Enterprise Resource Planning has traditionally been a software for large corporates with million dollar technology budgets. But that has been changing over the past decade with the advent of cloud based ERP systems. According to a survey conducted by Sage, nearly 30% of finance managers at UK based SMEs believe that cloud could make ERP more affordable or viable to them. In another study published by Gartner, the top five fastest growing ERP vendors today are all SaaS companies. Even the larger, mature SaaS players like NetSuite have registered exponential growth rates of nearly 40% while the traditional on-premise vendors like Oracle and SAP are showing signs of stagnation.

read more

In many industries, cloud computing is now vital to remaining competitive. The cloud typically offers superior flexibility, scalability, accessibility, and high availability, enabling businesses to grow more agile and responsive. Regulatory compliance concerns often make banks and other financial service providers slower to adopt the cloud, but even in the financial services industry, the cloud will soon become a necessity.
Banks are already seeing attractive use cases for cloud computing, as Bank Systems & Technology’s Bryan Yurcan and Jonathan Camhi pointed out late last year. Cloud-based payment processing is one hot topic. Cloud-based document management is another. Analytics for business insight and fraud detection are also growing popular. However, all of these applications will require a thorough understanding of the regulatory restrictions and how to comply with them. One of the most essential tools to make sure your cloud adoption meets regulatory requirements is cloud data encryption.

read more

Fundamentally, SDN is still mostly about network plumbing. While plumbing may be useful to tinker with, what you can do with your plumbing is far more intriguing. A rigid interpretation of SDN confines it to Layers 2 and 3, and that’s reasonable. But SDN opens opportunities for novel constructions in Layers 4 to 7 that solve real operational problems in data centers. “Data center,” in fact, might become anachronistic – data is everywhere, constantly on the move, seemingly always overflowing. Networks move data, but not all networks are suitable for all data.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Steve Riley, Technical Leader in the Office of the CTO at Riverbed Technology, will discuss how finding (or building) the right network, with the right applications, is still a labor-intensive task. Must it always be this way? No: for networks will soon be expressed as code. Finally, the data, the applications that process it, the networks that move it and the objects that store it can all be described by software constructs – let’s call this collection a super-blob – in the hands of skilled developers. Freed from their dependence on any given location, super-blobs can move around as necessary, resting on any physical fabric that can satisfy their requirements. As requirements change, locations may change – while preserving all application states. Location-independent computing is within our grasp.

read more

Software as a service (SaaS) adoption has more than quintupled since 2011 with the front office leading the way, research from North Bridge Venture Partners has shown.

The data, which polled 1358 respondents, found that SaaS was becoming increasingly important as a CIO priority, behind security software and business intelligence, hitting 74% adoption this year. IaaS and PaaS, in comparison, lag behind on 56% and 41% adoption respectively.

The report revealed fairly solid figures for cloud adoption and innovation. Nearly half (49%) of respondents claimed companies use cloud computing for revenue generation or product development activities, while a similar number (45%) want to or already run their company in the cloud.

The transition phase is also rapidly improving, according to the research. Aside from manufacturing, two thirds of respondents across all business apps will move some or most of their processing to the cloud in the next two years. This …

While on-premise deployments are still the default for many enterprise applications today, most everyone agrees that SaaS and Cloud are the future. The question from the CXO is no longer, “Should we consider putting this application in the cloud?” It is, “Why wouldn’t we deploy this in the cloud?” As this new thinking takes full effect, I see three big changes for IT professionals:
Instead of acquiring and operating on-site infrastructure and applications for the enterprise, IT professionals will be expected to coordinate business services for employees and end-users. Their role will be to ensure their “customers” are getting the performance levels they need to speed communication, increase collaboration and accelerate individual and organizational productivity.

read more

In 2013, the total cost of natural disasters reached $192 billion, according to recent research from Impact Forecasting, a division of reinsurance company Aon Benfield, who conducts these reports each year.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy topped 2013’s most costly natural disaster. With damage estimated at over $60 billion, Sandy is the second most expensive hurricane on record in the United States. Countless businesses lost revenue while waiting for power to return, or floods to subside. But many others were prepared, thanks to the IT professionals who made sure they had the right technology in place to weather any storm. In the eye of the storm, there are a few positive stories that came out of this devastating disaster.

read more

As technology evolves, business models evolve. The corner grocery store gave way to the emporium, which became the supermarket. Now we order groceries online with a credit card, and a truck turns up with the goods. Hansom cabriolets became taxis and limos, and now we have Uber. At one time, people would communicate at a distance through pigeons and human messengers. Then we created postal services, then email, and now a plethora of social networks. We still eat food, move around and communicate, but we do it all in different contexts. None of this contextual change would be economically or technically possible without the information systems to manage the business relationships, track transactions and settle accounts.
Now, think about your phone and Internet access arrangements. For most people, this means a subscription with one big company, a contractual commitment, a monthly payment and perhaps some usage charges. Big companies build and own the infrastructure; they may subcontract work to other companies, but the carrier “owns” the customer relationships. It was pretty much like that 50 years ago.

read more

“Organizations take time to evolve. That’s why we’re bound for a hybrid future, where public and private clouds blend to create a shared infrastructure that spans application, organization and data center boundaries,” noted Esmeralda Swartz, CMO of MetraTech, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo conference chairs Larry Carvalho and Vanessa Alvarez.
Cloud Computing Journal: How are cloud standards playing a role in expanding adoption among users? Are standards helping new business models for service providers?

read more

ServiceNow this week launched its Eureka version of its online service management suite with new features aimed at letting non-technical folks build custom applications and process flows.
IT service management (ITSM) has long been a huge benefit to complex and exception-rich IT operations by helping to standardize, automate and apply a common system-of-record approach to tasks, incidents, assets, and workflows.
ServiceNow has been growing rapidly as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider of ITSM, but clearly sees a larger opportunity – making service creation, use, and management a benefit to nearly all workers for any number of business processes.
It’s one of those rare instances where IT has been more mature and methodological in solving complexity than many other traditional business functions. Indeed, siloed and disjointed «productivity applications» that require lots of manual effort have been a driver to bring service orientation to the average business process.

read more