Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Information Management

IBM has taken another step to ramp up its cloud presence with the acquisition of Cloudant, a five-year-old company that offers a managed NoSQL cloud database. The acquisition adds a data layer to IBM’s growing portfolio of web/mobile application developer-oriented cloud platforms, such as WorkLight, and is a good complement to SoftLayer, the managed cloud service provider that IBM acquired last year.

The core component of the Cloudant data layer is based on CouchDB, one of a group of emerging NoSQL data stores based on the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) document-oriented data format to extend its portfolio of cloud-based development platforms to web/mobile app developers. It formalizes what was already a growing partnership between Cloudant and SoftLayer, IBM’s recently acquired managed cloud platform. But it also signifies that in the growing area of developer-friendly JSON-based NoSQL databases, IBM is …

2014 continues to be a year marked by the accelerating hiring cycles across nearly all cloud computing companies.

Signing bonuses of $3K to $5K for senior engineers and system design specialists are becoming common, and the cycles from screening to interviews to offers is shortening.  The job market in the cloud computing industry is leaning in favor of applicants who have a strong IT background in systems integration, legacy IT expertise, business analysis and in many positions, programming as well.

One of the most common questions and requests I receive from readers is who the best companies are to work for.  I’ve put together the following analysis based on the latest Computer Reseller News list The 100 Coolest Cloud Computing Vendors Of 2014.  

Using the CRN list as a baseline to compare the Glassdoor.com scores of the (%) of employees who would recommend this company to a friend and …

As the latest round of procurement for G-Cloud opened at the end of February it won’t be long until we get to see who’s made it onto the refreshed roster of suppliers on CloudStore when the new framework goes live in May.

With the new framework in the pipeline there are signs of renewed ambition for G-Cloud to deliver more business to a wider set of suppliers as evidenced by Francis Maude’s goal for a further £100m to be spent through the platform by May 2015.

The trouble is that when you look at the numbers, this is little more than a gnat’s bite from the elephantine £13.8bn spent on Government each year.  What’s more, this is the total spend on a framework where there are now 1186 suppliers vying for business.

It is clear that G-Cloud has a long way to go. So …

It’s official. IBM is now a cloud company. Big Blue has announced it is to push $1bn (£597.6m) of its resources and investments into cloud, including a developer-friendly platform as a service (PaaS) offering called BlueMix.

The Armonk giant also revealed it was to push SoftLayer into a variety of new zones, including making Watson available on the platform.

Amidst a plethora of announcements within the billion dollar investment, IBM SVP software and cloud solutions Robert LeBlanc described it as “another significant move in extending true cloud integration.”

“IBM is ushering in a bold new era of innovation by partnering with developers in an open environment to accelerate the emerging world of hybrid cloud computing,” he said. “We are combining the strength of our developer ecosystem with the depth of subject matter expertise to build a scalable model that easily spans from a single developer to global teams …

Although cloud hosting has been a massive boom it’s not necessarily a disruptive technology model.

While Amazon is certainly doing it to a much larger scale than ever before, it more represents an ongoing maturity of the simple web hosting we began in the early 90s. It may now be on steroids but it’s still fundamentally the same virtualized shared infrastructure model.

It’s also still just a technical decision, not one of business transformation. The Marketing and other business managers don’t care whether an app is run in-house, in the Cloud or anywhere else, as along as it works and provides them the software functionality they need.

So it is usually the technical teams making these decisions , with no real impact on how the organization overall performs their work, or in how the software that it runs works in terms of information models.

IRM : Identity Relationship …

Last year Gartner released numbers that pointed to the growth of cloud computing from 2011 to 2016, specifically, the growth of cloud computing by vertical industry.  According to Gartner, anticipated growth opportunities put these industries at the top when it comes to global IT spending, which includes cloud computing:

$84,074M – Banking & Securities

$70,683M – Communications, Media & Services

$63,589M – Manufacturing & Natural Resources

$34,611M – Insurance

$24,907M – Transportation

Healthcare did not make it to the top 5, but that vertical is at about $15,000M, just behind transportation.  However, healthcare as a whole is expected to jump up significantly in both cloud spending and IT spending.  The changing regulatory pressures will drive this trend, along with the opportunities to reduce costs in healthcare IT.

Although healthcare was once considered an industry that would not adopt cloud computing due to systemic security, legal, and privacy issues, that no longer seems …

It is a truth universally acknowledged that your first CRM deployment is more likely to fail than succeed – 63% of CRM initiatives fail according to a 2013 survey by Merkle Group Inc. Just like your first love, despite the hopes, excitement and expectation, a mixture of naivety and youthful exuberance means the first foray into CRM is unlikely to stand the test of time.

The reality is that first time around mistakes will be made, and the results may be less satisfying than expected. Be honest: with the first CRM deployment, no business knows exactly what to expect and where it will go in the future.

But that is no reason to turn your back on CRM for life. Those organisations that have been burnt by their first CRM implementation often struggle to pluck up the courage to try again. But learning from the good and bad aspects of that …

Madan Sheina, Lead Analyst, Software – Information Management

Informatica claims to have raised the bar for data integration and quality following the release of its PowerCenter and Data Quality 9.6 platform. This release scores points with Ovum because it mirrors much of the functionality that our enterprise clients are inquiring about and looking for – notably, business-friendly governance features, seamless integration and management of data across cloud and on-premise systems, and quicker integration cycles.

Equally noteworthy is the company’s effort to harden the customer and partner ecosystem around its data integration platform, and the revised packaging and pricing aimed at platform-purchasing. Informatica 9.6 clearly follows a strategy of convincing organizations that data quality and integration is best served by an integrated platform, rather than point tools.

The attention given to platform integration and cost-effectiveness will appeal to existing and new customers and solutions partners that want to graduate from …

What does SOA bring to cloud computing?  Most of those who design cloud architecture and build cloud-based systems don’t understand the answer to that question.  However, certain patterns are emerging that prove SOA is a best practice to define good cloud architecture…even though it may not be called SOA.

Many enterprises are just tossing things out of the enterprise onto public and private clouds and hoping for the best. Making things worse, many of the larger enterprise’s clients do not see the forest through the trees, or, in this case, the architecture through the clouds.  So, you have both parties taking a reactive versus a proactive approach to the cloud.

Every enterprise should have a good architectural context to support the use of cloud computing. Or, the ability to create an overall strategic plan and architectural framework, and then look at how cloud computing fits into this …

Enterprise PaaS provider CloudBees has today announced a partnership with Verizon to make its platform as a service available on Verizon Cloud.

This represents another hefty addition to the telco’s rapidly growing cloud ecosystem, after announcing a middleware partnership with Oracle back in January.

For Sacha Labourey, CloudBees CEO, the marriage seems a perfect fit, due to CloudBees’ market position in PaaS and Verizon’s enterprise experience.

“There was an interest in offering platform as a service on top of the Verizon cloud,” the CloudBees CEO told CloudTech. He added: “I think on the market we’re being recognised as having some leadership in terms of delivering PaaS as a service – a number of companies are doing it as a software and Verizon was looking for a way to offer this directly as a service.”

With the enterprise arm of its Jenkins solution in full swing, Labourey was quick …