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 »
Which applications are best for scaling a business from a tiny startup to an enterprise powerhouse? And how do you get your employees to use them? For most companies, success will come from adopting those which are easiest to use, and which employees are already using. Read more »
Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Spiceworks has raised a $25 million fourth round of funding from Adams Capital and Tenaya Capital to continue building out a community of IT professionals that use the Spiceworks software to monitor their companies’ networks. That community is like a Facebook for IT. Read more »
VMware is pushing an aggressive cloud computing strategy, but questions remain as to how successful the vendor can be in its quest to become the dominant player at every layer of the cloud stack. The challenge will be repeating its early hypervisor dominance by getting a first-mover advantage in advanced virtualization and cloud deployments. Other vendors, such as Microsoft, Citrix, and Red Hat, now provide additional cloud capabilities, and cloud-management solutions mean organizations need not even choose a virtualization vendor to complete their cloud transitions. These report examines VMware’s advantages in the cloud computing sector, its competitors, and why, in the end, the company may be a leader, but should not expect to dominate. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Spiceworks, an Austin startup that last week raised $16 million, has created something as revolutionary as Google in the small to medium business software market. Check out the video to learn more, and hear about the future of IT from Spiceworks’ CEO Scott Abel. Read more »
Many companies are slashing budgets to improve the bottom line — or at least postponing purchases until later — but not all. Thirty-nine percent of small and medium businesses reported budget cuts this year, averaging a 22 percent reduction in IT funding, according to Spiceworks’ annual […] Read more »
