roster of corporate backers. Eighteen companies are slated to become members of the evolving OpenStack Foundation which is expected to come online in the third quarter. Read more »
Hewlett-Packard is putting more of its chips on OpenStack as a key foundation for its upcoming public, private and hybrid cloud implementations. HP says its Converged Cloud will amalgamate existing HP technologies and OpenStack so applications can be managed uniformly across cloud types. Read more »
Two major tech players — IBM and Red Hat — are ready to sign on the dotted line to join OpenStack, sources said. That should go a long way to ease the pain of Citrix’s decision to set up CloudStack as an OpenStack rival. Read more »
Now that at least some of the smoke has cleared from the blockbuster news that Citrix is putting its CloudStack technology into the Apache process to compete with former partner OpenStack, here are 5 takeaways emerging from the latest cloud kerfuffle. Read more »
It looks like OpenStack won’t have the open-source cloud spotlight to itself anymore. Citrix has released the CloudStack software it acquired along with Cloud.com to the Apache Software Foundation, creating a competitive option to the OpenStack project of which Citrix was an early member. Read more »
Three fast-moving trends are altering the landscape for business IT: cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT. This report presents actionable strategies to respond to the new realities of corporate computing, including a redesign of the IT organization. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT combine to create another force that overwhelms IT departments: complexity, including complexity of devices and applications, physical and virtual computing environments, and related challenges for IT staff. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT are changing the game for IT departments. Section one of our three-part report describes and quantifies each of these trends, demonstrating that they are real now, growing rapidly and perilous to ignore. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
It seems like every cloud storage company really, really want to be the Dropbox of the enterprise when it grows up. It’ s easy to see why. Dropbox, which now claims 50 million users, is the sweetheart of the cloud storage, file-share-and-sync world. Read more »
Zynga is in a tricky position technologically thanks to its new frenemy status with Facebook. Zynga claims 240 million active users, and it wants a lot more, but scaling to those heights might require one heck of a computing infrastructure. Read more »
Amazon, the market leader, plays at the infrastructure level. But there was a lot of talk at Cloud Connect about Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, where cloud folks think the real action will ultimately lie. The company will soon have to address these shifts as well as trends ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Much of today’s business communication activity still happens in email, but that presents a problem for the current on-the-go workforce. This report, based on a recent survey of business managers, highlights some of the problematic areas around business content collaboration and provides options for working through them. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Continuing a yearlong trend, the fourth quarter in big IT was all about big data, and Hadoop in particular. Still, many are beginning to recognize the software framework’s shortcomings, which is why this quarter also saw more attention for startups claiming easy analytics and real-time processing. Elsewhere in infrastructure, SaaS startups made out well and valuations for these companies are getting higher, and naturally there was news from the AWS camp. This quarterly wrap-up examines these events and more, including the quarter’s dark spot, the hike in prices in the hard-drive manufacturing space due to the floods in Thailand. Companies mentioned in this report include Calxeda, Heroku, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and Tier3. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A group of tech companies led by IBM and including CA, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, NetApp, Red Hat, SAP — is throwing its weight behind a proposed standard to assure that applications can move between clouds. Amazon, RackSpace, Microsoft? They’re not on board, at least not yet. Read more »
Citrix Systems has partnered with Cotendo to introduce a product to add more speed and security to enterprise applications that need remote availability with LAN-like reliability. The NetScaler CloudConnector, which the companies announced today, combines the Citrix NetScaler infrastructure with Cotendo’s web and mobile acceleration services. Read more »
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