Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum Software

Public cloud vendors are increasingly focusing on vertical markets, which will significantly accelerate public cloud adoption by latecomers. The “verticalization” of public clouds comes as a result of efforts throughout vertical ecosystems, from regulators to traditional IT service providers such as IBM, as well as newcomers such as AWS, Salesforce.com, and Veeva.

It will grow in parallel to public cloud providers increasingly moving from technology services to packages targeted at specific needs and audiences. For more information, see the 2014 Trends to Watch: Public Clouds report that looks at the overall public market trends as well as specific trends for infrastructure, platform, and software-as-a-service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) public clouds.

Vertical market regulators are catching up with public clouds

Vertical market regulators are catching up with public clouds, and will continue to do so in 2014. For example, the publication of the Health Insurance …

By Nick Razey, CEO, Next Generation Data

Time and tide wait for no one. Wise words and all the more so amid the recent flooding experienced up and down the country with even the Thames bursting its banks just a few miles short of central London.  

If it wasn’t for the Thames Barrier who knows what might have happened? It’s sobering that a fifth of all the 30 year old barrier’s closures took place in the first two months of 2014. Not surprisingly this has sparked fresh calls for the building of a new one should the current one fail through overuse.  

When it comes to data centre location, these recent events should serve as a warning to any CIO still intent on going with the flow of conventional wisdom by continuing to take data centre space at premium rates in Docklands – entirely on the floodplain – or …

As an informed senior executive, you already know that it’s no longer a question of whether cloud service adoption is the right forward-thinking business technology strategy, but rather how you will leverage the abundance of new resources to outpace your competition.

More companies will be working within very heterogeneous cloud service environments, thereby putting more pressure on IT organizations that must deal with these additional complexities, according to a recent market study by Cloud Connect and the Everest Group.

Their latest market study reveals the increasing influence of cloud services on IT budgets, staff skills and business strategy. Moreover, the findings within the «2014 Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey» report debunks hyped-up perceptions with key facts.

«The new reality our research points to is that the modern enterprise will not be defined by public, private or hybrid but rather all of the above,» said Steve Wylie, cloud connect general manager …

Amazon Web Services has announced big price cuts across its cloud computing portfolio at an event in San Francisco – one day after rival Google did the same.

Andy Jassy, AWS senior vice president, explained to delegates in his keynote speech that lowering prices was “not new” for AWS, laying out the company’s latest price drop.

The facts: Amazon’s S3 storage cloud gets a pricing tier decrease from 36% to 65%. M3 gets an average 38% decrease, while C3 gets 30% – these were Linux prices, although Jassy promised there would be “comparable” figures for Windows and other operating systems.

Amazon’s relational database services will get an average reduction of 28%, while Elasticache drops by 34% and Elastic MapReduce goes down by anywhere between 27% and 61%.

“Lowering prices is not new for us – it’s something we do on a regular basis,” said Jassy. “This is something we …

Sketch “We apologise for bringing the rain down with us from Seattle,” said Andy Jassy, Amazon Web Services SVP in a slightly sheepish opening.

It was an opening delayed by half an hour because of weather and traffic fears, but those who had made it through the elements to San Francisco were treated to various client testimonials. Ranging from Adobe, to Airbnb and Twilio, they came in a variety of industries and a variety of languages – the latter seemingly to prove AWS’ customer base was truly global.

Yet this was one of the points Jassy was to emphasise in his morning keynote. AWS now has availability in 10 regions across five continents.

“Most companies these days have end users all over the world, and infact most startups launch with users all over the world,” he told delegates. “And as such, companies don’t want to settle for what was the …

You need a PhD to work out the best option, says Google SVP

Google has cut prices for its cloudy infrastructure across the board, aiming to “blend IaaS and PaaS” as well as change the outlook of the cloud pricing wars.

The Mountain View giant is reducing the price of its IaaS offering Compute Engine by a third (32%) ‘across all sizes, regions and classes’, ‘significant reductions in database operations and front-end compute instances’ for the PaaS product App Engine, a two thirds (68%) drop in Cloud Storage pricing as well as an 85% reduction in Google BigQuery on-demand.

Google also announced Sustained-Use Discounts to provide better savings for regular users. Those who use a virtual machine for over a quarter of a month get an automatic discount, while an additional 30% cut is added for those who use a VM for the entire month.

In a blog post Google …

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Software – Information Management

It hardly rains in Palm Springs, California. But there was a great deal of talk about clouds at Oracle’s recent CloudWorld analyst conference.

Oracle presented an update on the aggressive cloud strategy it unfolded at last September’s Oracle OpenWorld conference, where it made a score of announcements around its PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS offerings. Oracle has made significant incremental advances across both its public and private cloud portfolio offerings and clearly communicated its direction for the cloud – though many of the specifics around roadmaps were under non-disclosure agreement.

The company is committed to delivering a comprehensive suite of private and public cloud services integrated across SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS. A key question, however, is how flexible those products and services are beyond the Oracle technology stack (the so-called red stack).

Oracle is firmly committed to the cloud

Oracle was initially dismissive …

You can’t say it wasn’t coming. Cloud storage provider Box has announced its public offering after a huge amount of rumour and conjecture, with the overall amount raised expected to hit around $250m.

The company is looking to trade under the NYSE symbol ‘BOX’ and confirms reports in January that the cloud storage bods had confidentially filed.

The number of shares and their price wasn’t disclosed in the official S-1 form on the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) site, however the company’s numbers were – and it doesn’t make for pretty reading on first glance.

As the company’s revenues have gone up, so have its losses – $124.2m in revenue for the year ended January 31, combined with a loss of $169m. This compares with $58.8m revenue and $112.8m loss for the previous year, and $21.1m and $50.4m for 2011 …

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is like an F-16 Fighting Falcon.  In the right hands it can be nimble, graceful, and extremely powerful.  Not to mention that it often destroys other cloud platforms in a dogfight…  However, an important part of the analogy is the understanding that the AWS fighter plane comes in a thousand pieces with “some assembly required.”

Managed AWS services attempt to take care of some of this assembly for you.  Most AWS management partners and platforms will cover the basic features and customize them for your architecture.  For example, if you’re moving from an in-house datacenter to the cloud, an AWS management service will take the configuration of your infrastructure and translate that into AWS features and services. 

Hardware like CPU and RAM become services like Elastic Compute (EC2).  Switch and router configurations become networking services like Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).  Load-balancers become elastic (ELB).  Storage …

Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Ovum Software

Cloud service providers and consumers approach hybrid clouds from a public as well as a private cloud perspective. The objective for both is to run workloads where it makes the most sense at a technology and/or business level.

While hybrid clouds’ center of gravity will shift toward public clouds, it will do so quite slowly as enterprises increasingly mix and match the variety of hybrid cloud options available on the market, from connective to blended and accretive hybrid cloud. For more details see the 2014 Trends to Watch: From Private to Hybrid Clouds report that details not only hybrid clouds but also private cloud trends.

From public versus private to public and private

On the one hand, public cloud vendors offer a variety of hybrid options to meet various requirements in areas such are security or performance. On the other, private clouds were …