German giant misses its emissions target, slowly moves towards the green cloud for its customers

SAP has announced that it will power its data centres, and all other facilities, using 100% renewable electricity, pushing an environmentally friendly message as the software giant moves towards a cloud business model.

The news was included in SAP’s 2013 Integrated Report, which was made available last week, with overall energy figures creeping up – a fact the company put down to simple business growth.

Greenhouse gas emissions went up from 30.0 grams CO2 per euro of total revenue in 2012, to 32.4 grams in 2013, while total emissions amounted to 545 kilotons CO2, missing the company’s stated target of 460 kilotons. 2012 saw 485 kilotons, so it was maybe an ambitious figure set out in the first place.

SAP has an even loftier overall goal: to have emissions from operations by …

A survey of over 2000 respondents by Microsoft and 451 Research has shown that half of companies have deployed some form of hybrid cloud.

The report, which clocks in at a mammoth 75 pages (pdf here, if you’ve got an hour or two), revealed that 989 (49%) of the 2041 execs surveyed had configured a hybrid for interoperability. Of that number:

• 60% had used an on premise private cloud alongside a hosted private cloud
• 42.1% had combined an on premise private cloud with a public cloud
• 39.6% had configured a hosted private cloud with a public cloud

The news will come as validation for Redmond, who asserted in May last year that the next two years would be the “era of the hybrid cloud.”

As for cloud services used today and bought by service providers, 71% chose software as a service (SaaS), compared with hosted infrastructure services …

Box CEO Aaron Levie might have said that there was no direct rivalry between his company and Dropbox, but as both companies hurtle towards an IPO, it’s difficult not to compare the two.

According to Cromwell Schubarth writing for Biz Journals: “Levie downplays talk of a rivalry between the companies, pointing to questions about which social network would survive in the early days of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Just as those online social networks have all thrived, he has said there is room for a number of online storage and sharing businesses.”

Yet, as many of the hyper vendors muscle into the market – Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft just to name a few – gauging the success of pure play cloud storage firms leads to some interesting conclusions.

Dropbox may have 200m users compared to Box’s 20m, yet the fires were well and truly stoked by Box’s announcement …

The changing regulatory and compliance environment around data privacy necessitate improved methods of protecting sensitive information sent to the cloud.

Encryption is one strategy cloud service providers use to protect enterprise cloud data from cybercriminals and any unauthorized access.

Cloud Data Encryption mathematically transforms data so that it is undecipherable without the “key” that can be used to change the data back to its original form.

For a variety of reasons, enterprises often rely on their cloud service providers to maintain ownership and management of the keys, believing that cloud data encryption can only be accomplished in this way.

Quite frankly, it has become an issue of resource management for some enterprises, as summarized in this quote from a 2013 Gartner report: “Organizations have a limit to the amount of time that staff can dedicate to becoming experts in a given solution. Increasing the number of different vendor cryptographic solutions …

Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, Public Sector Technology

Telstra and Cisco have announced a first-of-its-kind alliance that signals an inflexion point in the evolution of the global infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market.

Even as Australia’s largest telco, Telstra has decided that the economies of scale required for sustainable success as an IaaS provider are beyond its means. It has determined that it is better to cease investing in potentially sub-scale home-tailored cloud computing infrastructure and instead partner with a global provider of ready-to-use cloud platforms.

The alliance is a win-win arrangement: Telstra has found a way to play a stronger local game in Australia by leveraging Cisco’s global cloud muscle, while Cisco has found a way to sell its global offerings into the Australian market without needing to invest in local services capabilities on the ground.

Cloud services winners will deploy global scale locally

One of the most significant impacts …

Amidst the World Wide Web turning 25, a company in Seattle was having a little celebration of its own.

On March 14 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of Amazon S3, described as “a simple storage service that offers software developers a highly scalable, reliable, and low-latency data storage infrastructure at very low costs.”

To say the eight years which have passed since then have been a success is an understatement to say the least.

With over 5,000 consulting and systems integrator partners, 3,000 technology and ISV partners, as well as more than 1,100 software listings for customers, it’s difficult to argue against Amazon as the market leader in infrastructure as a service.

In April last year Amazon announced the S3 cloud was storing more than two trillion objects – or 20 objects for every single person ever born on Earth. To put it into …

Nishant Shah, Senior Analyst, Government Technology

Stories about frustrating experiences with government agencies abound. Typically, they are due to a combination of service delivery failure, lack of transparency, and inadequate communication. Fortunately, many governments are beginning to address these issues with a greater sense of urgency. The need for action is being manifested in new policy and an operational focus on better service delivery globally, with customer relationship management (CRM) tools as integral as ever.

Ovum’s recently published Decision Matrix, Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a CRM for Constituent Service and Case Management in Government, examines the competitive dynamics for CRM in the public sector market and analyzes six leading software application suites to inform agencies’ selection processes.

With a focus on civilian and administrative agencies such as tax/revenue, immigration, and health/human services, it expounds the topics discussed here with rankings and detailed evaluations of Oracle, KANA, SAP …

Research from Eduserv has revealed that for three in four UK charities, inertia from the IT department is stunting growth and putting doubt into future fundraising activities.

The research, of 100 digital and IT leaders in UK charities including Oxfam, Macmillan and Unicef, found concern from heads of digital over moving with the times. Survey respondents argued this lack of ‘digital transformation’ would impact fundraising (73%), reputation (71%), and the ability to deliver the right services (59%).

For 75% of charities there was no clear IT strategy in place to move into a digital world, while more than half (52%) reported discord between IT and digital teams which added time to project deadlines.

There are three issues of responsibility that IT and digital need to address, according to Eduserv. These are mobile strategy, digital application strategy and ownership of the CRM system.

And according to respondents, for heads of digital …

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Software – Information Management

Informatica continues to see data disintermediation between cloud and on-premise IT systems as a lucrative opportunity. The latest release of its Informatica Cloud – marketed seasonally as Cloud Spring 2014 – advances this strategy, delivering new self-service tooling and user interface enhancements, aimed at business users, that are intended to remove much of the complexity and burden of cloud and on-premise data integration.

Informatica has leveraged its experience from on-premise data integration assets in the cloud to good effect, and its platform is technically enabled by its new Vibe technology, which ensures that reusable and self-adapting integration designs are fully portable across cloud and on-premise application environments.

Hybrid integration agility through self-service user empowerment

The main design theme for Cloud Spring 2014 is making business application users and administrators more self-sufficient in servicing their data integration needs. A brand new Cloud Designer tool enables IT …

A 2013 IBM survey shows that the cloud’s strategic importance to decision-makers, such as CEOs, CMOs, CFOs, HR directors, and procurement executives, is poised to double from 34 percent to 72 percent, vaulting over their IT counterparts at 58 percent.

The survey found that one out of five organizations is ahead of the curve on cloud adoption.  Moreover, they are achieving a competitive advantage by using cloud-based platforms, and not just cutting costs and driving efficiency through cloud computing.

The results of this survey are not surprising.  Business leadership drives much of the growth around cloud computing, demanding that IT both consider and implement this technology. They see the potential for this technology to be strategic, much like the growth of the Web many years ago that changed the face of many businesses. Remember, it was business units, not IT, that drove Web adoption and related functions like e-commerce …